Whatever happened afterwards though, on the internet what Ollie, Mitch and I did is there forever. I am the mum blogger with the sex tape. In my lowest moments, I worry that everyone who meets me sees me as solely that.
Joe often tells me I need to let people in more. That not everybody’s like Emma and Cora, whose names I struggle to say still, like they are Voldemort, when what happened then comes up.
That’s right. Joe – Joseph – and I are together. Not married – I’m not sure I am up for doing that again – but we live together. Poppy likes Joe, although, nearly five now, she can’t say that he’s my boyfriend without giggling.
It’s odd, doing new love with the responsibilities of now. There’s a romanticism that’s curtailed when you can’t lie in on Sunday mornings and have sex all day and eat like teenagers and worry about nothing. When you’re not getting to know each other at a time when the most grown-up thing you had ever bought was a £20 lamp and it still felt incredible that you were allowed to go to Greece together and share a bed and being an adult was very much like being in a play at school. Like it was with Ollie.
For most people, flirtations with the barman end there, in a bubble of what ifs flavoured with tequila slammers and scented with heavy aftershave. You may have the occasional thought of maybe, maybe, but that’s it, because you would never smash your real life up for something so pretty and frilly and young. You would never get the chance.
Now though, the barman and I put the bins out. The barman checks if I’ve called the landlord about the dishwasher. I remind him to take Poppy’s school uniform out of the washing machine and he reminds me to drop that bag into the charity shop when I’m passing. He works hard, getting up at 5 a.m. to manage a coffee shop in the Northern Quarter. Sometimes he works from home at the other end of the day, coding too, for friends; people he meets at the shop. We’re not rich, far from it.
Every now and then, we go dancing because it wasn’t just youth, music is something that formed me and continues to form me and we live in a place where we can embrace that. When I turned thirty-eight last week, we hired out a room in a club and danced until the early hours. Ed is no longer here to turn the volume down to the level of background noise that is only acceptable during the hot stone massage you booked on Groupon. Conversely, Joe loves dance music too and he comes into the room, turns the music up to booming, spins me round and we rave in the kitchen as he whispers into my hair that he loves me and I’m back there, twenty-three and euphoric but with these grey roots now and a messy, messy mind.
I can’t believe that I did that to Cora, that I was capable, and sometimes at 3 a.m. it makes me wake up screaming, as Joe holds my head and whispers that it’s okay. He knows what happened. The clearest thing you have is your sense of self and when you are so low that it has disappeared and you don’t recognise your own actions and the path you chose to take, it is truly, truly terrifying. I know now I had a breakdown after the video was posted and what I did to Cora was the culmination of it. I’ve had a lot of therapy; the therapy I should have had fifteen years ago when my baby came too early. Or maybe even before then, before I reached adulthood, after I lost my mum.
Jonathan White and I reported Emma to the police for posting the video. Despite new guidelines meaning that she could have gone to prison, she had no previous convictions and was given a caution and a fine. Part of me was relieved, for Seth.
I never reported Cora; too scared that she would report me too for what I tried to do to her and terrified that would mean I would be taken away from Poppy. She still ‘makes’ cupcakes.
Neither of them has ever exposed me for what happened in the penthouse, or when I used to go out with those men. On bad days, I get scared it will come out, one day. On others I think neither of them would poke me a second time, for fear I would report them or strangle them, neither being a strong option.
Emma spoke to a parenting podcast about the whole thing though I suspect Cora was behind that. Maybe I’m doing Emma a disservice thinking that though, underestimating her again. There’s nothing I can do about it legally. She still doesn’t believe I wasn’t sleeping with Robert.
But here is a lovely thing. When Asha had her second child Rupert last year and planned to have a naming ceremony for him, she asked me to be a kind of equivalent of a godparent, despite me being – our favourite in-joke – a sexually deviant heathen. Because we’re friends now; the proper kind. That was there to be discovered, like it is anywhere. I was just rushing to the finish wanting a twenty-year-old friendship style closeness with everyone I met, immediately, without seeing how things developed naturally, which was never going to work. Instead we built it slowly, Asha and I. Long lunches going over this hideous thing that had happened within this circle that we had formed. Frank conversations. Hugs. Longer dinners talking about our past loves, past hurts. Confessions. More hugs.
Honest talks about Asha’s anxiety, her need to control situations, how she feels like she missed out on a lot of the fun of having a baby because she was tidying the kitchen, refusing to give a bottle of formula, worrying
