Chapter 81: Lexie
Chapter 82: Harriet
Chapter 83: Lexie
Chapter 84: Harriet
Chapter 85: Lexie
Chapter 86: Harriet
Chapter 87: Lexie
Chapter 88: Harriet
Chapter 89: Lexie
Chapter 90: Harriet
Chapter 91: Lexie
Chapter 92: Harriet
Chapter 93: Lexie
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
About the Publisher
Present
I sit, listening to the drip, drip, drip from a shower that only runs for a short time to prevent me from trying to drown myself.
There is a loud, unidentified bang at the other end of the corridor. A sob that peaks at my door and then peters out like a siren as it moves further away towards its final destination.
I slam my fist down on the gnarly grey-green carpet in frustration. Pick at a thread. Trace the initial that is in my mind: A. A.
A psychiatric hospital is such a difficult place in which to achieve just a few necessary seconds of silence.
Nonetheless, I try again, pressing my ear against the plaster and shutting my eyes, in case dulling my other senses helps me to hear what’s being said on the other side of that wall.
It doesn’t.
My eyes flicker open again, angrily. I look around from my position on the floor and take in what has now become familiar to me after my admission four weeks ago. The mesh on the windows. The slippers – not shoes – that are never far from my toes. The bedside table up there and empty of night creams, of tweezers, of the normal life of a bedside table.
And then I go back to trying to focus on what they – my imminent visitor and her boyfriend – are saying. Because it’s too good an opportunity to miss, when I can hear them, right there.
‘Both of them again,’ announces the nurse as she flings the door open.
She looks at me sitting there on the floor, raises her eyebrows. I stand up slowly, move back to the bed. If she thinks my behaviour is odd, she doesn’t say it. I imagine she gets used to behaviour being odd. Gets used to not saying it.
‘Just sorting out the paperwork and then we’ll let her in,’ she says. ‘He said he’s staying in the waiting room again. Not sure why he bothers coming.’
But he does. Every time it’s the two of them, in a pair like a KitKat.
I press my ear against the wall again, so hard this time that it hurts. But since when did pain bother me?
December
I listen to them have sex, frowning at how uncouth it all sounds.
And then I think – what a hypocrite. Because here I am having sex myself. With a man who I think is called Eli. I wonder if the couple next door can hear us too; if they are having similar thoughts.
Over Eli’s naked, olive-skinned shoulder I glance at the TV. I have no idea who turned it on but they have put it on mute, a breakfast news segment on turkey farming. What an odd juxtaposition, I think, to all of this sex.
As Eli finishes, I look away, embarrassed, from the poultry, then pull my dress back down over my thighs.
‘I’d better head to work,’ he says, no eye contact. I barely have the energy nor inclination to nod.
‘Door’s unlocked,’ I reply, and he slips out without another word.
I exhale and reach down to the floor to pick up my glass then take a sip of amaretto and Coke. It’s 7 a.m. but I haven’t been to bed yet so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Plus, it’s there and I’m thirsty. The door slams.
I rest my head back against the sofa, look around. Half-full glasses, Pinot Grigio bottles, cigarettes stubbed out into old chocolate dessert ramekins. Crisps, squashed into vinegary hundreds and thousands on a cushion. Student scenes; not what I had thought my life would be at thirty-two.
I turn the TV off and return my attention to the couple next door. I think they are doing it on their sofa, this couple, because intermittently the arm of their furniture is knocking up against the wall. Sorry, wrong pronoun: it’s knocking up against my wall.
December
‘Tom, we need to do it,’ I say. I have a provocative way like that.
He’s sitting on the sofa in his T-shirt and pants, shovelling in a spoonful of porridge with one hand and scrolling through social media with the other. I pull off my pyjama top without waiting for an answer because the stick said to do it and we are slaves to the stick. Tom knows this is compulsory even though he has tired eyes, will likely now be late for work and really wants that porridge.
But he goes away tonight for three days, so it’s now or not at all. Not at all – when you’re thirty-three years old and two years into trying for a baby – is not an option.
Tom takes off his pants one-handed without removing his eyes from his phone. You learn, when trying to get pregnant, to multitask in ways you could never imagine.
I move the porridge to one side, being careful to rest it somewhere where it won’t get knocked off. This isn’t ‘I have to have you now’ sex so much as ‘I have to have you now because the stick says so but we’ve obviously got time to move the porridge to one side because no one wants to get sticky oats on the DFS sofa’ sex.
‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper breathily. ‘We can be quick so you’re not late.’
Tom swallows a mouthful of porridge and waits until the last second to give up scrolling. Half an hour after he leaves I am still lying on the sofa, knickerless, with my legs up against the wall, hoping – as I always hope despite increasing evidence of its uselessness – that this gravity-boosting move helps to propel things along.
I was pregnant, once. It never happened again.
Now, I think of pregnancy as less of a yes or no thing, rather as something more cumulative. A spectrum, on which I am in a segment marked Unequivocally Unpregnant.
My underwear goes back on gingerly. Don’t upset the potential embryo. Don’t disturb the sperm.
I stand up. I can hear my neighbour, Harriet, moving around next door, ticking across her wooden floor in heels, keys rattling, front door opening.
I know I should feel embarrassed in case she heard something just now, but I’m so focused