Player one, you may now make your first move. I drop the booklet on to the coffee table and pick up the remote control. On TV three presenters, one in a suit, two in red dresses, are raising money for charity. They introduce several acts: a familiar format. I turn the volume right down but leave the picture on the screen. I pull the Hoover out of its den in the corridor, its muzzle dragging behind us, a reluctant green herbivore. I switch it on. We start in the middle of the room; it’s easy. Together we are predatory; we seek fluff, suck it up. It’s satisfying teamwork. We claw our way under the sofa. The drone fills my mind. When I’m done, I lean the Hoover against the wall. On TV a plump teenager is spinning an impressive number of plates on sticks, balancing them on each flat surface of his body: the top of one foot, a bent knee, shoulders, the palms of his hands, his ginger head. Patches of red crawl up his neck from the effort. They are a deep crimson colour and look painful. The audience quietly cheers. The door to the kitchen is open.
The difficult cabinet is the one to the right. It’s where the corpse is hidden. It contains Neil’s body weight in grain. I look at the jigsaw of stacked goods: variously sized bags of quinoa, chia, sesame and giant cous cous fill the gaps between the rectangular granola, vialone nano, sushi rice, basmati, barley. Have you ever wondered why they make the characters in cereal ads so over-excitable? They’re compensating: this isn’t even real food. It’s so beige. I drag the big baking pot out of the bottom cupboard – the witchy, red one with the handles that was too cumbersome to cook with even when two of us lived here. I rip the tops off all the bags and boxes, and pour the grain inside. When I am done the pot is full and the cupboard is empty. I look into the mouth of the pot at the seeds, the sprouts, the clusters: so many different ways to be a unit.
In the Goldfish Bowl, we keep two glass pots on the reception counter. The large one is filled with pink and yellow sweets, the smaller one with one-pound coins. For one pound a pop, the visitors can guess how many sweets are in the large pot. We want to raise a thousand pounds for elderly people in need. Melissa’s idea.
Not our elderly people of course, who pay three times as much per month; other elderly people. The small pot is half full, the other to the brim and sealed shut. The sweets at the bottom have begun to calcify and melt into one another. When I am bored at my desk I look at them and try to figure out which ones still count as singles, which as an agglomeration. Only Mona knows the secret number. Tradition dictates that only the most senior nurse should know. I swirl a finger in the grain, feel the dry seeds attach themselves to my fingers. What else?
The laundry. I put on the laundry this morning. It now pushes its face against the glass of the washing machine. Hanging the laundry is the worst job. I hate it because there’s no immediate reward. I still have to wait for the clothes to dry, then collect them, iron them; all activities in themselves more satisfying than the act of hanging the laundry.
I could’ve got round to buying a new basket when he took away the old one. But the first week I didn’t feel like it. Replacing it seemed too much of a definitive gesture and I didn’t want to make any definitive gestures then. What use would we have for two laundry baskets if he came back? Then after a few more days I guess the idea of the laundry basket had become a sensitive thing in itself, which brought me right back to the night of the incident, in the quasi-arbitrary way in which daffodils are a reminder of spring, cinnamon of Christmas. The violence he used in slamming his books inside it.
If I leave the laundry in the machine any longer, I’ll have to wash it again tomorrow. I open the round door. With my arms full of clothes, it takes me two minutes to make it to the drying rack in the living room. First, I drop a sock. When I bend over to pick it up pants fall from the other side of the bundle. I lean to the side to retrieve them and the rest of the pile tumbles from my arms on to the floor. This is a moment in which I could very well sit down and cry, but I don’t. I keep things practical.
Player one, you may now make your next move. I breathe deeply and use my next life. I pick up the clothes. I resume the action.
The t-shirts go up easily, so do the vests, the shirts just need a quick shake. Pairing up socks is challenging. It requires some degree of attention but not my full attention. It belongs to the group of mid-level intellectual activities that are particularly tricky in this state, the kind of actions I’ve been trying to avoid. I can feel my mind beginning to think. I look over at the TV still running on mute. The talent show has ended, cutting seamlessly to a nature documentary. There are lions and cats filmed in slow motion as they jump – predators – but then the camera unexpectedly cuts to images of baby birds and ducklings, their down yellow and heartbreaking. There is something soft in my hands: one of Neil’s cashmere socks. It was white and expensive. Now it’s tiny and grey. Still soft.
Should I try to find the number for the commune? It is the middle of the night. Still, Neil hates mismatched socks, so he might be grateful. Or he might say it’s just like me; I couldn’t leave him alone for a minute. It’s only been three weeks. Barely. Did he even take the other sock with him? And if he did, does it look anything like this burnt, solitary one? Did he condemn it to the same destiny? Or is the other sock hiding somewhere else in the flat? Have I lost it, dropped it somewhere I can’t remember? Did I shrink it? Is it my fault? What would I say on the phone?
‘Hello, I’d like to speak to Neil Pratchett.’
‘What is your full name, madam, and what is the reason for your call?’
They would sound suspicious, like I was trying to get through to a prison ward. I bet they worry that calls from the external world will steer their disciples from their path. I would never do that. I respect his wishes. I have respect for us both.
‘I’m just trying to return a sock.’
Maybe they too have rules about footwear, like prisons. No shoelaces, no steel toes, no leather. No leather for sure. Is cashmere even vegan? I’m sure I’ve read somewhere it’s made by caterpillars. Insects are animals too. You should always feed sugared water to a troubled bee. Can an ant be called an ant, when it’s on its own, or does it only ever exist as part of an anthill? A part of a whole. And this sock is so alone and so soft and is breaking my fucking heart in two. I throw it in the non-recyclable waste bin.
I’d like to live somewhere where socks, at least, come in couples.
That night, I sleep a dreamless sleep.
The next morning, at dawn, I lift the lid of the pot. I walk to work instead of taking public transport, my pockets heavy, my hands sunk deep inside. Every few steps I pull my fist out, unfold it rapidly. I leave a trail for the small birds of London. Quinoa, vialone and chia. Soon, the birds will eat up the seeds.
I’ll have to find my own way back home.
SUGAR
Neil
The Night After the Break-up
For the first time in ten years I am living alone and I want clarity, which I could never achieve in Ruth’s presence. But even as I lie here, on this MDF bed, not quite the commune in Cornwall, but a flat near my office, between the four bare walls of my new room, Ruth inhabits my mind. That is the place where she first took up lodgings. In the beginning, before I had even met her.
In the summer of 2005 I moved out of my mother’s house again and got a job in a travel agency. It was the sort of place where everything was on display: the holiday deals in the window, the bottles of Perrier in the microfridges lined up beneath the main counter, the employees. Those were the years before everything moved online: Skyscanner had one paid employee, probably working out of some shithole student flat in Edinburgh; lastminute.com was cutting its losses by going into third-party acquisition; Airbnb was just a glint in the eye of some San Franciscan hippie entrepreneur. Good middle-class mothers still taught good little middle-class girls that sleeping on a stranger’s couch was a sure way to get oneself in trouble, regardless of how many stars someone had on CouchSurfing. In those years, travel agencies still made a profit with a younger crowd.
To attract these people, though, agencies needed us: the travel agents. Bait for the corporate thrill-seeker, making it happen for the not-so-adventurous student travelling to Thailand on a shoestring. Sleek, young, well dressed (in a non-threatening way, of course), we sat at parallel desks facing the street, encouraged by the management, if not to straight up walk out front to engage customers in direct conversation, then surely to make the best of our good looks. Through the glass pane, we smiled at anyone who looked even vaguely in our direction. But though the window was regularly refurbished (verdant plastic palm leaves on a bed of real sand as a backdrop for the summer deals to exotic beach destinations, colourful cardboard reproductions of the Kremlin on a bed of polystyrene snow for the winter deals to European capitals) and my colleagues and I made a fine smiling army of mannequins, business was slow that particular summer. Crushingly slow. I spent most days greasing up my side parting by running my fingers through it, bored to death, gazing out of the window like a sulky teenager. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, though I had been walking past its gates for three months, the nursing college across the street reopened for the autumn term.
I remember the very first time I saw her, the day Ruth came into focus in my life. It is so strange that this was over a decade ago: I can feel how I felt for her then even though I feel none of it now. Maybe she joined the college later in the academic year or maybe it took a while for me to pick her out of the swarm; Ruth is incredibly talented at blending in. It was in the middle of winter, close to Christmas. I watched her through the glitter frost on the glass pane: a little thing in a white smock and no coat. She wore a large scarf – a misshapen, handmade wrap – and kept her fingers knitted into the folds to fasten it at the chest. She looked cold, all pinks and blues and whites, and very small, like a winter flower. A late bloomer, I thought, and I laughed at my own joke. (I tried to keep myself in good spirits. No one I worked with had a sense of humour.) The girl swiped herself through the gates of the ugly grey block of student halls beside the university and then disappeared inside and that was it.
From then on I saw her exactly four times a day, all during work hours. Once in the morning on her way to lectures. Once around lunchtime, on her way back to her student halls. Once on her way into Tesco. Once on her way out from Tesco. The regularity of those outings immediately struck a chord. Here was this small, clueless thing ploughing through life, while all around her two hundred young nurses spent most of their time idling, sneaking out to smoke outside the school gates, applying make-up in hand-held mirrors while walking to the lecture hall, skipping seminars to hang out with boys behind the chemistry department.
She alone had a timetable to stave off the chaos. She went about her tasks definitively, easily, like she’d been doing this for years, even though she must only just have moved out of her parents’ house. She looked so young. Yet her behaviour resonated with me like a shared fate: week-a-page diaries and errands and long hours sitting behind desks with one key difference: what appeared to suit her nature so perfectly made me feel trapped.
I was making myself sick with the life I was living. There was no excitement whatsoever in it. But I did nothing to change it: I hated my life, yet I kept at it. There I was, too: obligatory lunch break at one for one unpaid hour exactly, eating a three-pound meal deal in my sticky leather chair, pinned behind my desk like a bug in a glass case. I despised my colleagues and I despised my life, but this wasn’t because I despised myself. Quite the opposite: I knew my own value, which made me angry, but I didn’t know what to do with this anger. I had nowhere to put it. I was prone to internal fits of rage, in which I envisioned myself, machete in hand, hacking through those stupid window decorations and into my fellow bots, as a collective punishment for our collective surrender. In my frustration, in my madness, the girl’s serene compliance to her schedule reached out to me. It lit a spark of hope at a time when I needed it desperately. Her tightly regulated routine struck me as necessary: not a default response to lack of stimuli or a dull inner life, but a deliberate decision.
Survival: she had it down. She was born for it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her as a small child, paying the same undivided attention to each action in her day, slotting wooden shapes into their correct places or directing a plastic spoon to her own mouth. As is the case, sometimes, with young children, she had the air of the expert about her, yet no pretension, and this was simply because she excelled at being normal. She was better at it than most members of human society. I could tell. Her normal life, unlike mine, unequivocally had meaning. She had, I realized, a long-term plan.
It took me days to work out how I felt. Then, one day, I finally got it. I was jealous. And a little aroused. The two feelings added up to one nauseatingly intense, physical sensation, which I eventually had to admit was desire.
I began keeping track of her movements. I quickly realized that her schedule never changed: 9 a.m., 2 p.m., 4 p.m., 4:30 p.m. Soon, my observations became more detailed as I grew hungry to discover more. She always wore the same scarf; a lucky charm, I assumed: a token of someone’s affection – her mother’s, I thought – that she’d packed to take to college. And later, as the weather grew harsher, a pale woollen coat joined the scarf, and yet she always kept her fingers interlocked in the thick cable pattern, even when there wasn’t a wind. It seemed to me she was protecting herself from the world.
In the mornings, she carried a drawstring backpack, the kind you get free at summer camps or in a sports shop, a simple rectangle of fabric with rope straps that sawed into the fabric of her clothes at the armpits. In the afternoon, she carried a white netted shopping bag. This was well before environmental concerns became a fashionable conversational centrepiece; only old ladies carried reusable bags and no one in Tesco would have guilt-tripped you for not bringing your own. In any case, she did; religiously. Always a single, string bag hanging from the nook of her arm; she never seemed to need a big shop. She let the bag swing in an unselfconscious sort of way, like an old lady would. I liked that. She looked like she was reusing her bag because it made sense financially, or simply because it was less likely to split, or because her mother had told her so, and had done so herself before her, like her grandmother before that and so on and so forth through generations of small birdlike ladies shopping for groceries. I never got the impression that in carrying the bag she was making a statement. It was a practical object, a bag with nothing special about it. Except that it was see-through.
I wasn’t able to make out the objects from my workplace. I shouldn’t have had a clue. But she bought the same things every week. So day by day, week by week, helped by the fact that the small Tesco Metro where I myself bought lunch held a very limited selection of items, I began to piece together the life of this tiny apprentice nurse who lived across the road. I gained an intimate access to her private world. But I still don’t know what took her so long in the shop every day. She was only getting a few things at a time.
On Mondays she bought a pint of milk (skimmed, I could tell by the red lid). She bought one on Wednesdays and Fridays too. Mondays, she also bought a dozen eggs, which would last for a week. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she bought a large tub of fat-free yoghurt, supermarket own brand. And a small box of teabags, once a week. After a few weeks, greedy for more intimate details, I began looking for less frequent items. I was eager to spot something more specific, something that would help me access a deeper layer of her personality: shampoo, seasonal flowers, a frozen pizza as a reward after an exam, tampons. I knew from the shelves in Tesco, and from previous girlfriends, that there were different types for different flows. I was curious to know what hers was like: purple for light, yellow for normal, green for heavy. She never bought any, which was in a way reassuring, because it meant that she must buy them in bulk. To preserve her modesty, I supposed. It made sense to me, with what I knew of her. I liked that she must have been planning for life’s little inconveniences well in advance. She seemed to buy a lot of s
ugar: a 500g packet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tate & Lyle, granulated, the two-tone pack, white and light blue.
Once I had a sense of what made up her month-long plan of purchases, I began to draw connections between one item and another. At this point I was detailing her shopping on paper: it had proved too hard to connect the dots in my mind.
I guess I had some notion, even back then, only a few weeks in, that I was becoming a bit obsessed with this girl. But I couldn’t help it. I was too bored. It was too addictive. I wasn’t hurting anyone, was I?
The women around me, women I worked with, women I worked for, had started to look increasingly tired, the way of old cars, rather than people. They’d lost their sparkle. It’d been a long time since any female had piqued my interest even slightly. They all seemed so boring, so predictable. Stick a curious man in a room full of travel posters and he’s bound to be travelling in his mind at the very least.
It seemed to me that rather than buying ready-to-eat foods she was purchasing ingredients. But what was she eating, exactly? Not much at all, I know that now. That wasn’t the best year in Ruth’s life. She doesn’t like to talk about it. But back then it seemed to me like a wholesome way to shop, and I liked that, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the hell she was making with all those eggs and all that sugar. Baking cakes? But I never saw her purchase any kind of flour. I looked up some recipes online and thought it might be meringues, but could she be living off meringues? There was something charming about that idea. I pictured her whipping up clouds of raw egg whites and sugar, blending plain milkshakes: she survived uniquely on angel food. I thought that suited her. I pictured her eating under her desk in class or with her knees up on the fireproof chair in her student room, still wearing her short white smock. Or sprawled out on her bed in her white underwear. Always in white. No one wore their uniform on the way into college or for any longer than was strictly necessary, except for her. I always saw her dressed in white. The first thing the other nurses did, when lectures were over, was unbutton the smock in a single quick fire of snap buttons, ball it up, and stuff it down their backpacks. I began toying with the idea that maybe she had nothing else to wear, maybe she was very poor. Maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t wearing anything else. I imagined how her skin hidden underneath must’ve matched her clothing. Do you get the picture now? She was so clean. So devoted. An angel.
Shelf Life Page 4