Caroline Corcoran - Through the Wall

I look down suddenly, realise I’m in pain. My nails have been digging so deeply into my hand that there is blood; I have pulled off cuticles and left skin red raw. It throws me. I didn’t notice the harm being caused. I rarely do.

Perhaps Luke would still be all about London. It would only have been four years and he adored it here. We earned good money, me as a songwriter for musicals and TV shows, and Luke in media sales. We – well, he – had a huge circle of friends. Thursday nights I would beg to come along to his work drinks in a fancy hotel bar near The Strand. Occasionally, he gave in.

There are tears now, threatening to jump.

Weekends, thankfully, were usually more private. We’d take our hangovers for chilly walks up Primrose Hill, Luke’s sensitive teeth hurting from the cold and both of our ears pinching until we found a pub to serve us tea in front of a fire.

We’d defrost, pull off hats, flick through the supplements. I’d pretend to lose at Scrabble to avoid a row. I’d pet the spaniel across the bar and fantasise about a future full of dogs, and then Luke would frown and point out all the reasons why pets were a terrible idea. I’d realise quickly, of course, that he was right.

‘Weren’t you thinking of getting a pet?’ asked my mom one day on the phone.

‘Luke doesn’t think it’s a good idea,’ I said, forgetting to edit.

‘But what do you think, Harriet?’ she said, gently but firmly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re so caught up in what Luke wants that you forget to ask yourself that these days.’

I hung up. Started calling less often.

In my version of us in the future, I would be better, too. The sort of person who didn’t forget I was supposed to be dieting and order chips, and not the sort of person who wears the wrong-shaped jeans and has a haircut that ‘seriously, you’ve had since 2003’. Thanks, Luke.

I am crying now, unstoppable. In February this year, one year after we got engaged, Luke left me.

I take out some nail scissors and start snipping at the ends of my long, dull blonde hair before realising what I’m doing with a jolt and going back to work. Trying to go back to work.

I Google Lexie again and this time I click the ‘images’ tab. It’s not like searching for Luke. Searching for Lexie gives you all kinds of information. She isn’t a blogger showing off her life but she does elicit a hundred or so pictures, even for the general public, of which, I suppose – for now – I am still a part.

Lexie lying propped up on her elbow on a beach with her giant, wild, curly brunette hair loose around brown shoulders. Lexie at a laptop, absorbed in her words with a fresh coffee next to her and a Jo Malone candle lit on her immaculate desk. I roll my eyes.

A selfie of Lexie and Tom next to a Christmas tree in their flat. I peer at that one for longer, trying to work out where they are in the mirror image of my home; analysing the small amount of background that I can see.

Eventually, I move on. There’s a picture of Lexie in heels and a pencil skirt with professionally done make-up looking steadfastly without smiling to the camera, one hand on a beautifully curved hip.

She looks incredible; a world away from the freckled girl on the beach or the Lexie in front of the Christmas tree. Online, Lexie is a changeling Barbie to me, and this is the Going Out version.

She goes out with confidence, she goes out with good hair, she goes out with Tom. There are pictures of her throwing her head back and laughing with friends, drinking bright pink cocktails on roof terraces and showing off tanned legs on holiday. She clutches her nephew close 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.

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.