Not had chance to connect with Sam yet – having a rough time with a break-up so been distracted. Will do soon though and thanks again for your help. Can’t believe you are so up for helping – reassuring to know there are good men out there … xx.
Probably a little much, but then so was following up my email in the early hours unnecessarily. He had upped the ante; I had just followed.
And then, seconds later, I get a reply.
You’re probably too good for him anyway xx
I go for off the cuff again.
*Blushes*
That was it. But it was enough.
If you wanted, we could meet up – I could give you an overview about the industry, pass on some more advice – and maybe flatter your ego a bit more too … x
I sit up, eyes blurred, heart hammering.
The next morning I am sanguine as I pick up my post, thinking of all the things Tom and I can do together, how quickly he can leave Lexie, how Luke will feel when he hears the news about my new English boyfriend.
There is a new future, and it’s Tom.
I walk down the stairs with a bouncy tread.
Lexie and Tom’s postbox is spilling over and there is a letter with a hospital stamp and Lexie’s name on it.
I am too curious and high – non-medicinally, I’ve taken a big hit of Tom – for legalities.
I whip it out of the top, slipping it between my own post and heading inside.
Then, suddenly, someone appears behind me. A flash of bright red hair. Big smile.
‘Hey!’ she shouts.
Chantal.
‘Oh, hi,’ I redden, clutching the post close to me, though she could never know.
‘You okay?’ she asks.
I nod. Don’t ask me about the boyfriend, I think, remembering what I said to her at the party. Don’t ask me about the boyfriend.
But then I remember how drunk Chantal was – how drunk Chantal always is – and know that she would never remember either that conversation or Tom’s face. I back away, anyway, make the usual excuses that end in ellipsis.
‘Sorry, I’ve just got to …’
Inside, I flick my sneakers off and stick the kettle on for an instant coffee.
Then I stand, holding the letter. I debate doing something TV-like with an iron and a penknife but then I decide screw it, everyone knows post can go missing, they’ll just get someone to resend it and that will be that.
We are pleased to confirm your consultation at the fertility unit.
So, here are the facts:
Tom and Lexie are trying for a baby.
They’re not having much luck.
Tom and Lexie have been arguing.
Tom is flirting with someone else, while on holiday with Lexie.
The kettle boils, though I don’t remember boiling it, and I absentmindedly return to the kitchen to make the coffee.
Then I sit down to my iPad and ponder.
What’s the best thing a man in the midst of all of that could hear?
I think about the blogs I’ve read.
Fun. Lightness. No pressure.
I leave the coffee on the side and pick up my phone, sitting down on the bed to write.
Sure – up for some mutual ego flattering over a drink or three. Mine’s an amaretto and Coke ;)
27
Lexie
February
I step out of the taxi and haul my case out behind me, swiping my fob on the gate as I enter our building. I feel the relief that I always feel in here. Outside is the chaos of Zone One. Inside is the calm neutrality of a chain hotel. No bright colours, nothing to shock. The occasional artwork on the wall is generic. Notices to residents are inane. It’s reassuring.
Tom, as was always the plan with work, is still in Sweden.
The post is gushing out of our box and I shove it under my arm as I get in the lift and head up to our floor.
As soon as I put my key in I can hear her, singing loudly, sounding even jollier than normal, I swear; though maybe that’s just because she often becomes a reverse mirror to my own mood.
And I am feeling so low that it is difficult to find the energy to turn the key in the door. I can’t imagine being able to get my clothes out of my case.
It doesn’t come over me often, but I crave having parents who I could call and cry and receive a virtual hug from.
I’m surprised. I thought this was something I was used to and didn’t have it in me to miss. Even in childhood I would go to Kit or to school friends if that’s what I needed. So why am I missing it now, this thing I never had?
Because, I think, I’ve never needed it like this. Never flailed so much. Never needed shoring up. And because I’ve never felt so distant from Tom, who, more than anyone, for my whole adult life has been the one to take on that role.
I shake my head to snap out of these thoughts. I am genuinely amazed that I have just moved my feet enough times and made contact with enough people to travel back from Sweden to my home. Surely it was only doable because I knew that when I got here, I could stay still for the foreseeable future.
The day after the row, Tom came back from work early and he and I made up. But since then, exacerbated by one of those thirty-something anxiety hangovers that won’t quite shift, I’ve started to panic.
I know external poisons can come in and wreck things. My lack of self-confidence has made Tom and I unequal. I think I’m being clingy, then I say sorry for being clingy, then I cringe at myself for saying sorry so much and suddenly that worry re-emerges: we’re not quite right. What if this poison has come in and made us toxic?
I want to be an equal partner who drinks Pinot Noir with him through joy not pain. Someone who makes him laugh and impresses him. If I am not those things, how long will Tom wait? I check on the condoms. They are still there, unopened. I think – again, the drip-feed – about why someone would be posting cruel messages on my social media, why I would be relevant to this faceless stranger. Could Tom have done something that prompted this kind of revenge or malice? Is it outside the realms of possibility that in the midst of all this, Tom has cheated on me?
I throw the post on the table, lean my case against the door then sigh onto the sofa. I think about the last time I was here and how odd the flat felt, and a shiver runs through me that is not only from the memory of the in-flight air-con.
But what now? It will be two weeks until Tom gets home and until then, I have two choices: I can sit here waiting for him to get back, or I can live my life and start to get some of me back. And something seizes me that is so dominant it even drowns out Harriet.
I write a list of things I want to achieve this year. Having a baby is of course on there, but it’s not at its heart.
At its heart is a sense that I have lost myself. And if I feel like I’ve lost myself then I need to go and reclaim myself, fast. I message Shona, suggesting that we meet up for that elderflower pressé.
Sorry it’s taken so long. I’ve been in Sweden with Tom for work.
The truth, too, is that instead of seeing her as a comfort, as time had passed I had worried about being around her. What if she announced a pregnancy? How would I cope? Then in a moment of clarity I remember the support, how it felt for someone to understand. How good that hug was, for both of us.
I redo my CV and email five copywriting agencies I’ve always been intimidated by. I book to go to a talk by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Swiftly, a message comes back from Shona.
Yes to the boring drinks, she says. I’ve actually just started treatment so could do with the distraction. This Friday?
Then I belatedly reply to the message from Rich that suggested a catch-up.
Dinner it is, he says. Mexican? If I remember rightly your dancing after margaritas is impressive so we must have those.
I laugh, genuinely, because it’s easier to remember the old me when someone else paints the picture.
A house party, a few years ago, in Edinburgh during the festival after watchin
g our friend Gabe do stand-up. I can remember the happy pain from laughing in my stomach and the potency of that tequila. I felt human. Rounded. I must try harder to hold onto those things.
I eat soup then check my email and have a response from one of the agencies, suggesting a coffee.
Suddenly I’m buzzing so I go for a run, picking up some sort of green kale horror juice on the way home and vowing that my other mission for the year is to get healthy. To feel like I can take on anything I might need to in the next year. Right now, I feel like I can.
I power walk home and run up the stairs to the flat. I FaceTime Tom and he answers straight away, half a second passing before I fill him in on work, and running, and my night out, and my list.
‘You’ve been busy,’ he laughs. ‘You only got home a few hours ago.’
He’s grinning and I pull my mass of hair out of its ponytail, laughing, too, and drowning out Harriet, who’s reaching a high note. The thoughts I had before now seem ridiculous.
‘Oh God, I can hear her from Sweden.’
‘I’m pretty sure the one about the chickens would make it to Venezuela,’ I whisper in response.
We smile, relaxed.
‘I’m sorry again about the other night …’ he says, going over the same ground. ‘What I said. I shouldn’t have got angry, not when you were so sad. I was just so frustrated that I couldn’t make it better. I was just so angry with everything.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘And I’m sorry again, too. I’m so sorry about doing that in front of your colleagues.’
Harriet hits an even higher note and the connection drops so we leave it there. I am sure I can hear that baby, so quiet but so piercing, in Harriet’s flat again, but when I put my ear to the wall, there is only – as ever – a piano.
28
Harriet
February
It’s only after I send my reply that I realise the insurmountable problem: there’s a strong chance that Tom, my neighbour, if I sat in a bar with him drinking amaretto, would recognise my face.
But in the end, he sends another message anyway. It comes while I am in the middle of hosting a dinner party, a little respectable warm-up to the part where people drink to forget until 3 a.m. and vomit in my toilet.
I fork some ready-prepared microwave vegetables for five people I’m working with who are currently sipping G & Ts in my living room. One is loosely playing the piano and another is laughing uproariously about something funny that happened in rehearsal today that wasn’t funny at all.
In the kitchen I am lonely and check my email to delay going back in. I’m not really expecting to hear from Tom. After all, the next move is mine. But I do.
Hey, Rachel, he starts and immediately, I think, formal.
Sorry about that last message. I think I gave you the wrong idea. I have a girlfriend who wouldn’t be happy with me going for drinks with you, even in a work way. Good luck with it all though, Tom.
Kisses are absent and so is suggestion. Another one follows one minute later.
PS. Could you delete these messages too? it says, which seems a bit OTT, but I guess he’s paranoid.
He doesn’t strike me as the kind who cheats – maybe talk of drinks with me on email is the nearest he’s ever come.
I stab the fork into the buttered leeks and shove it in the oven, the door slamming harder than my chest as someone shouts from the living room to ask if I’m okay, do I need some help.
‘Fine, thanks, will be in in a minute!’ I yell to her and despite all of the strangers sitting around in my flat acting as some semblance of company, suddenly I am the cheese on top of the ready-made lasagne, bubbling, steaming, spilling over.
I stab the fork into my own hand this time to distract myself from thinking about Tom, ending this embryonic thing that we have, and Luke, ending the bigger thing we had, and my family and the police turning up and how it made me feel, and who I am now, at this minute, in this kitchen.
Does Tom have any idea what can happen when people walk away from me? When they refuse to come back?
Blood runs down my wrist and onto my pushed-up sleeve as I pour myself a large amaretto, no Coke, and down it. Whether it’s the booze or the adrenaline of the pain, I decide that no, it’s not over, not just because he says it is. This was the first good thing that had happened to me in ages. I had seen a way to move on. And then he simply shuts it down? No. No.
That’s a shame, I reply, not caring about the blood on my phone. Googled you and thought you looked hot.
I am cringing at me, but I am so used to cringing at me that it barely registers.
I bandage my hand, make excuses about cooking accidents, and sit through the roast chicken and the small talk. Instead of letting it descend into chaos though, I turn the music off and start tidying at 10.30 p.m. so that I can see everyone out early, declarations of how much fun they’ve all had coming thick and fast as I think: you idiots. You haven’t had fun, you’ve had booze, why can’t anyone see the difference?
But I’m in a fog myself, the large amarettos I was drinking alone in the kitchen in between socialising hitting me hard now. I shut the door, grab the bottle and my empty glass, and lie down on the bed, picking up my phone. Nothing. How dare he! He started this, I think. He upped the ante. Him, him, him.
In the dim lamplight of my bedroom, I take my top off. I turn the camera to selfie mode, being careful to omit my face and just as careful to include my best feature: my 34E breasts.
‘But still, if this doesn’t appeal …’ I say and I send the picture.
He’s a man who’s swapped a regimented baby-making routine for no sex alone in a hotel room in Scandinavia. I heard someone in the flat earlier but I know Tom’s still away from his Twitter feed. So I wait and I see. And I pull my jeans off and the duvet over me before I pass out in my bed, which is too big for one tall, still bleeding, drunk person.
29
Lexie
February
I am out of my comfort zone, literally, as I sit on a school assembly plastic chair in a therapy session.
I am an adult. I comprehend therapy and its role and I have multiple friends who have gained great things from it. But for me, it has never felt necessary. An early night rereading a classic has been enough to cure the majority of ills. Nancy Mitford is my therapist, Daphne du Maurier is my counsellor.
But now I need more than Daph and Nance can give me and I am here.
It was on offer and I have taken it. I welcome claiming back my mind against conspiracy theories, doubt and paranoia. I welcome help, and positivity, and someone to tell me how not to be such an utter bitch.
That’s a starting point.
‘I just want to feel like less of a bitch,’ I say to this woman with kind eyes whose name is Angharad.
‘A bitch?’ she says. Welsh. ‘Go on.’
Or maybe I remember it that way because therapists always say ‘go on’ in films.
Either way, I go on.
They said to be brutally honest, so here I don’t fake-caveat.
I don’t say that I resent all pregnant people ‘even though I am obviously happy for them’. I just say that I resent them. I don’t say ‘I’m sure they do appreciate how lucky they are but it sometimes doesn’t seem that way.’ I just say ‘None of them seem to appreciate it at all, as much as I would. They just moan about their swollen ankles or their sleep deprivation and I would kill for those problems.’
It’s a release not to temper my words.
Except, suddenly, Angharad moves and I notice something, a tiny dune under her loose-fitting dress.
She sees me look.
‘Are you pregnant?’ I say, incredulous, before I have thought about manners. Or respect. Or professionalism. Or tact.
She is the fertility counsellor. Surely this isn’t allowed? Although, I will think retrospectively, what probably isn’t allowed is screening for hires on the basis that someone may become pregnant during their tenure.
‘We aren’t he
re to discuss me,’ she says and puts a protective arm across her middle.
Another one.
I scan back through everything I said about pregnant people.
From then, I am as mute as it is possible to be in a room where the sole task is to speak. In its darkest corner, my brain is processing ‘even your therapist is pregnant’ as yet another reason to feel badly treated by the universe.
I deliver one-word answers and watch the clock like a child, then fail to make a follow-up appointment.
30
Harriet
February
Tom and Lexie have headed out and I am at their place, again. I’m taking a risk, I know, as I have no idea how long they will be or where they have gone, but what is life without risk? I know that more than most.
I sit first on their sofa, to rest. I’m starting to feel quite comfortable here. I put the TV on and imagine I am Lexie.
‘Hey, Tom,’ I say quietly, imitating that chirpy northern lilt. ‘Stick the kettle on.’
I smile and stay there being Lexie for a few minutes. I search the TV planner for her recent shows and flick between them. Then it’s time to move, so I get up, put the pillows back – then change my mind and mess them up again – and I pilfer. I take a T-shirt of Tom’s. Some underwear. I snap pictures of myself lying on their sofa. I take aftershave from the bathroom. I stand and stare at a large, imposing image of a British postbox that dominates the walls in the living room, and I think fuck, how did I end up here? I am living next door to these people, in a flat I never chose, a city I never chose, a life I never chose. I didn’t covet an existence surrounded by these iconic London images. I didn’t romanticise Buckingham Palace or adorn my walls with red postboxes. I can take or leave Borough Market. I don’t gasp at Tower Bridge. I think of when I told my parents I was moving to London, staying over at theirs as Luke was away. Exactly where was hazy; he didn’t like it when I quizzed him.
Through the Wall Page 11