Through the Wall

by Caroline Corcoran

  ‘Yes. The freelance one. My job. That’s my job.’

  She points out that I am wearing pyjamas and it is midday and that there is no real job you can do in which that is acceptable. I start explaining bloggers, influencers, coders and how actually the world is being run in pyjamas, but she is glazing over.

  ‘You’re in your thirties, Lexie,’ she says. ‘It’s been ages now since you left the other job.’

  ‘Yes, but I left it to do this job. This isn’t the in-between job. It’s the new job.’

  She starts talking about pensions and healthcare.

  ‘If you have children, you’ll need more security. And you’ll barely get any maternity pay.’

  Silence. Is it more awkward or less when you can see each other’s faces?

  I crack first.

  ‘Well, I’m not pregnant. So maternity pay isn’t an issue for me.’

  It’s not something I hadn’t gone over the impact of losing. But in the end the financial security came second to my sanity.

  ‘Yes, not now,’ she pokes. ‘But maybe one day. Is that in the pipeline? Something you and Tom talk about?’

  She says it hurriedly, like she can rush conception along if she just speaks a bit faster. Save me some time since I seem to be squandering so much of it. I consider telling her I think Tom is cheating on me, just to change the conversation, but I don’t have room in my head for her thoughts. I don’t have the brainpower to balance out making her not hate Tom, but not blame me, either – not get defensive, not become overwhelmed and distraught.

  I don’t trust myself to speak. I realise that she wouldn’t think my fertility was an issue because she presumes I would tell her if it was. But I don’t believe that’s an excuse for storming any conversation in your boots and leaping around, stamping. People should take more care with others’ hearts, especially the ones that belong to their own children.

  It spirals, then, because I don’t do anything to stop it. Mum quotes a piece she read the other day about fertility versus careers. I barely have a career to prioritise, we’ve just established that. So now we are clear: I have no children and I have no career. I have nothing. Except for a fake pie, which I tell her needs to come out of the oven before biting my lip through goodbyes.

  I cry for a good few minutes when we end the call before I decide to try to run it off; although the tears keep flowing even as I jog. Is that normal, to run and cry at the same time? No one seems to look at me. Maybe they just think it’s sweat, streaming down my face. Or maybe half the people out there are running to chase away today’s sadness.

  The tears are finally starting to dry up and I am heaving my way around the park to a cheesy dance track, when a No Caller ID pops up on my phone and I answer in case it’s some much-needed work. Perhaps even a real job. Or at least someone offering me a bloody pension.

  I am leaning up against the wall of a Thai restaurant, inhaling shots of lemongrass in swift, sharp breaths as they speak.

  ‘It’s the nurse from the reproductive medicine unit,’ she says. ‘Confirming your appointment for an ultrasound tomorrow.’

  My breath speeds up and my heart races like I’ve just powered into a sprint.

  What?

  This is the first I’ve heard of any appointment and I panic. Did I miss a letter? A call? There isn’t a chance in hell that I would have and yet this is what I do: I focus instantly on how it could have been my fault.

  I always presume that over a belief that it could be down to anyone else. If I sat back to analyse that, it would say some terrible things about my self-esteem.

  ‘I didn’t get the letter,’ I say, panic rising in my voice as my breathing gets even shallower. The lemongrass suddenly makes me gag. ‘But yes, I’ll be there. What time? Where? I’m so sorry.’

  I’m babbling now, imagining what would have happened if they’d never called, whether I would have been blacklisted forever and never had a baby, all because of my own idiocy, even though there was no idiocy, but, somehow, still, my brain is saying there probably was idiocy.

  I go home to calm myself and get an early night before tomorrow. A date that is now not another non-event Wednesday but a major marker – the start of something huge.

  But sitting on the sofa in a towel with a herbal tea cupped in my palm, I feel sick.

  Because what I didn’t tell Tom, when we decided to go to the doctors, was that I was already in the system. That a few months ago, frustrated by Tom’s refusal to get help, I had booked an appointment with the GP to tell her that I was having trouble getting pregnant. Tom wasn’t ready, but I was so very ready, and I did it on an angry whim, knowing the whole process would be long and drawn-out anyway.

  I had blood tests and checks – all clear – and I was referred for more detailed investigations. Warned there would be quite a wait. I felt proven right: all I had done was get us a head start, so that when Tom was ready, we had skipped a stage.

  I planned to tell him when the letter came and we had moved up the queue. Now, with the letter never arriving, the news was too late and too fast.

  There is no option for cancelling – or of Tom getting here in time – so the only option is to go alone and deal later with admitting that I had gone behind his back. As he had gone behind mine recently, too?

  The next day I leave a ridiculous amount of time to travel the twenty minutes to the hospital and despite my guilt, I feel good. Finally, I get to nail this, to be proactive, the definition of which is to act, not to stay stagnant, waiting, complaining but doing nothing. I have done far too much of that.

  At the hospital I am in a frenzy writing lists, replying to emails, sorting the nights out I have planned, and I think I look happier than the other women in the room, heads buried in phones, Kindles or simply staring at walls where there are statistics I am trying to avoid looking at.

  This won’t be me, I think, disassociating from what I cannot stop thinking of in my head as Fertility Club and pulling out a Tana French with enough raging Irish crime in it to distract me. I’m always grateful when I’m reading the right book for the moment I am in; this is one of those times.

  Because what is happening here is a blip, not a long-term problem, and I’m on the way to sorting it. I am not in Fertility Club. I’m a bystander. A visitor. They’ll find a small, surmountable problem and then they’ll fix it.

  Except, they don’t. When I have my ultrasound, there is no obvious problem. No reason why I haven’t got pregnant again in the two years since our miscarriage. Instead, there is a whole load of nothing.

  ‘That’s good news,’ says the doctor, smiling gently at me, and I smile back, politely.

  ‘Is it, though?’ I ask her inside my head. Because it feels like an anticlimax. Because without a problem, how is there a solution? Do we go back to just trying and failing, trying and failing? And because despite trying not to look, I saw that chart in the waiting room with its big ‘unexplained infertility’ chunk of pie. No problem is still a problem and it’s a harder one – surely – to fix.

  ‘Let’s get you booked in for a follow-up appointment to discuss what’s next,’ the doctor says to me and I nod, try to look enthusiastic.

  In the hours between that news and Tom’s key going in the door, I become bleaker and bleaker, picturing a life that awaits me without children. I hear Harriet opening doors and walking across the floor and playing the piano and being fine.

  Harriet hasn’t been for an ultrasound today. Life is strolling along nicely for her. It’s okay for you, Harriet, I think, feeling that out-of-body rage towards this almost anonymous recipient again. It’s all so fucking okay for you.

  38

  Harriet

  February

  When Tom first got home, I could hear anger, despite Lexie and him having been apart for weeks. I knew he was coming back today from a social media picture of a beer he was drinking at the airport, so I cancelled my meetings, staying in and composing. Composing is a fake verb. The real verb was waiting.<
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  At 5 p.m., Lexie opened the door and that was when the voices became raised; though they quickly subsided and then I could hear Lexie crying, the sort that says someone is inconsolable, like the cries I had in the days and weeks after breaking up with Luke.

  But then I could hear the gentleness in Tom’s voice and the effect of whatever had caused the row earlier seemed to have dissipated. It pissed me off. Was that it? Instant forgiveness? When I, who had never picked fights, flattered Luke, didn’t criticise, had my life ruined out of the blue one day? Ended up not only alone, but also contained, in a bed in a psychiatric hospital? The universe is unbalanced. Sometimes all I want is just to balance it out.

  I consider my tactics carefully then and check my emails, just in case. But the one that makes my stomach lurch doesn’t do it in a good way.

  My mom writes:

  Harriet, now I’m even more worried. Please, get in touch.

  And that irritates me, too. Because why is it my responsibility to make her feel better? Who’s making me feel better? If I reply to that message, how does this work? She feels relief, gets on with her life and, meanwhile, nothing changes in mine – I’m still without Luke, without Tom.

  But maybe I don’t have to be without Tom. I can see, realistically, that it will be difficult to find a way back for me and Luke, but the more the relationship between Tom and me develops, the more I can see how I could move on. Tom is the fresh slate I’ve needed. The future hangs on Tom. With just one obstacle to shift out of the way.

  Now, I am so fixated that I can’t work or sleep. I just roam around the flat listening for clues. On Sunday, I sent Tom another topless picture. On Monday, I went to a club on my own and got thrown out for being too drunk. I don’t remember writing it, but my phone tells me that I sent Tom a long and graphic email about the life-changing sex he was missing out on by not meeting up with me, Rachel.

  Now, I hear him go out and I follow him to the bookshop.

  My stomach contracts as I watch through the window and see Tom browsing the shelves. Sure, we are having a tricky stage with this Rachel thing, but he doesn’t know that I am her. We can start again; I can disown Rachel, ghost her like a boring school friend, and make this work.

  Tom and Lexie are drifting apart and there is room in the gap for me to slip in between.

  Tom can make me better, introduce me to his friends, take me to his places and build me a life. I’ve let it happen before; I can let it happen again. We could pick up from where Luke and I left off.

  I go home, pour myself a drink and grab the iPad.

  I’ll delete the messages, I write to him. If you meet me for a drink.

  Send.

  The next day, I let myself in for a morning browse at Tom and Lexie’s. A special treat after I watch them go out for breakfast. Top of my list is Tom’s strange old-school diary and he’s left me a gift: a new entry.

  Lexie isn’t the only one who woke up that morning in Sweden with self-loathing. The aperitif, the wine, the special whisky someone ordered that I had to try despite loathing whisky … I was almost as drunk as she was. I just had the moral high ground of the person who is slightly less drunk than the drunkest person.

  Funny, Tom, funny.

  But I was annoyed. I want Lexie and me to be in this together; I don’t want us to become people who shout at each other in the street at 1 a.m. I felt angry that she’d made us that couple. And I felt sad about the miscarriage and gutted that Anais had got there first too, actually.

  My heart races because in the next paragraph, I see the word Rachel.

  Which is the only reason I would ever, ever have become a cliché like this. I knew Rachel was flirting and I didn’t stop it. I even lamely, drunkenly, tried to join in.

  But what I did think is that it would pass into the history of stupid things, and I would in time forgive myself and forget about it. But she’s back, sending photos of her breasts and telling Lexie that I’m cheating with her.

  I am all over this flat now – I can feel myself. I am Rachel, in the diary, I am in the condoms that now live in Tom’s drawer, and in the pretty knickers that I was almost tempted to keep for myself after I bought them. I am in Lexie’s tears, when she read that nasty tweet on her anniversary. I am everywhere, everywhere, crawling all over their broken life. And I won’t stop. I want to break it further. I want to stamp it into tiny pieces. I have experience, after all, of doing exactly that.

  39

  Lexie

  February

  Tom has his head in his hand on the sofa and I am sitting barefoot on the floor with my knees to my chest, and we are spent.

  ‘We should eat,’ I say.

  Tom looks up, sighs and nods.

  ‘That sounds good,’ he says with a tentative smile, because as soon as I told him what the doctors had said, his anger subsided.

  This was bigger than me going behind his back. Bigger even than Rachel; than unknown underwear.

  When Tom walked in, bag slung over his shoulder, I couldn’t hide it.

  Tom, at first, worried about my tears and holding me, but as I told him he zoomed in on one very crucial part: that I had gone to the doctor to start discussions about our potential family without him, the potential father. Understandable.

  ‘But I was moving forwards,’ he said, hurt. ‘I had been to get tested myself.’

  ‘I know,’ I sobbed. ‘But I didn’t know that then. When I went to the doctor. Months ago when we had had a row and I was frustrated. I just needed to do something.’

  I tried to talk more over my tears but it was difficult because my head was so foggy from crying.

  ‘I am trying to understand,’ he said. ‘But it’s hard because I wasn’t there, I didn’t hear exactly what they said and I don’t know what tests they did because you didn’t invite me. To the appointments to discuss our family, our baby. You didn’t even tell me it was happening.’

  The hardest thing was that he sounded less angry and more devastated. And that he still hugged me, knowing I depended on it. And that in the midst of this – which was so vast in itself – we still had the other thing to deal with. I felt exhausted, spent.

  I’d messed up and I knew it, but my own pain was too great to be magnanimous and apologise. Instead, like in Sweden, it all went into hot, brutal anger.

  ‘You wouldn’t have cared, Tom,’ I snarked, shrugging out of the hug I still desperately wanted to be in. ‘There would have been a trip to be on, or some work to finish, or some pictures to send to some woman. And way, way down the pile, the appointment. I didn’t want to put you out.’

  And out I stomped from the living room to the kitchen, where I stayed, tucked into a ball against the dishwasher, for an hour. In the meantime Tom, too, retreated. He went out, came back, had a shower. Stayed in the bedroom for a while.

  And then he walked into the kitchen like it was normal that I was there on the floor and awkwardly got down there himself, putting his arm around me as I sobbed with relief that he hadn’t gone away any more.

  ‘I didn’t send any pictures,’ he said quietly, no rage. ‘Let’s deal with the rest, but can we at least get rid of that worry. There is no other woman. There’s only me and you and a baby we really want.’

  Later in bed, we talked into the early hours about exactly what the doctor had said and what there was to try. When the letter comes through, we’ll go for the follow-up appointment. Together.

  We’ll be proactive. It will be hard to unpick the reasons why I got pregnant once and never again, but fixing it isn’t impossible. In the end, the exhaustion of sadness sends me to sleep until I wake at 4 a.m. and feel my eyes hurt, and I remember, horribly, why.

  40

  Harriet

  I waited three days after Luke moved out for anything more than the texts he would send occasionally, replying to mine.

  How was your day? I messaged, clawing for contact.

  Fine, he would say. No questions. Nothing to open up a conversation.


  You forgot your White Stripes T-shirt.

  Keep it, he replied.

  They were worse than nothing. There was gravitas in nothing but in those texts, I was reduced to perfunctory and I couldn’t bear the idea of becoming a life footnote.

  And for those three days, too, I was hit with the realisation that when everything was bleak, no one came. I hadn’t told my family. How could I admit to them what had happened when they would think it confirmed their view of Luke? I needed to protect him.

  As for friends, they were in inverted commas. They were in the US or they were Luke’s friends anyway. Certainly, there was no one close enough to come round to my house with wine or cupcakes or whatever girls brought one another in those situations, and that realisation slammed me in the face, as well. I drank and I scrolled social media day and night, taunting myself with what Luke was doing.

  How could he be at a party? How could he drink beer and pose for selfies?

  I begged him, over endless messages, not to go. I begged him to come to me instead.

  The ticks came up, the messages were read. But Luke stayed quiet. I thought – I knew – that slowly I was going insane.

  The difference in how we dealt with the break-up meant the crushing confirmation that his life was better than mine and kept turning even without me in it, whereas mine ground, ground, ground to a halt. He had a choice. He could go out or stay in, take the photo or not take the photo, open the beer bottle, be an active person in the world.

  Anyone would look at him and think that he mustn’t have cared about me because if he did, how could he be there? I was embarrassed and angry that those friends who I always felt laughed at me could still be in his life when I couldn’t, despite all that effort I had made. They should be the footnotes. And I was overtaken with the knowledge that now he could sleep with any of them, any time, and my skin felt like it crawled with the constant wondering. Was he doing it now? Tonight? This morning?