I drink the vodka.
I can’t access the happiness, even if I know it’s there in Poppy’s perfect form. It’s like it’s a person on the other side of a locked prison wall.
The rest of the day passes in a blur.
I think I open the door to take in a parcel.
Or did I dream that?
More vodka.
And suddenly I am waking up on my sofa, and think I am dreaming.
Because over the top of the chart songs on a chirpy reality show on TV, there is a woman’s voice, in my house, saying my name over and over and over and shaking me awake. Shaking me awake, hard. So it hurts.
A woman, when I am here alone.
I open my eyes.
And there, after all of these months, is my answer.
Cheshire.
Us.
Inside.
Present.
I stare at her. And for once, she makes eye contact.
37
Scarlett
28 July
She’s drunk, I can tell that immediately. Gin and slim, it’ll be.
‘Emma, what are you doing?’ I say, sitting upright, blurry.
She says nothing. Looks around. Her eyes look darker than usual. Glazed.
‘Did you knock? Did I not hear you?’ I mutter, trying to buy time for my brain to catch up.
‘Look at you, hey, Scarlett?’ she says, slowly. ‘Look at you. At home alone in such a stupor that you don’t even hear somebody break into your house. I say break in, you were so drunk you left the front door unlocked. Wow. I literally turned the handle, walked in and strolled past you, snoring on the floor with a bottle of vodka next to you like a tramp.’
I wince. Don’t call me that, Emma.
I stare at her. My friend, the shy one who gets talked over is gone now. Replaced.
There was someone outside my house last night, I think.
I had held off from calling the police because I was worried they would find nothing and that again Ed could use it as evidence of me being off the rails, delusional, drunk.
But there was someone.
It was Emma.
This isn’t a one-off. This isn’t about her being drunk tonight. This has a backdrop.
‘You tried to get in last night,’ I carry on. ‘Maybe other nights. Kept going until you found a way.’
‘Only last night,’ she murmurs, mostly under her breath.
A happy Kylie song plays on TV.
‘Me,’ she says quietly. It’s a one-word confession.
I am disorientated and I don’t know if I can be scared in the company of somebody I know so well. If I can be scared by a woman I have seen cry and laugh and feed her baby. But I don’t know you, I think. I have no idea who you are. And the realisation is terrifying because if I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you can do.
She sits down then, on the fancy armchair I bought before we had Poppy, when we used to buy things like fancy armchairs.
‘Cosy,’ she says, looking up at me. She touches the chair. ‘Pricey, I bet.’
You think you’re so much better than us. Us. Us.
It wasn’t Asha, in some sort of deal with Mitch, something I’ve thought about often after I saw them together – thought I saw them together – that day.
It wasn’t Cora, suspecting that I was coveting her position as local queen bee, wanting to keep me in my place.
But Emma.
Emma looks good at the moment, even now when her voice is slurring and her head lolls.
Emma has been going to the gym, getting fit. Martha says the woman he’s sleeping with is from the gym. Is this the story here? That love rival I had feared?
Emma has always been okay with silence. And right now, that’s one thing about her that hasn’t changed. She looks around at our house. The beams on the ceilings. The original fireplace. The empty buckets that used to be piled high with wood until we stopped bothering because fires are happiness and joy, and instead now we go to bed early in separate rooms or put another jumper on or shiver, bleak.
‘Robert has left me,’ she says. ‘He left me a few weeks ago.’
‘He’s left you?’ I say, trying to focus, to wake up. ‘Emma, I’m sorry.’
‘Oh come on, as if this is news to you,’ she slurs. ‘As if you don’t already know.’
I shake my head, not comprehending.
‘From Cora, you mean?’ I say, frowning. ‘She hasn’t said a word. I didn’t know.’
‘Oh give me a fucking break, Scarlett,’ she snarls. ‘Not Cora. I mean you probably already know from Robert.’
I stare at her.
What does this have to do with her sleeping with Ed?
Robert is Emma’s husband. The useless one; the one I’ve never met because he couldn’t be bothered to come to antenatal classes. And he certainly doesn’t sit in the coffee shops or the classes, infiltrating our new all-female world.
‘How would I know Robert has left?’ I ask.
She laughs in that awful bitter way; the opposite type of laugh to the one babies do at playgroup.
‘Well,’ she chimes, slumped in the chair. ‘You know a lot about Robert.’
I wish the vodka hadn’t taken its toll on my brain. I feel like I could keep up with what she is saying without that glugging around my head, engulfing my thoughts with jelly.
‘I’ve never met Robert, Emma, remember?’ I say, patiently like I’m talking to a child. ‘He didn’t come to NCT.’
She looks up at me, still stroking the chair like a cat.
‘Don’t speak to me like I’m an idiot, Scarlett. You do it all the time. Not any more.’
I’m chastised and duck my head. But I still have no clue what she’s on about.
‘You still haven’t caught up, have you?’ she snarls. ‘And I’m the idiot. You were supposed to be the smart one.’
The laugh again.
You think you are better than us.
I stare at her, trying to compute.
‘Did you send me the message about thinking I’m better than you?’ I ask, removing my jigsaw puzzle pieces, replacing them in a different formation.
She ignores the question.
‘Remember when I had that bad week juggling work and Seth without any help and
