Caroline Corcoran - Through the Wall

‘It’s been such a ridiculous run-up to Christmas at our place,’ Anais says, taking her tea from me as she frames herself, beautiful, in the entrance to the kitchen. ‘I’m still so jealous of you working for yourself.’

And I look down at my one Official Seeing People outfit, pulled on two minutes before she arrived and to be discarded one minute after she leaves, and glance at her phone on the side, lighting up with messages and urgency, and I think sure, Anais, sure.

‘Working from home, all that flexibility.’

Then she comes up with a very specific example of this.

‘You can bake a potato while you work.’

That’s it. That’s what I was after when I held that copy of Empire . Baked potatoes. While I work.

‘You can go for a run at 3 p.m.’

Because I do. Often.

She pads in her tights through to the living room.

‘Jesus, what the hell is that noise?’ she says as she sips her tea. Something with fennel.

I head back to the kitchen.

‘Oh, just Harriet!’ I yell as I press my own teabag against the side of the mug and fish it out. I decant the brownies onto a plate then I follow her in and laugh, because she is stood, ear pressed to the wall, to listen to Harriet’s latest composition involving chickens and a farm.

‘Get away from there,’ I stage-whisper, even though we both know she probably can’t hear us over that level of farmyard-based noise. There is a chicken impression, in rhythmic form. We are folded, creased, with laughter.

When we calm down, Anais sits, doing a noiseless impression of someone earnestly singing an opera as she curls her feet under her on the sofa.

She leans and takes a brownie from the plate that is sat on our tiny coffee table.

‘Does she do that all the time?’ she asks.

I think about it.

Suddenly it seems weird that I have started to think this is so normal, this woman singing loudly about love, dreams, emotions and chickens. I hear her pound the piano in frustration. I hear her ARRRGGGHH out loud when something doesn’t go well. And I live alongside it, like her cellmate.

‘Yeah, pretty much. There you go, another downside of our Islington life. Successful music writers move in next door and sing weird songs about farmyard animals.’

We laugh, a lot, but then there is a lull.

‘So, how are you?’ I ask.

As I eat my brownie, she tells me about the new app Rafael just designed, a Korean place they’d tried at the weekend and the trip to Mexico they’ve just booked. And then, when I can’t stop her any longer with my questions, questions, questions, she asks me the dreaded one from her side: ‘How about you – any news?’

I mime a full mouth and take a second.

It’s loaded, that question, once you get into your thirties. It means ‘Are you getting married, having a baby, buying a house? Do you have an awesome, game-changing new job that pays you so much money you can buy in Notting Hill?’ And if you don’t, if none of those things exist, you feel like you have failed at news. Sometimes I think I want a baby partly so I can succeed at news.

‘Not really,’ I say before spinning some mundane work and a trip to the theatre with Tom’s parents into news.

Because you can’t actually have no news. We must be busy and rammed and manic and constantly doing, and no news isn’t allowed. I dust brownie crumbs off my chin and onto a plate.

After Anais leaves I change back into my – Tom’s - pyjamas and consider why I didn’t speak to her about The Baby Thing.

Every time we’ve done this and I’ve omitted it, I’ve surprised myself. Because that is my news. That’s my story. Anais is my friend and I am a sharer. And not mentioning it means I have a low level of nausea about the unknown elephant in the room every time we meet. I didn’t even tell her about my miscarriage. Anais, my best friend, doesn’t know that I was pregnant . Doesn’t know about the biggest thing that ever happened to me. That seems crazy now but at the time I had hoped it would be a footnote to some good news, to the best news.

Not telling Anais what is going on in my head also means that we are drifting. I know it and she knows it; I can feel the chasm getting wider but I can’t do what I need to do to close it. So why?

I come to this conclusion: once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back. Once you say you’re trying, that’s your thing. That’s the ‘news’ they mean. That’s the black cloud over my head that everyone will see.

‘Are you okay?’ Anais asked into my ear as she left, hugging me close. ‘You seem …’

But I avoided her eyes, shrugging out of our cuddle and seeing her out with some paint-by-numbers thirty-something rambling about a busy week and work worries.

I eat the rest of the brownies, alone, leaning over the kitchen sink. It’s a while before I hear from Anais again; definitely longer than normal.

Suddenly, there is a loud giggle from next door that makes me jump. It’s not Lexie, it’s a woman who is less softly spoken, and I can hear Lexie replying, louder than normal to match her friend, and laughing heartily.

Tom has been away for a few days now, I think, so Lexie’s spending some time with the rest of the people in her life. I am irked at her greed. A beautiful boyfriend who brings her curry and loves her and friends, proper friends, who share in-jokes with her and pop round for tea. Does this really happen?

‘Just Harriet,’ she shouts as I stop playing my piano for a second and jolt.

It is the incongruity of my name, heard through the wall where I thought that I did not exist. But like they exist to me, I exist to them. I look down and see my hand shaking. The spell is broken and I can’t even focus on my piano.

Then they laugh again, loudly and together.

Through the wall, I am a person. They acknowledge me. They speak about me. They laugh at me. If there’s one thing I can’t take, Lexie, it’s people laughing at me.

My heart is pounding.

It’s been three days since I saw Tom/Luke getting into the lift with his curry. The hair. The shoulders. That nose. I shiver. I can’t sleep and I’m behind on a deadline for the score on a children’s musical. The guy I am working for is getting twitchy and my usual desire to impress has deserted me. I don’t care. I am focused on Lexie. I feel a surge of rage.

I can’t even get it together to put the generic flowers in a generic vase. They finally made it off the floor, but they are limp now, lying on the table in their plastic, begging for a drink like a neglected puppy. What can I say? I’m not one of life’s nurturers.

All I can do is Google. It starts innocently enough but then, of course, I search for Luke, even though I know that online he manages not to exist, in case the woman he was supposed to spend his life with sees news of a job promotion or the gig he went to last night.

I Google again.

Luke Miller, Chicago. Luke Miller, media companies. Nothing.

I slam my head back against the sofa and consider what he thinks I would do if I found him. See a social media food shot and book a flight to New York to queue up outside the diner where it was taken, in the hope that he came back for another rare burger and this time, I snared him? Or something worse? Something like last time.

I bang my laptop shut and sit, ruminating.

I should have been married now. Perhaps I’d have a baby, asleep in an upstairs cot somewhere in Hertfordshire. Or maybe Luke would have fetched my backpack and told me we were off, to travel around Europe. We’d come as far as the UK together from the US already, and we might have gone for a year of eating Comté cheese in France and devouring art in Barcelona. Whatever he had wanted, obviously. That’s how it had worked.