They sat together on the sofa like any other mother and daughter, but one was the voice and one was the pen. Frances dictated the letters—Mum is so much happier, we’ve been on lots of day trips, school is going really well, Mum helps me do my homework—and Miriam wrote the words on sheets of pale-blue paper. This went on for several weeks and the response was mysterious. Granny never replied. She clearly disliked these letters, which made Miriam panic.
“Can we ask why she hasn’t written back?” she said.
“Definitely not, that’s rude.”
Then, on Christmas Eve, Frances made her daughter a hot chocolate and asked her to sit down. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said. “About your grandmother.”
“Is she all right?”
“Very much so. I spoke to her this morning.”
“I thought you didn’t speak to each other?”
“She phoned with important news.”
Miriam imagined a removal van, pulling up outside the house and depositing Granny and her things.
“Old people are unpredictable,” Frances said.
“Pardon?”
“What you need to understand about old people is their personalities are unpredictable. Their brains can alter considerably.”
Miriam held on tight to the removal van.
“Their tastes change—not just for food, but for people and climates.”
Climates?
“She used to be chatty and kind, but now she’s something else, all right, Mim?”
No, it was not all right.
“She doesn’t find you interesting any more.”
Miriam’s lower lip quivered. She turned away from her mother, focused on the Christmas tree and its three decorations: a plastic pineapple, a plastic bunch of grapes and a plastic pear. Nothing says Christmas like artificial fruit.
“It breaks my heart to say this, darling, but I think she was humouring you before. She never told you her house has been on the market, did she? She’s been wanting to move to Spain, darling.”
Darling this and darling that.
“The house has sold.”
Removal van removal van.
“So she’s free to go. I’m so sorry, darling, but she doesn’t want us to bother her.” Frances put her arm around Miriam. “To be honest, this is a good opportunity. You need to learn that people are insincere. They humour each other, lead each other on, and my mother has always been very good at that. Her unpredictability damaged me. It makes me cross sometimes, but it’s just you and me now so we need to stick together.”
Just you and me.
“I’ve always tried to protect you, Mim. That’s why I taught you to whisper. I’ve had a lifetime of people mocking me for the things I say. It’s better that people can’t hear you. It’s safer.”
“So I can’t write to her any more?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Miriam stood up. “I’ve had an accident.”
“What?”
Wet pyjamas. Wet sofa. Wet floor.
“I’m sorry, Mum.”
Frances wanted to slap her. She wanted to grab her curls and press her face into the dark patch on the sofa. But she didn’t. She didn’t need to. Her work was done.
There is a tumbledown shed, neither upright nor fallen, in the middle of the woods. It has been standing by itself through years of wild and mundane weather—battered by sleet, fattened by snow, cracked by sun. Its days are numbered, but so are all of our days. If we could see the numbers, we would know how long we had left to make things right.
There is a woman, sitting on a wooden chair beside the shed, drawing circles in the dirt. The circles tell the story of what went round and round, day after day, making her dizzy and sick.
There is a man, rinsing out a Starbucks mug and filling it with water for the woman to drink. He is worried about her throat, even though she has told him that her throat is fine. He doesn’t know her well enough to decide whether she is telling the truth about this or anything else.
There is a cat, lying on its side, enjoying the feel of the man’s fingers running up and down its stomach.
“Can I ask you something?” Ralph says.
“Okay.”
“Have you really not left your house for three years until today?”
“Well, I suppose I told a bit of a lie there.”
“Did you?”
“I went into my back garden to feed the fish.”
“Probably good to get some fresh air.”
Miriam nods.
“What time is it?” he asks.
She looks at her watch. “Just after six.”
“Time flies when you leave the house.”
“It does.”
Ralph stands up and brushes the dirt from the back of his trousers. “Have you had a proper meal today?”
“Depends what you mean by proper.”
“I’ll take that as a no. Do you fancy a barbecue?”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“Unless you have to be going.”
Miriam stands up. She looks into Ralph’s eyes and finds nothing to distress or console her. What is his agenda? Where is this leading? “I need to keep my life simple,” she says, which makes things feel more complicated than before she said it.
“Okay,” Ralph says.
She squints, flicks her hair away from her face, rubs the thumb of her left hand around the palm of her right hand like she’s soothing some kind of pain, but there is no pain. She is trying to decide what to do, but how do you make a decision when you don’t even know what the options are?
“You look a little stressed,” Ralph says.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t want to offend you.”
“Go on.”
“You seem very nice, but there’s no one else around. Anything could happen and there’s no one to help.”
“I understand,” he says.
“Do you?”
“Of course. You don’t know me. I could be a serial killer. It’s perfectly sensible to be stressed.”
Miriam scratches her knee. Something has bitten her. “It’s not that I don’t want to stay and talk,” she says. “And a barbecue sounds interesting.”
Ralph half closes his eyes and clasps the corner of his bottom lip between his teeth. “I have an idea,” he says. “Do you have your phone on you?”
“I don’t own a mobile phone.”
“Really? Well how about I give you mine? I also have a knife in the shed.”
Is that supposed to make her feel less stressed?
“It came with the fork I bought for eating my tea.”
“Oh.”
“You take the knife and phone, then you can call the police or just stab me if I try anything stupid. Not that I would,” he says, smiling.
Miriam isn’t smiling.
Does he know what he’s saying?
Does he know what she’s capable of?
“I’m just trying to give you all the power,” he says. It was enjoyable at first, meeting someone new, but now he feels a flicker of resentment. Of course a woman might feel scared out here with a man she doesn’t know, but how does that make the man feel? The personal is political—that’s what Sadie’s always saying. All he wants to do is buy one of those cheap throwaway barbecues and cook her some chicken, and yet he feels like a lowlife. “Nothing’s easy,” he says.
“No,” she says, looking like she might cry.
“Okay,” he says. “Here’s the plan. I’m going into town to buy some food, and if you’d like to you can walk with me. Then you can head home if that feels best.”
“All right.”
Ralph grabs his wallet and rucksack and Miriam picks up her bag. They set off through the woods, talking about the names of trees and birds and how neither of them knows as much about these things as they should. Ralph is better with trees than birds. Miriam owns a book called Remarkable Trees of the World, but she can’t remember many names, apart from all the usual ones like oak and cedar and fir. It’s pathetic really, when you think about it, which she rarely does, because she is usually thinking about less ordinary matters, like her father and whether he loved her, like madness and whether it’s catching. She doesn’t tell Ralph this part, because they are about to say goodbye and he is talking about how a person can snap.
“So in a nutshell,” he says, “something snapped. That’s what people say, isn’t it? But to be honest, now I hear myself saying it, I don’t think that’s right. I wonder if something mended. Maybe something joined up.” He looks pleased with himself.
Make your mind up, Ralph. Did you snap or did you mend?
“Maybe your tolerance snapped.”
“Tolerance?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe.”
Now Ralph is saying what a long story it is, the story of what he can no longer tolerate, and Miriam isn’t listening. They have walked through the woods and come to the path, the one that passes a gate and a field, the one that leads through a meadow and into town. She can hear Ralph’s voice, it is warm and pleasant but she can’t really hear what he is saying. She wonders how she would reply if he asked what was going on inside her. MY HEART IS IN MY MOUTH. Those are the words. An easy cliché. She thinks of her heart moving up her body towards her throat. She imagines it sitting on her tongue, beating by itself, just sitting there with its own branches, pathways and tracks, bloody and plump. She imagines coughing it up onto the floor and no longer having a heart. What a stupid phrase. Sickening. Nonsensical.
“Miriam?”
She is walking the tangent tightrope, skirting around the outskirts, circling the outer circles, looping the loop. Welcome to the fringes of reality, but who says that the fringes are even the fringes? Maybe they’re the crux of it. Maybe they’re the real deal. Miriam has thought about this a hundred times but she doesn’t think about it now. She and a man she has only just met are about to hit the spot. The spot where it happened. Where push came to shove. Her arms, a shocking necklace. Her body, a trailing pendant. “What the fuck? Are you crazy?” he said, trying to shake her off. That was more than three years ago. Miriam tells herself this as she walks over the spot.
“I’m going to Asda,” Ralph says.
Miriam looks at him. He has no idea. He seems sweet. She hasn’t noticed the sweetness until now.
“I’m going to get one of those throwaway barbecues. I’m rubbish at barbecues, but how hard can it be? You just drop a bit of chicken on it and wait, don’t you?”
“I haven’t had a barbecue since I was six,” Miriam says, walking into the meadow. In the distance she can see the children’s play area, a woman with a toddler and a pram, a man in a red coat walking three dogs.
“Yes.”
Ralph has the sense that he might know things about this woman that he doesn’t yet know. The known unknown is full of sorrow. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
Miriam likes this. She asks if she can come to Asda. He says yes, of course, and he wants to hold out his hand but he keeps it in his pocket.
“I don’t really want to go home,” she says, as he throws a pack of chicken breasts into his shopping basket.
“Don’t go then.”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“Nowhere else to go.”
“Stay in the shed with me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not like that.”
“For how long?”
“Just for tonight.”
“With you?”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re safe with me.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes.”
“You just are. Think of it as a camping trip. A one-night mini-break.”
She has never had a mini-break before. Fenella had one last month—she went to Berlin and met Leon, who bought her a spicy sausage and kissed away her tiredness.
“I don’t want any funny business,” Miriam says.
“I know,” he says.
She is glad that he knows, but also disappointed. It means that she wears her reticence like a high-visibility jacket, which makes her a lollipop lady or a child on a school trip. Her buttons are fluorescent. Her innocence glows in the dark.