I think of all those evenings out, nights away – at his brother’s, with the boys, staying at his parents. So many opportunities.
Check.
No messages.
No wonder he can no longer touch me.
More vodka.
Cora tries to call me but I don’t pick up, knowing that I am more drunk now than anyone is supposed to be at 2 p.m. and that it’s not in a socially acceptable way, with friends and oily roast potatoes and shared bottles of Prosecco or a good red. Knowing that it could be her. That I can’t trust anybody.
I long for Poppy and look at old pictures and videos of her laughing. Time dawdles.
I try to FaceTime Ed again but he doesn’t pick up.
Paranoia hits.
I need to see my daughter. What if something has happened to my daughter?
Having Poppy has meant that I have still remained loosely in the world, when without her I would have locked the door and climbed under a duvet.
Josephine, after a month’s travelling for her honeymoon, has barely been in contact. Maybe she’s in a post-wedding love bubble. Maybe she’s just a bit grossed out by what’s happened.
It’s weird, what sex does. To a lot of people I’m different now.
You spend years building these worlds and sprawling networks that you think are carved into the earth’s core and then you realise that they were floating above it, temporary, ready to be blown apart when you move house, or stop messaging, or are publicly shamed.
No messages. I wander into the kitchen and leave my phone there. I know I have had too much to drink now to speak to Ed. He’s already watching my drinking. And I know what happens when people split up. It’s the kind of thing that’ll get flung in my face during a custody battle.
Back in the living room my lips taste it again, the harshness of that same straight vodka I’ve always turned to at the worst times.
I drink again.
It burns, and I need it.
Vodka doesn’t mess around.
I touch my tongue to my lips and remember other times, old bouts of pain.
Of drinking vodka straight too in the days after Ollie and I lost our baby, nearly thirteen years ago.
We drove back from the hospital at 3 a.m. that night, a time we would normally have been heading to another club. I pulled the sleeves of his hoodie, which I had been wearing for a couple of months as my body had spread out beyond my own clothes, over my hands. I shook with horror at what had happened to us over the last seventy-two hours, since I had gone into labour two and a half months before my due date.
We drove past a club where we had danced with each other with smiles on our faces and beer in our hands, and it felt ghoulish. Stupid us, not knowing what was ahead. That Ollie and me weren’t this Ollie and me. They were ‘those people’. Those naive, drunk people who thought the catastrophes happened to someone else, someone who – don’t we all think – was probably ready for them; knew somehow that they were coming. Not us. Never us. We had to think that, to believe we were protected.
I wanted to shake that Scarlett, drag her off the dance floor and scream at her to watch out.
Don’t get pregnant.
Don’t love.
Look what that horrible emotion is capable of.
At home, I took off every item of my clothing, wanting to distance myself from the hospital scents, the sterility, the beeps, those too-fast footsteps.
I climbed, silent and naked, into our bed, and curled up with my youthful body that had been re-formed by a baby that was no longer here. How could I escape from this when it was me?
And I drank, drank, drank, that same straight vodka.
I thought about single people, as I sat in bed with the bottle. About the ones without children, and they seemed wise or lucky beyond measure.
I didn’t belong in our world now of parties and euphoria but I had not moved on. That meant a grotesque limbo with my stretch marks and my bleeding and no baby and two layers of deep grief that these people had never known. That meant existing at the very edges of being human, far away from most people and their centred, normal experiences.
I couldn’t go out in case I saw people who I had made small talk with when I was pregnant. ‘Not too long to go!’ they had said last time but there was less time than we thought and it wasn’t enough. Now here I was, my body absent of the baby, and my arms too. How would they small talk that?
Eventually, no vodka left at home, I went to the pub, to clubs, to anyone’s party who would have me.
As I sat on a bench at 2 a.m., out of it, a teenage girl walked past carrying her strappy sandals. She glanced quickly at me, relief crossing her face: I wasn’t a man; I posed no threat.
‘Are you single?’ I asked and she nodded.
‘Stay that way,’ I said. ‘It’s safer.’
She nodded gravely, as though the subtext was a bad break-up.
‘Don’t love anybody,’ I carried on, believing these were the wisest words. I was twenty-three and ancient. I had discovered a truth about the universe.
The girl started to walk away. Not a man who would sexually assault her, but maybe an unstable woman. Still not ideal.
We stayed together, Ollie and I, not solid glue but more like old, tired Blu Tack that only vaguely does the job. We lost our stick sometimes but in the end we could form ourselves into a ball and keep going.
Ollie, reluctantly, began to come on nights out with me again but more as a chaperone than a boyfriend until I pressed the destruct button and pushed for the thing that would kill off lovely dancing us.
The feelings come back now compounded, extreme, but reminding me what happiness looks like when you’re hurtling, fast, towards a
