‘Leave her to it,’ Cora instructs loudly as Emma looks tortured. ‘She’s a grown woman. And you only get one bloody life.’
Then she mouths ‘message me’ over Emma’s head as they pull the door shut behind them and I head over to get to know Joseph.
Six hours later I wake up from a dream about blackcurrant squash. All I can feel is thirst, layered with panic. Poppy is shouting me from her room, Ed asleep next to me. Worlds are converging as I have a hangover of my twenties and the responsibilities of my thirties. I’m disorientated. Nauseous.
‘I’ll get her,’ he says. ‘You could probably do with the sleep.’
I nod and roll over, but I am wide awake now.
The last thing I remember is leaning in closely at a table alone with Joseph, saying cheers with another vodka. The memories are more like pictures than moving action. Joseph, brushing back his semi-long curls with his hand. Hand to his beard. Me, stumbling. Joseph, reaching out to help me. Me, laughing. Joseph, holding my hand. Us, walking down the street together. And then what? I can’t remember any of the later part. Did he walk me home? Through our gate, down our little path, up to the front door of my picture-postcard family home?
‘DADADA!’ shouts Poppy from downstairs.
I dive under the covers and try to make sense of this.
I would know, wouldn’t I, if something had happened? We couldn’t have had sex but a kiss. Could a kiss have happened without a memory? It did often enough, back in the day.
How am I here?
My phone beeps on the bedside table and I lunge for it, like Ed could read the message from downstairs.
It’s Cora. With just one line of ????
I ignore it and get back under the duvet.
I would know. I would know. And I can’t picture a kiss. Surely I’d have retained that image.
I get up and choose Poppy’s clothes for the day, her bright red tights and her little tartan skirt and her jumper, and have a hot shower.
‘I love you,’ I tell Ed as I walk into the kitchen in my slippers and he glances at me and frowns. It’s been a while since I said that. I can hear desperation in my tone.
‘Are you okay?’ is his reply.
I load the dishwasher. I put a dark wash on. I wipe the worktops and get some chicken out of the freezer for dinner. Ed goes for his usual Saturday morning run.
And it’s okay. It’s okay.
It’s the twenty-first century. As long as everything looks how you want it to, it doesn’t matter if inside you’re falling away from your own skin, if nothing is solid any more and if you do not have a clue who you are, what you did, if you kissed the hipster waiter and what the hell you are going to do next.
Anon
Oh, we all know about the thing with Joseph, after that night. The ongoing flirtation. The blurring of the boundaries. The fact that Scarlett fancies him, and him her, and her marriage – I allow myself a moment of congratulations here, as I am almost solely responsible – seems done anyway.
It makes me angry though, how greedy she is.
Because it reminds me of how all this started in the first place.
Of how, most likely, she doesn’t even want that man we are both sleeping with. When I do, so desperately.
And the morals! So superior and judgemental to everybody else but then all it takes is a few vodka slammers to send her to lock-ins with the local hipster.
But Scarlett is, always, obsessed with men wanting her. With everyone actually, being interested in her, and impressed by her, and coveting her things and envying that beautiful face and clicking on her blog.
How can model-like Ed not be enough for you? How can you want more?
Often I am speaking and I glance at Scarlett and see her, staring past me across the room to see if anything else is going on, who else is there. I get it, Scarlett. You are too good for me. Making do.
That makes me feel so stupid that it pinches.
The worst thing is that she thinks we are all so oblivious. That we don’t realise her head is elsewhere. That instead we are just so grateful to have a fancy new friend like Scarlett that we’ll take whatever she wants to throw our way.
Except, she isn’t that fancy, not really.
Po-faced and pristine sometimes, but then very quickly she becomes drunk and vulgar, swearing like she is in an eighteen movie with lots of guns and not much plot.
At least I know who I am, even if it’s someone you often scoff at, Scarlett.
Do you know who you are really: the blogger, the city girl, the high-flyer, the country mum with her wellies on, the loyal wife, the hot flirt, with your working-class accent when it suits and your clipped one when it doesn’t?
No. Didn’t think so.
Your friend. How could I be your friend, when you’ve committed the ultimate betrayal towards me, and then sit with me, looking me in the eye and never speaking of it?
And when I think of it like that, I don’t feel bad about what I did at all. Or about what I am about to do to up, up, up the ante.
18
Scarlett
3 June
I hear Ed’s key in the door as I am checking for an email from Jonathan White. I leap from my phone, guilty when he walks in, and I have no idea why. I am supposed to be keeping in touch with the lawyer; that’s the idea. But somehow everything connected to this whole thing makes me feel guilty, sheepish, part of a grubby cover-up.
My husband and I stare at each other.
‘Hey,’ he says, then walks over to kiss Poppy.
I can’t bring myself to reply.
I wipe down a table where we used to lose hours talking about friends and the news and how good the tagliatelle tasted. I
