My mum friends don’t normally do impromptu drinks but the words ‘marriage crisis’ get people slapping some mascara on and heading for the door.
I slam my own without a word and I walk to the pub wishing that I knew how to bring this back and turn it so that we faced the right way. But it is so far gone, isn’t it. It is so very, very far gone.
You think when you have been through big things like childbirth together that it means you’re right with each other, always. But sometimes you’re still wrong with each other, at a certain point.
Sometimes shared experience isn’t enough.
Sometimes, one type of shared experience bonds you and another yanks you apart, and you have no way of knowing which one is which except maybe, somehow, it’s to do with blame. When there is blame to level, teams stop being teams, couples stop being couples.
An hour later my friends and I are in our local and I am drinking fast and slurring, and I know I will regret this but I cannot stop it now it is in motion. I’m tired of hiding and lying and spinning. Take it all, know it all.
Emma, her lime and soda next to my Malbec – she’s driving – is holding my hand and I look down and see my rounded nails, manicured once but now, bitten down.
‘Has he strayed, babe?’ says Emma in a stage whisper, clinging to my hand so that we have become sweaty together. ‘A lot of men do it. It doesn’t mean you can’t move on from it.’
She speaks like she has some unique wisdom. I roll my eyes.
‘No he hasn’t strayed,’ I mutter but then, the gym visits, the drinks, the distance, the coldness. Has he strayed? Maybe, Em, maybe he has bloody strayed.
I look up and realise I’m missing Emma’s hand. It felt nice to be touched.
I think.
Strayed.
Would it be easier if that were what had happened? A linear problem. A well-trodden path. Rage, fury and then a balance of what would be lost versus what would be gained from leaving. We’d batten down the hatches, talk, leave it behind. Maybe book a fancy holiday. See a relationship therapist. Paint the house. Regroup.
I let Emma, who clearly has no gauge of the right amount of personal space but I am currently pathetically grateful of that fact, put her arm around me as I begin to cry again.
Asha thinks we should eat, and goes to order bar food.
‘What have I missed?’ bellows Cora, walking as fast as her heels can carry her across the pub towards us and sporting what I can see even for her are incredibly dark eyebrows. ‘If he is cheating, you’ve got Joseph there waiting. You could get your own back like that.’
She clicks her fingers.
I stare at her face. It looks odd.
‘Yeah I went a bit overboard on the old HD brows,’ she says, finger to her face. She shrugs. ‘Ah, well. It’ll fade. So, hot hipster or not?’
I look at Cora then and feel a swell of admiration.
Would she care, that I have a sex tape online? Would she laugh, shrug, tell me to move on and forget it? Ask to see it then tell me I had ‘great tits, hon’ and dilute the whole thing for me?
I open my mouth and I am so close to telling them, but then I see the receptionist from our doctor’s walk past to leave the pub, putting up a hand in greeting, and I close my mouth again, wipe my eyes and wave back.
Cora goes to the bar and our chips arrive, some hummus and dips, mini burgers, and Asha and I don’t touch them while Emma talks to herself quietly, totting up calories each time she dives in. She is still holding my hand.
Then Cora sits down, glass of Prosecco in front of her now.
‘Best they had.’ She grimaces. ‘Right, I’ve got the nanny to stay on an extra few hours for this one.’
She leans forward on the table. Eats a chip.
‘Shit’s hit the fan? Talk me through it.’
And I go to make a joke, to be acerbic about it, or light, to do what I’m supposed to do in this situation so that I don’t make anybody feel uncomfortable but I can’t manage it.
Instead, I break down and sob tears that sting my eyes like I have rubbed vodka into the corners.
I can’t keep this in. Without Ed to speak to about it, it’s bursting from my seams. My dad talks in code. I’m too ashamed to thrash this out with my little sister. Ollie is now off-limits.
‘There is a video of me,’ I say, quietly. ‘It’s online. I’m having sex in it, a long time ago, and it’s been sent to all of my friends and family. Except you lot: whoever did it obviously doesn’t know you are in my lives yet because that’s recent.’
No one says a word. But I’m used to shocking people into silence.
‘I’m not having a longer maternity leave, I’ve left work for good. It was too embarrassing that my colleagues had seen it, and clients felt weird about working with me,’ I continue. I still cringe at the memory of overhearing Flick, something I’ve never told her about. She’s the last person I want feeling guilty. ‘I’m trying to find out who posted the video but neither of the men …’
I see eyebrows shoot up.
‘Oh yes, there are two men. Neither will admit to posting it. I met up with them both. So I don’t know if it’s got into someone else’s hands somehow, or if they’re lying.’
I pause, to more silence. It’s weird seeing Cora without hearing her voice.
‘Sometimes …’ I whisper, heaving breaths. The relief of this. The pain of it.
