by A. S. Hatch
‘What’s this?’ he produced the pages I managed to get down a couple of days ago. ‘A letter?’ I nodded. ‘Lucy eh?’ he said and then looked up at your photo. He laughed. ‘Good for you Danny. I haven’t seen you out on your walks recently. You’re normally so consistent. I can tell what time it is from where you are along the path. I was thinking, as I was tucking into my roast beef last night and looking across the table at my wife, I haven’t seen Danny for a while. I’ll call on him tomorrow.’
‘I’ve been unwell. Virus, I think. I’m over the worst of it now.’
‘I see.’
‘I’ve been in bed for four days.’
‘You need a wife, Danny.’
‘Yes.’
He turned at one point and stuffed his fingers into the video-cassette slot in the telly. He rummaged around in there for a few seconds then inspected the dust on his fingers.
‘Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’ I offered, to break the silence more than anything.
‘Some concerns have been raised,’ he said, leaning forward conspiratorially.
‘What concerns?’
‘Over unsavoury behaviour.’
‘Unsavoury?’
‘Yes. In the woods.’
‘Oh.’
‘You have a view of everything from here. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?’
I thought of the black figure rushing across the grass towards the treeline last night. But as the words bubbled to the surface, it suddenly seemed foolish to mention it. I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined it. I shook my head.
‘I’m looking into it, trying to put people’s minds at ease. So if you do happen to see anything out there, let me know.’ He rose to his feet.
‘Have you seen Robbie lately?’ I asked as he reached the door. ‘I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks. I knock but there’s never any response. I haven’t checked for a few days because I’ve been ill.’
He put his hat back on and looked at me blankly. ‘I hope you’re feeling better soon Danny,’ he said. Then he left.
***
This is Ruby’s first letter to me:
1 January 2016
Hello Dan,
First things first. Happy New Year! I know it’s not exactly been a happy start to the year for you but it feels weird not to say it on January 1.
I’m so sorry to hear about your mother. Ivy is such a great name. I love ivy. If the world ended ivy would take over.
Do you believe in God? I never used to, but lately I’ve started to wonder. There’s so much badness, it can’t all be coincidence. Did you know there is a type of flea that is perfectly designed to burrow into your heel and then feed on your blood and expand up to 2,000 times its size inside your foot?
No one has ever written a letter like yours before. People write to me because I’m in prison but they don’t know what to say to me because I’m in prison. It’s the elephant in the cell. I get so many of the same letter. I can feel their unease. They’re writing on eggshells. Some are like news bulletins updating me on current events in the world. I’ve been having a yearlong conversation with an elderly man about politics. He doesn’t realise we have TVs here. I humour him. How many people would take the time to hand-write letters to a person they’ve never met? He must be very lonely. Perhaps he’s a widower? I can sense the questions he really wants to ask me bubbling beneath the surface. But he never does.
People write to me about ‘safe’ things. The letters are like press releases. Everything in them is perfect and sweet. Which is nice, but I read the words and I feel like I’m having a conversation with someone through a car window.
Your letter was different. It was raw. I could sense your pain. I couldn’t wait to write back to you. Reading it I felt like Julia meeting Winston for the first time! (Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four? Sorry, if you haven’t you won’t get the reference. If not, you must!) I want to know more about you. I want to hear about Ivy and this mysterious ‘Vic’. Don’t worry, I’m not some weirdo who leeches off the pain of others. I just like to listen and help people where I can. My twin says that’s my fatal flaw. You’re a fixer, she says. I prefer to say that I’m just addicted to people. My sister is so sweet. Of course she’s right; I do love to fix problems. Or try to. I was an art psychotherapist before. In here I’m a Listener, with a capital L. I volunteer for the Samaritans. I woman the phones, listen to people. Do my bit. Most of the other volunteers do it for a change of scenery, for some time away from their cell. I do it because I love to help people. The trouble is, every time you ‘listen’ you get new people. You never get to speak to the same person twice. There’s no way of reconnecting. Once the caller goes, another one comes through and you don’t know if what you’ve said has helped. I like to believe that it does. Kind words always help.
When I read your letter I sensed a person reaching out. I got the impression that the words you typed came from an honest desire to connect.
I used to get people to paint and draw their feelings. I used art as a sort of distraction therapy. Just paint what you feel, I’d say. And out would come these amazing pictures – sometimes abstract, other times perfectly legible – like scans of the contents of their souls. And it was a starting point; we’d analyse their work together and they’d begin to describe what they’d done and they didn’t realise they were in therapy any more. It was like crushing and hiding a pill in the dog’s dinner.
I hope you write back. You’ll be surprised at how much it helps to just get stuff down on paper. So, Dan, just write what you feel.
Ruby
I didn’t intend to write back to her. But of course I did.
Our tenancy at Beryl Avenue would expire at the end of June. I had just under six months to whip Lanes End into shape.
The day I rewired the cottage and reconnected the electricity felt like a major milestone. Restored to light and power, the cottage seemed to offer a glimpse of a life. I discovered a trove of antique furniture inside the smaller of the outbuildings. Chests, chairs, tables, wardrobes, a grandfather clock, even a Chinese folding screen, all tucked away under dustsheets. There was enough furniture to fill the entire cottage. Buoyed by the discovery, I drove home quickly.
A black coupé was parked outside the house. I pulled onto the drive and approached the car. The coupé’s engine fired into life. I knocked on the tinted window and it lowered with an electronic wheeze.
‘Scott, is it?’ I thrust my hand through the open window towards him. He gripped it limply. I could feel thick callouses on the palm of his hand. ‘You’re Vic’s personal trainer right?’ The coupé growled and hummed. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘He’s here to pick me up,’ Vic’s voice came from behind me. She was wearing a tracksuit top and yoga pants and had her gym bag slung over her shoulder.
‘What time is it?’ I said.
‘Six.’
‘You don’t normally go to the gym this early in the evening.’
‘Class times all changed in January.’ She walked around the front of the coupé and threw her bag onto the back seat. ‘You’ve been at the cottage so much lately you mustn’t have noticed,’ she said, across the roof of the car. She got in.
‘What time will you be back?’ I said, bending down to Scott’s window again. She looked at Scott, then at me, and said:
‘Around eight thirty.’ This sounded like a question.
‘Right.’ Scott pushed a button on his steering wheel and a thumping dance track erupted from the car like thunder.
‘Turn that down!’ Victoria barked at him. There was a tone of familiarity in her voice that I disliked very much.
‘Well, have a good workout or whatever. It was good to meet you,’ I said, these last words drowned out completely by a couple of monstrous engine revs. Scott’s side window rose and the coupé sped off.
I watched the empty street for a while and listened to the coupé’s engine recede farther and farther away. I went inside, fed Alfred an
d sat at the dining table with my laptop. As the old machine whirred into life I began already composing the opening lines of my first proper letter to Ruby.
Here is what I wrote:
16 January 2016
Dear Ruby,
I am so embarrassed by what I wrote on New Year’s Eve. I wasn’t myself that night. I could not have expected such an understanding response.
It feels nice to be writing to a Listener. I feel like I haven’t been listened to for a long time. Vic hears me but she doesn’t listen. The ‘mysterious’ Vic is my partner by the way. We’ve been together just over five years. These days I can’t figure her out. She’s maddening and evasive. She did not come to my mother’s funeral, that is true, but she had her reasons. I can’t believe I’m opening up like this to a stranger!
As it happens I have read Nineteen Eighty-Four and I understood your reference. My father was big into books. He was a carpenter, like me, but his great passion was reading and he encouraged me to read as much as possible growing up. He used to say the only reason he became a carpenter was so he could make himself a nice reading chair. Don’t be like me, he’d say. He was referring to his profession of course, he didn’t want me to work with my hands. But he was such a peaceful soul, so calm, so in control of everything, so content. There was always this serene almost enlightened smile on his face, as though he was privy to some secret of the universe nobody else was. As though what he knew removed any worldly concerns from his head. How could I not have wanted to be like him? He died when I was twelve. I used to read all the time. I used to lie on the rug at his feet and read ‘serious’ books to try and impress him. I haven’t read a single page of a book since he died.
My mother left a cottage to me in her will. I’m renovating it. I want to move there with Vic and start over. I finally got the lights to work today, which sounds insignificant now that I’ve typed it, but it felt like a big deal. I wanted to tell Vic but she dashed off as soon as I got home so I’m telling you about it instead.
Please, Ruby, tell me about you too. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Is your twin identical?
Sorry, there’s no order to this letter. I am writing these thoughts as they pop into my head. Are you analysing me as you read? Am I being selfish writing to you like this? I feel I should be asking about you, not burdening you with my problems. But you’re right, it is cathartic to get stuff down. It’s only taken me twenty minutes to write this letter, I haven’t stopped typing. It has come pouring out of me like water from a tap.
Can I trust you? Are you real?
Dan
I wasn’t entirely sure what I had begun, and with whom, but I was so lost and so alone that there seemed nothing to lose in seeing it through.
You’ve been at the cottage so much lately. Vic’s words came back to me. The implication, that I was the one who had pulled away, the injustice of this, made me burn with anger. What were a few harmless letters in the face of her infidelity (I was sure of it now)?
It was nine o’clock when Vic came home. I was in the workshop. She looked at me from the bottom of the driveway. Our eyes met. She pretended she hadn’t seen me and went inside. I heard Scott’s coupé drive off.
That night I dreamt about Jerusalem. It was empty apart from a single person sat in the bay window. Down on the beach my mother was leaning backwards into the wind. I watched her for a while, like I was the parent. Behind me the person sitting in my mother’s chair spoke. It was Victoria. She wore a white nightgown, bloodied between her thighs. Oscar was in her lap, his little wings flapping frantically. There were green feathers at her feet. She stared out of the window, an oddly intense look of concentration on her face. It dawned on me that she was throttling the bird. Suddenly, just when it seemed he was about to stop struggling, she released him and he flew away. You saw that, right? she said. Tell me you saw that?
A couple of days later I got this reply from Ruby:
23 January 2016
Dear Dan,
You can trust me. I am real.
I understand why you ask. I’m not offended. It’s hard knowing who to trust. You can spend a lifetime with a person and not really know them. I don’t blame you for questioning me. After all, who am I? Just a name on your computer screen.
I’ve needed something like this. A true exchange. You’ve come along at just the right moment. I promise never to judge you for anything you share with me. Will you promise the same?
Your father sounded like a wonderful man. It must have hit you very hard when he died. My sister Jade (yes, we’re identical) and I never really knew our father growing up. He left our mother and moved to Spain with his girlfriend when we were two. Once every couple of years he’d fly us over to his villa. We’d play in the pool all day or go to the market with his maid. And after a few weeks of that he’d drive us to the airport in his convertible and check us in with the chaperone service and wave us off. My two precious stones, he called us.
How is Vic maddening? People talk about the ‘seven-year itch’ in relationships but it can occur at any moment. You’ve been together for over half a decade. It’s reasonable to have some doubts. Or have I completely got the wrong end of the stick here? If it would help to talk about this then do. I’m not trying to analyse you.
Seeing as you asked so nicely, here is a bit about me: I practised art-psych in sunny Stoke-on-Trent, where I grew up. I wanted to be a painter but had no real talent so I spoke to a careers adviser who told me I should look into being an art therapist. That or retail. So I applied for the course and after four years I was a fully fledged psych with my own little NHS clinic in Stoke. And I loved it!
My problem was becoming too attached to patients. If they didn’t show for a session I’d become frantic. I’d call all the numbers in their file. I’d visit them at home. I’d want to know why. I needed to know why. That was easily the hardest part of the job. In order to do my job well I had to care. But then how do you switch it off? How do you let someone leave your clinic and go back to what you know is an awful home situation and just move on to the next patient? I struggled with that problem for the whole time that I practised.
I suppose that’s what did for me in the end. I met Lee through the clinic.
Changing the subject: did you grow up in your mother’s cottage? I bet it’s hard being there, seeing her things and smelling her smells? Describe it to me. I’m picturing stone walls and daisies, grass, trees, birds.
Ruby
This letter was breezy – like her first – but in this one I sensed something, a darkness, behind her words. She said she had problems detaching herself from patients. Had something in her own life made her that way? Certainly, it seemed her relationship with her father was a source of pain.
And who was Lee?
I realised, when I finished reading her letter, that I had been shaking the entire time. Was I afraid? Or was I excited?
January ended, giving rise to the annually occurring false hope that the worst of winter was over. Of course, the season found a way to deepen, as it does every February. I decided to wait a while until I wrote again to Ruby.
In the process of moving the antiques from the smaller outbuilding into the cottage – including an ornate and unfortunately defunct old grandfather clock – I discovered that the outbuilding would make a perfectly sized workshop.
Despite being filled now with furniture, the cottage still felt desolate. There was something unnerving about its atmosphere. Each day, in the moments between packing up my tools and walking across the shale to the Transporter, I would stand where the criss-crossing corridors met and listen. Old houses talk when you listen, my father used to say. But Lanes End didn’t. The only sounds came from outside: the rustling of the pines and the distant crashing of waves.
One night in early February I came home from Lanes End to a surreal situation. The door to the back room – Alfred’s room – was closed, which it never was, and I could hear an unfamiliar voice on the other side. I could ju
st about make out the words Hi, I’m Vicky, then a pause, then Hi, I’m Vicky again with a slight change in cadence. I opened the door and went in. Victoria screamed. She was clad fully in exercise gear. A yoga mat had been rolled out on the floor. There was a tripod on the dining table and a digital camera was screwed in place on top. The room resembled a film set, with a pair of spotlights rigged up on boom stands pointing at her from the corners of the room.
‘What are you doing?’ I said. She began fighting with the camera, which emitted a series of double bleeps that ascended and then descended in pitch.
‘Fucking thing. Stop recording!’
‘Sorry. What exactly did I interrupt?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What is all this stuff?’
‘What does it look like? It’s Scott’s vlogging rig,’ she said, looking closely at the camera and mashing its many buttons.
‘I thought Scott was a personal trainer.’
‘For crying out …’ She put the camera down on the dining table and held the back of her hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes and took a few slow deep breaths. Then she said, in a voice stripped of anger, ‘Scott is not just a PT. He is a wellness coach. He also happens to be a vlogger.’
‘Why do you have it?’
‘Scott wants to reach out to as many people as possible. He’s expanding his channel and has asked me to get involved. He wants to empower women.’
‘His channel?’
‘His YouTube channel.’
‘I had no idea he had a YouTube channel.’
‘Why would you? You never ask about my life, about any of this.’ She threw a hand in the air to indicate that she meant everything. We fell silent.
‘What’s his channel’s name?’ I asked after a while.
‘Live Well With Scott … You think it’s stupid?’
‘How does he empower women exactly?’
‘Dan, if you’re just going to …’
‘… I want to know. I’m interested.’
She looked at me sceptically and then said, ‘Wellness is just as much about the mind and soul as it is the body. That’s his core principle. He wants to touch as many people as possible. An important part of his vision is the inclusion and empowerment of women. He wants to get more women watching his channel and taking an interest in their spiritual and physical fitness. He asked me if I’d be interested in getting involved and I said yes.’