I am lying on my bed working out how to speak to Tom. Trying to muster the energy, even though, conversely, my heart is racing. I touch my skin. I pinch my knee. Am I the same? Is there anything about this Lexie that resembles the old one? Can I blame Tom, really, for any of this?
In retrospect, I think, when I left my job behind, I left myself behind.
I handed in my notice, breathed a sigh of relief that now I would relax and get pregnant again, and headed out on my leaving do. It was like a hen do. A final hurrah to my old non-mum self.
I danced to Nineties pop music on a square of dance floor in the corner of a bar and between us we drunk forty-five half-priced strawberry cocktails that somebody’s contact had ‘sorted out’.
‘Just do not drink any more,’ Shona told me. ‘Their cocktails are normally fourteen pounds each.’
‘How many have we had?’ somebody shouted when we went to the bar to order more.
Twenty-five. Thirty-six. Forty-two. At forty-five, the fifteen of us who were drinking switched immediately to cheap white wine. Life in journalism: feast or famine, if famine is the house Pinot Grigio.
I drunk fast and happily and didn’t leave until I realised I couldn’t remember what happened three minutes ago or which bus I was supposed to get home. And so I got in a cab, texting Tom that I was en route.
I’m growing up, I thought, nostalgic for this moment already as I fought the urge to vomit out of the taxi window. Now, the next stage of life would start. I pictured myself visiting my former colleagues in the office, my baby strapped to me in a sling, breastfeeding in the meeting room, a face from the past to them already.
I stumbled out of the taxi clutching a bag of leaving gifts with a soppy, drunken grin on my face.
I stopped on the pavement to send an important message to my colleagues.
I LOVE YOU, I wrote. It took me ten minutes.
WE LOVE YOU TOO, Shona replied. Though leaving your own leaving do first is shit.
But I got away with it. I had been the last woman standing at most other nights out until recently. I was the first to sign up for an after-work wine and if anywhere had an inch of dance floor, I was usually in the centre of it with my hands in the air trying to get the attention of a DJ regarding the immediate playing of some Destiny’s Child.
Now, though, things were different. I had told Tom a couple of months earlier that I wanted to go freelance. It had been nearly a year now since the miscarriage and nothing had happened. I wanted to make a change, to get a better work-life balance and be more relaxed. He said he would support whatever I wanted. Thanks to his parents’ generosity with the flat, we had few financial pressures; we were free to make these choices.
But still, I was bereft. My colleagues and I had the camaraderie of people who spent ten-hour days side by side then went to the pub with each other to dissect them. We were more comfortable in each other’s company than flatmates; we had an ease that I had never known with anyone but my family and Tom.
This is the right thing, though, I told myself as I missed them over the coming weeks and months. A baby is the priority now.
I set myself up as a business, writing and – as I failed to get pregnant and depression kicked in – moving further away from that funny, smart woman surrounded by friends in the middle of the dance floor with her hands high in the air. And now, I lie here on my bed, and not for the first time I sob with loss and grief for everything that I was, that I was going to be, and everything that I cannot imagine I can ever be again.