I think back to Chantal, standing there next to the baby corn. She’s probably relieved anyway, I think. No one wants to get stuck speaking to me when they’re sober.
On the way in to our building I glance at Tom and Lexie’s postbox. It doesn’t look too full. One of them must have picked up those leaflets I dropped in. Just a reminder, Lexie, I think. Just a hint that someone knows things aren’t as perfect as they seem, a suggestion that one of them is breaking ranks.
I take the elevator upstairs and open my door with a shaky hand. I lie on my sofa, shoes still on, sneakers and visible white socks dangling over the edge.
The message was sent at 9am US time.
Does that mean my parents were thinking about it overnight? Discussing it before bed? I know one thing: this is a direct response to me not replying to David last week.
Before now I’d ignored my parents but kept up enough occasional contact with my brother so they knew, at least, that I was alive.
Harriet, it begins, and my stomach lurches as though I have been disciplined by the principal. I usually delete her emails before I open them.
Since when did my polite, traditional, sixty-something mom ever not begin even an email with a ‘Dear’?
David says you didn’t respond to him last week and that made us worry such a lot. Are you feeling well?
I can sense her awkwardness. If I’d ruptured a lung, she’d shove some Oreos at me and fetch a blanket.
Mental health? I don’t get cookies. There’s no need for a blanket.
All she wants to know is that since I was in the psych hospital, my mind has been dusted, polished and vacuumed to make it as good as new. She wants to know she won’t be shamed again; that I’m not running around the world leaving smears. She wants to know that what I did once, I won’t do again. We’d all like to know that, Mom, I think. Me more than most.
Let us know. We think about you often. Mom and Dad x
I think about messaging Chantal, telling her everything that has happened, and her coming straight round with her Waitrose haul and plonking it in the hall in her rush to hug me. And then I feel embarrassed. How ridiculous. Chantal and I barely know each other. Chantal and I bond only when we are paralytic and lonely. And if I told her the truth and confessed what I did? Gave her my real surname and let her sit down on her sofa and Google? She would run a mile – and even that sliver of friendship that we have right now would be over.
So instead, I cry alone as usual. Because this is the twentieth message, or the twenty-fifth that I know I will ignore from my parents when before, we were close.
I’d go round to theirs and we’d order Chinese takeout and play board games. In summer we’d sit outside and chat until the early hours, tipsy on Californian rosé. But after the first few times of enthusiastic bonding, Luke – at the same time changing how he behaved with me, too – began to swerve those nights.
‘I don’t even like the place they order from,’ he’d say sullenly when I occasionally pushed. ‘So what’s the point?’
But I’d remember the man who would book plays he knew that I would like; turned up with cheese that he knew was my mom’s favourite. He’s just having a bad day, I would think. Everyone has a bad day.
But it kept happening.
‘We don’t see much of Luke any more,’ laughed my dad awkwardly. ‘Does he not like us or something?’
And I would make excuses and hate it, always being the one in the centre. Feeling like it exposed me, too.
David, though, we still saw. He would pop round to our place after a night out, filling Luke and me in on his evening, so Luke found him harder to avoid. I would sit up with my brother and be able to be as sympathetic or amused as he needed because look at me! I didn’t have these dramas. I was in love. Okay, I’d have liked for Luke to be closer to my parents, but still – no one had it perfect, did they?
I was smug, until I wasn’t any more. What is the opposite of smug? Is it bitter? Something worse?
I run over the last time Luke and I saw each other, when she took his hand, her finger shaking, terrified of me after what I had done, and I saw a tiny, almost imperceptible squeeze, and the tears roll out again. But this time, they are angry.
18
Harriet
January
Lexie, social media tells me, has gone away to her brother’s house. Meanwhile, Tom has gone to get drunk like he has the hangover resilience of a student and the funds of a Russian oligarch. I know this because I am sitting in a pub reading a book and watching him. I am quite the pro at this now. Unlike at my actual job, for which I have an inbox littered with warnings and queries and complaints. I’m behind on dead-lines, letting people down, failing, ruining my hard-fought-for reputation.
But how can I focus when I need to keep watch on Tom? I have read a lot of blogs on fertility issues, including on the impact on men. The pressure of knowing that there is something Lexie needs to make her fundamentally happy and that that may not be possible can’t be an easy thing to deal with.
Tom’s friends order food but Tom doesn’t want dinner. He doesn’t want to nurse a pint like it’s midweek and he is in his thirties, both of which are things that are true.
He goes to the bar to get his round.
‘Double JD,’ he adds at the end of the order, and I watch as he drinks that drink alone, in a second, before he returns to his friends with the more sociable pints.
Between rounds, he flags a waiter and orders separate vodka and Cokes. When his glass is nearing empty he looks around, twitchy, as his friends drink too slowly.
This morning I followed Tom to where he was filming on the South Bank and waited patiently, book or phone in hand at a distance, all day. One thing having being in a psychiatric hospital teaches you: how to wait it out, how to keep sitting, sitting, sitting.
And then, when he packed away his equipment and headed to the nearest pub, I decamped here, too.
Occasionally, I see a look of questioning in the eyes of the friends that he has met as they say no to the shots because they have an 8.30 a.m. meeting or a toddler who shouts about Cheerios in their face at 5.30 a.m.
They’re wondering what it is. Whether he has had bad news or has been fighting with Lexie. If someone in his family is ill.
I know, because I have drunk those drinks and I have seen those faces. This is why people turn up and drink like this. His friends might not know specifics, but they know it’s out of character and so must be needed, and so they humour his odd Thursday-night behaviour until midnight when really, they’d have liked to be back in their Surrey suburbs at 10 p.m.
‘I’ll stay with him for another couple,’ I hear one say to a third friend at the bar. ‘You get off if you need to. I won’t leave him alone in this state.’
‘Lexie, do you reckon?’ the friend, tall, bald, asks.
‘God knows,’ his friend replies. ‘But whatever it is, it’s not good.’
That is kindness, I think, melancholy for friends I no longer have and kindness that I was not shown when it was me who was suffering.
‘You could try a smile, love,’ says a man waiting for his pint at the bar.
‘Nothing to smile about,’ I say, but I take the drink he offers to buy me anyway. I look at his face and it is okay, and I consider having sex with him, but then I remember that I need to stay on track.
Tom walks home idly, despite the January chill. He is in no rush to get there. Me neither, Tom, me neither, I think as I follow him. What a shame we can’t go for a drink together. And then I have an idea.
The next night, as I predict, with Lexie still away, Tom follows the same path. After-work drinks and more pitying faces, I presume, as this time I don’t see them. Because I am at home, setting the trap.
Tom was drunk enough last night to follow any party he could find, but when his friends left, there was no party to follow. Tonight there will be. When he comes out of the elevator, the party will be easy to follow; in fact, impossible to ignore.
‘What’s so funny?’ says the guy I have been making small talk to for an hour now at the door to my kitchen. He smiles awkwardly.
It obviously wasn’t a comedy moment in his monologue. I’m not sure any of them have been, despite what he believes.
‘What?’ I say vaguely. ‘Sorry. Tell me that part again about your issue with feminism.’
And then, as he lectures me, I get back to Tom. Tom is wearing an old T-shirt that began life as navy. He’s in jeans and dark trainers, and his hair is overdue a haircut; even more overdue a haircut than usual. His forehead is slightly sweaty and as he turns around and takes his coat off, I see a hint of damp coming through on his lower back, too.
Between Tom and me is a dense crowd that is making me look sober enough to chair a meeting. Tom, too, looks out of it and unfocused. I suspect that he hasn’t even computed that he is at his next-door neighbour’s flat, or that underneath that giant throw is what constitutes my life – my piano – and what would be the giveaway. Right now, it’s just a dumping ground for empty glasses and rogue crisps.
Tom closes his eyes for a second, just stands there. When he opens them he looks dazed. Then it’s like he wakes up.
Suddenly, he has recalibrated and his eyes are everywhere. On Chantal, dancing alone in the centre of the room with her bright scarlet hair spinning around her face. On Steph, passed out and cuddling her wine bottle like a teddy and on a man whose name escapes me snorting coke off my piano-table. Remind me to give that a good Dettol before I start composing in the morning. The same man has done this at four separate parties. He speaks to no one while he gets high but clearly he is craving company in a strange form. Just to be there, in the background, and feel comforted by the noise. I get it. When I see him at the bus stop in the morning he utters a sheepish hello, thanks for the party, I have to head off now, as most of them do.
I pretend to engage in the conversation I am in and watch Tom. Leave him though, I think. Just observe.
But then the man I am speaking to – Aaron? Andy? – lunges at me, tasting of the hops and yeast of my first kiss with Luke, and of so many other kisses, but I am recoiling.
‘What are you doing?’ I yell at him, and a woman across the room looks vaguely over her shoulder.
‘Kissing you?’ he laughs. ‘This is often how this goes. We chat, we get on, we kiss?’
I glower at him. I am furious at this distraction.
‘I literally can’t even remember your name,’ I hiss. ‘Your chat was boring. What did I possibly say that suggested we got on? Don’t come near me again.’
He leaves, laughing in apparent disbelief at the level of my anger, and I go back to watching Tom. Searing with rage that I missed a few crucial minutes with something so pointless as Aaron, or Andy, or whatever the fuck his name was. There is nothing I hate more than wasted time.
But Tom. Back to Tom. As I stand, pretending to look at my phone, what there is to observe is a man with sad eyes who doesn’t touch drugs but drinks everything he can see. Even more than the parasites who usually come to my parties. The dregs of a bottle of whisky that someone left on the side. Beers that people put in his hands. Vodka and Cokes that he pours out for himself in my kitchen as though he lives here. I allow myself to fantastise momentarily that he does. Put some coffee on while you’re in there, Tom. Shall we make a risotto?
I consider being offended that Tom is in my flat pilfering things that I bought and without even acknowledging my existence, but it’s overridden. He’s here. This is an opportunity.
Someone hands him another beer. There are twenty-five to thirty people here in my tiny flat and Tom spends twenty minutes talking to a young, smiley set designer named Ian who lives way down on the first floor about the didactic theatrical style of Bertolt Brecht. I stand close by, taking it all in, waiting for something useful. But the pretentious drunk small talk keeps coming.
‘How did you end up here?’ Tom asks him. ‘If you live all the way down there?’
Ian looks surprised.
‘The parties on this floor are legendary,’ he says.
‘Bloody hell, I feel like someone’s grandpa,’ slurs Tom. ‘Yours, possibly. We live on this floor.’
‘And you don’t hear anything?’
‘We hear music and noise and parties but we didn’t have a clue that this was something that our neighbours joined in with. We assumed everyone was as anonymous as we are.’
We, we, bloody we.
‘To be honest,’ he adds with a smile. A sad one? There’s certainly some sadness in there; in his face. ‘We’re also happier in front of a film with a bowl of crisps. We’re in our thirties now, we’re pretty boring.’
‘I just hear the noise as I get near the building then get in the lift if I’ve been out and I don’t feel like going home,’ chirps Ian. He whispers, hammy: ‘And also … free booze.’
A fair point, Ian.
They get another beer and get back to Brecht.
The verb ‘rattle’ is normally reserved for five-bedroomed homes and old, widowed grandparents, but I rattle around this tiny flat and some nights that is unbearable. Even in hospital, there was more company – sure, some of it was in the form of disembodied noise from someone being restrained down the corridor but still, it was something.
Now, I need to fill this silence, and in the absence of friends and family, I do that with anyone I can in the only way I can, by offering them something for free. For most of them it’s wine, for the occasional man it’s sex.
There is the potential, of course, to have sex with Tom, too. But no, I think. I need to play a longer game.
Watching him, still, I head over to Chantal.
She grabs my arm, swings me around for a dance. I am happy enough, unusually, to join in. We twirl and we laugh and we drink, the whole time. I lean in close to her. ‘See that guy over there?’ I whisper.
She looks at Tom. Tries to focus.
‘He’s going to be my next boyfriend.’
‘That’s amazing,’ she hisses, slurring a Prosecco spray at my cheek. ‘You deserve a boyfriend. You deserve all the boyfriends.’
And then she pulls me in close and sways with me until she says, teary, that she feels like she might vomit, then shuffles to the door, carrying her shoes.
At the door, she leans in close to me.
‘I know I’m probably about to be sick,’ she says, gagging. ‘But I am still so excited about your next boyfriend.’
She kisses me on the mouth.
When a couple of hours later, Tom falls asleep on my sofa, I sit next to him and touch his face as gently as if he were a newborn. I move close to feel his sleep breath on my cheek. I touch the end of his curls, rubbing the tips between my fingers, and lean close to inhale his scent. Beer and sweat and hair gel.
Then I take out my phone and loll my head on his shoulder, snapping a selfie of us. He doesn’t react, still passed out. I am one more body in a sea of bodies and it’s 3 a.m. I see his keys, they have slipped out and are just next to his pocket on the sofa, and I make an eighth of a second decision to slip them into my own.
Shortly after that he wakes, looks like he may be sick, too, and then stumbles through the crowd the few steps to my front door.
When he has left, I touch the indent from his head that is on my cushion on the sofa, the place where I usually Google his name and turn the TV to mute so I can hear his relationship woes.
I watch him return moments later and search pointlessly for his keys before stumbling home again. Oh Tom, I think, as I pat his keys, safe in my pocket.
And then I go to bed while I still have party guests, which means my door will be unlocked all night and my belongings open to strangers. Whatever. The night – though it may have consisted of people I don’t know drinking all the alcohol in my house with barely a thank you – has been one of th
e best I’ve had. Beautiful Tom and his curls. I drift off with a smile on my face and a plan forming in my head. I sleep holding Tom’s keys. I’ve been nibbling on the dregs of their postbox and their social media. The flat key gives me access to a Tom and Lexie buffet.
19
Lexie
January
I FaceTime Tom from Yorkshire, my nephew, Noah – desperate to speak to Uncle Tom with me while his dad cooks us pasta – sitting on my lap.
Tom appears on the screen and I can see that he is guzzling our adored Noah up, but he looks pale.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I ask. ‘I told Noah we would try you just in case, but I thought the most we’d get was a quick thirty-second hello. You look awful.’
‘I have food poisoning,’ he says quickly.
‘Didn’t you go out last night?’ I ask. ‘Is food poisoning code?’
I nod at my nephew.
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘He understands hangovers. Noah’s dad’s a Yorkshireman.’
‘I’m serious,’ he snips.
I ease off.
‘I had a burger. Rich is feeling rough, too.’
I raise an eyebrow, but then Noah demonstrates to Tom the toddler yoga he does at nursery and I am focused on the tiny bottom stuck up in the air that’s making me laugh until I can’t breathe.
It’s only when I look up that I see Tom isn’t laughing. He is looking away, distracted, elsewhere when normally Noah consumes us both.
‘Lex, on your way back can you stop at the key place and get a flat key cut? I lost my keys last night. The porter had to let me in.’
‘Shit,’ I say, then check Noah didn’t hear. ‘Should we get the locks changed?’
‘No, I’ve got my wallet, so there’s nothing anyone could get our address from. Just a stupid drunk mistake.’
I laugh.
‘Ah! so you were drunk? But I thought it was the burger.’
He doesn’t even smile.
I get home the next day and the night passes into history, for now.
Something hangs between us, though. I think about how close we were when we started talking about starting a family. I see the us from then and the us from now. I think of the times we fill silences by both blurting out something inane at the same time and then politely withdrawing, to let the other speak. I think of the extra few centimetres between us in bed at night. At the lack of touch. Of the slight tilt of Tom’s diary – no longer a source of amusement to me but part of our routine, part of our calm – away from me now as he writes while I read, as we do.
Through the Wall Page 8