30 June
At the lawyer’s office, Jonathan frowns at me.
‘Are you okay, Scarlett?’ he says. ‘You’re looking anxious.’
I laugh.
‘Well, wouldn’t you?’ I say. ‘If this happened to you, d’you think you might not be too chilled out? Silly question really – you’re a man, it can’t happen to you. If you made a sex tape, no one would care.’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘That’s a sweeping statement but okay, point taken.’
He looks around the room, like he may have missed someone.
‘No Ed?’
‘Given the email I sent you I thought that might be best,’ I say. I am snippy now. Frustrated. I’m paying him money. And really, what does he do? I do all of the work.
Jonathan nods. Head down.
Ed didn’t take much persuasion not to come. It saved him taking the time off work. And from spending it with me, I suspect. We’re different people to the ones who came in here that first day. There’s no united front. Hands are not held.
I look around at the walls of this office; nothing personal here, so bare that Jonathan could be borrowing it from a colleague. Out of his window into the grey of Manchester. And I think of looking out of an upper floor somewhere else in this city, years ago. My head is there, resting with its long white blonde hair on a black leather sofa in a slick penthouse apartment in Manchester. The room is stark but even the starkness is expensive. Designer grey paint, wall to wall to wall. The art made up of collector pieces I am too young, too naive to recognise, but he tells me they’re impressive. And you can tell, anyway. Everything here is superior. The electronics spread themselves across walls; the gin is special edition.
And there in the picture is me, thin like a pre-teen, jiggling my body and unable to sit still then as I throw my head back and laugh. As my drink is topped up, again, higher. As I touch his knee. As I move in closer.
I look back at Jonathan and suspect more time has passed than it should have in the middle of a conversation while my mind has wandered off.
‘So, your email,’ he says, leaning forward onto his desk. ‘I wish you’d told me that was a possibility earlier on.’
I sigh. ‘Well, I didn’t know it was,’ I reply. ‘I mean, obviously I know it happened. But I didn’t know that whoever did this knew. That it’s something they would come at me for.’
‘And now you do?’
‘Yes,’ I say, cold. ‘Now I do.’
Jonathan folds his lips inwards. Types something quickly on his computer.
‘I just need to do whatever the hell I can to stop it coming out,’ I say. ‘To everyone. Including Ed. And my family. Just everyone. I can’t weather another thing, and not this. So how do I do that? Stop it? At least this time there is warning.’
Jonathan is firm. ‘The same way as we do the other thing. Find whoever sent you the message – and you’re confident it’s the same person that posted the video, right?’
I nod. I can’t have two people who hate me this much. Surely.
‘Find them, then we take this to the police. That’s the only route, Scarlett. Do not start engaging with them.’
I am so tempted though. Go direct. Find out who they want me to leave alone. See if we can talk this out. Then I laugh; this person posted a sex tape of me online, emailed it to my friends. Do I really think we’ll have a chat over a cup of tea and shake on it?
And I am sitting there, in the lawyer’s office, but I am standing there, at that dead end again. Fuck. Where the hell do I go from here?