‘We can’t move so I can get a better Insta grid.’ I smiled. I jumped on top of him, eyes wide. ‘CAN WE?’
‘Out near my mum and dad, near my brother,’ he laughed as he kissed me.
Where he grew up, in other words. A fancy village, near to the other fancy village he grew up in.
‘You always say it’s lovely when we visit,’ he pushed. ‘When we have our own children, they’d have cousins nearby …’
We wanted kids, and he was right. Maybe it was time to accept that life would change; that Manchester might not be right for us in this next phase.
It took drives through idyllic Cheshire villages, the odd overnight bag packed for a stay in a country hotel. It took mustardy roast beef next to wood burners with a Malbec in my hand. It took a parcel arriving containing fancy wellies real countryside people would never buy anyway with a note from Ed that said ‘Go on’. It took practical things like train timetables pored over to make sure I could still get to work, and RightMove searches, and questions like ‘When was the boiler put in?’ and mortgage evaluations and then suddenly, as we stood inside the beautiful, four-bedroomed eighteenth-century listed cottage that was now ours, we had crept across the finish line and made the decision.
And when we drove behind the removal van to Sowerton just over two years ago, me, my wellies and my Instagram were more than excited.
We got the keys to the cottage and we drank our champagne in bed that night because we hadn’t figured out how to work the heating yet.
‘There you go,’ said Ed, placing a hot water bottle on my feet. ‘I just ordered us a curry too. We might have to get out of bed for that though.’
I’d laughed. The tumbling anxiety I’d had about the move was fading with the crazy, fun newness of it all. We were married now and I was high on the novelty of being a wife and an owner of this fancy house and – as we tried for a baby then too – anticipating other firsts.
Smug could have described it if you disliked me; happy would have done if you didn’t.
A month later I was pregnant and then I had Poppy and went on maternity leave and life got busier and my boobs got leakier and friends got more distant and I started Cheshire Mama and I went back to the office to introduce Poppy but it was hard to merge my two worlds. I had thought Sowerton in all of its sleepiness was an extra life, a little bonus. I didn’t realise my Manchester one wouldn’t be there waiting forever.
But I like having friends. I like being popular. And so I found my mum crew.
My old friends picture my world now, I know, as me spending three weeks designing Poppy’s homemade birthday cake and making a Pinterest board for themes for the Christmas tree. I’m the first of our crowd to have a child and I get paranoid that they have written me off as having retreated to the insular world of the parent, with their craft boxes and their playdate schedule and their complete lack of a clue about current affairs or fashion or what’s happening in the world outside their bubble.
But I look into the gloom of the countryside from my taxi now and my skin prickles. Too quiet. Too dark. Not enough everything else. I laugh, now, at how I romanticised it. Sometimes I want to take a pin to the bubble and clamber out.
‘Good night?’ asks the driver and I nod but say nothing.
I lean my head back against the seat, feeling my body shake all over. I have no idea whether it’s from standing outside on an evening when the temperature has suddenly dipped and it’s far cooler than May should be or from the conversation with Emma or whether it’s just from everything that the last two weeks have brought.
Wanting to take up room in my brain so I can’t feel, I open up my Instagram.
And then, something happens.
In the comments, right there on my beautiful, filtered, parenting page, people are talking about my sex tape.
I feel the tickle of sweat in my armpits.
Word has spread. Worlds have collided.
One offers a ‘rerun’. Another compliments my naked body, as though it were public property. Coarse. Terrifying.
Who has seen this? I think. When was it posted? Who would be looking?
I delete and block as fast as I can, but they are from multiple accounts, these messages, and they keep coming. Someone is doing this to me this second.
I hug my own body and the shaking intensifies.
Help me, somebody, help me.
‘You all right, love?’ asks the driver.
I must have emitted a gasp.
I nod, tell him I had too much to drink. Dip my head low into my phone. Keep deleting.
I have tried so hard to contain it, but my workmates, my family, friends, then the clients, now this. The reality, I realise, sadly, is that whether the website operator removed it or not, I can’t contain it. That’s why that email was such an anticlimax. The video is a hurricane, far more powerful than me, blasting through my makeshift walls. I consider the word viral; how perfect it is to describe what is happening to me.
I have gone viral and it is a rotten, unwanted illness. The world is exposed and unvaccinated. There are no limits to what this thing can do and while it keeps coming and coming and coming, I can’t even attempt to recover.
It can kill me, I think, suddenly lucid. The thing is viral and it can kill me.
Tears stream down my face when I think, for a split second, that that could be a relief.
‘You sure you’re okay, love?’ says the taxi driver, brow furrowed in the mirror.
I nod again. Hide my face in my
