because intermittently the arm of their furniture is knocking up against the wall. Sorry, wrong pronoun: it’s knocking up against my wall.
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.
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
