‘Nothing bad! Nothing!’ he says quickly. ‘I just realised that I forgot to tell you that I met Harriet from next door for that musical thing.’
‘What?’ I laugh, but I hear it and it’s disingenuous; the laugh Tom’s envious friend Adam does when we tell him something good has happened to us. Adam is awful.
‘Everything had been so busy and so rushed that I just forgot to tell you,’ he says.
‘How could you forget to tell me that?’
Harriet and her singing is one of our best gags, and the idea that he could cross the line to real life on one of our best gags and not tell me is, he concedes, inconceivable. Perhaps I wouldn’t react so strongly if it didn’t feel like this came on the back of other omissions, other gaps.
‘I just can’t get my head around how you could not tell me that you met Harriet,’ I say, doing an Adam-esque smile. ‘Are you mates now?’
I laugh. Again, it’s not real and I hate it.
‘No! Not at all! It was about twenty-minutes long and just nothing. That’s why I forgot.’
‘But you met Harriet,’ I point out, again, throwing the onion into the pan. ‘It’s like me meeting Madonna and telling you it was nothing.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ he snaps and opens the fridge for the garlic.
‘It’s not, though. She’s like a celebrity in our world and you had coffee – coffee? – with her.’
He’s nodded at coffee and thank God. Because I think if he’d said three vodka and Cokes and a chaser, I might have lost it and this risotto might have been left abandoned to a row. Harriet, Rachel, Harriet, Rachel. Could this be something?
‘So, what was she like?’ I ask, and he glances nervously at the way I am opening a bottle of wine – cooking-purposes only for me now, of course – quite violently with a corkscrew.
‘She was exactly like you’d think Harriet would be,’ he says. ‘Bit awkward, geeky. Sweet enough.’
I frown.
‘That isn’t how I would think Harriet would be,’ I say, pouring the wine into the pan and feeling slightly calmer. ‘I would think she would be loud, and confident, and this statuesque goddess with five of her colleagues in tow.’
We’ve heard the same woman existing through the wall and come up with such completely different impressions of her.
‘All those evenings that she’s entertaining and they’re doing karaoke …’
He blushes, and I note it.
‘Did you fancy her?’ I ask.
‘No! Of course not. Why did you ask that?’
I look at him closely. Shit. What if he was – is – sleeping with Harriet? But now, I think, I am losing it.
‘I think I’d be intimidated by her in real life,’ I say, finally.
‘Seriously?’ he says, incredulous. ‘How could you be intimidated by our jolly singing neighbour?’
But I am nodding. I mean it.
I leave him to the cooking and I go into the living room to check my phone.
I have another message on Facebook, from Rachel. A different account but same face, same accusations, except this time she has upped the ante, implied that she and Tom slept together.
I walk into the kitchen and stare at the back of Tom’s head. My mouth opens but I can’t do it again, I can’t. He’s denied it, claimed that she’s a psycho, and I know he won’t say anything different now. So what’s the point? This is my parents’ influence coming out in me now. Bury it, ignore it, stop harping on about it.
Instead, I lock myself in the bathroom and sob silent, heaving tears about how I am now so desperate to have a child that I am potentially letting Tom cheat on me without saying a word.
64
Lexie
December
Today, Tom and I are at the pre-Christmas wedding of one of my old school friends – the kind who I bond with over oft-wheeled-out Nineties nostalgia and love dearly but haven’t actually had a conversation with in about ten years.
Relations between Tom and I are frosty. Tom doesn’t know why, but I have an internal monologue of rage that I cannot say out loud to him, so I am playing it out in my mind. I have come close to asking him again if he has been unfaithful so many times, but I cannot. I don’t have space for this in my mind. I need to get through IVF and then we will deal with it, as incongruous as that may seem.
I watch our friends say their emotive vows in front of a crackling fire with tears in my eyes and glance fleetingly at Tom. We’ve planned to do it ourselves. Quietly, with good wine and bad dancing. Children were – are – a priority over a wedding, but we intend to get there, eventually. Tom looks back at me, tries to read me. He is bewildered, I know, by my distance and my mood. If pushed, I blame hormones, the many, many drugs I am taking. And then I simply retreat.
Am I making a mistake? Am I attempting to bring a child into the world with a man I don’t trust? Or do I trust him, deep down? Do I know we will sort this and is that why I can shelve it? As he looks ahead, I stare at him again, trying to see, trying to reassure myself.
And today, there are more practical things to deal with. Inserting, for starters, some vaginal gel that involves, according to the packet, as this is my first one, lying horizontally. That’s okay, I thought, before we came. Someone I know will be staying at the venue and I’ll ask if I can use their room for ten minutes.
Except, because I have been a little distracted and thought of little but IVF recently, I know nothing about this wedding other than the train station we need to get to and what time we need to be there.
I look properly at the invite for the first time on the train. The wedding is in a tent. No guests will be staying ‘at the venue’, unless they pass out behind the pop-up bar and no one notices.
So 8 p.m. comes and the alarm on my phone goes off, and a minute later I am in a Portaloo, doing what looks like a yoga move to make myself as horizontal as possible. Despite my best attempts, I have always been shit at yoga. The gel insert, a bit like a tampon applicator, can’t go where it needs to go because I am too vertical so it keeps hitting bone – bone? Wow, I am clueless about my own body – and that brings tears to my eyes.
I am also nearly naked, because I wore my jumpsuit to this wedding, the leg of which is now trailing in some Portaloo wee.
I give up and run back into the tent crying to tell Tom that we need to go home now so that I can do this there instead, but as I walk in all faces turn to me and cheer.
They were waiting to do the speeches. Everyone else had returned; they were just holding on for me. And now I am here, with tears streaming down my face, a packet of vaginal gel sticking out of my bag and the wee of one of my fellow wedding guests on my trouser leg.
Fertility issues: drainers of energy, thieves of dignity.
We leave for home after the speeches and my vaginal gel finally reaches its destination as I lie on my own bed. I exhale. We missed a large chunk of the wedding but my medication has been done within the ideal time slot and that’s the important thing. Swoony first dances, boozy last dances: they, like the rest of the wedding and the rest of life, don’t come close to mattering at the moment.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t realise you needed help,’ says Tom.
‘There’s nothing you could have done anyway,’ I snap, cold.
Tom sighs. Gives up trying to speak to me. We might have left early but he’s still had enough free wedding wine to pass out on the duvet.
I can’t sleep though, so I sit up scrolling Harriet’s social media and noting her poised, together pictures. Is Rachel like you? I think again, glancing at Tom snoozing in his suit next to me. Is she poised and together like you? And I think about the fact that Harriet would never end up with wee on her jumpsuit or naked in a Portaloo, let alone doing both at the same time. And I think about Tom, and I picture them, again and again and again, together.
65
Harriet
This, then, is my story.
For three weeks after I left Luke in the park that day, I neglected t
o function.
I grieved. I knew it was over and I had run out of energy to try to fight it. I stopped working.
My family phoned but I deflected them with the odd text, and that was enough.
And I realised then that no one knocked on my door. No one even smiled at me kindly in Tesco, or gently touched my arm as I became teary on the bus.
And I did, often.
I became teary walking across the green holding a coffee and in the elevator, where a woman my own age stood staring straight ahead and pretended not to notice.
How could you be here in Zone One, in one of the biggest cities in Europe, and be so adrift from the world?
I saw myself through Luke’s eyes and I was hateful.
And then I stopped waiting for someone else to invite me to get drunk and got drunk by myself.
I got so very, very drunk for a long time. Weeks, maybe. The world was cloudy, and my lips begged me for balm and in the kitchen there was no food but many empty bottles. Finally, someone did interact with me, in the loosest sense, the newsagent’s eyes pitying me through my blur as I bought more own-brand vodka.
And that spurred me on.
One day I got dressed, went to Luke’s recently rented house – he had finally moved out of mates’ places and into his own home with a flatmate – and I watched from over the road.
I was there for hours, and I was angry.
Luke had made me a person who people pitied and cringed at, when I should have been a happy bride, dancing in a crowd with champagne in my hand and euphoric. I had worked hard for that moment. I had tried more than any other woman would. How could he deny me it?
I thought about my friends, distant now in Chicago. I thought about how Luke spoke to me, how I tiptoed around him, how I had tried so hard and how it wasn’t enough. I felt shaky and leaned up against a wall, still watching and waiting.
I was starting to sober up, because it had been a while and I hadn’t come prepared, and now I couldn’t leave my station. But still, I was drunk enough.
I was drunk enough that when I saw Luke come out of his house and kiss Naomi goodbye, leaving her in his home without him, it took me three seconds to decide to speak to this woman who’d ransacked my life and taken the best part.
The world was cloudy but Naomi was vivid.
On the doorstep she wore a neatly ironed shirt with tiny doves all over it. Her jeans finished just above the ankle. She had bare feet with toenails painted carefully in a vivid orange. I stared at them.
Her hair was loose and she had on no make-up except perhaps for a tiny bit of mascara and, if I was being hopeful, some concealer.
‘I’m Harriet,’ I said.
I stood still and she did, too, and then she turned briefly to check something inside, probably where her phone was, and in that third of a second, I slipped past her.
She told me to get out, of course she did, but I walked into the living room and sat down. She stared at me and I stared at her doves. They wanted peace; I didn’t.
66
Lexie
December
I am lying face down holding the outer edge of my knickers between my fingers while Tom draws up some liquid into a syringe. We are amateur doctors, taking on big tasks with small knowledge but making up for it in how much we care.
It is winter, a couple of weeks before Christmas, and for over a month now I have been immersed in the process of IVF.
I have gone from someone who is terrified of having blood taken to someone who can inject myself in the toilet of a pub in between my soup and my salad.
‘Have you got it all?’ I stress. ‘Make sure it all goes in.’
Get in, progesterone, make a baby.
In it goes, to my bum cheek.
‘Now massage!’ Tom shouts at me, panicked that I may miss my post-injection massage window.
I furiously knead my bottom.
I stop and stand to take six tablets ten minutes later, my hand cramping, before inserting a suppository. Then I lie on the bed, still, for it to ‘stay in’ for the next hour. The last part isn’t on the instructions and were I to have a normal office-based job – seriously, how do people do this with a normal office-based job? – it would be impossible, but it makes sense in my head, so I’m doing it. I need to exert some tiny hint of control.
Work has ground to a halt. This is it. Making a baby is my job and I’m treating it more seriously than I have ever treated any job in my life. The biscuit habits of before have gone, the cupboards full of lentils and seeds and oats.
I go to 3 p.m. yoga with a teacher named Izzy and three fabulous retired Londoners, as we are the only ones available to do classes at 3 p.m. and the only ones who want a class that involves no sweating and is really just a bit of lying around and breathing.
They all know why I’m here. I treat it less like yoga, more like group therapy.
In my last class before the embryo transfer Maurice, who is seventy-three, has hair down his back and can do a headstand, puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. I turn to smile at him.
‘I’ll light a candle for you,’ he says and my eyes are wet. ‘Namaste.’
His hug is grandfatherly and warm and I wish I could pocket it so I could have it again later. We wave goodbye, yoga mats tucked under our arms, and walk in opposite directions.
The hope is that I won’t be back at class but instead will be heading off to big school or, as we know it, pregnancy yoga. To rub my bump and bounce on a ball and practise breathing for the birth. We all hope this is goodbye.
I take vitamins, and I call the hospital with facts and figures. I sit for half an hour twice a day and I meditate to an app on my phone. I watch, smiling, as Tom fills in my chart for me, to make sure we do every bit of medication at the right time, that we don’t miss a beat. I grab more blueberries because what if, what if, it’s the blueberries that make the difference? I drink more water. I go to bed early.
I don’t even consider Rachel, because there is no room in my head to consider Rachel. Unless Rachel is some form of progesterone that I need to inject myself with twice a day, Rachel is of no consequence.
Things are better with Tom. I decide to trust him and be loyal to him because I need him. I remind myself again that Rachel is no one; she is words on a screen. If injecting your own bum cheek is difficult, coping with the gruelling emotion of hormones and terror without someone who you love is harder. Sometimes you have to take a punt. I can deal with this later if I am wrong, but right now I am taking that punt.
Tom, too, takes a break. ‘This is the bonus of being freelance,’ he says. ‘Though on the other hand, kids do cost a lot of money …’
He winks. No irony. Because now, we are newly optimistic. We aren’t fatigued any more. This isn’t the twenty-fifth try but the first one. The odds are far, far better for this than they are for what we have tried before. In fertility terms, IVF is the big gun. We’re excited for what might be about to happen. I’m stoic about the bad bits. Tom tells me I’m brave and I feel it, like I could take on the world for this imaginary baby. I haven’t achieved much for a long time but this, actually, this I am acing.
And finally, all there is to do for two weeks is wait.
We wait asleep and we wait awake. We wait while we eat Christmas dinner at Tom’s parents and we wait while we talk about the news, or our Christmas presents, or what is coming back on TV in January. We pretend we are doing other things but really, we are always waiting.
We have a date, a Tuesday just after New Year, when we must call the hospital with the test result.
Until then I rest and relax, but not in a hot bath because I’m too scared that could damage the imaginary baby. I can walk but not too far, because what if that hurts imaginary baby? I can eat, but nothing risky, because food poisoning is the enemy of imaginary baby.
It’s a fortnight that doesn’t exist in the real world, which is going on around us as our imaginary baby does or doesn’t develop. I see people lifting heavy gifts or drink
ing champagne with their Christmas dinners, and panic for a second, before I realise they are not me. It’s okay. They don’t have to follow the rules.
And then, finally, it’s time.
I wake at 6 a.m. having dreamt of children and heartache and joy and everything.
I get out of bed and walk to the bathroom, shaking all over, to my knees, to my neck.
‘I’m going to do it,’ I say over my shoulder to Tom and he sits bolt upright. He’s not slept, either.
My hands shake so much that I wee all over my fingers, but this unpleasantness fails even to register.
Because already, I can see the result coming up.
There is no baby. We did all of that, we tried so hard, but there is no baby.
67
Harriet
‘I’ll call Luke,’ Naomi said, but for whatever reason, she didn’t.
‘Luke is my fiancé,’ I replied, staring at her.
‘No, Luke used to be your fiancé,’ she said gently, but her voice shook.
‘You can’t go out with someone who was about to marry someone else a few months ago. You can’t do that.’
I believed it.
She sat down. And she actually picked up her phone and moved it away from her, onto the mantelpiece next to a picture of Luke skiing.
‘I was on that holiday,’ I said, disbelieving. ‘I took that picture.’
She looked at the picture then shrugged.
‘Well, that happens,’ she said, and now gentle sounded more like irritation. ‘I have pictures my ex probably took. But you move on. You need to move on.’
‘Were you engaged?’ I asked her, glancing round the room at the other pictures in Luke’s living room.
Luke graduating. Luke with friends who I knew. Luke after a bungee jump I booked for him. And there, in a gold frame, Luke and Naomi, dressed up, grins, wedding guests, plus-ones.
‘No, we weren’t engaged,’ she said slowly, a verbal eye-roll, as though she is putting the word in inverted commas.
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