The Map of Us

5 things about washing machines

Washing machines usually lasted about six months in our house. The abrasive nature of sand saw to that. My father’s clothes were always full of it. There was a well-established pre-wash ritual of pocket emptying and shaking and leaving things out to dry and more shaking and rinsing, but it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. After six months, something would always snap or disintegrate or crack, and we would have to buy another washing machine to take the place of the one in the kitchen that was in pieces.

Whenever we needed a new washing machine, everyone always blamed Jack. It was tradition. His pen- and paint- and crayon-covered trousers were bad at times, but it wasn’t his fault. We blamed Jack because it made him happy. He was intensely proud of destroying so many innocent washing machines. It was the highlight of his childhood.

We started giving the washing machines names, but that just made it harder when they inevitably broke and had to get taken to the tip. I cried for a week when Marjorie was carted away. Everyone was glad to see the back of Graham.

The record for the longest lasting washing machine was held by Desmond at eight months and two days. On the third day of the eighth month, Desmond burst into flames in the middle of a cotton cycle. Something to do with the heating element getting covered in fluff. We blamed Jack, as usual.

All our washing machines were supplied and installed by Mr Bill Southerton of ‘Southerton’s Electrical Appliances’ in the village. He was glad of the regular trade. He paid off his mortgage, went on two holidays a year and paid for his own hip replacement. We got a 15% discount.

free coffee

Jack did not look like a world authority on the colour blue. Everyone said that. At first. They doubted him. They kept him waiting in the lobby. They asked him if he wanted tea or coffee or chilled water, and then they left him sitting there for half an hour while they checked his credentials rigorously. They secretly called other companies he had worked for in the past and asked for a detailed description. They all said the same thing.

‘He’s about six-foot-tall with long hair and he wears jeans and faded T-shirts and he looks nothing like a world authority on the colour blue. He looks like he just left his skateboard outside and came in for free coffee.’

That set alarm bells ringing. Sometimes they got security to check for skateboards.

‘Is he really a world authority on the colour blue?’ Would be the next question.

‘Yes,’ would be the answer.

‘Okay. Thanks for your time. Sorry to bother you,’ they would say and put the phone down.

Then they would apologise for keeping him waiting in the lobby for so long, and Jack would joke with them that he was used to it and it happened all the time.

On the way to the meeting they would always ask him why it was that he favoured blue over any other colour.

And Jack would smile.

‘It was the colour of my grandmother’s typewriter,’ he would say.

agreement

Katherine thought that she might be able to sneak the top handle handbag into the house without her husband seeing. She was wrong. Clive was home early. His 5.15 had cancelled. Clive was a dentist who had scrupulously clean hands and very small eyes that were worryingly close together. He was a good man who enjoyed drilling holes in people’s faces. He was a contradiction.

Katherine and Clive lived in a modern and minimalist house where visitors were welcome as long as they took their shoes off in the hall and washed their hands before touching anything. It was painted throughout in shades of white. It all looked the same white, but all the whites were actually infinitesimally different. It was a subtle effect. Some of the walls looked slightly dirtier than others, but you had to look really closely.

Clive was sitting on the white stairs when Katherine walked through the white door and took her shoes off in the white hallway. There was really no way she could hide the patent leather handbag that was wrapped in tissue paper inside the carrier bag that had ‘Exclusive Handbags’ written on the side in big letters. Clive pinched the skin between his eyebrows. There wasn’t much to pinch. Katherine knew what it meant.

‘I thought we had an agreement,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘You were doing so well,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Then why?’ he said.

‘Because it’s perfect.’

Clive laughed. Not a cruel laugh or an amused laugh but a laugh that was full of inevitability and surrender.

‘No handbag is perfect,’ he said.

‘Don’t say that,’ she said, suddenly close to tears.

‘I love you,’ he said, softly.

‘I know,’ she said. Then she left him sitting on the stairs while she went to find a place on a glass shelf for her new handbag.

more sand

It’s going to break off.

I’m telling you.

Wind keeps up like this it’s going to break off.

Dry out.

Crumble.

The whole thing.

Break off.

Nice idea.

Too ambitious.

Wrong sort of sand for ambitious.

This is play-it-safe sand.

Saw it as soon as I got out of the car.

Don’t-take-any-chances sand.

Not the right sort of sand for a giraffe.

A sand sculpture of a giraffe?

Idiot.

What was I thinking?

Be fine.

Be extra careful.

Soft brushes.

Small tools.

Grain at a time stuff.

Big things.

Giraffes.

Take longer.

That’s all.

You can do it.

Three hours left.

Delicate touch.

Spray bottle.

Not too much.

A mist.

You can win.

Beat the dolphins with a giraffe.

See their faces then.

I miss her.

Try not to think about it.

Think about the giraffe.

I miss her.

Giraffe.

I miss the sound of that stupid typewriter.

The look on their faces.

I miss the sound of her breathing next to me.

Don’t.

I miss everything about her.

Stop.

Stop now.

Don’t want to forget.

She’s gone.

It’s going to break off.

I’m telling you.

Wind keeps up like this.

Crumble.

Everything does.

You can do it.

Steady hand.

Be gentle.

Grain at a time stuff.

Look.

Over there.

Dolphin.

Dorsal fin has gone.

Broken off.

Told you.

Still in it.

Still got a chance.

Giraffe?

Idiot.

I miss her.

NE

Abby was waiting in Mrs Whittle’s office. She was sitting in the green chair in front of Mrs Whittle’s desk where you sat when you had done something wrong. Abby hadn’t done anything wrong. Not that she could remember. She had pen on her uniform, but you couldn’t get told off for that. It wasn’t bad pen. It looked like a fish. Or a balloon. You could hardly see it.

Mrs Whittle was talking outside in the corridor. Abby didn’t know who she was talking to. The other teacher had gone home. The teacher that was still learning to be a teacher. She had nice hair and a fringe. She had funny teeth though. Abby wanted a fringe. She couldn’t have one. Her hair was too short. It was easier for her mum.

Abby was alone in the room. She wanted to go home. It was 5.18pm. There was a clock on the wall behind the desk. It didn’t make any sound.

Mrs Whittle stopped talking. Abby heard her walking away down the corridor. She was with someone. Abby didn’t know who. She couldn’t see. The door was pulled to.

The school was empty. Abby didn’t like it. She wanted her mum to come and collect her. Her mum didn’t. Someone else did.

date night

It was 8.35pm. The bar wasn’t exactly packed. It was snowing outside. Not the kind of snow that can make even a disreputable old city like London look picturesque, but the other kind that quickly turns into a grey mush and leaves a ragged tidemark on your shoes that is almost impossible to get out. That kind. The singles event was supposed to have started an hour ago. Matt had been told that it was always busy. Every Wednesday night. Except this one. Clearly anyone with any sense had stayed at home and saved their shoes for another day.

There were a few people milling around. Maybe about forty in total. Mostly middle-aged men with unbuttoned suit jackets and thinning hair. They were all sucking their guts in and looking at the door. He wondered how long it would be before one of them passed out. Matt hoped he wouldn’t end up like them.

There were a few single women, too. One was wearing a chunky sweater that had one arm longer than the other and looked like it had been knitted by a chimpanzee. The other appeared to have a chandelier hanging from her nose. It caught the light in a strange way and sent a shower of sparkles dancing across the ceiling.

Matt had never been to the bar before. It was new. A few months ago it had been a trendy seafood restaurant, and before that it was a trendy delicatessen. Now it was a trendy bar that was practically empty. Matt was drinking a glass of tap water with ice and a slice of lime. He was drinking it like it was a gin and tonic. It was much, much cheaper to pretend.

Matt had come a long way. He thought he’d better make some kind of effort. There was a woman sitting next to him on a stool. She had short red hair and freckles. She looked like trouble.

‘Hi,’ Matt said.

‘Hello,’ the woman with the red hair said back.

‘I’m Matt,’ he said.

‘Yes. I know,’ she said.

Matt looked confused.

‘Do I know you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s written on your name badge.’

‘Oh,’ Matt said, suddenly feeling like a dropped ice-cream. ‘Yeah. I forgot.’

‘First time?’ she said. It was a statement more than a direct question.

‘Yeah. Something like that. How about you?’

‘I’ve been coming for a couple of months,’ she said, sipping her drink. It was probably a real gin and tonic. Matt could see the bubbles.

‘Months?’ Matt said.

‘What can I say? I’m picky. I’ve made mistakes in the past.’

‘Me too,’ he said.

The woman with the real gin and tonic and the red hair and freckles turned towards him.

‘Are you married?’ she said. There was a hint of disquiet and suspicion in her voice.

‘I was,’ Matt said.

‘Divorced?’

‘Separated.’

‘Not quite divorced then,’ she said. Her smile was thin.

‘Getting divorced.’

‘How’s that going?’

‘We’re sorting through some stuff. Arguing over a sofa mostly.’

‘A sofa?’

‘Yeah. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?’

‘A little,’ she said. Then her face softened. ‘What do I know? I’m here too, right?’

‘And you?’ he asked.

‘Unexpectedly single. It happens. I just never thought it would happen to me.’

Matt looked into his drink and hoped she didn’t notice it was tap water.

‘This is kind of scary. It’s been a while.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You’ll soon get to know everyone. Just watch out for Gretchen in the hand knitted jumper. Oh, and Tabitha with the dangly nose ring. She’s a little intense. Whatever you do, don’t mention astrology.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘And Lindsey isn’t here yet. She’s always late. She collects china elephants. If you don’t like china elephants, I really wouldn’t bother talking to her. She’s lovely though. So, if you do like china elephants, you’re in luck. Have a great night.’

The woman with the red hair got up and started to walk away.

‘Nice meeting you,’ Matt said.

‘You too. Best of luck with the sofa thing.’

‘Thanks. I didn’t catch your name.’

‘It’s on my badge,’ she said, turning back so that he could read the large white label that had been staring him in the face the whole time.

‘Charlotte?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Maybe see you later then?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, and then she was gone.

special friend

The turquoise blue Royal Deluxe typewriter was fast becoming Violet’s dearest friend. They spent most of each day together.

It came in a hard case with a key on a piece of string and a black plastic handle and an instruction booklet inside. The instruction booklet had helpful touch-typing exercises in the back. Violet ignored those. She typed slowly and deliberately using only the middle fingers of each hand. She made small fists with the rest, locked in place by her thumbs. It served her well enough, and she was in no hurry. Arthur Galbraith could wait.

She typed on both sides of the paper. It seemed wasteful for her to do otherwise. She had to send off for it and it was expensive and it arrived wrapped in waxed paper and there were only 80 watermarked sheets in each pack. She had a choice to make – 80 pages single-sided or 160 pages double-sided. Violet knew the value of thrift. She was by now twenty-seven years of age and had her own house with a large garden, and she had already sold most of the good furniture to get by.

The typewriter had many special features that she did not fully understand. The right-hand margin warning bell was fairly self-explanatory. It also had a Variable Line Spacer and a Magic Margin Button and a Speed Selector and a Touch Control that adjusted the sensitivity of the keys. Violet was not impressed by any of it. The typewriter was turquoise blue. That was what made it special.

title

Arthur Galbraith’s adventures were to be written in the form of walking guides. As she seldom left her own house, Violet considered a walking guide to be much like a cookery book – they were bought to be looked at and not to be followed. But she was eager to avoid being called a charlatan or a fraud, even though that was exactly what she had it in her mind to become. She did not want her readers to find themselves lost.

She immediately removed Arthur Galbraith from the present and placed him on the Great Moor some distance in the past. If any person should set about to walk in Arthur’s footsteps believing the landscape he traversed was real, they would find it much altered and assume that the passage of time was to blame for erasing the landmarks and byways that were described in such detail in the book.

To further confuse people, Violet decided to accompany the text with a series of rudimentary pen and ink sketches that were so general and imprecise that they offered the walker no help at all in identifying where they were or what it was they had the intention of traveling towards. Places that only had shape and colour and substance in the thoughts of a lonely young woman sitting at a borrowed typewriter, trapped in a house with a large and untidy garden.

Violet would call the book Galbraith’s Boot. She chose the title for one simple reason: it did not contain a troublesome ‘e.’

volume one

The first volume of Galbraith’s Boot, entitled ‘Walks from Shiny Brook to Burton Hole,’ was published in 1961 when Violet was twenty-eight. It purported to be a reprint of the original edition from 1897, written by Arthur Galbraith himself and illustrated by his own hand in a notebook that he carried for such a purpose. It was, of course, a lie. All of it. There was nothing printed on any page that was not a fiction or a clever deceit of some kind.

It was a walking guide written by a woman who could not walk far, writing as a man who had died four decades earlier and only ever existed in her imagination. It proved to be surprisingly popular.

The first volume was a small, pocket-sized book, bound in cheap board. It sold out in a fortnight and was reprinted several times thereafter. A second volume, ‘Walks from Black Lake to Tin Gate Mire,’ appeared a few months later and did much the same.

Violet North purchased the Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter from her neighbour with her first royalties and bought for it a new carbon ribbon and a great deal of paper. She settled down to write, little realising the momentous upheaval she would cause. The Great Moor was stirring.

praise for Galbraith’s Boot

The foremost book on the Great Moor. Full of atmosphere and sly wit.

John Wallace Dobson.

Curator of Diairies & Journals

British Library

Arthur Galbraith was a pioneer and a visionary.

Edgar Mant

Monthly Gazette of Walking

Authentic and comprehensive. An unmatched work of topographical genius.

Joyce Scoines

Chief Cartographer

The Admiralty

A much sought-after guide for the intrepid walker and amateur explorer alike.

Sir Evelyn Stevens

Explorer

A gifted artist and a fearless author.

Barbara Atkins

Arthur Galbraith’s fine illustrations remind me of places that I visited often as a child. He was a remarkable fellow, and I feel honoured and fortunate to have called him my friend.

William Bell

Broadcaster

drawn

Violet considered drawing her sketches of the Great Moor in the garden.

The garden was large. A little more than an acre. Violet knew what it looked like from her window on the first floor. She thought that it was beautiful, but she did not go there. Not anymore. She was afraid. Inside was bad enough. They had put her out in the sun when she was younger. Put her out in the sun in the garden and left her there. Fresh air and sun would be good for her. Good for her bones. Make her strong. Get her out of the way.

Some nights they forgot to bring her in. Some nights it was something other than forgetting.

Violet drew her sketches in the front parlour or sitting on the stairs instead.

5 things about the garden

The garden had walls on three sides made from the same hard white brick as the house and topped with cement and tall shards of broken glass. The house occupied the fourth side of the square and was connected to the wall by a wrought iron fence that needed painting. Honeysuckle and wisteria and clematis and ivy covered the walls and the rusting fence and the house and some of the upper floor windows too. No one looked out of those.

The garden once had several circular lawns connected by gravel paths. And a glasshouse and a potting shed and flower beds and shaped hedges and pears and peaches trained against the south-facing wall and an apple tree and a compost heap and a belief in itself that had since been sorely shaken.

The lawns were gone. The paths were overrun. The glasshouse looked like a pond of broken ice. The potting shed was hidden beneath brambles and stinging nettles. Honeysuckle and wisteria and clematis and ivy had strangled the pears and peaches. The apple tree was the home of wasps. It was not the garden’s fault. The garden had done its best to survive. Just as Violet had.

The garden was lonely and heartbroken. It wanted so much to please her. It knew that she was frightened. It wanted to help, but it could not. It could not do it on its own.

The garden was patient. As all gardens are. As they have to be. Violet watched it from her window, and the garden tried to say to her ‘forgive me,’ but it was only a garden, and it could not speak. Instead it waited. There was still time.