26 June
I’m not used to seeing Asha without her having one boob hanging out, so the solidity of a sports bra is quite the departure.
‘Shimmy!’ orders the instructor and we try to follow as our babies career around the middle of the room on some mats. I hear Asha breathe heavily next to me. ‘Shake! It!’
I do what I’m told.
Asha’s boobs, I notice admiringly, as I glance to the side, look pretty good given that someone has been gnawing on them multiple times a day for the last year. Probably because they’d barely need a B cup versus my own Ds.
Sweat drips down my back. I used to run half-marathons before I had Poppy and I was running again, 5k here, 6k there. Since the video though, it’s rare.
‘Come to this class with me,’ messaged Asha a few days after they found out about the video. ‘I think you need to stay as busy as you can. Grab loads of time with Poppy. Take the pluses; all of that bonding.’
When we’ve stretched it out, most of the women grab their babies and disperse.
I look at Asha. She is frowning as she checks her phone, Ananya roaming around the room.
I am distracted by my own phone; another message from Ed telling me he needs to be away overnight next week. The niggling feeling of an affair, of that being the story behind the video, sent from Cheshire, keeps coming.
‘You exercised a lot before, right?’ says Asha, still Christmas stocking red up to her hairline.
‘Before’ and ‘after’ are words enough in their own right; we know what they mean. Those positive pregnancy tests may as well have been made of lead, crashing down the middle of our lives to saw them in half. The oddest part, I think, is that Asha and the others didn’t see the first half. It’s floating around somewhere unanchored to this one and unknown to them.
I nod. ‘Yeah I did sometimes,’ I say. ‘In Manchester. Not since.’
‘Since’ is another of those words.
‘Did you enjoy today?’
I nod again. I didn’t enjoy it at all, it was torturous, but do you enjoy anything when you’re in the middle of it, other than, you know, burgers or a large red or lying on the sofa watching Netflix? The rest is to enjoy afterwards or before. The knowledge that you will do it, or that you have completed it. Not the faffy in between bit.
Asha wipes sweat off her brow. I mirror.
‘Fancy a drink?’ she says and I indicate the perspiration and the Lycra.
But I still go.
I think about my bottom as I stand at the bar while Asha entertains our babies in their highchairs and I wonder if anyone is looking at it, thirty-five years old, motherly, unexercised and flaunting itself in Lycra. Who does it think it is, this arse?
I order a wine even though it’s 2 p.m.
I head back to the table and hand Asha a fizzy water. She glances quickly at my Malbec. Looks away. I start rambling, embarrassed, about baby gates and child locks.
‘It’s genuinely astonishing that other people from the group didn’t want to come with us.’ I smile. ‘When my chat is this good.’
Asha laughs. But now the beat and the moving of the class have stopped, my mind is whirring again. I have a meeting with the lawyer in a few days and barely anything to update him on. I’ve reached a dead end and the idea of standing still there is terrifying.
I take a large gulp of wine.
‘Are you okay?’ Asha asks.
‘Yeah, you know,’ I sigh. ‘Just fighting with Ed about the whole video thing.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
Yeah sure, I think, more chat about my sex tape side gig. My terror of the future. Being ashamed of myself, every second. Not being able to look my dad in the eye any more. Drifting from my sister. Career in ruins. My crumbling marriage.
Too much. Too awful.
‘No,’ I say, and then I think I sounded a little snippy.
But I was desperate to talk and then I was sick of talking and that’s just how it is.
‘Well if you ever do, I’m here,’ she says quietly, sipping her water. I don’t think she looks annoyed.
I nod, down the rest of my house red and flee.
And it’s on the walk home that I check my phone.
It’s not a surprise but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t puncture me in the lungs, pummel me in the gut.
It’s what I’ve feared.
Through all of this – which it strikes me now may just have been a warm-up – it’s what I’ve feared the most.
‘So you’ve quit your job as an infuencer?’ it says. ‘Not planning to go back to the job you used to do back in the day, are you? That’s what everyone will find out next. Unless you leave him alone.’
I stand in the street, next to a tree, as a dog runs past me and children shriek and thwack footballs in the playground of a nearby school and I feel my whole body tremble and reality and normal life drift, drift, drift further away.
I knew it was coming. Knew Mitch, Ollie and me was just the starting move.
That if somebody really wanted to wipe out my life – maybe not the breath but the joy, the pride, the self-worth – this is where they would go. It’s the picture that keeps me awake. Short skirts, long nights. The penthouse.
One part is confusing though: leave who alone? It sounds as though I’m supposed to know but I’m blank. Joseph? Ollie?
I am about to reply but I know I can’t.
I email Jonathan instead, as I’ve been told to do whenever anything happens.
Firstly, I say. This part of things must remain completely confidential from my husband. But there is something new.
And then I fill him in. On the truly murkiest part of my past, the one there is no way Ed would stick around if he knew about. The one I have to bury, if I have any chance of keeping this life, of still being respectable Scarlett, of not falling apart entirely.