The Snapshot

“She’s going to fucking loathe this,” Gareth thought with satisfaction as he uploaded the picture to the group’s Whatsapp. It was a snapshot of their perfect family : Katrina his wife, in the passenger seat of course; Alison, reading dutifully in the back; Patrick, three, cheekily grinning up at the camera. They had to be the happiest, he thought, surely. He scrolled through the previous messages, all sent in a flurry that morning as thirteen university friends were set to meet again after a ten year hiatus during which most, if not all of them, had lost touch . A country cottage with a hot tub had been their chosen destination and Natalie the Group Organiser had ensured that enough activities were planned to keep the kids occupied whilst the parents lost themselves in old memories. Their friendship had survived university (mostly) and their luxuriant, expendable, late twenties when they’d all had pokey but grown up spare rooms to shelter one other for Dionysian weekends that flung them all together again.

Yes, Natalie and Dylan - they were the big rivals, he thought. They also had two twins. Quite a handful by all accounts but alarmingly clever and athletic too, as frequent Facebook posts suggested. Yes, that was annoying. Neither of his were sporty, disappointingly. Natalie had a career too - not like Katrina. She was an architect and Dylan was a successful property developer. Their home, born from such a pairing was naturally exquisite; he felt almost aggressively aroused when he saw photos of it online sleepless at 3am as he whiled away the time ranking his friends in order of their success. A brief stint of depression after the twins were born was the only thing that robbed her of one precious tally mark in his flawless ranking system, though he could forgive that because it was practically fashionable now. Anyway Dylan had neutralised that by running a marathon in her honour and posting a tearfully proud status about it on the finish line, about his lioness of a wife. Well played, he had thought at the time. If only Katrina had something wrong with her which he could exploit. But there wasn’t, she was practically perfect.

Gareth glanced over at her, long dark hair, taut skin, even over the stomach where two kids had wreaked havoc after birth and pert boobs, a Christmas present that had been worth every penny of his bonus. He made sure her personal shopper accentuated them so he could maximise his investment. Yes, she was a work of art, he thought with satisfaction. Michelle would be devastated when she saw them all in the flesh.

   He was surprised she’d accepted the invitation when Natalie set up the group. He hadn’t seen his ex-wife since the final court hearing; she’d looked deliciously rough, like she’d barely slept and was practically dripping with pain and anxiety. He’d sat across from her in the court room sipping his oat milk latte and felt every rich drop of it. Even better when the final settlement was read out and she was awarded a measly fraction of his fortune. They’d had no kids - her fault of course. Two years of expensive and ineffectual IVF and he knew who was at fault, he thought looking around the car, ‘couldn’t throw enough money at that barren shitheap, he’d said to her once in an argument when she’d pushed him over the edge. And now she was actually attending this event, on her own no less! No man in the picture.

God he couldn’t wait; he almost felt aroused by the thought of it. He looked at the kids in the back and suddenly wished he’d paid overtime for the nanny, to join them. She could have kept them busy whilst he was fucking Katrina in the bedroom, imagining all the time that his miserable, dried up ex -wife was sitting downstairs making small talk with their friends trying to block the sounds of Katrina’s moans. Shit, he thought, looking at Katrina. Why spend all that money creating the perfect woman if you couldn’t enjoy her whenever you wanted? He smiled and patted her knee.

“Why don’t you have a nap, darling? You look exhausted.” She gave him a fond look back as though he was the most considerate man in the world.

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“It’s really weird, Emma. I mean, she looks virtually identical to Michelle.”  He turned to Emma, his wife, as she used her free hand to twiddle the aging aux cable into place. 

‘What do we want as the arrival song, guys?’ she shouted while passing her phone back to the back seat.  Her daughter, Becky (nineteen and family arbiter of taste) leaned forward and dextrously flicked through her mum’s Spotify. Fortunately the 90s were back in fashion so she chose quickly.

They pulled into the driveway of the country cottage where Natalie had booked, it was grander than Becky expected. She wasn’t looking forward to this holiday. She had noticed that there were never photos of her mum’s uni friends around the house and there was no facebook evidence to pursue. They weren’t years her mum cared to talk about, definitely weren’t friends she cared to spend a weekend away with. She’d been strangely quiet when they visited university open days last year. As other parents waxed loudly and nostalgically about fancy dress and pound a pint nights, her mum had been strangely forlorn, as though she’d was visiting a foreign country where she knew the language but wasn’t brave enough to try.

Grace was the only one she’d even heard mentioned. She had been her best friend, the only one with picture of her holding Becky as a baby but only as a baby.

“Becky, can you help grab the bags please?’ her mum asked pleadingly as she cleared a path through empty cans of 7UP pilling out of her open car door.

‘Yeah, just wait one second Mum.’ She unplugged her mum’s phone from the aux cable and jumped out of the car. She put her arm around her and pulled her in close.

“Quick holiday selfie,” she said, “So I can send it to Danny. He’s away with the boys this weekend and I want to make sure he knows I’m having a better time.” Her mum beamed into the camera.

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“Ah she’s a beauty Emma, just like her mum.’ Natalie said. They were sat on Emma’s bed post 3 course meal, cooked by Gareth of course after a Michelin star cooking course taken in France last summer.

“Fuck, don’t you just miss those years?” Natalie said to cover her silence as she flicked through Emma’s phone pictures. She’d asked to see one photo of her redecorated living room but now alcohol had expanded her quest and she was surfing Emma’s back catalogue of pictures. Emma had been the first to drift apart, she’d gotten pregnant in their third year at Uni & had taken a while to catch on. She’d taken her final exams as a mum and that label didn’t fit with libertine London lifestyle of casual drug taking. Natalie felt a pang of guilt as she browsed the photos, she seemed happy, the opposite of the life that she thought she’d condemned her friend too when she strategically stopped inviting her to post uni meet ups.

“Oh shit, sorry Emma,” Natalie said and thrust the phone back into her hand. Emma laughed carelessly at her friends reaction to the shot. “Oh,” she said laughing , “Valentine’s Day last year.’

“And what did you do?” Natalie was aware of the banality of the question but she was desperate to speak to cover the thoughts generated by the site of Emma half naked body lying suggestively on the bed. She thought this would pass. Just a uni thing, she had labelled the thoughts as such, but what was her excuse now? Natalie was constantly appraising women in the street, wondering what they looked like naked; wondering what it would be like to kiss them and softly hold the back of their hair, letting it fall through her fingers; wondering what they’d be like in bed, how she’d get them there and whether they’d be rough or gentle, as inexperienced as her or ready to guide her. Would it be like the porn she watched? Would it be like before? What she would say to her husband Dylan? What he would say? And the twins when they were old enough to understand? And the biggest question of all: could she love another women or did she just want to fuck them?

She had distanced herself from that answer until now because it  was the reason she had organised this weekend. To find out what Lizzy thought, to see her, to be around her even just to accidentally touch her as they crammed into the hot tub in the precious hours after the kids went to bed. Lizzy was living in New York now, working for a charity - some worthy job that forced Natalie to relieve teenage conversations where she’d been in awe of her worthiness. They hadn’t spoken in years but Natalie had followed her social media relentlessly, apart from a nine month ban when she was pregnant when it seemed just wrong. She poured over every snapshot of casual work’s drinks, tasted every mouthful of food with her, felt the same sun clasping her bare legs on her beach getaways and - worst of all, most painfully of all - she felt the grief, the sour heat of it, when Lizzie posted that her dad had died. The man Natalie had actually known since a child too and she longed to be the one to wrap herself around Lizzy and feel the sheer rawness of that grief and sate it with her comfort.

But instead she just looked at the photos and hated herself for it and hated it even more when Saran began to appear in every photo. Just after Lizzy’s father died, as though she was some avaricious magpie who had unearthed the treasure that was Lizzie and was restoring her to glory as Natalie would have done. And she hated it even more that Saran looked nothing like Natalie and, judging from her own social media profile, she was nothing like her too. How could that be, Natalie thought, when Lizzy had told her to her face that Natalie was perfect. “Just fucking perfect,” she had said, or shouted, the last time they properly spoke though Natalie heard Lizzy’s voice all of the time. Critiquing, approving her lifestyle choices or being consulted by Natalie over whether they would have enjoyed that holiday or film more than Dylan because that’s what Lizzy had also said. “You’ll never want to have every moment with him as you do with me. You’ll never wish that you met him when you were younger because you were so greedy for time with him, that you wished you’d met him when you were children so you could have had every moment together, like we had.” Even though for nearly all of that wasted time they’d just been friends. The pain of that memory caught Natalie off guard sometimes when she felt that her and Dylan had drifted, especially after the twins were born.

 “Do you want to do some for Dylan?” Emma said giggling, a bottle of wine, and three random shots (their uni tradition was that they all bring leftover alcohol and clear it up) catching up with her. Lizzy’s bottle of limoncello had had a particularly indulgent effect. Natalie paused and turned to look at her with a sultry smile, letting her shoulder strap fall down slowly and revealing just enough of the top of her chest that she knew would please Dylan and annoy Lizzy.

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“I think some of us got a bit too into reliving the Uni years.’ Dylan had posted proudly under the photo of Natalie as he shared it on the group’s Whatsapp page in the days after the weekend away. Lizzy felt the phone vibrate in her pocket during a work meeting. She was fed up of these fucking notifications; she really felt she’d nothing to add but it felt passive aggressive to leave. She’d spent most of the weekend avoiding Natalie and had pleaded the need to make cross Atlantic calls to Saran to avoid the long evenings. Still it had been painful, much more so than she’d wantedto admit. And then there was the photo from the group, saved on her phone but only until she got home on the subway because she didn’t want Saran to see. It would upset her. 

Saran knew who Natalie was - the girl who had made Lizzy into the sort of person who struggled to say cloying mushy sentiments like ‘I love you’ and who didn’t really want her new girlfriend leaving things at her apartment and who hadn’t wanted to make it official. Saran had got there in the end but it had been slow, painfully so, and she didn’t deserve this now. To know that Lizzy had taken the slow subway home and had stopped for a glass of wine in a bar on the way home on her own just so that she could eek out her time with it and then delete it with painful confidence. But only after another glass of wine and as though it wouldn’t be forever stored somewhere deep inside and locked away where Saran or Natalie couldn’t see it. Next to the memory of sitting between Natalie’s legs in the sun, her cropped jeans wrapped around her, Lizzy’s head on her knee as they sat on her parent’s doorstep every night for an hour after their last A level lesson. Because that’s what close friends normally do, right?

On her way home she caught the New York skyline at its best and sent a quick snap to the group. She didn’t really care what any of them thought except for Natalie, who she wanted to see the snap and feel the distance between them. As she had when she saw that photo of her looking unashamedly, half naked at the camera.

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  Michelle opened the image and thought, “Fuck, this is destiny.” She was working as a freelance travel writer, and was choosing between two promising destinations. She was breaking even now though post -divorce she had lived off her paltry stipend from Gareth. It had been barely enough to cover rent, so much so that she’d shamefully moved back in with her parents for a few years and suffered the further indignity of his hasty marriage and quick brood of children where she had failed him. She’d been desperate not to fail him in that regard, for herself, for her want of children, for her need to be a mother so strong that she’d felt unsaddled by it but as time went on and she saw him as he really was, she didn’t see having children with him at all. Eventually that vision paled and cut away to a burning desire to be free. 

 Especially after the last night, when she had told him that no she didn’t want to have sex because there was no chance she would get pregnant and he’d said, “Who gives a fuck?” and “Is that all I am to you?” and he’d been so angry. In a way she’d never fully seen before but had had glimpses of because he’d become nasty.  And she’d replied quietly, hoping he wouldn’t hear, that “Yes, because who the fuck would want to sleep with you?” and he’d taken her by the arm as she’d walked out of the bedroom and slammed her against the wall. She’d told him to let go, that she wasn’t fucking around but she was ashamed to say she’d been scared of a man she’d known for years, of a man who she thought she knew inside out. But it turned out that she had missed that part of him that was there burning away, seething with anger at her lack of fertility and at her failure as a woman. And so he’d done the one thing he could to make her feel that she was completely a woman. Completely at the mercy of him and his brute strength.

She hadn’t told anyone of course, she’d thought about it, especially at the divorce proceedings. It would have won her the case but how to prove it? Especially to a judge who looked as though he would have seen Gareth’s point. And it was made even worse by the fact that he was such a nice man to everyone else - the perfect husband, the banker, the triathlete. All things to all people except to her, except in the end but cruelly - unspeakably cruelly - he had made himself all things to her for those few years after the divorce because of what he had done to her that night and those years before when had lost sight of herself in his scathing comments and his attempts to mold her into the perfect woman and she had felt the weakness in that, had internalized his mocking commentary of her and the way that she chose to live her life. And even now, on a bad day, she wasn’t sure she would ever be totally free of him and then she’d seen that photo of his new wife and their children and seen what he’d made her in too and she knew that yes, actually she was free. She’d torn herself free in the end and that was made her the woman she was now. And then she saw the photo of New York that Lizzy sent and she knew even more, that yes, she was free. Free to say yes . And that was a right that now he could never take away from her.

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