myself up is something that’s been happening more lately, increasing alongside calories and sleeping as I do other things less: see friends, pluck my eyebrows, wear clothing items without an elasticated waistband. Laugh.
Through the wall, to snap me out of my internal chatter, comes Harriet. She slams her piano in frustration and then I hear a phone ring.
‘Yeah?’ she says, brusque, like people who are busy do. I am not even busy in this, the week before Christmas, the busiest week there is.
It must be a delivery driver, because ten seconds later I hear her buzz someone up and answer the door, shrieking about the beauty of the flowers. An early Christmas present? From a boyfriend? A friend? Her mum?
I peel myself away from the wall and nestle into the sofa. I’m home so much now that I work for myself that Harriet constitutes a concerning amount of my human interaction.
I picture her in heels, phone snuggling into her palm, hopping into her taxi, running out to dinner, to lates at a gallery, to taste potent festive cocktails. And I’m reminded of the old me, the me before fertility worries happened and sprawled over my life.
I shuffle to our bedroom in my worn-out slipper boots and rummage around in the wardrobe until I find the box I’m looking for. It is, as they always are, an old shoe box, full of photos that were supposed to be filed away in albums that were never bought and now live sandwiched between thank-you cards and badges from hen dos and birthday invites and leaving cards filled with in-jokes and old ticket stubs.
Somewhere along the line I stopped being this person who inspired people to turn cards around and write up the sides, who brought on exclamation marks and capital letters and leading parentheses.
I picture myself in my old job at a women’s magazine, where I had a reputation for always coming up with the best interview ideas.
‘Lexie will nail it,’ people would say, and I had the confidence to agree. I shared in-jokes, suggested new places for lunch. And then I shrunk. Now, as people sing Christmas songs outside my window and eat their fifth turkey roast of the month, I am alone, again, waiting.
I don’t know how life became this limited little space. I don’t know when I crammed myself into a box that was only just big enough for me, because I used to be a Harriet, too. And I am envious.
December
I’m halfway to a work Christmas meal – the kind where I preordered my soup, turkey, tiramisu in October – when I realise that I’ve forgotten my phone and have to head back to the flat.
I nearly trip when I get off the bus, swear under my breath.
I’m too clumsy and tall for these heels, and I make a note to switch them for sneakers when I get home, despite the fact that I will never rock a trainer in the breezy way I’ve seen other girls do – in the way Iris does – that bares a chic, non-icy ankle. How are the ankles of all of these people not freezing?
On me, a sneaker–jeans combo will look as though it belongs on an awkward thirteen-year-old on a school trip, not a thirty-something who should have mastered her classic look by now. I look down at myself: far from it.
I swipe my fob against the screen and pull the door to just as someone is getting in the elevator. I curse my timing, because there is an unwritten code in this building that no one shares elevators, when I notice the man who has beaten me to it.
His hair is dark, curly, wildly untamed. He shoves it impatiently out of his eyes with each hand, alternately.
And I breathe like I am due to jump out of a plane in two seconds because an alarm bell has gone off and is drowning out everything else.
It’s not just this man’s hair. It’s his dark eyes, it’s the hunching of his shoulders as he heaves his large rucksack onto his back and puts a takeout food bag on the floor. It’s the sigh he does, so internal for an external noise. It’s his long legs and his straight jeans and it’s his nose, slightly too Roman for most but not for me.
This man and my ex-fiancé, Luke, who used to live here in this flat and get in this elevator with me, do not share a passing resemblance. Instead, they are doubles. Identical. Interchangeable.
For once, I climb the stairs and slam the door of my flat behind me. But like the Thai spices, the man from the elevator has crept in anyway. I know – rationally, I know – that it wasn’t Luke, that it couldn’t be Luke, that my ex-fiancé isn’t here, in London, clutching his takeout in the elevator of my building. That after what happened, his former home is the last place he would ever come. But there is a part of my brain that the message hasn’t reached and that’s the part that is making my heart hammer into my chest, surely audible through the wall to next door, I think, as I realise I am leaning against it. I gasp for air.
After a few seconds I hear Lexie, her tiny voice quiet, gentle, the opposite of my own. A northern lilt, I sometimes think, though English accents are still not my forte.
‘Tom?’ she asks, raising her voice to carry into the kitchen. ‘Can you bring me a …’
But the end of the sentence falls away. As ever, there’s just enough wall between us to mask life’s detail.
But Tom. Not Luke, Tom. Tom from next door. I must remember that, when my heart starts racing, when my mind starts racing and at 4 a.m. Especially at 4 a.m. I pour a glass of wine, down it and – forgetting to switch my shoes – kick the generic flowers that were delivered from a generic former colleague to say a generic thank you out of the way and head out with my phone, trying to fight a feeling that Lexie from next door has stolen my Luke. That Lexie from next door has stolen my fucking life.
December
‘I miss Islington,’ sighs Anais as I flick the kettle on and she yanks off a tan Chelsea boot in the hall behind me. ‘Bloody Clapton.’
I’ve known she was coming round for a week now – she had a Christmas lunch around the corner – but still I had run around flustered for five minutes before she arrived. Endeavouring to put on eyeliner, remember how real people (I haven’t really considered myself to be one of those since I started working from home) dress and shove piles of post into drawers. Tom’s been away for a week now. I am flailing.
‘Remember why you live in Clapton, though,’ I say, brandishing a mint tea box and something ridiculously expensive from Planet Organic at her, and she nods to the latter, of course, because we are middle-class Londoners. ‘You own your place. No chucking your money away on rent.’ I sigh. ‘We’ll be here forever, because Tom’s dad will never put up the rent and we’ll never get anything better so we’ll never have the motivation to get a mortgage.’
It’s not just Anais; I say this to everyone, all the time. It’s my only response to my self-consciousness over how lucky we are to have moved this year into a Central London flat that has its very own swimming pool in the basement.
It’s still such a surprise to me, too; my own parents have barely lent me twenty pounds in my life – they’re of the ‘learn the value of money’ school of parenting. I’ve been encouraged to be utterly independent. Which makes this whole scenario pretty ironic.
Now, for less rent than my friends pay in Zone Six hellholes, I live somewhere where there is no paint chipped in the communal areas but walls that are freshly covered in high-end magnolia once a year. Where cleaners spirit away dead flies or discarded ticket stubs with the speed of a