Caroline Corcoran - Through the Wall

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.

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 exhausted, my eyes blurring at the screen enough to make me feel nauseous.

‘How can I not know who Sadie is?’ I say out loud and am shocked at the sudden noise.

I picture David, sitting on my bed as I packed around him to move to London. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he mumbled, staring at the floor, and I looked at this teenage boy masquerading as a six-foot-tall grown-up who went to work every day and rented a house. I touched his blond surfer hair gently then kissed his head. It still blew my mind that he was no longer a child.

Luke was sitting on the floor, staring at his phone. He looked up, irritated that this was taking so long but mostly that this was taking so much emotion.

‘Come and see us,’ I told David, working hard on not crying, or on being distracted by Luke. Focusing all of my energy on a grin. ‘We can go to gigs in Camden or take a trip to Paris for the weekend.’

David looked at Luke, who gave him a distant smile.

‘We’ll hook you up with some hot British girls,’ Luke said, eyes already back on his phone. ‘If that’s what will persuade you.’

I zipped up a suitcase.

Luke had loaded his own cases the week before, everything ironed and packed with precision. He showed no emotion – as he didn’t about most things – at leaving our life. He was matter-of-fact about it. Except for the long monologues about the job he already had and the myriad career benefits.

‘I can really go somewhere in work when we’re in London,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to make so much money.’

I cared more about my career than he did, there could be no doubt about that. I earned more too, though we never mentioned it. But I was rushed into the move before I could find work and Luke never once asked what my own thoughts were on London’s career opportunities.

I left the conversation alone. It was easier that way.

It was me who was most apprehensive about leaving my family, favourite takeout places and our life.

But Luke wanted it and Luke came first. Luke was more attractive than me, cooler than me, better than me. I would have chased Luke anywhere he went uninvited but incredibly I received invites. He wanted to move to the UK; I was moving to the UK.

David will never visit now and maybe that’s better. Friends – colleagues, really – are simpler than family. Less emotional. Less history. Less transparency. Less reality.

And how is London? Work? the email continues.

I delete it so I can’t reply to it maudlin and wine-fuelled at 2 a.m. when my latest batch of hire-a-friends has traipsed home.

But then to taunt myself I pull out old photos of David and me. Heads together as we lie on the sofa in new pyjamas on Thanksgiving morning as kids. Awkward teenagers with matching spots and matching grimaces on a family weekend to New York. Posing with illicit beers in our parents’ kitchen. I can’t cry this time because it is so confusing. There is so much happiness in these pictures that my face, against all instruction, is smiling ear to ear. God, I miss you , I think.

The only thing that cuts through my thoughts is Tom and Lexie. My new family, really, drowning out the old one. I do everything to drown them out too, taking a long shower, hammering at my piano, but they get through like they always do, and later, when I hear the door slam shut, I watch them out of the window, arms around each other and darting into a restaurant across the street to eat noodles and be together, still.

I open a bottle of wine and sit down at my laptop, googling Lexie, Luke, my brother, but this time the one I return to is Tom, whose surname I know owing to a sloppy postman. I know, eventually, that I’m going to have to let Luke go, but I am an addict and cold turkey is too much. Tom can function as my methadone.

Image search is my favourite and opening the folder of pictures I have of Luke, I was right, there is far more than a resemblance between him and Tom. In the hair, the before shot in an advert for hair wax, in those lazy shoulders and those gangly, endless legs. And that nose. I could kiss it, gently on the tip, and swear that Tom would know me and know my kiss.

I zoom in on Tom’s eyes. Take a screen grab of the left first, and then the right. I consider them, really look at them. These are the eyes of a man who I could love. And if I could love someone else but Luke and make a life with someone else but Luke, maybe everything would feel less dark. I would feel diluted again, like I used to feel. And maybe I could finally move on, too, from what happened.

I peer closely at my laptop, look at Tom’s eyes again. And then I start to go through all of his pictures, one by one, zooming in on body parts and details. Screen grab, save.

Sinking the last glass of Pinot Noir, my brain is whirring. Lexie. Always Lexie. Why does she get to have this life, the one that I wanted, when I worked so hard for it? When I put up with so much? Why does she get to laugh at me, while I sit through the wall, lonely? I feel a searing rage, so I open another bottle and I begin, slowly, to type. She doesn’t know what I am capable of, I think. She has no idea what I did and who really lives here, just through the wall.