Most of us, though, will never be the 0.000001 per cent with their pizza boxes. If you’re thirty-nine, Islington looks at you sadly like you’ve stayed at the party a little too long. Perhaps you could have a quick Sunday afternoon picnic on the green on your way out but then yes, it will be time for you to head off to the suburbs.
Anais is doing just that and building a life. Where she goes to sleep, there are old food markets and boozers and there are people who have lived there forever, who sell vegetables loudly and look at you blankly when you talk about brunch. There are new people, sure, but it’s not like here. Here, heritage ebbs away every time a greengrocer’s becomes a gin bar and a rental notice goes up in the window of the old pub. We are all to blame: I spend Sundays strolling in between market stalls selling lockets and trinkets and soaking up the feeling of it all, and then I spend my money in Waitrose. I am part of the problem. I am at its heart.
‘Mortgages are overrated and I have no idea why everyone is so obsessed with them,’ Anais says as she rummages in her bag for the box of brownies she’s brought with her. ‘Very much like babies.’
I bristle. She puts the brownies on the side.
‘Salted caramel,’ I say, reading the label and trying to distract myself from the irritation that’s surging through me over her flippancy. ‘Thanks.’
Since we were at university together, Anais has been vehemently opposed to procreating and didn’t change her mind even when she met Rafael. He’s Spanish; she’s Barbadian. If you were the kind of person who wheeled out terrible clichés, you’d tell them they’d make beautiful babies.
I’m not and I don’t. If struggling to conceive has any upsides, it’s taught me emotional intelligence. I make promises to myself that whatever happens, I will never be one of those people who don’t consider for one second that by proffering their opinions on your position on having children, they might have just ruined your whole week. You don’t know. You never know.
Anais and I did our journalism postgraduate course together and while the rest of us only manage yearly get-togethers, Anais and I are still proper friends. Her: a political editor for a broadsheet. Me: a copywriter for various dull brands who pay me to produce words about their products. I’m currently writing instructions for a washing machine. This isn’t how I saw it going when I turned up ten years ago for my first day at university, clutching a copy of Empire magazine and declaring my intentions of becoming a film critic.
But I left my last job at a magazine because I returned home four nights out of five stressed and panicked about something that had happened to do with internal politics. The sort that at the time seem like the centre of the universe and really are part of some distant solar system that no one should care about, ever.
And, mostly, because Tom and I had been trying for a baby for two years and, since the miscarriage, nothing else had happened. I wanted to alter something. I wanted to relax, get some work-life balance and go to Pilates at 2 p.m. if I fancied it. The problem was that I rarely fancied it. The problem was that being at home alone all day without the distraction of those internal politics and a 10 a.m. meeting to prep for left me depressed and so anxious that a two-minute walk to the post office felt far beyond me. I zoned in obsessively on the absence of a baby. As time went on I grieved more, not less, for that baby who didn’t make it. I’m not saying that leaving my job was the wrong decision. But it certainly hasn’t been a quick fix.
‘It’s been such a ridiculous run-up to Christmas at our place,’ Anais says, taking her tea from me as she frames herself, beautiful, in the entrance to the kitchen. ‘I’m still so jealous of you working for yourself.’
And I look down at my one Official Seeing People outfit, pulled on two minutes before she arrived and to be discarded one minute after she leaves, and glance at her phone on the side, lighting up with messages and urgency, and I think sure, Anais, sure.
‘Working from home, all that flexibility.’
Then she comes up with a very specific example of this.
‘You can bake a potato while you work.’
That’s it. That’s what I was after when I held that copy of Empire. Baked potatoes. While I work.
‘You can go for a run at 3 p.m.’
Because I do. Often.
She pads in her tights through to the living room.
‘Jesus, what the hell is that noise?’ she says as she sips her tea. Something with fennel.
I head back to the kitchen.
‘Oh, just Harriet!’ I yell as I press my own teabag against the side of the mug and fish it out. I decant the brownies onto a plate then I follow her in and laugh, because she is stood, ear pressed to the wall, to listen to Harriet’s latest composition involving chickens and a farm.
‘Get away from there,’ I stage-whisper, even though we both know she probably can’t hear us over that level of farmyard-based noise. There is a chicken impression, in rhythmic form. We are folded, creased, with laughter.
When we calm down, Anais sits, doing a noiseless impression of someone earnestly singing an opera as she curls her feet under her on the sofa.
She leans and takes a brownie from the plate that is sat on our tiny coffee table.
‘Does she do that all the time?’ she asks.
I think about it.
Suddenly it seems weird that I have started to think this is so normal, this woman singing loudly about love, dreams, emotions and chickens. I hear her pound the piano in frustration. I hear her ARRRGGGHH out loud when something doesn’t go well. And I live alongside it, like her cellmate.
‘Yeah, pretty much. There you go, another downside of our Islington life. Successful music writers move in next door and sing weird songs about farmyard animals.’
We laugh, a lot, but then there is a lull.
‘So, how are you?’ I ask.
As I eat my brownie, she tells me about the new app Rafael just designed, a Korean place they’d tried at the weekend and the trip to Mexico they’ve just booked. And then, when I can’t stop her any longer with my questions, questions, questions, she asks me the dreaded one from her side: ‘How about you – any news?’
I mime a full mouth and take a second.
It’s loaded, that question, once you get into your thirties. It means ‘Are you getting married, having a baby, buying a house? Do you have an awesome, game-changing new job that pays you so much money you can buy in Notting Hill?’ And if you don’t, if none of those things exist, you feel like you have failed at news. Sometimes I think I want a baby partly so I can succeed at news.
‘Not really,’ I say before spinning some mundane work and a trip to the theatre with Tom’s parents into news.
Because you can’t actually have no news. We must be busy and rammed and manic and constantly doing, and no news isn’t allowed. I dust brownie crumbs off my chin and onto a plate.
After Anais leaves I change back into my – Tom’s - pyjamas and consider why I didn’t speak to her about The Baby Thing.
Every time we’ve done this and I’ve omitted it, I’ve surprised myself. Because that is my news. That’s my story. Anais is my friend and I am a sharer. And not mentioning it means I have a low level of nausea about the unknown elephant in the room every time we meet. I didn’t even tell her about my miscarriage. Anais, my best friend, doesn’t know that I was pregnant. Doesn’t know about the biggest thing that ever happened to me. That seems crazy now but at the time I had hoped it would be a footnote to some good news, to the best news.
Not telling Anais what is going on in my head also means that we are drifting. I know it and she knows it; I can feel the chasm getting wider but I can’t do what I need to do to close it. So why?
I come to this conclusion: once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back. Once you say you’re trying, that’s your thing. That’s the ‘news’ they mean. That’s the black cloud over my head that everyone will see.
‘Are you okay?’ Anais asked into my ear as she left, hugging me close. ‘Y
ou seem …’
But I avoided her eyes, shrugging out of our cuddle and seeing her out with some paint-by-numbers thirty-something rambling about a busy week and work worries.
I eat the rest of the brownies, alone, leaning over the kitchen sink. It’s a while before I hear from Anais again; definitely longer than normal.
7
Harriet
December
Suddenly, there is a loud giggle from next door that makes me jump. It’s not Lexie, it’s a woman who is less softly spoken, and I can hear Lexie replying, louder than normal to match her friend, and laughing heartily.
Tom has been away for a few days now, I think, so Lexie’s spending some time with the rest of the people in her life. I am irked at her greed. A beautiful boyfriend who brings her curry and loves her and friends, proper friends, who share in-jokes with her and pop round for tea. Does this really happen?
‘Just Harriet,’ she shouts as I stop playing my piano for a second and jolt.
It is the incongruity of my name, heard through the wall where I thought that I did not exist. But like they exist to me, I exist to them. I look down and see my hand shaking. The spell is broken and I can’t even focus on my piano.
Then they laugh again, loudly and together.
Through the wall, I am a person. They acknowledge me. They speak about me. They laugh at me. If there’s one thing I can’t take, Lexie, it’s people laughing at me.
My heart is pounding.
It’s been three days since I saw Tom/Luke getting into the lift with his curry. The hair. The shoulders. That nose. I shiver. I can’t sleep and I’m behind on a deadline for the score on a children’s musical. The guy I am working for is getting twitchy and my usual desire to impress has deserted me. I don’t care. I am focused on Lexie. I feel a surge of rage.
I can’t even get it together to put the generic flowers in a generic vase. They finally made it off the floor, but they are limp now, lying on the table in their plastic, begging for a drink like a neglected puppy. What can I say? I’m not one of life’s nurturers.
All I can do is Google. It starts innocently enough but then, of course, I search for Luke, even though I know that online he manages not to exist, in case the woman he was supposed to spend his life with sees news of a job promotion or the gig he went to last night.
I Google again.
Luke Miller, Chicago. Luke Miller, media companies. Nothing.
I slam my head back against the sofa and consider what he thinks I would do if I found him. See a social media food shot and book a flight to New York to queue up outside the diner where it was taken, in the hope that he came back for another rare burger and this time, I snared him? Or something worse? Something like last time.
I bang my laptop shut and sit, ruminating.
I should have been married now. Perhaps I’d have a baby, asleep in an upstairs cot somewhere in Hertfordshire. Or maybe Luke would have fetched my backpack and told me we were off, to travel around Europe. We’d come as far as the UK together from the US already, and we might have gone for a year of eating Comté cheese in France and devouring art in Barcelona. Whatever he had wanted, obviously. That’s how it had worked.
I look down suddenly, realise I’m in pain. My nails have been digging so deeply into my hand that there is blood; I have pulled off cuticles and left skin red raw. It throws me. I didn’t notice the harm being caused. I rarely do.
Perhaps Luke would still be all about London. It would only have been four years and he adored it here. We earned good money, me as a songwriter for musicals and TV shows, and Luke in media sales. We – well, he – had a huge circle of friends. Thursday nights I would beg to come along to his work drinks in a fancy hotel bar near The Strand. Occasionally, he gave in.
There are tears now, threatening to jump.
Weekends, thankfully, were usually more private. We’d take our hangovers for chilly walks up Primrose Hill, Luke’s sensitive teeth hurting from the cold and both of our ears pinching until we found a pub to serve us tea in front of a fire.
We’d defrost, pull off hats, flick through the supplements. I’d pretend to lose at Scrabble to avoid a row. I’d pet the spaniel across the bar and fantasise about a future full of dogs, and then Luke would frown and point out all the reasons why pets were a terrible idea. I’d realise quickly, of course, that he was right.
‘Weren’t you thinking of getting a pet?’ asked my mom one day on the phone.
‘Luke doesn’t think it’s a good idea,’ I said, forgetting to edit.
‘But what do you think, Harriet?’ she said, gently but firmly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re so caught up in what Luke wants that you forget to ask yourself that these days.’
I hung up. Started calling less often.
In my version of us in the future, I would be better, too. The sort of person who didn’t forget I was supposed to be dieting and order chips, and not the sort of person who wears the wrong-shaped jeans and has a haircut that ‘seriously, you’ve had since 2003’. Thanks, Luke.
I am crying now, unstoppable. In February this year, one year after we got engaged, Luke left me.
I take out some nail scissors and start snipping at the ends of my long, dull blonde hair before realising what I’m doing with a jolt and going back to work. Trying to go back to work.
I Google Lexie again and this time I click the ‘images’ tab. It’s not like searching for Luke. Searching for Lexie gives you all kinds of information. She isn’t a blogger showing off her life but she does elicit a hundred or so pictures, even for the general public, of which, I suppose – for now – I am still a part.
Lexie lying propped up on her elbow on a beach with her giant, wild, curly brunette hair loose around brown shoulders. Lexie at a laptop, absorbed in her words with a fresh coffee next to her and a Jo Malone candle lit on her immaculate desk. I roll my eyes.
A selfie of Lexie and Tom next to a Christmas tree in their flat. I peer at that one for longer, trying to work out where they are in the mirror image of my home; analysing the small amount of background that I can see.
Eventually, I move on. There’s a picture of Lexie in heels and a pencil skirt with professionally done make-up looking steadfastly without smiling to the camera, one hand on a beautifully curved hip.
She looks incredible; a world away from the freckled girl on the beach or the Lexie in front of the Christmas tree. Online, Lexie is a changeling Barbie to me, and this is the Going Out version.
She goes out with confidence, she goes out with good hair, she goes out with Tom. There are pictures of her throwing her head back and laughing with friends, drinking bright pink cocktails on roof terraces and showing off tanned legs on holiday. She clutches her nephew close as he leans up to kiss her. Holds a mug like it is a tiny puppy with both hands in front of a raging wood burner. There is a theme: in all of these pictures Lexie looks loved, in-love and happy. Not tense. Not nervous. Not waiting for something to go wrong. Lucky fucking Lexie.
I slam the piano lid shut and go back to bed, forgetting, again, to drink some water. And I dream of Lexie, surrounded by her friends, smirking at me and laughing.
8
Lexie
December
I start looking up everyone I know who could potentially be pregnant and because this is the reality of what constitutes life in your thirties, half of them are rocking baby-on-board badges and bump selfies.
I Google the stats on getting pregnant after two years at my age and it’s depressing, so I read about all the things I shouldn’t be eating, doing, drinking, thinking and realise I am eating, doing, drinking and thinking most of them.
I shovel in eight chocolates that I’ve just hung up on the tree and hate myself, then Tom puts his keys in the door and it’s obvious what’s about to happen. Instead of immersing myself in my Maya Angelou as planned, I’ve spent the last hour in a Facebook tunnel of pregnancy announcements and baby pictures.
I pick a fight. I don’t want a hug, I wan
t to shout and for someone to make that legitimate.
‘Oh, there’s no dinner,’ he says, looking around as though he expected a steak and ale pie to rise from the ashes of the wooden spoon holder. Excuse provided.
‘What does that mean?’ I bite. ‘I’m so pathetic that you come back from your exciting life and all I should have been doing is rolling pastry?’
He cuts me off with a hand in the air.
‘I wasn’t being a dick, I just thought you mentioned pasta on a text earlier.’
Oh crap, I did mention pasta on a text earlier.
‘So nothing is allowed to come up in my life? Nothing is allowed to happen? As it goes, I got some last-minute work and I’ve been chained to my laptop since, Tom, so no – I haven’t had much time to make pasta …’
There was no last-minute work. If I was chained to my laptop, it’s because I wanted to see what social media thought about the women on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. To torture myself with the bump pictures.
But I miss it, the kind of day I’m pretending I’ve had. That feeling of being important and needed and relied upon. Even the stress of it is superior, a far more glamorous stress than this one with its leggings and its ovulation sticks and its cheap festive chocolate.
‘I do have a career, I do have a life.’
He runs his hand through his perpetually unkempt curls before pulling his jumper over his head.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ he says, undoing the belt on his jeans as he heads, sad-shouldered, out of the door. Then he turns around and kisses me on the forehead, and I’m reminded how much he’s started doing this, making allowances because we’re not equals any more. I’m the victim; he’s the carer. He impresses in meetings; I sit at home googling ‘ovarian reserve’ and eating biscuits.
Through the Wall Page 3
