28 July
Mitch. Robert.
Emma laughs with me in coffee shops, just after she has eaten her cereal with the man I’m on the internet having sex with.
She sits there in an oversized hoodie taking a long slug of her coffee, and talks about the terrible husband who barely lifts a finger in their life and all the time it is him, a man who saw me naked.
I nod along and tut about him, this husband, this half-hearted dad, this party boy. Not knowing that he is also the man who didn’t notice the slice across my stomach as I sabotaged my own life by sleeping with him in front of my boyfriend.
I think of Poppy, playing with Mitch’s son. Of Emma, sleeping with him. Of a different me, sleeping with him too.
My thoughts hurtle forwards, backwards, sideways. Was there a moment that Emma changed towards me? A moment I could pin down, when she must have found out what had happened between us back in the day?
‘Got it now?’ asks Emma.
No Emma. Not really.
But I don’t say anything out loud.
I don’t say anything out loud because she is the woman now who broke into my house and is trying to ruin my life and who has a laugh that is different to her normal laugh; eyes that are different to her normal eyes.
I look at her face and there is no trace of the friend I’ve known. Robert is one shock but that is a second.
But then I’ve thought it so often lately when I’ve started to suspect these women, haven’t I?
Did I know you? And I’m not sure I did, in the way that I wanted to believe I did.
One of the reasons I’ve never connected Emma to Mitch: I don’t even know her surname.
I don’t have her email; it’s not on her social media.
I’ve talked about everything with this woman – the mastitis that I battled through in the early weeks after having Poppy, what’s happened to my marriage, even the video.
And yet, I don’t know her surname.
I look at her.
‘We don’t know each other really, do we?’ I ask.
‘Of course we don’t,’ she snaps. ‘We were desperate for adult company. We’d have taken anyone.’
‘I told you such a lot,’ I say. ‘I told you my worries that Ed was cheating. I told you about the video.’
Emma shrugs. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You did, babe. Bit odd really. We haven’t known each other long. You want to be more careful with how much you share.’
But I had been desperate. Desperate to make friends; desperate to skip forward through the awkward parts where you exchange small talk. I wanted something to absorb me into its sphere. I wanted, as a new mum with an unsure identity, to make myself feel constructed and real. To build a whole world so I didn’t feel quite so much like I had strayed into someone else’s.
A feeling runs from my chest to my stomach and it is familiar.
The feeling, I think, of blaming myself, of thinking – deep down – that all of this has been brought on by me because I was bad and shameful and not good enough.
Did someone say it to me, as a teenager? That that was why I didn’t have my own mum. Something is sparking a memory. Of Josephine climbing into my bed while I cried, to cuddle me afterwards, telling me I could share her mum, if I wanted. I have the feeling again, of losing my last hold on things. Of this being too much. Of not being able to breathe.
Emma walks over and shuts the living room door, leaning against it.
I stand up.
‘Sit down and listen,’ she tells me.
But I speak before I can stop myself. ‘So it was Mitch then,’ I say, deadpan and wanting to get in there first. ‘Mitch leaked the video and now you hate me, because you’ve had to watch me having sex with your husband.’
She laughs, then, as she sits down in the chair opposite me.
‘Not quite.’
Her voice slurs with the booze and something else, unknown. An edge that is unnerving.
I stay silent.
Emma looks right at me again.
‘Robert has sex with a lot of people,’ she says. ‘Before he was with me, now he’s with me. It makes no difference to Robert.’
‘But I’m not sleeping with Mitch,’ I protest.
I correct myself, out of some sort of respect to her marriage.
‘I’m not sleeping with Bobby. With Robert. We were barely even mates then, just mixed in the same circles, went to the same clubs. What happened between us was twelve years ago. Way before you met, I would imagine?’
She nods. ‘Yeah. We only got together two years ago.’
‘Well then!’ I say, rallying, hopeful. ‘We were kids. Different people. And you and I can move on from this. It’s weird, yeah, but I barely knew Mitch. He wasn’t some big love of mine or anything.’
I think I see judgement in her eyes – so why have sex with him on camera then, why wasn’t your boyfriend enough for you – or am I so used to looking for it that I see that judgement anywhere now?
‘Look,’ I say, picking up pace. ‘I don’t know why Mitch … Robert did this. Perhaps because he has some issue with my ex Ollie? But now I know it was him, I can move on. You can help me make sure it doesn’t go up on any more sites, right? Get him to delete the video. To leave me alone.’
I think of the messages, to Ed, to me, of the threats of what could come next.
She can help, I think, surely. I sizzle with the hope of bringing this to a conclusion. I can move on.
But then I look at Emma’s face. Still so different to the meek, apologetic one I’ve known before and I’m reminded of characters on TV dramas whose faces change shape once you find out they’re the bad guy. Once you see them through the lens of evil and it’s impossible to imagine the original version.
This is Emma. My friend, my enemy, the surprisingly impressive actor.
And suddenly the fear is back. Because this woman, whoever she is, waited for an opportunity to break into my house. Planning went into this. Ed wasn’t here. This wasn’t her first attempt.
What sort of person does that, angry or not? I picture her holding Poppy, hugging me, offering me a bite of her carrot cake. I shudder.
‘I won’t go to the police, if that’s what you want,’ I say. ‘Especially when there is Seth to think of. We’ll just get Robert to leave me alone and I’ll move on. There’s no way I could face court anyway.’
It’s true.
Emma looks up slowly and deliberately and for a minute I think she is falling asleep. Has she downed something more than gin? But she smiles, lazily.
‘You don’t think much of Robert, do you?’ she asks.
I deliberate. What’s the right response, at this moment, when he has left her anyway?
‘No,’ I say. ‘When I met up with him a few weeks ago to ask if he had done this to me, he lied to my face. Said point blank it wasn’t him.’
‘Do you think you’re important to him?’ she asks. ‘More than just some girl he shagged?’
I cringe, every time I remember this is her husband we are talking about.
‘Well I didn’t,’ I say, defensive. ‘But then he did this to me. So otherwise, why?’
I focus in on the silence of the house. No baby crying. No Ed dashing from room to room picking up his jacket, his wallet, his keys. The TV has turned itself off from inactivity. No music, because slowly, slowly through this whole thing even that has gone from my life. My mood doesn’t deserve music. It doesn’t deserve beats or dancing or lyrics that are poetry. My mood only deserves heavy loaded silence.
The room feels small. Not in the cosy way that it does in the daytime when I read stories to Poppy in here; cuddle her in for a sleep.
Emma looks up.
‘Why?’ I repeat.
As soon as I have said the why out loud, my brain skips on and tries to answer its own question.
Is Mitch obsessed with me? Has he seen me around locally and remembered me? Stalked me? I shiver. Was it something that came back to him when he realised one day that his wife’s friend Scarlett was the woman he’d once filmed having sex?
I’m still flitting from theory to theory, trying to work it out, when Emma speaks. And if her face has contorted into a different person’s face during this conversation, now her voice is doing the same.
Unrecognisable.
Emotionless.
Bleak.
Terrifying.
Because what she says is:
‘It wasn’t Robert who posted the video, Scarlett. It was me.’