Читать книгу: «Through the Wall», страница 3

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 want 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.

I bite my tongue so I don’t cry until I hear the shower start, then I sit on the sofa and sob hot, heartbroken tears because he still loves me even though I don’t feel much but disdain towards me any more.

I hear Classic FM turn on next door and feel the redness in my cheeks burn deeper. She must have heard that, Harriet, me shouting, Tom’s pity, the tears that Tom – door closed on his long shower – will never know about.

I don’t care if she hears us have sex, but I care deeply if she hears me cry. This is far more exposing.

I google Harriet again, through blurred vision. I stare at pictures of her on Twitter looking statuesque and confident as she poses with colleagues at the opening of a musical. I see her toasting it with a glass of champagne. I think of my old life when I would post similarly glamorous pictures. Now, Tom inevitably finds me here when he gets in, pyjamas and stains, unwashed face and lethargy. I look at Harriet again and think how it would be impossible for me to do those types of things now; I am not capable. I am not the right shape to fit into those places.

Harriet stares back at me from my screen. There’s an oddness about London life that means you can live here, centimetres from another person, and never know them and that is okay.

Once, I cried on the bus after a bad day at work and a purple-haired South African woman with maternal eyes offered me a tissue.

It took me by surprise. My own mum isn’t maternal. She’s brusque and pragmatic and would have told me to get on with it – ‘that’s simply what the working world is like, Lexie’ – as I pined for maternal coddling.

But when it actually came? I was horrified. There’s supposed to be an imaginary wall around you in this city and it had been knocked down. And now I have the same feeling. I listen to Harriet hum along to Beethoven and think of her, hearing my sad life and wondering about me. Why doesn’t she go out? Why do they never have parties? Why does he put up with her?

This, now, is too intimate.

9
Harriet
December

I hear him come in and I turn on the radio to listen to glib Christmas hits, because hearing this man who is Luke, really, tell Lexie next door that he loves her is too much tonight, when I’ve not slept for a week thinking about the ex-fiancé who persuaded me to emigrate then abandoned me. Thinking about the fact that the Luke who used to live here, in my flat, has gone. About how there is another Luke who lives next door and a woman he lives there with, one who has taken my life and is enjoying it, more happily, more successfully than I ever could.

Tom, this other Luke, is still in his relationship; still wants to be there. I hear him laughing. I hear him being content. Unlike my Luke, this Luke has decided that this is enough for him. Lexie is enough for him. I lean against the wall and dig my nails into it so firmly that I chip the paint, and it’s only then that I realise what I am doing. Clawing my way to this other Luke, literally.

Through the wall, Tom and Lexie are Luke and I, a couple, together. And on the other side is new me, single, the remnants of what is left of a couple, not even half but maybe a quarter. I am too much, but then in other ways, I am not enough.

And then, my bad mood is exacerbated when I see an email from my brother, David, ‘checking in’. As usual, I suspect it was sent at the behest of my parents, making sure that I was alive. And, really, that anyone who was around me was alive. So, my girlfriend, Sadie, and I have bought a house, it reads, as though we caught up last week, as if I know who Sadie is.

Sleep has been difficult lately and I am suddenly exhausted, my eyes blurring at the screen enough to make me feel nauseous.

‘How can I not know who Sadie is?’ I say out loud and am shocked at the sudden noise.

I picture David, sitting on my bed as I packed around him to move to London. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he mumbled, staring at the floor, and I looked at this teenage boy masquerading as a six-foot-tall grown-up who went to work every day and rented a house. I touched his blond surfer hair gently then kissed his head. It still blew my mind that he was no longer a child.

Luke was sitting on the floor, staring at his phone. He looked up, irritated that this was taking so long but mostly that this was taking so much emotion.

‘Come and see us,’ I told David, working hard on not crying, or on being distracted by Luke. Focusing all of my energy on a grin. ‘We can go to gigs in Camden or take a trip to Paris for the weekend.’

David looked at Luke, who gave him a distant smile.

‘We’ll hook you up with some hot British girls,’ Luke said, eyes already back on his phone. ‘If that’s what will persuade you.’

I zipped up a suitcase.

Luke had loaded his own cases the week before, everything ironed and packed with precision. He showed no emotion – as he didn’t about most things – at leaving our life. He was matter-of-fact about it. Except for the long monologues about the job he already had and the myriad career benefits.

‘I can really go somewhere in work when we’re in London,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to make so much money.’

I cared more about my career than he did, there could be no doubt about that. I earned more too, though we never mentioned it. But I was rushed into the move before I could find work and Luke never once asked what my own thoughts were on London’s career opportunities.

I left the conversation alone. It was easier that way.

It was me who was most apprehensive about leaving my family, favourite takeout places and our life.

But Luke wanted it and Luke came first. Luke was more attractive than me, cooler than me, better than me. I would have chased Luke anywhere he went uninvited but incredibly I received invites. He wanted to move to the UK; I was moving to the UK.

David will never visit now and maybe that’s better. Friends – colleagues, really – are simpler than family. Less emotional. Less history. Less transparency. Less reality.

And how is London? Work? the email continues.

I delete it so I can’t reply to it maudlin and wine-fuelled at 2 a.m. when my latest batch of hire-a-friends has traipsed home.

But then to taunt myself I pull out old photos of David and me. Heads together as we lie on the sofa in new pyjamas on Thanksgiving morning as kids. Awkward teenagers with matching spots and matching grimaces on a family weekend to New York. Posing with illicit beers in our parents’ kitchen. I can’t cry this time because it is so confusing. There is so much happiness in these pictures that my face, against all instruction, is smiling ear to ear. God, I miss you, I think.

The only thing that cuts through my thoughts is Tom and Lexie. My new family, really, drowning out the old one. I do everything to drown them out too, taking a long shower, hammering at my piano, but they get through like they always do, and later, when I hear the door slam shut, I watch them out of the window, arms around each other and darting into a restaurant across the street to eat noodles and be together, still.

I open a bottle of wine and sit down at my laptop, googling Lexie, Luke, my brother, but this time the one I return to is Tom, whose surname I know owing to a sloppy postman. I know, eventually, that I’m going to have to let Luke go, but I am an addict and cold turkey is too much. Tom can function as my methadone.

Image search is my favourite and opening the folder of pictures I have of Luke, I was right, there is far more than a resemblance between him and Tom. In the hair, the before shot in an advert for hair wax, in those lazy shoulders and those gangly, endless legs. And that nose. I could kiss it, gently on the tip, and swear that Tom would know me and know my kiss.

I zoom in on Tom’s eyes. Take a screen grab of the left first, and then the right. I consider them, really look at them. These are the eyes of a man who I could love. And if I could love someone else but Luke and make a life with someone else but Luke, maybe everything would feel less dark. I would feel diluted again, like I used to feel. And maybe I could finally move on, too, from what happened.

I peer closely at my laptop, look at Tom’s eyes again. And then I start to go through all of his pictures, one by one, zooming in on body parts and details. Screen grab, save.

Sinking the last glass of Pinot Noir, my brain is whirring. Lexie. Always Lexie. Why does she get to have this life, the one that I wanted, when I worked so hard for it? When I put up with so much? Why does she get to laugh at me, while I sit through the wall, lonely? I feel a searing rage, so I open another bottle and I begin, slowly, to type. She doesn’t know what I am capable of, I think. She has no idea what I did and who really lives here, just through the wall.

10
Lexie
January

Tom isn’t away for work at all this week, so I am forced to alter my routine. I don’t want him to know that I rarely brush my teeth before lunchtime and only put on proper trousers if I’m going out.

I already worry what this version of me is doing for our relationship. So I make an effort. We eat meals together, I dab on foundation, I attempt not to talk relentlessly about having a baby. And one night, I heave myself up from the sofa and we go for noodles and a gig in our local pub, where we order gin and tonics and everything seems young and light and bright. By the end of the week, though, the bliss has abated.

‘It’s offensive that you put your clothes on the floor and expect me to pick them up,’ I hiss, belligerent, as Tom walks past.

‘I’ve not put my clothes on the floor,’ he says. ‘What are you on about?’

I march to the bedroom and return clutching a T-shirt.

‘I dropped it,’ snaps Tom, losing patience with me. ‘But if I had put it on the floor, I don’t think it would have warranted that nastiness.’

And he walks out of the flat, to the park maybe, or the pub, or to anywhere to escape me.

Maybe we’re not used to this much time together in our tiny home, maybe we’re too used to our own habits.

But then it shifts, again.

My period comes and we’re close, he’s my family again, because this is one loss we feel together, every month.

‘I think we should go to the doctor,’ I say tentatively when we’re exhausted from the sadness.

I know he’s of the mindset that we should let nature take its course and not panic – that it’s happened once, it will happen again – but this time, he agrees. Though with a caveat.

‘Can we leave it a few more months? I have so much on at work …’

And it’s this that sets me off. I don’t know my own fuse any more, it’s different now, so unpredictable, and suddenly I’m ranting, sobbing, shouting about how he can possibly think that work is more important than this, and he’s got hold of my shoulders.

‘I never said more important, I just said …’

Then he stops sharply and he folds into the sofa.

I know he is close, the closest, to crying.

His breath is shallow. His face is a sheet of crumpled up paper. It’s pressure on him, too, and I hadn’t tended to that. Incredibly, it hits me. I just … forgot. In all of this I forgot about Tom, when Tom means the most.

‘It’s just,’ he says, shoving tears furiously from his face. ‘It’s overwhelming. It feels like being a proper grown-up. And this is the first time that that’s truly happened to me.’

He tells me that he thinks I am depressed, nervously awaiting my reaction, but I agree. Yep. Depressed. There’s a relief in capitulating.

Now, I want help. I welcome it. I will ask about therapists and contact acupuncturists and invite the help from every corner where it makes itself available.

‘Let’s go to the doctor,’ says Tom. ‘You’re right. We need to move this on. It’s not doing us any good being in limbo.’

Later I lie awake, thinking about what I – or trying to have a baby – have done to him. I stroke his face, kiss his head, tell him I’m sorry, cling to this man who I love.