I think of how I rolled my eyes at Asha and I cringe. She couldn’t control her mind, she tells me, so she worked outwards. There’s always a story. I’m angry with myself for just looking – or rolling my eyes – at the surface.
In the same way, Asha tells me that she feels she played her part in what happened to me as well. Yes, Cora would make comments that I was smug and she wouldn’t be able to convincingly disagree with her. Because she thought I was a little aloof too. That I mocked Emma, and it was unkind. That sometimes she presumed I was laughing at her too. I cringe at that because it’s true. Asha is an intelligent woman who works in a job that’s way more important than mine and reads historical fiction and has a Google-worthy knowledge of contemporary artists and I reduced her to ironing and shoes off, girls because I was so paranoid about this new life of mine, so defensive and scared of changing.
Yes, she says too, she thought that while she was drowning in postnatal depression, I was sailing through. Why didn’t I tell her about the baby that I lost?
Did I need to saw myself open, I ask her, for people to see why I was sealed shut? She doesn’t know the answer. I don’t know the answer. None of us know the answer. There isn’t one.
I saw myself open now though and glance inside regularly when I am alone or at therapy and I see that I was smug, yes, and bitchy, then ten minutes later I was sorry and kind and quite a decent person. I see that I was aloof, because I was working so hard on that respectable persona. I see that – mostly because of the blog – I was so fixated on what everybody thought my life looked like that I stopped caring about what I thought it looked like. What it felt like.
It’s not straightforward. Characteristics have always tripped over each other. You can be lonely when you’re surrounded by friends, a bitch when you’re paranoid. Envious when you’re happy. You can even be having sex with two men, looking like you’re enjoying it when you’re heartbroken and grieving for a baby that wasn’t to be and a relationship that you knew couldn’t weather what was happening. When I had sex with both Ollie and Mitch that night, all of that was true. When the video pinged into people’s inboxes all those years later, none of it was visible.
To the people who judged me on the basis of that, I can’t say much. I judged too.
Asha and I go for walks, drink coffee on hard days, and the turmeric lattes which I know from Emma’s podcast appearance irritated her so much, on slightly easier ones. It hurt that she did that. And who had given her the idea of monetising her own life? Me. Her old pal Scarlett and her ill-fated blog.
I never went back to blogging and I don’t miss it. I don’t miss hiding in toilets to watch the likes roll in. My new life isn’t available to be rated.
When Asha took a maternity leave opportunity for her and her family to go to see her sister for six months in Australia, Joe and I booked flights: we are headed out with Poppy in a couple of months, Poppy old enough to stick headphones on and put her face in an iPad now. We can’t afford it but we’re doing it anyway. Joe has heard about a grungy old coffee and vinyl shop that he wants to visit and scope out. He’s thinking tentatively about looking for investment to open something similar here. Music’s something we love together. A strong coffee when we’re shattered isn’t far behind.
You’re wondering if Ed died, aren’t you?
I wondered too, as I saw him there on the ground, and I shook in terror for Poppy.
He lay there, still.
She watched, and cried.
I regret doing that to her, every day.
But then he is a man who did something as old as time, and made a woman feel ashamed for having a body, ashamed for having sex, I thought, as I stood there in the stillness.
A man who thought I brought it on myself.
Stillness.
A man who thought I should be punished.
Still, still.
He is a man who pushed me and pushed me and pushed me.
Was he a man who deserved it?
I’m not sure.
But you know what, I didn’t deserve any of it either.
And then the stillness was broken as Ed’s brother Liam and his wife Jaclyn appeared and their sleepy kids a second later, and they raced into action and got Ed up off the ground and though he couldn’t walk and needed an operation later down the line on the ankle I had managed to run over, he was okay. Okay enough to reassure Poppy.
It doesn’t matter now how much Ed tells his family we must move on. It doesn’t matter that Ed and I are civil, having talked at length about how toxic our relationship had become and how it is right that we are not together. How Ed had even admitted that he had been seeing a woman from the gym – yes, she lived in West Chorlton, yes that was her in the sat nav – for months when we were still together, though they have long since fizzled out now. How I told him that I know I wouldn’t have looked at Joe if we
