I look across the room, register their familiar faces in profile.
My friends.
There’s a film over this setting now and it’s been turned twenty degrees, thirty.
I walk slowly to Cora and Emma, at our usual table.
‘No Asha?’ I say, quiet, but if my voice sounds different to me, they don’t notice.
Cheshire.
Us.
I sit Poppy in her highchair next to Penelope, across from Seth.
I thought it would be a full house. That I could nail this, once and for all, with them all here. That now I suspect, it would be obvious who had done this to me.
Cora doesn’t answer though, her nails clacking on her phone and I bristle. On top of everything else, do not fucking ignore me.
I’m not the only one being ignored; Penelope blows raspberries to try and get her mum to make eye contact.
‘Realised she had double-booked. Ananya’s got swimming,’ fills in Emma. ‘Got your drink.’
I take a sip of turmeric latte – thinking how much I could do with a strong coffee – and thank her.
Emma looks at Cora who is still oblivious and back at me, raising an unruly eyebrow with flecks of grey through it.
I look away.
Sharing a wordless grumble about how distracted Cora is, is too much today when I no longer trust these women. When I think somebody is faking being in my camp.
But how difficult it is not to bitch or judge when people bitch and judge and will you along with them. You look pious or awkward. You look po-faced and no fun.
And apparently I do enough of that already.
I stare at my latte. When I look back up, does Emma look irritated?
You think you are better than us.
The Welsh one has a girl crush, said Ed.
What if it was something darker, a fixation?
I take a sip of my drink and watch Emma walk to the counter for a teacake for Seth.
I turn back to Cora, still messaging.
‘What?’ she scowls, looking up.
When I tell her nothing, she goes straight back to her messages.
If I have judged or criticised these women, I think, then bloody hell I have envied them too. Emma’s surety in where she is, where she wants to be forever, while I flail around the countryside, dreaming about the city. Cora’s flippancy; her lack of worry about where her affair is leading, what will happen to her marriage. Asha’s neatness, the order in her life while mine needs a deep clean.
I think that’s how human emotions in their messy, crossover way, work. Yin, yang. Dislike, envy.
I slump forward.
Cheshire. Us.
Ed. Is one of these women sleeping with Ed?
‘You okay, hon?’ Cora asks, still messaging, and I mutter a vague yes.
I’m not okay.
This was my only respite, I now realise, and the room feels like it’s underwater.
These women, odd band of sisters that they are, were my swaddling blankets.
‘I have a headache, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come,’ I say, this tiny room shrinking smaller, smaller and I need to get out before I am crushed between its walls.
The glances behind me are worried or fake.
‘Message us later, babe.’
‘Hope you feel better, hon.’
I battle the urge to retch.
Surely it can’t be one of them.
But it’s the only thing that makes sense.
‘Jesus!’
Someone has stepped in front of me.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Just wanted to help you with the pram.’
Joseph opens the door.
Even now, and with everything that is in my head, I think of my lank hair and my eyes, puffy from a lack of sleep.
I manoeuvre the pram past him and we stand still, outside the door.
‘Not spoken to you much since …’ he starts.
I look down. ‘Just busy,’ I mutter.
‘You back at work now?’ he says, trying for small talk, like we are pals. ‘How’s that going?’
‘I put it off until a bit later,’ I say. ‘Not quite ready to be parted from this buddy of mine.’
I tickle Poppy’s chin and she shrieks. And even today, it’s a jab of joy. The only thing that provides them at the moment.
Joseph smiles and I fancy him and then I think: How is there space in my brain for this? Perhaps it’s pleased to zone in on something primal, physical, instinctive? Instead of all of this other stuff: complex, unknown, modern.
But should I be suspecting him, as Cora said? Local, interested in me. I look at his face. My brain may combust.
Us though, us.
I glance over Joseph’s shoulder through the glass door and see Cora watching me. She looks away quickly, goes back to her phone. Emma rescues pieces of teacake, over and over, from the floor to feed to Seth. Up, down, up, down.
I look at Joseph again, his brow furrowed.
‘You sure you’re good?’ he says. ‘You know, if you ever want to talk …’
His fingers graze my arm and I pull back because I want him to stay there.
‘All good,’ I say, moving away. ‘Cheers for the drink.’
And I walk away before I am too tempted by touch and words and before I fall open and everything unravels.
35
Scarlett
27 July
‘She loves this one,’ says a woman with a scarlet smile next to me.
I stare at her. Can’t summon the energy for the requisite small talk.
Her smile drains away and she turns to the woman on the other side in the circle instead, moves a barely perceptible centimetre.
I say woman. She is – here – a mum. That’s what we all are, solely.
I don’t know her name, or her job, or what gives her goose bumps but I know she had a third-degree tear and her daughter has three middle names.
But hey, I can’t exactly hang out with my own friends, merrily whistling Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes with someone I am sure has ruined my life, right now.
Poppy totters back over to me and grins, arms raised ready for me to sing
