Ralph has Treacle all over his legs, his arms, his stomach. Treacle the ginger cat, bored with Ralph’s inactivity, hungry for breakfast. She pads up and down the sleeping bag, treads over the lumps and bumps of her new owner, searching for signs of life.

Treacle had been lost and alone, a stray cat in the woods, patchy and thin. Then she met Ralph Swoon, who was also lost and alone. Now they had each other, and a rickety old shed in the middle of the woods, full of slatted light.

He bought her a can of pilchards.

It was a fishy kind of love, but it was real.

Still wearing yesterday’s clothes, Ralph steps out of his sleeping bag. He runs his fingers through his hair and opens the door, heading for the pile of leaves that has become his outside toilet. Treacle sits in the doorway, waiting. She is already used to this part of their daily routine. She knows that Ralph will stumble back in, tip some food onto that cracked blue plate on the floor, then return to his sleeping bag and invite her inside it. Yesterday they fell asleep like that for three hours, with Treacle opening her eyes every now and then to make sure Ralph was still breathing.

Feline logic told her that he had dragged himself here to die. Why else would he have turned up in the woods at 11.30 p.m. on 4th August with no bag, no possessions, just a wallet, a phone and a guitar?

But the cat was wrong.

He hadn’t come here to die.

 

Last week, Ralph was sitting at the breakfast bar in his kitchen, listening to his wife and their two teenage sons out in the garden. Sadie and Arthur were hosing the legs of their new puppy while Stanley watched.

“This dog stinks,” said Arthur.

“It’s just mud. Help me hose it off,” said Sadie.

“He’s your dog, Mum.”

“Don’t start this again.”

“Who went and got him?”

“I bought him for you and Stan. You always wanted a dog.”

“I wanted a dog when I was six. You’re ten years late.”

“Oh fuck off.”

Arthur smirked. The puppy wriggled about, trying to escape the cold water, trying to play.

Ralph had been against the idea of a dog. Didn’t they have enough problems, without attending to the needs of what was effectively a furry baby? As usual, Sadie won. She said it would be good for Arthur, who was showing signs of excessive boredom. It would relax him, teach him responsibility, get him outdoors. A teenager needs a reason to climb out of bed in the morning, she said, otherwise he will sleep all day and all night and life will pass him by like an unremarkable dream. Sounds familiar, thought Ralph.

“Don’t get water in his ears,” said Sadie. “Dogs hate water in their ears.”

“So why does he keep jumping in the river?”

“Spaniels like to swim. They don’t swim underwater.”

Arthur dropped the hose on the floor. “He’s clean now, I’m going in.”

“He’s not clean. Look at him, he’s filthy.”

While the puppy shivered between them, Arthur and Sadie glared at each other. Stanley was an absent bystander, his thoughts elsewhere. These departures had been happening since last Friday, when Joe Schwartz kissed him hard, led him upstairs, sat beside him on the bed, kicked off his Converse trainers, flicked the hair out of his eyes and said you’re wonderful, Stan, I really think you’re wonderful.

Canadian Joe. An Adonis. He was a magician too—he had turned down the bickering voices of Arthur and his mother so that Stanley could barely hear them. Something about a filthy dog. Something about his brother having a problem.

“I’m not impressed with you right now,” said Sadie.

“Oh really,” said Arthur.

“You talk to me like I’m a piece of shit. What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem.”

“Just go and make me a coffee, Stan can help me finish. Stan, are you with us?”

Arthur marched through the kitchen in muddy boots, tapping on his iPhone.

When the twins were born, Ralph was still an undergraduate. He was twenty years old, passive and unworldly. He hadn’t wanted to call his sons Arthur and Stanley. He preferred Mark, Michael or Christopher, but he would never have risked arguing with Sadie about such crucial matters. They were fine, they were happy, he could lose her at any moment. This was the wordless core of their relationship, known and unknown. Sixteen years later they argued all the time and the sight of her Mini pulling into the driveway, its back seat covered with newspapers and unopened poetry anthologies, had begun to make him queasy.

Should your own wife make you feel queasy? Perhaps at the beginning, with the anticipatory fizzing, the urgent desire. But after sixteen years? What would she say if she knew?

“You make me feel queasy, dear.”

“You make me feel queasy too.”

“What now? A dry biscuit, a cracker, Alka-Seltzer?”

He took a digestive biscuit from the packet and put the kettle on. He listened to Sadie telling Stanley about an exhibition she wanted him to see—maybe they could go this afternoon, she said. There was a pause before the inevitable rejection: I’m sorry, Mum, but no can do.

“Why not?”

“I’m taking someone to the cinema this afternoon.”

“Can’t you go to the cinema another time?”

“Maybe you could see the exhibition with Kristin.”

“I don’t want to see it with Kristin, I want to take you.”

“But Kristin’s into art.”

“Will you shut up about Kristin?”

Kristin Hart. The boys’ godmother. She and her partner Carol were the paragons of contentment, which made them mesmerizing and annoying, even more so since Sadie found herself preoccupied with thoughts of Kristin in bed, Kristin in the shower, Kristin doing stretches before her morning run. Discombobulating, that’s what it was—the sexualization of an old friend. Really quite distracting.

Ralph closed his eyes.

He saw flickering lights, blocks of colour.

Yellow, black, reddish brown.

The talking had stopped. There was a moment of silence.

Yes, silence.

He exhaled into it, feeling his shoulders drop.

He noticed his fingers, the way they had curled into fists.

“I’m in such a foul mood,” said Sadie, marching into the kitchen with a cocker spaniel attached to her leg. “I need a coffee.”

“I’ll make it.”

“This bloody dog’s driving me insane. You can take him out this afternoon.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not? I need to get the food and drink for tomorrow. It’ll take me ages.”

His birthday party—something else he hadn’t wanted. But it wasn’t really for him. Sadie liked to surround herself with as many people as possible on a regular basis, otherwise his continued presence came as a shock.

“What do you know about Stan’s girlfriend?” she said, finishing her coffee while the spaniel licked her face.

“Are you sure he has a girlfriend?”

“I hope she’s not dull, like that girl he brought to the barbecue last month.”

“I thought she was perfectly nice.”

“He can do better than perfectly nice. She had no ambition.”

“Sadie, she’s a teenager.”

“When I asked where she wanted to be in five years’ time, do you know what she said?”

Ralph stood up, trying to decide whether to wash the dishes or go upstairs. “What?” he said, running the hot tap.

“In a swimming pool.”

“Maybe she loves swimming.”

“In five years’ time she wants to be in a fucking swimming pool? She could be in one now, Ralph. What kind of ambition is that? It’s like saying you want to end up on a toilet.”

“Sadie—”

“And do you know what else? She said her favourite restaurant was Frankie & Benny’s.”

His wife was oblivious to her own snobbery. Ralph blamed this on her parents, a lecturer and a mathematician who discussed current affairs, played the banjo and made home-made pesto, all at the same time. They were brilliant, quick, sarcastic. They lived in France and never visited. No child could ever emerge from their narcissism without hating herself, and Sadie had converted her self-loathing into something more tolerable: snobbery.

Ralph’s mother had been a housewife. His father worked for an upholsterer. It was no worse than Sadie’s background, it was just different, but try telling her that.

“Whatever,” he said.

“You sound like Arthur. Is that his hoodie you’re wearing?”

“Of course not. I don’t go around wearing our sons’ clothes. I bought this last year for running, don’t you remember?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you run,” she said, head down, fiddling with her phone.

Ralph went upstairs, leaving a bowl of washing-up water that was supposed to smell of lavender and lemon, but actually smelt like the passageway between Asda and the car park.

Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
Off to MK’s this pm for the works: colour, cut, massage.
Spirits need lifting!

Kristin Hart @craftyKH
@SadieLPeterson Coffee afterwards at Monkey Business?
We need to talk

Mark Williams @markwills249
@SadieLPeterson You’re gorgeous as you are #IfonlyIwere10yearsolder

Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
@craftyKH Coffee sounds great, meet you at 5pm?

Upstairs, Ralph was confused.

“Well blow me, I’ve forgotten why I came up here,” he said to no one.

Blow me. He almost Googled this phrase once, to discover its origins, but decided against it when he imagined the kind of sites that might pop up. He tried not to utter these words, especially when working with female clients, but saying blow me was something he had inherited from his father, along with narrow shoulders and a pert little bottom. Frank Swoon had been famous for his buttocks. Women wolf-whistled as he walked down the street. “Oh you do make me swoon, Mr Swoon. Just look at those little cheeks.” It was the kind of comment a man would have been slapped for.

Ralph’s confusion ran deeper than trying to recall why he had come upstairs.

In fact, it was chronic.

He was perpetually bewildered. He knew less about his own desires these days than his clients knew about theirs. Compared to him they were models of sanity, able to sit in front of him once a week and articulate their emotions with astounding clarity. Sometimes he wanted to tell them. He wanted to say hey, do you know how astounding this is, the way you know what you want? You may have a catalogue of neuroses, you may be anxious and depressed, but you actually know what you want.

Sadie had her own theory about his confusion. She was convinced that he hadn’t been the same since Easter, when he walked into a giant garden gnome in B&Q. Who puts an enormous gnome right at the end of an aisle? Ralph had complained to the manager, calling it a MAJOR SAFETY ISSUE. When the manager laughed, trying to hide his amusement inside an unconvincing coughing fit, Ralph threatened to call the police. Yes, he was overreacting. Yes, he should have been looking where he was going. But sometimes a gnome is not a gnome: it is a giant symbol of everything that’s wrong with your life.

Seconds before he headbutted the gnome, he was pretending to admire a vase of plastic daffodils. Insisting that they buy six bunches, Sadie was tweeting about how authentic they looked, how satisfying it was to have flowers that never died, and why hadn’t she thought of this before? Other people, miles away, were responding to her tweet. She was reading out their comments. Ralph stormed off down the aisle, unable to tolerate the peculiar hoo-ha evoked by the plastic daffodils, and he spotted Julie Parsley. Julie Parsley? And that was when he collided with the giant garden gnome.

Sadie held up her phone, took a picture of him rubbing his head, sprinted into the customer toilets.

What was Julie doing here in his local B&Q? Hadn’t she moved away? He remembered her singing ‘Move Over Darling’ on stage at the King’s Head; remembered her singing Ralph you’re so lovely, you really are lovely, to a melody she made up on the spot.

Her hair was short and wavy now, like that French actor—what was her name? Audrey Tautou. Yes, that’s the one. Ralph’s memory was still intact, despite the bump on his head, but Julie Parsley was nowhere to be seen. Her absence made him furious, even though she had been absent for much longer than the past few minutes. It made him shout. It made him complain about HEALTH and SAFETY and the BLOODY STUPIDITY of making a gnome that was as SOLID as a FUCKING WALL.

Ralph’s confusion had nothing to do with that day in B&Q.

It had nothing to do with Julie Parsley, his first love, aged fifteen.

And it had nothing to do with garden gnomes.