The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  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 there was something bleak around the corner coming for Ananya. How it was too late really by the time she listened to someone speak about their postnatal depression on the radio and stood next to her fridge holding a butternut squash and crying with empathy and with regret that this epiphany hadn’t happened to her earlier. That she worked for a mental health charity, and didn’t spot when she had mental health problems, which for her is difficult to fathom.

  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 cou
ple 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 had still been in love but we weren’t; hadn’t been for a long time by then. How sometimes people grow apart not together, and that’s just how it is.

  How the hugs that we shared after I had run him over had more emotion than they’d had for a long time in our marriage, filled as they were with relief and closure and knowing that no matter what, we will always be Poppy’s parents.

  ‘I only slept with someone for money once,’ I told him. ‘Please believe that.’

  And he did, eventually. Though I suspect on some level he thinks there’s little difference between that and the rest of what I did: the escort work. I was paid money to flirt, to sit next to men while I wore short skirts, to laugh at their jokes. Ed is black and white. But the thought has tortured me over the years too. The reasons why go out of the window again and all there is in those moments is shame, shame, shame.

  Ed tells his family that I am Poppy’s mum. That he doesn’t want to report me to police because I had been drinking too and that would impact her; as long as I agree to a better shared custody agreement than the courts would give him so that Poppy spends half of her time with Ed, in the countryside, in all of that much-lauded outdoor space. In truth I wonder if he didn’t report me too because he wouldn’t want to be a full-time parent. God, imagine, Ed. How awfully modern you would have to be for that. When Poppy is with Ed I miss her so much it hurts my insides but what choice did I have? It was that or an ABH charge. He is her dad. I go dancing when it hurts too much; I stay out late so I forget.

  Epilogue

  Cora

  After

  Hunter, then, was never the real other man.

  It was the name of my yoga teacher, that bit was true, but Hunter and I never got closer than a hand on my back for an adjustment to my plank.

  I just thought that was a nice detail.

  No. The man I was really having an affair with was called Robert.

  Mitch, some people call him.

  Robert slept with Scarlett, had a baby with Emma, and then – after we met one night in a fancy bar in a village nearby four months after I had Penelope – he began an affair with me. I realised he was Emma’s partner about a month in; saw them walking around a supermarket together. It jolted me, sure, but I wasn’t willing to give it up. When I told him I knew his wife, he felt the same.

  Asha knew about it. Saw us once when she was at a wedding at a hotel we were at together and tried to persuade me to stop it. She even had a word with Robert once when she saw him in the street. She ran when she thought she saw Scarlett watching them; she had no desire to spread the gossip further. Sweet, sweet Asha. I’m rolling my eyes now, can you tell?

  But here is the thing about Robert. He is an uninvolved dad, a cheating husband but when your life is dreary and you’re worried you’ve hit middle age and you’re in a monotonous relationship, he is an antidote better than the lines of coke he suggested we take together a few weeks ago.

  Robert and I book hotel rooms and pretend we don’t have children and order room service and have sex. We go to clubs and bars and casinos.

  All paid for by Robert because my money worries, unfortunately, are real.

  When Emma told me about the video she had found, blackmailing Scarlett seemed like the obvious answer. I pushed Emma into it really, got into her head about Scarlett and played on a lot of the insecurities that are right there for everybody to see with Emma. Yes, Emma, Scarlett does think she’s better than you. Yes, they probably are still sleeping together.

  Don’t be a doormat, Emma. Don’t let her get away with it. She’s laughing at you, Emma, while she pretends to be your friend.

  It helped deflect attention from me too. Because yes Emma, Robert was sleeping with somebody local. You got it right. You just had the wrong neighbour.

  Nobody likes to be laughed at and believing that someone’s doing it is a trigger for most people, dating back to the first person who bullied you, whether they were in the school playground or sitting next to you in the office. Everyone remembers the feeling. And everyone feels a surge of rage at the idea of anyone making them relive it.

  So I waited for Emma to deliver Scarlett to me. She would come of course, needing me after receiving such a blow as Emma delivered. You need your friends at times like that.

  But of course my blackmail attempt didn’t work, with Scarlett rejecting it and telling me she didn’t care if the world saw her have a threesome, if she was famed for being the blogger with the sex tape. She’d rather deal with that than capitulate to me. That anyway, there was no money.

  So now, I need a new plan.

  ‘If Emma is away next weekend with Seth, I could come to yours?’ I say to Robert, tracing a long fingernail down his back.

  He and Emma got back together, recently. He says he can’t afford to live in his own place. And, he points out, he doesn’t see me leaving Michael. We both know what this is. Though we’ll see how long he stays around when he gets wind of Emma’s podcast appearance.

  Robert and I are lying naked under icy white sheets in one of Manchester’s best boutique hotels. No kids allowed; it’s one of my favourite jokes to glare at them if I see them while I’m out with Robert, as though I hate them; as though I haven’t made one all of my own pretty recently, as though I don’t spend most of my time wiping dripping noses just like these parents are doing, the ones I pretend I find disgusting.

  Robert looks apprehensive. But then he shrugs.

  ‘Sure. At least we save some money on hotels.’

  He looks around pointedly. I don’t do four star. Five only. I reach to the side of the bed for my champagne glass.

  In truth too, Robert doesn’t care if I leave an earring or a lipstick at his house: he’s so flagrant about his affairs, and Emma still ignores anything she finds. They are back together in name only really.

  So I pack my expensive lingerie and I go on holiday to Emma’s house. And when Robert is in the shower on Sunday morning, I go on the laptop where Emma told me she found the video of him and Scarlett, an
d – she was clear on this part – probably everyone else he’s ever slept with.

  Which included his partner. I know that as Emma told me, sickened that she was filed away with ‘everybody else’. Sure, Emma; that’s the problem. Not your husband having sex with other people and filming it, but his filing system.

  I hear Robert singing in the shower – something from the old days, Noughties dance music that would send you crazy if you were on edge anyway. Bloody hell, Robert, let it go. I spray a little of Emma’s perfume on my wrist, smell and wince: not good. The kind of thing we used to spritz in Boots on Saturdays together when we were thirteen. Emma, hon, time to move on.

  And then I shut everything down. Because I’ve emailed the file I need to myself now.

  Dearest Emma, who sat next to me in double history and then twenty years later at NCT classes.

  Emma might not be as rich as our friend Scarlett but at least she should give me something to pay off a couple of credit cards, buy me some time, keep me in coffee.

  Give me the money, and I promise not to post the video of you and your partner Robert with your naked body that you’re so self-conscious of anyway, exposed to the world. And you’ve just seen how that can topple over a life, Emma. Nobody wants to be the new Scarlett Salloway.

  If you enjoyed The Baby Group, you’ll love Through the Wall. Click here to find out more.

  Acknowledgements

  These acknowledgements come to you from the lockdown of 2020, so don’t be surprised if I get extra sentimental; I’ve not hugged anyone outside of my immediate family for over a month. Book acknowledgements feel like a chance to give a few virtual hugs and a virtual cheers with a definitely not virtual glass of wine, at least.

  First, a note to my own ‘mum friends’. All of you are lovely, none of you have tried to ruin my life, all of this is a work of fiction. A special shout-out to my own NCT crew too, especially my good friends George and Anna who are always there with a strong cup of tea, wise words and reassurance that no, it’ll be fine that he’s eaten the Play-Doh. And to Beccy, my partner in crime through the newborn years, ‘mum friends’ don’t come much finer than you, my love.