Through the Wall

by Caroline Corcoran

  And then I remembered something I saw on Tom’s social media and had an idea.

  When you have no one to lose and an empty spot inside you where those people used to live, you can do whatever you want, whatever you fancy, and there are no consequences. It’s one of the best things about being me.

  53

  Lexie

  May

  I’m sitting cross-legged on the sofa with Tom as we watch a new TV series we’re into and drink tea – wine has too much fertility guilt in its sediment to enjoy now, hurrah – but my mind’s whirring, once again.

  Did I get too complacent? Have too much faith in us? Was I naive to think we weren’t susceptible to the things that everyone else is?

  I look at him and feel enraged. How the hell am I supposed to focus on fertility drugs and babies when I am dealing with this shit too, Tom?

  The oven beeps and Tom goes into the kitchen to take out the lasagne. I simmer with silent rage.

  ‘Low-fat cheese!’ he declares, like he’s announcing the Oscar winner for best film, and I shoot him a look that says he has read out the wrong result and everyone thinks he’s an idiot.

  ‘I can be healthy without us having to go on about it all the time, Tom, thanks,’ I snipe, a hand going protectively around my middle.

  He looks hurt.

  ‘I was only trying to be—’

  ‘Supportive, yes, I know. Let’s just watch this, all right? They said relaxation is as important as anything else.’

  He kisses me. But the other … The thing …

  My mind is in overdrive. I can’t say it and he won’t bring it up, so it hangs there between us every day. It hangs there today as cheddar clings to my fork and my tea cools to lukewarm. It hangs there as there is a loud explosion on the TV and a loud burst of song from next door. We laugh, because when Harriet does her high notes we always laugh, and that helps things. I hold on to that because I need him. I do. With all this and so many unknowns, I need him to be in my team.

  Then Tom goes to the toilet and I grab my phone. I’m trying to stop myself reaching for Tom’s, which is sitting balanced on the side of the sofa. Except, I see with a glance, it’s not. He’s taken it with him to the toilet.

  And for the first time, I genuinely think: Tom is cheating on me.

  54

  Harriet

  July

  I’m home, hammering on the piano, and I have a purpose. I need Tom to have very clearly in his mind that I work in musical theatre. It doesn’t matter if I annoy him or make him want to wear earplugs for the foreseeable future; I just need him to have it in his mind.

  He’s often posting on social media that he wants ideas to pitch, for anyone to tell him if they think there is a story.

  I log in.

  I scan down Tom’s feed and find the message he posted shouting out for documentary ideas a few weeks ago. I reply, making my suggestion about musical theatre.

  Then, of course, I need him to think: Who do I know who could get me some ins to this world? And at that moment, I need to hammer on my piano and spell it out to him.

  That way, I can get Tom into my own world and onto my own sofa without it being a problem that he may recognise me.

  I’m hopeful.

  55

  Lexie

  September

  Taking the drugs didn’t work. I Google stats on it retrospectively and scoff: of course it didn’t work. The odds were terrible, especially when I didn’t have a problem ovulating in the first place. I’m gloomy, pessimistic about the whole thing.

  We have, it seems to me, simply been being kept at arm’s-length from IVF to keep medical costs down. I fume about it to Tom for weeks. The personal has become the political and it’s a useful outlet.

  But eventually, it’s time to let it go. Because we are on to the next stage.

  We step off the bus and crunch through leaves as we walk to the hospital. Life, the year, has moved on.

  I am lying at an awkward angle twenty minutes later, with my legs in icy metallic stirrups as Tom holds both of my hands.

  ‘Relax,’ says a nurse.

  Legs, stirrups.

  I think about how I am half a stone lighter and how easy that was to achieve, once there was a focus. I think about how I have only shaved the bottom eighth of my calves – ankle-skimming jeans – and how there is a bead of sweat on my inner thigh. I think about how this, now, is the start of things.

  Today, we are having something called a dummy embryo transfer, which is a practice run for what, in two months, all being well, will be a real embryo being implanted into my uterus. But I am newly superstitious and – not new – I catastrophise, imagining that I will probably be struck down with cancer or run over by a bus. It’s not my possible death that worries me in these imagined situations, just the delay to IVF.

  The nurse looks at her piece of paper.

  ‘Oh, it’s your birthday!’ she says with a little smile that’s also sympathy, then she reaches for the speculum.

  ‘Yes, I meant to ask – afterwards, is it okay if I have a drink?’ I say when she returns. ‘Only, because it’s my birthday …?’

  I qualify it quickly, in case I get bumped down the list to make way for the people who want this enough that they’ll drink green tea and eat a cake made of spinach on their birthdays and not make a fuss.

  ‘Well, you’ll be on antibiotics to stop infection,’ she says. ‘But perhaps one won’t hurt …’

  I feel disproportionately sad, because fertility, gradually, has infiltrated everything. We are only going out for dinner – I’d have had three glasses of wine, max – but now there are restrictions. Again.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Tom when she goes out of the room to get a smaller speculum (relax, relax, relax). ‘We’ll still have a nice time.’

  But he looks drawn, like he always looks drawn these days, and he looks different to me, like he always looks different to me these days.

  Something happened in the spring, I think, as I lie there in silence. Tom stares at the wall. I don’t know if I’ll ever ask him again or whether I will just file it as strange behaviour we both exhibited during fertility treatment – alongside my going running and drinking liquids made of kale – but maybe that depends what happens next. Whether or not something comes along to supersede it.

  The nurse comes back in, tells me to cough and inserts the new, slightly less daunting speculum.

  I know all of this is a positive, but my eyes fill with tears because there are still no guarantees and fuck, it hurts.

  But soon it’s done and I can leave – I walk fast, even though I’m throbbing and bleeding between my legs, because I want to put distance between me and this hospital; between me and fertility issues.

  I want to leave behind the two couples who come to the hospital together – one woman the surrogate – and talk loudly and smugly about their successful pregnancy and how relieved they are that it wasn’t twins. Like they are so good at getting pregnant that they can afford to hope for fewer babies, not more. Other women sit next to them, sadly, unable to move, tortured.

  I don’t know about anyone else, but I need to be treated gently at the hospital. My skin is at its thinnest and it cannot deal with a lack of tact or a punch in the gut.

  I speed up again, Tom trailing behind. I look around me. I want to be that girl, walking along the street opposite on her lunch break, with no hospital visits, just deciding what burrito to eat and whether or not to get a coffee. Or that girl, who’s been on a binge in Topshop. That girl, that girl, any girl but this girl.

  ‘Slow down, Lexie,’ says Tom, but I don’t and then suddenly, as we walk quickly along a busy road, something in me snaps.

  ‘What happened in the spring, Tom?’ I ask, spinning round to look at him.

  And he looks genuinely blank and asks what I am talking about.

  I backtrack.

  ‘I’m sure it was just me being hormonal,’ I say, unable to cope with this conversation now an
d regretful that I have started it. ‘After that Rachel thing, I still feel paranoid that you were cheating on me.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Lex, of course not,’ he says. ‘She was just some weirdo. I thought we both knew that, ages ago. God, of everything we have to think about right now.’

  But he colours. His face is ever so slightly pinker than it should be.

  He sighs then kisses me. Tells me that nothing happened, nothing at all, and that everything is going to be okay.

  56

  Harriet

  September

  Tom, it seems, is malleable. He likes the musical theatre documentary idea. We are in business.

  Could I pick your brains? he has replied to my tweet. Speak to you or your colleagues?

  Sure, I reply. And then I try against everything in my nature to be the cool girl. Busy this week on a deadline but next week? Follow me and I’ll DM you my email address.

  When Tom messages me, I leave that sitting there, too. I need some control of this situation and taking time, moving slowly, is the way to get it.

  I pop out to get takeout noodles and on my way back I pick up my post, glancing at Tom and Lexie’s box. I scan around then shove my hand in and whip out a couple of letters, adding them to my pile. Then I slip them all inside my paper bag with my noodles and jump in the elevator to my flat.

  I can smell toast all the way up. I picture Lexie at home, in her slipper boots, eating her snack without a plate and licking off the butter that drips on her fingers. Brewing tea to go alongside it. I look down at my takeout.

  When I get home I take off my bra and pour a large amaretto with minimal Coke before settling down on the sofa with my post haul.

  I turn the first letter, addressed to Lexie, upside down in my hands and see if I can read through the envelope. I can’t. The stamp, though, is the hospital again.

  Things are happening.

  I shovel in my noodles standing up as I make coffee, adding rum, then open the letter, which outlines all the details of Lexie and Tom’s recent appointment, a successful ‘dummy embryo transfer’, and what will happen going forward with their round of IVF.

  I have a brief pang of concern for Lexie but then I think: What about me?

  She is the one who has the official problems getting pregnant. But is there any guarantee that I’ll have a baby, since I have no boyfriend and I’m thirty-three, and the human being I love is terrified of me? How do I know I am fertile? Luke and I tried for a baby for a few months before that was curtailed, too, after all, and nothing happened.

  Why should Lexie, who has Tom, and friends, and a life, get the sympathy?

  I throw the rest of my pad thai in the bin. What about me, what about me, what about me?

  57

  Lexie

  September

  I see her from a distance at first and she looks the same, but then she comes round the corner and it’s there: Anais’ baby bump; huge now, at nine months.

  I have steeled myself for this, having not seen her since it was much less obvious, and yet still my stomach deep-dives and I am aware of my armpits, damp.

  There is a mode, though, that I know how to access, and it’s Peak Girl.

  ‘Oh God! Your bump!’ I shriek, and she shrieks back and it’s not real. It’s surface. It’s everything we are not.

  Then we order green juice and avocado toast and post selfies on our social media, and she talks for a long time about eggs that she can have and eggs that she can’t have, and I nod and it’s hideous.

  Right now, I hate that we must talk, talk, talk about everything. I want to be vacuous. Discuss pop culture and nothing with meaning. Not her pregnancy diet and the day they found out and what they’re doing with the nursery.

  When the food comes, though, there is a lull of silence as we start eating. I look up at her, devouring her toast and oblivious to my awful thoughts. And I get a lump in my throat, because I should have been organising Anais’ baby shower, buying too many Babygros, messaging with ideas for baby names. I’m sorry, Anais, I say to her in my head, I’m sorry that I can’t be that good, kind friend at the moment. I wish desperately that I had the words to explain out loud.

  But then, she doesn’t make things better.

  ‘In an ideal world I’d have travelled a lot more first,’ she says, examining an egg yolk on the end of her fork, and my heart starts thumping. Don’t, Anais. Just don’t.

  One of my bugbears, through all the time that we’ve been trying for a child, is people who act like babies are a right and something you can plan for the month you want them, in between that trip to Argentina and the promotion you are after at work. How offensive to those of us who would take it anytime, anyhow.

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ I say, then I go to the loo and take five deep breaths, like the mindfulness book I have put my Patricia Highsmith novel to one side to read has taught me. Now, I can’t even read my comfort-blanket favourites. I must read books to stay sane. Fertility is like the creepiest weed scuttling all over your life.

  My breaths are weak in the face of the thoughts in my head.

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’ Anais asks as the decaf coffee she just ordered arrives. ‘Does it involve wine? Go on, make me envious. God, I miss wine.’

  ‘Well, you’re pretty lucky getting to have a baby.’

  I can hear myself, snippy and short.

  I have put my knife and fork down now. My breakfast sits, half eaten, as I leave all the fun parts out in my drive to be healthy.

  She looks chastised.

  ‘Oh, I know, I am lucky!’ she backtracks. ‘Just … if I could have planned it.’ Then she reaches over. ‘D’you not want that pancetta?’

  Take it, take it all.

  ‘Well, it’s not something that works to people’s schedules, is it?’ I say, same tone, same face as she crunches down my bacon.

  There’s no denying it: I don’t feel happy for her and I’m not magnanimous, I just think it’s unfair that Anais is having a baby and she didn’t – doesn’t – even want one – and that we are now steadfastly ignoring that fact. And I have to go hospital and wait for someone to get a different-sized speculum and take twelve different types of drugs if I even want to stand a chance of getting pregnant.

  I look at the clock above Anais’ head. I want to get this over with, go and turn off my phone and hide away in my pyjamas.

  I look up and Anais has stopped eating. She looks weird. I can’t work out if she’s sad or angry. We get the bill and leave without the muffins we normally finish with, or the stroll around Borough Market that we normally take our time over before we head home.

  The hug’s cold and there’s no Lovely to see you text. And I feel more relaxed on the bus home, faintly aware of two or three strangers’ body odour, than I did throughout the whole meal. This is my life now. I’m like social-event poison. It’s why staying in or riding buses alone is easier; out there, I make both other people and myself awkward and uncomfortable.

  I go home and I sit cross-legged on the floor, zoning out of everything except for Harriet, playing on her piano. Listening to Harriet is a version of mindfulness, perhaps. An odd one, but still – it soothes me.

  After a few minutes Harriet stops and I swear I can feel it, an instinct that she is there on the other side of that wall. I lean my head gently up against it.

  58

  Harriet

  September

  It is 2 a.m. and I am here, in my unhappy place, on Lexie’s social media.

  Today, in Lexie’s unfathomably joyous life, Lexie Does Friendship. There she is posing with green juice and avo toast – Lexie, you are perfect but you are clichéd, my dear neighbour – alongside a beautiful mixed-race friend named Anais.

  I click through to Anais’ page and there are similar snaps. Lexie left Tom behind and off she went to spend time with her friend. They didn’t need to be drunk. It didn’t need to be 1 a.m. She didn’t need to give Anais free drinks to make her hang out with her. What Lexie has is genuine
friendship.

  I once again click through all of her previous posts, trying to discover what it is about her that these people love, what it is that makes her able to forge the sort of friendships that I have been unable to forge since I arrived in this country. I look at the smiles between them and I think of Chantal and me, awkward in Waitrose as we clutch our meals for one. I wonder what it is about Lexie that Tom loves. I wonder if it is really my secret that is stopping me from making friends, stopping any true connections from forming. Or if, more simply, it’s just me. I look more closely at Lexie’s pictures to see if I can work it out.

  Is it her eyes, her smile, or something more subtle? I zoom into a freckle, check what she orders to drink. I see her post a picture of graffiti in Dalston and wonder if I should look to be edgier. She goes to the cinema and I wonder if it’s time for me to get into films. Would Tom like that?

  I look at her family pictures, at her friends. I pick over her life. She posts book covers often of novels that she loves. I vow to visit bookshops, make this a bigger part of my life.

  I screen grab hundreds of her photos and open them up together to get the whole picture, and eventually I fall asleep on the sofa, oddly comforted by the many bright, happy faces and facets of Lexie watching over me.

  59

  Lexie

  September

  And so I am back, after all, to see the counsellor.

  It’s the kind of thing you should do when you can’t stop accusing your boyfriend of cheating on you and you want to be kinder to your best friend and you have a very low opinion of yourself, so I am doing it.

  The counsellor is lovely. She has a soft, singy lilt and she appeases me of all guilt. It’s okay to hate Anais for the moment, she says, it’s okay to be angry, it’s okay to feel bitter at the world.