Through the Wall

Prologue

Present

I sit, listening to the drip, drip, drip from a shower that only runs for a short time to prevent me from trying to drown myself.

There is a loud, unidentified bang at the other end of the corridor. A sob that peaks at my door and then peters out like a siren as it moves further away towards its final destination.

I slam my fist down on the gnarly grey-green carpet in frustration. Pick at a thread. Trace the initial that is in my mind: A. A.

A psychiatric hospital is such a difficult place in which to achieve just a few necessary seconds of silence.

Nonetheless, I try again, pressing my ear against the plaster and shutting my eyes, in case dulling my other senses helps me to hear what’s being said on the other side of that wall.

It doesn’t.

My eyes flicker open again, angrily. I look around from my position on the floor and take in what has now become familiar to me after my admission four weeks ago. The mesh on the windows. The slippers – not shoes – that are never far from my toes. The bedside table up there and empty of night creams, of tweezers, of the normal life of a bedside table.

And then I go back to trying to focus on what they – my imminent visitor and her boyfriend – are saying. Because it’s too good an opportunity to miss, when I can hear them, right there.

‘Both of them again,’ announces the nurse as she flings the door open.

She looks at me sitting there on the floor, raises her eyebrows. I stand up slowly, move back to the bed. If she thinks my behaviour is odd, she doesn’t say it. I imagine she gets used to behaviour being odd. Gets used to not saying it.

‘Just sorting out the paperwork and then we’ll let her in,’ she says. ‘He said he’s staying in the waiting room again. Not sure why he bothers coming.’

But he does. Every time it’s the two of them, in a pair like a KitKat.

I press my ear against the wall again, so hard this time that it hurts. But since when did pain bother me?

1

Harriet

December

I listen to them have sex, frowning at how uncouth it all sounds.

And then I think – what a hypocrite. Because here I am having sex myself. With a man who I think is called Eli. I wonder if the couple next door can hear us too; if they are having similar thoughts.

Over Eli’s naked, olive-skinned shoulder I glance at the TV. I have no idea who turned it on but they have put it on mute, a breakfast news segment on turkey farming. What an odd juxtaposition, I think, to all of this sex.

As Eli finishes, I look away, embarrassed, from the poultry, then pull my dress back down over my thighs.

‘I’d better head to work,’ he says, no eye contact. I barely have the energy nor inclination to nod.

‘Door’s unlocked,’ I reply, and he slips out without another word.

I exhale and reach down to the floor to pick up my glass then take a sip of amaretto and Coke. It’s 7 a.m. but I haven’t been to bed yet so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Plus, it’s there and I’m thirsty. The door slams.

I rest my head back against the sofa, look around. Half-full glasses, Pinot Grigio bottles, cigarettes stubbed out into old chocolate dessert ramekins. Crisps, squashed into vinegary hundreds and thousands on a cushion. Student scenes; not what I had thought my life would be at thirty-two.

I turn the TV off and return my attention to the couple next door. I think they are doing it on their sofa, this couple, because intermittently the arm of their furniture is knocking up against the wall. Sorry, wrong pronoun: it’s knocking up against my wall.

2

Lexie

December

‘Tom, we need to do it,’ I say. I have a provocative way like that.

He’s sitting on the sofa in his T-shirt and pants, shovelling in a spoonful of porridge with one hand and scrolling through social media with the other. I pull off my pyjama top without waiting for an answer because the stick said to do it and we are slaves to the stick. Tom knows this is compulsory even though he has tired eyes, will likely now be late for work and really wants that porridge.

But he goes away tonight for three days, so it’s now or not at all. Not at all – when you’re thirty-three years old and two years into trying for a baby – is not an option.

Tom takes off his pants one-handed without removing his eyes from his phone. You learn, when trying to get pregnant, to multitask in ways you could never imagine.

I move the porridge to one side, being careful to rest it somewhere where it won’t get knocked off. This isn’t ‘I have to have you now’ sex so much as ‘I have to have you now because the stick says so but we’ve obviously got time to move the porridge to one side because no one wants to get sticky oats on the DFS sofa’ sex.

‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper breathily. ‘We can be quick so you’re not late.’

Tom swallows a mouthful of porridge and waits until the last second to give up scrolling. Half an hour after he leaves I am still lying on the sofa, knickerless, with my legs up against the wall, hoping – as I always hope despite increasing evidence of its uselessness – that this gravity-boosting move helps to propel things along.

I was pregnant, once. It never happened again.

Now, I think of pregnancy as less of a yes or no thing, rather as something more cumulative. A spectrum, on which I am in a segment marked Unequivocally Unpregnant.

My underwear goes back on gingerly. Don’t upset the potential embryo. Don’t disturb the sperm.

I stand up. I can hear my neighbour, Harriet, moving around next door, ticking across her wooden floor in heels, keys rattling, front door opening.

I know I should feel embarrassed in case she heard something just now, but I’m so focused on my only current goal that I can’t muster up the pride to care.

Plus, I swear that I just heard the sound of sex coming from her flat, too. Hot morning sex, I think, that they couldn’t resist even though they were meant to be at work. The opposite of the type that we were ticking off on a to-do list through the wall.

3

Harriet

December

‘I cannot believe how many chain restaurants are in this neighbourhood,’ says Iris, using a tone for the words ‘chain restaurants’ that most people reserve for ‘terrorism training centres for toddlers’ and grinning widely through her astute observation. ‘You know?’

I know.

I take a large glug of wine and feel my cheeks singe. She thinks where I live is embarrassing. She thinks I’m embarrassing. Everyone here thinks I’m embarrassing. I have been taking extra wine top-ups this evening and the room is starting to spin. I stare at her, try to bring her into focus.

Really, I think, Iris should be trying to bring me into focus. Because the truth is that she – they – have no idea who I am. What I’m capable of, what my real name is and who the real me is. What is at my core and what I did, nearly three years ago before they knew me.

Anyway, I think, flooded with rage suddenly as they speak around me: I love Islington. Take somebody socially awkward and place them in the heart of one of London’s busiest areas and they will adore you. They will never need to make small talk with the butcher. They won’t have a favourite restaurant because they have sixty within walking distance and when they do, it will change hands and become a pop-up Aperol bar anyway. You can know no one and that doesn’t mark you out as odd: it’s simply the way things are. You can have a secret, because you can hide away.

I recover from the insult quickly. A couple of drinks later, I am talking with unwarranted confidence about British political turmoil in the Eighties while intermittently chair dancing to Noughties pop music. I’m very drunk – I’m often very drunk – and I’m laughing. But it is an empty laugh because I don’t know the people I’m laughing with.

Next to me on my sofa is a man named Jim, ‘incredibly talented’, gay, talks about being an introvert often and loudly. Opposite me is Maya, who has been nursing her glass of Pinot Noir for the last two hours, despite my best attempts to top her up, loosen her up, liven her up, something her up. On the floor, barefoot and knees pulled to their chests, are Buddy and Iris, who live in Hackney and were probably christened Sarah and Pete and who rarely leave the house without making sure a copy of Proust is sticking out of their bags. A Christmas hat sits joylessly atop Iris’s shiny brunette bob.

I look around at all of them and try to feel something but there is nothing. Or there is worse than nothing; there is a low-level stomach ache that tells me I feel awkward and sad and that this gathering in my home is the opposite of friendship.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Last month, I met all of the people currently squeezed into my lounge for the first time. I am a songwriter, we are working on a musical together and I invited them over for Christmas drinks. For God’s sake, I even wheeled out a box of Christmas crackers.

I do this with everyone I work with. We usually rearrange around four times and people’s excuses are vague, but I am persistent. They all capitulate, eventually.

I’m still trying to find something that makes me stop craving the city’s anonymity; something that claims me as its own, despite four years passing since I left my native Chicago. I’m trying, desperately, to be social. But sometimes I think the truth is that when you carry a history like the one I carry, you can never truly grow close to people. It’s too risky. Too exposing.

I pull a cracker with Buddy and lose.

But still, I keep trying.

‘So, Harriet, are you seeing anyone?’ asks Introvert Jim, loudly, bolshily, butting in rudely to my thoughts.

I shake my head, top up my wine.

‘No, Jim,’ I slur, matching him for loudness as my drink glugs into the glass. I forget to offer a top-up to anybody else. ‘I am single.’

Oh, I am very, very, very much single. Unhappily single. I am not content being me. I’m not joyous in my own company. I am awkward and I make terrible decisions and I want another half to make 50 per cent less me. I aim to dilute myself, like a cordial.

‘Karaoke!’ I say, fuelled by wine and the panic that people may leave, and Iris and Buddy find it ironic enough – like the Christmas hats – to join in. Maya slips into her denim jacket and slopes off, giving me a pitying look that sets a flare off inside me as she says goodbye. Jim can be persuaded once I find him a dusty bottle of tequila for a shot.

These colleagues may not be an immediate solution to my solitude, but perhaps one day it will come in the form of a man who one of them knows.

Plus my parties, alcohol-fuelled as they are, rarely begin and end at my colleagues.

It happens, always, as it is happening tonight. The door is propped open so that my guests can pop downstairs for cigarettes. I live next to the elevator and what I never envisaged – given how antisocial my neighbours are in daylight – is that late at night, people started coming in the other direction, too. Peering in to see what’s happening. Hearing a song that they like. Grabbing a beer.

So it could be one of those, too; an unknown neighbour who comes for the alcohol but stays for me. I might not be perfect, but I have things to offer. Enough to hope that one day, someone might invite me back, might claim me.

There are hundreds of flats in our tall, imposing tower block, and most of them are inhabited by men and women in their twenties and thirties who don’t have children and can get drunk on Tuesdays without much consequence beyond a hangover they have to hide under carbs the next day at their desk. If they live here even as renters then they are mostly paid well and work hard for long hours, so that their evenings take on a desperate quality. Enjoy it, make the most of it, drink it, snort it before you’re back in a meeting at 8 a.m.

The building, with its modern feel, feels to me like it aids this. The sparse, airy lobby is an anonymous retreat, painted head to toe in magnolia with just a desk for the concierge and a sole plant that never wilts but never grows. Is it fake? When I stare at it, I can’t tell. I wonder if people ask the same thing about me.

In the lobby is an unplaceable but specific scent that never alters. The temperature’s always exactly what you want it to be, whatever the season.

At times it reminds me of an airport. People pass through, collect their parcels, take off in the elevator up to the eighth floor, and there are so many flats that you can easily never see them again. Occasionally, it reminds me of somewhere darker: of the psychiatric hospital where I used to be a patient. A coincidence? Maybe this is what I want from a home, I think. Utter sterility.

Now, my neighbours traipse into my home, three, four, every half-hour. They are on their way back from their work drinks or their dinners and they stick their hazy heads in to see what’s happening. Someone – me, most likely – shoves a wine glass into their hand and the next minute it is 1 a.m., and a city banker in his early twenties who I’ve never seen before is kissing Chantal from the fifth floor and vowing to move with her to a hippy commune in Bali. Chantal, like me, is a rare exception in this building to the city-banker rule, but I’ll get to that in a minute. By day, my neighbours are antisocial and aloof; by night, they are debauched and overfamiliar, revelling in their freedom. Happy mediums are not what we do in Zone One.

Did I make an idiot of myself? Chantal will message tomorrow, inevitably.

The message will come from her sofa, where she lies every day thinking about retraining as a masseuse. Chantal was made redundant from her job in marketing a year ago and from a distance, it is clear that she is in a deep depression, which isn’t helped by the fact that her rich parents pay for her to lie still and be sad. She has no motivation to move. But at 1 a.m. Chantal is shining, lit by lamplight and Prosecco. At 1 a.m., Chantal and I are something approaching friends. At 1 p.m., we exchange awkward chat in the preprepared aisle in Waitrose.

‘I’d better head to …’ she will mutter, gesturing vaguely at some bread, or a door, or anywhere.

‘Yeah, I’d better get on, too,’ I’ll concur urgently before ambling back to my sofa.

But meeting somebody is a numbers game, that’s what my mom would say if we still spoke. If it wasn’t impossible for us to speak, after what I did. It’s a numbers game and I’m following that policy. Let the strangers in. Keep them coming.

The nights begin with wine offered politely and with small talk. And then they descend into strangers and a blurry chaos I spend most of the next day clearing up. It’s worth it, though – the mess is comforting. It gives me a purpose.

Again, tonight, my flat is full of unknown or barely known neighbours and the last of my colleagues who are heading home now at 2 a.m., slurring. As they wait for the elevator outside my flat I hear them through the door that’s been left, as ever, temptingly ajar.

‘She’s just a bit … much, you know?’ says Iris, her voice loud because she is drunk on the alcohol that I just gave her, for free, while she hung out in my home. She is talking about me.

Buddy concurs, as the world always has concurred on this. I’m a bit … much. I’m not quite the right amount. Not on target. Not the level of person you would ideally want. If I were a recipe ingredient, you’d tip a portion of me out, or balance me with salt. As I’m a person, I can’t be amended, so I remain a bit … much.

I sit against the wall behind the door listening to the rest of their thirty-second conversation on the topic of me before the elevator announces itself loudly. An hour later, when everybody else leaves, everything is quiet, and I hear a TV being switched off next door and the soft, kind padding of slippers on laminate floor.

I say goodbye to my next-door neighbour, Lexie, in my head. She never turns up at my parties, but I know her name because I have heard her boyfriend say it through the wall. And then I lie down on the sofa, mascara on the cushion from the start of tears that will go on and on and on until the moment that I finally fall asleep.

4

Lexie

December

I’m typing and deleting and at that moment, Harriet starts singing in a children’s TV presenter voice that is too loud, surely, to be normal. Was other people’s noise this irritating when I worked in an office? I’ve always loved sound; the radio on in the background, talking to friends over TV shows. Slowly though, I think, all the rules of me are changing. I throw a cushion at the wall.

I uncurl my legs from the sofa then head for the kitchen because I’ve been thinking about the flapjacks in the cupboard all morning.

I look down at myself, bottom half shrouded in Tom’s pyjamas. My own strain at the waist too much now to be comfortable.

I eat the flapjack. And then I lie back on the sofa and think. Is it right that Harriet can get to me so much? Is it normal? My relationship with my next-door neighbour, to anyone living in a place that isn’t a vast Central London contemporary apartment block with a concierge service that takes delivery of your online orders and helps out the lost Deliveroo driver roaming hundreds of identical corridors with a pad thai, would sound bizarre.

I know more about her existence than I know about most of my friends’. We are closely entwined. She is by far the person I spend most time with. I know about her boozy parties with their Prosecco glugged into friends’ glasses as they try to resist and go home but they can’t – they can’t because they’re having too much fun.

I know about Harriet’s love for karaoke as her friends laugh and groan that they have work tomorrow. But then the intro kicks in and they stay and there is whooping. More friends join them. The joy multiplies. And there is always so much noise.

Now, the piano. I put pillows over both of my ears, but her sounds – always there, competing against our quiet home – are impossible to drown out.

Harriet writes songs for musicals that thousands of people hum on the bus home from the West End. She’s interviewed regularly for industry websites, sounding intimidating-smart. She is successful and rich, I presume, if she lives here. In this building, Tom and I are the exceptions with our normal salaries, and we can only be here because Tom’s parents own our flat and they’ve let us rent it for way below market value.

I realise I’m googling her again. I look at the picture of Harriet on her professional website. She is tall, striking and handsome and she looks powerful. I like her mouth. I envy her smooth, silky blonde hair. At school, she was undoubtedly the popular girl; a person who wouldn’t have sought me out as a friend as I battled my fringe of frizz and Play-Doh thighs.

In her flat, which doubles as a studio, Harriet writes and rewrites lines, her bare foot on the pedal of her piano; painted, unchipped fingernails flicking up and down before she scribbles down what she’s created. Harriet is a creator, she creates, she is creative. Purposeful, she is often so lost in her work that she forgets her plans and is late as she dashes to meet friends for brunch. She picks up flowers at Columbia Road, to sit on top of her piano and make a bright home even more colourful. She knows her own mind and tastes, never decorating her flat with something generic from a chain store, and to men, she is the whole package: smart, buckets brimming full of fun and utterly gorgeous.

Oh, I’ve never met her, of course.

I saw her once getting out of the lift when I had taken the stairs during a low-level fitness drive. I’ve found her mail in our postbox and shoved it into hers, and sometimes, like now, I Google her name. And yet I feel, somehow, like I know her.

From my home-office, aka the sofa next to the wall, I see my next-door neighbour, Harriet’s, existence happening, and it is plump and full and bursting.

Meanwhile, I have been here for three hours now with the start of back pain, flapjack on my chin and only seven sentences of my 2,000-word copywriting project on the page.

I wipe crumbs from my lap. I am no Harriet.

Just getting on the tube, says Tom’s text, later. Curry?

As I reply, I notice the stain on my – his – pyjamas and mean to change, but then I get distracted looking at the Thai menu.

Curry is bad. Curry means my size 12 jeans will dig into my skin. Curry means that we are unlikely to have sex tonight, when we should be doing it any chance we get.

Our impromptu and erotic sofa sex didn’t reap rewards and now almost a month has passed.

My ovulation sticks don’t say we’re in the window yet, but Great Doctor Google, alongside freaking me out about everything I do, have ever done and will ever do in my life, suggested that the more, the better is currently on-trend in medical policy. The idea that there is an ‘on-trend’ in medical policy is a worry if I think about it, so I don’t and instead choose my side dishes. I add duck spring rolls to a list of things I worry are stopping me from getting pregnant. They have many, many companions on that list.

In reality, we have no idea yet why I’m not pregnant. We have no idea why I got pregnant once, miscarried, and why it never happened again. And why, two years later, we are still static, waiting to move on and realising that we were so sure that I would get pregnant again, we never even properly grieved.

With every month that passes, anxiety wraps itself around me more tightly as I convince myself that it’s my fault. Despite trying everything. Despite following Tom, who works away sometimes making TV documentaries, around the country to have sex at the right time. Despite once buying a sexy nightie from Figleaves lingerie and staying in a Travelodge in Hull for a whole bloody week.

But beating myself up is something that’s been happening more lately, increasing alongside calories and sleeping as I do other things less: see friends, pluck my eyebrows, wear clothing items without an elasticated waistband. Laugh.

Through the wall, to snap me out of my internal chatter, comes Harriet. She slams her piano in frustration and then I hear a phone ring.

‘Yeah?’ she says, brusque, like people who are busy do. I am not even busy in this, the week before Christmas, the busiest week there is.

It must be a delivery driver, because ten seconds later I hear her buzz someone up and answer the door, shrieking about the beauty of the flowers. An early Christmas present? From a boyfriend? A friend? Her mum?

I peel myself away from the wall and nestle into the sofa. I’m home so much now that I work for myself that Harriet constitutes a concerning amount of my human interaction.

I picture her in heels, phone snuggling into her palm, hopping into her taxi, running out to dinner, to lates at a gallery, to taste potent festive cocktails. And I’m reminded of the old me, the me before fertility worries happened and sprawled over my life.

I shuffle to our bedroom in my worn-out slipper boots and rummage around in the wardrobe until I find the box I’m looking for. It is, as they always are, an old shoe box, full of photos that were supposed to be filed away in albums that were never bought and now live sandwiched between thank-you cards and badges from hen dos and birthday invites and leaving cards filled with in-jokes and old ticket stubs.

Somewhere along the line I stopped being this person who inspired people to turn cards around and write up the sides, who brought on exclamation marks and capital letters and leading parentheses.

I picture myself in my old job at a women’s magazine, where I had a reputation for always coming up with the best interview ideas.

‘Lexie will nail it,’ people would say, and I had the confidence to agree. I shared in-jokes, suggested new places for lunch. And then I shrunk. Now, as people sing Christmas songs outside my window and eat their fifth turkey roast of the month, I am alone, again, waiting.

I don’t know how life became this limited little space. I don’t know when I crammed myself into a box that was only just big enough for me, because I used to be a Harriet, too. And I am envious.

5

Harriet

December

I’m halfway to a work Christmas meal – the kind where I preordered my soup, turkey, tiramisu in October – when I realise that I’ve forgotten my phone and have to head back to the flat.

I nearly trip when I get off the bus, swear under my breath.

I’m too clumsy and tall for these heels, and I make a note to switch them for sneakers when I get home, despite the fact that I will never rock a trainer in the breezy way I’ve seen other girls do – in the way Iris does – that bares a chic, non-icy ankle. How are the ankles of all of these people not freezing?

On me, a sneaker–jeans combo will look as though it belongs on an awkward thirteen-year-old on a school trip, not a thirty-something who should have mastered her classic look by now. I look down at myself: far from it.

I swipe my fob against the screen and pull the door to just as someone is getting in the elevator. I curse my timing, because there is an unwritten code in this building that no one shares elevators, when I notice the man who has beaten me to it.

His hair is dark, curly, wildly untamed. He shoves it impatiently out of his eyes with each hand, alternately.

And I breathe like I am due to jump out of a plane in two seconds because an alarm bell has gone off and is drowning out everything else.

It’s not just this man’s hair. It’s his dark eyes, it’s the hunching of his shoulders as he heaves his large rucksack onto his back and puts a takeout food bag on the floor. It’s the sigh he does, so internal for an external noise. It’s his long legs and his straight jeans and it’s his nose, slightly too Roman for most but not for me.

This man and my ex-fiancé, Luke, who used to live here in this flat and get in this elevator with me, do not share a passing resemblance. Instead, they are doubles. Identical. Interchangeable.

For once, I climb the stairs and slam the door of my flat behind me. But like the Thai spices, the man from the elevator has crept in anyway. I know – rationally, I know –