28 July
Emma is sitting in the hug of a grey armchair that I used to sit in to breastfeed Poppy in the eerie world of 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. as she tells me the story of exactly how she ruined my life.
She is relaxed about it, a little dazed, and I wonder again if she has had something more than alcohol. Drugs may well be kicking around their house; Mitch was always a fan.
But not Emma, I think temporarily, as I picture her bursting through the door of the café half an hour after everyone else, agonising over whether to have a brownie.
Not Emma.
This is a different Emma though, I remind myself.
Normal rules do not apply. Normal rules, it turns out, were bullshit.
She gets comfortable against my deep purple cushions and I feel like I am emptying out, the final traces of hope and human connection gone now.
They were all I had, those women, and if it sounds ridiculous, it is.
But this has been a ridiculous few months and I have clung to all that I have been able to cling to and slowly, slowly, it has crept up on me: Asha, Emma and Cora were my closest friends.
‘Robert cheats on me all the time,’ she says now, not a sliver of emotion in her voice. ‘And I’ve become numb to it. The way you do to anything that happens constantly. He comes in at 4 a.m., showers, and I pretend to be asleep. I have my life; he has his.’
She slumps further back.
I listen to this new Emma, like I have listened so many times to Old Emma, and I will her to transition back.
‘I thought I could change him,’ she says and maybe there is something softer in there now. ‘And like every smart friend has ever told me – including you actually, once or twice – of course I couldn’t.’
‘But what was he like when you met him?’ I ask because I am genuinely curious. ‘Did he settle down then?’
Emma laughs but it’s angry, and I think it’s angry with me.
‘No,’ she snaps. ‘Of course not.’
I stay silent, scared I might throw our precarious balance off if I speak.
There’s a gap then.
‘I got pregnant quickly,’ she says eventually. ‘We were only casually dating. Partying a lot. I think he thought it was the ultimate rebellion. What’s the craziest thing you can do when you’re this party-boy DJ? His friends thought it was wild. Move to the country! Have a kid!’
‘Get married,’ I fill in.
Emma looks up, surprised.
‘We aren’t married,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
Of course I didn’t. We’ve established: I know nothing. I look at her wedding finger. There’s a thin band of gold around it. She glances at it too. Shrugs.
‘Just fits that finger best,’ she says. ‘And I’ve always felt like we might as well be married. No difference, once Seth came along.’
I assumed, of course. I skipped the steps of actual conversation like I did with her job as we focused solely on the babies.
If I was irritated by my friends at first for not asking me questions about the real me, then I have done the same, I realise. Not been interested, inquisitive, curious.
Just used, for what I needed. Hours filled, advice given.
It wasn’t Robert, it was me.
I look at her, this stranger.
‘So what happened?’ I ask as I see her eyes lose focus; her lids droop.
She is, I think, she is on something.
Emma has been pushed so far that she has got drunk at home and taken some sort of drugs.
A shrug.
‘I still wanted him to stay,’ she says. ‘I know it sounds pathetic but I always hoped he’d grow out of it. I wanted our family together. That was my only focus. For Seth.’
I nod, empathy surging.
I reach for her hand but she pulls it away.
‘A few weeks ago we had a row, a particularly bad one,’ she says. ‘And I told him that I knew about him sleeping with you. That this was worse than all the others, that you were my friend. He didn’t know that. Didn’t realise I knew you, of course.’
Her body crumples like a newspaper on our fire as mine stiffens.
‘I wanted him to know I could act too,’ she says. ‘That I wasn’t passive all the time. So I told him what I had done to you too. Posting the video. Sending it to everyone. I suppose I was kind of … proud of myself. But he was furious. Told me how upset you’d been by the video when he met you that day, what a disgusting thing it was to do. Said you were a nice person, and that back in the day you’d had a hard time of life. Told me some other things while he was at it. About just how low things had got for you. It was supposed to make me feel bad, I think.’
She raises an eyebrow.
I go cold. Freeze. Of course.
‘You sent those messages too,’ I say. ‘About the other thing.’
The penthouse. The fancy gin. Emma knows it all, the grimiest corners of my past.
She grimaces.
‘Say what you mean,’ she mutters. ‘We don’t need to call it “the other thing”. We can call it you having sex for money but only as long as the men had fancy pads, right? That about the size of it?’
My cheeks sting.
And even now, I’m ashamed.
‘It wasn’t sex,’ I whisper, and I can’t believe this secret, so long buried, is living and breathing in my living room. Tears of release pour down my face. ‘It was escort work before I met Ollie when I was all over the place and had no job and was desperate for cash. I didn’t even have a home, Emma. I had to stay on friends’ sofas. Once even on a bench. I knew I was getting my inheritance from my mum when I was twenty-five and it made me lazy. I got into a lot of debt and panicked.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘It wasn’t sex? Ever?’
I stay silent.
She scoffs.
The dam opens and shame floods me, drowns me, way beneath the surface.
Yes. One time there was a lot of money on offer, and I convinced myself it was a simple transaction and I did it. I slept with that man, twenty-five years older than me, maybe, and it was so much more than a transaction and the dam opened then and the shame flooded, over and over, just like now and I hated me, just like now.
‘I shouldn’t have to justify anything I’ve done in my life to you, Emma,’ I say but I don’t feel that way. I want to justify, like I spend so much time in my head trying to do too, to real people, to imaginary people, to myself. On a good day it works. On bad days, nothing does. I could have gone to my dad for money, instead of that man. My eyes sting. He’d have taken me in, any day, any hour. But I was too proud; still sulking about his new family. How can I have made that choice? I picture my dad knowing this and it hurts in my insides.
She ploughs forward, like I haven’t even spoken.
‘Robert was appalled by what I’d done to you,’ she says. ‘Asked why the hell I would share the video. And then said he had fallen out of love with me a long time ago but this was the final straw, he didn’t want to be with a person who could do this to somebody else, especially somebody they called a friend, and he left me.’
It wasn’t Robert, it was me.
This isn’t a friendly chat.
I’m not here to counsel her over her marriage.
She did this to me.
Not Mitch.
Emma.
And now she has let herself into my home and she is high and drunk and angry.
My heart starts thudding. The sweat drips again.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I need to keep Emma talking, because otherwise I don’t know what comes next. Will she tell Ed, tell everybody, what I did?
‘And why did you do this to me?’ I say. ‘Robert made some sort of sense. But you? I don’t get it, Emma.’
Emma settles back on the cushions; refocuses. Looks right at me.
‘I’ve suspected for a long time,’ she says. ‘That you were back on the scene.’
I open my mouth to protest but there is no chance.
‘Receipts of Robert’s I found, for local places, local hotels. It’s always been Manchester before, but for a while I’ve known Robert’s been sleeping with someone on our doorstep. Knowing you two had a history, it made sense. Clicked into place.’
Her stare is intense.
‘Was it still the same?’ she snarls. ‘After all of those years?’
I shake my head no, hard – no it didn’t happen, no, no, no.
‘You have no idea how much I hate you.’ She hurtles forward. ‘I was going to watch you fall apart from a distance, just do enough that he wouldn’t want you any more and the affair would stop. But then he left, and I needed to stand in front of you and tell you to leave him alone. Stay away from him. And from me. I am not your friend. I hate you. You’re the reason my husband’s left me. You have ruined my fucking life.’
The tone of her voice makes me stumble backwards.
I shake my head again. How can I stay away from him? It’s not happening Emma. I’m not sleeping with Mitch. No, no, no.
How quickly worlds fall apart, I think. One minute you are liked, loved. Next minute they fall like dominoes and your dad, husband, boss, friend: they all hate you, or pity you, or cringe at you, or resent you or can no longer look at you right in the eye.
But Emma does, now. And then up and down, head to toe.
‘I get it,’ she says. ‘There I am and there you are, glamorous, confident. Alpha.’
She looks up at a wedding photo of Ed and me on the wall above my head, gestures.
‘Don’t believe everything you see in a photo,’ I mutter. ‘I would have thought that was obvious by now.’
She ignores me. It’s not useful to her narrative.
‘I’m not sleeping with Robert,’ I tell her but she doesn’t hear it.
‘You had to have him, even though you already have everything,’ she murmurs.
‘Everything?’ I shout. ‘You remember that I have left my job because my body is all over the internet?’
‘Yeah,’ she murmurs. ‘Your really good body. Having sex with my baby’s dad.’
The laugh bursts out.
‘Emma, you can’t possibly think that’s a good thing?’ I shout, startled. ‘I’ve had my life blown apart by this. When I watch that hideous video, I’m not sitting there thinking, “Well, at least my boobs look good.” Do you have any idea how violated you feel when something like this happens to you?’
Her eyes are fire now, suddenly, and she’s furious.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t. I’m Miss Local. I do the weekly shop and I go in for the evening shift. I nag my partner to come home sometimes, just this once, before 4 a.m. I wash dishes. I try not to eat the biscuit. I feed my baby. That is literally all I do, Scarlett. This video? At least it’s exciting. At least it’s made you feel … something.’
And then, I see every shade of red there is at the very idea that any of this is enviable.
‘It’s made me feel something?’ I shout. ‘Is that why you did this? Because it worked, Emma. You made me feel something. You made me feel shame and horror and fear. You made me feel at rock bottom. You made me feel suicidal, at times. You made me feel desperate. You made me feel like I couldn’t experience joy any more, even when I was with my daughter, because I was so horrified by what had happened to me, wondering who had seen the video, wondering who was watching it now. You made me scared that there was worse to come. Scared that everyone would think I was a prostitute, and that Poppy would think that when she was older, and that Ed would leave me and my family would be broken up.’
I crumble, face in hands.
‘Was that the point then?’ I ask, as I look up. ‘That I would know how you felt, if my own marriage was in ruins?’
She raises both eyebrows.
I carry on, through my sobs. ‘You made me feel like I couldn’t look after my child and like I was having a breakdown and I know what that feels like too because despite what you think, my life has been hard and that has happened to me before.
‘I’ve been at rock bottom, at the very darkest places. So I know, for definite, when I’m on my way there again. And I was. I am.’
I could keep going but tears are taking up breath and I run out of it and all I can do is sob and sob, as Emma stands up and moves closer, standing over me.
For half a second I wonder if she will hug me but then I remember: that was the old world.
My brain switches to fear.
If not hugs, why is she coming so close?
But she is moving away again now, staring at the wall with an Alain de Botton quote on it. Everyone got the message from that piece of evidence? I am clever, I am arty, I am well read, I can design a beautiful home.
‘You just need to say the words to me and admit it, Scarlett,’ she says, head to one side looking at the print. Slurs. She hasn’t heard a word. ‘Stop me going crazy. Say the words.’
I stare at her.
‘Admit that you and Robert have been sleeping together all the time that we have been friends. I have to hear you admit it, Scarlett, even though he won’t, for my own sanity.’
And before I can answer, she carries on.
‘I’ve stayed close to get my own evidence, tried to make myself such a good friend that you would confess and spill, like Cora does, about the man you were seeing. I knew you wouldn’t realise there was any link to me. But you’re cagier. Elusive.’
She pauses.
‘Even when I get you paralytic.’
I picture her, topping up my drink even when she isn’t having one herself. Think of times when I’ve felt drunker than I should from what I think I’ve been ordering. Dark. I shudder.
‘Okay, okay,’ I say, hand up in defence. ‘Okay. There’s someone local who Robert is sleeping with by the sounds of what you say, with the evidence you’ve found. But it’s not me! I slept with Mitch – Robert – once, a long time ago when I was drunk and stupid. That’s it. Never again.’
She looks at me with venom. She doesn’t believe me.
‘It’s too big a coincidence, Scarlett,’ she says. ‘You, moving round here. The local receipts. What happened between you all those years ago. The way he defended you. He meets up with you, then leaves me. And look at me; look at you. Once I realised you had been in his bed, I couldn’t stop comparing. Beautiful, tall you. They’re normally in their twenties, the women he sleeps with, but you – he’d make an exception, I’d imagine.’
She touches her nose; rolls on.
‘It was this one night when I cracked. I was exhausted from getting up in the night with Seth. Robert was out again. He had left his iPad unlocked and I searched and found all kinds.
‘Messages to women, pictures. Videos. I was there for hours. And eventually, I got to someone who looked familiar.’
She looks down at me.
Her eyes, these new, dark ones, drill holes in mine.
‘To someone who I thought was my friend.’
She did this to me. Not a man, not an unknown. But a woman I trusted.
I think of every second of pain I’ve experienced through this: talking to my dad, watching my marriage unravel, seeing Poppy cry as we walked out of yet another baby group because I couldn’t breathe. Felicity’s face, my colleagues, the gross remarks on my Instagram, my body vibrating with fear at those messages. Jonathan the lawyer and Ed on either side of me as I clutched at my high neckline. Aunt Denise with her hand on my arm. Shame, shame, shame.
‘So what?’ I say. ‘You decided to take some sort of revenge?’
She nods, in a daze, pacing again.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Revenge.’
She looks up.
‘Starting off with the video.’
My heart pounds.
‘And then?’ I ask.
‘Funny you should ask,’ she says, sitting down and leaning back again on my fancy armchair.
And I steel myself, as much as a person who is falling apart can.