But suddenly there is something to distract me from the future. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody moves, quickly, in the side passage of my house. Too scared to investigate I put my key in the door and slam it behind me, double locking once I’m inside, willing myself to go and investigate. But I can’t.
Bury your head in the sand, Scarlett, about this as with everything. I don’t sleep until the early hours of the morning when the sun is coming up and I feel almost safe again.
Anon
It’s not my style, really, loitering next to wheelie bins, ducking into the shadows just along from the tomato plants and the pergola; honeysuckle rampaging over it.
That, Scarlett, is what you have driven me to.
I have been drinking more these last few weeks. Days are blending into night. At home I watch the video, over and over. Study you. Hate you.
If your intent was to break my life, then it’s worked. All I ever wanted, gone. I can’t see a way forward. Can’t see sky above me.
An existence that was grey when I started this has, as time has gone on, edged darker and darker to black.
And so, I will do the same to yours. What will hurt most, Scarlett? You have already lost your job, your reputation, your pride, your blog. But they have nothing, do they, on what you prize most. Your family. Are you fit to look after Poppy, really? A woman like you? Will you even be able to, once this has finished? Ed certainly doesn’t think so any more, not after the things I’ve told him. Where did he say he had taken her this weekend? You sure he was telling the truth, Scarlett?
Now I have nothing to risk. It is all lost. He is gone. I am smashed into pieces. And you did that, Scarlett, you.
But when I see you there, you dart in and put your key in the door faster than I can act, as my heart hammers in my chest, as I think about what I want to do to you, as I hesitate just for that second and the lock is turned, the door bolted.
But it will happen soon, Scarlett.
I think you know that too, really.
Two women. Such good friends. Such bad choices.
It has become inevitable what will happen between us two.
36
Scarlett
28 July
Only a few hours later, I wake up groggy and hungover and drink three coffees, back to back.
I message Ed. I know he’ll be up with our early-rising Weetabix fiend of a daughter.
How’s Poppy? I write. Give her a squeeze from me.
But there’s no reply.
My body tenses as I think about what will happen if Ed and I split up.
Weekends will be like this, without Poppy. Nights roaming around the house alone. Nothing to stop the panic coming. The vodka being opened. The bleakness kicking in.
I try Ed again. Nothing.
Maybe there would be bigger changes too.
Would we need to sell the house if Ed moved out?
I think about when we moved in here. Ed’s face when Poppy was born. I think about us all on base, barely leaving the house in those weeks after we brought her home as we worked out how to be a family and how to keep her safe here in a sanitised environment before we could consider exposing her to the dangers of the outside world.
I start to cry.
I don’t remember how I get there but I am sitting on the bottom stair, a pile of Ed’s coats on my lap. I check his pockets and I don’t know what I am searching for because these days nothing is in hard copy anyway and so I stop and I just sit there, buried in coats like I have crawled into a den, sad.
I message Martha.
Flick says you know some stuff about Ed, I say. Can you tell me everything?
And she calls me.
‘I don’t know for certain,’ she sighs. I hear it, attuned to it now: pity. ‘But I work with this guy who used to work with Ed, when he was at your place. Paul?’
‘Yeah, Paul Costello.’
‘That’s it.’
Ed still sees Paul.
‘Paul got a bit loose-lipped at the pub. Says it’s … the worst-kept secret. That all their mates know what Ed’s up to with some woman from the gym.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ I ask. ‘You’re my friend.’
She sighs again. ‘I’m sorry – I am,’ she says. ‘But it’s been hard, Scarlett. You went off radar and you didn’t seem in a great place. Or like you wanted to speak to me. I didn’t have any proper evidence – I still don’t – and I just thought that I couldn’t drop that on you with the situation like this. It was only when Flick heard it from Jared too and told me that I thought, well, that seems a bit more conclusive.’
She goes quiet.
‘We weren’t talking very much either,’ she says.
I say goodbye to her and thrust the raincoats and the puffas and the smart suit jackets off me, onto the hall floor.
Alone in my big house in the countryside, I take a large swig of the same cheap brand of vodka that I used to drink, back in the day.
I ignore the beautiful bottles, the drinks brought back from holidays and adventures. Because it is beauty again, the icing of life, and whether it is because I feel I don’t deserve to enjoy that or simply can’t see it any more, it feels like that part of life is gone for me now.
‘Fuck you, Ed,’ I mutter to myself.
I may not have made much effort but at least I have tried to keep our marriage going. Meanwhile Ed has shamed me, for sex I had with someone else twelve years ago, when he had sex with someone else – what – twelve weeks ago,
