Through the Wall

by Caroline Corcoran

  She smiles, kindly, and gives my belly a light touch. I don’t mind; it’s not invasive. She’s been involved in making this child, all of these brilliant NHS staff have, and if there’s joy to be had in among their long days and their bad news, I want to cut them a slice of it and give them a fork.

  We wait twenty minutes and then we go into the room, Tom and I, and she’s there again, standing in her blue uniform next to the doctor who’ll perform our scan. Both of them have such generous, knackered eyes.

  I go, automatically, to take my jeans and my underwear off in one movement, and the doctor laughs.

  ‘Not for this one!’ she says. ‘The baby should be big enough to see without an internal scan.’

  Maybe this is when it starts to become like the poignant scan moments you see on TV, instead of the grim ones so far with their internal cameras and their mystified conclusions. Is this when we become average about-to-be parents? Is this where people stop giving me the sympathy eyes?

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s an easy mistake to make, no need to be embarrassed, pet,’ says Norma, but I laugh.

  ‘Oh, I’m not embarrassed,’ I say, thinking of the time I weed into the pot with the wrapper on in a room with three people and one jean leg around my ankle. Thinking of the time that in my efforts to prove how determined I was to do my best at IVF, I accidentally suggested that I enjoyed rectal suppositories. ‘I’m way past embarrassed. I’m just relieved those ones are over.’

  On the bed, jelly is rubbed on my belly and Tom has his eyes trained on the screen already, my hand encased in two of his like it is the plastic inside a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg.

  My stomach lurches as the scan comes up on the screen and suddenly, all my newfound positivity evades me. I pray to gods I don’t believe in to back up the superstitions I know are non-existent and it’s like the pregnancy tests again. I’m back there. I can’t look. We have had an early scan already, the one that confirmed the baby, but this is the big one. Can we really hope for more luck? For more good news? I leave this one to Tom.

  But the doctor speaks quickly to reassure me.

  ‘One baby,’ she says. ‘And one healthy heartbeat.’

  I look at Tom, at Norma, and only then at our baby. This baby who all of us made together.

  Now it’s not theoretical, something else has moved from cliché to real fact: this is a miracle. Tom’s sperm and my egg, and medical science’s years of study and work, and a National Health Service clinging to life, and now this human growing there with this flashing red bit that is its brain (I think).

  ‘Thank you,’ I whisper and once again – whether it’s hormones or gratitude or just me being me – I cry heavy sobs of relief.

  The tests we need come back clear and we sit on the bus home staring at the scan picture. Tom leaps if anyone stumbles, or trips, or leans too near us. By us, I mean me. I can see how his protectiveness might lose its sheen in a few months but right now, it’s delicious.

  ‘Next stop,’ says Tom and then he – and it’s not a verb I use often in the passive form, and never with such joy – escorts me off the bus.

  When we get home I text the scan picture to my brother, who calls straight away. We don’t have a conversation; we simply weep down the phone at each other. Noah weeps too, but that’s because he’s three and having a tantrum about not being allowed to eat only sausages all day long so it’s not really the same thing.

  On FaceTime, even my unemotional parents look like they have feelings. I told them I was pregnant when we first found out, along with the true history of what had been happening to Tom and me. I cried in front of a screen for the lost baby, for my sadness, for the distance that had been between us throughout it all. And while they are never going to be criers, they felt it, I could see.

  They apologised for being insensitive. Mum told me that she felt bad for being so far away when we needed help. I tried to be gracious: I could have made it better, could have helped them to understand. Now, I felt like we could move forward, to a new stage where I could let go of my anger towards them and write cards to my mum made out to grandma and filled with glitter. She is coming to visit next month. I’m looking forward to it.

  Later, I download the social media that I had deleted back onto my phone because I can bear it, now I am not consumed with envy. I don’t see smugness and ingratitude. I just see people, living their lives, celebrating their good days and trying to get through their bad days.

  For me, I don’t post anything. I can’t ever, now I know what that can do. But I can look, I can be in that world again. Until the next thing comes, of course, which makes other people unbearable again. And it will. That’s the nature of it.

  For now, though, everything is sunshine, and we order a curry and drink non-alcoholic beer and talk endlessly about this baby, who will live here in the world, with its vests and its socks and its heart, beating.

  In the back of my mind there are still questions, unanswered, about Tom. But it can’t be real; can’t be bigger than this.

  82

  Harriet

  June

  It is 4 a.m. and, as has happened a lot lately, I have taken strong painkillers, given to me by a stranger at 2 a.m. rather than a GP with a prescription pad. Concepts, reality: they are vague.

  The good news, though, is that I am not stuffed full of pills. It’s all about balance. While I have started taking these pills, a few weeks ago I stopped taking the others: the high-dose antidepressants that I have been on since I was in the psychiatric hospital. Do it slowly, they said, we will come up with a way for you to cut down gradually. But I’m just not a gradual kind of person. Slowness frustrates me. And! I have a plan. A good, solid plan.

  First, though, I need to sleep. But I cannot sleep, because there are too many images and too many thoughts. I’m writing them down, drawing a complicated diagram to show where they all fit in. It’s actually extremely clear. Luke, Tom, Chantal, smug with her new boyfriend. Naomi, Naomi, Naomi, Naomi and her doves.

  I have been messaging Tom, not as Rachel this time but as Harriet, his real-life neighbour and friend who he met for coffee but didn’t want to have sex with. His real life neighbour who he thinks he might have had sex with. He doesn’t reply. I simmer with anger.

  I close my eyes and think of Naomi, as I do often. When that happens, I get another drink or another painkiller. It helps.

  I see Luke, telling me that he wanted to have children with me. I feel cold, cold hands holding mugs of hot chocolate. I see the Little Mermaid statue, hiding away from us under that thick wedge of snow.

  I don’t know now if I am awake or asleep.

  I sit next to Tom and Lexie’s wall and listen. I hear Lexie’s warm laugh. I hear a radio playing pop music. I stay quiet. I am noise, I have always been noise, but now I have to be silence.

  I imagine Lexie sitting in the same position that I am in now just centimetres from me, our heads but for a bit of plaster resting against each other, bearing the weight and taking some of the other’s burden. We could have been friends, Lexie, I think, if things hadn’t become quite so complicated.

  I think of how Tom wants to be there and how he doesn’t want to be here. I scrape my fingers down the wall again. When I look closely, I am surprised to see there are other nail marks, hundreds of them. If I do this enough, I wonder, will I eventually dig my way through to them?

  My thoughts shift.

  I hear the voice of Iris, standing right outside my own home and declaring me ‘a bit much’, and I see Chantal, happy, happy, happy with her new man.

  I think of being fifteen and playing the piano at the front of my class. I think of overcoming shyness and fear and feeling something approaching pride in myself that I had been asked to play. And then I think about the hum, quiet at first but then louder, of the usual names, all coming at me from my peers and drowning out my piano, no matter how hard my shaky hands tried to pound it.

  I think about Frances telling me she had to see to the dog,
and about Luke’s friends, smirking across the table at each other over dinner when they thought I wasn’t looking.

  I am in and out of sleep and not sure if I am messaging David, or dreaming of messaging David, and if I can hear Tom and Lexie laughing, or if that, too, is happening in my mind.

  I picture Luke again. This time he is holding wine in a plastic cup as I sit across from him on a field. I have a football baby bump. Things become hazy and he fades and finally, finally, I drop off, only to be woken by a knock on my door what feels like seconds later. Naomi. I leap up, fling it open, try to focus.

  ‘No major thing,’ says a porter, who looks like he has come to discuss a major thing. Not Naomi, I think, as reality dawns on me. Not Naomi, because Naomi is dead.

  The porter scans past me to the bottles on the floor, the remnants of lines of coke on the tablecloth that is draped over the piano. He thinks this is mess and disorder. He should see inside my brain.

  ‘We’ve had a few, erm, complaints about your parties. Just a quick mention to be considerate of other people in the block. Maybe chuck them out earlier. Turn the music down a bit.’

  He’s practised this. I nod; open my lips to make them feel less parched until I can escape to a tap. Things are spinning.

  ‘Thanks, Harriet,’ he says. ‘Appreciated.’

  I see him wince as he walks off and I vow to shower and tidy the flat today. Especially since I am lucid about one thing: there is someone I plan to invite round soon. I cannot have the place looking shoddy. Not for such an important visit.

  By 4 p.m., both the flat and me are clean, and I am in the pub and drunk again.

  Today, I was sacked from a musical I was writing a score for after not turning up for a meeting for what was apparently the sixth time.

  But it’s difficult getting to work on time when strangers fill your house until the early hours and you have to scrub traces of drugs off your piano. I got particularly drunk after Chantal left, holding the hand of her real life and waving her sad, old one goodbye. Her sad, old one was my present and my future. My reality. It turns out that for her it was just a small diversion.

  I shrugged when they sacked me, put the phone down and went straight into a pub. Since then, it’s just been top-ups.

  Except now, maudlin, drunk, something is dawning.

  Without Luke, I thought I was nothing. Without Tom, I thought I was nothing. Without friends and family, I thought I was nothing. And yet, I was always something, because I wrote songs and someone sung them, and people heard them and hummed them on their way home with their theatre programmes sticking out of their handbags – and that was real. I could hear it.

  If I get a reputation as someone who shouldn’t be relied upon for work and I lose that? Then I really will descend into nothingness.

  I picture everyone with their roles in life. Naomi, strolling into her office wearing her shirt with the doves all over it. Luke, at the centre of a gaggle of friends in the pub. My mom and dad, at home, toasting their retirement with Californian red on the terrace, relieved, probably, to be rid of their troublesome daughter. Tom, lugging his camera around the world with him. Lexie, typing, typing, typing, through the wall.

  And just on the edge of all of those images there is me: aimless, centreless, pointless.

  This is how I feel when I compose: I feel sharper and like I have a place in the world. When I am at the piano, it is the only time that I have ever felt like I was enough. That I have something to bring to the world.

  I gave up my contacts in Chicago to emigrate with Luke. But one good thing was that I did get work here. Lots of work. Better work. And since what happened, with Luke gone, work has been all there was left to anchor me.

  Now that is over, potentially. And if I can’t create any more, the only thing left to do is destroy: my liver, my flat, my bank balance. My neighbour.

  Lexie looks different when I jump in the elevator with her a few days later. I’ve been waiting for the opportunity, hanging around. Now, here we go.

  Lexie meets my eye then gives me that warm, generous smile that I have seen in so many pictures. Lucky me: finally, the recipient.

  I am breathing heavily; I had to run to catch up with her.

  ‘I’m Lexie,’ she says. ‘I think we live next door to each other.’

  For once, I am okay with someone starting a conversation in the elevator; it saves me a job.

  ‘I’m Harriet,’ I reply. I try to mirror her smile; after all, I know it well enough. ‘That funny thing with London when you live so close but never interact.’

  She laughs, just as the elevator shudders to a standstill.

  ‘My brother thinks it’s so odd that we don’t know our neighbours,’ she says.

  That smile again.

  ‘It’s probably good to meet you now anyway. I’m pregnant, so I should apologise in advance for 3 a.m. crying.’

  I look at her belly and there it is – her rounded verge.

  I’m following her out of the elevator now as I issue the obligatory congratulations.

  So, I think, it worked. That was your only problem, and it’s fixed. You’re having a baby. You have the friends, the family. Tom doesn’t even want to cheat on you with someone who is offering sex on a plate. You really do have it all.

  I smile at her, heart hammering with rage and, suddenly, without warning, filled with grief for Luke and where my life should be.

  That’s the one I wanted, I realise. I wanted to recreate what family felt like. I wanted to live in a bubble of roast chicken and movie nights, and that is another thing that I’m grieving. Being part of a team. Why should Lexie be part of a team when I cannot be? Why did Lexie choose well when I chose a man who played games with me, taunted me and then, finally, abandoned me?

  ‘Do you want to pop round?’ my voice is saying. ‘Cup of tea? Your brother will love it.’

  And she laughs again, head back so that her untamed, curly hair falls around her shoulders. She’s nice, I think, likeable. The kind of person I’d like to be friends with if I didn’t know that she would never have the space in that full, bursting life of hers. The kind of person I’d like to be friends with, if I didn’t want to destroy her more.

  83

  Lexie

  June

  An offer of a cup of tea in a lift and as easily as that, I end up inside, on the other side of the wall. To speak to Harriet, to look at her, to maybe put to bed once and for all the idea that she has a connection with Tom that is something more than the one I know of.

  ‘Ah, your piano,’ I say, stroking the top of it like a cat. ‘I’ve got to admit, I’ve heard you on it and wondered what you do. Do you play professionally?’

  ‘Yes, I write songs for musicals mainly, bit of TV work,’ she says. ‘It’s hard work but rewarding, getting to write music for a living. I love music.’

  Her voice is softer when she talks about her work and if I didn’t suspect her of sleeping with Tom, I would almost feel guilty that I know about her job already, that I have to lie about not knowing before. I feel creepy; imagining if somebody knew all about my life before they met me. I shudder at the thought.

  ‘It sounds great,’ I say, keeping it brief, but I mean it. It does.

  I hear a cupboard open as she goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

  When she comes back into the room, something about her has changed. Instead of being relaxed in her own home, she’s stiff and awkward. The softness that I heard briefly when she spoke about her career is gone.

  On one shelf are ten or fifteen books and on the others – all of the others – is nothing. Rows and rows of dusty nothing. I think of the stuff, the endless stuff in our flat, how I am constantly bagging up things for the charity shop and trying to curb the flow. Is she an eco-warrior, vowing to live a life without things? Or is this something stranger?

  There are no thank-you cards, no wedding invites. No fancy bottle of champagne being saved for Christmas. No thirty-something version of pretentiou
s art that is actually the cheapest thing you could buy this year from the Frieze art fair. No flowers, no plants, no candles. No scent at all, I realise. And no joy.

  There are no discarded theatre tickets or loyalty cards from one of our many local coffee shops. Perhaps the most notable thing though, especially considering that she is an ex-pat, is that there aren’t even any framed photographs of parents, siblings or much-missed friends. I feel cheated. Where is the anatomy of my neighbour? I came here expecting to see the pieces that made up the woman I listen to for hours each day. And here, there is nothing.

  She shouts from the kitchen to ask what I do and what tea I want.

  ‘Copywriter! Camomile!’ I shout back.

  I look down at my tummy. Even normal tea is out now.

  I glance at the other shelves. They are just as sparse, but there is something on one of them that’s of note. It’s my own name on an envelope with an NHS stamp on it. On top of a pile of other letters. I frown. Did it go to her by mistake? Is she going to pass it on to me? The thought crosses my mind that the other letters underneath it could be all of my missing post, but of course not. Of course not.

  Harriet appears next to me silently and I jump.

  ‘Sorry,’ she smiles. ‘Did I startle you?’

  She is holding two mugs of steaming tea.

  Then she follows my eyeline straight to the letters and puts the tea down close by them. Yet still doesn’t acknowledge their presence.

  ‘Sooo, when are you due?’ she says, suddenly animated, my best rom-com friend with an arm linked through mine. ‘Will you find out what you’re having? Do you have any names in mind?’

  She’s grilling me but barely giving me time to answer as she steers me to her Ikea couch.

  I sit down tentatively. I glance back at my post, then think about what’s happening on the other side of that wall.

  Is Tom home? Can he hear us, like I thought I could hear him? It sounds silent through there, but then Harriet is loud.