28 July
Here is that good friend, in glasses I’ve never seen her in before and cashmere pyjamas you want to stroke like a kitten.
‘Talk about freaking me out,’ she mutters as she opens the door. ‘You would have to choose the night Michael is away to do a late-night surprise call. What the hell’s happened?’
She looks down at my pyjamas.
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘You do not look good, hon.’
Unlike Cora, even the ‘at home in front of the TV’ version. Slippers that are worth upwards of £300. Brows and lashes dark and groomed as ever. That’s Cora.
‘I need to get to Ed,’ I hiss. ‘I’ll tell you everything later but first, I have to get to Ed. To Poppy. And I need you to drive me.’
She puts her hands on my shoulders.
‘Calm down,’ she says. ‘You need to take ten minutes first to breathe. You look like you’re about to collapse. You don’t want to see him in this state. Tell me what the hell is going on. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She looks at me.
‘Actually, fuck the kettle.’
And then she goes to her drinks cabinet and takes out a bottle of brandy, the drink of the crisis, and pours me one. I don’t argue.
I start speaking as soon as I have the drink in my hand.
Everything that Emma has told me in the last couple of hours is tumbling out, too fast, too messy, in the wrong order, disjointed, with the wrong emphasis. Doesn’t matter. I need to expel it, as fast as I can.
Cora doesn’t ask questions but I give her the answers, as she sits next to me on the sofa.
‘And it was her who shared the video,’ I sob, clutching my glass. ‘Emma! Not even Robert. But Emma. How could Emma be capable of that?’
I look at her and wait for the shocked reaction, the horror.
But Cora is still staring straight ahead, no matter what I reveal, saying nothing.
I tell myself it’s because she is taking in the shock. Recalibrating what she knows about Emma, her friend of twenty years. Maybe even doubting me, wondering if I’ve had a breakdown and invented this.
I glance at her again.
‘Why are you not answering me?’ I ask, uneasy. ‘I’m telling the truth.’
She nods. ‘Just taking it in,’ she says quietly.
Right.
But still.
This isn’t the Cora I know who would want the gossip, the details. To gasp and rant about Emma’s disloyalty and what a bitch she is and how she plans to freeze her out of having any sort of local social life in this area, ever.
I would expect another reaction too: for her to pretend to be one step ahead of it all. ‘I always knew there was something weird about her’, even if I knew that wasn’t true.
I look at Cora again. Face straight ahead. Like she’s watching the road while driving in bad visibility.
What’s going on?
My stomach does a forward roll.
Good friends.
‘What’s happening, Cora?’
She stays silent.
‘Cora.’ I’m louder now.
‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you. We just need … a chat.’
And I stay there, because I have to trust some people, sometimes. Maybe she has important information about Emma. Maybe she did suspect something. Maybe this is all about to make sense.
But in the dark, with the rain angry and beating up the roof, Cora’s newly built WAG mansion, out here up this isolated country road, is not idyllic, it’s threatening. Same image, different perspectives. Like Emma.
Could Emma be here? I suddenly think. They are tight. Has she persuaded Cora that I’m the one in the wrong? I look around at the closed door to the kitchen. To the spiral staircase that leads upstairs. To the door that leads down to the cellar.
I glance at Cora.
‘Come on then,’ I say. ‘Are you going to tell me that you knew about Emma?’
She nods. Shivers, in her very cold house. ‘Yeah. I knew.’
I’m mad now, furious. ‘When?’
She says nothing.
‘What is wrong with you?’ I prompt. ‘God, Cora. I thought we were close.’
She starts laughing then. ‘Oh come on, Scarlett, don’t be a child.’
Between them, they are bastardising the last year of my life.
‘When I stayed at your house? That wasn’t friendship?’
She laughs again. ‘No, Scarlett, that was drinking.’
She pauses. Quieter.
‘And you know Emma and I have been mates for years.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, tears threatening now. ‘So that’s where your loyalty lies. Even when she’s done this to me.’
Cora carries on laughing at me and suddenly, it’s one too many times. One too many times of being laughed at, somewhere, in some home, behind some screen, even if I didn’t see the teeth bared or the sound emitted. One too many mocking tones. One too many feelings of paranoia.
‘When did you figure out that it was Emma?’ I demand.
Something occurs to me before she can answer.
‘Does Asha know too?’
Cora laughs louder then and it’s unpleasant. ‘For someone who rates herself so much, Scarlett, you have a shocking sense of judgement.’
She doesn’t expand.
Fuck this. I’ll get a cab to Ed’s brother’s. I stand up to leave.
‘Stay,’ she says.
But I’m done, with all of it.
I ignore her and walk towards the front door.
‘I think you’ll want to know what I’ve got to say,’ she says, breezy. ‘Plus I’ve locked the gate.’
I turn to look at her and she indicates the intimidating intercom system on the wall with a remote control in her hand.
So I do as I am told and it occurs to me then that this new life of mine involves a lot of doing what I’m told.
Ed chose the house we should buy and Cora chooses the playdate locations and I traipse after them, hood up, head down.
I’m irritated, suddenly, by the realisation that in trying to be respectable, what I’ve become is obedient.
Cora starts speaking as I shiver harder, more deeply, and wonder why it’s so cold in this house. Why on a night in, with unseasonably bad weather, Cora wouldn’t have stuck the heating on.
‘You think,’ she says. ‘That it was Emma who shared the video. And you’re right. Technically.’
She pauses.
My heart beats faster.
‘There were tens of them,’ she says. ‘These videos of women Robert had sex with. Looks like it was a thing of his.’
My shivering is impossible to hide now and I vibrate with it.
‘What did you mean, “technically”?’ I ask.
The flash, again.
‘She came to me,’ she says. ‘Told me that one of the women in the videos was you. She was devastated, paranoid. Even when she showed it to me and I pointed out that it was obviously made years ago, that you must have known each other when you were younger, she was convinced you had reconnected recently and hooked back up.’
I throw my head back against the leather sofa in frustration.
‘I know, I know you didn’t,’ says Cora. ‘But she’d found all these receipts from hotels round here and was convinced there was someone he was seeing, locally. She put the two things together. Drew her own conclusion.’
She stops again.
‘She thought you were laughing behind her back.’
And isn’t that always what pushes us to be at our worst?
Cora continues. ‘We barely knew you at the time,’ she says. ‘The babies were young. But I was building an impression.’
‘Let me guess,’ I say, defeated. ‘Smug. Superior. Vain.’
‘That’s about it,’ she replies, like it’s a fact.
I feel like someone is pushing down on my chest.
‘Emma told me about the video,’ she says. ‘I was just the one who pointed out how we could use it.’
We is good when you want a team to be behind you. But when you learn who has posted videos of you having sex online, we is worse than I by far. One person trying to ruin your life can be an anomaly. But when it’s more than one, it becomes a conspiracy.
People have sat down together and decided to hurt you. Plotted it, planned it. Thwarted obstacles and found solutions. Laughed at their successes. Laughed at your pain. If someone does it alone, at least, there’s no one for them to laugh with.
I stay silent because I know Cora will answer my questions, whether I ask them or not. And I am void of all energy. Beaten.
‘Emma was angry with you,’ she says. ‘It built every time you told us a story about Ed and Poppy and your happy life. Meanwhile she was having a hard time with Robert. He’d be staggering in when she was up for the third time that night.’
Cora shrugs.
‘And then in the midst of all that, she found these videos. She got obsessed. Convinced you were sleeping together again, that that’s where Robert was when he didn’t come home.
‘You know how awful it is once you start comparing someone’s life to yours. That’s how Emma got. She thought you were thinner than her, prettier, fitter. Cooler. She was sure Robert would rather be with you. She was desperately unhappy, and every time we saw you it seemed like you were rubbing her face in it with your happiness.
‘And then of course, she told Robert about the video and he started defending you – even told her what a hard time you’d had back in the day when you didn’t have anywhere to live and had to stay on all your mates’ sofas and even work as a hooker.’
Cora smirks.
I can’t speak.
Instead, I absorb the information of what’s really been happening in all those months I’ve been in the dark, searching for clues.
I absorb them with the chill in this mansion, feeling it seep into my skin, deeper now, into every layer. I think of the odd looks I would catch Emma giving me sometimes. How I thought she was probably shattered; I was probably paranoid.
‘She called me saying he’d “taken your side” and left her,’ she continues. ‘And that just confirmed what she thought. That he still had feelings for you. That you were in a relationship.’
I shake my head again, no, no, no.
‘It’s not like Ed and I don’t have issues either,’ I say, quietly. ‘And it’s not like I’ve not been through bad times. I thought it was better not to moan on about what a hard life I had when I’m lucky compared to so many people.’
Cora nods. ‘I said that, at first, that your life couldn’t be as perfect as all those awful blog posts; that people just market themselves these days.’
I wince. Supportive Cora, telling me how much she loved my blog. How many other people add their likes then bitch about me?
‘But she wouldn’t have it,’ Cora rolls on. ‘Saw you as everything she wasn’t and then, in the back of her mind, had that image there all the time of you shagging Robert on video looking hot and young.’
I snip.
‘Well, I was twenty-three,’ I say. ‘That’s why I look young. Everyone looks young when they are young.’
Already at thirty-five it feels like a generation ago.
Cora ignores me.
‘She watched it over and over,’ she says. ‘You must have noticed a bit of a fixation on you? Yeah. You were an obsession for her. And every time she watched it, she hated you more.’
‘She’s pretty good at hiding it then,’ I say. ‘Ordering my tea. Babysitting my child. Ed thought it was a girl crush.’
Cora laughs. I feel my body start to tremble harder.
‘I suppose it was, in a way.’ She smirks. ‘But maybe more like a stalker.’
The shaking intensifies. Who was I leaving Poppy with? She’s with one of my best friends. She’s with a total stranger. She’s with my fucking stalker.
‘She thought that the more time she spent with you, the more she could get a picture of your life,’ says Cora. ‘See if you slipped. Know if you cheated. Be close enough to you that she could work out if you had feelings for Robert and how serious it was. That was why she’d be the first to volunteer to babysit. The first to show up if you needed a coffee and a chat.’
‘But there was no affair to admit!’ I explode.
‘I know that.’ Cora laughs, loudly. ‘That’s why the whole thing was so hilarious for me. Her, convinced you were sleeping with Robert. You, too prim to not feel guilty for a tiny flirt with the guy from the coffee shop. I just sat there, watching it unfold. You’ve got to entertain yourself somehow on maternity leave.’
I am incredulous. ‘And then?’ I ask.
‘And then what?’
‘Well it’s obvious this is leading somewhere. So why don’t you get to the point?’
I am feeling brave suddenly.
But it is misplaced. Badly misplaced.
‘I will get to the point when I want to get to the damn point, hon,’ says Cora, ice in her voice. ‘This is the problem with you, Scarlett. Even when you’re behind a locked gate with no one in the world who wants to help you, you still act superior.’
I go to stand up but she pushes me back down onto the sofa, and I stay there. I am out of fight.
My whole body vibrates again.
How can I have been this dislikeable?
I suspect sometimes that I am not fully formed because I leave chunks of myself behind. One chunk in Manchester, dancing with Ollie. One chunk presenting a pitch in work, a grown-up. One chunk with my mum, maybe, wherever that may be.
I am not whole.
And I feel like reality is slipping away now, like I’ve lost the last millimetre of grip.
I work so hard on the image – the party girl, the successful manager, the respectable mum. Perhaps that’s the problem.
I rebrand, rebrand, rebrand.
I wanted them to think I was shiny and glossy and new. And instead, this is what came across. Superior, smug, vain.
Until they forced me to expose my pain and split myself open.
I had tried to avoid that.
These women knew I had lost my mum, because people do when you have a child and she isn’t babysitting or knitting gloves like the other grans because she’s too dead for that.
But I have never told them about Poppy’s half-sister – because that’s what she would be, like Josephine is to me. I don’t have the words.
And if I did find them, I know they would ruin an afternoon and send awkwardness pulsating around the room.
My body won’t keep still, twitches, jitters.
Cora speaks again. ‘Emma talked about it so much, Scarlett, how you’d ruined her life, how it was so much worse than seeing strangers sleeping with Robert. How humiliating it was. How maybe if he left her for you, he’d be happier.
‘She was fixated. And eventually, I came up with the idea to post the video. To get her own back, and also stop you being so bloody smug.’
When all I really felt was fear and loneliness.
There are a lot of reasons for iciness. Is that not obvious?
I stare at Cora like she is one of Poppy’s drawings, in which I try to see shapes and patterns but I find nothing that I recognise.
But then an image starts to make itself clear.
Something lurches in my insides.
‘Easy to do with access to your phone a few times to get addresses while you changed Poppy,’ says Cora. ‘That all-staff one from your work was a gift.’
I breathe, or try to.
‘But what did you get from it?’ I say. ‘That’s what I don’t get.’
Cora sighs, as though it’s annoying that I am fixated on such an inconsequential detail.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘Let’s be blunt. I can feed this sex tape blogger stuff to the websites and they will love it. You’ll be huge, in a way you never wanted to be. They’re all gunning for mum bloggers, after that other one went viral.’
My heart thumps. She wouldn’t do this, would she?
‘Or,’ she says, flippant. ‘You can give me £200,000.’
She sounds like she’s asking to borrow a tenner.
I think of how I have wondered so many times if this is moving towards blackmail. And at the ridiculousness of where, now, that request is coming from.
Cora is the last person I know who needs money. Except.
‘I’m skint,’ she says, voice cracking. ‘Broke. I can’t tell Michael; he’ll kill me.’
I look at Cora’s gleaming white walls, the expensive cushions. I think of her designer bags, of appointments and more appointments and the nanny and the fancy car and that vanity project of a job.
Then I think of how cold it is in an old house this size that needs heating on a particularly cold late summer night.
‘You’re taking the piss, Cora,’ I spit. ‘You are rich by anybody’s standards.’
‘Was rich,’ she says without a beat. ‘Then maternity leave happened. Not earning – yeah I used to have a real job, did you know that? – plus hours with a baby on top of you where all you can do is more internet shopping on your phone. Lethal combination.’
I take this in.
‘It’s at breaking point,’ she says. ‘I have so many credit card bills and I’m being threatened with legal action. Michael knows none of it and if he did … Well we’re not in the best place anyway and he loves money. We won’t make it, I know that.’
‘You don’t know that,’ I say, trying to bring this down to relationships, a Tuesday morning chat over a latte. ‘He’s your husband. You’ll work it out together.’
What the hell am I doing reassuring this woman who has conspired to smash my world apart? Who is threatening to go further? It’s myself I need to protect, I think, not her. But old habits. Until a few minutes ago, she was my friend.
‘So the plan is to blackmail me then?’ I ask. ‘Is that it?’
She nods, grim, without missing a beat. Just like with Hunter, if I expected sheepish, I’m not getting it.
‘That’s it, yeah. Not ideal, hon. But we have something you want, the ability to not post the video elsewhere, not to tell the websites it’s you and let this really go viral. And to keep your other secret. Not share that one with the world. And you have something we want. For Emma, it’s revenge and seeing you suffer. For me it’s simpler: cash. With a little cut for Em, obviously.’
Cora appraises me, sitting there on her cream sofa sodden from running here in the downpour. My hair drips globules onto the leather. She leans over, takes a very long blue fingernail and wipes one off my forehead onto the floor.
‘Would put the heating on for you hon,’ she says. ‘But like I say, too skint.’
She stands, looking at me there, dripping, shaking.
‘Emma likes seeing you broken,’ she says, waving a hand around to indicate that I am demonstrating broken perfectly, right now. ‘You’re less of a rival to her, less likely to turn Robert’s head now you’re a depressed stay-at-home mum in joggers. Not so cool. Not so superior.’
Mascara, I know, is likely streaming down my face.
I stay quiet, digesting.
It’s a lot to digest, see, when your friends turn out to hate you and then attempt to blackmail you. Discussed and disgust, all over again.
Quietly, feeling the sadness seep into my bones with the rainwater, I look up at Cora, and then I find the energy to stand up too. Look her in the eye.
‘I don’t have money,’ I say. ‘I hate to disappoint you but even if I were willing to give it to you, which I’m not, I don’t have it.’
And it’s then that Cora turns. Has me up against the wall of her living room. Just underneath the giant studio photo of her face, of her bare soft shoulders.
She’s not physically imposing at five foot five and an untoned size twelve but I see something in her eyes that scares me for the strength it can give: desperation.
‘This isn’t just me wanting a few quid, Scarlett,’ she hisses, even though no one can hear her. ‘Things are bad. My beautiful house will be repossessed. This is my daughter’s home.’
‘I get that, I do but …’ I start.
‘It’s not just that, Scarlett. It’s the school we’ve had her enrolled in since she was born. It’s the cars, it’s imagining what we do without the fucking nanny and the cleaner and the housekeeper who run our entire existence. It’s our whole life. Everything.’
She has her hand across my neck and it’s hard to get out what I want to say but I try.
‘You can make more money,’ I manage. ‘Michael has a good job. You can get it back.’
No mention of her job because no one in their right mind thought that Cora was paying the mortgage with her Crunchie specials. But what was her former job? She’s never mentioned that before. We’ve never mentioned a lot of things before, I think. That’s been the problem.
In reality, Cora was on what seems to be an unending maternity leave with a token gesture cupcake hobby that allowed her to justify paying somebody else to raise her child. But it’s me who should give her my money? Sure.
Something is happening to her, seizing her and taking over and she pushes harder with her arm across me. I stay as still as I can like there is an angry dog or a large bee coming close. Apply the same theory to any predator, I think. Don’t aggravate. Placate them. Keep them calm.
‘Michael doesn’t have a fucking job,’ she hisses at me. ‘Do you think I would be this terrified if Michael had a job?’
‘What are you on about?’ I start. ‘In the city. With the finance company.’
She goes on about it enough; endless hints about how much cash he brings home. My details are sketchy but I know that much.
‘Sacked,’ she says. ‘For gross misconduct. Apparently he was perving over some new starter. Truly gross misconduct. I was too mortified to tell you all.’
Another omission in a sea of wet wipes and rice cakes.
We stand in silence then while I take that in, or perhaps even while she does too. She looks shell-shocked at her own news.
‘So you need another money maker,’ I say. ‘And that’s me and my misery.’
She nods, grim.
‘Well it’s either that or sell this,’ she says, indicating her fake boobs. ‘But I’m knocking on a bit now. And that’s more your style.’
I wince.
‘Are there really rumours about me on social media? About the blogger with the sex video?’
She laughs, from her belly like I’ve heard so many times before but never at me. Never like this.
‘Yeah that was true!’ she says. ‘That’s what gave me the idea to fill them in. The noticeboards speculate. No one’s put it together yet. But they would lap up the full story. Jesus, who knew you were such a follower, though? The second I mentioned it to you, you deleted everything.’
She’s right. How easily I will remove parts of my life as soon as someone tells me to, I think. Happens all the time. Ed. Cora.
‘It didn’t start off this big,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d help Emma get revenge and make a few quid to help with my credit card debt at the same time. But then Michael lost his job. I was poor growing up, Scarlett, and I can’t be poor again. And don’t give me that bullshit about having no money. I’ve seen your house. You both have good jobs.’
‘No, Cora. No. I left my job. Because of the video. Did you not get that, that night in the pub?’
She waves her arm dismissively. ‘But you’ll get another one,’ she says. ‘Same sort of thing. Well paid.’
Cora has the decency – can you call it that? – to duck her head before she says the next part; to avoid my eyes.
‘And I know you have an inheritance, after your mum died. Kids who lose parents always do.’
Too much, Cora. Too far.
It’s like somebody has taken the wrong brick out in a game of Jenga and I am falling, toppling, away from normal boundaries.
I have weathered a lot, these years, these months, these last hours.
I have tried to be respectable.
Not any more.
Where did respectable get me?
In my house, threatened.
In Cora’s house, shivering and sodden.
Online, shamed.
Cora’s arm, which seemed so strong a few minutes ago, has been shoved from my neck and she is on the floor, me on top of her.
Why did I think that she controlled me?
I’m bigger than her, fitter. And I have been building up to something. Pounding the pavements wasn’t enough. I need an outlet and here it is in its cashmere pyjamas, glasses on.
‘Emma at least had some emotional reason for wanting to take me down,’ I hiss. ‘But you! Money. Just money. Money that you spent on dresses and your eyebrows and so much fucking white paint. And now you want more, so you think the best way is to blackmail your own friend.’
I am panting now, I’ve become the predator I had frozen for earlier.
I pause, arm across her mouth so she couldn’t answer me even if there was anything for her to say.
I am too angry to hear excuses that involve private schools and designer coffee tables.
The shaking that was from a chill earlier is with rage now, pure rage.
And I need to get it out.
‘I ask again actually – was Asha in on it too? Or just two of the people I spent most of my days with?’
An image pops in of seeing Asha that day, with Mitch. Was this a whole team thing, only me on the outside? Did they come for me, target me as a group?
But Cora shakes her head, her newly dyed hair – sure, you’re skint – splayed across her cream carpet like roadkill.
‘Well that’s one thing,’ I say, sarcastic. ‘Though I guess my odds of finding three utter bitches was low. Even two’s quite impressive.’
I hold on to her throat then, and I think about her body, warm in bed next to me when I slept over like we were fourteen, crashed out after too many melted Mars Bars.
The friendships I’ve made since I’ve had Poppy have been similar to those teenage ones: intense, emotional. Fast.
Cora tries to wrestle away but I’m stronger and I hold her down, down, down, until it becomes like a meditation, the pressing, the holding, against a body that is moving hard and desperate against me.
How long can you stay in the moment for, Scarlett, how long, how long, how long?
Cora struggles.
But I’ve entered a state of mindfulness.
Far superior to the apps.
Far better than anything I get loading the motherfucking endlessly whirring time-sucking dishwasher.
I could do this forever, I think.
After living in the past so much, after spending so much time thinking of how the future looks, I have never been more in the now.
My inheritance did exist. It went on a deposit for a flat rental in Chorlton. It went on buying my way out of an old life, into a new one. It came at the right time, me turning twenty-five, as I moved out of my dad’s after I went travelling and he saw that I was serious about being a grown-up. It set up my life. It went, the rest of it, into an ISA that I think now might let me get away again, from here. And she thinks I’m giving that up?
‘Does the money matter now, Cora?’ I ask as her eyes start to droop. ‘Does it matter this second?’