The room spins and I stumble.
I said no to Ollie, just. I said no to Joseph, just. I said yes to a lot of drinks but I said no to enough, just. My mental health survived, just. Didn’t it?
‘What is this supposed to achieve?’ I ask through deep tears. ‘You want Poppy to lose her mum? Fucking hell, Emma, you have a child.’
Emma shrugs. Those eyes are dead, now. She is so far away from kindness; humanity.
‘To teach you a lesson,’ Emma says. ‘To break up your family, like you broke up mine.’
All I can think of is Poppy.
Ed wouldn’t do that to me, I think. I have to think. Then I think, again: Ed would do whatever it took to keep Poppy safe. He wouldn’t keep her away from her mother, but he would keep her away from danger. If he thinks I’m both, this could go either way.
‘If you’re so convinced that Ed is done with me, let me phone him,’ I say.
We sit in silence for a couple of minutes.
She sits back, frowns, then turns to plump the pillows that seem to be irritating her.
‘That’s better,’ she says, looking at the cushions. And then: ‘Okay, call him.’
She nestles backwards into the cushions like it’s Friday night and she’s looking forward to a gin and slim and a Netflix binge – and I walk tentatively, like I might break her decision, past her to get my phone and find my husband’s number in my favourites, dialling it to see if I can creep my fingernails over the cliff and cling on to the edges of my life.
41
Scarlett
28 July
I stand up as I dial, looking at Emma’s face from above with that soft blonde PE teacher sensible ponytail and her long, pointed nose as she sits there in my armchair. Who the hell are you, I think, this woman who pretended to be my friend? This clichéd, kind dieter. This strange, vindictive bitch.
Each ring makes it harder to breathe. Each ring makes me feel more desperate.
Emma is deadpan when she delivers the news that we both know, by now, on what must be the seventh ring.
‘He isn’t going to answer,’ she says, pitying. ‘He can’t let Poppy speak to a mum like that, knowing you’re probably drunk again too. It’s not good for her, Scarlett – you must see that.’
It’s why she’s looked so relaxed: she’s known this all along.
Voicemail picks up and I know even as I am speaking that I am making things worse.
‘Emma is here,’ I say, tripping over the syllables like I am just learning to use my tongue. ‘Emma made up those things. About me having affairs. About the … escorting. I only met Ollie to talk. About the video, like I told you. And Mitch. Mitch is Emma’s husband. The man from the coffee shop – Joseph – is just a friend. There was … it was … I’ll explain, when I see you. But I need to see you, Ed. I need to see Poppy. Please pick up. Call me back. Come home. Emma is here and I don’t know what she wants and, Ed, I’m scared.’
I’m sobbing and Emma yanks the phone from me with a firm grip before I realise what’s happening.
‘Ed,’ she says, managing to sound calm and rational somehow to my hysteria. ‘It’s Emma. Don’t worry. Scarlett’s had a few drinks too many and she’s blurry, to be honest it’s been happening a lot lately, but I’m with her. I’ll look after her. It might be better if you guys have space for a bit, keep Pops with you so she doesn’t see her mum in this state, bless her.’ And then she clicks to end the call, flicks it onto airplane mode and puts it in her pocket and I don’t act fast enough to stop her.
I’m moving through treacle that’s been in the fridge for hours. It’s part the start of a hangover, part still being drunk, part deep, deep shock.
I look around my house, where Emma has been so many times. She’s fed her baby crisps on my sofa and gulped sugary tea from my favourite mug. She’s complimented my colour scheme, got nostalgic at my old CD collection and she’s taken her shoes off and curled her feet under her on my carpet. She’s cooed at pictures of me and Ed taken in twelve-hours-sleep-fuelled days before we had Poppy.
How, I think suddenly, have I never noticed pictures of Mitch in her house?
Then I remember: I’ve never been to Emma’s house.
Is that odd?
Living in the next village – even if it’s only a five-minute drive away – when the rest of us are walking distance from each other, with a coffee shop close by and various baby groups in the community hall, means that we default to one of ours. Now I’m wondering if that was deliberate.
I look at Emma.
‘What now?’ I ask.
I glance, then, at Ed’s golf clubs, waiting to be put away, propped up against a bookshelf. I had told him off about them, a danger in a room that Poppy plays in.
But Emma walks past them. To the candlestick, heavy and decorative and never in any use that actually requires a candle, much to Ed’s bafflement. She examines it closely.
Will this get physical?
But if I think she might attack me, Emma already has.
Her worst was done online, in her messages to Ed, with knowledge, with a false closeness, with emails, with a misuse of intimacy.
She puts down the candlestick.
She is done.
Emma has no desire to hit me because how much worse could those blows be than the ones that she has already administered? She didn’t come here tonight for violence but to ask me questions, to make me promise to end an affair that isn’t real, a relationship that doesn’t exist, to quiet the questions
