Through the Wall
Through the Wall
Caroline Corcoran
Lexie’s got the perfect life. And someone else wants it…Lexie loves her home. She feels safe and secure in it – and loved, thanks to her boyfriend Tom.But recently, something’s not been quite right. A book out of place. A wardrobe door left open. A set of keys going missing…Tom thinks Lexie’s going mad – but then, he’s away more often than he’s at home nowadays, so he wouldn’t understand.Because Lexie isn’t losing it. She knows there’s someone out there watching her. And, deep down, she knows there’s nothing she can do to make them stop…
THROUGH THE WALL
Caroline Corcoran
Copyright (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Caroline Corcoran 2019
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Magdalena Russocka/Arcangel Images (apartment block), Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (women)
Caroline Corcoran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008335090
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008335106
Version: 2019-09-06
Dedication (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
To S, S and B, my team.
Contents
Cover (#u181c4f02-80f3-53a2-a94f-ba1ef996d8b5)
Title Page (#uc9c86d96-39e0-5913-b2e2-bf619aede50e)
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: Harriet
Chapter 2: Lexie
Chapter 3: Harriet
Chapter 4: Lexie
Chapter 5: Harriet
Chapter 6: Lexie
Chapter 7: Harriet
Chapter 8: Lexie
Chapter 9: Harriet
Chapter 10: Lexie
Chapter 11: Harriet
Chapter 12: Lexie
Chapter 13: Harriet
Chapter 14: Lexie
Chapter 15: Harriet
Chapter 16: Lexie
Chapter 17: Harriet
Chapter 18: Harriet
Chapter 19: Lexie
Chapter 20: Harriet
Chapter 21: Lexie
Chapter 22: Harriet
Chapter 23: Lexie
Chapter 24: Harriet
Chapter 25: Lexie
Chapter 26: Harriet
Chapter 27: Lexie
Chapter 28: Harriet
Chapter 29: Lexie
Chapter 30: Harriet
Chapter 31: Lexie
Chapter 32: Harriet
Chapter 33: Lexie
Chapter 34: Harriet
Chapter 35: Lexie
Chapter 36: Harriet
Chapter 37: Lexie
Chapter 38: Harriet
Chapter 39: Lexie
Chapter 40: Harriet
Chapter 41: Lexie
Chapter 42: Harriet
Chapter 43: Lexie
Chapter 44: Harriet
Chapter 45: Lexie
Chapter 46: Harriet
Chapter 47: Lexie
Chapter 48: Harriet
Chapter 49: Lexie
Chapter 50: Harriet
Chapter 51: Lexie
Chapter 52: Harriet
Chapter 53: Lexie
Chapter 54: Harriet
Chapter 55: Lexie
Chapter 56: Harriet
Chapter 57: Lexie
Chapter 58: Harriet
Chapter 59: Lexie
Chapter 60: Harriet
Chapter 61: Lexie
Chapter 62: Harriet
Chapter 63: Lexie
Chapter 64: Lexie
Chapter 65: Harriet
Chapter 66: Lexie
Chapter 67: Harriet
Chapter 68: Lexie
Chapter 69: Harriet
Chapter 70: Lexie
Chapter 71: Harriet
Chapter 72: Lexie
Chapter 73: Harriet
Chapter 74: Lexie
Chapter 75: Lexie
Chapter 76: Harriet
Chapter 77: Lexie
Chapter 78: Harriet
Chapter 79: Lexie
Chapter 80: Harriet
Chapter 81: Lexie
Chapter 82: Harriet
Chapter 83: Lexie
Chapter 84: Harriet
Chapter 85: Lexie
Chapter 86: Harriet
Chapter 87: Lexie
Chapter 88: Harriet
Chapter 89: Lexie
Chapter 90: Harriet
Chapter 91: Lexie
Chapter 92: Harriet
Chapter 93: Lexie
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Present
I sit, listening to the drip, drip, drip from a shower that only runs for a short time to prevent me from trying to drown myself.
There is a loud, unidentified bang at the other end of the corridor. A sob that peaks at my door and then peters out like a siren as it moves further away towards its final destination.
I slam my fist down on the gnarly grey-green carpet in frustration. Pick at a thread. Trace the initial that is in my mind: A. A.
A psychiatric hospital is such a difficult place in which to achieve just a few necessary seconds of silence.
Nonetheless, I try again, pressing my ear against the plaster and shutting my eyes, in case dulling my other senses helps me to hear what’s being said on the other side of that wall.
It doesn’t.
My eyes flicker open again, angrily. I look around from my position on the floor and take in what has now become familiar to me after my admission four weeks ago. The mesh on the windows. The slippers – not shoes – that are never far from my toes. The bedside table up there and empty of night creams, of tweezers, of the normal life of a bedside table.
And then I go back to trying to focus on what they – my imminent visitor and her boyfriend – are saying. Because it’s too good an opportunity to miss, when I can hear them, right there.
‘Both of them again,’ announces the nurse as she flings the door open.
She looks at me sitting there on the floor, raises her eyebrows. I stand up slowly, move back to the bed. If she thinks my behaviour is odd, she doesn’t say it. I imagine she gets used to behaviour being odd. Gets used to not saying it.
‘Just sorting out the paperwork and then we’ll let her in,’ she says. ‘He said he’s staying in the waiting room again. Not sure why he bothers coming.’
But he does. Every time it’s the two of them, in a pair like a KitKat.
I press my ear against the wall again, so hard this time that it hurts. But since when did pain bother me?
1 (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Harriet (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
December
I listen to them have sex, frowning at how uncouthit all sounds.
And then I think – what a hypocrite. Because here I am having sex myself. With a man who I think is called Eli. I wonder if the couple next door can hear us too; if they are having similar thoughts.
Over Eli’s naked, olive-skinned shoulder I glance at the TV. I have no idea who turned it on but they have put it on mute, a breakfast news segment on turkey farming. What an odd juxtaposition, I think, to all of this sex.
As Eli finishes, I look away, embarrassed, from the poultry, then pull my dress back down over my thighs.
‘I’d better head to work,’ he says, no eye contact. I barely have the energy nor inclination to nod.
‘Door’s unlocked,’ I reply, and he slips out without another word.
I exhale and reach down to the floor to pick up my glass then take a sip of amaretto and Coke. It’s 7 a.m. but I haven’t been to bed yet so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Plus, it’s there and I’m thirsty. The door slams.
I rest my head back against the sofa, look around. Half-full glasses, Pinot Grigio bottles, cigarettes stubbed out into old chocolate dessert ramekins. Crisps, squashed into vinegary hundreds and thousands on a cushion. Student scenes; not what I had thought my life would be at thirty-two.
I turn the TV off and return my attention to the couple next door. I think they are doing it on their sofa, this couple, because intermittently the arm of their furniture is knocking up against the wall. Sorry, wrong pronoun: it’s knocking up against my wall.
2 (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Lexie (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
December
‘Tom, we need to do it,’ I say. I have a provocative way like that.
He’s sitting on the sofa in his T-shirt and pants, shovelling in a spoonful of porridge with one hand and scrolling through social media with the other. I pull off my pyjama top without waiting for an answer because the stick said to do it and we are slaves to the stick. Tom knows this is compulsory even though he has tired eyes, will likely now be late for work and really wants that porridge.
But he goes away tonight for three days, so it’s now or not at all. Not at all – when you’re thirty-three years old and two years into trying for a baby – is not an option.
Tom takes off his pants one-handed without removing his eyes from his phone. You learn, when trying to get pregnant, to multitask in ways you could never imagine.
I move the porridge to one side, being careful to rest it somewhere where it won’t get knocked off. This isn’t ‘I have to have you now’ sex so much as ‘I have to have you now because the stick says so but we’ve obviously got time to move the porridge to one side because no one wants to get sticky oats on the DFS sofa’ sex.
‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper breathily. ‘We can be quick so you’re not late.’
Tom swallows a mouthful of porridge and waits until the last second to give up scrolling. Half an hour after he leaves I am still lying on the sofa, knickerless, with my legs up against the wall, hoping – as I always hope despite increasing evidence of its uselessness – that this gravity-boosting move helps to propel things along.
I was pregnant, once. It never happened again.
Now, I think of pregnancy as less of a yes or no thing, rather as something more cumulative. A spectrum, on which I am in a segment marked Unequivocally Unpregnant.
My underwear goes back on gingerly. Don’t upset the potential embryo. Don’t disturb the sperm.
I stand up. I can hear my neighbour, Harriet, moving around next door, ticking across her wooden floor in heels, keys rattling, front door opening.
I know I should feel embarrassed in case she heard something just now, but I’m so focused on my only current goal that I can’t muster up the pride to care.
Plus, I swear that I just heard the sound of sex coming from her flat, too. Hot morning sex, I think, that they couldn’t resist even though they were meant to be at work. The opposite of the type that we were ticking off on a to-do list through the wall.
3 (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Harriet (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
December
‘I cannot believe how many chain restaurants are in this neighbourhood,’ says Iris, using a tone for the words ‘chain restaurants’ that most people reserve for ‘terrorism training centres for toddlers’ and grinning widely through her astute observation. ‘You know?’
I know.
I take a large glug of wine and feel my cheeks singe. She thinks where I live is embarrassing. She thinks I’m embarrassing. Everyone here thinks I’m embarrassing. I have been taking extra wine top-ups this evening and the room is starting to spin. I stare at her, try to bring her into focus.
Really, I think, Iris should be trying to bring me into focus. Because the truth is that she – they – have no idea who I am. What I’m capable of, what my real name is and who the real me is. What is at my core and what I did, nearly three years ago before they knew me.
Anyway, I think, flooded with rage suddenly as they speak around me: I love Islington. Take somebody socially awkward and place them in the heart of one of London’s busiest areas and they will adore you. They will never need to make small talk with the butcher. They won’t have a favourite restaurant because they have sixty within walking distance and when they do, it will change hands and become a pop-up Aperol bar anyway. You can know no one and that doesn’t mark you out as odd: it’s simply the way things are. You can have a secret, because you can hide away.
I recover from the insult quickly. A couple of drinks later, I am talking with unwarranted confidence about British political turmoil in the Eighties while intermittently chair dancing to Noughties pop music. I’m very drunk – I’m often very drunk – and I’m laughing. But it is an empty laugh because I don’t know the people I’m laughing with.
Next to me on my sofa is a man named Jim, ‘incredibly talented’, gay, talks about being an introvert often and loudly. Opposite me is Maya, who has been nursing her glass of Pinot Noir for the last two hours, despite my best attempts to top her up, loosen her up, liven her up, something her up. On the floor, barefoot and knees pulled to their chests, are Buddy and Iris, who live in Hackney and were probably christened Sarah and Pete and who rarely leave the house without making sure a copy of Proust is sticking out of their bags. A Christmas hat sits joylessly atop Iris’s shiny brunette bob.
I look around at all of them and try to feel something but there is nothing. Or there is worse than nothing; there is a low-level stomach ache that tells me I feel awkward and sad and that this gathering in my home is the opposite of friendship.
Merry fucking Christmas.
Last month, I met all of the people currently squeezed into my lounge for the first time. I am a songwriter, we are working on a musical together and I invited them over for Christmas drinks. For God’s sake, I even wheeled out a box of Christmas crackers.
I do this with everyone I work with. We usually rearrange around four times and people’s excuses are vague, but I am persistent. They all capitulate, eventually.
I’m still trying to find something that makes me stop craving the city’s anonymity; something that claims me as its own, despite four years passing since I left my native Chicago. I’m trying, desperately, to be social. But sometimes I think the truth is that when you carry a history like the one I carry, you can never truly grow close to people. It’s too risky. Too exposing.
I pull a cracker with Buddy and lose.
But still, I keep trying.
‘So, Harriet, are you seeing anyone?’ asks Introvert Jim, loudly, bolshily, butting in rudely to my thoughts.
I shake my head, top up my wine.
‘No, Jim,’ I slur, matching him for loudness as my drink glugs into the glass. I forget to offer a top-up to anybody else. ‘I am single.’
Oh, I am very, very, very much single. Unhappily single. I am not content being me. I’m not joyous in my own company. I am awkward and I make terrible decisions and I want another half to make 50 per cent less me. I aim to dilute myself, like a cordial.
‘Karaoke!’ I say, fuelled by wine and the panic that people may leave, and Iris and Buddy find it ironic enough – like the Christmas hats – to join in. Maya slips into her denim jacket and slopes off, giving me a pitying look that sets a flare off inside me as she says goodbye. Jim can be persuaded once I find him a dusty bottle of tequila for a shot.
These colleagues may not be an immediate solution to my solitude, but perhaps one day it will come in the form of a man who one of them knows.
Plus my parties, alcohol-fuelled as they are, rarely begin and end at my colleagues.
It happens, always, as it is happening tonight. The door is propped open so that my guests can pop downstairs for cigarettes. I live next to the elevator and what I never envisaged – given how antisocial my neighbours are in daylight – is that late at night, people started coming in the other direction, too. Peering in to see what’s happening. Hearing a song that they like. Grabbing a beer.
So it could be one of those, too; an unknown neighbour who comes for the alcohol but stays for me. I might not be perfect, but I have things to offer. Enough to hope that one day, someone might invite me back, might claim me.
There are hundreds of flats in our tall, imposing tower block, and most of them are inhabited by men and women in their twenties and thirties who don’t have children and can get drunk on Tuesdays without much consequence beyond a hangover they have to hide under carbs the next day at their desk. If they live here even as renters then they are mostly paid well and work hard for long hours, so that their evenings take on a desperate quality. Enjoy it, make the most of it, drink it, snort it before you’re back in a meeting at 8 a.m.
The building, with its modern feel, feels to me like it aids this. The sparse, airy lobby is an anonymous retreat, painted head to toe in magnolia with just a desk for the concierge and a sole plant that never wilts but never grows. Is it fake? When I stare at it, I can’t tell. I wonder if people ask the same thing about me.
In the lobby is an unplaceable but specific scent that never alters. The temperature’s always exactly what you want it to be, whatever the season.
At times it reminds me of an airport. People pass through, collect their parcels, take off in the elevator up to the eighth floor, and there are so many flats that you can easily never see them again. Occasionally, it reminds me of somewhere darker: of the psychiatric hospital where I used to be a patient. A coincidence? Maybe this is what I want from a home, I think. Utter sterility.
Now, my neighbours traipse into my home, three, four, every half-hour. They are on their way back from their work drinks or their dinners and they stick their hazy heads in to see what’s happening. Someone – me, most likely – shoves a wine glass into their hand and the next minute it is 1 a.m., and a city banker in his early twenties who I’ve never seen before is kissing Chantal from the fifth floor and vowing to move with her to a hippy commune in Bali. Chantal, like me, is a rare exception in this building to the city-banker rule, but I’ll get to that in a minute. By day, my neighbours are antisocial and aloof; by night, they are debauched and overfamiliar, revelling in their freedom. Happy mediums are not what we do in Zone One.
Did I make an idiot of myself? Chantal will message tomorrow, inevitably.
The message will come from her sofa, where she lies every day thinking about retraining as a masseuse. Chantal was made redundant from her job in marketing a year ago and from a distance, it is clear that she is in a deep depression, which isn’t helped by the fact that her rich parents pay for her to lie still and be sad. She has no motivation to move. But at 1 a.m. Chantal is shining, lit by lamplight and Prosecco. At 1 a.m., Chantal and I are something approaching friends. At 1 p.m., we exchange awkward chat in the preprepared aisle in Waitrose.
‘I’d better head to …’ she will mutter, gesturing vaguely at some bread, or a door, or anywhere.
‘Yeah, I’d better get on, too,’ I’ll concur urgently before ambling back to my sofa.
But meeting somebody is a numbers game, that’s what my mom would say if we still spoke. If it wasn’t impossible for us to speak, after what I did. It’s a numbers game and I’m following that policy. Let the strangers in. Keep them coming.
The nights begin with wine offered politely and with small talk. And then they descend into strangers and a blurry chaos I spend most of the next day clearing up. It’s worth it, though – the mess is comforting. It gives me a purpose.
Again, tonight, my flat is full of unknown or barely known neighbours and the last of my colleagues who are heading home now at 2 a.m., slurring. As they wait for the elevator outside my flat I hear them through the door that’s been left, as ever, temptingly ajar.
‘She’s just a bit … much, you know?’ says Iris, her voice loud because she is drunk on the alcohol that I just gave her, for free, while she hung out in my home. She is talking about me.
Buddy concurs, as the world always has concurred on this. I’m a bit … much. I’m not quite the right amount. Not on target. Not the level of person you would ideally want. If I were a recipe ingredient, you’d tip a portion of me out, or balance me with salt. As I’m a person, I can’t be amended, so I remain a bit … much.
I sit against the wall behind the door listening to the rest of their thirty-second conversation on the topic of me before the elevator announces itself loudly. An hour later, when everybody else leaves, everything is quiet, and I hear a TV being switched off next door and the soft, kind padding of slippers on laminate floor.
I say goodbye to my next-door neighbour, Lexie, in my head. She never turns up at my parties, but I know her name because I have heard her boyfriend say it through the wall. And then I lie down on the sofa, mascara on the cushion from the start of tears that will go on and on and on until the moment that I finally fall asleep.
4 (#ulink_929401df-75a0-5638-892d-298767e394a4)
Lexie (#ulink_929401df-75a0-5638-892d-298767e394a4)
December
I’m typing and deleting and at that moment, Harriet starts singing in a children’s TV presenter voice that is too loud, surely, to be normal. Was other people’s noise this irritating when I worked in an office? I’ve always loved sound; the radio on in the background, talking to friends over TV shows. Slowly though, I think, all the rules of me are changing. I throw a cushion at the wall.
I uncurl my legs from the sofa then head for the kitchen because I’ve been thinking about the flapjacks in the cupboard all morning.
I look down at myself, bottom half shrouded in Tom’s pyjamas. My own strain at the waist too much now to be comfortable.
I eat the flapjack. And then I lie back on the sofa and think. Is it right that Harriet can get to me so much? Is it normal? My relationship with my next-door neighbour, to anyone living in a place that isn’t a vast Central London contemporary apartment block with a concierge service that takes delivery of your online orders and helps out the lost Deliveroo driver roaming hundreds of identical corridors with a pad thai, would sound bizarre.
I know more about her existence than I know about most of my friends’. We are closely entwined. She is by far the person I spend most time with. I know about her boozy parties with their Prosecco glugged into friends’ glasses as they try to resist and go home but they can’t – they can’t because they’re having too much fun.
I know about Harriet’s love for karaoke as her friends laugh and groan that they have work tomorrow. But then the intro kicks in and they stay and there is whooping. More friends join them. The joy multiplies. And there is always so much noise.
Now, the piano. I put pillows over both of my ears, but her sounds – always there, competing against our quiet home – are impossible to drown out.
Harriet writes songs for musicals that thousands of people hum on the bus home from the West End. She’s interviewed regularly for industry websites, sounding intimidating-smart. She is successful and rich, I presume, if she lives here. In this building, Tom and I are the exceptions with our normal salaries, and we can only be here because Tom’s parents own our flat and they’ve let us rent it for way below market value.
I realise I’m googling her again. I look at the picture of Harriet on her professional website. She is tall, striking and handsome and she looks powerful. I like her mouth. I envy her smooth, silky blonde hair. At school, she was undoubtedly the popular girl; a person who wouldn’t have sought me out as a friend as I battled my fringe of frizz and Play-Doh thighs.
In her flat, which doubles as a studio, Harriet writes and rewrites lines, her bare foot on the pedal of her piano; painted, unchipped fingernails flicking up and down before she scribbles down what she’s created. Harriet is a creator, she creates, she is creative. Purposeful, she is often so lost in her work that she forgets her plans and is late as she dashes to meet friends for brunch. She picks up flowers at Columbia Road, to sit on top of her piano and make a bright home even more colourful. She knows her own mind and tastes, never decorating her flat with something generic from a chain store, and to men, she is the whole package: smart, buckets brimming full of fun and utterly gorgeous.
Oh, I’ve never met her, of course.
I saw her once getting out of the lift when I had taken the stairs during a low-level fitness drive. I’ve found her mail in our postbox and shoved it into hers, and sometimes, like now, I Google her name. And yet I feel, somehow, like I know her.
From my home-office, aka the sofa next to the wall, I see my next-door neighbour, Harriet’s, existence happening, and it is plump and full and bursting.
Meanwhile, I have been here for three hours now with the start of back pain, flapjack on my chin and only seven sentences of my 2,000-word copywriting project on the page.
I wipe crumbs from my lap. I am no Harriet.
Just getting on the tube, says Tom’s text, later. Curry?
As I reply, I notice the stain on my – his – pyjamas and mean to change, but then I get distracted looking at the Thai menu.
Curry is bad. Curry means my size 12 jeans will dig into my skin. Curry means that we are unlikely to have sex tonight, when we should be doing it any chance we get.
Our impromptu and erotic sofa sex didn’t reap rewards and now almost a month has passed.
My ovulation sticks don’t say we’re in the window yet, but Great Doctor Google, alongside freaking me out about everything I do, have ever done and will ever do in my life, suggested that the more, the better is currently on-trend in medical policy. The idea that there is an ‘on-trend’ in medical policy is a worry if I think about it, so I don’t and instead choose my side dishes. I add duck spring rolls to a list of things I worry are stopping me from getting pregnant. They have many, many companions on that list.
In reality, we have no idea yet why I’m not pregnant. We have no idea why I got pregnant once, miscarried, and why it never happened again. And why, two years later, we are still static, waiting to move on and realising that we were so sure that I would get pregnant again, we never even properly grieved.
With every month that passes, anxiety wraps itself around me more tightly as I convince myself that it’s my fault. Despite trying everything. Despite following Tom, who works away sometimes making TV documentaries, around the country to have sex at the right time. Despite once buying a sexy nightie from Figleaves lingerie and staying in a Travelodge in Hull for a whole bloody week.
But beating myself up is something that’s been happening more lately, increasing alongside calories and sleeping as I do other things less: see friends, pluck my eyebrows, wear clothing items without an elasticated waistband. Laugh.
Through the wall, to snap me out of my internal chatter, comes Harriet. She slams her piano in frustration and then I hear a phone ring.
‘Yeah?’ she says, brusque, like people who are busy do. I am not even busy in this, the week before Christmas, the busiest week there is.
It must be a delivery driver, because ten seconds later I hear her buzz someone up and answer the door, shrieking about the beauty of the flowers. An early Christmas present? From a boyfriend? A friend? Her mum?
I peel myself away from the wall and nestle into the sofa. I’m home so much now that I work for myself that Harriet constitutes a concerning amount of my human interaction.
I picture her in heels, phone snuggling into her palm, hopping into her taxi, running out to dinner, to lates at a gallery, to taste potent festive cocktails. And I’m reminded of the old me, the me before fertility worries happened and sprawled over my life.
I shuffle to our bedroom in my worn-out slipper boots and rummage around in the wardrobe until I find the box I’m looking for. It is, as they always are, an old shoe box, full of photos that were supposed to be filed away in albums that were never bought and now live sandwiched between thank-you cards and badges from hen dos and birthday invites and leaving cards filled with in-jokes and old ticket stubs.
Somewhere along the line I stopped being this person who inspired people to turn cards around and write up the sides, who brought on exclamation marks and capital letters and leading parentheses.
I picture myself in my old job at a women’s magazine, where I had a reputation for always coming up with the best interview ideas.
‘Lexie will nail it,’ people would say, and I had the confidence to agree. I shared in-jokes, suggested new places for lunch. And then I shrunk. Now, as people sing Christmas songs outside my window and eat their fifth turkey roast of the month, I am alone, again, waiting.
I don’t know how life became this limited little space. I don’t know when I crammed myself into a box that was only just big enough for me, because I used to be a Harriet, too. And I am envious.
5 (#ulink_85853a39-7281-5e59-8079-bc84214317fc)
Harriet (#ulink_85853a39-7281-5e59-8079-bc84214317fc)
December
I’m halfway to a work Christmas meal – the kind where I preordered my soup, turkey, tiramisu in October – when I realise that I’ve forgotten my phone and have to head back to the flat.
I nearly trip when I get off the bus, swear under my breath.
I’m too clumsy and tall for these heels, and I make a note to switch them for sneakers when I get home, despite the fact that I will never rock a trainer in the breezy way I’ve seen other girls do – in the way Iris does – that bares a chic, non-icy ankle. How are the ankles of all of these people not freezing?
On me, a sneaker–jeans combo will look as though it belongs on an awkward thirteen-year-old on a school trip, not a thirty-something who should have mastered her classic look by now. I look down at myself: far from it.
I swipe my fob against the screen and pull the door to just as someone is getting in the elevator. I curse my timing, because there is an unwritten code in this building that no one shares elevators, when I notice the man who has beaten me to it.
His hair is dark, curly, wildly untamed. He shoves it impatiently out of his eyes with each hand, alternately.
And I breathe like I am due to jump out of a plane in two seconds because an alarm bell has gone off and is drowning out everything else.
It’s not just this man’s hair. It’s his dark eyes, it’s the hunching of his shoulders as he heaves his large rucksack onto his back and puts a takeout food bag on the floor. It’s the sigh he does, so internal for an external noise. It’s his long legs and his straight jeans and it’s his nose, slightly too Roman for most but not for me.
This man and my ex-fiancé, Luke, who used to live here in this flat and get in this elevator with me, do not share a passing resemblance. Instead, they are doubles. Identical. Interchangeable.
For once, I climb the stairs and slam the door of my flat behind me. But like the Thai spices, the man from the elevator has crept in anyway. I know – rationally, I know – that it wasn’t Luke, that it couldn’t be Luke, that my ex-fiancé isn’t here, in London, clutching his takeout in the elevator of my building. That after what happened, his former home is the last place he would ever come. But there is a part of my brain that the message hasn’t reached and that’s the part that is making my heart hammer into my chest, surely audible through the wall to next door, I think, as I realise I am leaning against it. I gasp for air.
After a few seconds I hear Lexie, her tiny voice quiet, gentle, the opposite of my own. A northern lilt, I sometimes think, though English accents are still not my forte.
‘Tom?’ she asks, raising her voice to carry into the kitchen. ‘Can you bring me a …’
But the end of the sentence falls away. As ever, there’s just enough wall between us to mask life’s detail.
But Tom. Not Luke, Tom. Tom from next door. I must remember that, when my heart starts racing, when my mind starts racing and at 4 a.m. Especially at 4 a.m. I pour a glass of wine, down it and – forgetting to switch my shoes – kick the generic flowers that were delivered from a generic former colleague to say a generic thank you out of the way and head out with my phone, trying to fight a feeling that Lexie from next door has stolen my Luke. That Lexie from next door has stolen my fucking life.
6 (#ulink_debc7528-ed02-5145-80fa-3d79218435a9)
Lexie (#ulink_debc7528-ed02-5145-80fa-3d79218435a9)
December
‘I miss Islington,’ sighs Anais as I flick the kettle on and she yanks off a tan Chelsea boot in the hall behind me. ‘Bloody Clapton.’
I’ve known she was coming round for a week now – she had a Christmas lunch around the corner – but still I had run around flustered for five minutes before she arrived. Endeavouring to put on eyeliner, remember how real people (I haven’t really considered myself to be one of those since I started working from home) dress and shove piles of post into drawers. Tom’s been away for a week now. I am flailing.
‘Remember why you live in Clapton, though,’ I say, brandishing a mint tea box and something ridiculously expensive from Planet Organic at her, and she nods to the latter, of course, because we are middle-class Londoners. ‘You own your place. No chucking your money away on rent.’ I sigh. ‘We’ll be here forever, because Tom’s dad will never put up the rent and we’ll never get anything better so we’ll never have the motivation to get a mortgage.’
It’s not just Anais; I say this to everyone, all the time. It’s my only response to my self-consciousness over how lucky we are to have moved this year into a Central London flat that has its very own swimming pool in the basement.
It’s still such a surprise to me, too; my own parents have barely lent me twenty pounds in my life – they’re of the ‘learn the value of money’ school of parenting. I’ve been encouraged to be utterly independent. Which makes this whole scenario pretty ironic.
Now, for less rent than my friends pay in Zone Six hellholes, I live somewhere where there is no paint chipped in the communal areas but walls that are freshly covered in high-end magnolia once a year. Where cleaners spirit away dead flies or discarded ticket stubs with the speed of a five-star hotel and then fling the windows open so that the feeling is hospital sterility. Where every type of night and day life we could need is in walking distance.
Right now, Islington’s anonymity soothes me. I walk out of my flat with nowhere marked out as my final destination and I wander up the high street past hipster thirty-somethings with children dressed in fifty-pound jumpers on scooters. At weekends, I clamber onto the bookshop on the barge on the canal, picking out piles of worn, second-hand classics. I smell the brunch that’s being eaten in seven-degree cold on the pavement like we are in Madrid in July and I know that that wouldn’t happen anywhere else in this country, but does here, because we are in a bubble. Nothing is real. Nothing gets inside.
Round here, CEOs play tennis at Highbury Fields with their friends like they are fifteen. In summer, I watch thirty-somethings charging around a rounders circle with friends. At the pub, there will be no locals but there will always be someone who is twenty-two and excited, who has just discovered that they can get drunk on a Monday and eat an assortment of crisps for dinner without anyone telling them otherwise.
On sunny evenings, we drink gin and tonics in overpopulated beer gardens that spill onto pavements. For Christmas, I have bought everything I need within the radius of a ten-minute walk from my flat. We are spoilt children and I adore it. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever known before.
But by repeating my mortgage conversation on loop, it’s become true to me. I’ve started to care about ownership and getting my hands on an enormous loan that will never be paid off. Whatever I had, it turns out, I would look over my shoulder to see what someone else had and want it, too. This is me. Perhaps it is everyone.
And there are downsides to life in this part of London.
We’re transient because we know this isn’t where we will settle.
It does happen: I look up at the family houses that surround Highbury Fields and like everyone, I wonder who could possibly have that life, that real life, living here beyond their thirties and becoming a family here, becoming old. But there are bins outside, spilling out with pizza boxes and wine bottles and toilet roll holders and nappies. It’s real.
Most of us, though, will never be the 0.000001 per cent with their pizza boxes. If you’re thirty-nine, Islington looks at you sadly like you’ve stayed at the party a little too long. Perhaps you could have a quick Sunday afternoon picnic on the green on your way out but then yes, it willbe time for you to head off to the suburbs.
Anais is doing just that and building a life. Where she goes to sleep, there are old food markets and boozers and there are people who have lived there forever, who sell vegetables loudly and look at you blankly when you talk about brunch. There are new people, sure, but it’s not like here. Here, heritage ebbs away every time a greengrocer’s becomes a gin bar and a rental notice goes up in the window of the old pub. We are all to blame: I spend Sundays strolling in between market stalls selling lockets and trinkets and soaking up the feeling of it all, and then I spend my money in Waitrose. I am part of the problem. I am at its heart.
‘Mortgages are overrated and I have no idea why everyone is so obsessed with them,’ Anais says as she rummages in her bag for the box of brownies she’s brought with her. ‘Very much like babies.’
I bristle. She puts the brownies on the side.
‘Salted caramel,’ I say, reading the label and trying to distract myself from the irritation that’s surging through me over her flippancy. ‘Thanks.’
Since we were at university together, Anais has been vehemently opposed to procreating and didn’t change her mind even when she met Rafael. He’s Spanish; she’s Barbadian. If you were the kind of person who wheeled out terrible clichés, you’d tell them they’d make beautiful babies.
I’m not and I don’t. If struggling to conceive has any upsides, it’s taught me emotional intelligence. I make promises to myself that whatever happens, I will never be one of those people who don’t consider for one second that by proffering their opinions on your position on having children, they might have just ruined your whole week. You don’t know. You never know.
Anais and I did our journalism postgraduate course together and while the rest of us only manage yearly get-togethers, Anais and I are still proper friends. Her: a political editor for a broadsheet. Me: a copywriter for various dull brands who pay me to produce words about their products. I’m currently writing instructions for a washing machine. This isn’t how I saw it going when I turned up ten years ago for my first day at university, clutching a copy of Empire magazine and declaring my intentions of becoming a film critic.
But I left my last job at a magazine because I returned home four nights out of five stressed and panicked about something that had happened to do with internal politics. The sort that at the time seem like the centre of the universe and really are part of some distant solar system that no one should care about, ever.
And, mostly, because Tom and I had been trying for a baby for two years and, since the miscarriage, nothing else had happened. I wanted to alter something. I wanted to relax, get some work-life balance and go to Pilates at 2 p.m. if I fancied it. The problem was that I rarely fancied it. The problem was that being at home alone all day without the distraction of those internal politics and a 10 a.m. meeting to prep for left me depressed and so anxious that a two-minute walk to the post office felt far beyond me. I zoned in obsessively on the absence of a baby. As time went on I grieved more, not less, for that baby who didn’t make it. I’m not saying that leaving my job was the wrong decision. But it certainly hasn’t been a quick fix.
‘It’s been such a ridiculous run-up to Christmas at our place,’ Anais says, taking her tea from me as she frames herself, beautiful, in the entrance to the kitchen. ‘I’m still so jealous of you working for yourself.’
And I look down at my one Official Seeing People outfit, pulled on two minutes before she arrived and to be discarded one minute after she leaves, and glance at her phone on the side, lighting up with messages and urgency, and I think sure, Anais, sure.
‘Working from home, all that flexibility.’
Then she comes up with a very specific example of this.
‘You can bake a potato while you work.’
That’s it. That’s what I was after when I held that copy of Empire. Baked potatoes. While I work.
‘You can go for a run at 3 p.m.’
Because I do. Often.
She pads in her tights through to the living room.
‘Jesus, what the hell is that noise?’ she says as she sips her tea. Something with fennel.
I head back to the kitchen.
‘Oh, just Harriet!’ I yell as I press my own teabag against the side of the mug and fish it out. I decant the brownies onto a plate then I follow her in and laugh, because she is stood, ear pressed to the wall, to listen to Harriet’s latest composition involving chickens and a farm.
‘Get away from there,’ I stage-whisper, even though we both know she probably can’t hear us over that level of farmyard-based noise. There is a chicken impression, in rhythmic form. We are folded, creased, with laughter.
When we calm down, Anais sits, doing a noiseless impression of someone earnestly singing an opera as she curls her feet under her on the sofa.
She leans and takes a brownie from the plate that is sat on our tiny coffee table.
‘Does she do that all the time?’ she asks.
I think about it.
Suddenly it seems weird that I have started to think this is so normal, this woman singing loudly about love, dreams, emotions and chickens. I hear her pound the piano in frustration. I hear her ARRRGGGHH out loud when something doesn’t go well. And I live alongside it, like her cellmate.
‘Yeah, pretty much. There you go, another downside of our Islington life. Successful music writers move in next door and sing weird songs about farmyard animals.’
We laugh, a lot, but then there is a lull.
‘So, how are you?’ I ask.
As I eat my brownie, she tells me about the new app Rafael just designed, a Korean place they’d tried at the weekend and the trip to Mexico they’ve just booked. And then, when I can’t stop her any longer with my questions, questions, questions, she asks me the dreaded one from her side: ‘How about you – any news?’
I mime a full mouth and take a second.
It’s loaded, that question, once you get into your thirties. It means ‘Are you getting married, having a baby, buying a house? Do you have an awesome, game-changing new job that pays you so much money you can buy in Notting Hill?’ And if you don’t, if none of those things exist, you feel like you have failed at news. Sometimes I think I want a baby partly so I can succeed at news.
‘Not really,’ I say before spinning some mundane work and a trip to the theatre with Tom’s parents into news.
Because you can’t actually have no news. We must be busy and rammed and manic and constantly doing, and no news isn’t allowed. I dust brownie crumbs off my chin and onto a plate.
After Anais leaves I change back into my – Tom’s - pyjamas and consider why I didn’t speak to her about The Baby Thing.
Every time we’ve done this and I’ve omitted it, I’ve surprised myself. Because that is my news. That’s my story. Anais is my friend and I am a sharer. And not mentioning it means I have a low level of nausea about the unknown elephant in the room every time we meet. I didn’t even tell her about my miscarriage. Anais, my best friend, doesn’t know that I was pregnant. Doesn’t know about the biggest thing that ever happened to me. That seems crazy now but at the time I had hoped it would be a footnote to some good news, to the best news.
Not telling Anais what is going on in my head also means that we are drifting. I know it and she knows it; I can feel the chasm getting wider but I can’t do what I need to do to close it. So why?
I come to this conclusion: once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back. Once you say you’re trying, that’s your thing. That’s the ‘news’ they mean. That’s the black cloud over my head that everyone will see.
‘Are you okay?’ Anais asked into my ear as she left, hugging me close. ‘You seem …’
But I avoided her eyes, shrugging out of our cuddle and seeing her out with some paint-by-numbers thirty-something rambling about a busy week and work worries.
I eat the rest of the brownies, alone, leaning over the kitchen sink. It’s a while before I hear from Anais again; definitely longer than normal.
7 (#ulink_70ed7c53-1573-557f-b58a-169266c38325)
Harriet (#ulink_70ed7c53-1573-557f-b58a-169266c38325)
December
Suddenly, there is a loud giggle from next door that makes me jump. It’s not Lexie, it’s a woman who is less softly spoken, and I can hear Lexie replying, louder than normal to match her friend, and laughing heartily.
Tom has been away for a few days now, I think, so Lexie’s spending some time with the rest of the people in her life. I am irked at her greed. A beautiful boyfriend who brings her curry and loves her and friends, proper friends, who share in-jokes with her and pop round for tea. Does this really happen?
‘Just Harriet,’ she shouts as I stop playing my piano for a second and jolt.
It is the incongruity of my name, heard through the wall where I thought that I did not exist. But like they exist to me, I exist to them. I look down and see my hand shaking. The spell is broken and I can’t even focus on my piano.
Then they laugh again, loudly and together.
Through the wall, I am a person. They acknowledge me. They speak about me. They laugh at me. If there’s one thing I can’t take, Lexie, it’s people laughing at me.
My heart is pounding.
It’s been three days since I saw Tom/Luke getting into the lift with his curry. The hair. The shoulders. That nose. I shiver. I can’t sleep and I’m behind on a deadline for the score on a children’s musical. The guy I am working for is getting twitchy and my usual desire to impress has deserted me. I don’t care. I am focused on Lexie. I feel a surge of rage.
I can’t even get it together to put the generic flowers in a generic vase. They finally made it off the floor, but they are limp now, lying on the table in their plastic, begging for a drink like a neglected puppy. What can I say? I’m not one of life’s nurturers.
All I can do is Google. It starts innocently enough but then, of course, I search for Luke, even though I know that online he manages not to exist, in case the woman he was supposed to spend his life with sees news of a job promotion or the gig he went to last night.
I Google again.
Luke Miller, Chicago. Luke Miller, media companies. Nothing.
I slam my head back against the sofa and consider what he thinks I would do if I found him. See a social media food shot and book a flight to New York to queue up outside the diner where it was taken, in the hope that he came back for another rare burger and this time, I snared him? Or something worse? Something like last time.
I bang my laptop shut and sit, ruminating.
I should have been married now. Perhaps I’d have a baby, asleep in an upstairs cot somewhere in Hertfordshire. Or maybe Luke would have fetched my backpack and told me we were off, to travel around Europe. We’d come as far as the UK together from the US already, and we might have gone for a year of eating Comté cheese in France and devouring art in Barcelona. Whatever he had wanted, obviously. That’s how it had worked.
I look down suddenly, realise I’m in pain. My nails have been digging so deeply into my hand that there is blood; I have pulled off cuticles and left skin red raw. It throws me. I didn’t notice the harm being caused. I rarely do.
Perhaps Luke would still be all about London. It would only have been four years and he adored it here. We earned good money, me as a songwriter for musicals and TV shows, and Luke in media sales. We – well, he – had a huge circle of friends. Thursday nights I would beg to come along to his work drinks in a fancy hotel bar near The Strand. Occasionally, he gave in.
There are tears now, threatening to jump.
Weekends, thankfully, were usually more private. We’d take our hangovers for chilly walks up Primrose Hill, Luke’s sensitive teeth hurting from the cold and both of our ears pinching until we found a pub to serve us tea in front of a fire.
We’d defrost, pull off hats, flick through the supplements. I’d pretend to lose at Scrabble to avoid a row. I’d pet the spaniel across the bar and fantasise about a future full of dogs, and then Luke would frown and point out all the reasons why pets were a terrible idea. I’d realise quickly, of course, that he was right.
‘Weren’t you thinking of getting a pet?’ asked my mom one day on the phone.
‘Luke doesn’t think it’s a good idea,’ I said, forgetting to edit.
‘But what do you think, Harriet?’ she said, gently but firmly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re so caught up in what Luke wants that you forget to ask yourself that these days.’
I hung up. Started calling less often.
In my version of us in the future, I would be better, too. The sort of person who didn’t forget I was supposed to be dieting and order chips, and not the sort of person who wears the wrong-shaped jeans and has a haircut that ‘seriously, you’ve had since 2003’. Thanks, Luke.
I am crying now, unstoppable. In February this year, one year after we got engaged, Luke left me.
I take out some nail scissors and start snipping at the ends of my long, dull blonde hair before realising what I’m doing with a jolt and going back to work. Trying to go back to work.
I Google Lexie again and this time I click the ‘images’ tab. It’s not like searching for Luke. Searching for Lexie gives you all kinds of information. She isn’t a blogger showing off her life but she does elicit a hundred or so pictures, even for the general public, of which, I suppose – for now – I am still a part.
Lexie lying propped up on her elbow on a beach with her giant, wild, curly brunette hair loose around brown shoulders. Lexie at a laptop, absorbed in her words with a fresh coffee next to her and a Jo Malone candle lit on her immaculate desk. I roll my eyes.
A selfie of Lexie and Tom next to a Christmas tree in their flat. I peer at that one for longer, trying to work out where they are in the mirror image of my home; analysing the small amount of background that I can see.
Eventually, I move on. There’s a picture of Lexie in heels and a pencil skirt with professionally done make-up looking steadfastly without smiling to the camera, one hand on a beautifully curved hip.
She looks incredible; a world away from the freckled girl on the beach or the Lexie in front of the Christmas tree. Online, Lexie is a changeling Barbie to me, and this is the Going Out version.
She goes out with confidence, she goes out with good hair, she goes out with Tom. There are pictures of her throwing her head back and laughing with friends, drinking bright pink cocktails on roof terraces and showing off tanned legs on holiday. She clutches her nephew close as he leans up to kiss her. Holds a mug like it is a tiny puppy with both hands in front of a raging wood burner. There is a theme: in all of these pictures Lexie looks loved, in-love and happy. Not tense. Not nervous. Not waiting for something to go wrong. Lucky fucking Lexie.
I slam the piano lid shut and go back to bed, forgetting, again, to drink some water. And I dream of Lexie, surrounded by her friends, smirking at me and laughing.
8 (#ulink_0870ec94-6852-513b-8934-b86d4f0f2a95)
Lexie (#ulink_0870ec94-6852-513b-8934-b86d4f0f2a95)
December
I start looking up everyone I know who could potentially be pregnant and because this is the reality of what constitutes life in your thirties, half of them are rocking baby-on-board badges and bump selfies.
I Google the stats on getting pregnant after two years at my age and it’s depressing, so I read about all the things I shouldn’t be eating, doing, drinking, thinking and realise I am eating, doing, drinking and thinking most of them.
I shovel in eight chocolates that I’ve just hung up on the tree and hate myself, then Tom puts his keys in the door and it’s obvious what’s about to happen. Instead of immersing myself in my Maya Angelou as planned, I’ve spent the last hour in a Facebook tunnel of pregnancy announcements and baby pictures.
I pick a fight. I don’t want a hug, I want to shout and for someone to make that legitimate.
‘Oh, there’s no dinner,’ he says, looking around as though he expected a steak and ale pie to rise from the ashes of the wooden spoon holder. Excuse provided.
‘What does that mean?’ I bite. ‘I’m so pathetic that you come back from your exciting life and all I should have been doing is rolling pastry?’
He cuts me off with a hand in the air.
‘I wasn’t being a dick, I just thought you mentioned pasta on a text earlier.’
Oh crap, I did mention pasta on a text earlier.
‘So nothing is allowed to come up in my life? Nothing is allowed to happen? As it goes, I got some last-minute work and I’ve been chained to my laptop since, Tom, so no – I haven’t had much time to make pasta …’
There was no last-minute work. If I was chained to my laptop, it’s because I wanted to see what social media thought about the women on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. To torture myself with the bump pictures.
But I miss it, the kind of day I’m pretending I’ve had. That feeling of being important and needed and relied upon. Even the stress of it is superior, a far more glamorous stress than this one with its leggings and its ovulation sticks and its cheap festive chocolate.
‘I do have a career, I do have a life.’
He runs his hand through his perpetually unkempt curls before pulling his jumper over his head.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ he says, undoing the belt on his jeans as he heads, sad-shouldered, out of the door. Then he turns around and kisses me on the forehead, and I’m reminded how much he’s started doing this, making allowances because we’re not equals any more. I’m the victim; he’s the carer. He impresses in meetings; I sit at home googling ‘ovarian reserve’ and eating biscuits.
I bite my tongue so I don’t cry until I hear the shower start, then I sit on the sofa and sob hot, heartbroken tears because he still loves me even though I don’t feel much but disdain towards me any more.
I hear Classic FM turn on next door and feel the redness in my cheeks burn deeper. She must have heard that, Harriet, me shouting, Tom’s pity, the tears that Tom – door closed on his long shower – will never know about.
I don’t care if she hears us have sex, but I care deeply if she hears me cry. This is far more exposing.
I google Harriet again, through blurred vision. I stare at pictures of her on Twitter looking statuesque and confident as she poses with colleagues at the opening of a musical. I see her toasting it with a glass of champagne. I think of my old life when I would post similarly glamorous pictures. Now, Tom inevitably finds me here when he gets in, pyjamas and stains, unwashed face and lethargy. I look at Harriet again and think how it would be impossible for me to do those types of things now; I am not capable. I am not the right shape to fit into those places.
Harriet stares back at me from my screen. There’s an oddness about London life that means you can live here, centimetres from another person, and never know them and that is okay.
Once, I cried on the bus after a bad day at work and a purple-haired South African woman with maternal eyes offered me a tissue.
It took me by surprise. My own mum isn’t maternal. She’s brusque and pragmatic and would have told me to get on with it – ‘that’s simply what the working world is like, Lexie’ – as I pined for maternal coddling.
But when it actually came? I was horrified. There’s supposed to be an imaginary wall around you in this city and it had been knocked down. And now I have the same feeling. I listen to Harriet hum along to Beethoven and think of her, hearing my sad life and wondering about me. Why doesn’t she go out? Why do they never have parties? Why does he put up with her?
This, now, is too intimate.
9 (#ulink_d6567f01-d6be-5a34-b6bd-0dddafb33e1b)
Harriet (#ulink_d6567f01-d6be-5a34-b6bd-0dddafb33e1b)
December
I hear him come in and I turn on the radio to listen to glib Christmas hits, because hearing this man who is Luke, really, tell Lexie next door that he loves her is too much tonight, when I’ve not slept for a week thinking about the ex-fiancé who persuaded me to emigrate then abandoned me. Thinking about the fact that the Luke who used to live here, in my flat, has gone. About how there is another Luke who lives next door and a woman he lives there with, one who has taken my life and is enjoying it, more happily, more successfully than I ever could.
Tom, this other Luke, is still in his relationship; still wants to be there. I hear him laughing. I hear him being content. Unlike my Luke, this Luke has decided that this is enough for him. Lexie is enough for him. I lean against the wall and dig my nails into it so firmly that I chip the paint, and it’s only then that I realise what I am doing. Clawing my way to this other Luke, literally.
Through the wall, Tom and Lexie are Luke and I, a couple, together. And on the other side is new me, single, the remnants of what is left of a couple, not even half but maybe a quarter. I am too much, but then in other ways, I am not enough.
And then, my bad mood is exacerbated when I see an email from my brother, David, ‘checking in’. As usual, I suspect it was sent at the behest of my parents, making sure that I was alive. And, really, that anyone who was around me was alive. So, my girlfriend, Sadie, and I have bought a house, it reads, as though we caught up last week, as if I know who Sadie is.
Sleep has been difficult lately and I am suddenly exhausted, my eyes blurring at the screen enough to make me feel nauseous.
‘How can I not know who Sadie is?’ I say out loud and am shocked at the sudden noise.
I picture David, sitting on my bed as I packed around him to move to London. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he mumbled, staring at the floor, and I looked at this teenage boy masquerading as a six-foot-tall grown-up who went to work every day and rented a house. I touched his blond surfer hair gently then kissed his head. It still blew my mind that he was no longer a child.
Luke was sitting on the floor, staring at his phone. He looked up, irritated that this was taking so long but mostly that this was taking so much emotion.
‘Come and see us,’ I told David, working hard on not crying, or on being distracted by Luke. Focusing all of my energy on a grin. ‘We can go to gigs in Camden or take a trip to Paris for the weekend.’
David looked at Luke, who gave him a distant smile.
‘We’ll hook you up with some hot British girls,’ Luke said, eyes already back on his phone. ‘If that’s what will persuade you.’
I zipped up a suitcase.
Luke had loaded his own cases the week before, everything ironed and packed with precision. He showed no emotion – as he didn’t about most things – at leaving our life. He was matter-of-fact about it. Except for the long monologues about the job he already had and the myriad career benefits.
‘I can really go somewhere in work when we’re in London,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to make so much money.’
I cared more about my career than he did, there could be no doubt about that. I earned more too, though we never mentioned it. But I was rushed into the move before I could find work and Luke never once asked what my own thoughts were on London’s career opportunities.
I left the conversation alone. It was easier that way.
It was me who was most apprehensive about leaving my family, favourite takeout places and our life.
But Luke wanted it and Luke came first. Luke was more attractive than me, cooler than me, better than me. I would have chased Luke anywhere he went uninvited but incredibly I received invites. He wanted to move to the UK; I was moving to the UK.
David will never visit now and maybe that’s better. Friends – colleagues, really – are simpler than family. Less emotional. Less history. Less transparency. Less reality.
And how is London? Work? the email continues.
I delete it so I can’t reply to it maudlin and wine-fuelled at 2 a.m. when my latest batch of hire-a-friends has traipsed home.
But then to taunt myself I pull out old photos of David and me. Heads together as we lie on the sofa in new pyjamas on Thanksgiving morning as kids. Awkward teenagers with matching spots and matching grimaces on a family weekend to New York. Posing with illicit beers in our parents’ kitchen. I can’t cry this time because it is so confusing. There is so much happiness in these pictures that my face, against all instruction, is smiling ear to ear. God, I miss you, I think.
The only thing that cuts through my thoughts is Tom and Lexie. My new family, really, drowning out the old one. I do everything to drown them out too, taking a long shower, hammering at my piano, but they get through like they always do, and later, when I hear the door slam shut, I watch them out of the window, arms around each other and darting into a restaurant across the street to eat noodles and be together, still.
I open a bottle of wine and sit down at my laptop, googling Lexie, Luke, my brother, but this time the one I return to is Tom, whose surname I know owing to a sloppy postman. I know, eventually, that I’m going to have to let Luke go, but I am an addict and cold turkey is too much. Tom can function as my methadone.
Image search is my favourite and opening the folder of pictures I have of Luke, I was right, there is far more than a resemblance between him and Tom. In the hair, the before shot in an advert for hair wax, in those lazy shoulders and those gangly, endless legs. And that nose. I could kiss it, gently on the tip, and swear that Tom would know me and know my kiss.
I zoom in on Tom’s eyes. Take a screen grab of the left first, and then the right. I consider them, really look at them. These are the eyes of a man who I could love. And if I could love someone else but Luke and make a life with someone else but Luke, maybe everything would feel less dark. I would feel diluted again, like I used to feel. And maybe I could finally move on, too, from what happened.
I peer closely at my laptop, look at Tom’s eyes again. And then I start to go through all of his pictures, one by one, zooming in on body parts and details. Screen grab, save.
Sinking the last glass of Pinot Noir, my brain is whirring. Lexie. Always Lexie. Why does she get to have this life, the one that I wanted, when I worked so hard for it? When I put up with so much? Why does she get to laugh at me, while I sit through the wall, lonely? I feel a searing rage, so I open another bottle and I begin, slowly, to type. She doesn’t know what I am capable of, I think. She has no idea what I did and who really lives here, just through the wall.
10 (#ulink_26c95f11-39e7-5fee-a239-7e7610e3b541)
Lexie (#ulink_26c95f11-39e7-5fee-a239-7e7610e3b541)
January
Tom isn’t away for work at all this week, so I am forced to alter my routine. I don’t want him to know that I rarely brush my teeth before lunchtime and only put on proper trousers if I’m going out.
I already worry what this version of me is doing for our relationship. So I make an effort. We eat meals together, I dab on foundation, I attempt not to talk relentlessly about having a baby. And one night, I heave myself up from the sofa and we go for noodles and a gig in our local pub, where we order gin and tonics and everything seems young and light and bright. By the end of the week, though, the bliss has abated.
‘It’s offensive that you put your clothes on the floor and expect me to pick them up,’ I hiss, belligerent, as Tom walks past.
‘I’ve not put my clothes on the floor,’ he says. ‘What are you on about?’
I march to the bedroom and return clutching a T-shirt.
‘I dropped it,’ snaps Tom, losing patience with me. ‘But if I had put it on the floor, I don’t think it would have warranted that nastiness.’
And he walks out of the flat, to the park maybe, or the pub, or to anywhere to escape me.
Maybe we’re not used to this much time together in our tiny home, maybe we’re too used to our own habits.
But then it shifts, again.
My period comes and we’re close, he’s my family again, because this is one loss we feel together, every month.
‘I think we should go to the doctor,’ I say tentatively when we’re exhausted from the sadness.
I know he’s of the mindset that we should let nature take its course and not panic – that it’s happened once, it will happen again – but this time, he agrees. Though with a caveat.
‘Can we leave it a few more months? I have so much on at work …’
And it’s this that sets me off. I don’t know my own fuse any more, it’s different now, so unpredictable, and suddenly I’m ranting, sobbing, shouting about how he can possibly think that work is more important than this, and he’s got hold of my shoulders.
‘I never said more important, I just said …’
Then he stops sharply and he folds into the sofa.
I know he is close, the closest, to crying.
His breath is shallow. His face is a sheet of crumpled up paper. It’s pressure on him, too, and I hadn’t tended to that. Incredibly, it hits me. I just … forgot. In all of this I forgot about Tom, when Tom means the most.
‘It’s just,’ he says, shoving tears furiously from his face. ‘It’s overwhelming. It feels like being a proper grown-up. And this is the first time that that’s truly happened to me.’
He tells me that he thinks I am depressed, nervously awaiting my reaction, but I agree. Yep. Depressed. There’s a relief in capitulating.
Now, I want help. I welcome it. I will ask about therapists and contact acupuncturists and invite the help from every corner where it makes itself available.
‘Let’s go to the doctor,’ says Tom. ‘You’re right. We need to move this on. It’s not doing us any good being in limbo.’
Later I lie awake, thinking about what I – or trying to have a baby – have done to him. I stroke his face, kiss his head, tell him I’m sorry, cling to this man who I love.
11 (#ulink_0447780a-4206-58e6-8a98-26bb283f08fb)
Harriet (#ulink_0447780a-4206-58e6-8a98-26bb283f08fb)
January
I wake with a feeling so familiar that it has a regular, cushioned spot in my brain.
There is something to worry about.
I am responsible for it.
It is not right and it is not good but I did it anyway.
Last night I set up an email account, purporting to be a student called Rachel who wanted to make documentaries, and I messaged Tom. It wasn’t smutty; I know Tom – Tom wouldn’t like that. Tom has integrity. This is one of the reasons Tom will make a great boyfriend.
There was no pouty profile picture, no innuendo. I was just an earnest student who admired his work.
This morning I look over it again. It doesn’t give a hint of my being drunk and it’s only sent at 10.30 p.m., so I will get away with it. I do, most of the time.
I lose the day to email refreshing and by the time night – or the early morning – comes, my eyes are sore and I pass out on the sofa. Though, to be honest, that’s how most nights end, whether I’m alone or next to yet another naked body that won’t call me tomorrow.
The next day, though, a reply comes.
Thanks for your comments on my work, says Tom. It’s lovely to hear someone so passionate about what they want to do.
He recommends a couple of websites, offers me a contact.
I take my laptop as close to the wall as I can get, listen for sounds of life. But if they’re there, they’re quiet. Or Tom is replying on a bus, in a café. I try to picture it but it doesn’t elucidate. Tom could be anywhere, doing anything, and I wouldn’t know because he’s not mine.
Suddenly, I feel stupid. I consider never replying and simply continuing to be his neighbour. Someone who sneaks occasional looks at him getting into the elevator. A crush, existing without everything else that people think I am capable of. No danger. No violence.
Even if I do reply, I can’t do it yet, so I need to distract myself. A colleague has invited me to drinks tonight and I make a last-minute decision to go. Rachel would. She’d be putting herself out there, young, excited, keen.
I’ve had a burst of Rachel energy. I’m running on Rachel.
Harriet’s not all that different to Rachel; it’s just that she’s been screwed over. It’s made her jaded.
Then, when I head from the bedroom into my living room to grab my purse, I hear her, losing it with him, loud and clear. I pin myself to the wall. This is the most I’ve ever heard, by far. He is quiet but she is still shouting, and though I can only get the occasional word, it’s enough.
‘Fertility … doctor … priorities … work … age … men … women … unhappy … baby.’
My palms sweat with knowledge and I stay there long after they’ve fallen silent. I’m used to suffocated noise here, the hum of buses, the barely audible sounds of Lexie and Tom living life. Anger and rage may sometimes drift up from the pavement outside in the booze-soaked early hours, but in here we live measured, muted lives. Listening to shouting through the wall feels like being back in hospital.
And then, there’s the detail. It’s not that I don’t know that plenty of couples have fertility issues. It’s just that through the wall their life sounds unblemished. And that now, there is a gap between them, just large enough to squeeze myself into.
12 (#ulink_c562909f-71e6-59c5-ac64-aeb29202d842)
Lexie (#ulink_c562909f-71e6-59c5-ac64-aeb29202d842)
January
‘Lexie!’ goes the voicemail. ‘Would love to catch up. Let me know if that freelance life of yours isn’t too busy.’
I smile, wry. It’s a school friend, Rich, who I haven’t seen for six months. It’s difficult to say why because my working days are short and erratic and filled with procrastination, and my evenings are bursting at the seams with Netflix and pyjamas and scrolling Harriet’s social media. But somehow, I mimic busy. I have time to read a bulky Donna Tartt novel in four days, but no time to catch up face to face with people I care about.
Slowly, after I left my job a year ago, meeting friends took on the magnitude of a job interview, so I began to swerve them, telling myself that this was self-care. I had left work after a year of trying for a baby to be less stressed; though, ironically, my stresses simply sprawled wider. I stressed about everything from my work abilities to my friendships to whether or not I was eating too much wheat and whether or not that was what was holding me back from getting pregnant.
But I thought it was all okay, because I had Tom.
Tom and I met when we were at university in London. I was working in a nightclub selling super-sweet shots for a pound a go; he was on antibiotics so not drinking. I had to walk away from him to carry on flogging the alcohol.
‘What if I give you twenty pounds and you throw the shots away?’ said Tom, not cocky, just pragmatic.
I laughed, threw back three of whatever it was that claimed to be apple-flavoured and sat back down.
I was full of the bravado of being twenty-one, skinny in Lycra now my puppy fat years had passed and slightly drunk. My dress was tiny, pale blue and strappy, the kind that seems laughable these days when I view polo necks and knee-high boots as valid going-out outfits. This was the early Noughties, though; we warmed up with cheap vodka, not cashmere socks. We thought self-care was buying ourselves a shot with our Archers Schnapps and lemonade.
‘I thought you were so out of my league,’ Tom tells me now, often.
But everything about Tom was what I wanted. I had never looked for cheeky, or bad, or sarcastic, or mean.
I wanted kind and I wanted stable. I had roots but my roots spread wide. When I was sixteen my mum and dad – an airline pilot – moved to Canada and my childhood, already an almost-version of adulthood, was very suddenly over. This isn’t a tragic tale; nothing terrible happened to me and I wasn’t orphaned or abandoned at seven. But enforced adulthood leaves a mark. I wasn’t ready, not quite. I was still battling that puppy fat and some high-level awkwardness in my own body, and I needed home-cooked meals and sofas that smelled of my mum’s perfume to give me a place in the world.
When they left, it was with an attitude of having done their parenting years. Now, we speak on FaceTime and message but I think, often, couldn’t you have given me two more years? Just to get me to the finish line instead of making me stumble my way through the last bit stunned and in shock that they had suddenly gone AWOL.
I did two years at boarding school then fled to London. At university, I was the only one without a ‘home’ to go back to in the holidays or for weekends. Sure, I could fly to Canada, but not for a two-day stint to fill up on macaroni cheese. Not to get my white washing done. Not to coddle myself in a blanket in my old bed and feel like a child again. Not to ask my dad sheepishly if he could look at my electricity bill because I didn’t know what the hell it meant.
‘You can come to me,’ said my brother, Kit, but that meant a student dive at the other end of the country with five blokes and a pubic hair mountain next to the bath.
I loved him for offering. Not enough to brave that bathroom.
So what I needed from a partner wasn’t chaos or abandonment or erratic behaviour. What I needed was goodness, reliability, someone to bring me toast in bed and book me a taxi home. It’s what Tom and I have always done, both of us, for each other.
‘I’m Tom,’ he said as I set the tray of shots down on the table in front of us. He put his hand out and I teased him for the formality and his slight poshness.
I mocked his Surrey accent, laughed when he told me later that he kept a diary that he had written in most days since childhood and downed a pint mimicking something I had read about called a ladette.
Then, when he stayed around, I felt my body relax, and I ordered the drink I actually wanted and talked to him for four hours, until the lights came on, when he walked me all the way to my front door and even carried my shoes.
I introduced him to my friends three days later. A gaggle of girl-women at a birthday dinner. I was three glasses of wine in and just starting to believe I had passionate views on obscure Nineties indie bands, when I saw Tom having an in-depth conversation with my flatmate, Alana. I smiled, tipsy and happy. He had arrived and slotted right in.
After that it’s as blurry as most things are after 9 p.m. when I was twenty-one. There was dancing, there were fifteen people all shouting the same song lyrics and there was kissing, kissing, kissing in Soho at midnight.
A couple of months later, I sat around his family’s giant dinner table, his mum dolloping extra portions of lasagne on my plate and calling me honey, and my grin wouldn’t take a break.
I glanced across at Tom, smearing garlic bread around his plate. I looked at his dad, nipping out to the kitchen for another bottle of Chianti in his slippers. I smelled melted cheese and scented candles and heard the sound of Radio 2 coming from the kitchen.
‘You’re lucky, you know,’ I said later when Tom and I were squeezed awkwardly into his single childhood bed. ‘Having a family.’
‘You have a family,’ he replied, adjusting his body in the tiny space.
But we’d have rather done this than slept separately. Sleeping separately would have felt like torture.
‘Kind of,’ I replied.
I hadn’t told him much about my own family yet. But even in our best days my family hadn’t been like this family. Tom’s mum squeezed me tight as soon as she met me; I always had the feeling that my own mum was recoiling if I hugged her. Not that she didn’t like it; just that she genuinely couldn’t cope with it. Meals weren’t a comforting event, they were functional: people did their own thing, turned up and grabbed a sandwich.
This version of family was the one I wanted, long term. Tom, tipsy on the red wine, nodded off next to me, and I lay there looking at him and thinking, I wonder if it’s you I’ll have children with? And wondering what our family would look like. Knowing, already, that it would look like tight hugs and lasagne and sheepskin slippers heading to the kitchen for another bottle of that Chianti.
Tom is still here thirteen years later; still, to me, incredible. But even Tom is just one person and one person can never be enough to carry a whole life. What a pressure I have been applying to him, what a heavy, heavy weight.
13 (#ulink_8e5b1823-9905-59c7-a779-969253d7ff51)
Harriet (#ulink_8e5b1823-9905-59c7-a779-969253d7ff51)
January
I am on a 7.38 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street, because Tom is on a 7.38 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street. I shiver; the day is pure January. Dark, cold. This feels like 3 a.m.
I waited for the door to close as he left the flat then I took the stairs, quickly, as he jumped in the elevator, and followed him out. Half an hour ago, I walked behind him onto the platform, pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, saw the destination he was heading to on the screen and everything went blurry.
Of all the places Tom could be going to on location for work this morning, I was following him to Hunstanton, the pretty Norfolk seaside town. The place where Luke and I got engaged.
On the train, I sit four rows behind him and burrow into my scarf to conceal myself – although, worst-case scenario, I figure, there’s no law that says a person can’t get the same train as their neighbour. Coincidences happen all day, every day, everywhere. They’re the basis of brilliant novels, and films, and stories. Look at my history with Hunstanton and how I am now heading back there, for starters.
I watch him and see the defeat in his shoulders. I see him sigh heavily. I see him stare out of the window for the whole journey, even though there is a book on his lap, even though it is barely light. There is a lot to be learnt from watching a person alone, doing nothing. I used to do it in hospital. It helped to pass the time: seeing if I could tell who were the dangerous ones, the violent ones. The ones, I suppose, who were the most like me. The ones who were capable of terrible things, as I was capable of terrible things.
I look around at the other commuters now, thinking what judgements they would pass if they knew about those terrible things. Could you tell what I did, if you stared for long enough? What would people learn, if anyone cared enough to watch me?
‘I care, Tom,’ I whisper to myself. ‘Look how much I care.’
He stretches his arms above his head in a yawn, unknowing, oblivious.
When Tom steps off the train, meets colleagues and shakes their hands then heads off to work, I leave him to it. I can’t follow further or loiter on the edge of their small group. But it has been enough. Just observing him. Gathering information for what might come next. Being in his company.
Before I get the train home, I swerve left and take another trip: it’s down to the beach, takes me down memory lane, too.
What peace, I think, as I stare out to sea. The sand has that miles-to-the-water Britishness. You want to swim? Fine, but you’ll have to earn it with a long trudge.
I look around. Beach huts the shade of party balloons have found fame since the social media bloggers turned up, desperate to tick off their daily dose of beauty. Hunstanton’s beach huts didn’t feel so ubiquitous when Luke and I were here. It made them quainter.
I walk on. Perfect tableaus are everywhere I look. A shaggy dog, braving the sea when all humans goosebump at the thought. Parents hugging hot coffee. Families taking out optimistic picnics. Later, their pictures will say they were happy eating the ham sandwiches; the reality was that they were happiest when they started speeding up the motorway towards their central heating and duvets.
I am watching all of them, nosy and cold with my nostrils the only body part I will allow out of my scarf. Things get hazy. I don’t know which of these people are here now and which of them were here then, when he did it.
It is four years almost to the day since Luke rooted one knee into the sand, wobbled slightly then sniped under his breath at the man who walked past and said with a grin, ‘I’d do it quickly mate, it’s freezing.’
‘Will you marry me?’ he asked, the familiar phrase sounding faintly amusing to me although I knew I couldn’t laugh: that wouldn’t be right for this scene. Luke was still snarling slightly at the guy who had ruined our moment.
His hand was ice as I held it and my eyes squinted into bright January sunshine. I felt my whole body shiver despite it because it was still winter and I hate the cold.
A boy was crying for ice cream nearby and I knew Luke’s teeth would hurt at the idea. Gulls squawked and waves crashed and everything smelled of sea air.
‘Yes,’ I said quickly before he said a word. I felt victorious. I felt validated that I had taken a gamble on him and moved away from my family and done all of this work to be better. And I felt, finally, like Luke must love me. That the charming, engaging man I had seen at the beginning was the real Luke. That he had just been under pressure lately, taking it out on me because I was closest. But he was still smart, still funny, still beautiful. The knowledge was as physical as the bracing wind.
Luke was on his phone twenty minutes after he proposed, looking at sports results, trying to buy some gig tickets from a friend, but mine stayed in my pocket: I didn’t need any distraction. I just stood there in the biting wind, smelling the vinegar from the chip shop, feeling it all.
‘What if we invite David over?’ I had blurted out, my confidence peaking. ‘Tell him in person?’
I missed David to the point that I felt it in my stomach, in my bones. He still hadn’t visited. This would be the perfect excuse.
Luke looked up from his phone.
‘Are you serious?’
I regretted my words already. This perfect tableau, ruined by my idiocy. I felt my body temperature shoot up like I’d just stepped off an air-conditioned plane into summer in the Mediterranean.
‘After the way your brother’s been to me the whole time we’ve been together. You don’t think that would be hard for me? To have him stay in our home? Turning you against me?’
I wished desperately that I could go back in time, take the words back.
But still, I had no idea what he was on about. My mom and dad might have been wary of Luke, sure, but David? David saw the charm that a lot of people saw in Luke; David had idolised him.
‘You’d probably break up with me by the time he went home.’
I gave in easily, desperately. I was horrified that I had started this conversation and wanted only for it to be over. I didn’t mention David again and after that, I stopped contacting my brother so often, too. What if he was trying to split Luke and I up? Things weregetting confusing. I couldn’t really be trusted to know.
On the train journey home, Luke didn’t speak one word to me, despite my stroking his arm the whole way and making unending, desperate small talk.
Later, I messaged my parents to tell them our news but ignored their calls in response. I knew that hearing what they had to say about us being engaged would bring me down.
But the voicemail did it anyway.
‘Just checking though, Harriet – you are sure, aren’t you? You are really sure?’ said my mom after the obligatory congratulations and a pause. I ignored and deleted her message and after that, the distance that had manifested itself since I emigrated stretched even wider.
I didn’t tell Luke what my mom had said. He would blame me for painting the wrong picture of him, for somehow making them feel that way, and he was being frosty enough with me anyway after our row about David. Until, suddenly, there was a surprise trip to Copenhagen booked and the dial pinged to the other side: I was forgiven.
‘Let’s celebrate our engagement!’ said Luke, euphoric, high.
See, I thought, see – there’s the charming version. There’s the man who sparkles.
I nodded, grinned, kept quiet about the inconvenience to my work schedule and to everybody I was going to have to let down, since I hadn’t been consulted on dates. I just felt relieved that he had thawed.
In Denmark, we left the hotel to the shocked faces of reception staff, who believed we should stay indoors. It was minus thirteen, while the hotel had fluffy cushions and a sauna.
‘It’s so cold, though,’ said a concerned manager, shaking his bald head and shivering at the thought. ‘It’s so cold. Even for Copenhagen.’
‘We’ll survive,’ said Luke sharply.
I winced. But I kept quiet: the one time I had brought up his rudeness to strangers, we had had a huge row.
‘Because I stand up to people when they don’t do their jobs, Harriet?’ he had said. ‘That’s not rudeness. That’s just not being pathetic.’
At the Little Mermaid, a bronze statue coated in white snow, we paused for twenty seconds, ticked it off, walked on.
‘It’s so cold,’ said a passing tourist to us amiably. ‘Even for Copenhagen.’
The man held his partner’s hand. I reached for Luke’s but he shook me off, told me it was too awkward to hold hands in gloves.
We waded back through wedges of snow to the café that served hot chocolate as real chocolate on a stick, melting into your milk, making the powder we stirred into water at home look like an abomination.
I took off my scarf, ordered my drink.
‘It’s so cold, though,’ I said, faux-serious as we sat down. ‘Even for Copenhagen.’
But Luke wasn’t laughing. My stomach lurched.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said, playing with the packets of sugar.
Our order arrived.
I looked deep into the sludge of my drink as the milk darkened. I picked up my spoon to stir and saw my hands shaking. Had I done something? I tracked back desperately. It had been going so well, but evidently I had messed up. Idiot. I steeled myself.
‘Do you want children?’
First, the relief that it wasn’t something bad. But then, the question itself. I was young and I was in love with Luke and with my job. Did children sleep through pianos playing at midnight? If I had a child, would I have the energy to compose in the evenings, which was when I worked best? Working was what had made London feel doable. I was turning down job offers, gaining a strong reputation. I was working on more lucrative projects; being approached for big-name musicals.
Luke had complained about it, how ‘obsessed’ I was with my job these days, and I wondered sometimes if that was making him snappier. Maybe it was my fault and I was neglecting him. So I had agreed on this holiday to put an out of office on and ignore work calls, despite the short notice. But it was hard. It was a part of me and I was happy. I wasn’t sure about placing limitations on that.
I knew, too, that I was prone to depression. I knew that in life I wobbled and wasn’t sure I had the stability to hold up others.
But at that moment, holding onto Luke’s arm with one hand and drinking pure liquidised chocolate with the other, I felt like I was being shored up by love and sugar and as stable as I had ever been.
Perhaps, I would feel surer too, in us. I panicked, always, that Luke would leave me. I looked around in restaurants and saw that woman, that woman, all the other women who would be better suited to him. I glanced and saw him looking, too.
If Luke wanted children with someone like me then someone like me should be grateful. I should have all of the bloody children he wanted, grow them in my womb immediately. I should shut up, as he often told me, and stop thinking and agree.
‘Yes,’ I said tentatively, but he didn’t hear the hesitation.
Instead, he was immediately manic, gripping my hands and describing this huge family, four or five kids, all of us travelling together.
‘Imagine it!’ he grinned, that intense eye contact that people found so beguiling. That I had described to people when I first met him. That was one of the many things that made me feel so adored, at first, so important. ‘Swimming in the ocean and skiing down the slopes in this cute little line.’
This idea bedded into my mind until it became the clearest, most perfect thing I could imagine. This would make us whole; make us too busy for the bad times.
In October that year, with Luke in agreement, I took my last pill and we started trying for a baby.
I told my mom, surprising myself. But it had been so long since we had something to pull us close together. I longed for my parents, despite my attempts to block the feelings out. The idea of a grandchild, I thought. That might change things. Do something more tangible than an engagement. Reset mom’s thoughts on Luke and me. Glue my family and me back together again.
‘Luke and I have decided to try for a baby,’ I told her in one of what were now our very occasional phone calls.
‘Well that’s lovely,’ she said, but I heard the tone in her voice and regretted my words already. There was a long pause and I could hear her debating. Should she say it? Keep quiet? Was she pushing me away further, if she said what she really thought? ‘But I thought you were definite on not wanting them? Have you changed your mind?’
I stayed silent, furious, on the other end of the phone. Because I knew what she was getting at.
‘You mean that you think Luke pushed me into it, right?’ I hissed. ‘Why are you always, always having a go at Luke?’
She was silent then, for a second.
‘Because I don’t think he’s kind to you and I don’t think he’s right for you,’ she said gently.
I put the phone down on her then, not for the first time. After that, I began to ignore most of her calls.
Then Luke and I started trying for a baby here, in this flat, where I now live alone, next to a happy couple and their happy life. And what do you know? They are trying for a baby, too. They live my old life and I live my new one.
Before my flat was empty, it was full. Before it was lifeless, we lived life, planned life, hoped, here, to make life. We cooked joints of beef, sent scents out into the hallway that said ‘We are here, we are popular, we are rich and full and greedy.’ We chose colours together, put up pictures. We put plants on the windowsills that are dead now, withered.
Whatever our imperfections were, whatever anyone else would have judged them as, I could live with them. They were worth it for what was presented to the outside world. For my value, when I came in this package. Isn’t that what matters now, anyway? Behind closed doors can be flawed, as long as Facebook says joy.
Luke and I planned to turn one of the rooms in our flat into a nursery, as Lexie and Tom will soon. Luke presumed I would give up work and I presumed that I would do whatever he wanted, so we left it there, even though the thought of not composing made me feel nauseous and unanchored.
Sometimes I thought of how much our children would miss out on in grandparents and my heart hurt. Luke wasn’t close to his family and, I had to admit to myself now, neither was I any more to mine.
Luke had no interest in trying to have a better relationship with my family – even when I had spoken to them more regularly, he would leave the room when they popped up on FaceTime – and Luke was the focus, so I created more space between us.
I didn’t think it mattered, anyway. Until I took a wrong turn and became one, we were two, set to become three, four, five … I pictured that ski trip. I had all I needed.
After Luke’s proposal, my confidence surged. I stopped doubting my worthiness with Luke quite so much and work was soaring. I started speaking up. Questioning. The difference was noticeable. Luke started to comment on it, called me ‘arrogant’, ‘difficult’.
In December, we landed back from a trip to the German Christmas markets and headed straight out to West London for tapas with some friends of his. I complained. I was tired, cold, lugging a giant bag and I wanted it to just be us. Us was always enough for me. Simpler, easier, less likely to end in a row.
‘Why do we have to be with other people all the time?’ I sulked on the Stansted Express – exhausted enough not to edit my thoughts before they became words.
‘Because friends are important, Harriet,’ he said lightly, typing a long message that was hidden from my view. ‘One day you should get some and see.’
He spent the rest of the journey on his phone. I spent it staring at him, nervous. It’s just because we’re tired, I thought. Don’t panic.
I sat through dinner with one foot mentally wedged in the door of the train home. I smiled politely through a chorus of Happy Birthday. I listened patiently to a woman called Francine tell me about her love-life woes. Luke ordered dessert and I bristled because seriously, how much longer?
‘You look stressed out, Harriet, everything all right?’ said his friend Aki, dark fringe hanging in eyes that peeped out to mock me.
Later, Luke would deny that she was anything other than concerned but I knew. She was one of the ones I thought would make a ‘real’ girlfriend for Luke.
Aki – single, too – met the eye contact of another friend, Seb, and I saw it in that second: they talked about it – how odd I was, how peripheral to the group, how I made everyone else feel tense, even as they speared olives and toasted their friend’s thirtieth birthday with the obligatory bottle of cava. I glanced around, paranoid.
Over tapas, the night got worse – drunker, blurrier – and Luke leaned in close to Aki, brushing her hair out of her face and whispering to her. I wasn’t in the toilet or outside. I was simply sitting next to him. This was an old move of Luke’s. He didn’t try to be subtle. He didn’t need to, because he knew I wouldn’t react.
Finally, we left.
And this time I did react.
‘Were you flirting with Aki?’ I dared to ask, drunk enough.
‘You know what,’ he said, fixing his eyes on me, hard. ‘You’re so obsessed with flirting that it’s probably you who’s shagging someone else, not me. Are you cheating on me, Harriet?’
From then on I went back to biting my tongue so often that it must have been scarred.
Meanwhile Lexie, I hear her, shouts and speaks and argues and still gets to live out everything I want, just centimetres away through the wall. She and Tom make meals, the kind that Luke and I used to share before dinner became a chore for one. They curl up on their sofa and watch films, as we did, and make plans, as we did.
And I listen to the life I should have had, and am expected to exist alongside it. I sit as close to the wall as I can and I listen to them laughing, and I know something purely and clearly: I cannot let Lexie and Tom have a happy life. I cannot let Lexie steal my happy life.
I think of what happened before. I think about how, when someone steals my life, I am capable of doing anything to get it back.
14 (#ulink_6cab328c-506b-5850-a385-42aafe23d08a)
Lexie (#ulink_6cab328c-506b-5850-a385-42aafe23d08a)
January
I smear lipstick on then panic that lipstick isn’t in any more. Is gloss back? My reference points stop in time when I stopped in time. It’s one of the reasons I need this.
I need to snap myself out of my rut, so I am going on an official night out.
I need to leave this box. I can’t exit the one in my brain, but the front door of the flat is easy to open when you make yourself do it – and when you take your pyjama trousers off – and that’s what I have to remember.
Tonight is a leaving do for my former colleague Shona and I am on the bus, heading to a cocktail bar in Dalston.
Tom does a low-level whistle at my pencil-skirted bum as I walk past.
‘You’re just trying to make me feel better about looking fat,’ I say, embarrassed.
‘Untrue,’ he says, shaking his head firmly and looking back at the TV. ‘You look hot.’
I have been edgy about going out all day, my hand shaking when I made a bad attempt at doing my eyeliner.
Mostly, I’m going so I can tell myself a story of my existence as the kind where I go on nights out – sometimes I feel I need to justify the fact I live in Central London and see so little of it – but also because I know it’s the kind of thing I should do to network.
How, I wonder, did I end up in an industry that revolved around contacts when I am this antisocial? Or am I? Is this new? The worst thing about current me is that I genuinely have no idea. I am so lost, I can’t even remember where I started. What’s new, or a problem, or fertility-related, and what’s always been there. I have no courage of my convictions, no decisiveness.
Then as I go to leave, I hear a baby crying next door. There is no baby next door. Is there? Could Harriet have got pregnant and had a child without me realising any of this was happening through the wall? Will I need to hear that every day, a baby growing into a toddler, giggling and needing milk and talking?
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask Tom.
‘Hear what?’ he asks, and I try to forget it, hope – or dread – that I am imagining things now, hearing children where there are no children. It is suddenly possible. Again, I am flailing.
When I cross the road I pause and look up at our apartment block.
I crane my neck but our flat, on the fifteenth floor, is anonymous, out of reach and far away.
A few floors up I can see a lamp on, a window slightly ajar. On the ground floor, a man sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette and shouting, furious, into his iPhone. The flat next door to him oozes Nineties pop music and shrieking laughter. The couple above them have lit a candle and are framed in the window – he is kissing her on the cheek like a motif.
All of these people, I think, suddenly outside my bubble, living these lives in such close proximity to me and yet, I have no idea who they are.
They are below me and above me, side by side. They are kissing, fighting, sleeping and dancing. Are they ill, in pain, feeling sad? Did they have good days today, or bad days? Did they have life-changing days? Have they broken up with their first love today, fallen for someone, or just been to the supermarket to buy some frozen peas? I stay there for five minutes, wondering what my life would look like from this perspective. Wondering who I am to people on the outside; what questions I inspire. In my mind, every single one of those people in there is like Old Me, not New Me. Not feeling their hands shaking, dabbed with sweat, as they put their phone back into their bag, simply because they are going out for the evening.
A few minutes later a bus comes and I am caught up in a wave of other people, swiping and taking our seats.
This used to be my day to day; now, I flinch when people move close to me. I look down at my hands and see that I shake, still.
On the bus I am next to a mum who is staring out of the window, her child talking to himself in the buggy in front of her.
I pull tongues at the toddler.
‘I like your giraffe,’ I say to him.
He blows a raspberry.
I stick out my tongue again and I smile.
When the bus begins to move, I look across the road and see Harriet coming out of our building. I stretch to get a better view, but the bus moves before I get the chance.
It’s been a few days since I lost my temper over the doctors and Tom broke down and, finally, I’m starting to come back to life. Right now, the sun’s toasting me through the bus window on an incongruously warm January day and some positive feelings are finding a gap to make their own way in, too.
I get off the bus with the hint of a grin and walk the few metres to the bar.
‘Lexie!’ bellows a man I used to work with who has definitely had at least three beers.
I order a glass of red wine and a few more and refuse to feel guilty about fertility advice not to drink. We have a plan now. This is my last hurrah.
‘Pitch to me!’ says my old editor.
‘I will,’ I promise, and I mean it.
And you know what, I think, as I look round the bar full of men with their ties pulled off and a waiter walking around asking anyone if they ordered chips, no one else is perfect, either. I am okay. I am going to be okay.
‘You’ve been so off radar, Lexie, we’ve missed you,’ says Shona as she squeezes me in a one-arm cuddle.
And because we’re on our own at the table, everybody else standing, I make a snap decision.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, one-arm cuddling her back. ‘I’ve had some fertility stuff going on. I don’t think I’ve been dealing with it well.’
I hold by breath. I said that out loud, I think. I did it.
‘Oh, bloody hell, Lexie,’ she sighs. ‘I wish you’d told me. Me, too. That’s why I’m leaving work, to be less stressed.’ She pauses. ‘And that’s why …’
‘You’re drinking Diet Coke,’ I fill in, laughing. ‘Oh God, the booze guilt is the worst, isn’t it?’
‘Only beaten by the sugar guilt, and the wheat guilt, and the ‘are you having enough sex’ guilt,’ she replies, eye-rolling.
I’m laughing harder than I have in a long time and it’s that easy not to feel alone. You confide and you’re confided in and you empathise, and you find the comedy in the awfulness. Why did I imagine some invisible rulebook that said I had to keep this to myself? That no one wanted to be burdened by my problems? That it was kind of … tacky to bring it up?
A psychologist would probably track it back to my childhood. I think of my mum, flitting into a room and out again, and my dad, heading away for work for two weeks at a time, and I think – there were no windows. There were no windows available for people to ask for help or to analyse. Was that deliberate? Did my parents – the children of postwar stoics – avoid leaving any windows open, so that things didn’t get too emotional?
‘I hope things get better for you soon,’ I say, still squeezed into her, close. ‘You’d make such a cool mum, even though I know it’s crap when people say that.’
She cuddles me, tight.
‘We should meet up soon,’ I say to her, mid-hug. ‘I’ll go nuts and buy you an elderflower pressé.’
I feel her shoulders shake and I don’t know if she is laughing or crying, but I tighten my arms around her, just in case.
I am not the only one here living this, consumed by it. They’re everywhere, the other mes. I’ve just been so wrapped up in my own narrative that I haven’t seen them. But I want to. I want to help them, and bond with them, and cuddle them. I hold onto Shona, even more tightly.
15 (#ulink_17054d98-854e-53d6-af55-5147a51eff98)
Harriet (#ulink_17054d98-854e-53d6-af55-5147a51eff98)
January
I am in a bar, watching Lexie. Similar to when I followed Tom, I just want to know how she works, what she does when she has a moment alone. But Lexie doesn’t have time alone; she makes sure of it.
Lexie is laughing and sipping wine and I am drinking wine too, faster than her, and I am not laughing.
I am not worried about Lexie seeing me because it is dark in here and busy, and she is surrounded – of course – by friends.
So I am able to sit at this safe distance and stare at her as she touches her hands to her hair and face, pulls at the side of her skirt. Nerves, Lexie? Thinking about that YouTube baby you heard crying before you left the flat? I see her drinking and I judge her. From my now extensive online research on fertility issues, I know that alcohol is a fuel to them. Tut-tut, Lexie. Does Tom know you’re throwing away your baby chances with every sip of that large red? It’s almost like you don’t deserve it anyway. It’s almost like you don’t deserve your whole lovely fucking life.
‘Want some company?’ says a man who is too small for me anyway but pretty.
I examine his clothes and I can tell: he isn’t someone who people would view as cool. I steadfastly ignore him, fixed stare in place. He goes to say something but he can’t think what and he simply retreats. A little smaller now, a little less sure. Briefly, part of me feels guilty. But I need to focus.
I see Lexie having a deeper chat than the others, a personal one. I tilt my head to one side thoughtfully, trying to read Lexie and the girl’s facial expressions and work out what they are saying. The other girl sips Diet Coke. They hug, at a certain point, like one of them is dying.
When Lexie goes to the toilet I go along – like girlfriends do! – and slip into the cubicle next to her. I stay in there while she washes her hands and reapplies her lipstick, humming to herself happily.
‘How’s freelancing going?’ asks the woman next to her.
‘It has its ups and downs,’ says Lexie plainly. ‘But mostly I’m glad I did it.’
Something we have in common actually, Lexie. Perhaps we could be friends. If I wasn’t about to ruin your life.
She continues. ‘Nice to keep your own hours but a bit lonelier than the old office.’
‘No Thursday crisps for dinner club?’ her friend asks, spraying musk perfume that drifts into my cubicle.
Lexie erupts in a guffaw.
‘No Thursday crisps for dinner club,’ she laments. ‘Oh God, I miss crisps for dinner club.’
I go back to my spot at the side of the bar, where I pick up my bottle of wine and top myself up then carry on watching Lexie.
Lexie leaves at 11.30 p.m. and I slip out after her. She stops at the corner of the road and swaps her heels for ballet pumps. I’m close enough to hear her sigh of relief as her toes yawn into the shoes.
We even take the same bus home. I’m a few rows behind her, face buried in a scarf, but she wouldn’t notice me anyway. Her own face is buried in her phone.
I look at her social media as she updates it and see comments on a selfie telling her she looks good. She did. I glance up. She does. But I log into the account that I’ve created under a new name and tell her she doesn’t. Tell her the opposite. Tell her that she looks hideous, and old. I watch her shoulders fall and I know, even from here, that she is reading it. Glass, Lexie, thin glass. Smashable, which is convenient.
She gets in the elevator and our night together ends. I loiter outside and head up a few minutes later.
When I get home I can hear him, playing computer games and speaking to drunk, drunk Lexie in a tone that sounds concerned and gentle. Not annoyed. Not furious.
‘Really, Tom?’ I say out loud. ‘You’re not even a bit pissed off that she’s drunk when you’re trying for a baby?’
I think of how Luke reacted when I got drunk. He never liked it. Compounded my hangovers by telling me how embarrassing I had been. Whereas drunk Luke was popular and hilarious, according to him, according to his friends.
I throw my handbag at the wall.
When I’ve calmed slightly I sit on my sofa and write my reply to Tom.
Thanks so much for your advice.
That’s all I have. I’m wary of anything that sounds too flirty; I suspect Nice Tom would run a mile. But I need to make sure I don’t kill the conversation. I need to know him better. The sounds through the wall aren’t enough and the likeness to Luke is driving me crazy. This is the closest I can get. It’s why I played the baby noises. Just a few things to tip them over the edge, make the misery greater than the joy. And then things can reset. Lexie can move on; Tom can be with me.
Plus, ever since I heard Lexie’s voice, raised and ranting, and Tom’s, bleak and beaten in response, I’ve wondered whether things are as perfect as I thought they were anyway. Or was I hearing something unreal?
In hospital, my therapist would have said that I was projecting Luke and me onto Tom and Lexie, I’m sure. Seeing them as more perfect than they were, as I used to do with us.
But we’ll never know: I decided to stop seeing my therapist despite her repeated insistence that we have a lot more ‘work’ to do. Despite her suggesting that I had been a victim of abuse. I stopped seeing her. I didn’t like her being mean to Luke.
I hear something bang down on a table. A beer? A laptop? Is Tom checking if he’s heard from Rachel? I tell him I’ll order the book and that the work experience contact would be great. And then I add some drivel about passion.
I am making myself feel nauseous but still, I send it and get no reply, which irritates me because all he’s doing is watching some non-event 0–0 draw; I know the result because I mute my TV and then watch what he’s watching, for insight.
He updates his social media too, some football-based joke with an image from his TV, metres away from me, and I feel a surge of anger that I – Rachel – am low down on the priority list.
Then, despite the fighting the other day, I hear him and Lexie chatting normally. Fuck them and their eternally happy relationship. I throw the remote control at the wall.
I go to bed and make sure I slam my door, and I think about Tom, but when I think about Tom, it is hard not to think about Luke. I’m drifting again, the two of them merging.
Luke met me when I was at my lowest ebb. I had broken up with an ex-boyfriend, Ray, six months ago because I knew people thought he was uncool. Because I wanted them to think I was better than that.
But I missed him, that man with jeans that were too short for him, whose ability to make me laugh was obscene.
Ray had moved on, though. To someone who was proud of him; who was confident enough in herself, most probably, not to care what other people thought. Since then, I had been all over the place. Tried on some different crowds. I played at being artsy, picking up baggy patterned trousers and talking loudly about my love for the playwright Joe Orton before landing on something that was easy to pick up: party girl. This one was brilliant,because you didn’t need to learn a hobby for it, or acquire any accessories. Unless a hobby was chucking liquor down your throat most nights until 2 a.m., when you vomited in an unknown sink and your accessory was cheap vodka.
I slept with anyone, everyone. I missed Ray and I disliked myself, and I was trying, even back then, to dilute me.
Then one night I was drinking sherry at the home of a pretentious mutual friend who had just got back from a gap year in Europe and become obsessed with everything Spanish.
‘No one actually likes this stuff though, right?’ a guy at the party had asked bluntly with a grin. ‘It tastes like mushrooms.’
I was horrified. I wouldn’t have ventured anything other than polite agreement and awe at her sophisticated drink choices. The friend was new, someone from work, and I was trying to impress. Or rather, not to offend. Are they the same thing?
Either way, I thought this man was fearless and impressive with his honest sherry feedback. Everyone laughed and slapped him on the back; he was popular and down-to-earth. And handsome, I thought with a jolt as I looked up at him, so handsome.
Luke’s confidence soared even more as he drank and I listened to him take on somebody’s views on bullfighting and somebody else’s thoughts on Rioja. He put arms around people’s shoulders, nudged them playfully in the ribs.
Then he turned his attention to me.
‘Have you ever tried any English wines?’ he said out of nowhere, focused in my direction. ‘They’re making some really good stuff down in Sussex.’
He placed his hand on my waist, steered me to a sofa in the corner next to the back door. I hadn’t even thought he had seen me. I was shaking.
I muttered an intimidated no, sneaked a glance up at his messy curls.
The idea of dating someone like this man, Luke, with his wine knowledge and confident views? This was a world away. This was what I had been looking for. But I knew there was no way he would be interested in me.
Except then when our friend turned off the music and started to read aloud from Hemingway like a primary school teacher introducing the class to Roald Dahl, Luke whispered ‘Shots?’ in my ear and took my hand.
The crowd big enough for our friend not to notice, he led me out of the back door and down the street to the British pub in town, making me cry with laughter at his impressions of the Hemingway reading as we walked. I had drunk enough now to stop being quite so mute.
‘I wish all American bars were like this,’ he said, two notes too loudly, as I looked around, confused, at the snooker table. I had never been in a British pub before. I could see why.
He ordered us some drinks and it was only as we sat down that I realised just how drunk he was. Conversation became hazy and nonsensical and we got up to dance, though it wasn’t a dancing vibe and, really, I felt too self-conscious to move my limbs.
‘Come on!’ he said, twirling me around in a different beat to the music. ‘You’re too beautiful not to dance! Dance, dance, dance.’
It was almost a chant. My protests were ignored and half an hour later, my mouth was full of yeast and hops as he kissed me, forcibly and deep. I was sober enough to be aware that like it wasn’t a dancing kind of bar, it wasn’t a kissing kind of bar either, but I tried to block that out. His Roman nose knocked against mine. I had my hands at the nape of his neck, just at the start of his dishevelled curls.
‘Shall we go back to mine?’ he slurred.
I wanted to go home to sleep and he was barely coherent enough to be company. But I went home with him because he was beautiful and he wanted me and he had fixed his eyes on mine, and we had brief sex that felt like a one-night stand.
Until two days later when he sent me a message.
I’ve found a place that stocks English wine. Come and sample with me?
It felt glamorous and clever and new. It felt like being in my twenties should feel. It felt fancy and impressive. Luke wasn’t just a boy to drink beers and have sex with; he was sophisticated and a grown-up, clutching a fresh white from the British countryside.
Minutes later, a message pinged in from our mutual friend.
Saw you leave with Luke the other night. He’s a charming guy but just … be careful, okay?
I rolled my eyes – how novel, someone being jealous of me – and didn’t think about it again. Instead, my thoughts for the next few months were taken up with the French restaurants Luke took me to and the plays he booked. With the way he stared at me so intently and told me I was beautiful. With the books he lent me and the movies he recommended. With his height, with his curls, with his long arms steering me into his car or into a beautiful hotel room with a deep, plush bath.
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Caroline Corcoran
Lexie’s got the perfect life. And someone else wants it…Lexie loves her home. She feels safe and secure in it – and loved, thanks to her boyfriend Tom.But recently, something’s not been quite right. A book out of place. A wardrobe door left open. A set of keys going missing…Tom thinks Lexie’s going mad – but then, he’s away more often than he’s at home nowadays, so he wouldn’t understand.Because Lexie isn’t losing it. She knows there’s someone out there watching her. And, deep down, she knows there’s nothing she can do to make them stop…
THROUGH THE WALL
Caroline Corcoran
Copyright (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Caroline Corcoran 2019
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Magdalena Russocka/Arcangel Images (apartment block), Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (women)
Caroline Corcoran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008335090
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008335106
Version: 2019-09-06
Dedication (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
To S, S and B, my team.
Contents
Cover (#u181c4f02-80f3-53a2-a94f-ba1ef996d8b5)
Title Page (#uc9c86d96-39e0-5913-b2e2-bf619aede50e)
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: Harriet
Chapter 2: Lexie
Chapter 3: Harriet
Chapter 4: Lexie
Chapter 5: Harriet
Chapter 6: Lexie
Chapter 7: Harriet
Chapter 8: Lexie
Chapter 9: Harriet
Chapter 10: Lexie
Chapter 11: Harriet
Chapter 12: Lexie
Chapter 13: Harriet
Chapter 14: Lexie
Chapter 15: Harriet
Chapter 16: Lexie
Chapter 17: Harriet
Chapter 18: Harriet
Chapter 19: Lexie
Chapter 20: Harriet
Chapter 21: Lexie
Chapter 22: Harriet
Chapter 23: Lexie
Chapter 24: Harriet
Chapter 25: Lexie
Chapter 26: Harriet
Chapter 27: Lexie
Chapter 28: Harriet
Chapter 29: Lexie
Chapter 30: Harriet
Chapter 31: Lexie
Chapter 32: Harriet
Chapter 33: Lexie
Chapter 34: Harriet
Chapter 35: Lexie
Chapter 36: Harriet
Chapter 37: Lexie
Chapter 38: Harriet
Chapter 39: Lexie
Chapter 40: Harriet
Chapter 41: Lexie
Chapter 42: Harriet
Chapter 43: Lexie
Chapter 44: Harriet
Chapter 45: Lexie
Chapter 46: Harriet
Chapter 47: Lexie
Chapter 48: Harriet
Chapter 49: Lexie
Chapter 50: Harriet
Chapter 51: Lexie
Chapter 52: Harriet
Chapter 53: Lexie
Chapter 54: Harriet
Chapter 55: Lexie
Chapter 56: Harriet
Chapter 57: Lexie
Chapter 58: Harriet
Chapter 59: Lexie
Chapter 60: Harriet
Chapter 61: Lexie
Chapter 62: Harriet
Chapter 63: Lexie
Chapter 64: Lexie
Chapter 65: Harriet
Chapter 66: Lexie
Chapter 67: Harriet
Chapter 68: Lexie
Chapter 69: Harriet
Chapter 70: Lexie
Chapter 71: Harriet
Chapter 72: Lexie
Chapter 73: Harriet
Chapter 74: Lexie
Chapter 75: Lexie
Chapter 76: Harriet
Chapter 77: Lexie
Chapter 78: Harriet
Chapter 79: Lexie
Chapter 80: Harriet
Chapter 81: Lexie
Chapter 82: Harriet
Chapter 83: Lexie
Chapter 84: Harriet
Chapter 85: Lexie
Chapter 86: Harriet
Chapter 87: Lexie
Chapter 88: Harriet
Chapter 89: Lexie
Chapter 90: Harriet
Chapter 91: Lexie
Chapter 92: Harriet
Chapter 93: Lexie
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Present
I sit, listening to the drip, drip, drip from a shower that only runs for a short time to prevent me from trying to drown myself.
There is a loud, unidentified bang at the other end of the corridor. A sob that peaks at my door and then peters out like a siren as it moves further away towards its final destination.
I slam my fist down on the gnarly grey-green carpet in frustration. Pick at a thread. Trace the initial that is in my mind: A. A.
A psychiatric hospital is such a difficult place in which to achieve just a few necessary seconds of silence.
Nonetheless, I try again, pressing my ear against the plaster and shutting my eyes, in case dulling my other senses helps me to hear what’s being said on the other side of that wall.
It doesn’t.
My eyes flicker open again, angrily. I look around from my position on the floor and take in what has now become familiar to me after my admission four weeks ago. The mesh on the windows. The slippers – not shoes – that are never far from my toes. The bedside table up there and empty of night creams, of tweezers, of the normal life of a bedside table.
And then I go back to trying to focus on what they – my imminent visitor and her boyfriend – are saying. Because it’s too good an opportunity to miss, when I can hear them, right there.
‘Both of them again,’ announces the nurse as she flings the door open.
She looks at me sitting there on the floor, raises her eyebrows. I stand up slowly, move back to the bed. If she thinks my behaviour is odd, she doesn’t say it. I imagine she gets used to behaviour being odd. Gets used to not saying it.
‘Just sorting out the paperwork and then we’ll let her in,’ she says. ‘He said he’s staying in the waiting room again. Not sure why he bothers coming.’
But he does. Every time it’s the two of them, in a pair like a KitKat.
I press my ear against the wall again, so hard this time that it hurts. But since when did pain bother me?
1 (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Harriet (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
December
I listen to them have sex, frowning at how uncouthit all sounds.
And then I think – what a hypocrite. Because here I am having sex myself. With a man who I think is called Eli. I wonder if the couple next door can hear us too; if they are having similar thoughts.
Over Eli’s naked, olive-skinned shoulder I glance at the TV. I have no idea who turned it on but they have put it on mute, a breakfast news segment on turkey farming. What an odd juxtaposition, I think, to all of this sex.
As Eli finishes, I look away, embarrassed, from the poultry, then pull my dress back down over my thighs.
‘I’d better head to work,’ he says, no eye contact. I barely have the energy nor inclination to nod.
‘Door’s unlocked,’ I reply, and he slips out without another word.
I exhale and reach down to the floor to pick up my glass then take a sip of amaretto and Coke. It’s 7 a.m. but I haven’t been to bed yet so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Plus, it’s there and I’m thirsty. The door slams.
I rest my head back against the sofa, look around. Half-full glasses, Pinot Grigio bottles, cigarettes stubbed out into old chocolate dessert ramekins. Crisps, squashed into vinegary hundreds and thousands on a cushion. Student scenes; not what I had thought my life would be at thirty-two.
I turn the TV off and return my attention to the couple next door. I think they are doing it on their sofa, this couple, because intermittently the arm of their furniture is knocking up against the wall. Sorry, wrong pronoun: it’s knocking up against my wall.
2 (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Lexie (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
December
‘Tom, we need to do it,’ I say. I have a provocative way like that.
He’s sitting on the sofa in his T-shirt and pants, shovelling in a spoonful of porridge with one hand and scrolling through social media with the other. I pull off my pyjama top without waiting for an answer because the stick said to do it and we are slaves to the stick. Tom knows this is compulsory even though he has tired eyes, will likely now be late for work and really wants that porridge.
But he goes away tonight for three days, so it’s now or not at all. Not at all – when you’re thirty-three years old and two years into trying for a baby – is not an option.
Tom takes off his pants one-handed without removing his eyes from his phone. You learn, when trying to get pregnant, to multitask in ways you could never imagine.
I move the porridge to one side, being careful to rest it somewhere where it won’t get knocked off. This isn’t ‘I have to have you now’ sex so much as ‘I have to have you now because the stick says so but we’ve obviously got time to move the porridge to one side because no one wants to get sticky oats on the DFS sofa’ sex.
‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper breathily. ‘We can be quick so you’re not late.’
Tom swallows a mouthful of porridge and waits until the last second to give up scrolling. Half an hour after he leaves I am still lying on the sofa, knickerless, with my legs up against the wall, hoping – as I always hope despite increasing evidence of its uselessness – that this gravity-boosting move helps to propel things along.
I was pregnant, once. It never happened again.
Now, I think of pregnancy as less of a yes or no thing, rather as something more cumulative. A spectrum, on which I am in a segment marked Unequivocally Unpregnant.
My underwear goes back on gingerly. Don’t upset the potential embryo. Don’t disturb the sperm.
I stand up. I can hear my neighbour, Harriet, moving around next door, ticking across her wooden floor in heels, keys rattling, front door opening.
I know I should feel embarrassed in case she heard something just now, but I’m so focused on my only current goal that I can’t muster up the pride to care.
Plus, I swear that I just heard the sound of sex coming from her flat, too. Hot morning sex, I think, that they couldn’t resist even though they were meant to be at work. The opposite of the type that we were ticking off on a to-do list through the wall.
3 (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
Harriet (#uea5c512f-0dac-5648-bac0-082684e2058e)
December
‘I cannot believe how many chain restaurants are in this neighbourhood,’ says Iris, using a tone for the words ‘chain restaurants’ that most people reserve for ‘terrorism training centres for toddlers’ and grinning widely through her astute observation. ‘You know?’
I know.
I take a large glug of wine and feel my cheeks singe. She thinks where I live is embarrassing. She thinks I’m embarrassing. Everyone here thinks I’m embarrassing. I have been taking extra wine top-ups this evening and the room is starting to spin. I stare at her, try to bring her into focus.
Really, I think, Iris should be trying to bring me into focus. Because the truth is that she – they – have no idea who I am. What I’m capable of, what my real name is and who the real me is. What is at my core and what I did, nearly three years ago before they knew me.
Anyway, I think, flooded with rage suddenly as they speak around me: I love Islington. Take somebody socially awkward and place them in the heart of one of London’s busiest areas and they will adore you. They will never need to make small talk with the butcher. They won’t have a favourite restaurant because they have sixty within walking distance and when they do, it will change hands and become a pop-up Aperol bar anyway. You can know no one and that doesn’t mark you out as odd: it’s simply the way things are. You can have a secret, because you can hide away.
I recover from the insult quickly. A couple of drinks later, I am talking with unwarranted confidence about British political turmoil in the Eighties while intermittently chair dancing to Noughties pop music. I’m very drunk – I’m often very drunk – and I’m laughing. But it is an empty laugh because I don’t know the people I’m laughing with.
Next to me on my sofa is a man named Jim, ‘incredibly talented’, gay, talks about being an introvert often and loudly. Opposite me is Maya, who has been nursing her glass of Pinot Noir for the last two hours, despite my best attempts to top her up, loosen her up, liven her up, something her up. On the floor, barefoot and knees pulled to their chests, are Buddy and Iris, who live in Hackney and were probably christened Sarah and Pete and who rarely leave the house without making sure a copy of Proust is sticking out of their bags. A Christmas hat sits joylessly atop Iris’s shiny brunette bob.
I look around at all of them and try to feel something but there is nothing. Or there is worse than nothing; there is a low-level stomach ache that tells me I feel awkward and sad and that this gathering in my home is the opposite of friendship.
Merry fucking Christmas.
Last month, I met all of the people currently squeezed into my lounge for the first time. I am a songwriter, we are working on a musical together and I invited them over for Christmas drinks. For God’s sake, I even wheeled out a box of Christmas crackers.
I do this with everyone I work with. We usually rearrange around four times and people’s excuses are vague, but I am persistent. They all capitulate, eventually.
I’m still trying to find something that makes me stop craving the city’s anonymity; something that claims me as its own, despite four years passing since I left my native Chicago. I’m trying, desperately, to be social. But sometimes I think the truth is that when you carry a history like the one I carry, you can never truly grow close to people. It’s too risky. Too exposing.
I pull a cracker with Buddy and lose.
But still, I keep trying.
‘So, Harriet, are you seeing anyone?’ asks Introvert Jim, loudly, bolshily, butting in rudely to my thoughts.
I shake my head, top up my wine.
‘No, Jim,’ I slur, matching him for loudness as my drink glugs into the glass. I forget to offer a top-up to anybody else. ‘I am single.’
Oh, I am very, very, very much single. Unhappily single. I am not content being me. I’m not joyous in my own company. I am awkward and I make terrible decisions and I want another half to make 50 per cent less me. I aim to dilute myself, like a cordial.
‘Karaoke!’ I say, fuelled by wine and the panic that people may leave, and Iris and Buddy find it ironic enough – like the Christmas hats – to join in. Maya slips into her denim jacket and slopes off, giving me a pitying look that sets a flare off inside me as she says goodbye. Jim can be persuaded once I find him a dusty bottle of tequila for a shot.
These colleagues may not be an immediate solution to my solitude, but perhaps one day it will come in the form of a man who one of them knows.
Plus my parties, alcohol-fuelled as they are, rarely begin and end at my colleagues.
It happens, always, as it is happening tonight. The door is propped open so that my guests can pop downstairs for cigarettes. I live next to the elevator and what I never envisaged – given how antisocial my neighbours are in daylight – is that late at night, people started coming in the other direction, too. Peering in to see what’s happening. Hearing a song that they like. Grabbing a beer.
So it could be one of those, too; an unknown neighbour who comes for the alcohol but stays for me. I might not be perfect, but I have things to offer. Enough to hope that one day, someone might invite me back, might claim me.
There are hundreds of flats in our tall, imposing tower block, and most of them are inhabited by men and women in their twenties and thirties who don’t have children and can get drunk on Tuesdays without much consequence beyond a hangover they have to hide under carbs the next day at their desk. If they live here even as renters then they are mostly paid well and work hard for long hours, so that their evenings take on a desperate quality. Enjoy it, make the most of it, drink it, snort it before you’re back in a meeting at 8 a.m.
The building, with its modern feel, feels to me like it aids this. The sparse, airy lobby is an anonymous retreat, painted head to toe in magnolia with just a desk for the concierge and a sole plant that never wilts but never grows. Is it fake? When I stare at it, I can’t tell. I wonder if people ask the same thing about me.
In the lobby is an unplaceable but specific scent that never alters. The temperature’s always exactly what you want it to be, whatever the season.
At times it reminds me of an airport. People pass through, collect their parcels, take off in the elevator up to the eighth floor, and there are so many flats that you can easily never see them again. Occasionally, it reminds me of somewhere darker: of the psychiatric hospital where I used to be a patient. A coincidence? Maybe this is what I want from a home, I think. Utter sterility.
Now, my neighbours traipse into my home, three, four, every half-hour. They are on their way back from their work drinks or their dinners and they stick their hazy heads in to see what’s happening. Someone – me, most likely – shoves a wine glass into their hand and the next minute it is 1 a.m., and a city banker in his early twenties who I’ve never seen before is kissing Chantal from the fifth floor and vowing to move with her to a hippy commune in Bali. Chantal, like me, is a rare exception in this building to the city-banker rule, but I’ll get to that in a minute. By day, my neighbours are antisocial and aloof; by night, they are debauched and overfamiliar, revelling in their freedom. Happy mediums are not what we do in Zone One.
Did I make an idiot of myself? Chantal will message tomorrow, inevitably.
The message will come from her sofa, where she lies every day thinking about retraining as a masseuse. Chantal was made redundant from her job in marketing a year ago and from a distance, it is clear that she is in a deep depression, which isn’t helped by the fact that her rich parents pay for her to lie still and be sad. She has no motivation to move. But at 1 a.m. Chantal is shining, lit by lamplight and Prosecco. At 1 a.m., Chantal and I are something approaching friends. At 1 p.m., we exchange awkward chat in the preprepared aisle in Waitrose.
‘I’d better head to …’ she will mutter, gesturing vaguely at some bread, or a door, or anywhere.
‘Yeah, I’d better get on, too,’ I’ll concur urgently before ambling back to my sofa.
But meeting somebody is a numbers game, that’s what my mom would say if we still spoke. If it wasn’t impossible for us to speak, after what I did. It’s a numbers game and I’m following that policy. Let the strangers in. Keep them coming.
The nights begin with wine offered politely and with small talk. And then they descend into strangers and a blurry chaos I spend most of the next day clearing up. It’s worth it, though – the mess is comforting. It gives me a purpose.
Again, tonight, my flat is full of unknown or barely known neighbours and the last of my colleagues who are heading home now at 2 a.m., slurring. As they wait for the elevator outside my flat I hear them through the door that’s been left, as ever, temptingly ajar.
‘She’s just a bit … much, you know?’ says Iris, her voice loud because she is drunk on the alcohol that I just gave her, for free, while she hung out in my home. She is talking about me.
Buddy concurs, as the world always has concurred on this. I’m a bit … much. I’m not quite the right amount. Not on target. Not the level of person you would ideally want. If I were a recipe ingredient, you’d tip a portion of me out, or balance me with salt. As I’m a person, I can’t be amended, so I remain a bit … much.
I sit against the wall behind the door listening to the rest of their thirty-second conversation on the topic of me before the elevator announces itself loudly. An hour later, when everybody else leaves, everything is quiet, and I hear a TV being switched off next door and the soft, kind padding of slippers on laminate floor.
I say goodbye to my next-door neighbour, Lexie, in my head. She never turns up at my parties, but I know her name because I have heard her boyfriend say it through the wall. And then I lie down on the sofa, mascara on the cushion from the start of tears that will go on and on and on until the moment that I finally fall asleep.
4 (#ulink_929401df-75a0-5638-892d-298767e394a4)
Lexie (#ulink_929401df-75a0-5638-892d-298767e394a4)
December
I’m typing and deleting and at that moment, Harriet starts singing in a children’s TV presenter voice that is too loud, surely, to be normal. Was other people’s noise this irritating when I worked in an office? I’ve always loved sound; the radio on in the background, talking to friends over TV shows. Slowly though, I think, all the rules of me are changing. I throw a cushion at the wall.
I uncurl my legs from the sofa then head for the kitchen because I’ve been thinking about the flapjacks in the cupboard all morning.
I look down at myself, bottom half shrouded in Tom’s pyjamas. My own strain at the waist too much now to be comfortable.
I eat the flapjack. And then I lie back on the sofa and think. Is it right that Harriet can get to me so much? Is it normal? My relationship with my next-door neighbour, to anyone living in a place that isn’t a vast Central London contemporary apartment block with a concierge service that takes delivery of your online orders and helps out the lost Deliveroo driver roaming hundreds of identical corridors with a pad thai, would sound bizarre.
I know more about her existence than I know about most of my friends’. We are closely entwined. She is by far the person I spend most time with. I know about her boozy parties with their Prosecco glugged into friends’ glasses as they try to resist and go home but they can’t – they can’t because they’re having too much fun.
I know about Harriet’s love for karaoke as her friends laugh and groan that they have work tomorrow. But then the intro kicks in and they stay and there is whooping. More friends join them. The joy multiplies. And there is always so much noise.
Now, the piano. I put pillows over both of my ears, but her sounds – always there, competing against our quiet home – are impossible to drown out.
Harriet writes songs for musicals that thousands of people hum on the bus home from the West End. She’s interviewed regularly for industry websites, sounding intimidating-smart. She is successful and rich, I presume, if she lives here. In this building, Tom and I are the exceptions with our normal salaries, and we can only be here because Tom’s parents own our flat and they’ve let us rent it for way below market value.
I realise I’m googling her again. I look at the picture of Harriet on her professional website. She is tall, striking and handsome and she looks powerful. I like her mouth. I envy her smooth, silky blonde hair. At school, she was undoubtedly the popular girl; a person who wouldn’t have sought me out as a friend as I battled my fringe of frizz and Play-Doh thighs.
In her flat, which doubles as a studio, Harriet writes and rewrites lines, her bare foot on the pedal of her piano; painted, unchipped fingernails flicking up and down before she scribbles down what she’s created. Harriet is a creator, she creates, she is creative. Purposeful, she is often so lost in her work that she forgets her plans and is late as she dashes to meet friends for brunch. She picks up flowers at Columbia Road, to sit on top of her piano and make a bright home even more colourful. She knows her own mind and tastes, never decorating her flat with something generic from a chain store, and to men, she is the whole package: smart, buckets brimming full of fun and utterly gorgeous.
Oh, I’ve never met her, of course.
I saw her once getting out of the lift when I had taken the stairs during a low-level fitness drive. I’ve found her mail in our postbox and shoved it into hers, and sometimes, like now, I Google her name. And yet I feel, somehow, like I know her.
From my home-office, aka the sofa next to the wall, I see my next-door neighbour, Harriet’s, existence happening, and it is plump and full and bursting.
Meanwhile, I have been here for three hours now with the start of back pain, flapjack on my chin and only seven sentences of my 2,000-word copywriting project on the page.
I wipe crumbs from my lap. I am no Harriet.
Just getting on the tube, says Tom’s text, later. Curry?
As I reply, I notice the stain on my – his – pyjamas and mean to change, but then I get distracted looking at the Thai menu.
Curry is bad. Curry means my size 12 jeans will dig into my skin. Curry means that we are unlikely to have sex tonight, when we should be doing it any chance we get.
Our impromptu and erotic sofa sex didn’t reap rewards and now almost a month has passed.
My ovulation sticks don’t say we’re in the window yet, but Great Doctor Google, alongside freaking me out about everything I do, have ever done and will ever do in my life, suggested that the more, the better is currently on-trend in medical policy. The idea that there is an ‘on-trend’ in medical policy is a worry if I think about it, so I don’t and instead choose my side dishes. I add duck spring rolls to a list of things I worry are stopping me from getting pregnant. They have many, many companions on that list.
In reality, we have no idea yet why I’m not pregnant. We have no idea why I got pregnant once, miscarried, and why it never happened again. And why, two years later, we are still static, waiting to move on and realising that we were so sure that I would get pregnant again, we never even properly grieved.
With every month that passes, anxiety wraps itself around me more tightly as I convince myself that it’s my fault. Despite trying everything. Despite following Tom, who works away sometimes making TV documentaries, around the country to have sex at the right time. Despite once buying a sexy nightie from Figleaves lingerie and staying in a Travelodge in Hull for a whole bloody week.
But beating myself up is something that’s been happening more lately, increasing alongside calories and sleeping as I do other things less: see friends, pluck my eyebrows, wear clothing items without an elasticated waistband. Laugh.
Through the wall, to snap me out of my internal chatter, comes Harriet. She slams her piano in frustration and then I hear a phone ring.
‘Yeah?’ she says, brusque, like people who are busy do. I am not even busy in this, the week before Christmas, the busiest week there is.
It must be a delivery driver, because ten seconds later I hear her buzz someone up and answer the door, shrieking about the beauty of the flowers. An early Christmas present? From a boyfriend? A friend? Her mum?
I peel myself away from the wall and nestle into the sofa. I’m home so much now that I work for myself that Harriet constitutes a concerning amount of my human interaction.
I picture her in heels, phone snuggling into her palm, hopping into her taxi, running out to dinner, to lates at a gallery, to taste potent festive cocktails. And I’m reminded of the old me, the me before fertility worries happened and sprawled over my life.
I shuffle to our bedroom in my worn-out slipper boots and rummage around in the wardrobe until I find the box I’m looking for. It is, as they always are, an old shoe box, full of photos that were supposed to be filed away in albums that were never bought and now live sandwiched between thank-you cards and badges from hen dos and birthday invites and leaving cards filled with in-jokes and old ticket stubs.
Somewhere along the line I stopped being this person who inspired people to turn cards around and write up the sides, who brought on exclamation marks and capital letters and leading parentheses.
I picture myself in my old job at a women’s magazine, where I had a reputation for always coming up with the best interview ideas.
‘Lexie will nail it,’ people would say, and I had the confidence to agree. I shared in-jokes, suggested new places for lunch. And then I shrunk. Now, as people sing Christmas songs outside my window and eat their fifth turkey roast of the month, I am alone, again, waiting.
I don’t know how life became this limited little space. I don’t know when I crammed myself into a box that was only just big enough for me, because I used to be a Harriet, too. And I am envious.
5 (#ulink_85853a39-7281-5e59-8079-bc84214317fc)
Harriet (#ulink_85853a39-7281-5e59-8079-bc84214317fc)
December
I’m halfway to a work Christmas meal – the kind where I preordered my soup, turkey, tiramisu in October – when I realise that I’ve forgotten my phone and have to head back to the flat.
I nearly trip when I get off the bus, swear under my breath.
I’m too clumsy and tall for these heels, and I make a note to switch them for sneakers when I get home, despite the fact that I will never rock a trainer in the breezy way I’ve seen other girls do – in the way Iris does – that bares a chic, non-icy ankle. How are the ankles of all of these people not freezing?
On me, a sneaker–jeans combo will look as though it belongs on an awkward thirteen-year-old on a school trip, not a thirty-something who should have mastered her classic look by now. I look down at myself: far from it.
I swipe my fob against the screen and pull the door to just as someone is getting in the elevator. I curse my timing, because there is an unwritten code in this building that no one shares elevators, when I notice the man who has beaten me to it.
His hair is dark, curly, wildly untamed. He shoves it impatiently out of his eyes with each hand, alternately.
And I breathe like I am due to jump out of a plane in two seconds because an alarm bell has gone off and is drowning out everything else.
It’s not just this man’s hair. It’s his dark eyes, it’s the hunching of his shoulders as he heaves his large rucksack onto his back and puts a takeout food bag on the floor. It’s the sigh he does, so internal for an external noise. It’s his long legs and his straight jeans and it’s his nose, slightly too Roman for most but not for me.
This man and my ex-fiancé, Luke, who used to live here in this flat and get in this elevator with me, do not share a passing resemblance. Instead, they are doubles. Identical. Interchangeable.
For once, I climb the stairs and slam the door of my flat behind me. But like the Thai spices, the man from the elevator has crept in anyway. I know – rationally, I know – that it wasn’t Luke, that it couldn’t be Luke, that my ex-fiancé isn’t here, in London, clutching his takeout in the elevator of my building. That after what happened, his former home is the last place he would ever come. But there is a part of my brain that the message hasn’t reached and that’s the part that is making my heart hammer into my chest, surely audible through the wall to next door, I think, as I realise I am leaning against it. I gasp for air.
After a few seconds I hear Lexie, her tiny voice quiet, gentle, the opposite of my own. A northern lilt, I sometimes think, though English accents are still not my forte.
‘Tom?’ she asks, raising her voice to carry into the kitchen. ‘Can you bring me a …’
But the end of the sentence falls away. As ever, there’s just enough wall between us to mask life’s detail.
But Tom. Not Luke, Tom. Tom from next door. I must remember that, when my heart starts racing, when my mind starts racing and at 4 a.m. Especially at 4 a.m. I pour a glass of wine, down it and – forgetting to switch my shoes – kick the generic flowers that were delivered from a generic former colleague to say a generic thank you out of the way and head out with my phone, trying to fight a feeling that Lexie from next door has stolen my Luke. That Lexie from next door has stolen my fucking life.
6 (#ulink_debc7528-ed02-5145-80fa-3d79218435a9)
Lexie (#ulink_debc7528-ed02-5145-80fa-3d79218435a9)
December
‘I miss Islington,’ sighs Anais as I flick the kettle on and she yanks off a tan Chelsea boot in the hall behind me. ‘Bloody Clapton.’
I’ve known she was coming round for a week now – she had a Christmas lunch around the corner – but still I had run around flustered for five minutes before she arrived. Endeavouring to put on eyeliner, remember how real people (I haven’t really considered myself to be one of those since I started working from home) dress and shove piles of post into drawers. Tom’s been away for a week now. I am flailing.
‘Remember why you live in Clapton, though,’ I say, brandishing a mint tea box and something ridiculously expensive from Planet Organic at her, and she nods to the latter, of course, because we are middle-class Londoners. ‘You own your place. No chucking your money away on rent.’ I sigh. ‘We’ll be here forever, because Tom’s dad will never put up the rent and we’ll never get anything better so we’ll never have the motivation to get a mortgage.’
It’s not just Anais; I say this to everyone, all the time. It’s my only response to my self-consciousness over how lucky we are to have moved this year into a Central London flat that has its very own swimming pool in the basement.
It’s still such a surprise to me, too; my own parents have barely lent me twenty pounds in my life – they’re of the ‘learn the value of money’ school of parenting. I’ve been encouraged to be utterly independent. Which makes this whole scenario pretty ironic.
Now, for less rent than my friends pay in Zone Six hellholes, I live somewhere where there is no paint chipped in the communal areas but walls that are freshly covered in high-end magnolia once a year. Where cleaners spirit away dead flies or discarded ticket stubs with the speed of a five-star hotel and then fling the windows open so that the feeling is hospital sterility. Where every type of night and day life we could need is in walking distance.
Right now, Islington’s anonymity soothes me. I walk out of my flat with nowhere marked out as my final destination and I wander up the high street past hipster thirty-somethings with children dressed in fifty-pound jumpers on scooters. At weekends, I clamber onto the bookshop on the barge on the canal, picking out piles of worn, second-hand classics. I smell the brunch that’s being eaten in seven-degree cold on the pavement like we are in Madrid in July and I know that that wouldn’t happen anywhere else in this country, but does here, because we are in a bubble. Nothing is real. Nothing gets inside.
Round here, CEOs play tennis at Highbury Fields with their friends like they are fifteen. In summer, I watch thirty-somethings charging around a rounders circle with friends. At the pub, there will be no locals but there will always be someone who is twenty-two and excited, who has just discovered that they can get drunk on a Monday and eat an assortment of crisps for dinner without anyone telling them otherwise.
On sunny evenings, we drink gin and tonics in overpopulated beer gardens that spill onto pavements. For Christmas, I have bought everything I need within the radius of a ten-minute walk from my flat. We are spoilt children and I adore it. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever known before.
But by repeating my mortgage conversation on loop, it’s become true to me. I’ve started to care about ownership and getting my hands on an enormous loan that will never be paid off. Whatever I had, it turns out, I would look over my shoulder to see what someone else had and want it, too. This is me. Perhaps it is everyone.
And there are downsides to life in this part of London.
We’re transient because we know this isn’t where we will settle.
It does happen: I look up at the family houses that surround Highbury Fields and like everyone, I wonder who could possibly have that life, that real life, living here beyond their thirties and becoming a family here, becoming old. But there are bins outside, spilling out with pizza boxes and wine bottles and toilet roll holders and nappies. It’s real.
Most of us, though, will never be the 0.000001 per cent with their pizza boxes. If you’re thirty-nine, Islington looks at you sadly like you’ve stayed at the party a little too long. Perhaps you could have a quick Sunday afternoon picnic on the green on your way out but then yes, it willbe time for you to head off to the suburbs.
Anais is doing just that and building a life. Where she goes to sleep, there are old food markets and boozers and there are people who have lived there forever, who sell vegetables loudly and look at you blankly when you talk about brunch. There are new people, sure, but it’s not like here. Here, heritage ebbs away every time a greengrocer’s becomes a gin bar and a rental notice goes up in the window of the old pub. We are all to blame: I spend Sundays strolling in between market stalls selling lockets and trinkets and soaking up the feeling of it all, and then I spend my money in Waitrose. I am part of the problem. I am at its heart.
‘Mortgages are overrated and I have no idea why everyone is so obsessed with them,’ Anais says as she rummages in her bag for the box of brownies she’s brought with her. ‘Very much like babies.’
I bristle. She puts the brownies on the side.
‘Salted caramel,’ I say, reading the label and trying to distract myself from the irritation that’s surging through me over her flippancy. ‘Thanks.’
Since we were at university together, Anais has been vehemently opposed to procreating and didn’t change her mind even when she met Rafael. He’s Spanish; she’s Barbadian. If you were the kind of person who wheeled out terrible clichés, you’d tell them they’d make beautiful babies.
I’m not and I don’t. If struggling to conceive has any upsides, it’s taught me emotional intelligence. I make promises to myself that whatever happens, I will never be one of those people who don’t consider for one second that by proffering their opinions on your position on having children, they might have just ruined your whole week. You don’t know. You never know.
Anais and I did our journalism postgraduate course together and while the rest of us only manage yearly get-togethers, Anais and I are still proper friends. Her: a political editor for a broadsheet. Me: a copywriter for various dull brands who pay me to produce words about their products. I’m currently writing instructions for a washing machine. This isn’t how I saw it going when I turned up ten years ago for my first day at university, clutching a copy of Empire magazine and declaring my intentions of becoming a film critic.
But I left my last job at a magazine because I returned home four nights out of five stressed and panicked about something that had happened to do with internal politics. The sort that at the time seem like the centre of the universe and really are part of some distant solar system that no one should care about, ever.
And, mostly, because Tom and I had been trying for a baby for two years and, since the miscarriage, nothing else had happened. I wanted to alter something. I wanted to relax, get some work-life balance and go to Pilates at 2 p.m. if I fancied it. The problem was that I rarely fancied it. The problem was that being at home alone all day without the distraction of those internal politics and a 10 a.m. meeting to prep for left me depressed and so anxious that a two-minute walk to the post office felt far beyond me. I zoned in obsessively on the absence of a baby. As time went on I grieved more, not less, for that baby who didn’t make it. I’m not saying that leaving my job was the wrong decision. But it certainly hasn’t been a quick fix.
‘It’s been such a ridiculous run-up to Christmas at our place,’ Anais says, taking her tea from me as she frames herself, beautiful, in the entrance to the kitchen. ‘I’m still so jealous of you working for yourself.’
And I look down at my one Official Seeing People outfit, pulled on two minutes before she arrived and to be discarded one minute after she leaves, and glance at her phone on the side, lighting up with messages and urgency, and I think sure, Anais, sure.
‘Working from home, all that flexibility.’
Then she comes up with a very specific example of this.
‘You can bake a potato while you work.’
That’s it. That’s what I was after when I held that copy of Empire. Baked potatoes. While I work.
‘You can go for a run at 3 p.m.’
Because I do. Often.
She pads in her tights through to the living room.
‘Jesus, what the hell is that noise?’ she says as she sips her tea. Something with fennel.
I head back to the kitchen.
‘Oh, just Harriet!’ I yell as I press my own teabag against the side of the mug and fish it out. I decant the brownies onto a plate then I follow her in and laugh, because she is stood, ear pressed to the wall, to listen to Harriet’s latest composition involving chickens and a farm.
‘Get away from there,’ I stage-whisper, even though we both know she probably can’t hear us over that level of farmyard-based noise. There is a chicken impression, in rhythmic form. We are folded, creased, with laughter.
When we calm down, Anais sits, doing a noiseless impression of someone earnestly singing an opera as she curls her feet under her on the sofa.
She leans and takes a brownie from the plate that is sat on our tiny coffee table.
‘Does she do that all the time?’ she asks.
I think about it.
Suddenly it seems weird that I have started to think this is so normal, this woman singing loudly about love, dreams, emotions and chickens. I hear her pound the piano in frustration. I hear her ARRRGGGHH out loud when something doesn’t go well. And I live alongside it, like her cellmate.
‘Yeah, pretty much. There you go, another downside of our Islington life. Successful music writers move in next door and sing weird songs about farmyard animals.’
We laugh, a lot, but then there is a lull.
‘So, how are you?’ I ask.
As I eat my brownie, she tells me about the new app Rafael just designed, a Korean place they’d tried at the weekend and the trip to Mexico they’ve just booked. And then, when I can’t stop her any longer with my questions, questions, questions, she asks me the dreaded one from her side: ‘How about you – any news?’
I mime a full mouth and take a second.
It’s loaded, that question, once you get into your thirties. It means ‘Are you getting married, having a baby, buying a house? Do you have an awesome, game-changing new job that pays you so much money you can buy in Notting Hill?’ And if you don’t, if none of those things exist, you feel like you have failed at news. Sometimes I think I want a baby partly so I can succeed at news.
‘Not really,’ I say before spinning some mundane work and a trip to the theatre with Tom’s parents into news.
Because you can’t actually have no news. We must be busy and rammed and manic and constantly doing, and no news isn’t allowed. I dust brownie crumbs off my chin and onto a plate.
After Anais leaves I change back into my – Tom’s - pyjamas and consider why I didn’t speak to her about The Baby Thing.
Every time we’ve done this and I’ve omitted it, I’ve surprised myself. Because that is my news. That’s my story. Anais is my friend and I am a sharer. And not mentioning it means I have a low level of nausea about the unknown elephant in the room every time we meet. I didn’t even tell her about my miscarriage. Anais, my best friend, doesn’t know that I was pregnant. Doesn’t know about the biggest thing that ever happened to me. That seems crazy now but at the time I had hoped it would be a footnote to some good news, to the best news.
Not telling Anais what is going on in my head also means that we are drifting. I know it and she knows it; I can feel the chasm getting wider but I can’t do what I need to do to close it. So why?
I come to this conclusion: once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back. Once you say you’re trying, that’s your thing. That’s the ‘news’ they mean. That’s the black cloud over my head that everyone will see.
‘Are you okay?’ Anais asked into my ear as she left, hugging me close. ‘You seem …’
But I avoided her eyes, shrugging out of our cuddle and seeing her out with some paint-by-numbers thirty-something rambling about a busy week and work worries.
I eat the rest of the brownies, alone, leaning over the kitchen sink. It’s a while before I hear from Anais again; definitely longer than normal.
7 (#ulink_70ed7c53-1573-557f-b58a-169266c38325)
Harriet (#ulink_70ed7c53-1573-557f-b58a-169266c38325)
December
Suddenly, there is a loud giggle from next door that makes me jump. It’s not Lexie, it’s a woman who is less softly spoken, and I can hear Lexie replying, louder than normal to match her friend, and laughing heartily.
Tom has been away for a few days now, I think, so Lexie’s spending some time with the rest of the people in her life. I am irked at her greed. A beautiful boyfriend who brings her curry and loves her and friends, proper friends, who share in-jokes with her and pop round for tea. Does this really happen?
‘Just Harriet,’ she shouts as I stop playing my piano for a second and jolt.
It is the incongruity of my name, heard through the wall where I thought that I did not exist. But like they exist to me, I exist to them. I look down and see my hand shaking. The spell is broken and I can’t even focus on my piano.
Then they laugh again, loudly and together.
Through the wall, I am a person. They acknowledge me. They speak about me. They laugh at me. If there’s one thing I can’t take, Lexie, it’s people laughing at me.
My heart is pounding.
It’s been three days since I saw Tom/Luke getting into the lift with his curry. The hair. The shoulders. That nose. I shiver. I can’t sleep and I’m behind on a deadline for the score on a children’s musical. The guy I am working for is getting twitchy and my usual desire to impress has deserted me. I don’t care. I am focused on Lexie. I feel a surge of rage.
I can’t even get it together to put the generic flowers in a generic vase. They finally made it off the floor, but they are limp now, lying on the table in their plastic, begging for a drink like a neglected puppy. What can I say? I’m not one of life’s nurturers.
All I can do is Google. It starts innocently enough but then, of course, I search for Luke, even though I know that online he manages not to exist, in case the woman he was supposed to spend his life with sees news of a job promotion or the gig he went to last night.
I Google again.
Luke Miller, Chicago. Luke Miller, media companies. Nothing.
I slam my head back against the sofa and consider what he thinks I would do if I found him. See a social media food shot and book a flight to New York to queue up outside the diner where it was taken, in the hope that he came back for another rare burger and this time, I snared him? Or something worse? Something like last time.
I bang my laptop shut and sit, ruminating.
I should have been married now. Perhaps I’d have a baby, asleep in an upstairs cot somewhere in Hertfordshire. Or maybe Luke would have fetched my backpack and told me we were off, to travel around Europe. We’d come as far as the UK together from the US already, and we might have gone for a year of eating Comté cheese in France and devouring art in Barcelona. Whatever he had wanted, obviously. That’s how it had worked.
I look down suddenly, realise I’m in pain. My nails have been digging so deeply into my hand that there is blood; I have pulled off cuticles and left skin red raw. It throws me. I didn’t notice the harm being caused. I rarely do.
Perhaps Luke would still be all about London. It would only have been four years and he adored it here. We earned good money, me as a songwriter for musicals and TV shows, and Luke in media sales. We – well, he – had a huge circle of friends. Thursday nights I would beg to come along to his work drinks in a fancy hotel bar near The Strand. Occasionally, he gave in.
There are tears now, threatening to jump.
Weekends, thankfully, were usually more private. We’d take our hangovers for chilly walks up Primrose Hill, Luke’s sensitive teeth hurting from the cold and both of our ears pinching until we found a pub to serve us tea in front of a fire.
We’d defrost, pull off hats, flick through the supplements. I’d pretend to lose at Scrabble to avoid a row. I’d pet the spaniel across the bar and fantasise about a future full of dogs, and then Luke would frown and point out all the reasons why pets were a terrible idea. I’d realise quickly, of course, that he was right.
‘Weren’t you thinking of getting a pet?’ asked my mom one day on the phone.
‘Luke doesn’t think it’s a good idea,’ I said, forgetting to edit.
‘But what do you think, Harriet?’ she said, gently but firmly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re so caught up in what Luke wants that you forget to ask yourself that these days.’
I hung up. Started calling less often.
In my version of us in the future, I would be better, too. The sort of person who didn’t forget I was supposed to be dieting and order chips, and not the sort of person who wears the wrong-shaped jeans and has a haircut that ‘seriously, you’ve had since 2003’. Thanks, Luke.
I am crying now, unstoppable. In February this year, one year after we got engaged, Luke left me.
I take out some nail scissors and start snipping at the ends of my long, dull blonde hair before realising what I’m doing with a jolt and going back to work. Trying to go back to work.
I Google Lexie again and this time I click the ‘images’ tab. It’s not like searching for Luke. Searching for Lexie gives you all kinds of information. She isn’t a blogger showing off her life but she does elicit a hundred or so pictures, even for the general public, of which, I suppose – for now – I am still a part.
Lexie lying propped up on her elbow on a beach with her giant, wild, curly brunette hair loose around brown shoulders. Lexie at a laptop, absorbed in her words with a fresh coffee next to her and a Jo Malone candle lit on her immaculate desk. I roll my eyes.
A selfie of Lexie and Tom next to a Christmas tree in their flat. I peer at that one for longer, trying to work out where they are in the mirror image of my home; analysing the small amount of background that I can see.
Eventually, I move on. There’s a picture of Lexie in heels and a pencil skirt with professionally done make-up looking steadfastly without smiling to the camera, one hand on a beautifully curved hip.
She looks incredible; a world away from the freckled girl on the beach or the Lexie in front of the Christmas tree. Online, Lexie is a changeling Barbie to me, and this is the Going Out version.
She goes out with confidence, she goes out with good hair, she goes out with Tom. There are pictures of her throwing her head back and laughing with friends, drinking bright pink cocktails on roof terraces and showing off tanned legs on holiday. She clutches her nephew close as he leans up to kiss her. Holds a mug like it is a tiny puppy with both hands in front of a raging wood burner. There is a theme: in all of these pictures Lexie looks loved, in-love and happy. Not tense. Not nervous. Not waiting for something to go wrong. Lucky fucking Lexie.
I slam the piano lid shut and go back to bed, forgetting, again, to drink some water. And I dream of Lexie, surrounded by her friends, smirking at me and laughing.
8 (#ulink_0870ec94-6852-513b-8934-b86d4f0f2a95)
Lexie (#ulink_0870ec94-6852-513b-8934-b86d4f0f2a95)
December
I start looking up everyone I know who could potentially be pregnant and because this is the reality of what constitutes life in your thirties, half of them are rocking baby-on-board badges and bump selfies.
I Google the stats on getting pregnant after two years at my age and it’s depressing, so I read about all the things I shouldn’t be eating, doing, drinking, thinking and realise I am eating, doing, drinking and thinking most of them.
I shovel in eight chocolates that I’ve just hung up on the tree and hate myself, then Tom puts his keys in the door and it’s obvious what’s about to happen. Instead of immersing myself in my Maya Angelou as planned, I’ve spent the last hour in a Facebook tunnel of pregnancy announcements and baby pictures.
I pick a fight. I don’t want a hug, I want to shout and for someone to make that legitimate.
‘Oh, there’s no dinner,’ he says, looking around as though he expected a steak and ale pie to rise from the ashes of the wooden spoon holder. Excuse provided.
‘What does that mean?’ I bite. ‘I’m so pathetic that you come back from your exciting life and all I should have been doing is rolling pastry?’
He cuts me off with a hand in the air.
‘I wasn’t being a dick, I just thought you mentioned pasta on a text earlier.’
Oh crap, I did mention pasta on a text earlier.
‘So nothing is allowed to come up in my life? Nothing is allowed to happen? As it goes, I got some last-minute work and I’ve been chained to my laptop since, Tom, so no – I haven’t had much time to make pasta …’
There was no last-minute work. If I was chained to my laptop, it’s because I wanted to see what social media thought about the women on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. To torture myself with the bump pictures.
But I miss it, the kind of day I’m pretending I’ve had. That feeling of being important and needed and relied upon. Even the stress of it is superior, a far more glamorous stress than this one with its leggings and its ovulation sticks and its cheap festive chocolate.
‘I do have a career, I do have a life.’
He runs his hand through his perpetually unkempt curls before pulling his jumper over his head.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ he says, undoing the belt on his jeans as he heads, sad-shouldered, out of the door. Then he turns around and kisses me on the forehead, and I’m reminded how much he’s started doing this, making allowances because we’re not equals any more. I’m the victim; he’s the carer. He impresses in meetings; I sit at home googling ‘ovarian reserve’ and eating biscuits.
I bite my tongue so I don’t cry until I hear the shower start, then I sit on the sofa and sob hot, heartbroken tears because he still loves me even though I don’t feel much but disdain towards me any more.
I hear Classic FM turn on next door and feel the redness in my cheeks burn deeper. She must have heard that, Harriet, me shouting, Tom’s pity, the tears that Tom – door closed on his long shower – will never know about.
I don’t care if she hears us have sex, but I care deeply if she hears me cry. This is far more exposing.
I google Harriet again, through blurred vision. I stare at pictures of her on Twitter looking statuesque and confident as she poses with colleagues at the opening of a musical. I see her toasting it with a glass of champagne. I think of my old life when I would post similarly glamorous pictures. Now, Tom inevitably finds me here when he gets in, pyjamas and stains, unwashed face and lethargy. I look at Harriet again and think how it would be impossible for me to do those types of things now; I am not capable. I am not the right shape to fit into those places.
Harriet stares back at me from my screen. There’s an oddness about London life that means you can live here, centimetres from another person, and never know them and that is okay.
Once, I cried on the bus after a bad day at work and a purple-haired South African woman with maternal eyes offered me a tissue.
It took me by surprise. My own mum isn’t maternal. She’s brusque and pragmatic and would have told me to get on with it – ‘that’s simply what the working world is like, Lexie’ – as I pined for maternal coddling.
But when it actually came? I was horrified. There’s supposed to be an imaginary wall around you in this city and it had been knocked down. And now I have the same feeling. I listen to Harriet hum along to Beethoven and think of her, hearing my sad life and wondering about me. Why doesn’t she go out? Why do they never have parties? Why does he put up with her?
This, now, is too intimate.
9 (#ulink_d6567f01-d6be-5a34-b6bd-0dddafb33e1b)
Harriet (#ulink_d6567f01-d6be-5a34-b6bd-0dddafb33e1b)
December
I hear him come in and I turn on the radio to listen to glib Christmas hits, because hearing this man who is Luke, really, tell Lexie next door that he loves her is too much tonight, when I’ve not slept for a week thinking about the ex-fiancé who persuaded me to emigrate then abandoned me. Thinking about the fact that the Luke who used to live here, in my flat, has gone. About how there is another Luke who lives next door and a woman he lives there with, one who has taken my life and is enjoying it, more happily, more successfully than I ever could.
Tom, this other Luke, is still in his relationship; still wants to be there. I hear him laughing. I hear him being content. Unlike my Luke, this Luke has decided that this is enough for him. Lexie is enough for him. I lean against the wall and dig my nails into it so firmly that I chip the paint, and it’s only then that I realise what I am doing. Clawing my way to this other Luke, literally.
Through the wall, Tom and Lexie are Luke and I, a couple, together. And on the other side is new me, single, the remnants of what is left of a couple, not even half but maybe a quarter. I am too much, but then in other ways, I am not enough.
And then, my bad mood is exacerbated when I see an email from my brother, David, ‘checking in’. As usual, I suspect it was sent at the behest of my parents, making sure that I was alive. And, really, that anyone who was around me was alive. So, my girlfriend, Sadie, and I have bought a house, it reads, as though we caught up last week, as if I know who Sadie is.
Sleep has been difficult lately and I am suddenly exhausted, my eyes blurring at the screen enough to make me feel nauseous.
‘How can I not know who Sadie is?’ I say out loud and am shocked at the sudden noise.
I picture David, sitting on my bed as I packed around him to move to London. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he mumbled, staring at the floor, and I looked at this teenage boy masquerading as a six-foot-tall grown-up who went to work every day and rented a house. I touched his blond surfer hair gently then kissed his head. It still blew my mind that he was no longer a child.
Luke was sitting on the floor, staring at his phone. He looked up, irritated that this was taking so long but mostly that this was taking so much emotion.
‘Come and see us,’ I told David, working hard on not crying, or on being distracted by Luke. Focusing all of my energy on a grin. ‘We can go to gigs in Camden or take a trip to Paris for the weekend.’
David looked at Luke, who gave him a distant smile.
‘We’ll hook you up with some hot British girls,’ Luke said, eyes already back on his phone. ‘If that’s what will persuade you.’
I zipped up a suitcase.
Luke had loaded his own cases the week before, everything ironed and packed with precision. He showed no emotion – as he didn’t about most things – at leaving our life. He was matter-of-fact about it. Except for the long monologues about the job he already had and the myriad career benefits.
‘I can really go somewhere in work when we’re in London,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to make so much money.’
I cared more about my career than he did, there could be no doubt about that. I earned more too, though we never mentioned it. But I was rushed into the move before I could find work and Luke never once asked what my own thoughts were on London’s career opportunities.
I left the conversation alone. It was easier that way.
It was me who was most apprehensive about leaving my family, favourite takeout places and our life.
But Luke wanted it and Luke came first. Luke was more attractive than me, cooler than me, better than me. I would have chased Luke anywhere he went uninvited but incredibly I received invites. He wanted to move to the UK; I was moving to the UK.
David will never visit now and maybe that’s better. Friends – colleagues, really – are simpler than family. Less emotional. Less history. Less transparency. Less reality.
And how is London? Work? the email continues.
I delete it so I can’t reply to it maudlin and wine-fuelled at 2 a.m. when my latest batch of hire-a-friends has traipsed home.
But then to taunt myself I pull out old photos of David and me. Heads together as we lie on the sofa in new pyjamas on Thanksgiving morning as kids. Awkward teenagers with matching spots and matching grimaces on a family weekend to New York. Posing with illicit beers in our parents’ kitchen. I can’t cry this time because it is so confusing. There is so much happiness in these pictures that my face, against all instruction, is smiling ear to ear. God, I miss you, I think.
The only thing that cuts through my thoughts is Tom and Lexie. My new family, really, drowning out the old one. I do everything to drown them out too, taking a long shower, hammering at my piano, but they get through like they always do, and later, when I hear the door slam shut, I watch them out of the window, arms around each other and darting into a restaurant across the street to eat noodles and be together, still.
I open a bottle of wine and sit down at my laptop, googling Lexie, Luke, my brother, but this time the one I return to is Tom, whose surname I know owing to a sloppy postman. I know, eventually, that I’m going to have to let Luke go, but I am an addict and cold turkey is too much. Tom can function as my methadone.
Image search is my favourite and opening the folder of pictures I have of Luke, I was right, there is far more than a resemblance between him and Tom. In the hair, the before shot in an advert for hair wax, in those lazy shoulders and those gangly, endless legs. And that nose. I could kiss it, gently on the tip, and swear that Tom would know me and know my kiss.
I zoom in on Tom’s eyes. Take a screen grab of the left first, and then the right. I consider them, really look at them. These are the eyes of a man who I could love. And if I could love someone else but Luke and make a life with someone else but Luke, maybe everything would feel less dark. I would feel diluted again, like I used to feel. And maybe I could finally move on, too, from what happened.
I peer closely at my laptop, look at Tom’s eyes again. And then I start to go through all of his pictures, one by one, zooming in on body parts and details. Screen grab, save.
Sinking the last glass of Pinot Noir, my brain is whirring. Lexie. Always Lexie. Why does she get to have this life, the one that I wanted, when I worked so hard for it? When I put up with so much? Why does she get to laugh at me, while I sit through the wall, lonely? I feel a searing rage, so I open another bottle and I begin, slowly, to type. She doesn’t know what I am capable of, I think. She has no idea what I did and who really lives here, just through the wall.
10 (#ulink_26c95f11-39e7-5fee-a239-7e7610e3b541)
Lexie (#ulink_26c95f11-39e7-5fee-a239-7e7610e3b541)
January
Tom isn’t away for work at all this week, so I am forced to alter my routine. I don’t want him to know that I rarely brush my teeth before lunchtime and only put on proper trousers if I’m going out.
I already worry what this version of me is doing for our relationship. So I make an effort. We eat meals together, I dab on foundation, I attempt not to talk relentlessly about having a baby. And one night, I heave myself up from the sofa and we go for noodles and a gig in our local pub, where we order gin and tonics and everything seems young and light and bright. By the end of the week, though, the bliss has abated.
‘It’s offensive that you put your clothes on the floor and expect me to pick them up,’ I hiss, belligerent, as Tom walks past.
‘I’ve not put my clothes on the floor,’ he says. ‘What are you on about?’
I march to the bedroom and return clutching a T-shirt.
‘I dropped it,’ snaps Tom, losing patience with me. ‘But if I had put it on the floor, I don’t think it would have warranted that nastiness.’
And he walks out of the flat, to the park maybe, or the pub, or to anywhere to escape me.
Maybe we’re not used to this much time together in our tiny home, maybe we’re too used to our own habits.
But then it shifts, again.
My period comes and we’re close, he’s my family again, because this is one loss we feel together, every month.
‘I think we should go to the doctor,’ I say tentatively when we’re exhausted from the sadness.
I know he’s of the mindset that we should let nature take its course and not panic – that it’s happened once, it will happen again – but this time, he agrees. Though with a caveat.
‘Can we leave it a few more months? I have so much on at work …’
And it’s this that sets me off. I don’t know my own fuse any more, it’s different now, so unpredictable, and suddenly I’m ranting, sobbing, shouting about how he can possibly think that work is more important than this, and he’s got hold of my shoulders.
‘I never said more important, I just said …’
Then he stops sharply and he folds into the sofa.
I know he is close, the closest, to crying.
His breath is shallow. His face is a sheet of crumpled up paper. It’s pressure on him, too, and I hadn’t tended to that. Incredibly, it hits me. I just … forgot. In all of this I forgot about Tom, when Tom means the most.
‘It’s just,’ he says, shoving tears furiously from his face. ‘It’s overwhelming. It feels like being a proper grown-up. And this is the first time that that’s truly happened to me.’
He tells me that he thinks I am depressed, nervously awaiting my reaction, but I agree. Yep. Depressed. There’s a relief in capitulating.
Now, I want help. I welcome it. I will ask about therapists and contact acupuncturists and invite the help from every corner where it makes itself available.
‘Let’s go to the doctor,’ says Tom. ‘You’re right. We need to move this on. It’s not doing us any good being in limbo.’
Later I lie awake, thinking about what I – or trying to have a baby – have done to him. I stroke his face, kiss his head, tell him I’m sorry, cling to this man who I love.
11 (#ulink_0447780a-4206-58e6-8a98-26bb283f08fb)
Harriet (#ulink_0447780a-4206-58e6-8a98-26bb283f08fb)
January
I wake with a feeling so familiar that it has a regular, cushioned spot in my brain.
There is something to worry about.
I am responsible for it.
It is not right and it is not good but I did it anyway.
Last night I set up an email account, purporting to be a student called Rachel who wanted to make documentaries, and I messaged Tom. It wasn’t smutty; I know Tom – Tom wouldn’t like that. Tom has integrity. This is one of the reasons Tom will make a great boyfriend.
There was no pouty profile picture, no innuendo. I was just an earnest student who admired his work.
This morning I look over it again. It doesn’t give a hint of my being drunk and it’s only sent at 10.30 p.m., so I will get away with it. I do, most of the time.
I lose the day to email refreshing and by the time night – or the early morning – comes, my eyes are sore and I pass out on the sofa. Though, to be honest, that’s how most nights end, whether I’m alone or next to yet another naked body that won’t call me tomorrow.
The next day, though, a reply comes.
Thanks for your comments on my work, says Tom. It’s lovely to hear someone so passionate about what they want to do.
He recommends a couple of websites, offers me a contact.
I take my laptop as close to the wall as I can get, listen for sounds of life. But if they’re there, they’re quiet. Or Tom is replying on a bus, in a café. I try to picture it but it doesn’t elucidate. Tom could be anywhere, doing anything, and I wouldn’t know because he’s not mine.
Suddenly, I feel stupid. I consider never replying and simply continuing to be his neighbour. Someone who sneaks occasional looks at him getting into the elevator. A crush, existing without everything else that people think I am capable of. No danger. No violence.
Even if I do reply, I can’t do it yet, so I need to distract myself. A colleague has invited me to drinks tonight and I make a last-minute decision to go. Rachel would. She’d be putting herself out there, young, excited, keen.
I’ve had a burst of Rachel energy. I’m running on Rachel.
Harriet’s not all that different to Rachel; it’s just that she’s been screwed over. It’s made her jaded.
Then, when I head from the bedroom into my living room to grab my purse, I hear her, losing it with him, loud and clear. I pin myself to the wall. This is the most I’ve ever heard, by far. He is quiet but she is still shouting, and though I can only get the occasional word, it’s enough.
‘Fertility … doctor … priorities … work … age … men … women … unhappy … baby.’
My palms sweat with knowledge and I stay there long after they’ve fallen silent. I’m used to suffocated noise here, the hum of buses, the barely audible sounds of Lexie and Tom living life. Anger and rage may sometimes drift up from the pavement outside in the booze-soaked early hours, but in here we live measured, muted lives. Listening to shouting through the wall feels like being back in hospital.
And then, there’s the detail. It’s not that I don’t know that plenty of couples have fertility issues. It’s just that through the wall their life sounds unblemished. And that now, there is a gap between them, just large enough to squeeze myself into.
12 (#ulink_c562909f-71e6-59c5-ac64-aeb29202d842)
Lexie (#ulink_c562909f-71e6-59c5-ac64-aeb29202d842)
January
‘Lexie!’ goes the voicemail. ‘Would love to catch up. Let me know if that freelance life of yours isn’t too busy.’
I smile, wry. It’s a school friend, Rich, who I haven’t seen for six months. It’s difficult to say why because my working days are short and erratic and filled with procrastination, and my evenings are bursting at the seams with Netflix and pyjamas and scrolling Harriet’s social media. But somehow, I mimic busy. I have time to read a bulky Donna Tartt novel in four days, but no time to catch up face to face with people I care about.
Slowly, after I left my job a year ago, meeting friends took on the magnitude of a job interview, so I began to swerve them, telling myself that this was self-care. I had left work after a year of trying for a baby to be less stressed; though, ironically, my stresses simply sprawled wider. I stressed about everything from my work abilities to my friendships to whether or not I was eating too much wheat and whether or not that was what was holding me back from getting pregnant.
But I thought it was all okay, because I had Tom.
Tom and I met when we were at university in London. I was working in a nightclub selling super-sweet shots for a pound a go; he was on antibiotics so not drinking. I had to walk away from him to carry on flogging the alcohol.
‘What if I give you twenty pounds and you throw the shots away?’ said Tom, not cocky, just pragmatic.
I laughed, threw back three of whatever it was that claimed to be apple-flavoured and sat back down.
I was full of the bravado of being twenty-one, skinny in Lycra now my puppy fat years had passed and slightly drunk. My dress was tiny, pale blue and strappy, the kind that seems laughable these days when I view polo necks and knee-high boots as valid going-out outfits. This was the early Noughties, though; we warmed up with cheap vodka, not cashmere socks. We thought self-care was buying ourselves a shot with our Archers Schnapps and lemonade.
‘I thought you were so out of my league,’ Tom tells me now, often.
But everything about Tom was what I wanted. I had never looked for cheeky, or bad, or sarcastic, or mean.
I wanted kind and I wanted stable. I had roots but my roots spread wide. When I was sixteen my mum and dad – an airline pilot – moved to Canada and my childhood, already an almost-version of adulthood, was very suddenly over. This isn’t a tragic tale; nothing terrible happened to me and I wasn’t orphaned or abandoned at seven. But enforced adulthood leaves a mark. I wasn’t ready, not quite. I was still battling that puppy fat and some high-level awkwardness in my own body, and I needed home-cooked meals and sofas that smelled of my mum’s perfume to give me a place in the world.
When they left, it was with an attitude of having done their parenting years. Now, we speak on FaceTime and message but I think, often, couldn’t you have given me two more years? Just to get me to the finish line instead of making me stumble my way through the last bit stunned and in shock that they had suddenly gone AWOL.
I did two years at boarding school then fled to London. At university, I was the only one without a ‘home’ to go back to in the holidays or for weekends. Sure, I could fly to Canada, but not for a two-day stint to fill up on macaroni cheese. Not to get my white washing done. Not to coddle myself in a blanket in my old bed and feel like a child again. Not to ask my dad sheepishly if he could look at my electricity bill because I didn’t know what the hell it meant.
‘You can come to me,’ said my brother, Kit, but that meant a student dive at the other end of the country with five blokes and a pubic hair mountain next to the bath.
I loved him for offering. Not enough to brave that bathroom.
So what I needed from a partner wasn’t chaos or abandonment or erratic behaviour. What I needed was goodness, reliability, someone to bring me toast in bed and book me a taxi home. It’s what Tom and I have always done, both of us, for each other.
‘I’m Tom,’ he said as I set the tray of shots down on the table in front of us. He put his hand out and I teased him for the formality and his slight poshness.
I mocked his Surrey accent, laughed when he told me later that he kept a diary that he had written in most days since childhood and downed a pint mimicking something I had read about called a ladette.
Then, when he stayed around, I felt my body relax, and I ordered the drink I actually wanted and talked to him for four hours, until the lights came on, when he walked me all the way to my front door and even carried my shoes.
I introduced him to my friends three days later. A gaggle of girl-women at a birthday dinner. I was three glasses of wine in and just starting to believe I had passionate views on obscure Nineties indie bands, when I saw Tom having an in-depth conversation with my flatmate, Alana. I smiled, tipsy and happy. He had arrived and slotted right in.
After that it’s as blurry as most things are after 9 p.m. when I was twenty-one. There was dancing, there were fifteen people all shouting the same song lyrics and there was kissing, kissing, kissing in Soho at midnight.
A couple of months later, I sat around his family’s giant dinner table, his mum dolloping extra portions of lasagne on my plate and calling me honey, and my grin wouldn’t take a break.
I glanced across at Tom, smearing garlic bread around his plate. I looked at his dad, nipping out to the kitchen for another bottle of Chianti in his slippers. I smelled melted cheese and scented candles and heard the sound of Radio 2 coming from the kitchen.
‘You’re lucky, you know,’ I said later when Tom and I were squeezed awkwardly into his single childhood bed. ‘Having a family.’
‘You have a family,’ he replied, adjusting his body in the tiny space.
But we’d have rather done this than slept separately. Sleeping separately would have felt like torture.
‘Kind of,’ I replied.
I hadn’t told him much about my own family yet. But even in our best days my family hadn’t been like this family. Tom’s mum squeezed me tight as soon as she met me; I always had the feeling that my own mum was recoiling if I hugged her. Not that she didn’t like it; just that she genuinely couldn’t cope with it. Meals weren’t a comforting event, they were functional: people did their own thing, turned up and grabbed a sandwich.
This version of family was the one I wanted, long term. Tom, tipsy on the red wine, nodded off next to me, and I lay there looking at him and thinking, I wonder if it’s you I’ll have children with? And wondering what our family would look like. Knowing, already, that it would look like tight hugs and lasagne and sheepskin slippers heading to the kitchen for another bottle of that Chianti.
Tom is still here thirteen years later; still, to me, incredible. But even Tom is just one person and one person can never be enough to carry a whole life. What a pressure I have been applying to him, what a heavy, heavy weight.
13 (#ulink_8e5b1823-9905-59c7-a779-969253d7ff51)
Harriet (#ulink_8e5b1823-9905-59c7-a779-969253d7ff51)
January
I am on a 7.38 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street, because Tom is on a 7.38 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street. I shiver; the day is pure January. Dark, cold. This feels like 3 a.m.
I waited for the door to close as he left the flat then I took the stairs, quickly, as he jumped in the elevator, and followed him out. Half an hour ago, I walked behind him onto the platform, pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, saw the destination he was heading to on the screen and everything went blurry.
Of all the places Tom could be going to on location for work this morning, I was following him to Hunstanton, the pretty Norfolk seaside town. The place where Luke and I got engaged.
On the train, I sit four rows behind him and burrow into my scarf to conceal myself – although, worst-case scenario, I figure, there’s no law that says a person can’t get the same train as their neighbour. Coincidences happen all day, every day, everywhere. They’re the basis of brilliant novels, and films, and stories. Look at my history with Hunstanton and how I am now heading back there, for starters.
I watch him and see the defeat in his shoulders. I see him sigh heavily. I see him stare out of the window for the whole journey, even though there is a book on his lap, even though it is barely light. There is a lot to be learnt from watching a person alone, doing nothing. I used to do it in hospital. It helped to pass the time: seeing if I could tell who were the dangerous ones, the violent ones. The ones, I suppose, who were the most like me. The ones who were capable of terrible things, as I was capable of terrible things.
I look around at the other commuters now, thinking what judgements they would pass if they knew about those terrible things. Could you tell what I did, if you stared for long enough? What would people learn, if anyone cared enough to watch me?
‘I care, Tom,’ I whisper to myself. ‘Look how much I care.’
He stretches his arms above his head in a yawn, unknowing, oblivious.
When Tom steps off the train, meets colleagues and shakes their hands then heads off to work, I leave him to it. I can’t follow further or loiter on the edge of their small group. But it has been enough. Just observing him. Gathering information for what might come next. Being in his company.
Before I get the train home, I swerve left and take another trip: it’s down to the beach, takes me down memory lane, too.
What peace, I think, as I stare out to sea. The sand has that miles-to-the-water Britishness. You want to swim? Fine, but you’ll have to earn it with a long trudge.
I look around. Beach huts the shade of party balloons have found fame since the social media bloggers turned up, desperate to tick off their daily dose of beauty. Hunstanton’s beach huts didn’t feel so ubiquitous when Luke and I were here. It made them quainter.
I walk on. Perfect tableaus are everywhere I look. A shaggy dog, braving the sea when all humans goosebump at the thought. Parents hugging hot coffee. Families taking out optimistic picnics. Later, their pictures will say they were happy eating the ham sandwiches; the reality was that they were happiest when they started speeding up the motorway towards their central heating and duvets.
I am watching all of them, nosy and cold with my nostrils the only body part I will allow out of my scarf. Things get hazy. I don’t know which of these people are here now and which of them were here then, when he did it.
It is four years almost to the day since Luke rooted one knee into the sand, wobbled slightly then sniped under his breath at the man who walked past and said with a grin, ‘I’d do it quickly mate, it’s freezing.’
‘Will you marry me?’ he asked, the familiar phrase sounding faintly amusing to me although I knew I couldn’t laugh: that wouldn’t be right for this scene. Luke was still snarling slightly at the guy who had ruined our moment.
His hand was ice as I held it and my eyes squinted into bright January sunshine. I felt my whole body shiver despite it because it was still winter and I hate the cold.
A boy was crying for ice cream nearby and I knew Luke’s teeth would hurt at the idea. Gulls squawked and waves crashed and everything smelled of sea air.
‘Yes,’ I said quickly before he said a word. I felt victorious. I felt validated that I had taken a gamble on him and moved away from my family and done all of this work to be better. And I felt, finally, like Luke must love me. That the charming, engaging man I had seen at the beginning was the real Luke. That he had just been under pressure lately, taking it out on me because I was closest. But he was still smart, still funny, still beautiful. The knowledge was as physical as the bracing wind.
Luke was on his phone twenty minutes after he proposed, looking at sports results, trying to buy some gig tickets from a friend, but mine stayed in my pocket: I didn’t need any distraction. I just stood there in the biting wind, smelling the vinegar from the chip shop, feeling it all.
‘What if we invite David over?’ I had blurted out, my confidence peaking. ‘Tell him in person?’
I missed David to the point that I felt it in my stomach, in my bones. He still hadn’t visited. This would be the perfect excuse.
Luke looked up from his phone.
‘Are you serious?’
I regretted my words already. This perfect tableau, ruined by my idiocy. I felt my body temperature shoot up like I’d just stepped off an air-conditioned plane into summer in the Mediterranean.
‘After the way your brother’s been to me the whole time we’ve been together. You don’t think that would be hard for me? To have him stay in our home? Turning you against me?’
I wished desperately that I could go back in time, take the words back.
But still, I had no idea what he was on about. My mom and dad might have been wary of Luke, sure, but David? David saw the charm that a lot of people saw in Luke; David had idolised him.
‘You’d probably break up with me by the time he went home.’
I gave in easily, desperately. I was horrified that I had started this conversation and wanted only for it to be over. I didn’t mention David again and after that, I stopped contacting my brother so often, too. What if he was trying to split Luke and I up? Things weregetting confusing. I couldn’t really be trusted to know.
On the train journey home, Luke didn’t speak one word to me, despite my stroking his arm the whole way and making unending, desperate small talk.
Later, I messaged my parents to tell them our news but ignored their calls in response. I knew that hearing what they had to say about us being engaged would bring me down.
But the voicemail did it anyway.
‘Just checking though, Harriet – you are sure, aren’t you? You are really sure?’ said my mom after the obligatory congratulations and a pause. I ignored and deleted her message and after that, the distance that had manifested itself since I emigrated stretched even wider.
I didn’t tell Luke what my mom had said. He would blame me for painting the wrong picture of him, for somehow making them feel that way, and he was being frosty enough with me anyway after our row about David. Until, suddenly, there was a surprise trip to Copenhagen booked and the dial pinged to the other side: I was forgiven.
‘Let’s celebrate our engagement!’ said Luke, euphoric, high.
See, I thought, see – there’s the charming version. There’s the man who sparkles.
I nodded, grinned, kept quiet about the inconvenience to my work schedule and to everybody I was going to have to let down, since I hadn’t been consulted on dates. I just felt relieved that he had thawed.
In Denmark, we left the hotel to the shocked faces of reception staff, who believed we should stay indoors. It was minus thirteen, while the hotel had fluffy cushions and a sauna.
‘It’s so cold, though,’ said a concerned manager, shaking his bald head and shivering at the thought. ‘It’s so cold. Even for Copenhagen.’
‘We’ll survive,’ said Luke sharply.
I winced. But I kept quiet: the one time I had brought up his rudeness to strangers, we had had a huge row.
‘Because I stand up to people when they don’t do their jobs, Harriet?’ he had said. ‘That’s not rudeness. That’s just not being pathetic.’
At the Little Mermaid, a bronze statue coated in white snow, we paused for twenty seconds, ticked it off, walked on.
‘It’s so cold,’ said a passing tourist to us amiably. ‘Even for Copenhagen.’
The man held his partner’s hand. I reached for Luke’s but he shook me off, told me it was too awkward to hold hands in gloves.
We waded back through wedges of snow to the café that served hot chocolate as real chocolate on a stick, melting into your milk, making the powder we stirred into water at home look like an abomination.
I took off my scarf, ordered my drink.
‘It’s so cold, though,’ I said, faux-serious as we sat down. ‘Even for Copenhagen.’
But Luke wasn’t laughing. My stomach lurched.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said, playing with the packets of sugar.
Our order arrived.
I looked deep into the sludge of my drink as the milk darkened. I picked up my spoon to stir and saw my hands shaking. Had I done something? I tracked back desperately. It had been going so well, but evidently I had messed up. Idiot. I steeled myself.
‘Do you want children?’
First, the relief that it wasn’t something bad. But then, the question itself. I was young and I was in love with Luke and with my job. Did children sleep through pianos playing at midnight? If I had a child, would I have the energy to compose in the evenings, which was when I worked best? Working was what had made London feel doable. I was turning down job offers, gaining a strong reputation. I was working on more lucrative projects; being approached for big-name musicals.
Luke had complained about it, how ‘obsessed’ I was with my job these days, and I wondered sometimes if that was making him snappier. Maybe it was my fault and I was neglecting him. So I had agreed on this holiday to put an out of office on and ignore work calls, despite the short notice. But it was hard. It was a part of me and I was happy. I wasn’t sure about placing limitations on that.
I knew, too, that I was prone to depression. I knew that in life I wobbled and wasn’t sure I had the stability to hold up others.
But at that moment, holding onto Luke’s arm with one hand and drinking pure liquidised chocolate with the other, I felt like I was being shored up by love and sugar and as stable as I had ever been.
Perhaps, I would feel surer too, in us. I panicked, always, that Luke would leave me. I looked around in restaurants and saw that woman, that woman, all the other women who would be better suited to him. I glanced and saw him looking, too.
If Luke wanted children with someone like me then someone like me should be grateful. I should have all of the bloody children he wanted, grow them in my womb immediately. I should shut up, as he often told me, and stop thinking and agree.
‘Yes,’ I said tentatively, but he didn’t hear the hesitation.
Instead, he was immediately manic, gripping my hands and describing this huge family, four or five kids, all of us travelling together.
‘Imagine it!’ he grinned, that intense eye contact that people found so beguiling. That I had described to people when I first met him. That was one of the many things that made me feel so adored, at first, so important. ‘Swimming in the ocean and skiing down the slopes in this cute little line.’
This idea bedded into my mind until it became the clearest, most perfect thing I could imagine. This would make us whole; make us too busy for the bad times.
In October that year, with Luke in agreement, I took my last pill and we started trying for a baby.
I told my mom, surprising myself. But it had been so long since we had something to pull us close together. I longed for my parents, despite my attempts to block the feelings out. The idea of a grandchild, I thought. That might change things. Do something more tangible than an engagement. Reset mom’s thoughts on Luke and me. Glue my family and me back together again.
‘Luke and I have decided to try for a baby,’ I told her in one of what were now our very occasional phone calls.
‘Well that’s lovely,’ she said, but I heard the tone in her voice and regretted my words already. There was a long pause and I could hear her debating. Should she say it? Keep quiet? Was she pushing me away further, if she said what she really thought? ‘But I thought you were definite on not wanting them? Have you changed your mind?’
I stayed silent, furious, on the other end of the phone. Because I knew what she was getting at.
‘You mean that you think Luke pushed me into it, right?’ I hissed. ‘Why are you always, always having a go at Luke?’
She was silent then, for a second.
‘Because I don’t think he’s kind to you and I don’t think he’s right for you,’ she said gently.
I put the phone down on her then, not for the first time. After that, I began to ignore most of her calls.
Then Luke and I started trying for a baby here, in this flat, where I now live alone, next to a happy couple and their happy life. And what do you know? They are trying for a baby, too. They live my old life and I live my new one.
Before my flat was empty, it was full. Before it was lifeless, we lived life, planned life, hoped, here, to make life. We cooked joints of beef, sent scents out into the hallway that said ‘We are here, we are popular, we are rich and full and greedy.’ We chose colours together, put up pictures. We put plants on the windowsills that are dead now, withered.
Whatever our imperfections were, whatever anyone else would have judged them as, I could live with them. They were worth it for what was presented to the outside world. For my value, when I came in this package. Isn’t that what matters now, anyway? Behind closed doors can be flawed, as long as Facebook says joy.
Luke and I planned to turn one of the rooms in our flat into a nursery, as Lexie and Tom will soon. Luke presumed I would give up work and I presumed that I would do whatever he wanted, so we left it there, even though the thought of not composing made me feel nauseous and unanchored.
Sometimes I thought of how much our children would miss out on in grandparents and my heart hurt. Luke wasn’t close to his family and, I had to admit to myself now, neither was I any more to mine.
Luke had no interest in trying to have a better relationship with my family – even when I had spoken to them more regularly, he would leave the room when they popped up on FaceTime – and Luke was the focus, so I created more space between us.
I didn’t think it mattered, anyway. Until I took a wrong turn and became one, we were two, set to become three, four, five … I pictured that ski trip. I had all I needed.
After Luke’s proposal, my confidence surged. I stopped doubting my worthiness with Luke quite so much and work was soaring. I started speaking up. Questioning. The difference was noticeable. Luke started to comment on it, called me ‘arrogant’, ‘difficult’.
In December, we landed back from a trip to the German Christmas markets and headed straight out to West London for tapas with some friends of his. I complained. I was tired, cold, lugging a giant bag and I wanted it to just be us. Us was always enough for me. Simpler, easier, less likely to end in a row.
‘Why do we have to be with other people all the time?’ I sulked on the Stansted Express – exhausted enough not to edit my thoughts before they became words.
‘Because friends are important, Harriet,’ he said lightly, typing a long message that was hidden from my view. ‘One day you should get some and see.’
He spent the rest of the journey on his phone. I spent it staring at him, nervous. It’s just because we’re tired, I thought. Don’t panic.
I sat through dinner with one foot mentally wedged in the door of the train home. I smiled politely through a chorus of Happy Birthday. I listened patiently to a woman called Francine tell me about her love-life woes. Luke ordered dessert and I bristled because seriously, how much longer?
‘You look stressed out, Harriet, everything all right?’ said his friend Aki, dark fringe hanging in eyes that peeped out to mock me.
Later, Luke would deny that she was anything other than concerned but I knew. She was one of the ones I thought would make a ‘real’ girlfriend for Luke.
Aki – single, too – met the eye contact of another friend, Seb, and I saw it in that second: they talked about it – how odd I was, how peripheral to the group, how I made everyone else feel tense, even as they speared olives and toasted their friend’s thirtieth birthday with the obligatory bottle of cava. I glanced around, paranoid.
Over tapas, the night got worse – drunker, blurrier – and Luke leaned in close to Aki, brushing her hair out of her face and whispering to her. I wasn’t in the toilet or outside. I was simply sitting next to him. This was an old move of Luke’s. He didn’t try to be subtle. He didn’t need to, because he knew I wouldn’t react.
Finally, we left.
And this time I did react.
‘Were you flirting with Aki?’ I dared to ask, drunk enough.
‘You know what,’ he said, fixing his eyes on me, hard. ‘You’re so obsessed with flirting that it’s probably you who’s shagging someone else, not me. Are you cheating on me, Harriet?’
From then on I went back to biting my tongue so often that it must have been scarred.
Meanwhile Lexie, I hear her, shouts and speaks and argues and still gets to live out everything I want, just centimetres away through the wall. She and Tom make meals, the kind that Luke and I used to share before dinner became a chore for one. They curl up on their sofa and watch films, as we did, and make plans, as we did.
And I listen to the life I should have had, and am expected to exist alongside it. I sit as close to the wall as I can and I listen to them laughing, and I know something purely and clearly: I cannot let Lexie and Tom have a happy life. I cannot let Lexie steal my happy life.
I think of what happened before. I think about how, when someone steals my life, I am capable of doing anything to get it back.
14 (#ulink_6cab328c-506b-5850-a385-42aafe23d08a)
Lexie (#ulink_6cab328c-506b-5850-a385-42aafe23d08a)
January
I smear lipstick on then panic that lipstick isn’t in any more. Is gloss back? My reference points stop in time when I stopped in time. It’s one of the reasons I need this.
I need to snap myself out of my rut, so I am going on an official night out.
I need to leave this box. I can’t exit the one in my brain, but the front door of the flat is easy to open when you make yourself do it – and when you take your pyjama trousers off – and that’s what I have to remember.
Tonight is a leaving do for my former colleague Shona and I am on the bus, heading to a cocktail bar in Dalston.
Tom does a low-level whistle at my pencil-skirted bum as I walk past.
‘You’re just trying to make me feel better about looking fat,’ I say, embarrassed.
‘Untrue,’ he says, shaking his head firmly and looking back at the TV. ‘You look hot.’
I have been edgy about going out all day, my hand shaking when I made a bad attempt at doing my eyeliner.
Mostly, I’m going so I can tell myself a story of my existence as the kind where I go on nights out – sometimes I feel I need to justify the fact I live in Central London and see so little of it – but also because I know it’s the kind of thing I should do to network.
How, I wonder, did I end up in an industry that revolved around contacts when I am this antisocial? Or am I? Is this new? The worst thing about current me is that I genuinely have no idea. I am so lost, I can’t even remember where I started. What’s new, or a problem, or fertility-related, and what’s always been there. I have no courage of my convictions, no decisiveness.
Then as I go to leave, I hear a baby crying next door. There is no baby next door. Is there? Could Harriet have got pregnant and had a child without me realising any of this was happening through the wall? Will I need to hear that every day, a baby growing into a toddler, giggling and needing milk and talking?
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask Tom.
‘Hear what?’ he asks, and I try to forget it, hope – or dread – that I am imagining things now, hearing children where there are no children. It is suddenly possible. Again, I am flailing.
When I cross the road I pause and look up at our apartment block.
I crane my neck but our flat, on the fifteenth floor, is anonymous, out of reach and far away.
A few floors up I can see a lamp on, a window slightly ajar. On the ground floor, a man sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette and shouting, furious, into his iPhone. The flat next door to him oozes Nineties pop music and shrieking laughter. The couple above them have lit a candle and are framed in the window – he is kissing her on the cheek like a motif.
All of these people, I think, suddenly outside my bubble, living these lives in such close proximity to me and yet, I have no idea who they are.
They are below me and above me, side by side. They are kissing, fighting, sleeping and dancing. Are they ill, in pain, feeling sad? Did they have good days today, or bad days? Did they have life-changing days? Have they broken up with their first love today, fallen for someone, or just been to the supermarket to buy some frozen peas? I stay there for five minutes, wondering what my life would look like from this perspective. Wondering who I am to people on the outside; what questions I inspire. In my mind, every single one of those people in there is like Old Me, not New Me. Not feeling their hands shaking, dabbed with sweat, as they put their phone back into their bag, simply because they are going out for the evening.
A few minutes later a bus comes and I am caught up in a wave of other people, swiping and taking our seats.
This used to be my day to day; now, I flinch when people move close to me. I look down at my hands and see that I shake, still.
On the bus I am next to a mum who is staring out of the window, her child talking to himself in the buggy in front of her.
I pull tongues at the toddler.
‘I like your giraffe,’ I say to him.
He blows a raspberry.
I stick out my tongue again and I smile.
When the bus begins to move, I look across the road and see Harriet coming out of our building. I stretch to get a better view, but the bus moves before I get the chance.
It’s been a few days since I lost my temper over the doctors and Tom broke down and, finally, I’m starting to come back to life. Right now, the sun’s toasting me through the bus window on an incongruously warm January day and some positive feelings are finding a gap to make their own way in, too.
I get off the bus with the hint of a grin and walk the few metres to the bar.
‘Lexie!’ bellows a man I used to work with who has definitely had at least three beers.
I order a glass of red wine and a few more and refuse to feel guilty about fertility advice not to drink. We have a plan now. This is my last hurrah.
‘Pitch to me!’ says my old editor.
‘I will,’ I promise, and I mean it.
And you know what, I think, as I look round the bar full of men with their ties pulled off and a waiter walking around asking anyone if they ordered chips, no one else is perfect, either. I am okay. I am going to be okay.
‘You’ve been so off radar, Lexie, we’ve missed you,’ says Shona as she squeezes me in a one-arm cuddle.
And because we’re on our own at the table, everybody else standing, I make a snap decision.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, one-arm cuddling her back. ‘I’ve had some fertility stuff going on. I don’t think I’ve been dealing with it well.’
I hold by breath. I said that out loud, I think. I did it.
‘Oh, bloody hell, Lexie,’ she sighs. ‘I wish you’d told me. Me, too. That’s why I’m leaving work, to be less stressed.’ She pauses. ‘And that’s why …’
‘You’re drinking Diet Coke,’ I fill in, laughing. ‘Oh God, the booze guilt is the worst, isn’t it?’
‘Only beaten by the sugar guilt, and the wheat guilt, and the ‘are you having enough sex’ guilt,’ she replies, eye-rolling.
I’m laughing harder than I have in a long time and it’s that easy not to feel alone. You confide and you’re confided in and you empathise, and you find the comedy in the awfulness. Why did I imagine some invisible rulebook that said I had to keep this to myself? That no one wanted to be burdened by my problems? That it was kind of … tacky to bring it up?
A psychologist would probably track it back to my childhood. I think of my mum, flitting into a room and out again, and my dad, heading away for work for two weeks at a time, and I think – there were no windows. There were no windows available for people to ask for help or to analyse. Was that deliberate? Did my parents – the children of postwar stoics – avoid leaving any windows open, so that things didn’t get too emotional?
‘I hope things get better for you soon,’ I say, still squeezed into her, close. ‘You’d make such a cool mum, even though I know it’s crap when people say that.’
She cuddles me, tight.
‘We should meet up soon,’ I say to her, mid-hug. ‘I’ll go nuts and buy you an elderflower pressé.’
I feel her shoulders shake and I don’t know if she is laughing or crying, but I tighten my arms around her, just in case.
I am not the only one here living this, consumed by it. They’re everywhere, the other mes. I’ve just been so wrapped up in my own narrative that I haven’t seen them. But I want to. I want to help them, and bond with them, and cuddle them. I hold onto Shona, even more tightly.
15 (#ulink_17054d98-854e-53d6-af55-5147a51eff98)
Harriet (#ulink_17054d98-854e-53d6-af55-5147a51eff98)
January
I am in a bar, watching Lexie. Similar to when I followed Tom, I just want to know how she works, what she does when she has a moment alone. But Lexie doesn’t have time alone; she makes sure of it.
Lexie is laughing and sipping wine and I am drinking wine too, faster than her, and I am not laughing.
I am not worried about Lexie seeing me because it is dark in here and busy, and she is surrounded – of course – by friends.
So I am able to sit at this safe distance and stare at her as she touches her hands to her hair and face, pulls at the side of her skirt. Nerves, Lexie? Thinking about that YouTube baby you heard crying before you left the flat? I see her drinking and I judge her. From my now extensive online research on fertility issues, I know that alcohol is a fuel to them. Tut-tut, Lexie. Does Tom know you’re throwing away your baby chances with every sip of that large red? It’s almost like you don’t deserve it anyway. It’s almost like you don’t deserve your whole lovely fucking life.
‘Want some company?’ says a man who is too small for me anyway but pretty.
I examine his clothes and I can tell: he isn’t someone who people would view as cool. I steadfastly ignore him, fixed stare in place. He goes to say something but he can’t think what and he simply retreats. A little smaller now, a little less sure. Briefly, part of me feels guilty. But I need to focus.
I see Lexie having a deeper chat than the others, a personal one. I tilt my head to one side thoughtfully, trying to read Lexie and the girl’s facial expressions and work out what they are saying. The other girl sips Diet Coke. They hug, at a certain point, like one of them is dying.
When Lexie goes to the toilet I go along – like girlfriends do! – and slip into the cubicle next to her. I stay in there while she washes her hands and reapplies her lipstick, humming to herself happily.
‘How’s freelancing going?’ asks the woman next to her.
‘It has its ups and downs,’ says Lexie plainly. ‘But mostly I’m glad I did it.’
Something we have in common actually, Lexie. Perhaps we could be friends. If I wasn’t about to ruin your life.
She continues. ‘Nice to keep your own hours but a bit lonelier than the old office.’
‘No Thursday crisps for dinner club?’ her friend asks, spraying musk perfume that drifts into my cubicle.
Lexie erupts in a guffaw.
‘No Thursday crisps for dinner club,’ she laments. ‘Oh God, I miss crisps for dinner club.’
I go back to my spot at the side of the bar, where I pick up my bottle of wine and top myself up then carry on watching Lexie.
Lexie leaves at 11.30 p.m. and I slip out after her. She stops at the corner of the road and swaps her heels for ballet pumps. I’m close enough to hear her sigh of relief as her toes yawn into the shoes.
We even take the same bus home. I’m a few rows behind her, face buried in a scarf, but she wouldn’t notice me anyway. Her own face is buried in her phone.
I look at her social media as she updates it and see comments on a selfie telling her she looks good. She did. I glance up. She does. But I log into the account that I’ve created under a new name and tell her she doesn’t. Tell her the opposite. Tell her that she looks hideous, and old. I watch her shoulders fall and I know, even from here, that she is reading it. Glass, Lexie, thin glass. Smashable, which is convenient.
She gets in the elevator and our night together ends. I loiter outside and head up a few minutes later.
When I get home I can hear him, playing computer games and speaking to drunk, drunk Lexie in a tone that sounds concerned and gentle. Not annoyed. Not furious.
‘Really, Tom?’ I say out loud. ‘You’re not even a bit pissed off that she’s drunk when you’re trying for a baby?’
I think of how Luke reacted when I got drunk. He never liked it. Compounded my hangovers by telling me how embarrassing I had been. Whereas drunk Luke was popular and hilarious, according to him, according to his friends.
I throw my handbag at the wall.
When I’ve calmed slightly I sit on my sofa and write my reply to Tom.
Thanks so much for your advice.
That’s all I have. I’m wary of anything that sounds too flirty; I suspect Nice Tom would run a mile. But I need to make sure I don’t kill the conversation. I need to know him better. The sounds through the wall aren’t enough and the likeness to Luke is driving me crazy. This is the closest I can get. It’s why I played the baby noises. Just a few things to tip them over the edge, make the misery greater than the joy. And then things can reset. Lexie can move on; Tom can be with me.
Plus, ever since I heard Lexie’s voice, raised and ranting, and Tom’s, bleak and beaten in response, I’ve wondered whether things are as perfect as I thought they were anyway. Or was I hearing something unreal?
In hospital, my therapist would have said that I was projecting Luke and me onto Tom and Lexie, I’m sure. Seeing them as more perfect than they were, as I used to do with us.
But we’ll never know: I decided to stop seeing my therapist despite her repeated insistence that we have a lot more ‘work’ to do. Despite her suggesting that I had been a victim of abuse. I stopped seeing her. I didn’t like her being mean to Luke.
I hear something bang down on a table. A beer? A laptop? Is Tom checking if he’s heard from Rachel? I tell him I’ll order the book and that the work experience contact would be great. And then I add some drivel about passion.
I am making myself feel nauseous but still, I send it and get no reply, which irritates me because all he’s doing is watching some non-event 0–0 draw; I know the result because I mute my TV and then watch what he’s watching, for insight.
He updates his social media too, some football-based joke with an image from his TV, metres away from me, and I feel a surge of anger that I – Rachel – am low down on the priority list.
Then, despite the fighting the other day, I hear him and Lexie chatting normally. Fuck them and their eternally happy relationship. I throw the remote control at the wall.
I go to bed and make sure I slam my door, and I think about Tom, but when I think about Tom, it is hard not to think about Luke. I’m drifting again, the two of them merging.
Luke met me when I was at my lowest ebb. I had broken up with an ex-boyfriend, Ray, six months ago because I knew people thought he was uncool. Because I wanted them to think I was better than that.
But I missed him, that man with jeans that were too short for him, whose ability to make me laugh was obscene.
Ray had moved on, though. To someone who was proud of him; who was confident enough in herself, most probably, not to care what other people thought. Since then, I had been all over the place. Tried on some different crowds. I played at being artsy, picking up baggy patterned trousers and talking loudly about my love for the playwright Joe Orton before landing on something that was easy to pick up: party girl. This one was brilliant,because you didn’t need to learn a hobby for it, or acquire any accessories. Unless a hobby was chucking liquor down your throat most nights until 2 a.m., when you vomited in an unknown sink and your accessory was cheap vodka.
I slept with anyone, everyone. I missed Ray and I disliked myself, and I was trying, even back then, to dilute me.
Then one night I was drinking sherry at the home of a pretentious mutual friend who had just got back from a gap year in Europe and become obsessed with everything Spanish.
‘No one actually likes this stuff though, right?’ a guy at the party had asked bluntly with a grin. ‘It tastes like mushrooms.’
I was horrified. I wouldn’t have ventured anything other than polite agreement and awe at her sophisticated drink choices. The friend was new, someone from work, and I was trying to impress. Or rather, not to offend. Are they the same thing?
Either way, I thought this man was fearless and impressive with his honest sherry feedback. Everyone laughed and slapped him on the back; he was popular and down-to-earth. And handsome, I thought with a jolt as I looked up at him, so handsome.
Luke’s confidence soared even more as he drank and I listened to him take on somebody’s views on bullfighting and somebody else’s thoughts on Rioja. He put arms around people’s shoulders, nudged them playfully in the ribs.
Then he turned his attention to me.
‘Have you ever tried any English wines?’ he said out of nowhere, focused in my direction. ‘They’re making some really good stuff down in Sussex.’
He placed his hand on my waist, steered me to a sofa in the corner next to the back door. I hadn’t even thought he had seen me. I was shaking.
I muttered an intimidated no, sneaked a glance up at his messy curls.
The idea of dating someone like this man, Luke, with his wine knowledge and confident views? This was a world away. This was what I had been looking for. But I knew there was no way he would be interested in me.
Except then when our friend turned off the music and started to read aloud from Hemingway like a primary school teacher introducing the class to Roald Dahl, Luke whispered ‘Shots?’ in my ear and took my hand.
The crowd big enough for our friend not to notice, he led me out of the back door and down the street to the British pub in town, making me cry with laughter at his impressions of the Hemingway reading as we walked. I had drunk enough now to stop being quite so mute.
‘I wish all American bars were like this,’ he said, two notes too loudly, as I looked around, confused, at the snooker table. I had never been in a British pub before. I could see why.
He ordered us some drinks and it was only as we sat down that I realised just how drunk he was. Conversation became hazy and nonsensical and we got up to dance, though it wasn’t a dancing vibe and, really, I felt too self-conscious to move my limbs.
‘Come on!’ he said, twirling me around in a different beat to the music. ‘You’re too beautiful not to dance! Dance, dance, dance.’
It was almost a chant. My protests were ignored and half an hour later, my mouth was full of yeast and hops as he kissed me, forcibly and deep. I was sober enough to be aware that like it wasn’t a dancing kind of bar, it wasn’t a kissing kind of bar either, but I tried to block that out. His Roman nose knocked against mine. I had my hands at the nape of his neck, just at the start of his dishevelled curls.
‘Shall we go back to mine?’ he slurred.
I wanted to go home to sleep and he was barely coherent enough to be company. But I went home with him because he was beautiful and he wanted me and he had fixed his eyes on mine, and we had brief sex that felt like a one-night stand.
Until two days later when he sent me a message.
I’ve found a place that stocks English wine. Come and sample with me?
It felt glamorous and clever and new. It felt like being in my twenties should feel. It felt fancy and impressive. Luke wasn’t just a boy to drink beers and have sex with; he was sophisticated and a grown-up, clutching a fresh white from the British countryside.
Minutes later, a message pinged in from our mutual friend.
Saw you leave with Luke the other night. He’s a charming guy but just … be careful, okay?
I rolled my eyes – how novel, someone being jealous of me – and didn’t think about it again. Instead, my thoughts for the next few months were taken up with the French restaurants Luke took me to and the plays he booked. With the way he stared at me so intently and told me I was beautiful. With the books he lent me and the movies he recommended. With his height, with his curls, with his long arms steering me into his car or into a beautiful hotel room with a deep, plush bath.
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Caroline Corcoran
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Lexie’s got the perfect life. And someone else wants it…Lexie loves her home. She feels safe and secure in it – and loved, thanks to her boyfriend Tom.But recently, something’s not been quite right. A book out of place. A wardrobe door left open. A set of keys going missing…Tom thinks Lexie’s going mad – but then, he’s away more often than he’s at home nowadays, so he wouldn’t understand.Because Lexie isn’t losing it. She knows there’s someone out there watching her. And, deep down, she knows there’s nothing she can do to make them stop…