Caroline Corcoran - Through the Wall

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.

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.