Through the Wall

by Caroline Corcoran

‘Or it’s what they say when they’re confused,’ says Tom, sounding a little annoyed. ‘Where the fuck has this come from?’

  ‘A girl called Rachel says you’ve been swapping sex pictures with her. There are knickers in my drawer that aren’t mine. The condoms. Sex isn’t exactly fun for us at the moment. So I’ll ask again. Are you cheating on me?’

  In the midst of every ounce of awfulness in this conversation, I am a tiny bit relieved. I thought I was too weak for this; it turns out I’m too angry for anything but this.

  And then, our reception goes and Tom cuts out.

  I sit on our bed simmering until he calls me back.

  ‘Who the fuck is Rachel?’ he says, no pleasantries. ‘Send me these messages. I want to see them. Let me speak to her.’

  I curse the lack of nuance on FaceTime. Is he red-faced? Are his hands shaking? How can I tell if he’s lying to me when I can’t reach out and touch him?

  He sighs then, though, and he’s more real. Nearer to human. He speaks more calmly.

  ‘We can’t do this properly over a laptop, Lex, but I promise you, I swear to you, I’m not cheating. I don’t know who this girl is but we’ll figure it out, okay? She’s just some weirdo. I’m not cheating on you. I want you. I want a family with you. I love you.’

  I sit silently for a minute.

  ‘Happy anniversary,’ he says quietly, but I just say a quiet, emotionless goodbye.

  When I turn my laptop off, I realise I am sweating and that now I am late to meet my brother, Kit, who will be waiting for me at King’s Cross station.

  I see a call flash up from my mum.

  Call you back another time, I text, instead of answering. Just in a rush.

  It’s the fifth, sixth time I’ve done this.

  I am too fragile at the moment to cope with the sharp questioning that I’ve managed all my life from my mum. To brush off the ‘Where is your life going?’ or the career digs. I am too emotional to deal with the pragmatic nature of my dad.

  I can hear him now, if I ever did tell him I was struggling to get pregnant.

  ‘Well that’s just the world,’ he would say. ‘If it’s not meant to happen, it’s not meant to happen. There’s no point wallowing in it.’

  The world is divided in two now, I think on the bus. There are the people I can enjoy being around and the ones who I cannot.

  The first lot aren’t necessarily my closest friends. The second lot aren’t necessarily people I don’t adore in other circumstances.

  But the first category have soft edges and I never suspect that after we have spoken, they will say something cutting about me.

  In the same way, I cannot appreciate sharpness or laugh at cruel wit. Last week in a coffee shop I saw a former colleague, Liv, who works for herself now, too.

  ‘Stay for a latte!’ she said, hugging me tight. ‘On me. Let’s catch up. Freelancer club.’

  My heart was hammering. Liv is bitchy, sharp. I’d be expected to keep up and to participate, and that was too much. I made excuses and fled, clutching my coffee like a fire alarm had gone off.

  Give me the soft people, though, and I will squidge up against them.

  My brother has always been one of the soft people. Kit is thirty-six, married to Lucy, and three years ago they had Noah. His disastrous love life might have been a joke to a lot of people before that but not to me. My heart broke every time his did, because all that my brother has wanted, since he was twelve and overweight and bullied, is kindness and love.

  ‘I just want a child of my own to tickle on the belly until they shriek,’ he told me, drunk, late one night after a break-up with a long-term girlfriend. ‘I just want to eat tuna bloody pasta with someone I love.’

  At the time I couldn’t fathom these tiny ambitions, as I threw everything into work. Now, I get it. These ambitions: they aren’t small at all.

  I don’t resent Kit, despite him having a child, because he is so deeply entrenched in my team.

  Luce is going away next weekend, his text said. Noah and me thought we might come and stay?

  Kit’s company, I think, as I stand at King’s Cross waiting for them, is like a human cookie. He slows my breathing; he is like my head being stroked gently as I snooze. I need this now. I need this right now.

  ‘Auntie Lexie!’ says a tiny voice from the other end of the platform and Noah is running, Kit following closely behind with a bag falling off his shoulder and being shrugged back on with every step.

  ‘Noah, hold my hand!’

  They are a car crash. The happiest car crash you could see.

  ‘Slow down!’

  The other passengers are looking. I’m looking, proud.

  ‘Noah, there are train tracks here! Noah!’

  Noah lands in my arms, so warm despite the cold day, and I heave him up into the air.

  ‘Are you still my best friend?’ he asks.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I say into his ear as someone slams into my calf with a wheelie case. I wince.

  Noah wriggles down too soon, like always, when I want the cuddle to last fifteen, twenty times longer. I am still inhaling him when he moves.

  Kit catches up and engulfs me in a bear hug.

  He’s still massive; just now, his height has caught up with his belly and the smile on his face says he couldn’t care less.

  ‘You okay?’ he whispers, one of each of our hands holding Noah’s, and my eyes fill, as I knew they would, with tears.

  He’s walking love, delivered to me on the train when I’m at my weakest, and now I am crying into his chest so that Noah, hand tight in mine, cannot see.

  ‘Everyone is pregnant,’ I sob. Oh, the relief not to hold back what I’m feeling, his brotherly role secure whatever awfulness I throw his way. ‘I’m still not pregnant and it’s not fair. And I think Tom is cheating on me.’

  He keeps me close, squeezed between his bulk and Noah’s tininess, and I am spirited into a cab, into my sparse, familiar building, upstairs in the lift and onto my sofa, a pizza delivery following closely behind without me even knowing when or how it was ordered. Right now, I want to live in Kit’s spare room in Yorkshire forever, where he will bring me tea and Noah will cuddle me, and everyone will have their soft edges.

  Later, Noah is on a makeshift bed made of pillows in my bedroom, and Kit and I have glasses filled to the rims with Merlot. Kit is of the belief that a wine glass filled one third full could only ever be a sign of pretentiousness, because what other reason could there be to top your glass up three times when you could just do it once?

  An empty pizza box lies on the floor. From nowhere, there appears to be a pack of Hobnobs. My stress levels have reduced by around 40 per cent in the last hour. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I needed this.’

  ‘But Tom’s not cheating on you? Not really?’ he says, knowing Tom, trusting Tom.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I reply honestly. ‘But I don’t know. There are so many weird things, and I never seem to know what’s reality and what’s in my head. I don’t trust my own judgement any more.’

  I tell him about Rachel. Then about the knickers, the anecdote making me flush red.

  ‘He is so adamant that they are nothing to do with him that I feel like I can’t doubt it, but at the same time, where the hell did they come from? He says they must be old ones of mine, but I swear, I never owned those. Maybe I’m going insane.’

  ‘Have you talked to Mum and Dad?’ he asks. ‘Not about the knickers. About fertility stuff. Tom.’

  ‘No,’ I say, defensive. ‘I can’t burden them. They’re a long way away, they’d feel helpless.’

  Plus, there are financial worries, a house here in the UK that won’t sell, a retirement fund that really needs it to. They don’t need this.

  ‘I know what they’re like,’ says Kit thoughtfully, ‘But if it was Noah, I wouldn’t give a shit if I had no money and I was begging on the streets; if he was sad, I would want to know. And it was okay, wasn’t it? The last time you saw them?’

&nb
sp; I raise an eyebrow.

  Last Christmas, Kit was at his in-laws and Mum and Dad spent it with Tom and me.

  It is no exaggeration to say that I spent about 50 per cent of December on Project Proving to My Mum I am Doing Okay. I might not have a staff job or a baby or a wedding certificate, but I had Christmas-baked goods, grown-up tree decorations. I had presents wrapped with bloody ribbons in a tasteful colour scheme.

  I messaged her, a day before they were due to fly over.

  Got your room ready! I said. I’m excited.

  I don’t often admit an emotion to my mum but it was true – I was excited. This was new, a fresh stage for us, and maybe this was the one we would excel at. Real adults, doing real Christmas.

  A reply pinged in.

  Oh don’t worry, darling, we’re staying in the hotel, she said. Sorry, thought I mentioned.

  I was a bit gutted but hey, I could definitely live with the space – except then I noticed the pronoun.

  THE hotel? I replied. What hotel?

  The one we’re eating Christmas dinner at, she messaged back. That we booked back in September.

  I never told her that I had thought I was cooking. That I had thought we would be peeling potatoes together while Wham played on the radio. That I had thought we could get drunk on Prosecco while we watched crap Christmas TV in our slippers after we’d stuffed our faces with mince pies.

  Instead, I just cried, quietly, to Tom, who didn’t understand why it mattered so much.

  ‘We haven’t bought much stuff,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got the turkey.’

  ‘But other people’s families get to do this,’ I muffled into his jumper. ‘I don’t get any of it, all year, any year, and just once I thought it would be like normal family stuff. Except that I would be the grown-up.’

  I had really, really wanted to be the grown-up.

  In the end, my parents arrived and we ate meals together, pulled restaurant crackers, met up at the cinema to watch Christmas movies. We dragged them to an ice rink. But then we said polite goodbyes. Nobody fell asleep with a paper hat on their head. No one got angry over the bids for Bond Street in Monopoly. We simply met up again the next morning, ordered eggs and avocado, made more small talk.

  I had wanted my parents – living abroad the rest of the time – to be in my home. Just to be. I had wanted them to check the gravy with me, and congratulate me on my stuffing, and drink a Baileys on my sofa, and get up in the morning in their pyjamas. I had wanted to lend them shower gel and towels and to make their beds. I had wanted something more real than the hotels that we stayed in when we visited them. I had wanted this to be the new normal.

  But Kit was right. It had been okay when I last saw them. Digs about my job and my life choices had been there but they’d been fairly minimal. Nobody fell out. The hotel turkey was moist.

  ‘Yeah,’ I sigh. ‘It was okay.’

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ says a tiny voice from behind the door. ‘It’s very noisy in London. Can I have a biscuit?’

  And I let him under the blanket while Kit tells him not to tell his mum about the late-night Hobnob.

  36

  Harriet

  February

  I have been laid face down on my bed, sobbing, for an hour now. Nothing is more likely to do this to me than the closeness of a sister with her brother.

  Lexie, I know from a social media post, has her brother to stay in her flat. They speak in quiet, companionable voices that mean I cannot catch a word, but their laughter comes through with the sounds of a little boy, giggling too and shrieking.

  I think of David and how he never came to visit me in the UK until he picked me up from a police station. I think of him moving in with somebody called Sadie and if they will have a baby. If it happens, will I know that child? Will I love it? Will I tickle its little belly after I change its diaper? I think about reaching out to my brother and how much I miss him, but it feels too late now, like it is impossible to come back from.

  The sobs are overwhelming me and they are not, as people often say they do, making things feel better. I am not purging, I am cultivating. I click on David’s Facebook page, where he is living his life with friends I don’t know, sporting facial hair I don’t recognise and espousing political beliefs that I didn’t know he had. There are now people in his life who are so periphery and yet, are closer than me. Meanwhile, Lexie sits back and wins, yet again, laughing with a brother who is tangible and real and sitting on her sofa.

  The worst thing is that it is my own fault. Despite their horror at what I did, my family tried to keep me in their life. When I finally allowed David to tell them what had happened, my parents – never before having left the US – sorted out passports and travelled all the way over to see me in hospital.

  They walked in as I lay prone on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I had no phone to browse, no comb to brush my hair. I couldn’t be trusted with even such innocent items.

  The door pushed open.

  While Mom rushed to me, Dad held back. When I refused to put my arms around Mom and carried on staring in silence, she returned to him looking confused, shaken.

  ‘It’s your fault,’ I said when I finally spoke. Not how are you, not how was the flight.

  I hissed a chasm between us.

  ‘All of this. Look what you did.’

  The family who had come thousands of miles to see me and love me didn’t mean anything; all I wanted was Luke.

  They were silent, utterly shocked.

  ‘You never liked him. Luke never felt like he could be part of our family. That’s why he left me. Now look what’s happened.’

  ‘Harriet, you can’t blame …’ began my dad, wide-eyed and pale at my response and at this environment that none of us had ever thought we would find ourselves in.

  ‘We just want to help,’ interrupted my mom, softly, with a hand on his arm.

  I knew she was trying to bring the whole conversation down a level, to calm a hysterical toddler.

  ‘Why?’ I snarled, looking up and meeting her eye for the first time. ‘You sabotaged my life. You pushed Luke out. No wonder we had to move abroad in the first place.’

  They stood, framed in the doorway. A moment passed. My dad, I saw, still taking in the room in its starkness and its lack. My mom failing to blink away tears.

  ‘You abandoned me,’ I continued, eyes back on the ceiling. ‘Now I’m abandoning you.’

  They left then but tried to visit again every day they were in the country. I refused, repeatedly, to see them. Their return ticket delivered them back to the States two weeks later.

  Towards David, I was a little gentler. My brother had decided to stay in England for longer, with some mates who were here on a gap year.

  David was always my Achilles heel and made me comprehend what people felt when they talked about having your own child. I’d jump in front of a bus for David. So I let him visit.

  He sat alongside my bed every day, before he went to a gig or a pub or a party. Sometimes I was silent; sometimes we would chat. Music, TV, mutual friends.

  Then one day, a few weeks after I was admitted, he moved from his usual chair, sat on my hospital bed and took my hand in his. He thought I had had enough drugs and therapy to be spoken to more honestly. I steeled myself.

  ‘I know you were heartbroken about Luke,’ he said gently. ‘But can you try to explain to me what happened? I just can’t believe you’re capable of doing that to somebody.’

  I couldn’t face a lifetime of knowing that David was disgusted by me. So I attacked, pushed away.

  ‘I don’t know why you care,’ I sniped as a nurse handed me some meds. ‘You hated Luke anyway.’

  He looked shocked.

  ‘For starters, I didn’t hate Luke,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you got that from.’

  I raised a sulky, weak eyebrow. Luke had told me. It had to be true.

  ‘But anyway, that’s kind of beside the point.’

  ‘I’d like you to leave
now,’ I said and turned away from his kiss goodbye.

  After that I refused his visits and David, needing to return to work, flew back to the US. When I came out of the hospital, I kept our contact minimal.

  We exchanged the basics – work’s fine, life’s fine, fine, fine, fine. But compared to where we were before, I let a ravine form between us and he, I think, found the whole thing so bewildering that eventually, it was a relief to let it happen.

  With my parents, I was even more extreme. There were phone calls to the hospital and later, when I got out, emails, but I was stoic in my coldness.

  Then a letter arrived.

  We won’t give up, Harriet. You’re our daughter. We will give you time to calm down but in a month or so we are coming over, or we’re flying you home.

  I considered calling them so many times, to say sorry and to explain and to say yes, yes, yes, please bring me home. Look after me. Feed me chicken soup. I looked at flight prices myself, thinking it may be better to try to explain in person. If I went all that way, they would know then that I was remorseful, good. But in the end, I was too ashamed. How could I explain to people who had invested years in raising me, teaching me morals and how to live, why I had done that to another human? And how could I take back everything I had hurled at them? How would we recover?

  I thought of David’s speech to me, adult suddenly and superior.

  And I knew I couldn’t be told off again, eye to eye, by someone who I adored. It was better just to let them go.

  I wrote back.

  Do not contact me. Do not visit me. I’ve moved flats now anyway, so you would have a wasted journey.

  Lies, harshness, whatever was required to make sure I didn’t have to answer to those faces who loved me so very much.

  37

  Lexie

  February

  I have been thinking about speaking to my mum and dad about my fertility issues since Kit brought it up. But they FaceTime before I get chance to call them.

  ‘Have you got a job yet?’ my mum asks.

  There are minimal pleasantries, no chit-chat. My mum has little patience for small talk. She allocates that to my dad, who’s only marginally better at it than she is. Sometimes I genuinely believe she comes to the phone armed with a list of bullet points.