I’ve just finished a musical, so work is more manageable than it has been recently. I have time to think. To plan.
Next door too, things are quiet. Tom and Lexie are visiting Lexie’s brother in Yorkshire. Ugh, family. Tom and Lexie, and their family.
I picture country cottages and homemade soup and twenty-year-old in-jokes, and there is a pain across my forehead that is worse than a hangover, worse than a migraine. I look at pictures of David again. I touch his face lightly as a child, as a teenager, as the grown-up I barely got chance to know. I wish that I could explain to him where the distance between us came from. What Luke had said to me. How I had felt like I had to make a choice between him and my fiancé. How I felt like if that were the case, I had to opt for my future husband, the man who I would have children with. How I am slowly, hesitantly, starting to admit that I made a catastrophically wrong decision.
Tom has posted some pictures of him and Lexie on social media. Tom and Lexie do the pub; Tom and Lexie do walks in the country. Tom and Lexie do refusing to be broken, no matter how big the boots are that trample all over them.
I look at the images again and feel that familiar and strong desire to erase Lexie from the picture, to sketch myself in instead. I feel betrayed, angry. Everything I used to feel when I thought of Luke being with Naomi.
I’ve not left the house since Tuesday. I’ve drunk cup-a-soups for dinner, and Googled Tom and Luke. My skin is pale and a large spot has sprung up on my chin. My hair is lank and greasy, right to the ends, and I smell oddly of damp.
I contemplate the last time this happened; where it led.
I make another coffee, more amaretto, and check Tom’s social media again. The selfie of the two of them walking, the one of them in the pub probably taken by a friend, or just someone they met who liked them because that’s what life is like being Tom and Lexie. I’ve seen the cards in their flat, the invites. People are drawn to them, in a way they have so rarely been drawn to me.
By now, Tom and Lexie have most probably finished their walk and are thinking about watching a film with a bottle of red.
I throw my own coffee cup against the wall and leave the remnants there. Because who will know? Who will care? This isn’t like being in the hospital: no one cleans up my mess, no one checks if I’m falling apart.
I’m losing patience. I need Tom and Lexie to come back. They are too in control up there, too happy. I need to move things on.
I set up another Facebook account and send Lexie a follow-up message from Rachel.
Do you know where your boyfriend was on the fifth of this month? I type. Might be worth asking him …
I’ve done my online research. I know Tom was away that night.
I log out. Look around. What now?
It hits me then, a feeling that one of the therapists identified long ago and that comes to me in a physical form often, especially on those nights when those people are in my flat with their names and their faces blurring with Pinot Grigio: I am very, very lonely.
I’m lonely alone, and I’m lonely in a houseful of people, and there is no time when I am not lonely. I am too lonely to reach out to people on the periphery of my life and pull them closer. I am scared of rejection, of being known. I keep Chantal half a metre away in Waitrose, make sure I don’t socialise with work colleagues unless I’m drunk.
I don’t have the guarantee of the other friendless; a family who will ensure that I am not lonely unconditionally, surrounding me with bickering and a claustrophobic Christmas that everyone will grumble about but never, ever want to give up. And I can’t get that back now. My family are too far gone.
But Tom can fix that, I think, he can fix that. As long as Lexie is erased.