I shift uncomfortably on the floor. Notice everyone else has taken their shoes off. I stare at the feet clad in Muppets socks across the circle. The odd socks with the hole in the toe next to them. I remove my trainers and think about how infantilising it is.
Mums have started to be replaced by grans and grandpas and nannies at these baby groups. We are out of the newborn classes now and a lot of the parents have gone back to work.
I listen to the tuneless singing; look at the woman leading the class in her branded T-shirt and her kids’ TV presenter dungarees. And I am suddenly filled with a desperate panic.
I loved this when it was temporary, precious, limited.
Now that life stretches before me with no other focus and no idea how the hell I can go back to my job or my entire industry – what if word’s spread? – it’s terrifying.
What happens when Poppy is older? No job. No friends. No marriage?
The music changes to another generic nursery rhyme and I am observing from outside the community centre windows.
This is it.
No job, I repeat to myself, like a mantra.
No marriage?
No friends.
Whoever posted that video has taken my life away from me, whole. When that night happened it seemed a tiny part but now it’s pushed itself into the furthest corners of my life and everything is infested, everything is dying.
And then there is the knowledge: the worst could still come. I picture the penthouse. Taste that expensive gin. Shiver.
At the same time sweat, I realise, is pouring down my back.
I feel dizzy.
It’s happening again.
I have got to get out of here.
I grab Poppy and my bag and I almost run to the door as I mutter about a migraine.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I murmur to a one-year-old who is mad at me for ending her class prematurely. ‘I’m sorry.’
And I am.
I’m sorry I can’t sit back and enjoy this bonus extra time with her.
I’m sorry that when I take her out, in this dreamy village to its traditional classes, that I scour the room for evidence, feel my mind drift off, instead of drinking up that time with my daughter.
Later when Poppy is in bed, I am the worst combination to message my boss – morose, self-pitying, drunk – but that is what I do.
I need my job back, Flick, it says. I know I’m an idiot for only realising this now but I do. I need it. Especially if Ed is fucking about. I need to be me again x PS: If it’s already gone to somebody else, can’t you just kick out that useless shit Carl and give me his job instead? HA!
I need to extricate myself from Cheshire, and whatever the hell is going on here. I convince myself that if I can just claw my way back to Manchester, to Scarlett 2.0, it will all be okay. If Ed is cheating, I will leave him, get an apartment, register Poppy with a nursery near work. This is manageable. Breathe, I think, breathe.
At 4 a.m. the next morning, I wake up on the sofa with a gasp from a nightmare. I get out of bed and look down the stairs and I can see Ed’s shoes by the door. I didn’t hear him come in, late again. Have barely seen him since he got back from his weekend away. He is in the spare room, I presume. I think about going in there and confronting him. Are you sleeping with one of my friends, Ed? But treat this like Jonathan would treat it, I think. Get your evidence first. Then act.
I remember the text to Flick then. Groan.
It had seemed like the perfect tone at the time. Felicity is my friend. Felicity hates Carl too. But now, from the outside, when Felicity is Carl’s boss, it’s awful. I am not being the grown-up.
There is no reply.
By mid afternoon, trapped home alone with nowhere to go and no one to see. I send a follow-on.
Sorry about that message, it says. Bit too much wine! But it would be great to talk, if you get a chance. Sx
Still nothing, and my shame, already meandering around parts of my skin, speeds up, spreads out and multiplies until it covers me like a onesie.
Ed comes down, dressed, kisses Poppy, says a cursory hello to me and heads out. Poppy plays on the living room floor. Brings me books and toys that she wants me to read and play with. I say no, I can’t. Feel shame at that too.
I keep the curtains closed, even though no one walks past. Poppy’s getting used to playing without daylight.
This village is small and I am convinced my only friends here are involved in this. I am convinced too that everyone knows that I am the woman in the video, the glassy-eyed mum who runs out of playgroups or the one who gets drunk and flirts with waiters. All these versions of me, and all of them the bad kind.
If they feel like you are good gossip here, in Sowerton, they will detect you like metal, and they will wrestle you out of your sensible mum coat and make you expose your soul so they can pass it on at their next coffee date with the girls like the baton at primary school sports day.
I can’t face that. Can’t cope with being exposed any further.
So when I have to go out, I choose paths that are off the beaten track; the unadopted roads. I keep my head low. I walk like I am nineteen and scared, being followed from the night bus by a big, leering man. Instead of thirty-five and being followed around the internet by someone without height, breadth, without any physicality.
Could it really be them?
And why?
How?
I long for Manchester and its grime and the smell of eighteen different types of
