Central heating. Food delivered at regular times in a cereal bowl. Soft carpet (brown and orange, garish to some and retro to others, depending on your position, your vantage point, your mood at the precise moment of looking, all of which is shifting, so the brown and orange carpet is a magic carpet, pre-existing and conjured up). What else? Don’t get this cat started—her magnificent list could go on and on. There’s a garden to prowl through. There’s Ralph anxiously calling her name. There are floors and walls and ceilings, a woolly blanket, the joy of rubbing against human legs while human mouths open and close to exchange the details of domestic life. 7 Beckford Gardens—it’s heaven, that’s what it is. To a cat, if not a human.
Treacle is on the dining-room floor, rolling and stretching, playing with the tassels of a yellow cushion. Ralph and Miriam are sitting at the table, eating Heinz tomato soup from cereal bowls. They have just finished a game of Monopoly (Miriam was the dog, Ralph the car). The game took a long time because Miriam had no idea how to play it. Now Ralph is talking about the Internet.
“How do you find it all?” he says.
“Sorry?”
“Being online.”
“I just use Google,” she says.
“Are you on Facebook or Twitter or anything like that?”
“No.”
“You have no online presence?”
Is he suggesting that she doesn’t exist? Surely it’s hard enough for people to establish an offline presence, let alone another kind? How many presences can one person have?
“No.”
“Well good for you.”
“Why is it?”
“Well played, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t choose anything.”
“You’re off-grid, Miriam. Totally off-grid.”
“What?”
“No one can find you.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
“Oh it is,” he says. “It really is.”
The business of daily life has clearly changed for proper people. Activities like eating and sleeping and taking a shower are now thought of as being offline, incommunicado, absent, AWOL.
“I’d like to be on a grid,” she says. “Someone’s grid.”
“Well I envy you, I really do.”
“You envy me?”
“You have your privacy.”
“I have nothing.”
“My wife thinks it’s acceptable to put the details of our private life online, but how does that differ from writing it on paper and sticking it on a lamp post? I feel like a character in her online stories.”
“I’m sorry your wife is crazy.”
“I don’t think she can be classed as crazy, Miriam.”
“Do you think you might be partially responsible?”
“For what?”
“Her stories.”
The cheek. The audacity! “What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes I pretend to be a normal person so I feel like one.”
“You are a normal person.”
“Sometimes you have to fake something to make it real,” she says, quoting the book Fenella lent her about staying sane in a mad world. This special method of being is called “acting as if you already possess what you desire”. Act as if you’re confident and confidence will grow. Act as if you’re happy and… It’s amateur dramatics. Self-help theatre.
“I’m not sure what you’re suggesting,” Ralph says.
“Well, she could be telling stories about a marriage to make it feel like a marriage.”
Ralph stares at Miriam. She is erupting. There is no other word for it. The excitement of learning Monopoly has made her erupt and he liked her better before, when she was less confident.
(She is only acting as if, Ralph. She is pretending to be confident.)
Treacle spots Miriam’s slippers, white and fluffy, twitching under the table, and prepares to pounce. Ralph says something about a woman called Parsley. He says that sometimes he wonders if he should have married Julie Parsley instead of Sadie. Miriam sneezes, then says that she has never had the opportunity to marry one person, let alone two, and thank goodness for that really, because she wouldn’t know what to do with a person who kept returning to her. Your plate is full, she tells him, and yet you moan all the time.
“Do I?” he says.
“Yes,” she says, then wonders if this observation is one of the things you are not supposed to say. There is a list of these things; people like Fenella are born with it inside them.
She looks at his face—yes, something has happened. He has altered. She assesses her options. She could slap his face. No, that’s not acceptable, so how do people navigate their way through these things?
“Do you like Tracey Emin?” she asks, watching him finish his soup and sit upright in his chair. “I do. I’d like to make a big neon sign, just like one of hers, with the words audible smog in lights.”
“Do you do that kind of thing?”
“What kind of thing?”
“Are you artistic?”
“I’m not sure I’m anything in particular.”
“Of course you are. We’re all something in particular, but how possible is it to know what that something is? That’s the question.”
It’s a question, Miriam thinks. Not the question. And being with another person is so complicated and difficult and maybe it’s not worth the effort.
In the garden next to Miriam’s, Boo Hodgkinson reaches the top of his ladder and finds himself glancing, staring, gawping at Miriam Delaney. “Holy crumpets,” he says. It’s a good phrase, holy crumpets, and Boo has always liked it. Why? Because crumpets actually have holes in them. Unlike so many exclamations (You’re joking! My God! Fuck me!), this one is loaded with truth. It is a statement of fact.
As he balances on his ladder, trying to get a good look at what’s happening in Miriam’s dining room, he remembers reading about a woman whose entire life was overshadowed by an acute fear of crumpets. She suffered from trypophobia, a fear of holes that appear in small clusters, which is sometimes known as repetitive-pattern phobia. After ten minutes of intense Googling, Boo discovered that it comes from the Greek word trypo, meaning drilling or punching holes, and phobia. He also discovered that thousands of people across the world are horrified and repulsed and existentially challenged by beehives, ant holes, pumice stones, honeycombs, coral, meat, wood, muffins and bundles of drinking straws.
Boo is supposed to be cleaning out his guttering. His home is not simply his castle, it is one of the great loves of his life. He adores every bit of it, from its tiny basement to its brand-new roof, its double-glazed windows to its double garage, its summerhouse to its front porch. So when there is a storm, a freak midsummer storm that batters his house and thrashes against it, Boo pulls his waterproof trousers up and over his red tracksuit bottoms, clicks his tool belt into place and heads into the garden to assess the damage. He rests the ladder against the wall, climbs to the top and peers into the guttering with great tenderness and concern. While he is up here, flicking clumps of moss onto the grass below, filling a tiny crack with sealant, he spots Miriam in her dining room. Oh what a lovely sight. But what is that? Who is that? A man? Surely not? He knows that Miriam left her house but he hadn’t seen her return (with a man). This can’t be right. She’s an innocent, not a floozy. Maybe he’s a handyman or a plumber or a man who came to read the gas meter (who ended up playing Monopoly, Boo?).
Oh no, she has seen him. She is waving. He smiles, waves back. He throws his hands up in the air, it’s a gesture about the craziness of the storm and he knows she will understand, she will read him correctly. She is nodding now, he is holding up a lump of moss in a dramatic way as if it fell from the sky, and he can tell she understands, she is following what he’s saying about the impact, the damage, the aftermath. They are talking without words, attending to what is broken.
Miriam steps away from the window. Boo climbs down the ladder and goes inside. He takes off his waterproof trousers, makes a coffee, walks through to his living room and sits in a chair by the window. He is hungry but he doesn’t feel like eating, tired but he doesn’t feel like sleeping. Seeing Miriam in her dining room with a man has changed the atmosphere of his day. He wonders if his latest herbal remedy—a natural antidote to anxiety, acronymically named Anata—is making him oversensitive. (Anata is still in its trial period, which basically means that Boo swigs it from the bottle twice a day and scribbles observations in a Moleskin notebook.)
He is looking out of the window, watching the cars drive along the waterlogged street, when he sees something. A boy. Running up to Miriam’s front door.
The letterbox rattles and Miriam hopes it’s what she thinks it is—not junk mail, not proper post, just an unsigned card from an unknown person. Yes, she thinks. Yes yes yes. She picks it up, reads it, shows it to her house guest. On the front, a photograph of a tree. On the back, written in turquoise ink:
AT THE MARKET EVERY SATURDAY: A TREE OF
SIMPLICITY. THERE’S ONE WITH YOUR NAME
ON IT, MIRIAM
“Who’s it from?” Ralph says.
“You don’t know?”
“They just come through the door.”
“They?”
“Would you like to see the others?”
On the front of every card, a photograph. On the back, handwritten in capital letters, a statement. Ralph flicks through them:
OPTING OUT IS BEAUTIFUL, OPTING IN IS DIVINE
(on the front, a photo of St Ives)
WHEN IT IS TIME YOU WILL FIND US
(photo of a dog with puppies)
BEING ALONE IS NOT COMPULSORY
(photo of a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth)
THERE ARE MANY LIVES TO LEAD
(photo of a city at night)
THIS CAN BE YOU WHEN YOU’RE READY
(photo of a woman holding a white and red megaphone)
YOU COULD SIT AND READ A BOOK IN A CAFE,
MIRIAM. YOU COULD CYCLE THROUGH THE
STREETS WITH THE WIND IN YOUR HAIR
(photo of a bike against the wall of a French cafe)
WHEN SOMEONE SPEAKS LOUDLY, IT DOESN’T
MEAN THEY HAVE FOUND THEIR OWN VOICE
(photo of a black cat)
“And these were all hand-delivered?” Ralph says.
“Yep.”
“And they haven’t freaked you out?”
“Why would they?”
“If I got postcards from a stranger it would freak me out.”
“I find them comforting.”
An incredulous sniff.
“I like what they say,” Miriam says.
Ralph flicks through the postcards a second time, as if this will somehow disclose a name and address. “We were just seconds away from seeing who delivered this,” he says, waving the final card around.
“Never mind,” Miriam says, taking it from his hand in case he bends it.
“You like getting these, don’t you? You actually like it.”
“I do.”
There is a knock at the door. Ralph stands up as if it’s his house, his door, then pauses. He watches Miriam open the front door and say hello to a man in a red tracksuit.
“I chased,” the man says, shaking his head. He pants and wheezes as he tries to speak. “No good, no good.” Boo looks down at his legs, oily water on red velour, sartorial tragedy. “Oh no,” he says. “I got splashed.”
“Ralph, this is Boo. He lives next door. He’s the one I was waving at just now.”
“You were up a ladder,” Ralph says, eyeing the man’s thick moustache.
“And this is Ralph,” Miriam says. “I found him in the woods.”
Boo feels a little woozy, which rhymes with floozy, which makes him think of Miriam doing God knows what with this man from the woods and he can’t believe what it makes him feel—how physical it is, how acidic. “Do you have any Gaviscon?” he says.
“You’d better come in,” Miriam says.
“There was a boy,” Boo says.
“A boy?”
“I ran after him—thought he might be the one.”
“He was.”
“Was he?”
“Yes.”
“You received another card?”
“I did.”
Ralph watches as Miriam feeds her neighbour Gaviscon on a plastic spoon and shows him the latest card, the one about a tree of simplicity.
“This is an invitation,” Boo says.
“Do you think so?”
“I do.”
The postcard and the boy and Boo’s dirty legs—it happens like this.
“So are you in or are you out?” Matthew says, standing by the door of the bedroom he shares with his brother.
“I’m too tired,” Alfie says, from one of two single beds. He is propped up on three pillows, reading a magazine called Doctor Who Adventures.
“Why are you in my bed?”
“It’s more comfy.”
“How can it be?”
“Dunno, it just is.”
Matthew closes the door and walks over to his bed. This doesn’t take long because their room is small. In fact, the whole house is small. This two-bedroom Victorian terrace may have high ceilings, but its rooms make non-violent animal-loving people declare that there isn’t enough space to swing a cat. (Even when there are thousands of ways to say it, ancient words still rise from our mouths. Are the words inside us or are we inside the words?)
“I’ll pay you,” Matthew says, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“How much?”
“Five quid.”
“What if she sees me?”
“She hasn’t seen you so far.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“I’m six feet tall.”
“So?”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“So?”
“You’re less visible.”
“No I’m not.”
Matthew snatches Doctor Who Adventures out of Alfie’s hands. “Please,” he says. “I’ll give you a tenner and that’s my final offer.”
The boy’s eyes light up. “Do you love her?”
“What?”
“Do you want to go out with her?”
“Of course not. One day I’ll explain, okay?”
Alfie gets out of bed. He needs the money for an Amy Pond action figure to go with Doctor Who and River Song. He also wants a Tardis and an army of Daleks, but he knows that he has to stop somewhere because I want doesn’t get, money doesn’t grow on trees and his parents are not made of it. He puts on brown trousers, his new shirt, a bow tie and a tweed jacket. “Do I look like Doctor Who?” he says.
“You look like a proper Time Lord,” Matthew says.
“Thanks. Can I borrow your hair wax?”
“If you’re quick.”
A young man and a seven-year-old boy, driving through town. They sing along to Oasis in fake Manchester accents, something about lights being blinding. The man laughs. The boy laughs. Then the car stops.
“I’ll wait here,” Matthew says, handing Alfie a postcard.
“What if she sees me?”
“Just say hello.”
“Okay. Give me the tenner.”
“You can have it when you get back.”
“Now or never.”
Matthew slaps a ten-pound note on the dashboard. “Go,” he says.
Alfie climbs out, walks along the street, turns the corner and enters Beckford Gardens. He wanders up to the front door of number 7, almost slipping on the wet pavement. I’m doing this for you, Amy Pond. Soon we’ll be together. I’ll rescue you from Toys R Us. No, I’m not buying a Rory figure. We don’t need Rory. Without bothering to look at the photo or what’s written on the other side (he has given up trying to read these things—the previous ones made no sense), he opens the letterbox and pushes the postcard through it. He turns and walks away and there are footsteps behind him, footsteps moving quickly. He stops. It’s a bright-red man. Running after him. Shouting “Wait, please wait!”
Alfie begins to run. Matthew spots him, he must have spotted the man too because he starts the engine, opens the passenger door and reverses the car. Alfie jumps in, he struggles to close the door as Matthew puts his foot down on the accelerator. A three-point turn in the middle of the street and they’re facing in the right direction, facing the bright-red man, and they feel bad as they speed through a puddle, sending water up and over him.
“Sorry, sir,” Matthew shouts. He closes the car window and turns left.
“This is a rescue mission,” Alfie says.
“Maybe,” Matthew says.
“No, it definitely is,” Alfie says, as they head for Toys R Us. He pictures Amy Pond, all alone in a cardboard box with plastic windows. “She must get so lonely,” he says.
“Yes,” Matthew says.