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.
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.
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
