I think about how a hug we shared the other day reminded me of the ones I get from my parents. Hanging back. Not quite invested. I think of how it’s rare now that we get tipsy together slowly and speak about being teenagers, or politics, or any other conversation that meanders its way through a bottle of wine. I try to remember the last time we kissed, just kissed, without it being about trying for a baby, and I cannot. Alone that night in a bed at the other end of the country, I feel very distant and suddenly, very sad.
20
Harriet
January
It’s an odd thing, walking into a flat that is a mirror image of your own. Everything is filtered, not quite right, and Lexie and Tom’s flat feels half the size of mine as there is stuff, the stuff that makes up a life, at every turn. Mine has the air of a place that has been cleansed and purged so that it looks bigger in the AirBnB pictures.
I waited for my moment. Social media told me that Tom was away. Then, I heard their door slam and watched Lexie run across the road and gesticulate wildly at a bus before zooming away to give me space. Thanks, Lexie, I think, much appreciated.
I peruse, first, like I am at an art gallery or enjoying a Sunday afternoon at a museum. Contemplate, muse.
I should feel nervous, I think, but then I have done worse than this. Far worse.
I walk through the living room with its corner sofa squished into this tiny space. Lexie’s make-up bag is on the side with lipstick blotted onto a tissue alongside it. I touch the colour so there is a trace on my finger. I hold her Pantone mug, cold now with a mouthful of leftover tea in its bottom, between my palms. I see a birthday card, half written, with a long, heartfelt message from Lexie. I run my fingers along the radiator and feel the leftover trace of warmth.
In the kitchen, a chalkboard on the wall says the words BROCCOLI NOODLES ICE CREAM WITH THE MARSHMELLOWS IN IT. There are biscuit crumbs on the side, a bottle of red with two thirds gone. A life.
They could do with emptying the bin though, I think, sniffing the air and grimacing. I walk into the hall and stroke my finger across the wall as I decide that this flat really does need a second coat of paint.
But they are, of course, not the most interesting exhibits.
First, sitting on Lexie and Tom’s unmade bed, an iPad. No lock code on it, perhaps as it always lives at home. Email is too dense to bother, a sea of marketing and mailing lists, but there, as easy as that, are Lexie’s personal notes. I find one entitled ‘Work ideas’.
‘Think about whether there is any future in writing/making enough money AT ALL,’ it says. ‘Retrain???’
Lexie isn’t happy in her work. Needs more of it.
I move on.
Photos don’t grab me – I’ve seen enough of those online – but an old handwritten school diary that I find buried in a drawer does, for too long almost, as after all, I have no idea how long Lexie will be and I do need to get on.
You’d think the diary would be Lexie’s, wouldn’t you, with her being a writer, but it’s Tom’s, wedged there and peeking out from underneath his socks. One has a hole in. Both letting yourselves go, I think. Bad relationship form. Gaps, gaps, gaps.
I scan to the date I’m looking for. A diary, huh, Tom? Maybe I’m sexist but that seems like a pretty odd hobby for a thirty-something man. But oh, what a convenient one. I arch an eyebrow and begin to flick through.
It was in a flat I thought was next door (Harriet’s), though I was drunk enough already by then that it’s hazy. And I don’t remember seeing Harriet. So maybe not, he writes and my face flushes with pride. I’m in his private, hidden diary. I reside there, under his socks.
I flick a few pages back.
Fertility issues are taking their toll. I don’t want to be that man wishing the pub was open an hour later so I can drench my sadness in the acceptable male coating of beer and ignore the real issues. But it looks like I am that bloke.
I could sit here guzzling this up all day. How quaint. How sweet. How exposing.
And then it is time to go. I take out what I brought with me from my bag and I shove it in the same drawer as the diary before locking the front door behind me.
21
Lexie
January
There are two versions of today, I have decided, there is a counterfactual.
There is the version in which I sit on the sofa muttering about Facebook friends who post endless updates on their kids’ toilet-training.
And then there is the other version, where I have been out at a meeting and welcome Tom back from his work trip to Leeds with a homemade risotto.
In version two, I am happy. And I’m making up to Tom for the last three days, when I’ve been frosty and passive-aggressive in all talk of motherfucking Sweden.
I put old Nineties tracks on and dance around the kitchen, singing badly to Sophie Ellis-Bextor. I pour two glasses of Malbec and place them next to the organic mushrooms. I look around. It’s the scene of something we have not been for a long time. But it’s so convincing that I’m almost feeling it. Maybe this is how to make us happy again, copy the old us and hope they reappear.
‘Woo-woo,’ Tom whistles, opening the door and taking in my dress and make-up. ‘Hot.’
He takes his trainers off to the soundtrack of our life, Harriet at her piano.
‘She’s off again,’ he says, rolling his eyes as he puts his slippers on and sighs a contented sigh. He’s home and he likes being here, and I am part of that. We have that. I hand him a glass of wine.
‘She’s been at it all day,’ I tell him, laughing. ‘At least, when I’ve been here.’
Because we’re in version two here and in version two, I didn’t sit through the wall seething at Harriet’s jolly singing all day and resenting someone I haven’t met.
This is my brain now. Fury, guilt, self-loathing.
I know how resenting other people’s happiness is a force for bad. We have Instagram inspo quotes. We have #goals. Women are supposed to champion each other, to want success for each other, and yet … here I am.
Over dinner, Tom tentatively brings up the trip again. We book my flights to join him and then agree to book an appointment at the doctors for when we get back.
‘I’m so excited!’ I say, smiling.
I’m trying to make it feel genuine but it still doesn’t. I still don’t want to go to Sweden; still hate the delay. He looks at me oddly and I wonder if I have overdone it with the fake joy. We’re jarring, lately. Misjudging. Not quite meshed.
At 9 p.m., we are watching a film when I think I hear the baby crying again.
‘Can you hear that baby again?’ I ask Tom.
He stares at the movie.
‘Probably just a mate of Harriet’s brought her child over,’ he says, barely registering.
‘At this time?’
He just shrugs.
I will sound crazy if I go on about how often I hear it, fixated.
So I wait for Tom to leave the room and when he goes to make tea, I leap up. I put my ear to the wall but it’s stopped. Or it never started?
And then my feet are cold, so I go into our room to the place that holds the best selection of socks, Tom’s drawer, but something catches my eye. Not his diary, which I know is in here and would never touch, but a flash of red, a familiar branding.
‘Tom, why have you got condoms in your drawer?’ I ask, marching into the kitchen before I can stop myself.
‘What?’ he asks, pouring boiling water into mugs.
‘Condoms. A brand new box of condoms. Why would you buy condoms? Why would you buy condoms now?’
He tells me he didn’t and looks back at the tea because he doesn’t think this is important. But it is important. Because I am doubtful and he now gets drunk and lies about it, and there are things, aren’t there, that if I’m honest have felt strange. I got in the other night and the flat felt different. Like someone had been here. There’s a possibility that I’m going crazy, but there’s also a possibility that I’m
not. The last few months have been hard for Tom, too. What routes do people take out of that?
But what else do you say?
I have no idea what I think but I sit back down, grip his hand and I try to hold on to something.
22
Harriet
January
It’s there, a message from Tom in ‘Rachel’s’ inbox. The stomach flip that seeing it there gives me makes me miss dating, romance. I bask in that feeling before I open it.
Here’s the email address, he says. Let me know how you get on.
Brilliant; it requires feedback. Except that I can’t apply for work experience with his friend because I’m not me and I don’t work in his industry. Ah.
I decide to deal with that detail later and enjoy this, for now. I’m relieved, too, to be distracted from the email from my parents.
I know what happened last year was wrong – drilled into me through three months in a psychiatric unit and the reaction of my shamed family – but how could they not excuse it? How could they not see that when you follow all the rules, then the person you have done everything for changes their mind anyway, that that’s not a normal thing to experience? If anyone would listen, I would like to explain just once how that altered me.
I’d woken up late, to Luke sitting up in bed, staring at me with an expression that I had never seen on the face that was more familiar to me than any other. It was a few months since we had started trying for a baby; less than a year since we had got engaged.
‘I’ve been having these thoughts,’ he’d said, earnestly, like he was auditioning for an arthouse film, not ruining my life. I had known, even if I never would have acknowledged that thought then, that Luke loved the drama. Heavy pause. ‘That maybe this isn’t right.’
I could see brochures for wedding venues on the bedside table.
‘Forever’s a big thing,’ he had gone on, sighing, auditioning. ‘It’s made me question everything.’
I had tried to zone out. Tried to block out a memory of my mom, after I had gushed to her once just before Luke and I moved to the UK about how smart Luke was, how inspiring.
‘You do know that you’re just as smart as he is, don’t you, Harriet?’ she’d said, focusing her eye contact on the tea towel.
I’d looked up from the suds. Dried my hands.
‘Why are you saying that to me?’ I had snapped.
‘I just wanted to make sure you knew,’ she’d said and then walked away.
Perhaps, I thought for the first time as he wheeled out these clichés, she had been right. Had I placed Luke on too much of a pedestal? But the thoughts had disappeared quickly, as the reality of what was happening hit me.
Luke had hugged me like a lame apology and I’d thought of my phone and how the last ten messages had to do with our wedding – appointments with potential photographers, messages to Luke himself just a day earlier about what kind of bloody cake we would have.
A massive doughnut ring, I had suggested, only half kidding. A nod to our American roots?
Luke had dismissed it.
Traditional afternoon tea platter, he’d told me. A nod to our British future.
I knew, as a bland statement of fact, that I would always love him and need him and had wondered – practically – how that worked. I knew I should fight it, reason with him, show him why he was wrong, and I had tried, but I was too desperate to sound appealing.
And yet, Luke did change his mind. In retrospect, probably another way to toy with me, since Luke never normally changed his mind on anything. But he went out and I sat in a ball on the floor, already knowing the loneliness of my new life. I had seen the photo of us at Land’s End in Cornwall, wrapped up in long woollen scarves, out of the corner of my vision in the living room, and had made my hands cover as much of my face as I could, to block out as much of the world as it was possible to block.
And then Luke had put his key in the door and climbed down onto the floor with me.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking!’ he’d said, a huge grin on his face. ‘Let’s forget it.’
Forget it? I’d thought of how twenty minutes earlier I had felt like I was dying. How I had looked at what else there was in my life and saw that aside from work, there was nothing. My family had become increasingly distant every time they criticised or questioned Luke so that by now, we were hanging on by a thread. I no longer had friends; even Frances was barely in touch. Luke didn’t like me seeing people without him. But I had been all right with that: I had only needed Luke.
‘Okay,’ I’d said. ‘Thank you.’
The relief had felt physical, zooming through my insides.
‘That’s okay,’ he’d said, magnanimous. But not sorry, never sorry.
‘Did I tell you about that exhibition I wanted to see at the National Portrait Gallery?’ he’d then said suddenly. What?
Then he sighed like he was in love. ‘God! I adore this city.’
He had moved on. This one might have been particularly extreme, but I was used to these turnarounds, used to flipping my emotions back and forth and being ready to do happiness, even when it followed so closely behind sadness. Used to playing whatever role he needed me to.
Once you start breaking up, though, you can’t stop breaking up, not any more than temporarily, and it had happened properly two weeks later as we watched a film in bed.
‘I’m moving out, Harriet,’ he’d said and if the last version of Break-Up Luke had been drama school over-actor, this one was robot. No emotion, no flicker of doubt. ‘It’s not been right for a while.’
I’d sat in shock as he slung clothes in a bag and made toast to take with him, carefully spreading his Marmite for what felt like hours.
And while some break-ups might knock someone left field for a few weeks or propel them into a trip around Asia, I’d known for me that it was done. That life would grind to a halt that day he left our bed. How the hell would I start again? Who would want me? My life was over and he was asking for the phone number of our reception venue so he could cancel our wedding, as though it were a pizza we’d waited too long for. We’re pissed off. The pepperoni was due at 7 p.m. and now it’s eight thirty. We’ve had to have beans on bloody toast.
I’d stayed in bed until the evening. I watched bad TV and I didn’t cry until finally, I did and I couldn’t stop, and I sobbed myself to sleep. And this time, Luke didn’t reverse out of it; didn’t change his mind.
I’m jolted out of this familiar trip down memory dead end with a booming noise from next door. Movie night at Tom and Lexie’s. I kick the wall then wince. Tom and Lexie and their eternal fucking togetherness.
The noise brings me back into the present, reminds me to act. I open up my laptop and slam my fingers on the keyboard. This time I am not Harriet, and I am not Rachel, but I am … Leo. Why not?
Hi Lexie, I begin, listening to the noise of the film through the wall and feeling the rage again, that swell. You have no idea what I’m capable of, I think. You have no idea what I did.
I work for a media agency and might have some copywriting work to send your way. Good rate and regular hours. Let me know if you’d be interested.
The address is gmail but I don’t think she’ll care. From that list on her iPad? Lexie is kind of desperate.
After that, there doesn’t seem much point waiting up, so I get an early night, going to sleep dreaming of a Tom–Luke hybrid lying with his feet in the cold, cold sea on a beach in Norfolk and laughing, like Lexie did, in my face.
23
Lexie
January
It’s when you have a meeting at a nice hotel that you realise all your clothes are too small and of a shape last featured in a fashion magazine a decade ago.
So I splashed out. Anais in tow, I bought a jumpsuit and today, I head to a salubrious hotel, check my coat and scarf into the cloakroom, and tell the maitre d’ that I am meeting someone for coffee. He takes me to my table but I see a man, mid-thirties, alone and looking like he is
waiting to meet somebody, so I head over. Take the lead, I think, dredging Old Me up from the past. This man wants you for work. Remember that you’re good.
‘Leo?’ I say with a smile.
‘Nope,’ he snips and looks back at his iPad.
I sit back down, burning red, and pretend to be engrossed in my phone while I wait, looking forward to proving that there is a Leo and that he is coming to meet me.
But twenty minutes pass. My coffee arrives. And another ten. There may in fact not be a Leo, here at least. I have finished my coffee. My face flushes when anyone comes near my table, or whenever I look up from my phone. This is the reality then: Old Me isn’t back, after all. It’s tragic New Me who’s turned up today, again. It’s her we’re stuck with now.
Hi Leo, sorry to bug you but just checking I have the right time and place? I email. I’m at the hotel and it’s 9 a.m. No worries at all if you’re just running late, though! Lexie.
As soon as I’ve sent it, I am embarrassed by New Me once again. Why am I sorry to ‘bug’ someone who hasn’t turned up to an arranged meeting? Why is it no worries if he is running late but hasn’t told me? Why did I put in an exclamation mark, like the whole thing was fun really, not a problem to me? I am sweating, though it is five degrees outside.
I ask for the bill and sitting in my taxi home, I estimate that altogether, Leo has cost me a hundred and fifty pounds. But more than that, he has cost me my pride when I tell Tom that the meeting I had built up as so important didn’t even happen.
Through the Wall Page 9