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.
I didn’t think about what our friend said for six months or so when – to my utter shock – my presumed one-night stand Luke and I were together, an established, long-term couple.
It took those six months for Luke and I to move in together with four of his colleagues. I longed for us to have our own place, but that would come in time, he said. It was a statement of fact; not the start of a discussion. In the time we had been together, things had shifted. I had already learnt that this was how things worked. I had done what he wanted that first night; now, a precedent was set.
What we also didn’t discuss was how much I longed for Frances, my best friend and former flatmate, who had said that Luke could live with us with barely an increase in my rent.
Frances was solid and she solidified me. I got funnier when she found me funny; cleverer when she found me smart. I pictured us, dressed up as we were in a framed photo in our living room. Before Luke and I met, Frances and I had thrown a Christmas party. In the photo, our faces are squeezed together, a tiny bit of eggnog on Frances’s chin.
The morning after the party, hung-over, Frances climbed into my bed and we watched already-old Friends episodes on TV. We’d giggled loudly over the dance battle that had taken place in our living room the night before, the rhythm shifting every twenty seconds as another drunk person had a great brainwave and pulled up a different song on their phone.
‘Can we make it an annual thing?’ I asked, my head on the pillow next to hers, throbbing. ‘It was so, so much fun.’
‘Well, as long as we’re still here,’ said Frances.
‘Whoa, bleak.’
‘I didn’t mean dead, you idiot,’ Frances laughed, and we got the sort of giggles that come from that very specific combination of sleep-deprived, hung-over, happy and young. ‘More that we might both fall madly in love and head for the suburbs to procreate.’
I had laughed like it was ludicrous, but we had only squeezed in one more Christmas party before I did meet a man and I did move out. There were no suburbs, though; just that bleak houseshare a few roads down from where Frances and I had lived, where I was expected to do six people’s washing up.
I still didn’t know why Luke had said no to Frances’s offer for him to move in with us other than maybe Frances might have started to see too much of our reality.
For the duration that she saw him, Luke had enough charisma and charm that she didn’t know that reality. Didn’t know that after the early weeks of foreign wine and dinners and compliments, things had shifted. And that now there were subtle digs, comments, seeds sewn. I had become good at lying, dressing up, glossing over, even to Frances. I clung to the early weeks, wrote a narrative that was led by them and that buried the other. A narrative that shifted time and spun and twisted. I was convincing, even to Frances. Even to my
own mind.
Mainly, though, I think Luke didn’t want to live with Frances because it was what I wanted, my idea. And as time went on, I was realising that that wasn’t something he would put up with.
But that was okay. I felt, the whole time we were together, that Luke was out of my league and that I had to work harder, try more, be better to make up for it. We would get back to those dinners, to those stroked cheeks over English wine, if I just worked that bit harder. He would laugh, very occasionally, and I would catch that glimpse of the early weeks and become more determined.
‘It’s weird,’ Luke said to me, on one of our earliest dates. ‘I’d been thinking on my way to that party that night that I quite fancied having a girlfriend.’
His comment hung in the air and I thought: What? So you picked me up like a packet of cookies?
But really, it confirmed what I thought. I’ve always believed that no one could actually love me. It would just have to be serendipitous timing. A bit like when the man you want is living next door to you, at the very moment that he is having relationship problems.
16
Lexie
January
My good mood passes as quickly as it came. I pitch to the editor who was enthused about me writing for him last night, and he doesn’t reply. I am hung-over and my insides feel rotten, and I get the fear that drunk me told sober Shona too much.
In the afternoon it’s worse when I check the mail and find fertility clinic leaflets jammed in there so it’s full to bursting. What the fuck?
I log on to social media absent-mindedly and my stomach lurches. My accounts are filled with cruel messages from unknown, faceless accounts that are trolling me, like the one from last night.
Ugly bitch, says one.
Why would you post selfies when you look like that? says another. I switch tabs. Different network, same nastiness.
I feel disproportionately sick. Given these messages are from faceless people with no context, how can I care? But maybe that makes it worse. Why would they target me? What have I done?
The baby cries again next door and I am gasping for breath, suddenly. I feel like I am being attacked on all sides or losing my mind and I am not sure which one is the worse option.
In the evening my anxiety is worse again, speeding up and threatening a panic attack, and Anais texts me.
You’re doing that thing where you go off radar. Phone me x.
But I can’t reply. I need to be happier before I reply.
In her world, things are the same and this is one of the things I struggle with the most. For me, there is no stopping this, stepping off and rejoining the old party. There is guilt in wine, envy in other people and the knowledge that I have opted out. That I want something else.
But the something else is out of reach for me, too. The crew I’ve decided to join have no place for me. My mum friends from childhood do an annual trip to one of those family-friendly holiday parks together. I am never invited.
‘Oh you wouldn’t want to come,’ goes the refrain. ‘It’s all kids.’
They are right, of course, but not for the reason they think.
They are so removed from my reality that they picture Old Me, sipping cocktails, dancing behind VIP ropes and eating ceviche on rooftop terraces. They see me throw my carefree head back and slick on more lipstick. That me wouldn’t have wanted to go on the camping trip, they’re right. But that me’s a very distant memory.
And now, if I tried to go back to hanging out on that roof terrace, I would stick out there too, clearly over that phase of life and stuttering with my newfound lack of confidence.
I am in thirty-something limbo and I don’t belong anywhere. Except here, on this sofa. I get a biscuit.
Then my phone rings and it’s Tom.
He shouts hello and sounds drunk, and I know I shouldn’t be annoyed with him but I am. Because I tried to call him earlier, to tell him about the messages. Because I have cried in shame for the bulk of today and though he couldn’t have known that, I’m still angry.
‘I’ve got good news!’ he yells, clearly walking down a street as there are people shouting in the background. ‘We need to go to Sweden next month for this documentary. And the best bit is that they’ve said you can come out for a bit too, free flight.’
But if I’m honest, I’m mostly furious because unlike me, he can still be in the old world. He’s not gone to the pub nervous and shaking or spent half the night talking about fertility issues. He’s just been drinking with work colleagues, nothing new, nothing unusual.
A few years ago I’d have loved the idea of the Sweden trip. I’d have boasted about it on social media, booked restaurants, bought expensive boots, made plans. Now, I am so irritated I can’t speak.
The messages pop into my head again, too. Why would someone target me, unless they have something against me? Unless I have done something wrong. Or unless I have something they want.
‘So?’
Could that thing be Tom? That’s how these things normally work, isn’t it? Love rivals and vengeance?
‘Mmm?’
‘What is it?’
He sounds, suddenly, trepidatious. I am now a person who can make him trepidatious.
And he’s right to feel it, because now I have to bristle; tell him what the problem is. In I come to ruin everyone’s mood and make it all about fertility again. I am so tired of this role that I barely have the energy to speak.
‘We said we’d go to the doctors,’ I say, deadpan. ‘I don’t want to go on holiday. I want to go to the doctors.’
He’s quiet.
‘But it’s only a month. We can fit the doctors in before we go or …’
‘Plus that means we probably won’t get to try at the right time. I can’t stay for the whole trip, can I? It’s going to be hard to make sure I’m with you on exactly the right days.’
We are silent for thirty seconds and I consider, or try to consider, what it would be like to forget babies. To enjoy the rest of life. It would be so easy, to step off this trajectory. But I know it in my fibres – I can’t.
‘It didn’t even cross your mind,’ I say quietly, sadly. ‘And it’s all I can think about.’
Because there is so much pressure, being the one doing the planning, calculating, moderating, bleeding. I am exhausted. We haven’t even started any of the truly hard stuff and I am spent.
‘Well, you know what, maybe you need to think about some other stuff,’ says Tom.
I put my head back on the cushion and close my eyes.
Tom does something with his voice that is akin to putting a ‘hold fire’ hand up, were we in the same room. ‘Just for a month. Think about some other stuff and then when we come back we’ll go full steam ahead with the hospital.’
I hear someone shout his name and my eyes spring open.
‘You’re not with people having this conversation, are you?’
‘No, no, someone just came out of the pub and shouted me, but they can’t hear anything, I promise. I’m going to have to go but we’ll talk about it later, okay? I’m sorry. I love you. But Sweden!’
I sit, mulling over the conversation we have just had and wishing that logic and patience still existed for me. Wishing one month was what one month used to be, instead of a ticking, looming period of time in which we cannot have a baby, which may mean I never have a baby – a waste, a throwaway month, a month that pushes us down the list. The small becomes huge, the inconsequential becomes life-altering.
In another universe, Tom is right, but my brain won’t receive the message. My brain just hears delay, delay and works out how many months until I turn thirty-four. And it stews on the fact that Tom, when asked about going to Scandinavia, hadn’t thought for one second about the doctors when it would have stamped itself as a headline across my thoughts. I thought he was my teammate on this. Some of it though, the internal figuring out, there’s no denying that I am doing alone.
But Sweden! I think of the leaflets I picked up e
arlier that seemed to fill our postbox. Fertility clinics and IVF success rates. Had the universe – or the marketing part of it – uncovered my secret and was now targeting me at home? Or was I reading too much into a coincidence? They do happen.
Then, I think about the messages. What am I considering when I link them to Tom? Cheating and lying and angry other women? How can I possibly be serious? My Tom. My loyal, honest Tom.
It’s only then that I realise I didn’t even tell Tom about the messages, when they are why I’ve been desperate to speak to him all day. This is how much fertility issues dominate: when you’re talking about them, a part of your day that is so huge can become nothing, less than nothing, in seconds.
Later, I ignore Tom’s texts and curl up in a ball on the sofa, wishing that I could feel better as Harriet sings some sort of classical reimagining of a Take That song.
‘Fuck off, Harriet,’ I mutter. ‘Just fuck off.’
17
Harriet
January
I’m making small talk with Chantal in the preprepared aisle in Waitrose when my phone beeps to say I have an email. It’s an odd thing, to feel colour, but I know the second that my face turns pale.
‘Are you okay?’ Chantal asks, seeing the change, too.
‘Yeah,’ I say, distracted. ‘I just have to … deal with something.’
I walk quickly towards the entrance of the supermarket, dumping what’s in my basket in the wrong places as I go, annoying middle-class shoppers as I barge past them with no apology.
But it’s only when I get outside that I feel like I can breathe. I stop and lean up against a bus stop under a screen that’s flipping from page to page to tell me when buses are expected – two minutes, one minute, due. I try to remember the tips from the mindfulness app that I’ve been using erratically for a few months, but my breathing won’t steady. There is ice on parked cars, but I feel no chill. I shove my phone back in my bag.
Through the Wall Page 7