Through the Wall

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Caroline Corcoran 2019

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Magdalena Russocka/Arcangel Images (apartment block), Shutterstock.com (women)

Caroline Corcoran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008335090

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008335106

Version: 2019-09-06

Dedication

To S, S and B, my team.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: Harriet

Chapter 2: Lexie

Chapter 3: Harriet

Chapter 4: Lexie

Chapter 5: Harriet

Chapter 6: Lexie

Chapter 7: Harriet

Chapter 8: Lexie

Chapter 9: Harriet

Chapter 10: Lexie

Chapter 11: Harriet

Chapter 12: Lexie

Chapter 13: Harriet

Chapter 14: Lexie

Chapter 15: Harriet

Chapter 16: Lexie

Chapter 17: Harriet

Chapter 18: Harriet

Chapter 19: Lexie

Chapter 20: Harriet

Chapter 21: Lexie

Chapter 22: Harriet

Chapter 23: Lexie

Chapter 24: Harriet

Chapter 25: Lexie

Chapter 26: Harriet

Chapter 27: Lexie

Chapter 28: Harriet

Chapter 29: Lexie

Chapter 30: Harriet

Chapter 31: Lexie

Chapter 32: Harriet

Chapter 33: Lexie

Chapter 34: Harriet

Chapter 35: Lexie

Chapter 36: Harriet

Chapter 37: Lexie

Chapter 38: Harriet

Chapter 39: Lexie

Chapter 40: Harriet

Chapter 41: Lexie

Chapter 42: Harriet

Chapter 43: Lexie

Chapter 44: Harriet

Chapter 45: Lexie

Chapter 46: Harriet

Chapter 47: Lexie

Chapter 48: Harriet

Chapter 49: Lexie

Chapter 50: Harriet

Chapter 51: Lexie

Chapter 52: Harriet

Chapter 53: Lexie

Chapter 54: Harriet

Chapter 55: Lexie

Chapter 56: Harriet

Chapter 57: Lexie

Chapter 58: Harriet

Chapter 59: Lexie

Chapter 60: Harriet

Chapter 61: Lexie

Chapter 62: Harriet

Chapter 63: Lexie

Chapter 64: Lexie

Chapter 65: Harriet

Chapter 66: Lexie

Chapter 67: Harriet

Chapter 68: Lexie

Chapter 69: Harriet

Chapter 70: Lexie

Chapter 71: Harriet

Chapter 72: Lexie

Chapter 73: Harriet

Chapter 74: Lexie

Chapter 75: Lexie

Chapter 76: Harriet

Chapter 77: Lexie

Chapter 78: Harriet

Chapter 79: Lexie

Chapter 80: Harriet

Chapter 81: Lexie

Chapter 82: Harriet

Chapter 83: Lexie

Chapter 84: Harriet

Chapter 85: Lexie

Chapter 86: Harriet

Chapter 87: Lexie

Chapter 88: Harriet

Chapter 89: Lexie

Chapter 90: Harriet

Chapter 91: Lexie

Chapter 92: Harriet

Chapter 93: Lexie

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

Present

I sit, listening to the drip, drip, drip from a shower that only runs for a short time to prevent me from trying to drown myself.

There is a loud, unidentified bang at the other end of the corridor. A sob that peaks at my door and then peters out like a siren as it moves further away towards its final destination.

I slam my fist down on the gnarly grey-green carpet in frustration. Pick at a thread. Trace the initial that is in my mind: A. A.

A psychiatric hospital is such a difficult place in which to achieve just a few necessary seconds of silence.

Nonetheless, I try again, pressing my ear against the plaster and shutting my eyes, in case dulling my other senses helps me to hear what’s being said on the other side of that wall.

It doesn’t.

My eyes flicker open again, angrily. I look around from my position on the floor and take in what has now become familiar to me after my admission four weeks ago. The mesh on the windows. The slippers – not shoes – that are never far from my toes. The bedside table up there and empty of night creams, of tweezers, of the normal life of a bedside table.

And then I go back to trying to focus on what they – my imminent visitor and her boyfriend – are saying. Because it’s too good an opportunity to miss, when I can hear them, right there.

‘Both of them again,’ announces the nurse as she flings the door open.

She looks at me sitting there on the floor, raises her eyebrows. I stand up slowly, move back to the bed. If she thinks my behaviour is odd, she doesn’t say it. I imagine she gets used to behaviour being odd. Gets used to not saying it.

‘Just sorting out the paperwork and then we’ll let her in,’ she says. ‘He said he’s staying in the waiting room again. Not sure why he bothers coming.’

But he does. Every time it’s the two of them, in a pair like a KitKat.

I press my ear against the wall again, so hard this time that it hurts. But since when did pain bother me?

1

Harriet

December

I listen to them have sex, frowning at how uncouth it all sounds.

And then I think – what a hypocrite. Because here I am having sex myself. With a man who I think is called Eli. I wonder if the couple next door can hear us too; if they are having similar thoughts.

Over Eli’s naked, olive-skinned shoulder I glance at the TV. I have no idea who turned it on but they have put it on mute, a breakfast news segment on turkey farming. What an odd juxtaposition, I think, to all of this sex.

As Eli finishes, I look away, embarrassed, from the poultry, then pull my dress back down over my thighs.

‘I’d better head to work,’ he says, no eye contact. I barely have the energy nor inclination to nod.

‘Door’s unlocked,’ I reply, and he slips out without another word.

I exhale and reach down to the floor to pick up my glass then take a sip of amaretto and Coke. It’s 7 a.m. but I haven’t been to bed yet so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Plus, it’s there and I’m thirsty. The door slams.

I rest my head back against the sofa, look around. Half-full glasses, Pinot Grigio bottles, cigarettes stubbed out into old chocolate dessert ramekins. Crisps, squashed into vinegary hundreds and thousands on a cushion. Student scenes; not what I had thought my life would be at thirty-two.

I turn the TV off and return my attention to the couple next door. I think they are doing it on their sofa, this couple, because intermittently the arm of their furniture is knocking up against the wall. Sorry, wrong pronoun: it’s knocking up against my wall.

2

Lexie

December

‘Tom, we need to do it,’ I say. I have a provocative way like that.

He’s sitting on the sofa in his T-shirt and pants, shovelling in a spoonful of porridge with one hand and scrolling through social media with the other. I pull off my pyjama top without waiting for an answer because the stick said to do it and we are slaves to the stick. Tom knows this is compulsory even though he has tired eyes, will likely now be late for work and really wants that porridge.

But he goes away tonight for three days, so it’s now or not at all. Not at all – when you’re thirty-three years old and two years into trying for a baby – is not an option.

Tom takes off his pants one-handed without removing his eyes from his phone. You learn, when trying to get pregnant, to multitask in ways you could never imagine.

I move the porridge to one side, being careful to rest it somewhere where it won’t get knocked off. This isn’t ‘I have to have you now’ sex so much as ‘I have to have you now because the stick says so but we’ve obviously got time to move the porridge to one side because no one wants to get sticky oats on the DFS sofa’ sex.

‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper breathily. ‘We can be quick so you’re not late.’

Tom swallows a mouthful of porridge and waits until the last second to give up scrolling. Half an hour after he leaves I am still lying on the sofa, knickerless, with my legs up against the wall, hoping – as I always hope despite increasing evidence of its uselessness – that this gravity-boosting move helps to propel things along.

I was pregnant, once. It never happened again.

Now, I think of pregnancy as less of a yes or no thing, rather as something more cumulative. A spectrum, on which I am in a segment marked Unequivocally Unpregnant.

My underwear goes back on gingerly. Don’t upset the potential embryo. Don’t disturb the sperm.

I stand up. I can hear my neighbour, Harriet, moving around next door, ticking across her wooden floor in heels, keys rattling, front door opening.

I know I should feel embarrassed in case she heard something just now, but I’m so focused on my only current goal that I can’t muster up the pride to care.

Plus, I swear that I just heard the sound of sex coming from her flat, too. Hot morning sex, I think, that they couldn’t resist even though they were meant to be at work. The opposite of the type that we were ticking off on a to-do list through the wall.

3

Harriet

December

‘I cannot believe how many chain restaurants are in this neighbourhood,’ says Iris, using a tone for the words ‘chain restaurants’ that most people reserve for ‘terrorism training centres for toddlers’ and grinning widely through her astute observation. ‘You know?’

I know.

I take a large glug of wine and feel my cheeks singe. She thinks where I live is embarrassing. She thinks I’m embarrassing. Everyone here thinks I’m embarrassing. I have been taking extra wine top-ups this evening and the room is starting to spin. I stare at her, try to bring her into focus.

Really, I think, Iris should be trying to bring me into focus. Because the truth is that she – they – have no idea who I am. What I’m capable of, what my real name is and who the real me is. What is at my core and what I did, nearly three years ago before they knew me.

Anyway, I think, flooded with rage suddenly as they speak around me: I love Islington. Take somebody socially awkward and place them in the heart of one of London’s busiest areas and they will adore you. They will never need to make small talk with the butcher. They won’t have a favourite restaurant because they have sixty within walking distance and when they do, it will change hands and become a pop-up Aperol bar anyway. You can know no one and that doesn’t mark you out as odd: it’s simply the way things are. You can have a secret, because you can hide away.

I recover from the insult quickly. A couple of drinks later, I am talking with unwarranted confidence about British political turmoil in the Eighties while intermittently chair dancing to Noughties pop music. I’m very drunk – I’m often very drunk – and I’m laughing. But it is an empty laugh because I don’t know the people I’m laughing with.

Next to me on my sofa is a man named Jim, ‘incredibly talented’, gay, talks about being an introvert often and loudly. Opposite me is Maya, who has been nursing her glass of Pinot Noir for the last two hours, despite my best attempts to top her up, loosen her up, liven her up, something her up. On the floor, barefoot and knees pulled to their chests, are Buddy and Iris, who live in Hackney and were probably christened Sarah and Pete and who rarely leave the house without making sure a copy of Proust is sticking out of their bags. A Christmas hat sits joylessly atop Iris’s shiny brunette bob.

I look around at all of them and try to feel something but there is nothing. Or there is worse than nothing; there is a low-level stomach ache that tells me I feel awkward and sad and that this gathering in my home is the opposite of friendship.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Last month, I met all of the people currently squeezed into my lounge for the first time. I am a songwriter, we are working on a musical together and I invited them over for Christmas drinks. For God’s sake, I even wheeled out a box of Christmas crackers.

I do this with everyone I work with. We usually rearrange around four times and people’s excuses are vague, but I am persistent. They all capitulate, eventually.

I’m still trying to find something that makes me stop craving the city’s anonymity; something that claims me as its own, despite four years passing since I left my native Chicago. I’m trying, desperately, to be social. But sometimes I think the truth is that when you carry a history like the one I carry, you can never truly grow close to people. It’s too risky. Too exposing.

I pull a cracker with Buddy and lose.

But still, I keep trying.

‘So, Harriet, are you seeing anyone?’ asks Introvert Jim, loudly, bolshily, butting in rudely to my thoughts.

I shake my head, top up my wine.

‘No, Jim,’ I slur, matching him for loudness as my drink glugs into the glass. I forget to offer a top-up to anybody else. ‘I am single.’

Oh, I am very, very, very much single. Unhappily single. I am not content being me. I’m not joyous in my own company. I am awkward and I make terrible decisions and I want another half to make 50 per cent less me. I aim to dilute myself, like a cordial.

‘Karaoke!’ I say, fuelled by wine and the panic that people may leave, and Iris and Buddy find it ironic enough – like the Christmas hats – to join in. Maya slips into her denim jacket and slopes off, giving me a pitying look that sets a flare off inside me as she says goodbye. Jim can be persuaded once I find him a dusty bottle of tequila for a shot.

These colleagues may not be an immediate solution to my solitude, but perhaps one day it will come in the form of a man who one of them knows.

Plus my parties, alcohol-fuelled as they are, rarely begin and end at my colleagues.

It happens, always, as it is happening tonight. The door is propped open so that my guests can pop downstairs for cigarettes. I live next to the elevator and what I never envisaged – given how antisocial my neighbours are in daylight – is that late at night, people started coming in the other direction, too. Peering in to see what’s happening. Hearing a song that they like. Grabbing a beer.

So it could be one of those, too; an unknown neighbour who comes for the alcohol but stays for me. I might not be perfect, but I have things to offer. Enough to hope that one day, someone might invite me back, might claim me.

There are hundreds of flats in our tall, imposing tower block, and most of them are inhabited by men and women in their twenties and thirties who don’t have children and can get drunk on Tuesdays without much consequence beyond a hangover they have to hide under carbs the next day at their desk. If they live here even as renters then they are mostly paid well and work hard for long hours, so that their evenings take on a desperate quality. Enjoy it, make the most of it, drink it, snort it before you’re back in a meeting at 8 a.m.

The building, with its modern feel, feels to me like it aids this. The sparse, airy lobby is an anonymous retreat, painted head to toe in magnolia with just a desk for the concierge and a sole plant that never wilts but never grows. Is it fake? When I stare at it, I can’t tell. I wonder if people ask the same thing about me.

In the lobby is an unplaceable but specific scent that never alters. The temperature’s always exactly what you want it to be, whatever the season.

At times it reminds me of an airport. People pass through, collect their parcels, take off in the elevator up to the eighth floor, and there are so many flats that you can easily never see them again. Occasionally, it reminds me of somewhere darker: of the psychiatric hospital where I used to be a patient. A coincidence? Maybe this is what I want from a home, I think. Utter sterility.

Now, my neighbours traipse into my home, three, four, every half-hour. They are on their way back from their work drinks or their dinners and they stick their hazy heads in to see what’s happening. Someone – me, most likely – shoves a wine glass into their hand and the next minute it is 1 a.m., and a city banker in his early twenties who I’ve never seen before is kissing Chantal from the fifth floor and vowing to move with her to a hippy commune in Bali. Chantal, like me, is a rare exception in this building to the city-banker rule, but I’ll get to that in a minute. By day, my neighbours are antisocial and aloof; by night, they are debauched and overfamiliar, revelling in their freedom. Happy mediums are not what we do in Zone One.

Did I make an idiot of myself? Chantal will message tomorrow, inevitably.

The message will come from her sofa, where she lies every day thinking about retraining as a masseuse. Chantal was made redundant from her job in marketing a year ago and from a distance, it is clear that she is in a deep depression, which isn’t helped by the fact that her rich parents pay for her to lie still and be sad. She has no motivation to move. But at 1 a.m. Chantal is shining, lit by lamplight and Prosecco. At 1 a.m., Chantal and I are something approaching friends. At 1 p.m., we exchange awkward chat in the preprepared aisle in Waitrose.

‘I’d better head to …’ she will mutter, gesturing vaguely at some bread, or a door, or anywhere.

‘Yeah, I’d better get on, too,’ I’ll concur urgently before ambling back to my sofa.

But meeting somebody is a numbers game, that’s what my mom would say if we still spoke. If it wasn’t impossible for us to speak, after what I did. It’s a numbers game and I’m following that policy. Let the strangers in. Keep them coming.

The nights begin with wine offered politely and with small talk. And then they descend into strangers and a blurry chaos I spend most of the next day clearing up. It’s worth it, though – the mess is comforting. It gives me a purpose.

Again, tonight, my flat is full of unknown or barely known neighbours and the last of my colleagues who are heading home now at 2 a.m., slurring. As they wait for the elevator outside my flat I hear them through the door that’s been left, as ever, temptingly ajar.

‘She’s just a bit … much, you know?’ says Iris, her voice loud because she is drunk on the alcohol that I just gave her, for free, while she hung out in my home. She is talking about me.

Buddy concurs, as the world always has concurred on this. I’m a bit … much. I’m not quite the right amount. Not on target. Not the level of person you would ideally want. If I were a recipe ingredient, you’d tip a portion of me out, or balance me with salt. As I’m a person, I can’t be amended, so I remain a bit … much.

I sit against the wall behind the door listening to the rest of their thirty-second conversation on the topic of me before the elevator announces itself loudly. An hour later, when everybody else leaves, everything is quiet, and I hear a TV being switched off next door and the soft, kind padding of slippers on laminate floor.

I say goodbye to my next-door neighbour, Lexie, in my head. She never turns up at my parties, but I know her name because I have heard her boyfriend say it through the wall. And then I lie down on the sofa, mascara on the cushion from the start of tears that will go on and on and on until the moment that I finally fall asleep.

4

Lexie

December

I’m typing and deleting and at that moment, Harriet starts singing in a children’s TV presenter voice that is too loud, surely, to be normal. Was other people’s noise this irritating when I worked in an office? I’ve always loved sound; the radio on in the background, talking to friends over TV shows. Slowly though, I think, all the rules of me are changing. I throw a cushion at the wall.

I uncurl my legs from the sofa then head for the kitchen because I’ve been thinking about the flapjacks in the cupboard all morning.

I look down at myself, bottom half shrouded in Tom’s pyjamas. My own strain at the waist too much now to be comfortable.

I eat the flapjack. And then I lie back on the sofa and think. Is it right that Harriet can get to me so much? Is it normal? My relationship with my next-door neighbour, to anyone living in a place that isn’t a vast Central London contemporary apartment block with a concierge service that takes delivery of your online orders and helps out the lost Deliveroo driver roaming hundreds of identical corridors with a pad thai, would sound bizarre.

I know more about her existence than I know about most of my friends’. We are closely entwined. She is by far the person I spend most time with. I know about her boozy parties with their Prosecco glugged into friends’ glasses as they try to resist and go home but they can’t – they can’t because they’re having too much fun.