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.