I stand in the queue at the doctor’s and wonder if the man behind me, coughing without covering his mouth, knows.
I go to get my hair cut and I look in the mirror and see the face of this young, happy blonde girl holding her scissors and the first thing I think is ‘Do you know?’
And you, and you, and you. It’s incessant.
And still, it’s not even close to how it would have been if I’d been exposed as the mum blogger with the sex tape. I shudder.
‘Why have you deleted Cheshire Mama?’ the odd acquaintance asks. And I tell them I have been concerned about privacy. Concerned about sharing, as Poppy gets older, becomes a little person. They nod, understanding, then tell me it’s a shame, it was doing well. I know, I think. We were almost at eight thousand. Now, gone.
We run in silence for a few minutes.
I keep going, going. I know how to get in the zone, to focus on the heavy pad of good trainers on hard pavement and to block out everything else but the next step.
Plus I have a lot of rage that needs an outlet. In the absence of a punch bag, the pavement can take the pounding.
‘It’s probably not what you want to hear …’ Asha says over the noise. It’s nice having someone running alongside me. ‘But yeah. It doesn’t sound like the most unlikely scenario. Who wants to screw you over in life? Love rivals are up there, right? I mean if this were a BBC drama, it would be a love rival.’
We laugh. But Asha’s right. It’s logical.
If my life has been ruined because Ed is fucking about though, I think, running, running, running harder, I will lose it. If Ed is fucking about while implying that all of this has happened because I had sex, when it’s because he had sex, worse sex, sex that betrays, I will lose it, lose it, lose it.
Slam, slam, slam.
‘Scarlett, I can’t go that fast,’ says Asha, over the noise of my trainers as she falls behind me. The air is charred, smoky with a nearby barbecue. I hear the others complain too but I can’t slow down.
I need to keep running because I can feel my head spinning off somewhere bleak. Is it coming for me? I think. Is the next thing coming? The biggest secret of all? They could email it again; they have the addresses. They could message Ed; they have his number. I imagine his face; my dad’s. I can’t take another hit.
When Asha catches up with me I am bent double, resting my hands on my knees, gasping for breath and I am sobbing, hard and louder than I am ever allowed to at home, terrified that I have lost control.
32
Scarlett
24 July
Ed is away on a boys’ trip for two nights and I am suspicious. Two nights in a hotel is a convenient thing to have in the calendar if you’re sleeping with somebody else.
I haven’t asked him because my brain needs wiping like dirty glasses at the moment and can’t be trusted to judge things. Am I trying to get myself off the hook? Shift the blame to him? The worst thing each and every time I lose myself in life is that I can’t trust my own thoughts. And isn’t that the most terrifying thing of all.
But then, I get a message from Flick.
You around for brunch today by any chance?
Flick names an edgy place in the Northern Quarter and I try on five different tops.
It happens so quickly when you move out of a city. One minute it’s instinctive, the vibe, the style, the mood. And then it’s like a language you don’t speak.
I drop Poppy at Ed’s parents’, where we make small talk with no eye contact, and head into town to meet her.
I walk in to the restaurant wearing jeans and trainers. Is it worth trying to impress people now, given what they know?
Flick is in her Pilates clothes, straight from a class with her hair scraped back and I remember that: the coolest thing you can do in a city at brunch is give zero fucks.
She sips a green juice and looks young without her heels and her make-up, so that her wedding ring seems incongruous. I, on the other hand, feel weathered.
As I say hello, she slurps from a straw.
‘It’s good to see you,’ she says, putting her drink down and standing up to kiss me. ‘Sorry it took me so long to reply.’
From then on though, the conversation is stilted and that makes me sad. Like a relationship, can you pull back a friendship once awkwardness kicks in?
We order: eggs and smoked salmon for her, a bacon sandwich for my hangover, more juice for Flick and strong coffee for me.
I chew fast so that I can finish and say something and fill the silence, because it isn’t comfortable like it used to be.
And then when the food has gone away and only the dregs of our drinks are left, Flick looks up at me and the expression on her face makes me feel sick.
‘You know I said a while ago I needed to speak to you urgently?’ she says.
I nod. Sure.
‘I wasn’t up to it.’
‘It wasn’t about the video, Scarlett,’ she says. ‘It was about Ed.’
I think about the other messages I had from her afterwards, the missed calls. All ignored. Thinking she wanted to talk to me about work when really, it was this.
I’ve known, anyway, haven’t I?
Those nights away. The texts at Josephine’s wedding. His distance to me and how sometimes I have an instinct that this video has been a gift, to let him pull back from us and our marriage. To give him an excuse to blame me, when it comes to it. And it will come to it, I know.
I look up. Wait.
‘I changed my mind about telling you
