Robert.
Rob?
Someone I knew when I was younger? One of those love stories in miniature?
I think.
Robert.
Rob.
Bob.
Bobby.
None of them mean anything.
But with a sinking feeling, I realise something else.
Seth has bright-red hair.
There isn’t a hint of auburn in Emma’s blonde.
‘Emma, what’s Robert’s full name?’
There’s a beat.
‘Robert Mitcham,’ she says. ‘That helps, doesn’t it? To connect the dots.’
Robert Mitcham.
And my stomach plummets.
Robert Mitcham.
Bobby Mitcham.
The man I found on Facebook, after Ollie told me his surname and I did some googling around DJs in Manchester. I found his first name, eventually. Bobby Mitcham.
Mitch, who I met in Manchester to ask him if he had posted a video of us having sex online, is Robert, Emma’s uninvolved husband. The man who made her weep when he said that for once he would spend time with them together as a family and they would go for pizza, but then slept through it even after she shook him awake and begged, for Seth, for Seth, but he had only got in from a club at 5 a.m., and he smelt of Vivienne Westwood perfume.
A man who it makes sense I would have never seen around here – unless I did that one time, with Asha – because they live in the next village, not Sowerton, and my world is parks and playgroups; Mitch’s is clubs and bars.
I presumed he lived in Manchester because we met there and all his reference points were there; not because he ever said it. Emma tells me freely that he is at home rarely, spends a lot of time in Manchester with friends. And now, inevitably, they are done.
Emma, or this version of Emma, watches my face as it dawns.
I stay still as she looks down at me on my sofa and I absorb this new reality and the picture I have in my mind of Emma’s husband shifts to be the man I once had sex with. Robert is Mitch. The man I thought when we met up in the pub two months ago had no children and no wife but again not – in retrospect, I realise – because he told me that, just that fatherhood didn’t seem to fit with the picture I saw.
And I was right, in many ways. Emma tells me often they spend no time as a family, heaving the changing bag around National Trust houses as Ed and I do. As Ed and I did.
That man I met in the pub wasn’t a dad, not really. He had a child but chose to live life like he did not, making – in the process – Emma miserable and bitter. And vengeful.
She stands in front of me, this new Emma, watching me think.
‘There we go.’ She smirks. ‘She finally gets it.’
But I don’t, I think. There are so many steps I still don’t understand.
‘I was your friend,’ I say sadly, and all that Emma does is laugh and laugh and laugh, as pop songs that we have danced together as we held on to our drinks this year play, taunting us, in the background about who we used to be, and a friendship I thought we had.
38
Scarlett
28 July
Mitch. Robert.
Emma laughs with me in coffee shops, just after she has eaten her cereal with the man I’m on the internet having sex with.
She sits there in an oversized hoodie taking a long slug of her coffee, and talks about the terrible husband who barely lifts a finger in their life and all the time it is him, a man who saw me naked.
I nod along and tut about him, this husband, this half-hearted dad, this party boy. Not knowing that he is also the man who didn’t notice the slice across my stomach as I sabotaged my own life by sleeping with him in front of my boyfriend.
I think of Poppy, playing with Mitch’s son. Of Emma, sleeping with him. Of a different me, sleeping with him too.
My thoughts hurtle forwards, backwards, sideways. Was there a moment that Emma changed towards me? A moment I could pin down, when she must have found out what had happened between us back in the day?
‘Got it now?’ asks Emma.
No Emma. Not really.
But I don’t say anything out loud.
I don’t say anything out loud because she is the woman now who broke into my house and is trying to ruin my life and who has a laugh that is different to her normal laugh; eyes that are different to her normal eyes.
I look at her face and there is no trace of the friend I’ve known. Robert is one shock but that is a second.
But then I’ve thought it so often lately when I’ve started to suspect these women, haven’t I?
Did I know you? And I’m not sure I did, in the way that I wanted to believe I did.
One of the reasons I’ve never connected Emma to Mitch: I don’t even know her surname.
I don’t have her email; it’s not on her social media.
I’ve talked about everything with this woman – the mastitis that I battled through in the early weeks after having Poppy, what’s happened to my marriage, even the video.
And yet, I don’t know her surname.
I look at her.
‘We don’t know each other really, do we?’ I ask.
‘Of course we don’t,’ she snaps. ‘We were desperate for adult company. We’d have taken anyone.’
‘I told you such a lot,’ I say. ‘I told you my worries that Ed was cheating. I told you about the video.’
Emma shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You did, babe. Bit odd really. We haven’t known each other long. You want to be more careful with how much you share.’
But I had been desperate. Desperate to make friends; desperate to skip forward through the awkward parts where you exchange small talk. I wanted something to absorb me into its sphere. I wanted, as a new mum with an unsure identity, to make myself feel constructed and real. To build a whole world so I
