The world is cloudy again but Lexie – like Naomi was all that time ago – is vivid.
Lexie doesn’t have doves. Lexie is sweet.
Embarrassingly sweet, at times, with her endless questions and apologies.
I hate it.
It is another thing that reminds me of Naomi, the capacity to be gracious and self-critical because you have it all.
Everyone can be pleased for other people when they are even more pleased for themselves. It’s those of us who’ve lost at life who struggle to be as eternally kind as the world expects that we will be. I picture Naomi now, in the moments after it happened, holding her cheek, shrieking, screaming at me, grabbing at a towel, at a glass of water, at her phone. Shock, I guess. I was shocked, too.
Thinking of Naomi and what happened gives me snapshots of another time and suddenly, Lexie standing here with her tiny baby bump, they are lucid.
I hadn’t thought much of myself but I was starting to. There was the odd scribble to my brain: I was in a relationship with a man who had chosen to be with me, I was doing well at my job. Having someone like Luke, who people admired and liked, was erasing the notes that were made that day when I played the piano at school, scrawling all over them with new ones.
But then, the ending. A message in block capitals to my mind that it should forget all previous memos. That as originally thought, I was too awkward and too tall. And that these were all the reasons why Luke, seeing the possibility of a future with me, decided that wasn’t what he wanted. It was time to make his choice and he saw that he had chosen badly. He sent me back, demanded a refund.
I messaged Luke over and over, begging him to tell me why he had swapped me for Naomi.
You want the truth? he replied, in the end. Because she’s cooler, prettier and smarter than you. And that’s just for starters.
Now, I know the version David has told me of their relationship, but back then I believed what he was saying. I saw only an upgrade. And I tumbled backwards so quickly that it was impossible to get a foothold, to put a brake on or to take a breath, and the next thing I was there, holding the empty mug, looking at Naomi’s eyes and her face, reddening.
Next, the police. The blurriness of their arrival, seen through alcohol and shame and drug withdrawal.
A trial, a verdict, a stay in hospital – and time to spend in my own mind and my own body. Afterwards, lonely weekends with too-long limbs, evenings out with the wrong-shaped friends, and a constant, constant feeling that this wasn’t right. I fitted badly, everywhere, all the time, when all I wanted was to slide into my slot.
I read stories of people who were trapped in the wrong gender and wondered if that would fix it. But no, that wasn’t it. Mine wasn’t a gender misalignment. It was a personality misalignment.
And then I met Tom and it seemed again like it might be possible to clamber my way up to the surface. I could get to know him through my work and he would see the best me, the one who had talent and knew what she was doing and was respected. My hands dart again across that imaginary piano.
I look up, focus on Lexie.
I can’t have Tom now. But what I can have is the knowledge that I won’t have to hear her, living the life that I wanted through the wall every damn day. That I won’t have to listen to their unbearable joy.
‘The alternate me,’ I whisper to her.
‘What?’ she says quietly, shaking.
‘Perhaps the important part was always you,’ I mutter, looking her right in those eyes that I know so well.
She holds her arm taut across her middle now, finally as scared of me as she should be. I move her arm away, put my hand to her stomach again. Focus.
I look at her baby bump closely, trying to imagine the human being in there. I cannot stand the idea of her thinking that she has beaten me. It reminds me of Luke’s friends, those looks, that mocking. It reminds me of those girls at school. It reminds me of colleagues, party guests, glancing at each other when I try to get them to stay longer and I’m slurring my desperate words. It reminds me of the next day, when we are working together and I see them head off to lunch together while I eat alone.
I’m still not taking my antidepressants and my thoughts are fuzzy.
I try to remember the Harriet that Frances knew all those years ago, but she’s as inaccessible and distant as a character in a novel I was ambivalent about a decade ago. She’s the Harriet with the heart and the soul who was touched and loved – and she’s long, long gone. I think of Chantal and how everybody moves on eventually, and how I am still here, waiting for somebody.
I look at Lexie, manifesting everything that I used to be.
I move my hand, gently, across Lexie’s middle. I look at her face, devastated, betrayed. I wonder what her brain is doing, whether or not it has scanned forwards to single-parenthood, to custody battles. Whether or not it is still computing the part where she has been betrayed at her most vulnerable by the person she trusted the most, just centimetres away through this wall. Or whether, now, it can only rest on her baby.
‘Stay there,’ I say, my hand clamped firmly to her stomach. ‘And I’ll tell you everything.’