4 May
My feet ache as I walk into my building; they have had a chilled-out time on their year-long commuting break and they are mad as hell about getting back to the grindstone.
‘Scarlett!’ says our giant Aussie Charlie on reception as I walk through the revolving door. ‘First day back?’
I nod, bouncing from one foot to the other and unable to keep still with nerves.
‘How’s the baby?’ he says, standing up to high-five me. ‘Congrats. I’ve got three. You’ve got fun ahead.’
‘Thanks, Charlie,’ I reply.
I’m twitchy. Now I’m back at work, I want to be back at work.
‘Get on, yep, get on.’ He nods. ‘Get there on time so you can get out for the nursery pick-up, right? All different now. Go!’
He shoos me towards the lift and I dig out my pass, call it and wait. In a few minutes I will see Felicity and the thought calms me. Felicity is my boss but also my mate. Felicity came to my baby shower; I went on her hen do. She’ll talk me through what’s happened in the last year, give me the low-down on the new people and we’ll drink coffee and eat the fancy donuts and everything will be easier because of our relationship. And because of the donuts. Calm, Scarlett. This will be okay.
The lift opens and I catch sight of one of the finance guys, Jared, walking past. I know everyone in this building – it’s the best and worst thing about a business that values team-building away days and boozy Friday lunches highly – but Jared a little better than most; Ed was in his department when he used to work here.
That’s how we met, Ed and I, at work, or through both spending lunchtimes in the gym next door.
On rare Manchester sunny days, we’d meet outside and go for a run together instead, sprinting the last one hundred metres, competitive with each other. Then Ed got offered a job at another company and took it, both of us thinking that was probably sensible anyway, now we were spending most nights at each other’s flats. Jared got promoted. He and Ed kept in touch, meet for a pint regularly. But as I wave at him from the lift, Jared keeps his head down. Mustn’t have seen me.
Eventually we get to my floor and I step out, straight into a waiting Felicity.
I fling my arms around her even while I know it is unprofessional.
‘Flick!’ I exclaim, relieved, and she hugs me back hard.
‘Good to see you,’ she says and I pull out and look at her.
‘You look amazing,’ I say because this, for unknown reasons, is how you reacquaint with female friends. I love your earrings. Your shoes are hot. Where’s that lipstick from? Et cetera, et cetera. Start with the pawing of the new coat and the stroking of the cashmere, then you’re ready to move on to real subjects.
‘Nice shirt,’ I add. ‘And thanks for the welcome committee.’
She smiles but it’s close-mouthed.
‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about. We’ll grab a boardroom.’
The goose bumps are worse than the ones I had without a coat in Sowerton this morning. A boardroom means we need privacy; our office is open-plan. So what is it? Redundancy? Can they do that when I’m on maternity leave? Or is that the point – I’m not any more, so they can?
But I can’t ask because Flick is marching off now, past the beanbags, towards the room I presume she has booked, a hand on my lower back to guide me there too. I quickstep to keep up, new trainers threatening blisters.
On the way we pass my colleagues, ten or twenty of them.
‘Sara!’ I say, excited to see a long-term desk buddy. But Sara just smiles awkwardly and ducks her head.
Freddie doesn’t look up at all.
Sanjeeta rummages in a drawer.
I think about Jared.
Something odd is happening.
‘Is the company folding?’ I whisper to Flick, half-laughing. ‘Why is everyone being strange?’
She doesn’t answer but ushers me into the room and shuts the door, flicking on the lock.
The trainer situation dictates that I sit down immediately. Flick stays standing.
‘Firstly,’ she says. ‘Welcome back.’
She gives me the only genuine smile I’ve seen since I walked in here. ‘It’s lovely to see you. I’m sorry I’ve not made it over in a few months.’
I look away awkwardly. She visited when Poppy was small. It was about nine months ago. She was one of my closest friends.
‘Well, firstly too it’s nice to be back,’ I say. ‘But I think we had better get to secondly. There’s a disconcerting vibe in here?’
Flick nods, seriously.
And then she does sit down, and jiggles her mouse to make her computer come alive.
She clicks onto something, then looks at me.
‘I need you to steel yourself here, Scarlett,’ she says.
My stomach lurches. Redundancy, then. I think about the size of our mortgage and regret following Ed’s lead despite my nerves and maxing ourselves out on our four-bed pretty listed building on the winding country road in our idyllic Cheshire village. How long will it take me to find something else? How big will my pay-off be?
‘Go on,’ I say, needing the conclusion as I try to do sums with no facts.
She sighs. Clicks again.
‘I was sent a link to this in the early hours of this morning by somebody I don’t know,’ says my friend, my boss. ‘And so was everybody else on the team.’
I nod.
‘Right,’ I say, searching her face for clues about where this is going. But Felicity cannot meet my eyes.
‘It’s a sex tape,’ she says.
My eyebrows shoot up. Jesus. That explains why everyone is in a strange mood; my return isn’t the headline this morning. A sex tape!
‘Whoa,’ I say. ‘Do you know why you were sent that?’
Flick doesn’t say anything else. Instead she wipes her dark-rimmed glasses on her expensive blue silk shirt to – I’m sure – try and steady hands I notice are shaking.
But then she composes herself.
‘I didn’t open it at first because it was an unknown link. But I came in early and asked IT to take a look at it, because of the title.’
I nod. Yep. We are always being told to be careful what we open. Makes sense.
Flick bows her head, as if in prayer.
‘I did send a memo to everybody, to tell them not to open it,’ she says, looking tortured. ‘I tried to act, as fast as I could. But it wasn’t fast enough, evidently. They’d either already looked or they were too curious and ignored me.’
I reach a hand to her then.
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s not your fault. They shouldn’t have done that if you told them not to look at it.’
Would I have looked, though, I wonder? A sex tape isn’t normal Monday morning fodder.
Flick’s prayer ends and she looks at me.
‘Scarlett,’ she says. ‘The video clip was titled with your name. You’re in it. It’s your sex tape. You and … two men.’
I laugh at first, in disbelief.
‘That’s impossible,’ I say.
But then I look at her screen, from a chair where I usually sit with a cup of coffee in my hand looking at the Google Analytics and I freeze with a memory of something that happened in a different time, to a different me.
Fuck.
Sitting in the chair next to my boss, I am still and I am ice. Flick’s hand is hovering over a video clip.
‘I can show you, if you want me to, but I understand if not,’ she says quietly.
Perhaps if she weren’t my friend, or if she were a man, it would be different. But something compels me to watch. I lean forward and click play myself.
Flick stands up to pull the blind down.
I stare at the movements on the screen and at the three naked bodies – one of which is my own – having sex with each other, in various shapes and combinations.
Fuck.
I wrap my arms around myself and try and hold the parts of me together.
My head throbs, my vision blurs.
Felicity, moving back towards me, looks alarmed.
She tries to touch me but I shake her off.
‘Let me contact medical,’ she says, concerned.
We work in a large building, with lots of other creative companies. There is a nurse in a small room on the second floor. It’s a forward-thinking place to work. Good mental health is a key focus so he would get me a cup of tea and ask if I need the in-house counselling service phone number for a referral and I would sit there and reply with what? That it’s not too many working hours that’s the problem here, but the fact I just sat in a boardroom with my boss and watched myself have sex.
I shake my head.
‘No medical,’ I manage. ‘I just need a minute.’
She nods.
I know it happened. I do remember it, somewhere in the recesses of my mind.
Felicity has turned the sound off on the video, or it doesn’t have sound, but for whichever one of those is true, I am grateful.
One long minute later I look back at my boss’s bowed head. She is still wiping.
I continue to sit, my heart feeling like it could injure me with its drumming; migraine kicking in. My back is sweating like I have just completed one of the ten marathons I have run in my lifetime. My face is hot like I’ve opened the oven on a bubbling lasagne – ready-made, knowing me – and peered right inside.
‘It was posted to a website but they sent the video link too,’ Felicity says, under her breath.
So it’s not just an email to be deleted but this video is accessible to whoever, whenever. For those people to laugh at me or be turned on by me or to use me for whatever they need.
My eyes, which sting with the urge to weep like a toddler who doesn’t want to share, can’t take themselves off the video.
My hands and my legs shake harder, deeper.
It was pointless, I think, to try and reinvent myself as I look at the woman on the screen. Same arms, same legs, same me.
You attempt so hard to be something, to leave something behind but image is fragile and now my shiny new one is on the floor.
Can someone pop in to sweep it up? You’ve left a shard in the corner. That’s it, all gone now.
The video finally stops.
‘Stay,’ says Felicity weakly, as I stand up to leave. ‘Let’s talk this through.’
But I laugh and she dips her head. Because we both know that what she is saying is preposterous. How can I put either of us through that? What would ‘that’ even involve?
The only option here is surely to run, run, run as fast as I can.
I fight the urge to throw up.
Even if some people didn’t open it without the private IT favours Flick asked for, they would try the link later, at home; less wary, too curious.
To walk to the lift I have to walk past all of them, the colleagues that now know what you would get if you peeled back every single item of clothing that I am wearing.
It feels like that’s exactly what has happened.