It is November, but I am sweating. I am on the tube, squeezed up against rush-hour commuters, and in my bag are forty syringes and what looks like enough medication to cure a ward full of sickness but will actually just do me and my uterus for a few weeks. I am terrified. Not of taking the medication but of dropping it, of it being stolen, of losing my mind for a moment and leaving my haul abandoned in the luggage rack. It is the most precious object I have ever carried and when I get home, I look at my stinging palm and realise I’ve been holding it so tightly that it has left a raging red mark that doesn’t fade for an hour.
‘Oh my God!’ Tom says later as I chop an onion and lob olive oil into a pan, then I jump again.
‘Nothing bad! Nothing!’ he says quickly. ‘I just realised that I forgot to tell you that I met Harriet from next door for that musical thing.’
‘What?’ I laugh, but I hear it and it’s disingenuous; the laugh Tom’s envious friend Adam does when we tell him something good has happened to us. Adam is awful.
‘Everything had been so busy and so rushed that I just forgot to tell you,’ he says.
‘How could you forget to tell me that?’
Harriet and her singing is one of our best gags, and the idea that he could cross the line to real life on one of our best gags and not tell me is, he concedes, inconceivable. Perhaps I wouldn’t react so strongly if it didn’t feel like this came on the back of other omissions, other gaps.
‘I just can’t get my head around how you could not tell me that you met Harriet,’ I say, doing an Adam-esque smile. ‘Are you mates now?’
I laugh. Again, it’s not real and I hate it.
‘No! Not at all! It was about twenty-minutes long and just nothing. That’s why I forgot.’
‘But you met Harriet,’ I point out, again, throwing the onion into the pan. ‘It’s like me meeting Madonna and telling you it was nothing.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ he snaps and opens the fridge for the garlic.
‘It’s not, though. She’s like a celebrity in our world and you had coffee – coffee? – with her.’
He’s nodded at coffee and thank God. Because I think if he’d said three vodka and Cokes and a chaser, I might have lost it and this risotto might have been left abandoned to a row. Harriet, Rachel, Harriet, Rachel. Could this be something?
‘So, what was she like?’ I ask, and he glances nervously at the way I am opening a bottle of wine – cooking-purposes only for me now, of course – quite violently with a corkscrew.
‘She was exactly like you’d think Harriet would be,’ he says. ‘Bit awkward, geeky. Sweet enough.’
I frown.
‘That isn’t how I would think Harriet would be,’ I say, pouring the wine into the pan and feeling slightly calmer. ‘I would think she would be loud, and confident, and this statuesque goddess with five of her colleagues in tow.’
We’ve heard the same woman existing through the wall and come up with such completely different impressions of her.
‘All those evenings that she’s entertaining and they’re doing karaoke …’
He blushes, and I note it.
‘Did you fancy her?’ I ask.
‘No! Of course not. Why did you ask that?’
I look at him closely. Shit. What if he was – is – sleeping with Harriet? But now, I think, I am losing it.
‘I think I’d be intimidated by her in real life,’ I say, finally.
‘Seriously?’ he says, incredulous. ‘How could you be intimidated by our jolly singing neighbour?’
But I am nodding. I mean it.
I leave him to the cooking and I go into the living room to check my phone.
I have another message on Facebook, from Rachel. A different account but same face, same accusations, except this time she has upped the ante, implied that she and Tom slept together.
I walk into the kitchen and stare at the back of Tom’s head. My mouth opens but I can’t do it again, I can’t. He’s denied it, claimed that she’s a psycho, and I know he won’t say anything different now. So what’s the point? This is my parents’ influence coming out in me now. Bury it, ignore it, stop harping on about it.
Instead, I lock myself in the bathroom and sob silent, heaving tears about how I am now so desperate to have a child that I am potentially letting Tom cheat on me without saying a word.