I bristled because seriously, how much longer?
‘You look stressed out, Harriet, everything all right?’ said his friend Aki, dark fringe hanging in eyes that peeped out to mock me.
Later, Luke would deny that she was anything other than concerned but I knew. She was one of the ones I thought would make a ‘real’ girlfriend for Luke.
Aki – single, too – met the eye contact of another friend, Seb, and I saw it in that second: they talked about it – how odd I was, how peripheral to the group, how I made everyone else feel tense, even as they speared olives and toasted their friend’s thirtieth birthday with the obligatory bottle of cava. I glanced around, paranoid.
Over tapas, the night got worse – drunker, blurrier – and Luke leaned in close to Aki, brushing her hair out of her face and whispering to her. I wasn’t in the toilet or outside. I was simply sitting next to him. This was an old move of Luke’s. He didn’t try to be subtle. He didn’t need to, because he knew I wouldn’t react.
Finally, we left.
And this time I did react.
‘Were you flirting with Aki?’ I dared to ask, drunk enough.
‘You know what,’ he said, fixing his eyes on me, hard. ‘You’re so obsessed with flirting that it’s probably you who’s shagging someone else, not me. Are you cheating on me, Harriet?’
From then on I went back to biting my tongue so often that it must have been scarred.
Meanwhile Lexie, I hear her, shouts and speaks and argues and still gets to live out everything I want, just centimetres away through the wall. She and Tom make meals, the kind that Luke and I used to share before dinner became a chore for one. They curl up on their sofa and watch films, as we did, and make plans, as we did.
And I listen to the life I should have had, and am expected to exist alongside it. I sit as close to the wall as I can and I listen to them laughing, and I know something purely and clearly: I cannot let Lexie and Tom have a happy life. I cannot let Lexie steal my happy life.
I think of what happened before. I think about how, when someone steals my life, I am capable of doing anything to get it back.
January
I smear lipstick on then panic that lipstick isn’t in any more. Is gloss back? My reference points stop in time when I stopped in time. It’s one of the reasons I need this.
I need to snap myself out of my rut, so I am going on an official night out.
I need to leave this box. I can’t exit the one in my brain, but the front door of the flat is easy to open when you make yourself do it – and when you take your pyjama trousers off – and that’s what I have to remember.
Tonight is a leaving do for my former colleague Shona and I am on the bus, heading to a cocktail bar in Dalston.
Tom does a low-level whistle at my pencil-skirted bum as I walk past.
‘You’re just trying to make me feel better about looking fat,’ I say, embarrassed.
‘Untrue,’ he says, shaking his head firmly and looking back at the TV. ‘You look hot.’
I have been edgy about going out all day, my hand shaking when I made a bad attempt at doing my eyeliner.
Mostly, I’m going so I can tell myself a story of my existence as the kind where I go on nights out – sometimes I feel I need to justify the fact I live in Central London and see so little of it – but also because I know it’s the kind of thing I should do to network.
How, I wonder, did I end up in an industry that revolved around contacts when I am this antisocial? Or am I? Is this new? The worst thing about current me is that I genuinely have no idea. I am so lost, I can’t even remember where I started. What’s new, or a problem, or fertility-related, and what’s always been there. I have no courage of my convictions, no decisiveness.
Then as I go to leave, I hear a baby crying next door. There is no baby next door. Is there? Could Harriet have got pregnant and had a child without me realising any of this was happening through the wall? Will I need to hear that every day, a baby growing into a toddler, giggling and needing milk and talking?
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask Tom.
‘Hear what?’ he asks, and I try to forget it, hope – or dread – that I am imagining things now, hearing children where there are no children. It is suddenly possible. Again, I am flailing.
When I cross the road I pause and look up at our apartment block.
I crane my neck but our flat, on the fifteenth floor, is anonymous, out of reach and far away.
A few floors up I can see a lamp on, a window slightly ajar. On the ground floor, a man sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette and shouting, furious, into his iPhone. The flat next door to him oozes Nineties pop music and shrieking laughter. The couple above them have lit a candle and are framed in the window – he is kissing her on the cheek like a motif.
All of these people, I think, suddenly outside my bubble, living these lives in such close proximity to me and yet, I have no idea who they are.
They are below me and above me, side by side. They are kissing, fighting, sleeping and dancing. Are they ill, in pain, feeling sad? Did they have good days today, or bad days? Did they have life-changing days? Have they broken up with their first love today, fallen for someone, or just been to the supermarket to buy some frozen peas? I stay there for five minutes, wondering what my life would look like from this perspective. Wondering who I am to people on the outside; what questions I inspire. In my mind, every single one of those people in there is like Old Me, not New Me. Not feeling their hands shaking, dabbed with sweat, as they put their phone back into their bag, simply because they are going out for the evening.
A few minutes later a bus comes and I am caught up in a wave of other people, swiping and taking our seats.
This used to be my day to day; now, I flinch when people move close to me. I look down at my hands and see that I shake, still.
On the bus I am next to a mum who is staring out of the window, her child talking to himself in the buggy in front of her.
I pull tongues at the toddler.
‘I like your giraffe,’ I say to him.
He blows a raspberry.
I stick out my tongue again and I smile.
When the bus begins to move, I look across the road and see Harriet coming out of our building. I stretch to get a better view, but the bus moves before I get the chance.
It’s been a few days since I lost my temper over the doctors and Tom broke down and, finally, I’m starting to come back to life. Right now, the sun’s toasting me through the bus window on an incongruously warm
