Now though, everything to do with that awful blog has gone.
Someone from Cheshire.
Scarlett shocks me when she tells that.
I had no idea she could know that; that anyone could get that information. What can I say? I’m a novice. Learning on the job. What I lack in experience though, I make up for in utter fucking hatred.
I feel my face contract. Snap back into Good Friend mode quickly.
Horrific, Scarlett. So close. Who could it be? Why would they do that?
There is satisfaction in seeing her now, exposed, weakened. I sit back to assess her, now she isn’t hiding.
When I do see glimpses of change, I bathe in them.
Scarlett is a little fatter, a little more bedraggled, a little less confident.
She no longer has the celebrity status that Cheshire Mama gave her.
That spurs me on. Because it means that she is less likely to hurt me again. That he is less likely to want her. And that, of course, is the reason I’ve done this to her in the first place.
27
Scarlett
26 June
I’m not used to seeing Asha without her having one boob hanging out, so the solidity of a sports bra is quite the departure.
‘Shimmy!’ orders the instructor and we try to follow as our babies career around the middle of the room on some mats. I hear Asha breathe heavily next to me. ‘Shake! It!’
I do what I’m told.
Asha’s boobs, I notice admiringly, as I glance to the side, look pretty good given that someone has been gnawing on them multiple times a day for the last year. Probably because they’d barely need a B cup versus my own Ds.
Sweat drips down my back. I used to run half-marathons before I had Poppy and I was running again, 5k here, 6k there. Since the video though, it’s rare.
‘Come to this class with me,’ messaged Asha a few days after they found out about the video. ‘I think you need to stay as busy as you can. Grab loads of time with Poppy. Take the pluses; all of that bonding.’
When we’ve stretched it out, most of the women grab their babies and disperse.
I look at Asha. She is frowning as she checks her phone, Ananya roaming around the room.
I am distracted by my own phone; another message from Ed telling me he needs to be away overnight next week. The niggling feeling of an affair, of that being the story behind the video, sent from Cheshire, keeps coming.
‘You exercised a lot before, right?’ says Asha, still Christmas stocking red up to her hairline.
‘Before’ and ‘after’ are words enough in their own right; we know what they mean. Those positive pregnancy tests may as well have been made of lead, crashing down the middle of our lives to saw them in half. The oddest part, I think, is that Asha and the others didn’t see the first half. It’s floating around somewhere unanchored to this one and unknown to them.
I nod. ‘Yeah I did sometimes,’ I say. ‘In Manchester. Not since.’
‘Since’ is another of those words.
‘Did you enjoy today?’
I nod again. I didn’t enjoy it at all, it was torturous, but do you enjoy anything when you’re in the middle of it, other than, you know, burgers or a large red or lying on the sofa watching Netflix? The rest is to enjoy afterwards or before. The knowledge that you will do it, or that you have completed it. Not the faffy in between bit.
Asha wipes sweat off her brow. I mirror.
‘Fancy a drink?’ she says and I indicate the perspiration and the Lycra.
But I still go.
I think about my bottom as I stand at the bar while Asha entertains our babies in their highchairs and I wonder if anyone is looking at it, thirty-five years old, motherly, unexercised and flaunting itself in Lycra. Who does it think it is, this arse?
I order a wine even though it’s 2 p.m.
I head back to the table and hand Asha a fizzy water. She glances quickly at my Malbec. Looks away. I start rambling, embarrassed, about baby gates and child locks.
‘It’s genuinely astonishing that other people from the group didn’t want to come with us.’ I smile. ‘When my chat is this good.’
Asha laughs. But now the beat and the moving of the class have stopped, my mind is whirring again. I have a meeting with the lawyer in a few days and barely anything to update him on. I’ve reached a dead end and the idea of standing still there is terrifying.
I take a large gulp of wine.
‘Are you okay?’ Asha asks.
‘Yeah, you know,’ I sigh. ‘Just fighting with Ed about the whole video thing.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
Yeah sure, I think, more chat about my sex tape side gig. My terror of the future. Being ashamed of myself, every second. Not being able to look my dad in the eye any more. Drifting from my sister. Career in ruins. My crumbling marriage.
Too much. Too awful.
‘No,’ I say, and then I think I sounded a little snippy.
But I was desperate to talk and then I was sick of talking and that’s just how it is.
‘Well if you ever do, I’m here,’ she says quietly, sipping her water. I don’t think she looks annoyed.
I nod, down the rest of my house red and flee.
And it’s on the walk home that I check my phone.
It’s not a surprise but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t puncture me in the lungs, pummel me in the gut.
It’s what I’ve feared.
Through all of this – which it strikes me now may just have been a warm-up – it’s what I’ve feared the most.
‘So you’ve quit your job as an infuencer?’ it says. ‘Not planning to go back to the job you used to do back in the day, are you? That’s what everyone will find out next. Unless you leave him alone.’
I stand in the street, next to a tree, as a dog runs past me and
