It is autumn. Summer has passed, that Russian-doll summer when every encounter opened to reveal a smaller version of itself, connected but separate, and if you put the moments together all you were left with was a wooden doll.
“I carved this for you,” Eric said, handing Miriam a parcel.
“Really?”
“Open it.”
Wrapped in brown paper, a small wooden Miriam.
“Is this me?” she said, holding it up.
“I hope you don’t think it’s silly.”
Miriam looked at herself in miniature.
“I was thinking about how you don’t always see yourself,” he said. “You don’t see yourself as a real person. So if you put this somewhere in your house, you can’t forget that you exist and we can see you.”
This morning, the real Miriam pats the wooden Miriam on the head as she passes by. She feeds the cat, takes a shower, dresses in baggy jeans and a sweatshirt. It’s time for work.
Imagine a woman, digging in the dirt. Imagine a man, digging beside her. They are Swoon & Delaney Garden Services, with an old Land Rover and a frenetic black spaniel.
While she is looking for her boots, Miriam hears the letterbox rattle. Something has landed on the mat. Another postcard. On the front, a koala wearing an orange Aran jumper. On the back, in big blue writing:
Dearest Miriam,
Thank you for finally agreeing to go for dinner with me. I had a wonderful evening. Would you like to do it again? Please give this some thought. I will knock on your door soon to hear your answer.
Yours in anticipation,
Boo Hodgkinson
She pins it to the noticeboard, next to the postcard of a woman holding a megaphone and the drawing of a spaceship.
Working side by side in the misty rain, they trim dead leaves and branches, pull roots from the soil. Harvey joins in with the digging, sending dirt into the air, then rushes off to bark at a pigeon.
“Harvey, come here,” Ralph says. He rubs the dog’s head.
He asks Miriam what she’s doing this evening. She says she’s going to Fenella’s to watch the second series of The Bridge. Before the box set, they will be eating what Fenella refers to as her signature dish: Fenella paella.
“Sounds like a nice evening,” he says.
“What about you?”
He grimaces. “Sadie’s coming round to collect more books.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Miriam pushes her hands deep into the soil. Unlike Ralph, she doesn’t wear gloves while she works. She wants proof under her fingernails—proof that she was out here, having a normal kind of day like a normal kind of person. Soon, someone will uncover the truth. “That Miriam’s a fake,” they will say. “She’s not one of us.” But for now there is dirt and fresh air and days that involve getting in a car and going somewhere.
When they stop for lunch, she tells Ralph how she is expecting someone to tap her on the shoulder.
He stops eating his ham sandwich. “Imposter syndrome,” he says.
“Pardon?”
“It’s when people feel like frauds or fakes, waiting to be found out.” Then he says something about the importance of internalizing good experiences and how her brain is plastic. “You can do this,” he says.
He doesn’t mean the design and upkeep of this garden. He means life. The be-all and end-all. The being in it without ending it. At least she thinks this is what he means.
“What do you mean?” she says.
“You know what I mean.” He pours her a cup of tea from his Thermos and offers her a Viennese whirl. “So, what about Boo?” he says.
“What about him?”
“Are you going out with him again?”
“Maybe.”
He rolls his eyes. “Miriam,” he says, mock stern.
“Shall I tell you what I’ve learnt about love?” she says.
“Go on then.”
“It’s one part illusion, two parts anxiety—a magic trick and a personality disorder, rolled into one. You’ve taught me that and I’m grateful.”
“That’s not what love is.”
“No?”
“Don’t use me as an example. I made the classic mistake of marrying someone who didn’t love me.”
“What did that feel like?”
“Sorry?”
“I’d like to make sure I never do it,” she says.
He thinks for a moment. “You know when you walk into a room to get something, and by the time you arrive you’ve forgotten what you were looking for?”
“Yes.”
“Well it feels a bit like that.”
They drink tea. They eat Viennese whirls.
Ralph reaches into his bag, pulls out an edible green toothbrush and holds it in front of Harvey’s nose. The spaniel runs off to eat in the sun, and a few minutes later he is rolling on his back, rolling on the damp grass, all four legs in the air. He releases one high-pitched bark, a bark of silliness and joy.
They work quietly for a while, alone with their own thoughts.
Ralph is still losing what he has lost. What has gone can’t really be gone.
Miriam is still finding what she has found. What is here can’t really be here.
Two sides of the same coin, spinning between them.
“A penny for them,” he says.
She stands up straight, stretches her back. “I was thinking about Fenella,” she says. “One minute she’s jogging, then she’s making a lamp shade from a pair of old knickers. Some people just spring from one thing to the next so easily don’t they?”
Ralph smiles. “Really? Old knickers? You’ll have to introduce me to this Fenella of yours. She sounds dynamic.”
“You don’t like dynamic. It threatens you.”
He laughs in the way you laugh when something is painfully true and deeply surprising.
“And she’s not actually mine,” she says.
“Whatever,” he says.
“Did I tell you that she once stopped a man from jumping off a building by singing a Dolly Parton song?”
“Which song?”
“‘Here You Come Again’.”
He nods. “That would do it for me,” he says.
“Seriously? That would tell you life was worth living?”
“For a while,” he says, and begins to sing. His Dolly Parton impression excites the dog, which runs in manic circles around their legs. “Never underestimate the mysterious power of country music, Miriam.”
She shakes her head. “I’m so baffled by other people,” she says.
He pushes a spade into the ground with his foot.
She marks out an area that will be a vegetable patch.
The dog falls asleep under a tree, dreaming wild dreams that make his body shake.
In the distance, all the time—even when Miriam whispers a cautious maybe; even when Ralph digs deep while humming the tune to ‘Jolene’; even on days full of dirt, fresh air, sunshine and misty rain—something flickers at the edge of things. It dances on the outskirts, a mover and groover, a shapeshifter on the fringes of every life.
Miriam can see it, even when she can’t. She can feel it, even on days like this.
Negative space. The presence of absence. The constant spectacle of what isn’t there.