28 July
I stand up as I dial, looking at Emma’s face from above with that soft blonde PE teacher sensible ponytail and her long, pointed nose as she sits there in my armchair. Who the hell are you, I think, this woman who pretended to be my friend? This clichéd, kind dieter. This strange, vindictive bitch.
Each ring makes it harder to breathe. Each ring makes me feel more desperate.
Emma is deadpan when she delivers the news that we both know, by now, on what must be the seventh ring.
‘He isn’t going to answer,’ she says, pitying. ‘He can’t let Poppy speak to a mum like that, knowing you’re probably drunk again too. It’s not good for her, Scarlett – you must see that.’
It’s why she’s looked so relaxed: she’s known this all along.
Voicemail picks up and I know even as I am speaking that I am making things worse.
‘Emma is here,’ I say, tripping over the syllables like I am just learning to use my tongue. ‘Emma made up those things. About me having affairs. About the … escorting. I only met Ollie to talk. About the video, like I told you. And Mitch. Mitch is Emma’s husband. The man from the coffee shop – Joseph – is just a friend. There was … it was … I’ll explain, when I see you. But I need to see you, Ed. I need to see Poppy. Please pick up. Call me back. Come home. Emma is here and I don’t know what she wants and, Ed, I’m scared.’
I’m sobbing and Emma yanks the phone from me with a firm grip before I realise what’s happening.
‘Ed,’ she says, managing to sound calm and rational somehow to my hysteria. ‘It’s Emma. Don’t worry. Scarlett’s had a few drinks too many and she’s blurry, to be honest it’s been happening a lot lately, but I’m with her. I’ll look after her. It might be better if you guys have space for a bit, keep Pops with you so she doesn’t see her mum in this state, bless her.’ And then she clicks to end the call, flicks it onto airplane mode and puts it in her pocket and I don’t act fast enough to stop her.
I’m moving through treacle that’s been in the fridge for hours. It’s part the start of a hangover, part still being drunk, part deep, deep shock.
I look around my house, where Emma has been so many times. She’s fed her baby crisps on my sofa and gulped sugary tea from my favourite mug. She’s complimented my colour scheme, got nostalgic at my old CD collection and she’s taken her shoes off and curled her feet under her on my carpet. She’s cooed at pictures of me and Ed taken in twelve-hours-sleep-fuelled days before we had Poppy.
How, I think suddenly, have I never noticed pictures of Mitch in her house?
Then I remember: I’ve never been to Emma’s house.
Is that odd?
Living in the next village – even if it’s only a five-minute drive away – when the rest of us are walking distance from each other, with a coffee shop close by and various baby groups in the community hall, means that we default to one of ours. Now I’m wondering if that was deliberate.
I look at Emma.
‘What now?’ I ask.
I glance, then, at Ed’s golf clubs, waiting to be put away, propped up against a bookshelf. I had told him off about them, a danger in a room that Poppy plays in.
But Emma walks past them. To the candlestick, heavy and decorative and never in any use that actually requires a candle, much to Ed’s bafflement. She examines it closely.
Will this get physical?
But if I think she might attack me, Emma already has.
Her worst was done online, in her messages to Ed, with knowledge, with a false closeness, with emails, with a misuse of intimacy.
She puts down the candlestick.
She is done.
Emma has no desire to hit me because how much worse could those blows be than the ones that she has already administered? She didn’t come here tonight for violence but to ask me questions, to make me promise to end an affair that isn’t real, a relationship that doesn’t exist, to quiet the questions in her head.
And to tell me that she has ruined me. She has won. My life is even worse than hers; my family ripped apart even more violently. She has scored some sort of point in a game she thinks I’ve been involved in.
So instead, she gets up from her chair. Plumps my cushions again.
‘Don’t let him win,’ I say, quietly, grasping at anything I can. ‘Don’t let him win by trying to ruin my life. There’s no “women like me” or “women like you”. There’s just women – people – trying to get through life. That’s what we’re all doing, Emma.’
She stares at me.
‘Delete the video, Emma,’ I say gently. ‘And tell my husband that I am not cheating on him, with any of those men. That I didn’t do what you said I did for money. That I’m a good mum. Please Emma. Please.’
But if I think I am getting through, I am wrong.
‘I want you to suffer,’ she says, and her matter-of-factness is worse than anger. ‘I want you to suffer what I have. To feel loss.’
The worst sentiment there is.
‘I have suffered,’ I say, quietly now, beaten. ‘Just because people don’t share their stories, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. I’ve suffered, and I’m suffering, and what you’ve done has hurt me and my family, maybe irreparably. So if that was your aim, it’s done. I’m not sleeping with Robert, Emma, I’m not, I’m not. Now please, can you stop.’
I taste salt on my lip, and somehow I am on the ground, in front of the fireplace like a cat, and while I am there Emma steps over me, grazing me with a bright purple trainer.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she says.
Then she walks to the front door, opens it and leaves.