I flounder now, defensive almost.
‘Oh come on, Ollie, everyone knows it’s not as embarrassing for a bloke. There’s no shame for you. Maybe you wanted to get revenge. For me leaving you.’
He looks at me.
‘After all of this time?’ he says. ‘You think I’m that bitter?’
Then, quietly and sad. ‘You didn’t really think it was me?’
He says it hoping.
I say nothing.
‘You did,’ he says, devastated, and I duck my head.
If Ollie didn’t do this, then it isn’t over. And it means I have to contact Mitch.
‘Do you have a number?’ I ask, wincing.
Ollie looks up from the dregs of his coffee.
‘For Mitch. Do you have a number?’
He shakes his head.
‘Sorry, Scarlett,’ he says. He thinks. Scrolls through his phone contacts. ‘I don’t keep in touch with anyone who knows him either.’
I can’t make eye contact with him because now, more than at any other point in the conversation, we have to picture it. The night that I tried to break our grief, not understanding myself well enough to know that I was really trying to break our relationship, by bringing someone else into our private sphere. Self-destruct didn’t cover it; it was relationship destruct, life destruct.
I was sad and I had been through something no one should have to go through, not least when they are twenty-three and living in a shared flat and working in a pub and also have done their share of pain already, surely, losing their mum from breast cancer when they were barely able to remember her.
I’d pressed a button I needed to press to get out, away from Ollie and clubs and grief and drugs and vodka and music and sadness. It was a grim method of making those things happen because I didn’t know how otherwise. That was my whole world.
Mitch, that friend of a friend, was up for it. God knows how drunk you have to be to have that conversation, but however drunk that is, I was it.
And Mitch was gorgeous. Grass-green eyes, auburn hair, a cheeky smile. A party boy, another sometime DJ – weren’t they all – an overgrown child, like all of our friends.
My C-section scar was still pink when I took my clothes off. Mitch didn’t notice. It stung when he touched me. He still didn’t notice.
Ollie flushes red and I know he is remembering too.
How it broke us, sharing us and our bodies and our world, especially at that point when all of it was so fragile.
How that had been the point.
Because perhaps if it hadn’t been for that night and the awkwardness afterwards, we might have made it. But I didn’t want to make it. I wanted to run away from every memory of our girl and her existence. Including the man who made her.
I picture it.
Mitch’s closely cropped hair. His legs, skinny like Ollie’s. But he was different to Ollie with his gym-honed upper body, young enough that it could still work out in the mornings after brutal drug and alcohol binges.
I remember when we went home together – the same night we discussed it – to mine and Ollie’s flat. I remember chunks, but nothing clearly. Mitch watching as Ollie and I had sex. Sobering up just enough to see Ollie’s face as Mitch touched me. Feeling oddly removed, like I had from all of life for that previous six months too, as I had sex with Mitch. Seeing a look of alarm cross Ollie’s face like he couldn’t believe we were doing this. Could we love each other at that moment?
I force myself to come back to the present.
I ask Ollie, despite my shame.
‘Can you remember much about that night?’ I mutter quietly.
‘Yes,’ he says with emotion. ‘I remember Mitch filming.’
I think of the quantities of vodka I had drunk. The quantities of vodka I drank a lot of nights. Of how much we used to drink and of how little we used to consider consequences or the future, or the impact of anything on anything.
I nod. I had vague memories of Mitch filming too.
I hadn’t cared. This was twelve years ago. The world had barely coined the phrase ‘revenge porn’. It was a bit of fun. We thought the worst a camera phone had to offer was some dodgy pixilation.
The truth is that when someone was filming the video that would ruin my life, I might as well have turned to the camera phone, grinned and winked.
‘Did he send you a copy?’ I ask Ollie, cringing.
He looks appalled. ‘No! God. Of course not.’
I tried to remember more. Did Mitch send it to me? Did I have a copy in the days before I took computer security seriously? Ever show it to anybody? I don’t think so but I couldn’t swear to it. I was drunk, it’s been years, life was blurry then. Life has become blurry again now.
We sit in silence for a few minutes.
‘You know you said you were having trouble tracking Mitch down?’ says Ollie eventually. ‘I know Mitch was short for his surname. Mitcham. If that’s of use.’
And it is. There was no formality with Mitch. He wasn’t someone you put in your address book and wrote Christmas cards to. You couldn’t imagine him having an oven. Everyone just knew him as the DJ, thingy’s mate, y’know, Mitch. This is more than that. This helps.
I walk out of the pub loaded with a wedge of guilt, for accusing Ollie, and for inflicting this on him now too.
We hug for slightly too long and I feel tipsy from what I know, really, was too much wine for a stomach only lined with sweets and too much emotion for a woman and her ex and all the nerves of meeting him in the first place and an increasing feeling of unsettledness for where the hell this mess will end.
And in the car I email Mr White.
Met Ollie, I tell him. He denied it and I believe him. Just working on a contact for the other man. Think it’s much more likely to be him.
And then I shove my hand back in the Haribo, turn the music back up and start my long drive home, hands trembling on the steering wheel.
6
Scarlett
7 May
DJ Manchester Mitcham.
And it’s easy, then. Those two extra letters do it.
I find him on Twitter, still pedalling his DJ skills at the odd fortieth birthday party. I send him a short DM, asking to meet up.
All right love, he replies. That’s a blast from the past. But yeah, sure. Everything okay? D’you know the Anchor pub in town? Could meet you there after work tonight?
I’m meeting up with the other guy, I message Ed, who’s at work. I feel victorious. This has to be it, despite the friendliness of Mitch’s messages. If it’s not Ollie, who else? And I never knew Mitch well. Who knows what sort of person he is, what motivation could have led him to this? The story will unravel soon, I’m sure of it. So hopefully some answers soon.
Keep me posted, he replies. And send me the details of where you’re meeting. I can come, if you want?
Jesus, I think. Imagine.
Best if I go alone but I’ll keep in touch, I say. I tell him the name of the pub.
I pick up the phone to Mr White, who I speak to often enough now that he has become Jonathan.
‘Made contact with Mitch,’ I say.
‘Great news,’ he says, jovial. ‘Keep all the notes. I’ll ask Lynne to book you in for later this week. We can go through everything then. Let’s get him, Scarlett.’
I get to the pub early.