I am on social media, without noticing that I have logged on to social media, and there is a message. I thought the one I had the other day telling me how ugly I was had been upsetting. This, from a girl named Rachel, is worse.
I’ve been swapping pictures with your boyfriend, it says. Ask him. Or just ask yourself if he’s been acting differently.
Does this happen? In real life and not just to Z-list celebrities or nineteen-year-olds? Then I realise that I am not dismissing it. Ask yourself if he has been acting differently. I ask. I get an affirmative.
Minutes later, and my brain has taken me to a worse place. Is it, I think, even just pictures? I think about the condoms. About the weird feeling that someone has been in the flat. About the fact that somehow, I am burying the moment that I found someone else’s underwear in my drawer.
I need to think, through the fog that now makes up my brain. Tom is central to my life and Rachel could be a robot, for all I know.
And yet … Things are adding up, they’re making sense.
If Tom did this, I think, then I would have to make decisions about my relationship at a time when that relationship is a constant I really need to stay on course. I know how weak it sounds. I know how weak it is.
While I’m online, I read Tom’s homage to our anniversary and I scoff. And suddenly weakness is superseded by blind rage. What sort of victim finds someone else’s underwear in her drawer and doesn’t push it? I accepted his dismissal. I buried it. I vibrate, suddenly, with everything I should have shouted and screamed and emitted, until he had told me the truth.
Tom is still in Sweden and has posted a picture taken when we used to go on spontaneous weekend breaks and talk about life goals and joining the Labour Party and what we could do about global warming and where we might want to eat Thai food next week. A picture from the easy past, delivered from the complicated present.
Before I know what I am doing, I am FaceTiming him.
‘Happy anniversary!’ he chirps, face giant in my laptop screen.
‘Are you cheating on me?’ I ask and he laughs, but awkwardly. Adrenaline surges.
‘What?’
‘That’s what people say to these questions when they need to buy time to think, Tom.’
‘Or it’s what they say when they’re confused,’ says Tom, sounding a little annoyed. ‘Where the fuck has this come from?’
‘A girl called Rachel says you’ve been swapping sex pictures with her. There are knickers in my drawer that aren’t mine. The condoms. Sex isn’t exactly fun for us at the moment. So I’ll ask again. Are you cheating on me?’
In the midst of every ounce of awfulness in this conversation, I am a tiny bit relieved. I thought I was too weak for this; it turns out I’m too angry for anything but this.
And then, our reception goes and Tom cuts out.
I sit on our bed simmering until he calls me back.
‘Who the fuck is Rachel?’ he says, no pleasantries. ‘Send me these messages. I want to see them. Let me speak to her.’
I curse the lack of nuance on FaceTime. Is he red-faced? Are his hands shaking? How can I tell if he’s lying to me when I can’t reach out and touch him?
He sighs then, though, and he’s more real. Nearer to human. He speaks more calmly.
‘We can’t do this properly over a laptop, Lex, but I promise you, I swear to you, I’m not cheating. I don’t know who this girl is but we’ll figure it out, okay? She’s just some weirdo. I’m not cheating on you. I want you. I want a family with you. I love you.’
I sit silently for a minute.
‘Happy anniversary,’ he says quietly, but I just say a quiet, emotionless goodbye.
When I turn my laptop off, I realise I am sweating and that now I am late to meet my brother, Kit, who will be waiting for me at King’s Cross station.
I see a call flash up from my mum.
Call you back another time, I text, instead of answering. Just in a rush.
It’s the fifth, sixth time I’ve done this.
I am too fragile at the moment to cope with the sharp questioning that I’ve managed all my life from my mum. To brush off the ‘Where is your life going?’ or the career digs. I am too emotional to deal with the pragmatic nature of my dad.
I can hear him now, if I ever did tell him I was struggling to get pregnant.
‘Well that’s just the world,’ he would say. ‘If it’s not meant to happen, it’s not meant to happen. There’s no point wallowing in it.’
The world is divided in two now, I think on the bus. There are the people I can enjoy being around and the ones who I cannot.
The first lot aren’t necessarily my closest friends. The second lot aren’t necessarily people I don’t adore in other circumstances.
But the first category have soft edges and I never suspect that after we have spoken, they will say something cutting about me.
In the same way, I cannot appreciate sharpness or laugh at cruel wit. Last week in a coffee shop I saw a former colleague, Liv, who works for herself now, too.
‘Stay for a latte!’ she said, hugging me tight. ‘On me. Let’s catch up. Freelancer club.’
My heart was hammering. Liv is bitchy, sharp. I’d be expected to keep up and to participate, and that was too much. I made excuses and fled, clutching my coffee like a fire alarm had gone off.
Give me the soft people, though, and I will squidge up against them.
My brother has always been one of the soft people. Kit is thirty-six, married to Lucy, and three years ago they had Noah. His disastrous love life might have been a joke to a lot of people before that but not to me. My heart broke every time his did, because all that my brother has wanted, since he was twelve and overweight and bullied, is kindness and love.
‘I just want a child of my own to tickle on the belly until they shriek,’ he told me, drunk, late one night after a break-up with a long-term girlfriend. ‘I just want to eat tuna bloody pasta with someone I love.’
At the time I couldn’t fathom these tiny ambitions, as I threw everything into work. Now, I get it. These ambitions: they aren’t small at all.
I don’t resent Kit, despite him having a child, because he is so deeply entrenched in my team.
Luce is going away next weekend, his text said. Noah and me thought we might come and stay?
Kit’s company, I think, as I stand at King’s Cross waiting for them, is like a human cookie. He slows my breathing; he is like my head being stroked gently as I snooze. I need this now. I need this right now.
‘Auntie Lexie!’ says a tiny voice from the other end of the platform and Noah is running, Kit following closely behind with a bag falling off his shoulder and being shrugged back on with every step.
‘Noah, hold my hand!’
They are a car crash. The happiest car crash you could see.
‘Slow down!’
The other passengers are looking. I’m looking, proud.
‘Noah, there are train tracks here! Noah!’
Noah lands in my arms, so warm despite the cold day, and I heave him up into the air.
‘Are you still my best friend?’ he asks.
‘Absolutely,’ I say into his ear as someone slams into my calf with a wheelie case. I wince.
Noah wriggles down too soon, like always, when I want the cuddle to last fifteen, twenty times longer. I am still inhaling him when he moves.
Kit catches up and engulfs me in a bear hug.
He’s still massive; just now, his height has caught up with his belly and the smile on his face says he couldn’t care less.
‘You okay?’ he whispers, one of each of our hands holding Noah’s, and my eyes fill, as I knew they would, with tears.
He’s walking love, delivered to me on the train when I’m at my weakest, and now I am crying into his chest so that Noah, hand tight in mine, cannot see.
‘Everyone is pregnant,’ I sob. Oh, the relief not to hold back what I’m feeling, his brotherly role secure whatever awfulness I throw his way. ‘I’m still not pregnant and it’s not fair. And I think Tom is cheating on me.’
He keeps me close, squeezed between his bulk and Noah’s tininess, and I am spirited into a cab, into my sparse, familiar building, upstairs in the lift and onto my sofa, a pizza delivery following closely behind without me even knowing when or how it was ordered. Right now, I want to live in Kit’s spare room in Yorkshire forever, where he will bring me tea and Noah will cuddle me, and everyone will have their soft edges.
Later, Noah is on a makeshift bed made of pillows in my bedroom, and Kit and I have glasses filled to the rims with Merlot. Kit is of the belief that a wine glass filled one third full could only ever be a sign of pretentiousness, because what other reason could there be to top your glass up three times when you could just do it once?
An empty pizza box lies on the floor. From nowhere, there appears to be a pack of Hobnobs. My stress levels have reduced by around 40 per cent in the last hour. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I needed this.’
‘But Tom’s not cheating on you? Not really?’ he says, knowing Tom, trusting Tom.
‘I don’t think so,’ I reply honestly. ‘But I don’t know. There are so many weird things, and I never seem to know what’s reality and what’s in my head. I don’t trust my own judgement any more.’
I tell him about Rachel. Then about the knickers, the anecdote making me flush red.
‘He is so adamant that they are nothing to do with him that I feel like I can’t doubt it, but at the same time, where the hell did they come from? He says they must be old ones of mine, but I swear, I never owned those. Maybe I’m going insane.’
‘Have you talked to Mum and Dad?’ he asks. ‘Not about the knickers. About fertility stuff. Tom.’
‘No,’ I say, defensive. ‘I can’t burden them. They’re a long way away, they’d feel helpless.’
Plus, there are financial worries, a house here in the UK that won’t sell, a retirement fund that really needs it to. They don’t need this.
‘I know what they’re like,’ says Kit thoughtfully, ‘But if it was Noah, I wouldn’t give a shit if I had no money and I was begging on the streets; if he was sad, I would want to know. And it was okay, wasn’t it? The last time you saw them?’
I raise an eyebrow.
Last Christmas, Kit was at his in-laws and Mum and Dad spent it with Tom and me.
It is no exaggeration to say that I spent about 50 per cent of December on Project Proving to My Mum I am Doing Okay. I might not have a staff job or a baby or a wedding certificate, but I had Christmas-baked goods, grown-up tree decorations. I had presents wrapped with bloody ribbons in a tasteful colour scheme.
I messaged her, a day before they were due to fly over.
Got your room ready! I said. I’m excited.
I don’t often admit an emotion to my mum but it was true – I was excited. This was new, a fresh stage for us, and maybe this was the one we would excel at. Real adults, doing real Christmas.
A reply pinged in.
Oh don’t worry, darling, we’re staying in the hotel, she said. Sorry, thought I mentioned.
I was a bit gutted but hey, I could definitely live with the space – except then I noticed the pronoun.
THE hotel? I replied. What hotel?
The one we’re eating Christmas dinner at, she messaged back. That we booked back in September.
I never told her that I had thought I was cooking. That I had thought we would be peeling potatoes together while Wham played on the radio. That I had thought we could get drunk on Prosecco while we watched crap Christmas TV in our slippers after we’d stuffed our faces with mince pies.
Instead, I just cried, quietly, to Tom, who didn’t understand why it mattered so much.
‘We haven’t bought much stuff,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got the turkey.’
‘But other people’s families get to do this,’ I muffled into his jumper. ‘I don’t get any of it, all year, any year, and just once I thought it would be like normal family stuff. Except that I would be the grown-up.’
I had really, really wanted to be the grown-up.
In the end, my parents arrived and we ate meals together, pulled restaurant crackers, met up at the cinema to watch Christmas movies. We dragged them to an ice rink. But then we said polite goodbyes. Nobody fell asleep with a paper hat on their head. No one got angry over the bids for Bond Street in Monopoly. We simply met up again the next morning, ordered eggs and avocado, made more small talk.
I had wanted my parents – living abroad the rest of the time – to be in my home. Just to be. I had wanted them to check the gravy with me, and congratulate me on my stuffing, and drink a Baileys on my sofa, and get up in the morning in their pyjamas. I had wanted to lend them shower gel and towels and to make their beds. I had wanted something more real than the hotels that we stayed in when we visited them. I had wanted this to be the new normal.
But Kit was right. It had been okay when I last saw them. Digs about my job and my life choices had been there but they’d been fairly minimal. Nobody fell out. The hotel turkey was moist.
‘Yeah,’ I sigh. ‘It was okay.’
‘I can’t sleep,’ says a tiny voice from behind the door. ‘It’s very noisy in London. Can I have a biscuit?’
And I let him under the blanket while Kit tells him not to tell his mum about the late-night Hobnob.