Caroline Corcoran - Through the Wall

Tom isn’t away for work at all this week, so I am forced to alter my routine. I don’t want him to know that I rarely brush my teeth before lunchtime and only put on proper trousers if I’m going out.

I already worry what this version of me is doing for our relationship. So I make an effort. We eat meals together, I dab on foundation, I attempt not to talk relentlessly about having a baby. And one night, I heave myself up from the sofa and we go for noodles and a gig in our local pub, where we order gin and tonics and everything seems young and light and bright. By the end of the week, though, the bliss has abated.

‘It’s offensive that you put your clothes on the floor and expect me to pick them up,’ I hiss, belligerent, as Tom walks past.

‘I’ve not put my clothes on the floor,’ he says. ‘What are you on about?’

I march to the bedroom and return clutching a T-shirt.

‘I dropped it,’ snaps Tom, losing patience with me. ‘But if I had put it on the floor, I don’t think it would have warranted that nastiness.’

And he walks out of the flat, to the park maybe, or the pub, or to anywhere to escape me.

Maybe we’re not used to this much time together in our tiny home, maybe we’re too used to our own habits.

But then it shifts, again.

My period comes and we’re close, he’s my family again, because this is one loss we feel together, every month.

‘I think we should go to the doctor,’ I say tentatively when we’re exhausted from the sadness.

I know he’s of the mindset that we should let nature take its course and not panic – that it’s happened once, it will happen again – but this time, he agrees. Though with a caveat.

‘Can we leave it a few more months? I have so much on at work …’

And it’s this that sets me off. I don’t know my own fuse any more, it’s different now, so unpredictable, and suddenly I’m ranting, sobbing, shouting about how he can possibly think that work is more important than this, and he’s got hold of my shoulders.

‘I never said more important, I just said …’

Then he stops sharply and he folds into the sofa.

I know he is close, the closest, to crying.

His breath is shallow. His face is a sheet of crumpled up paper. It’s pressure on him, too, and I hadn’t tended to that. Incredibly, it hits me. I just … forgot. In all of this I forgot about Tom, when Tom means the most.

‘It’s just,’ he says, shoving tears furiously from his face. ‘It’s overwhelming. It feels like being a proper grown-up. And this is the first time that that’s truly happened to me.’

He tells me that he thinks I am depressed, nervously awaiting my reaction, but I agree. Yep. Depressed. There’s a relief in capitulating.

Now, I want help. I welcome it. I will ask about therapists and contact acupuncturists and invite the help from every corner where it makes itself available.

‘Let’s go to the doctor,’ says Tom. ‘You’re right. We need to move this on. It’s not doing us any good being in limbo.’

Later I lie awake, thinking about what I – or trying to have a baby – have done to him. I stroke his face, kiss his head, tell him I’m sorry, cling to this man who I love.

I wake with a feeling so familiar that it has a regular, cushioned spot in my brain.

There is something to worry about.

I am responsible for it.

It is not right and it is not good but I did it anyway.

Last night I set up an email account, purporting to be a student called Rachel who wanted to make documentaries, and I messaged Tom. It wasn’t smutty; I know Tom – Tom wouldn’t like that. Tom has integrity. This is one of the reasons Tom will make a great boyfriend.

There was no pouty profile picture, no innuendo. I was just an earnest student who admired his work.

This morning I look over it again. It doesn’t give a hint of my being drunk and it’s only sent at 10.30 p.m., so I will get away with it. I do, most of the time.

I lose the day to email refreshing and by the time night – or the early morning – comes, my eyes are sore and I pass out on the sofa. Though, to be honest, that’s how most nights end, whether I’m alone or next to yet another naked body that won’t call me tomorrow.

The next day, though, a reply comes.

Thanks for your comments on my work , says Tom. It’s lovely to hear someone so passionate about what they want to do.

He recommends a couple of websites, offers me a contact.

I take my laptop as close to the wall as I can get, listen for sounds of life. But if they’re there, they’re quiet. Or Tom is replying on a bus, in a café. I try to picture it but it doesn’t elucidate. Tom could be anywhere, doing anything, and I wouldn’t know because he’s not mine.

Suddenly, I feel stupid. I consider never replying and simply continuing to be his neighbour. Someone who sneaks occasional looks at him getting into the elevator. A crush, existing without everything else that people think I am capable of. No danger. No violence.

Even if I do reply, I can’t do it yet, so I need to distract myself. A colleague has invited me to drinks tonight and I make a last-minute decision to go. Rachel would. She’d be putting herself out there, young, excited, keen.

I’ve had a burst of Rachel energy. I’m running on Rachel.

Harriet’s not all that different to Rachel; it’s just that she’s been screwed over. It’s made her jaded.

Then, when I head from the bedroom into my living room to grab my purse, I hear her, losing it with him, loud and clear. I pin myself to the wall. This is the most I’ve ever heard, by far. He is quiet but she is still shouting, and though I can only get the occasional word, it’s enough.

‘Fertility … doctor … priorities … work … age … men … women … unhappy … baby.’

My palms sweat with knowledge and I stay there long after they’ve fallen silent. I’m used to suffocated noise here, the hum of buses, the barely audible sounds of Lexie and Tom living life. Anger and rage may sometimes drift up from the pavement outside in the booze-soaked early hours, but in here we live measured, muted lives. Listening to shouting through the wall feels like being back in hospital.

And then, there’s the detail. It’s not that I don’t know that plenty of couples have fertility issues. It’s just that through the wall their life sounds unblemished. And that now, there is a gap between them, just large enough to squeeze myself into.

‘Lexie!’ goes the voicemail. ‘Would love to catch up. Let me know if that freelance life of yours isn’t too busy.’

I smile, wry. It’s a school friend, Rich, who I haven’t seen for six months. It’s difficult to say why because my working days are short and erratic and filled with procrastination, and my evenings are bursting at the seams with Netflix and pyjamas and scrolling Harriet’s social media. But somehow, I mimic busy. I have time to read a bulky Donna Tartt novel in four days, but no time to catch up face to face with people I care about.

Slowly, after I left my job a year ago, meeting friends took on the magnitude of a job interview, so I began to swerve them, telling myself that this was self-care. I had left work after a year of trying for a baby to be less stressed; though, ironically, my stresses simply sprawled wider. I stressed about everything from my work abilities to my friendships to whether or not I was eating too much wheat and whether or not that was what was holding me back from getting pregnant.