When I get in, Ed is in bed for an early start at work, which means that I don’t tell him what’s happened. But gradually, seeing Ed’s face has not been the comfort it usually is when I’m nervous, looking up the aisle at him on our wedding day, or in those terrifying seconds when we waited for the nurse to find a heartbeat at Poppy’s scan as he squeezed my hand tight. Now, it would just add to my shame. I lie in bed, missing him, missing myself, missing a clear mind and now I’ve left them, missing the friends who would have hugged me goodbye, told me they loved me, clambered into the taxi with me, held my hand and listened, if I ever decided that I could speak to them about all of this; if I decide one day that actually, I need to.
15
Scarlett
23 May
Scarlett, the message says. Please answer my calls. I do need to speak to you, urgently x PS: I can also help you find something else work-wise. I know you must be climbing the walls in Mum Land!
Flick. It’s the anchor I need.
But I’m irritated too. Mum Land feels patronising. Flick doesn’t know what a support the women of Mum Land have been.
I delete the message without reply. No good can come anyway from talking about a life that doesn’t exist any more, to someone I can no longer look in the eye. I can’t bear the shame; the pity.
And for all my thoughts the other day about telling them, I’m relieved that my mum friends don’t seem to have seen the comments on the blog. That they still don’t know. That being with them is respite.
Flick sends me another message afterwards.
We’ve all been young, Scarlett. No one is judging you xx
And I laugh. Because everyone is judging me every day, everyone is judging everyone every day. What they’re posting, what they’re wearing, what they’re ordering, where they’re going. What their job is, who they’re married to, what car they drive, what make their bag is.
Sling a sex tape into the mix though and you up the stakes.
Everyone has to judge me so that they think I’m different to them. In another bracket. Way more sexually out there. Way more promiscuous. Way less careful. Otherwise it could have been them, and nobody likes thinking it could have been them.
No one is judging you? Ha.
As I sit looking at that text though, I feel something shift. The floundering, the sadness, it’s being replaced with a fury and a desire to scream at somebody for what they have done to me. I loved New Social. Ed and I would have been thinking about a second child soon, I’m sure. Now neither of us have mentioned it because it comes under an umbrella of ‘future’ that no one wants to put their cash on.
Somebody has reached into my life and shifted everything around so that I jiggle, loose, without form now.
But who?
Anon
You see, nothing about this place is good enough for Scarlett.
Not our bars. Not our drinks.
Seems our men are fine, though.
I watch Scarlett leave the bar that night.
In an upstairs room, unused as there is no private function, I climb over a rope and look at her from a window as she waits for her taxi. She paces, infuriated at having to wait, calling the taxi company – I presume that’s who she is calling – over and over. Scarlett doesn’t like to wait for things. Some of us have more patience; have become accustomed to biding our time.
When it finally comes, she steps in wearing her biker boots, looking less drunk than she claimed to be, only minutes ago.
I wish I could see the moment that she reads the messages I posted earlier as I hid in the toilet cubicle, from my multiple fake accounts. But that must happen in the taxi.
I wish I could watch Scarlett’s face as her worlds – so far kept neat and separate as though they were in an office storage system – start to become muddled.
The taxi pulls away. I check, and the messages are already gone. I add some more, flicking between accounts, then I head back downstairs, pick up my drink and make a toast.
‘To Scarlett!’ I say. ‘So drunk she had to go home. That’s got to be a sign that she’s had a good night, right? Even if she did seem to kind of hate the bar.’
We laugh. Because of course Scarlett would hate the bar.
‘To good friends,’ one of the other girls says.
‘To such good friends,’ I echo.
16
Scarlett
25 May
I put my key in the door and place three large shopping bags and one small person on the floor.
Like often lately, I need coffee. Being ashamed is exhausting; nobody mentions that.
Next to the kettle is a piece of paper.
It strikes me then how rarely I see Ed’s handwriting. Cards. And now notes, telling me he’s leaving me.
It’s short, Ed’s note.
Staying with my parents for a few days. I think we need some space after the pressure of the last month. Let’s talk later. Ed x
A little life holiday. How I wish I could book myself one of those. Thanks for the support, Ed.
It’s been ticking away in the back of my mind, the question of whether he is cheating, and it comes back now. Is that where my husband Ed has really gone?
And where does our child come into this, I think, as the kettle boils? Could I just leave, no matter how angry or hurt I was? Of course I couldn’t.
I make my coffee strong. Message Ed a picture of the note asking what the hell he’s doing and realise that I’m not sad, but furious.
Shaking, now, with rage.
Shaking with rage at Ed, at a skewed world that means I can’t sashay out of our home and our responsibilities but my husband can. It’s hard to do dramatic sashays when you have to make fifteen phone calls
