Jessica
I stand on the street, shaking, and realise that I’ve forgotten my sunglasses.
It’s bright, cold early spring sunshine, so my eyes start streaming, or maybe I’m crying, I don’t know anymore.
There are tears pouring down my face either way.
I’m still wearing my pyjamas under my coat, I’ve only got 23 per cent battery on my phone, and my career is over.
All because my husband poured his heart out and told a load of massive secrets about me, about us, about our marriage, to a stranger.
As I stand in the street, dithering, a man pulls up on a motorbike.
He takes off his helmet to reveal a bald head, and then takes a huge long-lens camera out of his bag.
He checks the door numbers and then angles himself outside my house.
Surely not? They haven’t sent a photographer to get pictures of us? I start walking before he can notice me, thanking my lucky stars that I’m only a tiny bit internet famous, and not any kind of actual celebrity.
But the faster I walk, the more apparent it becomes that I don’t know where to go.
When my mum died, one of the things I wished I had an answer to was when I’d stop wishing I had her around.
But actually I’m quite glad I didn’t ask anyone, because I think they’d have told me the awful truth.
It’s never.
You never stop wishing you had your mum.
It still hits me at weird moments.
When someone at work would get flu and go home to be looked after, when my friends have fights with their mums over lax grandparenting, and now apparently when you have the worst fight of your life with your husband and you don’t know where to go.
I could go to Dad’s but I’d rather do almost anything else.
I could go to Tom and Grace’s, but they’ll be getting their kids ready for school or nursery and I’d have to face them after they’ve clearly read the article.
So the only place I can think of to go is Clay’s flat.
My phone is, obviously, blowing up.
Producers for shows I’ve been on are asking me if I want to do a slot to tell ‘my side’ of the story.
Various brands who work in the divorce space are asking me if I want to discuss branded work.
Our account is full of people messaging to ask whether it’s true, to tell me that they don’t believe me, to say that they’re disappointed, they’re not surprised, they are surprised.
My friends, who are mostly too cowardly to admit that they’ve seen it, are dropping ‘Hey, how are you?’ messages, some from people I haven’t seen for literally years, who obviously don’t give a shit about my welfare and just want to know what’s really happening.
‘Are you home?’ I ask, when Clay picks up the phone.
‘I will be in ten minutes. See you there,’ he tells me, making it so that I don’t have to ask. When my cab pulls up outside his flat, he’s waiting on the doorstep, at the top of a little flight of stairs. I wanted stairs like that up to my front door but I decided we shouldn’t buy a house like that because it would be a nightmare with a pram. But we still don’t have a pram and maybe never will, so that was stupid, wasn’t it?
‘Darling girl,’ says Clay, opening his arms. ‘Come here.’
He ushers me inside and then hugs me for a moment. Then he pushes me through to the kitchen where he takes a bottle of vodka from the freezer and pours two little blue shot glasses.
‘It’s the middle of the morning,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘It is.’ We both drink. ‘But what a fucker of a morning you’ve had.’
He refills my glass but not his own. Then he gives me a bottle of very cold water from the fridge and steers me to the sofa, an enormous white marshmallow of a piece of furniture. It’s comfortable but very difficult to maintain a dignified posture on.
‘I would like you to turn your phone off,’ he tells me. I look at my phone. I don’t actually know how you turn this version off, I’ve never felt any need to. Silent in the theatre and airplane on a flight, but never actually off. I google for the instructions and then obediently hold the buttons down until it’s no longer the thing which connects me to the whole of the rest of the world, and instead just a very expensive paperweight.
‘Are you sure that’s okay?’ I ask.
‘Ignoring it is the best thing you can possibly do. I say that as your manager, and your friend. And the publishers or anyone else should go through me anyway, so it’s just one less thing for you to worry about.’
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘Do you want to talk about next steps?’
I nod. ‘Are there next steps? I sort of assumed I’d need to put the house on the market and update my LinkedIn.’
He half laughs. ‘Not yet. Is it true?’
I’m sort of surprised he has to ask. ‘Of course it’s not true!’
‘You’re not having problems?’
‘Having problems doesn’t mean you want to split up,’ I say, twisting the bracelet around my wrist.
‘ Are you having problems?’
This is a trickier one to answer because it’s direct. Because yes, if I’m properly honest, we are. But not the way Verity described them; she’s made it sound like we’re miserable and we’re just staying together so we can make money by pretending to be happy, which is a cruel misrepresentation of what I’ve been trying to do.
Clay seems to have got bored of waiting for me to answer and starts making a complicated coffee. ‘All right, easier question,’ he says. ‘Are you splitting up?’
‘No,’ I say, emphatically as I can muster. ‘We’re not.’
‘All right. Well, at least that’s easier. I won’t lie to you, it isn’t good. What this girl is saying is damning, and unless Jack can prove that he didn’t say any of it to her—’
‘He did.’ I swallow. ‘Not all of it. But he said some of it. I don’t know how much.’
Clay takes a moment to compose himself. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look shocked. ‘Then there’s not much we can do in terms of arguing that it’s defamatory or libellous,’ he says evenly.
‘Okay.’ I nod.
‘So then I think it’s going to be about image rehabilitation. Admitting that you’ve had a bit of a time of it, that the bootcamp was as much about you and Jack working on your marriage as anything else. We do a post about how you’ve never pretended not to have fights; we say that your fertility situation is private and personal.’ I wince at his words. ‘Which is entirely true,’ he carries on. ‘And we distract with this Verity girl.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We push that she came on the retreat, abused your hospitality and trust; that her marriage is obviously in a real state; that she was jealous of you and exploited some admittedly real struggles that you’re both having, and that she took it public to try and promote herself, to make a quick buck.’
‘I don’t think she was jealous,’ I say weakly. ‘I think she just needed the money. She told Jack she wants a divorce and she needs money to leave her husband and build a new life for her and the kids.’
‘Would you have done that? When you were really broke?’
‘I don’t know what I’d have done in her situation.’
‘You’re too bloody soft,’ Clay says, ruffling my hair like I’m his teenage child. ‘You need to get a stomach for this stuff. We’re not going to make you as famous as I want you to be without breaking a few eggs.’
‘That’s a very confusing metaphor,’ I say, pulling a sofa cushion to my chest. ‘But we need to think of another plan. I don’t want to make Verity the villain.’
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Leave it with me. I’m going to leave you to watch something while I do a proper damage assessment, and then I’m coming back. All right?’
I want to resist because I’m in my thirties and don’t need to be treated like a small child, but I’m too tired and sad and angry. ‘All right.’
He hands me the remote control and doesn’t even roll his eyes when I open Netflix and put the first series of Gossip Girl on. He disappears into his study and I lie on the sofa, watching the faces on the screen, wondering how long we can pay the mortgage for with what’s in the bank, whether I will be able to keep seeing my lovely therapist, whether I can still have my gym membership, whether I’ll still be able to pay for my dad to have his hip replaced privately. The list of things we need to pay for goes on, and on and on. Or maybe Clay will come back and say everything’s over, and then the list will have to be cut short. I wish I could call my mum.
An hour later, when Blair and Serena are fully on the outs, Clay comes back. I jump up, like he’s coming out of the operating theatre to tell me how the surgery on a loved one went.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Mixed,’ Clay says. ‘The publishers still want book two. They want to discuss acknowledging this in the book but we can come to that later.’
‘What about the Americans?’
‘They’re not at their desks yet. You haven’t signed any paperwork, worst luck, so they might try and reduce the amount they were offering, but I’ll do my best.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘What else?’
‘The mental health app and the laundry people don’t care, they want to keep working with you.’
I do some sums in my head. That means we can pay our tax bill for this year, and keep up our mortgage payments, but not much else.
‘There’s a couples’ therapy brand who want to talk about a partnership, which is good.’ He sees my expression. ‘Okay, it’s not good, but it’s something.’
‘What’s the bad news?’ I ask tentatively.
‘The vitamins and supplements brand are pulling it; I think the fertility stuff is a worry for them.’
‘Sure,’ I say, trying to sound fine. ‘Makes sense.’
‘And your next appearance on Morning Chat has been cancelled. They said they’ll pick up the discussion about a regular slot at some point.’
I sit up slightly. ‘Well, that’s good, I guess.’
Clay looks at me pityingly. ‘That’s showbiz for “you’re dumped”, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. So now we wait and see. It might be that other outlets follow, or Morning Chat might just be being over cautious because we’re in the eye of the storm right now, and come crawling back next month. It could be either.’
‘Okay. So it could be worse?’
‘It could be so much worse. I’d still quite like to knock some sense into that husband of yours.’
‘I know,’ I say, trying not to think about Jack and what’s waiting for me at home.
‘There are also a lot of interview requests, from big podcasts, broadcast media, the usual. But I’m thinking that’s too much of a risk. I think we keep control of all the content coming from you both and maybe just lay low for a few days. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
When I get home that evening, I close the door behind me, quietly, and Jack doesn’t ask where I’ve been.
Maybe he assumes or feels that he doesn’t have the right to ask after what he’s done.
I make the mistake of turning my phone back on and see people making videos about the story, posting their theories on all sorts of websites; there are newsletters and blog posts and think pieces.
Some girl I knew at Bristol has done a self-indulgent column for one of the papers about how we were pressuring people to stay married.
I didn’t expect that from someone I once lent a spare pair of knickers to when she stayed over and slept with my housemate.
A couple of days pass with Jack and I barely speaking to each other.
We sit through a painful council of war with Clay, the publishers, PR, and the crisis comms people they ended up hiring even though I don’t think they said anything other than ‘don’t respond to any posts about you’.
Everyone keeps saying the same thing – it will go away.
People will lose interest.
It won’t matter this time next year.
But we don’t have a clean slate anymore.
We’re not blameless or unassailable.
Whenever we get a big brand deal or announce a new book, this is what they’ll comment underneath.
We’ve joined the long list of influencers who have a chink in their armour, a top trump that someone else can literally always use to tell us that we’re bad and wrong.
And I guess maybe there’s a power in that.
I might be able to find some freedom in it, eventually, in the idea that the thing I’ve been most afraid of came true and I survived it.
If I survive it.
And then it’s time to put a post up from our own accounts.
Much like the times we have sex when I’m ovulating even though neither of us really wants to, we’ve got to try and perform something intimate to get the result that we want.
It’s all very sexy.
I pick a picture of us, on the retreat, sitting next to each other in the snug, both talking to other people.
I go through dozens of drafts and eventually settle on something which I think is pretty good.
And then I go to Jack’s study, where he’s been hibernating for the last two days, mired in shame, and I knock on the open door.
He looks hollowed-out.
I know how bad he feels.
I’ve barely said anything that I want to say to him because despite the fact that we all know he’s the cause of this problem, I hate seeing him suffer and I absolutely can’t be the person who does that to him.
‘Hey.’
‘Hello,’ he says, sitting upright. ‘All okay?’
We’re back to awkward housemates again; so much for the progress of the retreat. ‘Yeah. Fine. I wrote something. For social.’
‘Oh, great,’ he says. I offer my phone and he takes it, awkwardly, as if he’s worried he’s going to drop it. He reads what I’ve written:
Had a busy week? No, us neither. To be serious, we know that we’ve been at the centre of a bit of drama this week. We’ve said no to the interview requests and we haven’t gone on any podcasts, because we wanted to look at ourselves before we start talking about what happened. The piece about us was, at least in places, true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. We have been struggling lately, and maybe we owed it to you guys to be more honest about that. Fertility, work, getting a bit older, it’s all added up. We’re a work in progress, and we need to keep talking about that. Thanks for bearing with us. J I cannot believe he is asking this question.
‘Because our management told us to.’
‘But who do we owe this to? These people who follow us for free? Or the people who bought our book, which has good advice in it regardless of what we’re doing in our personal life? Like, do people get pissed off with Jane Austen for writing romantic fiction and being a spinster?’
I’m really running out of patience now. ‘Do you want me to post this or not?’
‘You asked if I thought it was a good statement, I told you that I think it’s more of the same toxic positivity bullshit – now you can do what you usually do and post it anyway.’
I blink at him, as if he’s just hit me. Then I go to get my laptop, bring it back and smack it down on his desk. I open it, and find the spreadsheet where I track our finances. I make it as big as I can and then jab my finger at the words on the screen. ‘Mortgage. Insurance. Heating. Electricity. Internet. Socialising. Gym membership. London Library membership. Ten different streaming platforms. The new sofa, the old sofa we’re still paying off. Your credit card from when you were twenty-five. My credit card from when I was twenty-five. Student loan, student loan, student loan for your MA – are you looking at this?’
‘Yes,’ he says, though he’s barely looking at it at all.
‘How do you think we pay for all this?’
He swivels on his chair, like a truculent child. ‘Jessica, I know how we pay for it.’
‘So where do you get off being angry with me for trying to do damage limitation?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, getting to his feet. He picks up a stress ball, some stupid freebie we got at one of the first events we ever went to. Pushes it between his hands, worrying at it. ‘I’m not angry with you,’ he says. ‘I’m angry with them.’ He gestures at my phone. ‘All these strangers in parasocial relationships with people on the internet, and our so-called management team who are making us prostrate ourselves for forgiveness when we haven’t done anything wrong. They keep saying the word “accountable”, over and over again, and I don’t want to be accountable. I don’t want to apologise to them because I didn’t do anything to any of them!’
I say nothing. Jack says nothing. I leave the room and I post the picture. But it doesn’t work. The next day Clay gets a call from the American publisher telling us that they love the book, but the timing isn’t right. The contracts will not be drafted, the great American dream is dead. Jack tries very hard to pretend that he’s sad about it, but I know the truth now. He hated our work together, and rather than telling me that, he sabotaged it. Subconsciously, I think. I don’t think he’s cruel enough to do anything like that on purpose. But the outcome is the same.