‘I dunno. I was envious of your happiness, I think.’
Carrie has the next bit very well rehearsed: I can tell.
‘So the thing is, envy is what you feel when you covet something someone has that you don’t. Jealousy is when you are worried someone is trying to take what you have.’
‘OK …’
‘Yeah, so anything that happened to me by the time you were being a bitch to me, you already had. So why were you being so horrible about it?’
‘That’s a really good question.’
‘You already had the great husband. You’d bought your flat. You had the big impressive job. And when I got even just some of that, you couldn’t handle it.’
‘It’s not really that, I don’t think.’ Was it?
‘No, actually, what you needed was a friend who was always in the shit all the time so you could tell yourself that you were so much better by comparison,’ Carrie says coldly. ‘Oh, there’s Carrie, fucking up again, at least I’ll never be that bad.’
Was she right? I’ve never heard Carrie talk so much sense.
She softens a bit. ‘I know you were hurting after the miscarriage, but that didn’t mean that me having a baby had anything to do with what was going on with you. I wasn’t taking away your chance. I wasn’t taking away your happiness.’
‘Wow, how did you get so wise? What have you done with my mate?’ I say feebly.
‘Just grew up a bit, I suppose.’
‘I think I’ve been going backwards,’ I tell her. Do I tell her about Ted? I can barely stand to tell it to myself.
‘Yeah, I heard you left Johnny. That was a bit of a weird one all right,’ she reflects.
‘I know it looked all great from the outside, but it probably wasn’t,’ I tell her.
‘Yeah,’ she says, smiling sadly. ‘I suppose I did notice he never made you laugh.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’
Carrie shrugs. The point has been proven. That was never her place.
The baby is restless in her jumping thing, demanding to be set free.
‘Well, you did it,’ I tell her, gesturing towards the doorway.‘We were all trying to run towards the same thing and you got yourself here. You’ve arrived at contentment. Plain and simple.’
Carrie’s laugh is unkind. ‘It wasn’t like it was easy.’
‘Wasn’t it?’
Her face turns hostile. ‘Did you know that I got ripped from here to here?’ she says, pointing at her stomach and then around to the small of her back. ‘I thought I was going to die. Marianne’s birth was one of the worst things to ever happen to me. And when I finally got to take her home, to here, it felt like coming back to a house that was suddenly underwater. I was just in shock that people were expecting me to live like this and that they thought it was perfectly fine.’ She pauses to let it all sink in. ‘It hasn’t been easy for me, you know.’
‘I’m really sorry I wasn’t there for that,’ I tell her, and I genuinely am. ‘I didn’t know. I just saw you on Facebook looking really happy.’
‘Well, maybe don’t believe everything you see on the internet,’ she tells me, turning her attention back to Marianne. As Carrie picks her up again, I notice the picture of her, Marianne and Billy, her small but perfectly formed little family, held on the vast American fridge by a Peter Rabbit magnet.
‘I can’t believe you’re living with someone I haven’t even met yet.’
‘I’m not sure I even want you to meet him,’ she says bitterly, an old reflex kicking back in.
This last sentence makes my eyes go hot and wet in their sockets, making something loosen in Carrie.
‘Well, if you want to stick around, he should be home from work in about an hour or two.’
