An almost token eye-roll from Cora.
A weekend of space from Ed and this nightmare sounds idyllic. Glorious. That’s if he’s even at home anyway. Depends how long this life holiday goes on for. I am crying again, suddenly, as the content of Ed’s note hits and I don’t know whether it’s the afternoon wine or the fact that Emma is holding Poppy on her hip and taking some of the weight of life, but I am appreciative of everything they do for me and of their role: new, odd, intense. Crucial.
So what if we have barely anything in common? We’re building something here, something long-term. It takes a village, and all that.
I look at Emma, jiggling a sleepy Poppy whose eyes are drooping. She rubs at them and leans into Emma. I glance at Cora, holding my hand with her silky smooth manicured one and still suggesting, every now and then, that an affair with a beautiful bendy man can do wonders.
I look at Asha, tipping a bag of Waitrose crisps into a bowl and pushing it in front of my face. I think I would like to have an affair, if we could leave out the other parts and it could just involve someone holding my hand and decanting my crisps.
These women are a team, I think, as I look around at them. And a team is what I’ve been missing.
‘I’m up for a trip,’ I say, as Emma nervously passes me a tissue. ‘I’m absolutely up for a trip.’
Anon
‘You have no idea how much I need a girls’ weekend,’ I say to my friend Scarlett.
And I mean it.
What could possibly be bad about a trip away with Scarlett?
An opportunity to see her up close, twenty-four hours a day.
To observe her, even more than I do the rest of the time, in her pyjamas, as she wipes her make-up off her face, side by side as we brush our teeth.
To see what he sees. Her, then me. Alongside each other.
To see who she really is, this woman whose life is tripping over mine.
To see how she could have done this to me.
Oh, it means putting up with the other stuff, of course. The self-obsession. The drama. My blog! My marriage crisis!
Just let someone else speak, Scarlett, for once.
But it will be worth it.
How could I do that to a friend? Maybe the question needs to be rephrased: how could I do that to somebody who was becoming, even when she didn’t know it, my worst, my closest, enemy? How could I do that to somebody who had, when it came to it, done far worse to me?
I count down the hours to that weekend.
Apart from anything, it means I will know where she is all the time too. That I won’t have to torture myself with wondering if she has her hands, with their elegant long fingers, all over him again.
17
Scarlett
29 May
It’s been months since I went on a night out, and now a second is following closely after the first. Which is especially odd since I hated that one and bolted from it.
Ed is back from his parents’, but stays out a lot. Gym sessions have got longer.
‘What was that about?’ I asked, when he came home but he answered in one-word responses and I was too angry to make any effort.
Instead of living together as a couple and a family, at the moment we coexist and speak in instructions and questions. Things have deteriorated fast.
‘Has Poppy had lunch?’
‘Any updates on the lawyer?’
‘Can you pick up some nappies?’
‘There are clean vests in the washing basket.’
It crosses over, too, to critique.
‘She isn’t having more biscuits.’
‘You’ve drunk all that wine?’
I don’t know how this happened to us but we have become that couple who have nothing else to say to each other, except we have so much to say: we just can’t manage it.
I don’t completely blame Ed. He’s reverted to what he knows; the way the men that created him do it.
Ignore it, shelve it, pour giant bucketfuls of sand over the place in your brain where it lives and move on with an air of tension around you wherever you go because you are so desperately trying not to let that sand dune shift. Drink a beer. Talk about that 3–0 win.
Ed is now so thickly covered over that I can’t dig through, whatever I try.
It’s your birthday this week, right Em? I type to the group. We should go out! Last time was so fun.
I lie so often now that I have started not to notice or to be confused about when I am lying and when I am not. I just need company. People. A hug. To laugh.
Besides, it’s all relative isn’t it? Compared to the awkwardness and shame that is being at home with Ed, or the pain of those final days in work, or talking about my sex tape with my dad, that night out, being drunk, was fun.
Or blurrier, at least.
I have to get on top of the ironing, messages Asha, who may be the only person of our generation who would actually get out an ironing board for anything other than a wedding.
But she’s making this sound more wifey than it will be. I know Asha and her multitasking. There will be an epic novel propped up next to her, or a mental health podcast – Asha works for a mental health charity – as her soundtrack. Sorry, ladies.
Emma comes; it’s her birthday. Cora says yes because she loves drinking.
At the coffee shop bar, Emma double checks her tonic is slimline; asks if I’m sure her dress isn’t mumsy (it’s the epitome of mumsy and she’s wearing tights despite it being late May but bless her, who could tell her that and see that face fall?)
Cora complains loudly that her glass of Veuve Clicquot isn’t cold enough and whips out a Chanel compact from her Louis
