And to tell me that she has ruined me. She has won. My life is even worse than hers; my family ripped apart even more violently. She has scored some sort of point in a game she thinks I’ve been involved in.
So instead, she gets up from her chair. Plumps my cushions again.
‘Don’t let him win,’ I say, quietly, grasping at anything I can. ‘Don’t let him win by trying to ruin my life. There’s no “women like me” or “women like you”. There’s just women – people – trying to get through life. That’s what we’re all doing, Emma.’
She stares at me.
‘Delete the video, Emma,’ I say gently. ‘And tell my husband that I am not cheating on him, with any of those men. That I didn’t do what you said I did for money. That I’m a good mum. Please Emma. Please.’
But if I think I am getting through, I am wrong.
‘I want you to suffer,’ she says, and her matter-of-factness is worse than anger. ‘I want you to suffer what I have. To feel loss.’
The worst sentiment there is.
‘I have suffered,’ I say, quietly now, beaten. ‘Just because people don’t share their stories, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. I’ve suffered, and I’m suffering, and what you’ve done has hurt me and my family, maybe irreparably. So if that was your aim, it’s done. I’m not sleeping with Robert, Emma, I’m not, I’m not. Now please, can you stop.’
I taste salt on my lip, and somehow I am on the ground, in front of the fireplace like a cat, and while I am there Emma steps over me, grazing me with a bright purple trainer.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she says.
Then she walks to the front door, opens it and leaves.
Emma, guest on a parenting podcast
Thanks for having me on to talk about the mum blogger sex tape scandal. I know this won’t make me popular. Not very #womensupportingwomen or any of Scarlett’s other painfully forced hashtags. Sorry, I’m bitching already.
I meant to start by saying that I’m sorry.
No, I am.
Really.
But envy is a difficult emotion to battle, especially when you are as low as I was then.
I still don’t believe that Scarlett wasn’t sleeping with Robert for months, maybe longer. There was someone local. She ticked every box. Everything about it made sense.
Ever since I found that video and realised that it was my friend on there having sex with my partner, I was obsessed.
When he was on a night out, I wondered constantly if he was with her. All I could think about when I was with her was whether she was sleeping with him.
She was beautiful, my friend Scarlett, with that sporty body and the glossy bob. I knew she’d have kept him, if it had been them who’d had a child together, in a way that I couldn’t.
She could have made him stay in and be a dad and get married and make a bit of tea for her when their child had colic and she was weak with hunger. And he would have loved her. In a way that he has never loved me.
I’d cry all the time, angry tears. It was overwhelming, the need to ruin her.
And so I wished terrible things upon her.
I wished terrible things upon her as we were jogging, sipping coffee, eating noodles.
I wished terrible things upon her even as she sat, jigging her tiny daughter up and down on her lap. Yep, you can blow raspberries at a child at the exact same time that you’re wishing misery on their mum.
I wished terrible things upon Scarlett as she drank turmeric bloody lattes instead of coffee when I ordered my third Americano of the morning and as she flung her toned legs up on an Airbnb sofa and as she flirted with people she really shouldn’t have been flirting with. God, she was greedy, Scarlett Salloway, wanted everyone to want her.
Old habits, probably.
Sorry. That was bitchy again.
Anyway, that’s the story. I did it.
But I wasn’t the only one.
There was someone else too.
42
Scarlett
28 July
Emma leaves my phone on the table.
She knows it’s no use to me anyway.
All I can do with it now is make things worse.
I try phoning Ed again anyway. Nothing. Over and over I call, thinking that surely he will pick up, I’m his wife, but he ignores it. Or it’s in another room, on silent, as he tries to block me from his mind. It is after 11 p.m.
But Poppy, I think. Poppy.
I pace the house, hot, panicked and feeling my brain start to twirl out of control as it does when I can’t focus in on one thing.
I call, and call.
Liam and his wife too. They don’t pick up their phones either, presumably asleep.
I need to get out of this house.
I need to get to Ed.
I grab the car keys and leave, saturated even in the distance between the front door and the car from rain that while I’ve been speaking to Emma has become torrential.
I put the key in the ignition and press a boot down on the clutch but something doesn’t feel right and I realise: it’s because I am drunk.
Even in my chaos, I know I can’t drive while I’m drunk. Can’t risk hurting somebody or hurting myself when I have – and it’s the only thing I can think of that matters now when there used to be a plethora of reasons, the ones that make up a whole life and person – a child.
I sit in the drive and take my phone out of my pocket.
Who can I call, at this time of night? Who will help me?
Josephine is too far away, geographically and in her life, from this whole situation. We are so distant now; another thing the video has taken from me. I look down at my pyjamas and boots and see rock bottom.
My dad: I still can’t let him see how bad things are. Still can’t paint the whole picture.
Old friends
