Violet left him to walk in stolen boots for some time. She did not want a repeat of his disastrous voyage at sea. He was not turning out to be the man she had thought she imagined. Not at all. He had a mind of his own and a temperament that was combustible and a face she had not yet had the delicacy to finalise. His stride was long, and he had the hands of a violin player, or perhaps a pianist, and a voice that had not yet been tested. It was not until he had gone some several miles into an unwritten wasteland that she realised she had sent him on his way without a name. It was an oversight that she sought to quickly remedy.

Violet thought of her father, but his name would not do. He was a cruel man who had shunned her and stayed away and led a life elsewhere that did not include a daughter who could not walk far and whose frailty was a downright disappointment. She did not wish to recall his name. Or the name of her brother who pinched and pushed and kicked and dropped things from a height. Sharp things. Heavy things. Just because her legs did not work did not mean that she could not feel.

There were other names. Many. She wrote a list. And all the while a man with an uncertain face walked away from her into a shapeless void that had not yet been typed.

name

Violet’s house had four floors and an attic. It was detached and made of hard white bricks and was surrounded by a large garden that was already beginning to look unkempt and overgrown. There were 93 steps inside. The staircases were narrow with painted banisters and fluted spindles. Some of the spindles were broken or missing. The staircase from the ground floor to the first floor was carpeted. The rest were bare boards. The carpet was held in place by brass stair rods made by Galbraith & Sons of Edinburgh. That would be his name.

The washbasin in the first-floor bathroom was manufactured by Arthur & Co. It sat on a cast iron stand and had a white marble surround. There were 14 steps and a small landing between the ground floor and the bathroom. It took Violet five minutes to reach it. She clung to the banister. The paint had worn off in places. There were many layers of paint hidden beneath. Violet hoped to see them all one day. That would be his name.

And so Arthur Galbraith was born. Not exactly born, but brought into the world of imaginary existence. He was the child of a brass stair rod and a first-floor washbasin with a marble surround. They represented the outer limits of Violet’s universe. A name should mean something. His seemed apt somehow.

kissed

Violet had been thinking about Arthur Galbraith’s face again, but she was yet to be convinced by any of the faces she had devised. None of them would do. She did not ask his opinion, for he had already shown himself to be difficult and ill-tempered when it came to making a choice.

Her problem was further complicated by a small technical matter. Almost every element of his face had an ‘e’ in it somewhere and the ‘e’ on her borrowed turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter often stuck. There was an ‘e’ in ‘nose’ and ‘ear.’ There were two in ‘eye’ and ‘eyebrows’ and cheeks’ and ‘teeth’ and ‘forehead.’ It was infuriating. Every time she would have to press a small button and the top of the Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter would pop open automatically, making the interior of the machine accessible. Then she would unstick the ‘e’, replace the top, press the backspace key and start again.

Only Arthur’s chin and mouth and lips were immune from the lengthy and annoying process. But they were not a place she cared to start. She knew something of chins and mouths, but a man’s lips were unknown to her. She found herself thinking about them far more regularly than his nose. Did it matter what an imaginary explorer’s lips looked like or felt like? She would never be kissed by such a man – and ‘kissed’ had an ‘e’ in it.

distance of paper

Violet set Arthur Galbraith to walk upon the Great Moor. It was a place of beauty and sadness and longing and hope and regret and joy, and it would take a lifetime to walk, for some things are not as simple as distance and direction.

Arthur put his boots to good use. They were no longer stolen. They were his. He had rock and peat and plain earth beneath his feet. He had a long stride, an unknown purpose and a Great Moor stood before him. Unexplored. Uncertain. A place without a map. He would be its pen.

And as he walked a face emerged. Not a face that Violet could have imagined. It was his face. It was his to choose. And strong hands not meant for instruments and a voice that said little that it did not mean.

The son of a brass stair rod and a washbasin finally appeared on a hilltop overlooking the Great Moor and looked south and east and north and west and decided to refuse the stars their steady counsel and let love guide him. He had a long road ahead. Not straight or flat or without discomfort.

And that is where Arthur and Violet and a turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter began their journey together. Almost touching. Merely the distance of paper apart.

more sofa

Matt called the day after our meeting in the wine bar. The fate of the three-seater sofa was still preying on his mind. The whole 10.37am thing had rather overwhelmed the conversation.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’

I knew who it was. We had been together for five years. Married for three. Just because we were separated now didn’t mean that I would suddenly forget, even if I wanted to.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Sorry about last night.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. I wanted to see where this was going before I said anything more definite.

‘Are you busy?’

This was a typical Matt tactic. He liked to make sure that I was in the middle of doing something so that I’d have to stop doing it and give him my undivided attention. I made a mental note to find some way of quantifying his approach in a graph.

‘Just stuff,’ I said, trying not to be curt.

‘I wanted to talk to you about the sofa,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’ He said.

‘Because you always want to talk about it,’ I said.

‘Oh’ he said. He sounded small and distant and brittle.

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. This was getting ridiculous.

‘You can have the sofa. Okay? I don’t want it.’ I said.

It was the truth.

There was a pause on the line.

‘Why do you have to be such a bitch all the time,’ he said. Then he hung up.

half

We bought the three-seater sofa from a local secondhand furniture centre. It was hidden under a nest of tables and a glass-fronted display cabinet full of dog hair. It cost £55. I paid for it, and Matt said he would pay for his half when he got a full-time job. He had a full-time job for a while, but he didn’t pay me back. We were still 92% in love back then, so I didn’t mind that much. I minded when it suited me though. I used it against him sometimes. His unpaid half of the sofa had some value in a petty argument.

‘You still haven’t given me the money for your half of the sofa,’ I’d say.

‘Well I’ll sit on the floor then!’ he would say.

Then he would sit on the floor for about five minutes until he thought I’d calmed down. Then he would sneak back onto the sofa and hope that I hadn’t noticed. I noticed. It was a victory of sorts.

The three-seater sofa was dusty pink. It was tired-looking. Grumpy even. The zips on the cushion covers were all broken. The arms were covered in coffee stains. At least that’s what we hoped they were. It only had three casters. They were an unusual size that no one stocked anymore. We used a copy of ‘Elementary Statistics and the Role of Randomness’ to stop it from rocking backwards.

Matt liked to sleep on it in the afternoon when he was considering his future. He considered his future a lot. With his eyes closed. Gently snoring. He also got to sleep on it when our arguments weren’t quite so petty. He didn’t seem to mind. Matt and the grumpy pink sofa had some sort of connection that I didn’t fully understand. I had never slept on the sofa. Why should I? I paid for the double bed as well.

dreams

I’m not sleeping. Not really. I sleep for an hour, then I wake up and listen. I’m not sure what I hope to hear. Breathing maybe. The bed feels wrong. Not empty so much as at the wrong angle. Too flat. I’m used to Matt being there. I told him we should have got a futon in the first place, but he didn’t listen.

If I do get to sleep, I don’t dream. Nothing. Not even fleeting glimpses. I have tried eating strong cheese before bed. And spicy food. It didn’t work. Not in the way I hoped for anyway.

I miss dreaming. I used to dream. I don’t know where my dreams have gone. I hope it’s only a temporary thing. I hope they come back to me. Maybe they are unhappy, too? Maybe my dreams are having trouble adjusting?

I was going to draw a graph for the report, but I couldn’t see the point. There was nothing to show.

sorry

Matt called back an hour later.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

I didn’t say anything for a while.

That’s when he hung up again.

Great.

We’ve been having a lot of conversations like that. Not really conversations. Single words followed by about a thousand miles of tense silence. ‘Sorry’ was fairly common. We’ve both said it. I’ve said it more. Not that I’m counting or anything.

We used to a talk a lot. Nothing profound. Just normal stuff. Endlessly.

I miss it and I don’t.

Sometimes I wanted to talk about things that mattered to me. That didn’t happen so often. That took preparation and timing. Maybe a takeaway. Or a rented DVD from the corner shop. And a bottle of wine. Always a bottle of wine. Or two.

I had to pay for the preparation. Sometimes it worked. I couldn’t always make him listen though. That’s where the timing came in. After the takeaway was normally too soon. After the film had finished and Matt had watched all the special features and deleted scenes and alternate endings – that was my chance. After the bottle of wine was too late.

I don’t buy as much wine now. Or takeaways. I haven’t rented a DVD since he left.

I lied about the wine. I still buy about the same amount. I just get better wine, and it lasts a lot longer.

I’m getting used to the quiet. It’s hard. I talk to myself. There’s no one else.

rainbow

I decided early on that the centrepiece of my research would be a detailed questionnaire. It would be a paper-based document of as many pages as were necessary. I had a large lever arch folder to fill.

I knew that the answers to certain questions would carry more weight than others, so it would be subdivided into several different sections that I would score separately when it was complete.

I would call it ‘The Compatibility Index.’ It sounded great. I wrote it down on a piece of paper with a purple felt tip pen. It looked great, too. So I outlined it in yellow pen. Then I drew little green stars around the outline. Then I drew larger red stars around the green stars. Then I filled the space between the inner green stars and the outer red stars with small orange hearts. Then I drew a rainbow in the background with all the wrong colours and realised I had probably gone too far. It was a mess. My brother was good with pens. I wasn’t. Maybe I was being overly critical? I reminded myself that if Jack had drawn the same thing it would all be blue, including the rainbow, which would rather defeat the object.

I got out another piece of paper and wrote ‘The Compatibility Index’ again, this time in ordinary pen. It looked sad, like a room after you take down all the party decorations. It could not be helped. I punched some holes in the sheet of paper and clipped it inside the vast empty folder. That was even worse. Now it looked sad and lonely, like a room full of decorations when no one shows up to the party. I knew that feeling. I’ve had birthdays like that. Let’s not go there.

I stuck the messy rainbow picture on the wall by my desk. The tape would probably tear the wallpaper off when I tried to take it down, but it didn’t matter. It was my flat, and I didn’t like it all that much anyway.

I liked the little orange hearts best. I went to get some chocolate. I was having fun already. Yeah. How hard could it be?

tortoise

I haven’t always been good with numbers. For a long time, I had a disagreement with the numbers 3 and 5. They looked exactly the same to me. It sounds stupid. But however hard I looked I could not tell the difference between them. I tried. I practiced writing them down and always got them wrong. Reversed. Mirrored. Substituted one for the other. I wrote whole pages of perfectly formed numbers only to discover they were not the numbers I thought they were. My brother used to laugh at me. He was older. It was his job to laugh and point and call me names and make me the object of his ridicule. Jack wasn’t good at numbers either. His disagreement ran much deeper. He had a problem with all of them. They were a foreign language to him.

Jack liked coloured pencils. I liked coloured pencils too, but I couldn’t get them to do the things he could. He made coloured pencils sing. I made them squawk. He could do the same with felt pens and crayons and chalk and poster paint. He was rarely without colour. On his hands or face. Under his fingernails. On his clean shirt. If he could not find paper or a wall to draw on, he drew on his trousers. Every six months my parents had to buy a new washing machine. And more trousers. I liked trousers, too.

Katherine was not like us. Not ever. She liked dresses. With flowers. She brushed her hair and wore socks.

I failed exam after exam. Dates of important events muddled. Sums confused and incomplete. The world conspired against me. Everything had a 3 or a 5 in it. Or both.

Then one day it stopped. Just like that. 3 and 5 were suddenly not the same any more. They were different. Individual. Unique looking. I don’t know how it happened. I was eleven. Nearly. I remember. It was the same day that Mr Everson from across the road backed his caravan over our tortoise. He said it was an accident. I don’t know if the two things are linked somehow. I doubt there is a correlation. Nothing that I can prove now anyway.

view

Helen had been in my office again. I could tell. I don’t leave traps or anything. That would be childish. I used to though. I could tell because there was a card waiting for me on my desk. It had ‘I Am Sorry’ written on it in silver glitter with a picture of a sad hamster holding a wilting daisy. It wasn’t signed. I knew it was from Helen. She left the price on the back.

Helen and I have a love hate relationship that is heavily skewed towards the loathe and detest end of the spectrum. Apparently I have a better office than her. It has a window that overlooks the canal. The canal is a toxic slick of greeny-brown water full of traffic cones and paper coffee cups, topped with a thick layer of oily scum. Occasionally a rat will float by. On its back. Legs in the air. Usually with another rat trying to eat it. Or mate with it. It’s hard to tell. Helen’s window looks out over the allocated parking in front of the building and the main road. Somehow my view is superior.

Helen likes to ‘borrow’ my things and leave them on her desk in plain sight - daring me to come and reclaim them. Proving ownership of a stapler can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Now she has begun to write her name on the bottom of things that don’t belong to her.

So have I. She uses a marker pen. I have a UV security pen that can’t be seen under normal light. I may have written something rude about her on the bottom of my desk organiser. I know it will be her next target. She can’t lift my filing cabinet.

64.726%

Helen has been where I am now. Twice. I would have expected her to be more understanding. She still has both of her wedding rings. And a tattoo. I haven’t seen it. I’ve heard about it though. Apparently it says something about undying love with a heart in the background and some poorly drawn butterflies. Romantic. Only one problem. To my knowledge, she was never married to anyone called Derek.

Her first marriage lasted an impressive nine days. The argument started at the reception. It escalated during the taxi ride to the airport. They were asked to leave the Executive Departure Lounge when other passengers complained about the shouting. Free champagne on the flight calmed things down, but it was only a temporary reprieve. It all kicked off again when they reached the hotel. They didn’t even make it to the end of their honeymoon. Her husband flew home early with a budget airline and got diverted to Stockholm. Helen decided to stay behind. The resort was all-inclusive, with three vast swimming pools and an attractive bar manager with taut abdominal muscles.

Helen’s second marriage lasted a little longer. I am not sure how. The pair lived entirely separate lives from around the third month. He came to one office party, but we weren’t sure who he was, so no one talked to him, least of all his wife.

By the time she was twenty-eight, Helen had been a Mrs Drake and a Mrs Cortes. Now she is using her maiden name again. Miss Cook. The sign on her door just says ‘Helen.’ It was easier for everyone to remember.

In case you were wondering, the average marriage lasts around 8 years. Not an exact figure. 64.726% was therefore an approximation based on limited data. Here is how I worked it out:

(y1 - x1) + (y2 - x2) = z

(z x 8 x 365)/100 = 64.726%

But that isn’t why it’s funny. It’s a statistics joke. It’s funny because it’s accurate to three decimal places. See?

I don’t know why I bother.

same

Daniel Bearing had seven identical suits. They were grey. And seven identical ties. They were black. And seven identical shirts. They were white. They hung in a row in a purpose built, humidity-controlled wardrobe on identical hand crafted wooden coat hangers. They were Italian walnut. He had seven identical pairs of shoes. They were handmade black wingtip Oxfords.

Daniel had a nice car and a nice apartment in a nice area and nice neighbours and absolutely no social life because he was never at home.

Daniel worked for twelve hours a day, six days a week and only took a holiday when he was told to. He lived alone. He was too busy to live with anyone else. They would never see him. They would never notice he had been and gone because all his clothes were identical.

Daniel’s life was a carbon copy of his father’s. His father had worked for over thirty years to build Bearing Foods into an award-winning company with an annual turnover in the millions.

Daniel didn’t have to think for himself. It had all been done for him. Right down to the colour of his socks. They were grey. Like his suits.

Daniel Bearing knew one thing though. He didn’t want to end up on a puffin-infested island wearing a hat like his father.

Dear Matilda

Just a quick note to say that washing machine No.76 has settled in nicely and is behaving itself – so far. Bailey Southerton did an excellent job of installing it. He turned up as arranged and was not what I expected at all. He has mended some other things around the house, too. And he found the lawnmower. He has taken it away as it requires new parts and a full service. He says he might even have some wooden spindles to replace the ones on the staircase that are broken or missing. Bailey Southerton really is a very nice young man. I think you will like him. Mr Southerton (Snr) sends his best regards.

Sidney is recovering from a bad cold. He is asleep under the apple tree in the garden as I write this. He does so love the garden. Despite his illness, he could not be persuaded to stay in bed this one time. He was overjoyed to hear that Bailey might be able to fix the lawnmower. He remembers the garden how it was when your grandfather was alive.

Your brother is back from his trip to South America but has now flown to Italy, where he is working with a cosmetics company who are looking for a new blue. I didn’t think there was a such a thing as a ‘new blue,’ but Jack feels confident that he will be able to come up with something that they haven’t seen before. He started talking about wavelengths and nanometres and the optical spectrum of visible light again. That’s when I stopped listening.

Katherine is buying handbags again. Oh dear.

Your father will be at the 3rd Annual Sand-athon at Cabthorne beach all weekend. He has high hopes this time. I’m fairly certain he will be disappointed. Bloody dolphins! Washing machine No.76 will have its first real test on his return. We would all love to see you.

Love

Mum x

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