Caroline Corcoran - Through the Wall

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.

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 – that it wasn’t Luke, that it couldn’t be Luke, that my ex-fiancé isn’t here, in London, clutching his takeout in the elevator of my building. That after what happened, his former home is the last place he would ever come. But there is a part of my brain that the message hasn’t reached and that’s the part that is making my heart hammer into my chest, surely audible through the wall to next door, I think, as I realise I am leaning against it. I gasp for air.

After a few seconds I hear Lexie, her tiny voice quiet, gentle, the opposite of my own. A northern lilt, I sometimes think, though English accents are still not my forte.

‘Tom?’ she asks, raising her voice to carry into the kitchen. ‘Can you bring me a …’

But the end of the sentence falls away. As ever, there’s just enough wall between us to mask life’s detail.

But Tom. Not Luke, Tom. Tom from next door. I must remember that, when my heart starts racing, when my mind starts racing and at 4 a.m. Especially at 4 a.m. I pour a glass of wine, down it and – forgetting to switch my shoes – kick the generic flowers that were delivered from a generic former colleague to say a generic thank you out of the way and head out with my phone, trying to fight a feeling that Lexie from next door has stolen my Luke. That Lexie from next door has stolen my fucking life.