Through the Wall

by Caroline Corcoran

  Except then, I see something out of the corner of my eye. One hand across my baby, the other starts to reach, reach, reach for what I need.

  My fingertips, the edges of me, are reaching hard to help my deepest parts. They claw and they stretch and just in time, like a baby rooting to suckle, they latch onto what they were going for. The handle of a china pot. I knot one finger around the edge.

  And there is power. There is unlimited power, unknown, unexpected power. Suddenly, I am a person who can aim to hurt somebody. I am a person who could do anything. I could snarl and I could scratch. I could kill and I could maim. I could do anything for this baby. Anything she drove me to. And I wouldn’t regret it, wouldn’t feel anything about it, other than to know that it was a necessity. At my weakest, it turns out I am at my strongest.

  Because it isn’t Harriet who picks up the hot tea. It is me.

  It isn’t Harriet who is the attacker in the end, it is me.

  It isn’t Harriet who screams a guttural, feral scream, it is me.

  She isn’t the only one who can act.

  I get a purchase on the teapot and I throw it as hard and violently as my weakened body can manage. The lid flails open and the liquid hits her, and I hear a noise from Harriet that I have never heard, in all of my time of hearing Harriet’s noises. And then, I grab the keys that I saw for Harriet’s front door a few minutes ago – the ones she locked me in with – and I run.

  90

  Harriet

  June

  I feel pain that I have never felt and I cry out. The focus is on my scream and on my agony, and Lexie, suddenly, has escaped me. She bolts past, grabs the keys from the shelf where they were badly hidden. I didn’t think they needed to be. I never expected it to be about whether or not Lexie could get out because she was never going to get the chance.

  I scream, but she doesn’t glance back to check that I am okay. She just bolts, back to her perfect life.

  ‘Bitch!’ I yell, but she has gone now, the door flung open.

  I go to race after her but the pain is too intense. There won’t be a second chance.

  All I can hear are my own cries and I look down to see my forearm, where my skin is burning.

  It is reddening, deeper and deeper. I feel faint.

  I sit down on my sofa and look up at the camomile tea now splattered across my wall. I try to focus on where it hit the paint as well as me, as the pain gets worse.

  When he left, Luke took all the pictures from the walls and I painted everything beige. Luke took the imagination, along with everything else. Lexie and Tom’s walls are, of course, in colour.

  Now, though, Lexie’s weak camomile tea adorns my wall, shaped like a map.

  Art, in a sense, I think in a daze, like a tattoo showing off the defining part of my life. The first art on my walls since Luke took all the pictures away.

  Maybe this is what the scar that is starting to come up now on my arm will be. Art too, in a sense.

  I think about Luke sitting there on our sofa where Lexie was sat and I think, through an agony that is making me nauseous, I want desperately for you to be back. Whatever that comes with. I need someone to make this a real place again and to make me a real person. I close my eyes. Is that right? Is that what I want?

  I want him to brighten the walls and colour me in.

  The pain is making me delirious. It could, I think, be a good thing.

  I thought that if I replaced Luke with a man who looked like him then I could squint and convince myself that things were the same. I thought we would move on and have a family and a sausage sandwich in the pub, and that the picture would be so close to being the same, I wouldn’t even notice the oddity. Like a Spot the Difference puzzle, of my life.

  I gasp, once more, as another shot of pain runs through me. I should get some ice, call an ambulance, call Chantal, perhaps, but I can’t. Instead, I just sob in agony and wait, once again, for someone else to come. And once again, nobody does.

  91

  Lexie

  June

  I am sobbing so hard that it sounds like I am laughing, but I am not, I am not. I worry about my mental health, because surely what has just happened is a mirage. I was never getting out of there. My baby was never getting out of there.

  But it was real; it has to be, because now I am no longer pinned underneath Harriet but running up and down the hall hammering on doors. My neighbours come out but they immediately inch back inside again, looking alarmed, like it is me they need to fear. Sticking their heads out of the door is the token amount of effort they must make so that they feel like good people, people who don’t ignore what’s in front of them. Anything more is beyond their neighbourly remit.

  Don’t ruin the anonymity, for God’s sake. This isn’t a borrow-a-cup-of-sugar kind of place. We aren’t living in the suburbs. I’ll put your post in your postbox and pretend I don’t see you in the lift. Let’s keep to the status quo.

  ‘I need some help!’ I shout to one of them, begging.

  I don’t have my phone, Tom isn’t home and I need desperately for somebody to do something. For somebody to bring me biscuits and call the police and order me a cab to the hospital. For somebody to touch me kindly, not violently. For somebody to check that my baby is okay.

  But the woman I am looking at has kept the chain on the door.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ I yell, but it only serves to confirm her fears about me.

  She didn’t move here to be part of a community and get involved. She moved here to lock the door and know nobody’s name. And in truth, hadn’t I been happy to do the same?

  Finally, I get it together enough to make my own way in a cab to the hospital, where I shriek at the woman on reception, my hysteria alarming people in the waiting room.

  ‘I was attacked,’ I say, out loud, in shock at what I am saying. ‘I’m pregnant and I was attacked by my neighbour. She has a history of violence.’

  They call the police for me, then they take me into a scan room.

  I hold my breath and stroke my stomach rhythmically, like a mantra.

  I weep like I need to emit something and I tell it – her, I have suddenly become sure today, her – that I am sorry that she should have had to have gone through something like that, when she hasn’t even had the chance yet to gasp some air and drink some milk and relax for a while in the world.

  The sonographer speaks.

  ‘The baby is fine,’ she says.

  It is a fine baby.

  I lie there then, longer than I should, longer than NHS waiting times allow. But I cannot move. I just watch my baby on the screen. While Harriet and I speeded up and became louder, the baby carried on steadily and surely, drumming a beat inside me that tells the doctors and me that she is safe.

  92

  Harriet

  June

  After Lexie came over, the police arrived. I felt awfully popular; I’ve never had so many visitors. And now, a few weeks later in the psychiatric hospital I have been admitted to, Chantal.

  Chantal knocks on the door of my room in the middle of the afternoon. She takes in the starkness of our surroundings, the reality of a scene that so far in her life has only featured in movies and books and nightmares. Not like me, of course – I’ve been here before. It’s a home from home.

  I see her take a deep breath.

  Still, she recovers quickly. She kisses me on the cheek and slings off a rucksack, from which she busies herself unpacking biscuits, chocolate bars, sweets, magazines, fancy herbal teas. Like girls do! And this moment, that I have wanted for so long, wrecks me and I am sobbing in her arms. She strokes my unwashed, greasy hair and I relax into her touch.

  ‘I wanted to see you in person,’ she tells me as I eventually pull away and she moves from the bed to the chair alongside. She crosses her legs, prim. Uncrosses them. Tries to get comfortable in this place where there is no comfort. ‘Because I feel like over the years we have become friends, as well as neighbours.’

&nb
sp; If only I had known that, before. I ask her, mumbled, why she ran away from me when I saw her during the day in the supermarket. Why she didn’t stay and talk. Why she had never come over clutching biscuits before.

  ‘Because I was embarrassed!’ she laughs. ‘I thought you must see me as the awful drunk who turned up at your parties and made an idiot of herself. I’ve been a bit of a mess these last couple of years, to be honest, Harriet. Bad break-up.’

  Everyone is focused on themselves, aren’t they? It’s all about me, me, me, whoever we are.

  ‘Meeting Archie has really turned things around for me,’ she says, gesturing to the door when she says her boyfriend’s name.

  He is there, waiting for her, the man who made things better. The man who came to my party, looked horrified and left. The man who saved her from me, from my world.

  ‘I’m applying for jobs, cutting down on the booze. I’m feeling a lot healthier.’

  I nod, distant.

  ‘I didn’t want to harm her baby,’ I say quietly when she stops speaking. ‘Not really.’

  Chantal looks down, awkward. But I need to get this out. And Chantal needs to know this, surely, if we really are going to be friends?

  ‘I felt so jealous that she had all the things I should have had with my ex, Luke, in my old life,’ I continue. ‘It overwhelmed me.’

  Tears spring in my eyes as I picture David, the last time I was here, sitting where Chantal is now; avoiding my eyes in the same way that she is. Soon, Chantal will leave with Archie for a sofa and some sweet-and-sour chicken and contentment. And I will stay here in this desolate place, alone.

  I look around, bewildered. How have I routed so off course that I have ended up back here?

  ‘I was lonely,’ I say, and I am sobbing, desperately and with no restraint. ‘Every time I heard them being together through the wall, I felt so utterly alone.’

  I reach for Chantal then. My friend, my Frances, my friend. She moves onto the bed and stays there until I am spent.

  ‘Shall I get you a cup of sugary tea?’ she says eventually, laying a hand on my arm.

  And it feels like being loved. It feels like being human.

  ‘Tom and Lexie have moved out,’ she says a few minutes later when I’ve calmed down and we clutch our mugs like hot-water bottles. There isn’t much cosiness to be found in this place; you cling to it where you can. ‘To the country, the porter told me. Fresh start.’

  Her cheeks are red; I know she has been building up to this.

  ‘And how are you feeling about everything?’ she asks then.

  I take a deep breath. Lexie would be proud.

  ‘Well, they keep telling me again that it sounds like I was the victim of domestic abuse in my past relationship,’ I say. ‘That that may be what led to everything that has happened.’

  That was always confusing last time I was in here because it sounded right, but I loved Luke. I adored him. Now, though, I think I’m finally starting to get it.

  I look up at her.

  ‘I’m not trying to excuse it,’ I say, panicked, ashamed. ‘But I had stopped taking my antidepressants. I hadn’t slept in weeks. I was just …’

  ‘In a bad, bad place,’ intercepts Chantal with empathetic eyes. ‘I get it. Trust me, I get it. And we want to help. When you get out of here, spend some time with us, with Archie and me.’

  She looks shy. We.

  ‘We’ve actually just moved in together. He’s great. I’ve told him about you. He wants to help, too.’

  Charity work from Saint Archie. Excellent. I murmur congratulations.

  ‘We’ll cook you dinner, we can all hang out,’ she carries on, on a roll. ‘We can make sure that you’re not alone this time. That’s what friends do. It must have been awful being here in another country and feeling so solitary, Harriet.’

  I go quiet. So much kindness and yet – is smug creeping in, too?

  ‘The good news is that I think I’m finally over Luke,’ I say, changing the subject.

  Chantal nods. Smiles gently.

  ‘That’s great,’ she says. ‘Really great.’

  I take a Hobnob, and another.

  ‘Someone used the word “toxic” to me,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘And I suppose in retrospect that’s what Luke was. Messing with my thoughts, putting me down, making me think I was insane.’

  She puts out a hand, squeezes mine.

  ‘God, you’ve been through it,’ she says.

  It feels good to talk. Especially to somebody who isn’t being paid to listen.

  ‘Apparently it wasn’t just me, either. He’s got a history of it, a university girlfriend who was in rehab for a year after they split.’

  I sip some water.

  ‘They even think he abused the girlfriend he had after me, Naomi. Naomi! I can’t compute that. She was smart, beautiful. She had a career and friends and her own mind.’

  Chantal smiles, leans over and touches my face. I flicker at first because she has her fingers on my chin, as Luke used to do, often.

  But this is different. A soft version of a hard move.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ she murmurs. ‘Look in a mirror one time.’

  I’m too embarrassed to respond and tuck my chin under so she has to take her touch away. Then I miss it, of course, instantly.

  ‘I wrote a letter to say sorry to Tom and Lexie,’ I say and Chantal raises an eyebrow. I see her glance towards the door.

  ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t send it. I just folded it up and put it in a drawer. It was mostly catharsis.’

  I lean over and take another biscuit.

  ‘Anyway, you should go.’

  I know what that glance was about. Archie out there in the waiting room. Real life. Priorities.

  ‘Get back to your boyfriend,’ I say. ‘He must be bored out of his brain waiting outside there. Their magazine selection is particularly bad.’

  She leaves and promises to come back soon. And she does, regularly.

  I don’t tell Chantal that I miss Tom and Lexie and their role in my life. I don’t tell her that our lives were so interconnected that it seems a shame to have nothing. I don’t tell her that it seems a shame to me, too, that just as we had connected and hammered down this wall, they have left.

  That they were in a way my flatmates; my family. The closest I have ever had. Until I’m sentenced, when I will very likely go to prison, or stay in hospital, in which case – maybe that’s really the time for me to make some friends. They can’t turn down my invites, can they, when they are locked up in there and prevented from leaving?

  93

  Lexie

  July

  I have a baby bump now and I feel simultaneously obsessed with it and guilt-ridden by its existence. Is a baby-on-board badge for the bus smug? Am I ruining people’s day just by walking into a room? I won’t ever not be self-conscious about pregnancy. I try hard not to shout about it.

  For Tom and I, there is a fresh start with all of the new baby clichés that you would expect. Off we are headed to the outskirts of Essex, where people tell me there are good schools and we can just about afford a tiny square of garden, with Tom’s parents helping. I know, we break the mould.

  We’ll be near Anais, too, and I feel a little like I’m starting to build a life again. To build myself again.

  I see a counsellor every week – a different one to Angharad – and now I am out of the fog I have realised that seventy pounds an hour is a bargain to remake myself and to remake Tom and me.

  Because we have struggled. Tom with the guilt, me with the thoughts of what if, what if, as my belly begins to swell and make tiny movements.

  I have struggled with dreams of Harriet, with jumping whenever anyone enters a room, with the wondering of who will live next door to us in our new house, and of how I will keep them at a distance.

  With Tom’s betrayal too, despite it being a far watered-down version of the one I at one point thought we were dealing with. I had thought it was possible that he coul
d cheat on me. Tom had thought it was possible that he had cheated on me, he has told me since. Harriet told him that they slept together and he wondered, for a time, if he could genuinely have forgotten something so big. Until Harriet attacked me, when he knew this had just been part of her menace.

  But if you can both believe that? Things have changed between us, immeasurably.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom says to me every night in the dark.

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ I say and I kiss him as we lie, closely entwined with our Almost Baby between us.

  Am I right to forgive him for the messages, for the lies? That’s an unanswerable question. But for me, Tom is my baby’s father and he is my partner. He is a human being who made a mistake during a time when we both lost ourselves. The intention was there, at the time I needed him to be fully in my corner. But he didn’t touch anyone, didn’t sleep with anyone and that’s a distinction for me, even if it isn’t for some. His was a forgivable mistake and now we move forward, flawed. But loving each other, still.

  Today, we are back at our flat, emptying it out and packing our things in boxes with ridiculous names like ‘Alcohol, sieve x3 & Xmas tree lights’. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember people talking about packing boxes only with things that belong in the same room. I remember this when we are 95 per cent finished with our packing.

  ‘Charity shop?’ Tom asks occasionally, but I cling to it all.

  I’m nostalgic. We’re ending a life. I want to remember it and out of the bubble of what I now see clearly was my depression, I value it. I want to remember our life here as more than Harriet, too. I want to remember laughing and eating and reading one word on a urine-covered stick that changed our lives.

  There are three items sitting lonely in the bin bag marked for the charity shop while the rest of our life is coming with us to sit for a couple of hours in angry East London traffic jams.

  Tom goes out to get more boxes.

  I am sitting cross-legged on the floor sorting through a box of clothes. I pause. Hear a sound that makes me think of all the other sounds I heard, all the other times that I listened in.