The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  I want to kiss her.

  ‘Was I … embarrassing last night?’ I say, taking the cup from her hand, sipping even though it burns.

  Asha heads across to the sofa. ‘We were all drunk,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  But I have more to fear, I think, more to share. That’s what she doesn’t realise.

  I drink my coffee with Asha in front of a Friends repeat and then I head back to the bedroom, passing Cora on the way.

  ‘Just going for a shower,’ she says. Smirks. ‘Bloody hell, I bet you’re feeling rough.’

  And I feel disproportionately angry. Just one day, I think. Just one day where I don’t feel shamed would be nice.

  I fight the urge to tell her that her cupcake tasted of zero-hours contracts.

  Is the key in drinking? Do I need to stop? Or is it too late for me? Am I destined to have an aptly scarlet letter across my chest forever?

  I lie on the bed on my front like a teenager in a hungover sulk and scroll through my phone. Pictures, on Facebook and Instagram, from last night, in which I look like a mess. In which my eyes don’t focus.

  And then worse.

  I open my email and see a message from the website provider. After they agreed to take the video down, Jonathan told me they could potentially give me information about who posted the video. I asked.

  And finally, they have something for me.

  ‘We have been able to pin down the area that the video was sent from,’ it says. ‘Hopefully this will be of some use to you.’

  Cora comes into the room.

  ‘Want some toast?’ she asks.

  ‘Just give me a second,’ I say, angling my phone away from her, my heart thumping hard.

  ‘You okay, hon?’ she asks.

  I nod, distracted. ‘Uh-huh.’

  She stands there, waiting for more.

  I look at her. ‘Just got to deal with something at home. I’ll be out in a bit.’

  But I have taken it in, even as she stands there. What the next line says. What this means.

  Because the area that the video was sent from is not Manchester where Mitch is.

  It’s not the Midlands near Ollie.

  The video was posted from a place closer to home.

  My hands shake now, as Cora walks away.

  I shove my things in a bag and tell the girls my hangover is too bad to stay for the rest of the day for a pub Sunday lunch as planned and I head home early. My mind is buzzing about who could have done this, who wants to hurt me so much that they sat in their home in a sleepy, leafy, boring village and posted a video of me having sex with two men.

  Because the video was posted in Cheshire.

  In the car home, I look around at those fields, those country pubs, that farm shop that sells the good brownies and it feels like they are edging closer to me, surrounding me, so I can’t escape this place now.

  Cheshire.

  It is too much to be a coincidence.

  Someone from the inside of my life is out to get me.

  Now I just need to figure out who it is; who I can no longer trust.

  Anon

  ‘Girls, I’m going to have to head off too,’ I say, as soon as Scarlett leaves. ‘I’m feeling rough as well. Bad noodles?’

  The other girls laugh.

  ‘Sure, sure, the old “it was the takeaway.” Not the eighteen wines.’

  In truth, my stomach has been edgy since Scarlett went. Nothing to do with noodles though, or even wine. I know she has figured something out.

  She was different suddenly. Her eyes were alert, bright, and they didn’t look at us properly.

  She was edgy. Not like the night before when she had danced barefoot with her hands in her own hair like she found herself irresistible, lids drooping.

  I looked at her then and felt any latent guilt shift – well, it didn’t hurt you too much, did it, this video? And you clearly don’t feel bad about what you did to me. Even if you don’t realise I know about it.

  She buried her hands in her hair, sang along quietly.

  I stared at Scarlett in those minutes and imagined having that self-belief, imagined having that body.

  I remembered seeing that body – all of it – just before I had clicked send. Watching the video again and again. Imagining the hurt it could cause. The adrenalin rush. Send. The panic. The buzz. The sense of righting a wrong. The nausea. The horror. The pride. The euphoria.

  I had sat quietly that weekend we were away together in the Peak District as she posted pictures of her daughter on her blog again. Saw her smiling to herself across a room as she was self-effacing in her replies to all the hundreds of comments online that told her how pretty she is, even though she knows that, that’s why she posted it, that’s why she is always posting, posting, posting.

  And in those moments, I had realised something.

  The video hadn’t been enough to ruin her.

  Even my messages to Ed hadn’t been enough to ruin her.

  But that didn’t matter. Because there was more, Scarlett, still to come.

  I drive home wondering what she knew and how.

  And think about whether that means I have to speed things up. To deliver the next blow sooner than planned. Imminently.

  23

  Scarlett

  16 June

  Another evening, another split into separate rooms of the house.

  Does it all come down to the furniture really? Share a bed, a sofa, a dining table and you’ll be all right. Start dividing off and where you divide next, right through the centre of your feelings for each other, is inevitable.

  I am in the bath long after it has become tepid because it is still less chilly than being in a room with my husband.

  Cheshire. The video was posted in Cheshire. What the hell does that mean? How close has this come from? I glance at the door. Ed is in the living room watching something on his iPad with his headphones on. I think again of all of those nights out he’s been on lately, of my suspicions that he’s cheating. Would a woman who wants me out of the picture do this to me? And could she be here, just out of touching distance buying new underwear to show to my husband behind a pretty moneyed door in Cheshire?

  The door is locked and I have taken my phone in with me; I need short, sharp hits of distraction. It feels the same as the Haribo. I scroll old pictures on my blog of Ed, Poppy and me looking happy and content. Looking like people you would want to be. The comparison is almost unbearable.

  I file the email from the website provider in case I need it as evidence, in a trial I can’t imagine being brave enough for, to speak up about things I never want to speak up about. That’s how they get my silence, isn’t it? With my own shame. I remember Asha talking about the theory of the greater good; risking your own self for the bigger picture, in case this happens to somebody else. But I’m not strong enough. I’m not.

  Without realising, I’ve opened Facebook. New friend request. Joseph Jacobson. It takes me a second but a look at the picture and my familiar response to his face confirms it: he’s the guy from the coffee shop. I glance at the bathroom door, guilty. Something happens that feels nostalgic. The way you feel at the beginning. The way you feel about potential.

  I accept his request and a message pops in. It’s incongruous to my social media presence with its family life and its cute baby.

  I don’t bite, it says. Never feel like you can’t stop in for coffee. Nothing happened between us, after all. We can still be mates.

  I exhale. I had been fairly sure there had been no kiss but still; it’s good to hear him confirm.

  If he’d left it there it might have been okay. But he’s typing, typing. Don’t do it, I think, but at the same time I think, do.

  You look beautiful in that profile picture. Ridiculously beautiful.

  I need to distance myself from this because my physical response to it screams danger.

  I look at his picture. Ridiculously beautiful.

  Could he be something to
do with the video, with the threats? A man who fancies me, and lives and works in Cheshire? There are more unlikely scenarios.

  Immediately my phone pings with a text and I think, Joseph. But three words give a different reveal.

  Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett, it says. Ollie. I liked seeing you. Can I see you again?

  I sit bolt upright, water splashing over the side of the overfilled bath.

  Jesus.

  I’ve pictured it, haven’t I, even when things have been good with Ed, being back with Ollie.

  I’ve pictured the reunion and felt the kiss and known the squeeze of emotion through my whole body and I’ve wondered: do other people feel this way? Is this just first love? Perhaps it even happens if you didn’t care that much; it’s just something your brain does; a chemical response when it remembers how powerful everything was first time around.

  I glance at the door to check it’s locked.

  I read it again.

  Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.

  Joseph is forgotten.

  Could Ollie be contacting me for any other reason than the one I’m thinking of?

  But really, what he is saying is simple. What Ollie is asking is whether I will meet him in a pub again, with no practical reason this time. He wants to meet me in a pub when we are both married and despite us sharing an obscene attraction and a lot of love, whether it’s past or present.

  The answer is obvious, and I start typing.

  24

  Scarlett

  16 June

  Ollie and I are in a club; we drink vodka tonics. We’re older than most of the people around us, sure, but we’re better dancers, and we know dance classics like they were written on our bones.

  This laughs in the face of a baby exercise class, and we sweat and it’s beautiful and Ollie kisses me. We’ve aged, yes, but the kisses have not.

  I wear a short dress and trainers and from a distance, in the flattering night-time, I am twenty-two.

  We kiss on the dance floor and then we kiss in the taxi home but this time it’s not home, as there are husbands there, and wives, and children. We realise occasionally that we are grown-ups with our own recycling bins and the memory is funny. The weight of responsibility has lifted for this brief moment and we revel in it. Can barely remember those people we are on Mondays, on Tuesdays, on all the days.

  We go to a hotel and it’s not grubby because he is my first love and this is romance. Sex with him is different but the power of it and the strength of my adoration for him is the same.

  The next morning we order room service brunch and I laugh that Ollie is happily eating eggs after years of being suspicious of them and their odd chameleonic ways. He smirks when I order a green juice when healthy drinks used to mean Diet Coke. We raise an eyebrow at our new funny habits; our millennial leanings.

  Next we take a long bath together – as we used to do but this is a far superior bath tub than any our skint youth ever brought us – and we plan to leave and start over. We’re glad we’ve lost those years because of our children and we’re relieved that we have that caveat because otherwise the pain of that loss and that waste would be too much to deal with.

  I picture it over and over, this scene.

  But it’s not real.

  It does not happen because my answer to Ollie is no. It has to be a no, doesn’t it, if I am giving my marriage even a fighting chance. Currently it clings to the rafters, bloody of lip with a clump of hair yanked out of its skull. It needs all the help it can get. But I am doing it for past me, who used to stare at Ed in bed and think I’d never seen a man so beautiful. Who used to look at our life and our family and our home that looked like a Pinterest board and think this, this is the stuff of fantasy. I wasn’t the only one who thought that either; why d’you think Cheshire Mama is so successful?

  We made small talk at first, Ed and I, when we met at the agency and then one day he asked me for a drink. We had this physical chemistry that meant I slept with him after two dates, and that felt like I had waited a year. Something about us clicked into place and I was excited too, about being part of his close family and its big, fancy gated mansion in the country and their annual Salloway Sports Day and their four-course meals and their poshness. I made him laugh until he roared, I knew, and he used to stare at me regularly. ‘I’ve never seen a face I like so much,’ he said, a month or two in. ‘Never take this face away.’

  So I tell Ollie no, for that Ed and that me, and then I lie there and carry on imagining that other world, where I had said yes and Ollie and I picked up where we left off, the new us, and found out exactly how that worked.

  I dip back down under water.

  You wanted respectable, Scarlett, then this is the sort of sacrifice respectable people make. You think respectable people aren’t tempted? Hardly. They just learn to say no, over and over, to the late night and the single-use plastic and the chips for dinner and the fourth gin and the affair. Definitely to the affair.

  But Ollie.

  My phone beeps and it’s one word in response to my negative. Shame.

  I tilt my head back against the tub and groan.

  My phone beeps again.

  Any luck with Mitch?

  It’s no harm to tell him about that, surely, to keep the line of communication open to pass on this information. It concerns him too, after all.

  He says he didn’t do it, I say. I met him for a drink.

  I should have messaged and told him that, I realise. It impacts him as well.

  Sorry I didn’t tell you, my brain is all over the place, I write.

  And what do you think?

  My gut instinct was that he was telling the truth.

  Ollie is typing. Like we’re friends now and I don’t know why but I’m glad. But if not him, who? Who would have had access to his phone?

  I sit back. Don’t reply as I don’t know, and I feel stupid for not knowing. I should be able to solve this; it should be intuitive.

  Website operator says the video was posted in Cheshire, I tell him. He’s in my team now; there’s going to have to be some trust.

  I have no idea how they would have got hold of the video, but any exes bitter when you left them and based there? he says. I know how much being dumped by Scarlett can hurt.

  A few months after we had the night with Mitch, things had completely unravelled in my brain. I was struggling, and booze and nights out were making it worse.

  When a friend told me she wanted to get off the party circuit and was looking for a buddy to go travelling with, I took out a credit card and said yes because I had been waiting for something like this to break the cycle and I ended it with Ollie abruptly, like a coward. A phone call, the night before I got on a plane, after all that we had been through.

  ‘Is this because of what happened with Mitch?’ he asked me that night, speaking into the last days of the landline.

  I was silent. In a way, I thought. Kind of.

  ‘I regret it,’ he carried on, crying. ‘It’s taken something away from us, I know, an intimacy, but we can get it back, Scarlett. We have a lifetime to get it back. We can have another baby. A family. Don’t end this.’

  I sounded cold in my effort not to cry but I promised to call him when I got back from my trip. I went away for three months. We never spoke again, until this.

  I am an in or out person, always have been. I got rid of my phone and picked up a pay-as-you-go for the trip, and it was easy to disappear when you left the country back then. You didn’t update social media, you only paid the obscene prices to message if it were an emergency.

  When I got home, I moved in to my dad’s house and saved up some money.

  I had started to get into the advent of social media and I got work experience at a digital marketing agency and I applied myself to it with as much dedication as I used to dedicate myself to getting off my face. I needed this; my life had to change. I was offered a junior position in the social media team and started to climb, being promoted and doing
better than I had ever done at anything. It was a buzz like the ones I got on the dance floor, albeit a little more muted.

  Eventually I moved out of my dad’s house and into a shared flat with a couple of girls in Chorlton, where you went out on Sunday mornings for eggs benedict, not Friday nights for lines of coke.

  I got a two glasses of red wine habit instead of a vodka one. I wore heels. I dyed my cheap blonde highlights back to my original dark brown and when I could afford it, put a glossy sheen from a fancy salon on top.

  I became addicted to it all too, and what it brought, and with every new choice I added to the new me, with her sharp bob and her pension and, six years after she left party-boy Ollie, her new boyfriend, posh Ed, the financial controller from work, who became her husband in an expensive wedding where we served good wine and rare beef. We celebrated with smart, successful friends.

  It’s a path that my mind has taken me down many times in the last two months. How far things have fallen back, back, back.

  Any exes bitter when you left them?

  I think, over and over.

  After Ollie, there was no one serious until Ed. But there were flings, love stories in miniature.

  I think carefully about each one now. How things were left and if, somehow, those people could have had access to the video. I don’t come up with anything.

  If you change your mind, I’m up for a drink, says Ollie from my phone at the side of the bath, from the past.

  I pull the plug out, grab a towel then head to bed. But I leave my phone behind to make sure that I don’t message back and dive into that past because the present is so very, very bleak.

  25

  Scarlett

  18 June

  ‘Forgot my phone,’ I say, putting my key in the door. ‘Got all the way to the gym before I realised and no way can I do the treadmill without music.’

  Ed is sitting on the sofa, holding it. He brandishes it at me.

  Again.

  ‘What now?’

  And my husband looks at me with such disdain that I think if it weren’t for Poppy, I would give up on us for good because who can take a life like this? Who can take a face that looks at them like this?