But I pull out too fast, too irresponsibly, miles away from the mum driving of the daytime with its mirror checks and its car seats and its slowness.
And its sobriety.
Because yes, I also pull out of Liam’s drive ignoring the fact that I am too drunk to drive, still, the rationale of earlier having left me now and on the drive over here as the events of tonight spiralled.
I hear a shout. Ed’s lovely accent-free voice, the one that I used to tease him about when we met, gently, inexplicably, because I barely knew anybody else who didn’t sound like they were from the heart of Manchester.
My husband’s lovely voice shouting stop to me, shouting no, shouting Scarlett, shouting please, shouting listen. And then the thud.
And it’s only when I feel that thud I’ve never heard the car make before that I know that I have hit him, Ed, and that as I step out of the car in what feels like slow motion, there is no sound coming from him.
This man who kissed my head at the hospital. This man who put the hot water bottle on my feet in our new bed. This man who poured me a glass of wine. The man who told me, as Poppy came into the world, that she was a girl, and knew what that meant to me and held me as we wept together.
And as I round the back of the car, I see Ed, not moving and I crouch down to check him, to revive him, to tend to him.
‘Be okay, Ed, be okay,’ I murmur in his ear, and then I stand up and look up for Liam, for Jaclyn.
‘Call an ambulance!’ I yell, though I am scared simultaneously because my drinking will have repercussions. Huge ones, potentially – depending what happens next. But what else can I do?
I look up.
But it’s not Liam or Jaclyn at the door.
Instead it is my daughter. Gummy smile, sleepy eyes, in her baby pink pyjamas with elephants on them. She holds her toy dog close to her soft tummy. Her chubby feet are bare.
She is excited to see me, my love, after we have been apart. But her smile fades and she is simultaneously worried, because her dad is on the ground and I am stood above him, screaming.
45
Scarlett
Three years later
‘This is really not the ideal place to raise a child,’ he says, as Poppy heaves her scooter in through the door of our tiny flat, leaving the latest batch of scuff marks on the wall.
I mutter about it too on a weekly basis but I’m smiling.
We are home.
This home is in central Manchester, the place I thought I had to flee from for the next phase of life, because I would be too old to be there in my thirties and there was a sleepy pub that did a good roast dinner in the countryside calling my name. They were the rules; that was the trajectory.
But now a moderately rough bit of town is where late thirties me puts the chain on at night, double bolts the door and calls home.
Turns out, there are all kinds of ways of doing things.
Poppy needs space, and she gets it. We just have to work a bit harder to get it than opening the back door and pushing her out of it into a big, luscious Sowerton garden with its very own swing.
Ideal places to raise a child can be far from ideal if they create miserable parents who feel like a section of their insides have been hollowed out because they don’t belong there, because for them it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
People are different. I need the city. I need songs. I need to dance. I need noise. I need edge and culture.
Nobody wrote a rulebook for a life and there’s a reason. Something was right, and I tried it, and something else was right, and I am trying that. Now though, I try not to bury all the old versions of life, all the old versions of me. I try to let them live too.
I am back at work; a new job at a painfully cool agency that I got partly thanks to an incredible reference from a guilt-ridden Felicity who I catch up with regularly for a drink and a conversation in which we try to avoid the topic of the time we watched me have sex.
Martha comes too. I apologised for being so distant when I moved; she said no, it was her. She had been dealing with a new situation, trying to be a step-parent to her boyfriend’s daughter and she was drowning. She had to retreat. I had been too focused on me to think about everyone else’s narratives. Everyone else’s battles.
I stop at two wines these days. I should probably quit altogether; there’s no doubt I see alcohol as a crutch and I definitely abused it for a while. But I’m a work in progress. Leave that with me.
Now I don’t mind being a work in progress though; I don’t mind looking grimy. I don’t mind having a past. I don’t mind that I am, like most, a little bit fucked up.
Sometimes I am almost glad the video was uploaded that day, and that Emma and Cora did that to me: it pressed restart on my life, and restart was what I needed. Everybody needs restarts sometimes. Life’s never one long go.
I am even almost able to laugh about the thing that ruined my life. Mostly because I’ve realised: your life being ruined isn’t always a bad thing. There might be a better one available.
It takes me a long time now though to make new friends not least because those websites did write posts on me, the mum blogger with the sex tape. Anyone in my life who didn’t know – though there weren’t many anyway – was filled in after that. Cora denies that she leaked it, in the only contact
