22 May
Mundane chart music that doesn’t make you feel anything booms around a bar that has no defining characteristics. There is a cocktail list that contains every obligatory cocktail choice and nothing unique. Men drink pints. Women snap pouting selfies.
‘You hate it, don’t you?’ asks Asha, next to me, anxious.
‘Of course I don’t hate it,’ I say, but I feel myself grimace.
Cora gives me a strange look.
She chose this place for tonight; booked the table.
Asha blushes.
Emma reaches over us for a chip. ‘Oh, babe, the points,’ she groans, singsong in that hint of a Welsh accent. ‘Nau-ghty.’
And I roll my eyes but it’s fond now; part of me thinks she’s playing up to her role.
I drink my cheeky glass of wine. Eat a naughty chip. Post a #mumsonthewine picture of all of us on my Instagram and then pretend to need the toilet so I can sit in there for a few minutes and watch the likes roll in.
When I come out an ice bucket of champagne lands on the table.
‘Babe, you didn’t!’ squeals Emma, mouth full of a chip, to Cora.
‘Emma, I did,’ says Cora, mock serious, unscrewing a cork with a delicate hand that is heaving under the pressure of its jewellery and violent nails.
The cork pops.
‘You’re so generous,’ I say warmly to Cora, as I place a hand on her arm.
She pours me a glass.
‘Not at all,’ she responds. ‘Just a little something.’
Emma is looking at her phone.
‘Does anyone know how many points are in champagne?’ she asks. ‘Is it more than a gin and slim?’
On a whim, I take her phone out of her hand.
‘I have looked it up,’ I declare. ‘And there are, officially, one hundred fun points in a glass of champagne.’
Emma laughs at herself as she rummages in her bag and pulls out a hair bobble, tying hair back in a ponytail that is frizzing in the humidity of the bar.
I down my own drink. Pop her phone back in her bag.
They all look surprised. They don’t think I’m fun because I’m often not, I suppose, distracted by my daughter or my sex tape or my blog. Dismissing the bar, cringing at the locals.
I down the gin that was sitting next to me before the champagne arrived and then I drag Emma with me to the dance floor. Through a slight tipsy fog and in dim lighting, I still see Emma flush with pride.
‘The Welsh one has a girl crush on you,’ Ed said with a laugh a few weeks ago, when I told him a story about my mum friends. ‘It’s obvious.’
‘She’s not Welsh, just lived there when she was little,’ I had said but it didn’t matter, he had taken a couple of characteristics of each of them and scribbled out a picture. Emma with only her hint of a childhood accent was Welsh, overweight, in awe. And where had he built that picture from really, barely having seen them since NCT classes over a year ago? From me and how I painted her.
‘What I don’t get is what you get from her,’ he added.
I had looked at his head then, turned away from me, knowing that what I got from Emma – and Cora and Asha – would be impossible to describe to him, unemotional as he is.
They bring comfort; support. Not the sharp humour I have sought from friendships before, no. Not the podcast recommendations or the gallery tips or the acerbic political commentary. But I sink into them like they’re my own bed after a newborn night feed. I trust them to hold my baby while I pay. I know that when I meet them, somebody will bring me a cup of coffee. These things sound low-level but right now, in my life, they are the top of the mountain. We’re so busy looking after our babies but in between, we look after each other too.
We have become closer, in ways, than most friends do. We talked about our fears of having our vaginas ripped open as we practised putting nappies on in antenatal class. Then the babies came and we helped each other position our breasts into our children’s mouths and fed each other toast, desperate for the carbs but unable to free a hand.
We have sat with each other while we wept, not sure why, checking in to see if it’s exhaustion or something more. In the odd moment when we have had something to give, having had an extra hour’s sleep or with our own baby napping, we’ve snuggled in the other’s child, given the gift of a two-minute break with a still-hot tea.
We have discussed, in detail, the way we bled until simply standing up was torture in the weeks after childbirth. We have relayed the hours that we spent pushing or having our babies cut from us, of the emergency button that was pressed or the forceps that came, gunning for us.
We have talked when we couldn’t talk to anyone else about the loneliness of those days home alone with what is technically another human but one that is unable yet to provide any company. About the oddness of that unique time: how special, how scary, how quiet.
We have sighed with relief when we’ve walked into a baby group and seen each other because that means that we can hand our baby over when we go to the toilet, instead of passing them to a stranger and spending the 10 second duration of our wee convinced that they are at that moment being kidnapped.
I look at the table and see Cora’s eyes on us. I grin and motion to her to join but she shakes her head, looks at her phone.
The alcohol hits me then; my drinking stamina isn’t back to its former glories, post Poppy.
Emma leans forward and shouts into my ear over the music.
‘My sister-in-law told me about the row you had over the photo of her little boy,’ she yells, and I go cold.
While it may have been overshadowed lately by my own online dramas, that row had kept me awake at night. Because that woman had been right. And I should understand how having your privacy breached online feels.
That was her child and her decision and I had belittled it and I wanted to say sorry to her, but I felt too embarrassed now, ashamed by my response.
‘Your sister-in-law?’ My voice sounds sharp.
Emma nods. ‘Oh, you didn’t know?’ she says, leaning right in. ‘Yeah she’s married to my brother, babe.’
I shake my head. All I can think is how I love these women but the rest of it? I am sick, sick, sick of this parochial village. I hate that I put make-up on to walk the five minutes from my house to the post box because it’s almost impossible to get there without seeing someone I know. That I have to spend £10 minimum to pay on card at the pub. That I used to stare at the sky and think it was lovely, unobscured by Seventies office buildings, and now it feels like it’s closing in on me, and it’s darker than before, gloomier. That everyone here wears jeans, walking boots, sensible coats and how they all seem content, as they let you pass on the narrow part of the village where there is no pavement. That I envy that contentment, as I long for eccentricity and colour and even misery and extremes, but there is none, ever; there is just someone wishing me a good afternoon, as they pull a beanie hat down over their ears.
I think of how much I miss the anonymity of the city. How creepy it is that everyone here is related and linked and known.
I look at the walls of the bar with their IKEA art and beer stains, and they feel like they’re inching closer too.
It’s breeding paranoia, this feeling.
If the men were telling the truth, then it’s someone else rather than Ollie or Mitch who posted the video. Someone, somehow, however impossible that seems, got hold of it. Is it weird altercations like the one with Emma’s sister-in-law that I need to be looking out for? Is the person who did this a stalker? Someone close?
‘Are you okay?’ shouts Emma over the music, panicking, I can see, that she has upset me but her face is blurring at the edges.
My heart is beating at a rate that would score off the chart on a blood pressure test.
It’s like I have a migraine. Or am having a bad trip.
I need to get out of here.
I stumble as I head back to the table for my bag.
‘Drunk too much,’ I shout back to Emma, then I signal to the door and flee without goodbyes. Knowing I appear rude again, to these friends that do so much for me.
Outside, I flag a cab. Oh, I mean I call a cab and wait forty-five minutes for it and when it arrives, it is inexplicably a minibus because that’s what happens in the countryside.
I look into the darkness out of the window and it seems, still, so alien and I think about how Ed and I ended up here.
We decided on it when we were engaged. I had taken some persuading but Ed had painted a tempting picture.
‘Hot toddies in the local,’ he said, dreamy as we lounged, legs on top of each other, on our tiny sofa in the Chorlton flat we had been renting together for a year. ‘We can get a dog, buy wellies. Do our house up like something off Instagram.’
My head snapped up, like he knew it would. I did a lot of social media in my job and I had aspirations of becoming some sort of influencer then. I had been thinking about a direction I could go. Home renovations? With our salaries we could get something pretty big to do up in the countryside. Still.
‘We can’t move so I can get a better Insta grid.’ I smiled. I jumped on top of him, eyes wide. ‘CAN WE?’
‘Out near my mum and dad, near my brother,’ he laughed as he kissed me.
Where he grew up, in other words. A fancy village, near to the other fancy village he grew up in.
‘You always say it’s lovely when we visit,’ he pushed. ‘When we have our own children, they’d have cousins nearby …’
We wanted kids, and he was right. Maybe it was time to accept that life would change; that Manchester might not be right for us in this next phase.
It took drives through idyllic Cheshire villages, the odd overnight bag packed for a stay in a country hotel. It took mustardy roast beef next to wood burners with a Malbec in my hand. It took a parcel arriving containing fancy wellies real countryside people would never buy anyway with a note from Ed that said ‘Go on’. It took practical things like train timetables pored over to make sure I could still get to work, and RightMove searches, and questions like ‘When was the boiler put in?’ and mortgage evaluations and then suddenly, as we stood inside the beautiful, four-bedroomed eighteenth-century listed cottage that was now ours, we had crept across the finish line and made the decision.
And when we drove behind the removal van to Sowerton just over two years ago, me, my wellies and my Instagram were more than excited.
We got the keys to the cottage and we drank our champagne in bed that night because we hadn’t figured out how to work the heating yet.
‘There you go,’ said Ed, placing a hot water bottle on my feet. ‘I just ordered us a curry too. We might have to get out of bed for that though.’
I’d laughed. The tumbling anxiety I’d had about the move was fading with the crazy, fun newness of it all. We were married now and I was high on the novelty of being a wife and an owner of this fancy house and – as we tried for a baby then too – anticipating other firsts.
Smug could have described it if you disliked me; happy would have done if you didn’t.
A month later I was pregnant and then I had Poppy and went on maternity leave and life got busier and my boobs got leakier and friends got more distant and I started Cheshire Mama and I went back to the office to introduce Poppy but it was hard to merge my two worlds. I had thought Sowerton in all of its sleepiness was an extra life, a little bonus. I didn’t realise my Manchester one wouldn’t be there waiting forever.
But I like having friends. I like being popular. And so I found my mum crew.
My old friends picture my world now, I know, as me spending three weeks designing Poppy’s homemade birthday cake and making a Pinterest board for themes for the Christmas tree. I’m the first of our crowd to have a child and I get paranoid that they have written me off as having retreated to the insular world of the parent, with their craft boxes and their playdate schedule and their complete lack of a clue about current affairs or fashion or what’s happening in the world outside their bubble.
But I look into the gloom of the countryside from my taxi now and my skin prickles. Too quiet. Too dark. Not enough everything else. I laugh, now, at how I romanticised it. Sometimes I want to take a pin to the bubble and clamber out.
‘Good night?’ asks the driver and I nod but say nothing.
I lean my head back against the seat, feeling my body shake all over. I have no idea whether it’s from standing outside on an evening when the temperature has suddenly dipped and it’s far cooler than May should be or from the conversation with Emma or whether it’s just from everything that the last two weeks have brought.
Wanting to take up room in my brain so I can’t feel, I open up my Instagram.
And then, something happens.
In the comments, right there on my beautiful, filtered, parenting page, people are talking about my sex tape.
I feel the tickle of sweat in my armpits.
Word has spread. Worlds have collided.
One offers a ‘rerun’. Another compliments my naked body, as though it were public property. Coarse. Terrifying.
Who has seen this? I think. When was it posted? Who would be looking?
I delete and block as fast as I can, but they are from multiple accounts, these messages, and they keep coming. Someone is doing this to me this second.
I hug my own body and the shaking intensifies.
Help me, somebody, help me.
‘You all right, love?’ asks the driver.
I must have emitted a gasp.
I nod, tell him I had too much to drink. Dip my head low into my phone. Keep deleting.
I have tried so hard to contain it, but my workmates, my family, friends, then the clients, now this. The reality, I realise, sadly, is that whether the website operator removed it or not, I can’t contain it. That’s why that email was such an anticlimax. The video is a hurricane, far more powerful than me, blasting through my makeshift walls. I consider the word viral; how perfect it is to describe what is happening to me.
I have gone viral and it is a rotten, unwanted illness. The world is exposed and unvaccinated. There are no limits to what this thing can do and while it keeps coming and coming and coming, I can’t even attempt to recover.
It can kill me, I think, suddenly lucid. The thing is viral and it can kill me.
Tears stream down my face when I think, for a split second, that that could be a relief.
‘You sure you’re okay, love?’ says the taxi driver, brow furrowed in the mirror.
I nod again. Hide my face in my phone.
When I get in, Ed is in bed for an early start at work, which means that I don’t tell him what’s happened. But gradually, seeing Ed’s face has not been the comfort it usually is when I’m nervous, looking up the aisle at him on our wedding day, or in those terrifying seconds when we waited for the nurse to find a heartbeat at Poppy’s scan as he squeezed my hand tight. Now, it would just add to my shame. I lie in bed, missing him, missing myself, missing a clear mind and now I’ve left them, missing the friends who would have hugged me goodbye, told me they loved me, clambered into the taxi with me, held my hand and listened, if I ever decided that I could speak to them about all of this; if I decide one day that actually, I need to.