bar in Dalston.
Tom does a low-level whistle at my pencil-skirted bum as I walk past.
‘You’re just trying to make me feel better about looking fat,’ I say, embarrassed.
‘Untrue,’ he says, shaking his head firmly and looking back at the TV. ‘You look hot.’
I have been edgy about going out all day, my hand shaking when I made a bad attempt at doing my eyeliner.
Mostly, I’m going so I can tell myself a story of my existence as the kind where I go on nights out – sometimes I feel I need to justify the fact I live in Central London and see so little of it – but also because I know it’s the kind of thing I should do to network.
How, I wonder, did I end up in an industry that revolved around contacts when I am this antisocial? Or am I? Is this new? The worst thing about current me is that I genuinely have no idea. I am so lost, I can’t even remember where I started. What’s new, or a problem, or fertility-related, and what’s always been there. I have no courage of my convictions, no decisiveness.
Then as I go to leave, I hear a baby crying next door. There is no baby next door. Is there? Could Harriet have got pregnant and had a child without me realising any of this was happening through the wall? Will I need to hear that every day, a baby growing into a toddler, giggling and needing milk and talking?
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask Tom.
‘Hear what?’ he asks, and I try to forget it, hope – or dread – that I am imagining things now, hearing children where there are no children. It is suddenly possible. Again, I am flailing.
When I cross the road I pause and look up at our apartment block.
I crane my neck but our flat, on the fifteenth floor, is anonymous, out of reach and far away.
A few floors up I can see a lamp on, a window slightly ajar. On the ground floor, a man sitting on the windowsill smoking a cigarette and shouting, furious, into his iPhone. The flat next door to him oozes Nineties pop music and shrieking laughter. The couple above them have lit a candle and are framed in the window – he is kissing her on the cheek like a motif.
All of these people, I think, suddenly outside my bubble, living these lives in such close proximity to me and yet, I have no idea who they are.
They are below me and above me, side by side. They are kissing, fighting, sleeping and dancing. Are they ill, in pain, feeling sad? Did they have good days today, or bad days? Did they have life-changing days? Have they broken up with their first love today, fallen for someone, or just been to the supermarket to buy some frozen peas? I stay there for five minutes, wondering what my life would look like from this perspective. Wondering who I am to people on the outside; what questions I inspire. In my mind, every single one of those people in there is like Old Me, not New Me. Not feeling their hands shaking, dabbed with sweat, as they put their phone back into their bag, simply because they are going out for the evening.
A few minutes later a bus comes and I am caught up in a wave of other people, swiping and taking our seats.
This used to be my day to day; now, I flinch when people move close to me. I look down at my hands and see that I shake, still.
On the bus I am next to a mum who is staring out of the window, her child talking to himself in the buggy in front of her.
I pull tongues at the toddler.
‘I like your giraffe,’ I say to him.
He blows a raspberry.
I stick out my tongue again and I smile.
When the bus begins to move, I look across the road and see Harriet coming out of our building. I stretch to get a better view, but the bus moves before I get the chance.
It’s been a few days since I lost my temper over the doctors and Tom broke down and, finally, I’m starting to come back to life. Right now, the sun’s toasting me through the bus window on an incongruously warm January day and some positive feelings are finding a gap to make their own way in, too.
I get off the bus with the hint of a grin and walk the few metres to the bar.
‘Lexie!’ bellows a man I used to work with who has definitely had at least three beers.
I order a glass of red wine and a few more and refuse to feel guilty about fertility advice not to drink. We have a plan now. This is my last hurrah.
‘Pitch to me!’ says my old editor.
‘I will,’ I promise, and I mean it.
And you know what, I think, as I look round the bar full of men with their ties pulled off and a waiter walking around asking anyone if they ordered chips, no one else is perfect, either. I am okay. I am going to be okay.
‘You’ve been so off radar, Lexie, we’ve missed you,’ says Shona as she squeezes me in a one-arm cuddle.
And because we’re on our own at the table, everybody else standing, I make a snap decision.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, one-arm cuddling her back. ‘I’ve had some fertility stuff going on. I don’t think I’ve been dealing with it well.’
I hold by breath. I said that out loud, I think. I did it.
‘Oh, bloody hell, Lexie,’ she sighs. ‘I wish you’d told me. Me, too. That’s why I’m leaving work, to be less stressed.’ She pauses. ‘And that’s why …’
‘You’re drinking Diet Coke,’ I fill in, laughing. ‘Oh God, the booze guilt is the worst, isn’t it?’
‘Only beaten by the sugar guilt, and the wheat guilt, and the ‘are you having enough sex’ guilt,’ she replies, eye-rolling.
I’m laughing harder than I have in a long time and it’s that easy not to feel alone. You confide and you’re confided in and you empathise, and you find the comedy in the awfulness. Why did I imagine some invisible rulebook that said I had to keep this to myself? That no one wanted to be burdened by my problems? That it was kind of … tacky to bring it up?
A psychologist would probably track it back to my childhood. I think of my mum, flitting into a room and out again, and my dad, heading away for work for two weeks at a time, and I think – there were no windows. There were no windows available for people to ask for help or to analyse. Was that deliberate? Did my parents – the children of postwar stoics – avoid leaving any windows open, so that things didn’t get too emotional?
‘I hope things get better for you soon,’ I say, still squeezed into her, close. ‘You’d make such a cool mum, even though I know it’s crap when people say that.’
She cuddles me, tight.
‘We should meet up soon,’ I say to her, mid-hug. ‘I’ll go nuts and buy you an elderflower pressé.’
I feel her shoulders shake and I don’t know if she is laughing or crying, but I tighten my arms around her, just in case.
I am not the only one here living this, consumed by it. They’re everywhere, the other mes. I’ve just been so wrapped up in my own narrative that I haven’t seen them. But I want to. I want to help them, and bond with them, and cuddle them. I hold onto Shona, even more tightly.
January
I am in a bar, watching Lexie. Similar to when I followed Tom, I just want to know how she works, what she does when she has a moment alone. But Lexie doesn’t have time alone; she makes sure of it.
Lexie is laughing and sipping wine and I am drinking wine too, faster than her, and I am not laughing.
I