Through the Wall

by Caroline Corcoran

  It wasn’t in inverted commas. It existed.

  And so whatever has happened now, the idea that this wasn’t real, that this didn’t happen. Don’t tell me that, Naomi. Don’t fucking tell me that.

  ‘Then it’s not the same,’ I told her, snapping back to reality, hands shaking like it was a year ago and I was back on that beach in Norfolk, saying yes to Luke.

  A pause.

  ‘Whose wedding was that?’

  ‘A friend of mine. Esra.’

  ‘And Esra and her husband presumably said vows. Promised things. Meant them. Presumably, it would have been quite shit if Esra’s husband had just bailed on that and abandoned her, right before their wedding.’

  This time she didn’t speak. She just stared at the picture.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she sighed and it threw me.

  Magnanimous? Weird? A ruse to get to a phone to call Luke? An attempt to sober me up, if she can tell I’ve been drinking?

  But I said yes. Who the hell else did I have to drink tea with?

  ‘Milk?’ she asked and the mundanity of the conversation was bizarre.

  I thought.

  ‘No. No milk. But two sugars, please.’

  She nodded and brought us both in a glass of water while the kettle boiled. I need the sugar, I thought. I was shaking. Weakness? Or rage?

  Once again, there was no one else to look after me, so I had to do it myself. Have some sugary tea, Harriet, sit yourself down.

  I couldn’t remember, thinking about it, if I had taken my antidepressants today. Or yesterday. Or at all, lately, despite the fact that I had been on them for years. See, I told you – no one came to help me. My mind was half there and half on that beach, and I was feeling it again: untethered, adrift.

  Maybe that was why Naomi looked so relaxed; so obviously not scared of me.

  You should be scared though, I thought through my haze, you should be scared, because I have never hated anyone more than I hate you, life thief, Luke thief.

  ‘Look, woman to woman, human to human, you don’t look in a good way,’ she said, cocking her head to one side like a dog’s leg as it pees.

  I looked away from her, disgusted, and scanned the room. She went into the kitchen to get the kettle that had just boiled.

  Actually, I thought, there are many things I recognise here.

  The David Hockney picture on the wall. The mug that came all the way with us from the States. The framed Chicago vintage postcard, the jacket slung over the back of the sofa, the photo frame. I stumbled as I walked between them, the room getting hazier, too.

  Fuck, fuck, she did steal my life. This bitch stole my fucking life. And the worst thing: I suspected she would live it better than I could. Exist on an equal footing to Luke. Answer back. Deserve him.

  ‘I recognise them all,’ I muttered to myself, and she asked ‘What?’ and set my tea in front of me before beginning her speech.

  ‘Harriet, look, sometimes relationships don’t work out. Sometimes they just come to the end of the line. There will be someone out there who suits you better than Luke, anyway. Someone perfect for you. Someone who …’

  And it’s then that I did the thing.

  I picked up the cup of tea and I threw it, scalding Naomi’s perfect, make-up-free face.

  68

  Lexie

  January

  I sob in Tom’s arms after the negative pregnancy test. I take another one and it says the same, and again the result comes up so fast that it felt like these tests work on a percentage basis: 0 per cent pregnant. You have failed the test. Did you even try? Are you sure this is the subject for you?

  For weeks, I am reclusive.

  I veer between comfort eating and starvation, and punish my body for not giving me what I wanted. I had done everything that was expected of me, and I have lost and I am devastated.

  ‘You can tell me now, did you cheat on me?’ I bark at Tom, because now there is no reason not to ask, is there?

  I tell him about the other messages Rachel sent me too, the ones I never mentioned, and he denies it all again and says he doesn’t know who Rachel is, or why she would send me such awful messages. I laugh in a nasty, disbelieving way and raise my eyebrows because I want to hurt him, or hurt me, it is unclear which one.

  I won’t let it go.

  ‘This girl said you slept with her,’ I say coldly.

  He swears on his family’s life it isn’t true.

  ‘Have you done anything to piss anyone off? Anything to make someone want revenge on you? Because otherwise, why would she say this if it’s not true, Tom? You’re not a celebrity, you’re not in a boy band. It makes no sense.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I genuinely have no idea,’ he says, and now he is crying. ‘All we have been through and somebody does this. Of course I haven’t cheated on you, of course I haven’t.’

  Where do you go from there?

  I ignore calls from family and friends, then I turn off my phone so no one can infiltrate my world, because I hate the world, all of it, and I am on an angry lockdown at home.

  Which means, of course, that there is a lot of the one person in my life I cannot shut out: Harriet.

  Harriet becomes the recipient of much of my rage.

  ‘Fuck you, Harriet!’ I shout when she is singing loudly enough that I am confident she won’t hear but later, I say it when she is quiet, too. ‘Fuck you and your happy fucking songs!’

  I throw a lamp against the wall and it breaks, leaving a tiny scratch mark in the plaster. I convince myself that leaves a gap for her music to get through and only serves to make her louder.

  I go online to see what she is doing, who she is socialising with and just how perfect her life is now. I become convinced that she knows about my existence and pities me. I consider the possibility once again of her and Tom. I fixate on her, as someone who is everything I am not, who has everything I don’t.

  69

  Harriet

  After the liquid hit her face everything moved fast.

  Suddenly, I felt lucid and I could see terror etched on Naomi’s face where her neat and subtle make-up normally sat.

  ‘Get out!’ she screamed, hysterical, as she clutched her reddening cheek. ‘Get out, get out, get out!’

  I thought, briefly, how good it would be if her social media audience could see her now. Not nearly so composed, are you, Naomi?

  Then I ran all the way to the tube and jumped on a train, amazed that no one looked at me when I sweated, panted, and when it was written all over my face that something of some magnitude had just happened to me.

  ‘Do I look weird to you?’ I remember asking a stranger in a daze, but she just looked up from her book then moved seats.

  I stared at the cover across the carriage, longing for the woman reading it to come back. All I ever wanted was for people to connect to me. To touch my arm. To stroke my hair. To tell me it would be okay.

  I’ve never been sure if a person could survive with so few connections to the world, on such meagre touch rations as I seem to have been allocated. I’ve read studies about it, Romanian orphans, rocking, rocking, side to side, and somehow that’s how I picture my life. It doesn’t move or progress, it just rocks slightly, left to right.

  I bought a bottle of wine and I went home until they came for me, and then I sobered up in a police station.

  And then someone asked who my next of kin was and I couldn’t bear to call my parents, so I called David, who arrived only after I had spent a night in a cell because it takes a long time to get from Chicago, even when your sister has been arrested.

  The cell was rotten, and bleak, and I had the distant, drunk feeling of coming home. I wasn’t a person to exist in the world, I thought, self-pitying. I was narrow and isolated, and this made more sense for me. It was a relief, actually, not trying to work out what I was supposed to do to make friends, or how to fit in, but just to close my eyes and accept now that I was on the other side, the
bad one.

  70

  Lexie

  January

  I am naked except for a towel, holding a showerhead and aiming it at the bath plughole, but it is beating me. The clot from my period, which I am chasing around the plug, veers from side to side.

  It’s laughing at me, like everyone is laughing at me, because I’m weak and I’m also so unpregnant, unpregnant, unpregnant.

  71

  Harriet

  When my trial came, the worst thing wasn’t the sentence – which after evidence was read out from a psychiatric report about my drinking and my depression and my coming off my drugs too fast meant a stint in a psychiatric hospital. It was the fact that Luke was there, looking at me across the dock from where the good people stood.

  We had switched roles now and he didn’t like it. He stared at me, daring me to look at him, and I, shaking all over, avoided his eye contact.

  Even after my outburst at the hospital, my parents tried. My mom wrote long letters, sometimes asking questions, sometimes filling me in on the neighbours’ sweet granddaughter and the new recipe she had started making with English cheddar cheese. Had I tried it? It really was delicious. Wittering, across an ocean. I never replied.

  She called too, every week I was in hospital, but I stayed resolutely silent as she spoke.

  ‘Please just tell me you’re okay,’ she would sob. ‘And if you’re not, let me help.’

  I stared at the wall. Finally, one day, I replied.

  ‘I am an adult,’ I said, working hard on not crying once again. ‘I told you, this is what I want. If you want the best thing for my recovery, you will leave me alone.’

  My mom’s tears rung out in my ears before I buried mine in my thin, sad hospital pillow. After that I refused all of her calls.

  It was rage mixed with shame mixed with nostalgia mixed with love and that combination was too much for me to handle. It’s easier to cut off your family when you live in another country. It’s easier to cut off your family when you are locked away in an institution.

  I stayed in hospital for three months, and then I had intensive therapy and a higher dose of antidepressants.

  When I came out, friends fell into two camps. The ones who had in the meantime blocked me, deleted me, cancelled me from their worlds, and the ones who tried, but who I pushed away anyway. But there was one I needed. One I couldn’t let go.

  ‘Do you think you could still be my friend?’ I said quietly, hopefully, on the phone in bed to my dear, dear Frances.

  We were no longer as close since I moved, since Luke, but she had written me a postcard once, when I moved out, saying ‘You will always be my bestie.’ I kept it in a book of Emily Dickinson poetry next to my bed. It was one of the only things I took with me to hospital. It was the one and only time anyone had called me their best friend. And Frances had no ties to Luke; unlike everyone else, first and foremost she was mine.

  ‘I love you, Harriet,’ she sighed. ‘But I’m sorry, I have to go now. I need to put some dinner on for the kids and feed the dog. I’ll call you though, yeah?’

  The noise of her family chaos sneaked into our line and she went back to her packed world, while I went back to silence. She did call but it was awkward, dealing with such huge events over the phone when so much distance had been created between us. Over time that distance stretched and grew. I always had the sense that I was putting her in an awkward position, just existing. Eventually, I stopped contacting her and made it easier for my Frances to move on.

  I know Luke went back to the States, from one rogue social media site he left public accidentally, but I know nothing else. After the trial it felt like Luke cancelled himself; Naomi, too. I couldn’t find a trace of them online, no updates, no pictures, no signs of life. They went off the grid, in social media terms at least.

  So I was left only with my barely there contact with David and with me, knowing that I wasn’t that drunk, and I didn’t trip, and that I picked up that mug and I made that decision.

  72

  Lexie

  March

  I thought stress was mental, internal, but it has written itself all over my face and it’s making moves to travel further.

  There is a rash over my forehead, over my cheeks, inflamed. I get migraines now, which are new. Last month I skipped a period and had what doctors think was an anovulatory cycle. This, too, is new. But the stress, the anxiety, it turns out that it is powerful enough to freeze nature.

  And now I am lying here at 2.30 a.m. and Tom isn’t home. He went out for a quick drink after work and last checked in around eleven to say he was having one for the road.

  I never want to be that girl – another ‘that girl’ – who nags him about being out drinking, but right now, I need him to be present. I need him focused and available. I need him to reassure me even further than he has done that he isn’t cheating, has never cheated, would never cheat. I need not to be lying awake worrying about him. I also need him not to develop new habits because they are disconcerting. Until a few months ago he hadn’t been out until the early hours in years. He was slowing down like all of us, preferring his alcohol to be slow-cooked with a shoulder of lamb than chucked down his throat like urgent medicine. But then, this.

  I start writing him a message but when I’ve rewritten it five times, I stop. This is ridiculous. When did Tom become someone to whom I had to edit my messages? I decided to stay with him and to trust him, didn’t I? Then that applies, still, whether it is 2.30 p.m. or 2.30 a.m. And also I know, of course, that this is Tom’s way of coping. So I try to be patient. And I try even harder to sleep.

  But my mind is whirring with the knowledge that he goes to anything these days. We have turned him into that man. He goes to the birthday drinks of someone from work who is twenty-two and whose surname I suspect he doesn’t know. He texts me at 6 p.m. about leaving dos, thirtieths, twenty-ninths, engagement parties, impromptu beers. Sometimes he invites me, but mostly he doesn’t.

  He needs to be drunk, alone in a crowd. He needs to throw beer – and Jack Daniels often, which is new – at his insides until he has flushed away any weakness and he can return to me stronger. I know all this, of course, because I know Tom. And because I have done it myself, when work has been hard, or when not being a parent has been hard.

  Tom carries the weight of not being able to make me feel better. He carries the pressure of not crying when I am sad, or shouting when he is angry at the world, too. He is heartbroken and grieving, but his heart and his grief are not the priorities. In this situation, he doesn’t know which man he is supposed to be, and so he has reverted to the trope of the man who hides in the pub under a cover of beer and makes sure he gets home too late to talk. That man.

  73

  Harriet

  March

  Out of the blue, I get an email from my brother.

  Please call Mom, it says simply. And then: And call me. I saw Luke.

  I know that it is most likely a trick to get me to call, my family dangling the only carrot they know is irresistible to me. And for a moment, I think about not replying.

  I have Tom now, don’t I? I don’t need anyone else. I don’t even need Luke. Though it is sometimes like they are on a seesaw. Eventually, Tom will sit down firmly and throw Luke off course perhaps, but right now, they are balanced against each other, both existing as equals in my mind, thrusting forwards, sitting back, depending on the other’s movement.

  Luke is Tom, Tom is Luke. The lines are blurring and the two are starting to fuse. It feels sometimes like they have to co-exist, like one couldn’t be real without the other.

  Of course, I call David back.

  ‘Harriet, where have you been?’

  ‘You said you saw Luke.’

  David sighs and despite everything, it is beautiful to hear his breathing and his life. See, Lexie. I have a brother, too. One who worries about me and cares.

  ‘So?’ I push.

  ‘It’s nice to speak to you, too,’ he says.<
br />
  But I have no sense of humour about Luke and I need this. Once he’s given me the drug I’ll be able to have a normal conversation, but until then I am shaking, desperate, with a fissure in me that needs fusing.

  He knows it.

  ‘Okay fine, Luke. It was at a bar and brief. Awkward, unsurprisingly.’

  I want to ask if he was with anyone but I am too scared.

  ‘He was with a friend,’ David fills in. ‘Male.’

  ‘Bradley? Andrew?’ I need more.

  ‘A guy I didn’t recognise; I think they worked together.’

  ‘Where? Where did they work?’

  There is a pause.

  ‘Harriet, you know that’s the kind of thing I couldn’t tell you, even if Luke had let it slip to me, which he didn’t.’

  Because psychotic me might board the next plane to Chicago and storm his office.

  But, suddenly, I can hear Luke laughing, not scared.

  Tom.

  It is Tom, through the wall.

  Things are in the fog, again.

  ‘Harriet, there’s something I only wanted to tell you if you sounded like you were okay. Like you were moving on.’

  My heart plummets. Luke. Luke. Luke.

  I speak fast, reassuring him, because that seems to be what will get me more of the drug.

  ‘I’m okay. I’ve moved on. I told you, I’m busy with work, with friends. Life’s good.’

  Short sentences. Speed this up.

  ‘Is Luke okay?’

  ‘Yes. Naomi isn’t.’

  He is so stilted saying her name, the one word in the world that has made us this distant.

  Okay, Naomi. I can deal with whatever has happened to Naomi.

  But then.

  ‘Naomi killed herself,’ David says gently. ‘Luke told me that Naomi killed herself a few months ago.’

  I laugh, at first. Because Naomi irons her shirts and paints her toenails bright orange. Naomi isn’t dead. I stumble, where I am stood. Naomi is utterly alive.