Be kind, I tell Poppy, over and over when she pushes Seth over or pulls Ananya’s hair. Be kind. I say it because it is the best advice I can give; the simplest rule for life, even if I sometimes don’t manage to follow it myself. This message isn’t kind, is the first thing I know.
You think you are so perfect!!! You think u are better than the rest of us. I dot. You deserve this, Im glad I shared the video.
From the same pay-as-you-go phone as before.
Someone that has my number but that doesn’t narrow it down. As Mitch and Asha both pointed out, I am public property, with contact details that until recently were easily available online. And anyone can pick up a spare pay-as-you-go phone.
I look at the spelling errors. Possibly drunk.
I check the large clock above the fireplace: after eleven.
My heart drums in my chest because I tell you what else happens when Ed is not here, and I know somebody is trying to harm me: I get frightened.
I glance towards the living room door.
And then, when I realise that the person in the house who is supposed to get frightened is dependent on me not to be frightened, I get more frightened.
Because here’s the reality that has made my body unable to stay still lately, like it refused to so often when I was young, foot tapping, hand twitching. If they’ll come at me online, they will come for me in real life too. They know, most likely, where I live. They may have been deleted now but they were up there for long enough – the many, many pictures of my home, my view, in such a tiny village make it easy to find. And there are expensive things in this house, for someone in the mood for blackmail.
This person knows things about me, my life and maybe my finances. They know what I used to do, about that penthouse apartment in Manchester. My hand twitches faster.
I go to get a second glass of wine but stop because she needs me to be alert, Poppy, doesn’t she? See, Ed, I think. Not such a lush after all.
Instead I stalk the house, flinging open cupboard doors, bursting into rooms. I crouch down and peer under the dining table. I spirit in and check Poppy’s wardrobe. I sit on the plush carpet of her bedroom and I reach through the bars of her cot and stroke her face. Then I stay there on the floor again.
I feel the dull sensation of tears but even I can’t bear to cry again and I stop, angry, and then I pull the door to her room closed and go back downstairs.
Something has just occurred to me about that message.
I pick up my phone, to reread it and check.
But it’s been deleted.
And she would delete it, wouldn’t she?
Because suddenly I know. It has to be a she. Outside of Ed, I only belong in an ‘us’ with groups of women. I’m certainly not an us with Ollie; with Mitch. Neither would think I thought I was better than them.
That’s why I shared it.
Us. Us. Us.
Whoever is out to get me is firmly in the present, on the inside of my life. Known.
And there aren’t that many people in the present, on the inside of my life. Known.
Particularly in Cheshire.
Who do I even speak to really? I make small talk with my sister-in-law Jaclyn, or I did before this happened and she stopped inviting us round, preferring to see Ed and Poppy on their own now, or maybe that’s just what Ed wants. I pass those people in the village and swap generics on the weather, the upcoming season, back and forth. I flirt a little as I order coffee from Joseph. I make faux pas to Emma’s sister-in-law. I am too distant from the playgroup floor chat to make friends. I no longer have any reason to see Ronnie.
You think you’re better than the rest of us.
Who has welcomed me and ruined me at the same time?
Us. Us.
I feel my stomach flip.
It couldn’t be, could it?
Because it occurs to me then that there is only one group of ‘us’ that I am truly part of here, in Cheshire.
I look at our group chat, at the obscene amounts of information shared in there. Emotions, plans, personal details. I think of how I sent a close-up of my nipple to people I had known, at the time, for three months. Of everything I have shared.
I pace around the house, body twitching more now, deeper, unable to stay still.
I walk into the kitchen and pour a glass of water. Try to breathe.
My stomach lurches as I realise that all of my mum friends could believe I thought I was better than them, rolling my eyes, drifting off, posing for selfies for Cheshire Mama while they hold my coffee.
These women have seen a version of me that did look haughty.
That, lost in the countryside, at first cringed and viewed them as too local, too limited, too clichéd, too middle-aged, too WAG, too uncultured, too unaware, too stupid, too unfit, too aggressive, too too too.
The rest of us.
I see myself through their eyes and it’s horrifying.
Could Emma be this angry with me, resentful that our relationship is like the seesaw we put the babies on but always swung up my way? As she asks me questions and gives me compliments and arranges to see me and I struggle to concentrate when she tells me stories or to remember what’s going on in her life?
I pad back to the living room, my bare feet cold on the wooden floor that surrounds the rug in front of the wood burner. I don’t have the energy to locate socks.
There’s what I think of Asha, my brain grimacing at her attachment parenting. I judge Asha for the fussiness we’d have called OCD before we knew what OCD really was and that using it to point at
