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VICTORIA

August 2033

Dear Lucy,

Thank you for writing to me and for enclosing your photograph. You are as beautiful as I imagined. I have Blu-tacked you to my wall.

Before we meet – if we meet – I should warn you: I don’t much resemble the man you may have seen in the papers. That all happened so long ago. (Has it really been sixteen years?) I’m heavier now and that thick mop of black hair is long gone. I don’t want my appearance to shock you so I have enclosed a photograph of myself. I certainly don’t expect to end up on your wall.

I have often thought about what it would be like to see you, to hear about your life, what kind of person you are, your dreams – your fears. But in my heart I never believed it could happen. I must have read your letter a dozen times and each time I open it I expect your words to have disappeared. But there they are.

I’ve been contacted many times over the years, by journalists, bloggers, one time a screenwriter, all wanting to know ‘what really happened’ in the cottage, when all they really want is for me to confirm what they’ve already heard. They ask about Ruby. They ask about Lanes End. They ask about the trial. I throw their letters in the bin. But you ask me a different question. You ask me to tell you ‘who I really am’. And I get the feeling you truly do want to hear my side of the story.

It can’t have been easy for you to reach out to me like this. I imagine you’ve heard a great many things about me already. I expect you’ve googled me. I’m so grateful you’ve written at all. That you ask for my version shows integrity. That you’re even considering meeting me feels like a miracle. You want the facts before judging me. I cannot ask for a fairer hearing than this. So, assuming nothing, let me give them to you. Whether this serves my own ends or not, when you finish reading this letter you will know ‘who I really am’. And then you can decide for yourself.

So, who am I really?

I may as well start right here with this desk. These tapered legs, the panels that fit together so neatly they form a perfectly flush surface, these wooden pegs that connect it all together. It’s all my handiwork. I used to make my living crafting and selling furniture. Now I do it for the love of it. I love that each type of timber has its own smell. I love feeling, with each swipe of my block plane, smoothness replacing roughness. And the gentle sound the shavings make under my boot. And the softness of fresh sawdust.

The last couple of months I’ve been crafting a miniature chest of drawers for Gordon, for his wife’s fiftieth. I’m reluctant to call him a friend but I suppose in a way he has become one to me. She can keep all her earrings and bracelets and loose things inside it. It’s been a long time since I lived with a woman but I still remember the catastrophe of Victoria’s things. Gordon and I had a good laugh about that. The last layer of French polish is drying tonight. It’ll shine like a mirror.

I’m working on something for you too. A little gift. I’ll give it to you if you choose to see me. You should know, though, I’m a perfectionist; if you keep me waiting too long I’ll have sanded and smoothed it down so much there’ll be nothing left of it. I suppose that’s a bit like love isn’t it? You spot things that displease you or that actively irritate you; maybe a facet doesn’t glint in the light like it should or when you run your finger along an edge you feel a snag, and then you’re reaching for the sandpaper and burnishing it into fine dust.

That, or you chuck it in with the offcuts and start again.

***

I met Victoria on Christmas Eve 2010 in a bar. She materialised from the crowd of swaying bodies. She sashayed up to me, a smile on her face, and draped her arms around my neck. We never spoke, it was too noisy. There was no need to. We danced. I lost track of time. I remember the lights coloured her skin alternately pink and blue. And the softness of her skin. And the smell of her hair conditioner. She was beautiful. Long straight mousey blonde hair. A couple of days after Christmas, half-naked and breathless in her parents’ basement, she told me she was a dental assistant. Oh, I said, I’m a carpenter. Jesus was a carpenter, she said. And after that we were a couple.

Throughout the next year we spent every moment we could together. Victoria got to know my mother Ivy very well. They adored each other.

By the following Christmas, Victoria and I had moved out of our parents’ houses and into a little semi on Beryl Avenue. Rented of course, but we loved that little house. It gave us independence. The garage was my domain, my workshop. The only bit of original furniture in that house was the oak coffee table with the magazine compartment on the side which I made for my mother and which she gave back to me when we moved in, saying it had been the only thing left to her in her mother-in-law’s will. I always despised that bitch, she said, looking down at the coffee table as though it was her grave slowly descending into the earth. When I reminded her that I had made it for her, she just looked at me blankly. We didn’t realise at the time but my mother was suffering from multi-infarct dementia and would be dead within five years.

A pleasant routine established itself in our lives. Every Sunday we drove in the van (my VW Transporter) to her parents’ and then for lunch with my mother, who lived alone after the death of her second husband Frank.

We were very passionate (I hope you won’t mind me mentioning) and made love often. Our relationship was everything I wanted. Victoria was so easy to get along with back then. We never fought. We never bickered. I only wanted to see her happy. And I thought we were happy.

One Saturday Victoria dragged me into a pet shop to look at the puppies and fell in love with a schnauzer.

A couple of weeks later a green van pulled up outside the house. I wasn’t expecting any deliveries so paid it no mind. But then the doorbell rang.

When I collected her from work I didn’t mention the mysterious package that’d been left in the back room. She squealed with delight when she saw the shrouded cage. I put my hand over her mouth and pointed to the information card the pet shop owner had provided.

Hello, my name is: Oscar

While I get used to my new home please don’t make any loud noises for at least 24 hours and please don’t expose me to any artificial light for a week.

Victoria threw her arms around me. Like I said, I only ever wanted to see her happy. And so her happiness was also mine.

The next morning we unveiled the cage. There he was. Plump and green. Tiny beak like a piece of chopped carrot. Eyes like two tiny black beads. An arrowhead of electric blue feathers at his rear. No bigger than a blackbird. Oscar the quaker parrot stood on his perch and tilted his head as Victoria leant in closer.

‘Do you like him?’ Victoria asked with her face pressed to the cage, making it seem like she was asking Oscar if he liked me.

Over the next few months Victoria taught Oscar to pick up little sticks and bob up and down and follow her finger in a circle above his head like they were dancing together. But not long after Oscar arrived he stopped coming out of his cage. And the odd time Victoria did manage to coax him out he would turn his back on her and wander off uninterestedly. One night she told me she thought Oscar was depressed and that we ought to get another one. ‘He needs a companion!’ she said, looking into my eyes and pressing her iPad to her heart. To me it seemed obvious what Oscar’s problem was. You only had to take one look at him to see he simply didn’t belong here. He had given up on life. A companion wouldn’t fix him. But that was the thing about Victoria; to her there wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be fixed. Something wrong with your teeth? Fix them. Something wrong with your exotic bird? Fix it. Something wrong with your life? There’s got to be a fix.

So we bought Alfred, another quaker, and then, one Friday morning in January 2013, Oscar was dead. Victoria wouldn’t touch him. I went into the back room and approached the cage, a tea towel in my hand. Alfred was on the middle perch. Poor Oscar was on his side like a discarded toy; a fake parrot that we’d bought to entertain the real one. I buried him in the back garden.

After that Victoria lost all interest in Alfred. He was a killer, she said. Alfred the Murderous was now my responsibility.

Some new void opened in Victoria’s life. Or maybe it was the same old void that Oscar had been supposed to fill. She moped. She smiled less. She googled more. Facebooked more; she started showing me pictures of infants I didn’t know. Whenever she felt lost, or aimless, she dived deep into the internet like this. The iPad became attached to her hand, like an IV drip that she dragged around the house, delivering, one click at a time, a numbing drug. At night, overturned on her bedside table, a ghostly glow emanated from its edges as it received and gave out its mysterious data. And when she awoke it wasn’t for me that she reached but the iPad. She’d impart the dispatches of the night to me. Pictures of celebrities. Of houses. Of appliances we didn’t need. Spa treatments we couldn’t afford. She was searching. Searching for something but she didn’t know what. And then one night, she muted the telly and said: ‘Let’s have a baby.’

***

I write this letter slowly, carefully. I know what’s at stake. Every day between one and two o’clock I go down to the library, which is always completely empty, for the peace, and I write one side of A4. Sometimes two. I can tell already it is going to be much longer than I intended. I hope you will read it to the end. When I set out to write this I knew there was a lot to cover, a life in fact, but I had forgotten how cathartic the act of setting down one’s thoughts on paper is. It is just how Ruby said. As I recall these memories I relive them. In order. And so I cannot skip anything. To understand what happened in October, you need to know everything that came before. I cannot overlook even the small moments. They all matter, which is why I must write them down. When you receive this letter, when you hold it in your hands, you will feel how heavy my life is. Has been.

***

You may not know this about me, Lucy, but I’m a ‘Wild’ un’, from a place called Wilder-on-Sea. Tucked in the northernmost tip of a jutting chin of flat coastal land west of Bowland Forest, Wilder is buffeted by vindictive westerlies off the Irish Sea year-round. It used to be a fishing town. The pubs all have names like The Anchor and The Trawler. There’s one called The Mermaid’s Backside. But I can’t remember ever seeing a single active fishing vessel come into Wilder Marina in my life. I only ever saw them come in on Wilder Heritage Day, a yearly celebration of the town’s former glory. I used to love Heritage Day. My father would park up in his Transit and get chips and we’d watch the boats come in. An old guy on a microphone would announce each boat. Old people would clap and crouch arthritically to the grandchildren in their buggies – the many grandchildren of Wilder, whose parents you never saw – and point to the boats.

Once upon a time the town had flourished. With the Irish and Celtic seas to the west, the salmon- and cod-rich waters of the North Channel to the north; Wilder-on-Sea was a fisherman’s haven. There was money in Wilder. Lots of money. Houses shot up everywhere. Families moved to Wilder from all over the Northwest. There were so many children they had to build another school. But then the Common Fisheries Policy came in and almost overnight Wilder began to die. The fishing slowed to a crawl. The money dried up. Families left. Those that stayed struggled. The new school closed. Around the time I met Victoria there were hardly any young people around any more. All the jobs had moved to neighbouring towns. Now Wilder is Death’s waiting room. In 2015 Wilder had one of the highest suicide rates per capita of any town in Europe. The council put up chain-link fences all along the promenade to stop people – young men mostly – throwing themselves into the sea. The whole town looked like a giant prison yard. Unless you found yourself in Wilder at birth, there was no reason to be there. ‘Wild’ uns’ they call us: a grim badge of honour for those who choose to wear it. A symbol of endurance.

So when Victoria said ‘Let’s have a baby,’ it came as no great surprise. In Wilder there’s really not much else for a young woman to do.

Throughout 2013 we tried to conceive without success. The first nine months came and went with only a couple of late periods to show for our efforts. But she remained stoically upbeat. We carried on. We’ve only been trying for nine months, she said. And then nine months became a year. But still every month she clutched her hope to her chest like a lottery ticket. I loved her so much in those days. She gave me, us, direction and purpose. I wanted a child, don’t get me wrong, I wanted very much to be a father, to drive my son or daughter to Wilder Marina in the Transporter and get chips and watch the boats come in on Heritage Day. But more than I wanted a child I wanted Victoria to be happy. A man can live in the isolation of a town like Wilder. He can even flourish if he doesn’t need much company. But for a woman to be childless in Wilder was to become like Wilder itself, defunct and spare. Victoria and I could have been happy if we had a baby, I thought. She’d have been fulfilled and the sight of her fulfilment would have fulfilled me. But the months rolled on and gradually she began to remind me of someone who’s been sat pulling the lever of the same slot machine all night waiting for the jackpot, fearing that if she walks away it might pay out on the very next pull. It became a sort of spiritual crisis for her. A trial. Via the iPad, she absorbed a whole world of half-knowledge and speculation on the pregnancy forums. The websites she read aloud from sounded almost religious. ‘You will rise and you will prevail.’ ‘When the night has reached its darkest point, every moment thereafter is brighter.’ They were clichés. But the words gave her hope and I didn’t mind that.

On New Year’s Day, four years after Victoria and I had met, we turned up at my mother’s house for the traditional roast, as arranged, but she wasn’t in. It was intensely cold. I called her mobile. She was at Wilder Beach, waiting for me, she said. I knew immediately something was wrong.

At the seafront the wind was biblical. The sea was very far out and the sand expanded almost to the horizon. I saw a black figure in the distance, shaped like a cross. A person with their arms stretched out. I ran to it. As I got nearer I could make out with relief my mother’s coat and boots. She was leaning back into the wind with her eyes closed, an ecstatic look on her face. I was out of breath from running, and my hands went to my knees. I felt like I was bowing before her. Suddenly, the wind caught in her coat like a sail and she fell into my arms.

‘Daniel?!’ she shouted, the wind roaring like a rocket.

‘Mum, what are you doing here?!’

‘Where’s your father?! He should’ve been here an hour ago!’

‘Dad’s dead, Mum!’

In the Transporter Ivy did not speak. She sat hunched over, sulking like a child as Victoria rubbed some warmth into her shoulders. As we idled at a red light, I looked down at her. She seemed so frail. So old suddenly. To my mind she was unbreakable. A woman who commanded such respect that just the sound of her weight on the creaky floorboard outside my bedroom was enough for my friends to know it was time to leave. I couldn’t reconcile the Ivy in my head with this withered, beaten woman next to me. I felt ashamed. For having failed to sense her frailty. For having failed to recognise that she was not invincible, she was only a woman. Better and stronger than any man, but still human.

I took her to the GP the next morning. When the official diagnosis came through, my mother’s house seemed instantly to assume an atmosphere of death. I began noticing dust everywhere, grime in the grouting, cobwebs in the corners. How had I missed this? As I cleaned it, I dredged up a montage of bittersweet memories. I’d be stood in the bathroom and suddenly I’d remember my father bathing me as a toddler, and my mother coming in with the towel and the talc and how she used to thrust the bottle forward so that the powder exploded on my belly. And I remembered how I’d sat outside their bedroom door in the middle of the night whimpering for hours. My mother told me years later how desperately she wanted to get out of bed and comfort me as I cried but my father held her in place, reminding her – correctly – that I had to grow out of it. And birthdays and Christmases and coming home from holidays to find the house was somehow smaller than we remembered. And then my father’s cancer. And how much noisier the house was after he died because my mother put a radio in every room and left Radio 4 on all day.

She met Frank at my father’s wake. It was held at the cricket club. Not that my father played cricket, that was just where every family function – happy or sad – seemed to be held in Wilder. I remember going outside to escape my father’s over-attentive relatives and looking in through a window and seeing my mother at a table with a man sat across from her. I remember her watery smile as he talked and she listened, nodding. I remember his bushy black-and-white beard and the angular protrusion of his glasses as seen from behind. I remember him leaning across the table and taking both of my mother’s hands in his.

Over the following months I saw much more of Frank. He was forever over fixing things, bringing things, food, utensils, money. I found Christian pamphlets in the kitchen drawer. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. I didn’t like him from the start. One time I said as much. My mother rebuked me for being judgemental. He’s just a kind lonely man, she said, he’s lost someone too, just like us. Eventually, my mother came to rely on Frank for company. And then, suddenly, it ‘made sense’ for him to come and live with us.

He was clever. He played it perfectly. He introduced new rules into our household, small things at first – like having to wait for him to get home before eating dinner, which was sometimes late, and saying grace at table, which we never did before. Then he started implementing other rules. No soap operas for my mother. They ‘rotted’ her brain. No radio. If there was silence to be filled, it should be filled with contemplation and prayer. He binned my father’s ‘trashy’ novels and replaced them on the shelf with a bible, photographs of his family (whom we never met) and religious ornaments. I’m not sure when exactly he began battering my mother.

He terrified me. Always dressed, almost clerically, in black. His neck-length salt-and-pepper hair, always dried out and bristly like his beard, made him look, to my child’s eyes, like an evil king from a fairy tale.

One night, this was about a year after Frank moved in with us, I got out of bed to go to the toilet. I heard whimpering. I had grown used to the sound of my mother’s nocturnal sobbing, and immediately knew that this was different. I tiptoed the length of the bungalow past the bathroom to the source of the sound. The living room door was open. Through the gap between the door and its hinges I saw the back of Frank’s head above the couch, silhouetted by the light of the TV. On the screen a naked man stood over the figure of a naked woman gagged and tied to a wooden table. The man wore a Mexican wrestler’s mask. The woman looked terrified of the man. She thrashed about on the table. Frank removed his glasses and placed them on the coffee table beside the couch, slowly and deliberately. He rose from the couch and moved closer to the screen. He was naked too. Too scared to move, I watched him. When his breathing began to get heavier I took the opportunity to escape back to my room where I remained, unable to sleep, all night. I held on for as long as I could but eventually I wet myself.

I suppose that was my first experience of sex.

I never slept much or well after that. Every night I dragged my chest of drawers over to block the bedroom door, as protection. Against what I wasn’t sure, Frank never laid so much as a finger on me. My grades at school dipped. I was always tired. I found everyone irritating, especially teachers. One lunchtime I was hit in the backside by a football. It was an accident, and the kid who came asking for the ball back was younger than me. I picked the ball up and walked over to the kid and kicked it as hard as I could into his face. He fell to the floor. I was sent home. I’d broken the kid’s nose. It was Frank who came to school to pick me up. He didn’t say a word to me, nor I to him. But I sensed rage in the way he slammed the car door. That night at table he lowered his cutlery and said: Tell your mother what you told me before. I didn’t know what he was on about, I said. Don’t lie Daniel, tell her what you said. About how you wished she’d died instead of your dad. His voice was level, he was calm. I looked at my mother. She was white with hurt. I never said those things, I assured her. Frank closed his eyes. But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that sweareth by him shall glory: but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped, he said. Now look at your mother and tell her you’re sorry. I looked at her. Say it. I said I was sorry. What for? I couldn’t say the words. Daniel. What … for? I said I was sorry for wishing she’d died instead of my father. There you go. Wasn’t so hard was it? There may be hope for you yet, he said. Then he picked up his fork and tucked back in to my mother’s shepherd’s pie.

Then there was the terrible moment in my father’s old garage workshop, when I confronted Frank with a wrench. For a delicious moment the glower in his eyes gave me hope that he just might hit me back, and then my mother might’ve considered kicking him out. Instead he touched his fingers to the tributary of blood that had formed on his cheek, put his glasses back on and told me in a low voice that he was going to teach me a lesson.

And as the traffic lights turned green and these long-repressed memories flooded over me like the tide and my mother’s tears soaked into the collar of her cardigan, I realised that Frank had made good on his vow, that he had indeed taught me an important lesson.

Over the next six months Victoria and I carried on trying to conceive. But I was preoccupied with my mother’s decline. It was hard watching her trying to struggle on at home by herself.

It was around this time that Victoria’s superstitions began. Egged on by the women on the pregnancy forums she started doing strange things. She stopped eating fruit. She threw out all the cleaning products and started using only vinegar and water. She put her feet in water tanks and let tiny fish eat her dead skin. She played ‘songs’ on her iPad that were nothing but silence but that apparently emitted an inaudible frequency that stimulated her ovaries. None of these things bothered me, until she stopped visiting my mother. One Sunday, Vic said she wasn’t feeling well and preferred to stay home. I sensed a lie but didn’t press her on it. She was having a rough time – we’d been trying to conceive for eighteen months then – and I thought perhaps she just needed some time to herself. But when she said she couldn’t come the following Sunday I had to say something.

‘I can’t Dan,’ she said.

‘It would mean a lot to me if you came.’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Please Dan,’ she said weakly. I could feel myself getting worked up. My fists clenched. I couldn’t help it. I punched the cushion beside her as hard as I could. Victoria flinched, and we stared at each other for a couple of seconds in stunned silence before I stormed out.

Ivy didn’t ask after Victoria that day. She seemed lost in a different time in history altogether. With just the two of us at the table, I was minded of the immediate aftermath of my father’s death. The clinking of our cutlery was accompanied only by the Sunday drama on the radio.

When I got home Victoria was upstairs having a bath. She’d left her iPad on the couch. I unlocked it, the passcode was her birthday, and opened Safari. Evidently, she was a very active member on the pregnancy forums. There were various other hare-brained schemes for conceiving that she hadn’t tried. Eating only seafood and spinach. Climbing into an ice bath immediately after sex. Sitting upside-down after sex. The colour orange. The list went on. And then I read something that made my stomach twist inside my body.

A thread entitled: ‘IF YOU’RE TRYING TO GET PREGNANT – READ THIS!!! By Katrina, a mother of two beautiful boys.’ Katrina used to work in an old persons’ home. She’d been trying to get pregnant for years. She was on the brink of giving up. But then ‘MDH got promoted’ (I discovered MDH meant ‘my darling husband’), meaning she didn’t have to work any more. So she quit and after that she got pregnant straight away. Twins. What a miracle, et cetera. One day, admiring the two babies, it hit her. She knew why she had finally become pregnant. It was because she had taken herself away from death. She was no longer surrounded every day by dying people. That was the only explanation and she urged the women on the forum to ‘avoid death, and places where death lurks at all costs!!!!’ (this included: doctor’s practices, nursing homes, funerals and graveyards), before adding: ‘If someone you know is sick or dying, you mustn’t see them any more. You mustn’t allow their death to block the new life fighting to blossom within you.’ The post had received hundreds of replies and thousands of likes. Scores of women, all using the same pseudo-religious language and shorthand, thanking her, referring to her as some sort of prophet. For the first time I felt resentful of the whole process, the whole matter. I wanted to barge in on Victoria’s bath and to rage at her stupidity, at her callous, blind stupidity. Instead I went out to the workshop and spent the evening polishing an ash dining table until I was sure she’d gone to bed.

The following Sunday she said her father was in Ireland on a golf weekend and her mother had asked her to stay over, to keep her company. So on the Saturday I drove her to her parents’ house, but before she got out I stopped her. I told her I knew about Katrina on the forum and why she was avoiding my mother. She said nothing. She just clenched the handles of her overnight bag tightly and pursed her lips. I had begun to feel like I knew her less and less. We sat in silence. Cars whooshed by. Seagulls twitched on the roofs of the houses. In that moment I think I experienced the first desperate pang of regret. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, allowed this phase to pass, just carried on trying to get her pregnant. But I felt her changing. A shell of cynicism and hardness was forming around her. I reached out to her with my hand but she avoided my touch like a cat.

Victoria announced one night that if by January we hadn’t conceived she would contact the fertility clinic. We were still having sex. Mostly, perfunctory. Occasionally, aggressive. When I climbed into bed with her without a kiss or caress I did so out of love for her. I sensed her love for me was still there too, simply trapped beneath a layer of ice. Sometimes I tried melting it. Sometimes I took a pneumatic drill to it.

Christmas Day was hard. I sensed it would be my mother’s last. Ivy was now living full-time in the Jerusalem Full-Time Residential Care Home. Scrawny strings of tinsel hung from each corner of the visiting room. The nurses wore elf costumes. Some residents were arranged in a semicircle around the telly watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Ivy didn’t register me when I kissed her forehead and I knew it wasn’t one of her ‘good days’. I wished her a happy Christmas. I told her I loved her. I told her I was thankful for everything she’d done for me. I looked up and saw that her brow was furrowed and I thought for a moment that my words had got through, that I had stirred something deep within her.

‘Do you remember too?’ I said. ‘It wasn’t so long ago.’ I squeezed her hand. I felt I had reached her. But she continued to stare straight ahead, right through me. And then I realised her expression hadn’t altered at all in the time I’d been there. I followed her gaze to the window and realised she hadn’t heard a single word I’d said. Her expression, which I had interpreted as recognition, was simply confusion. For it was dark and the nurses had put the lights on in the visiting room and instead of the sea, all Ivy saw was a reflection of herself in the window. Ghostly and see-through. Half there, half gone.

***

We’ve had a heatwave. On my walk this afternoon I got hot and sticky. I miss the Wilder wind. I used to hate it. In winter it made your fingers cold even through thick gloves. But today I longed for a blast of that coastal air. I make sure to go for a walk every day if I can. It helps to order my thoughts. I’m not so near to the sea any more, as you know. But sometimes I see a seagull overhead and it reminds me of Wilder. You must be lost, I’ll say to it, so far from the coast. And I wonder if it will ever find its way back.

***

‘Zona pellucida,’ Victoria said, reading from her iPad, ‘is the name of the membrane that surrounds the ovum prior to implantation.’ It was a dark afternoon in late January 2015. That morning she’d had her last shot of follicle-stimulating hormone before the fertilised egg was due to be transferred into her uterus the next day. ‘Implantation normally occurs one to five days after the ovum has been transferred.’ Victoria had read on the forums that the chances of successful implantation were increased if she stayed still. So she took a week off work and sat on the couch in orange pyjamas and watched telly. On day five I heard her leave the house and slam the door behind her. I ran to the end of the drive in time to see her turning the corner at the end of the street. I went back inside. Upstairs in the bedroom, her orange pyjamas were strewn on the floor next to the bed. I went to put them inside the laundry basket but only the top was there. I looked around for the bottoms and found them scrunched into a tight ball in the dustbin. I held them up to the light. There it was. Our £5,000 bloodstain.

When she returned two hours later I met her outside.

‘Vic,’ I began. Her orange tracksuit top was tied around her waist and a V of sweat had darkened her singlet underneath. Little wisps of hair stuck to her forehead and neck. ‘Vic, I’m –’

‘It’s fine, Dan.’ She looked at me, mouth agape, regaining her breath.

‘It isn’t fine. We should talk about this.’

She began marching on the spot, pumping her arms.

‘I said it’s fine.’

She gave me a smile I had never seen before. It was a receptionist’s smile. A stranger’s. It was chilling. She walked past me into the house and closed the door behind her. We didn’t talk about it. Neither then, nor later. I didn’t dare go near her. I kept picturing that smile.

That was the beginning of the exercise. She started getting up at five forty to run. A juice machine appeared and at six thirty every morning it would go off. The noise was terrible; like an angle grinder. Sometimes the sound would infiltrate my dreams and I’d picture her downstairs stuffing Alfred into it, filling the air with an explosion of green feathers and blood. We didn’t have sex any more. That was over. She bought more orange clothes. A set of dumbbell weights appeared in the back room – Alfred’s room. An aerobics step. She’d stand the iPad up and do whole routines. This went on for weeks. I felt she was becoming a stranger, that I was living alone. I felt less and less inclined to reach out, less capable.

‘The forums say the healthier your body, the greater the chances of successful implantation. Seed and soil concept,’ she said at six twenty-five one morning through a mouthful of raw carrot. ‘In agriculture, fertile soil leads to greater yields. It’s the same in the uterus.’

She joined a gym. She ran there from work, and after the gym she ran home. She insisted we charge our phones on the landing because the forums advised that LEDs and microwaves hindered recovery. She bought a sleeping mask and began piping birdsong into the bedroom through a gap in the door. In the half light of night I looked at her lying next to me, at her hands folded serenely over her chest. Come back to me, I’d say in my head, repeating the words over and over, Come back to me, hoping the words might somehow leap from my mind into hers. I started having dreams. Variations of the same dream. I was in a hall of mirrors and though I was alone I could immediately sense the panic of needing to locate Victoria and Ivy. I saw them and ran to them but it was never really them, it was their reflections, and I’d smash into a mirror. I turned and one of them would beckon me, gesturing with her hand but never speaking, and I’d run and again smash my face in.

Victoria arranged for a second round of IVF in May. One morning in March I caught a glimpse of her naked body. I had not seen it for a long time. It had changed so much. She was leaner, wiry. While she cleared a circle in the steamed-up mirror I climbed into the shower. It was such an odd situation; I felt estranged from her yet we conducted our daily lives with the same proximity as before. We were extras in a film. Things to do, but nothing to say. I closed my eyes and let the water pummel my face. I heard Victoria say something.

‘What?’ I yelled.

‘I said I’m starting with my trainer tonight.’

‘Oh. OK.’

The only ostensible difference the trainer made was that now Victoria came home later and more tired. She’d go straight into the kitchen to microwave one of the five identical dinners she’d pre-cooked at the weekend, put her earphones in and watch fitness videos on YouTube while she scooped the food into her mouth.

May came. Victoria was injected with more hormones. Then they sucked eggs from her body. Then they put one back inside her. After it was done, I guided her across the car park to the Transporter.

‘Let’s get you home.’

‘I’m not coming home,’ she said. ‘I’m going to my mother’s. The forums all agree, every kilojoule you save after transfer increases the chances of successful implantation. My mother can look after me, bring me things.’

‘You planned this? Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve done things for you. I could’ve looked after you.’

‘You’ve got work,’ she said feebly. She wouldn’t look at me.

It would’ve been useless to protest. I dropped her at her parents’ house and went straight to Jerusalem. When I arrived, Ivy wasn’t in the bay window. I was told she was sleeping and was taken to her. The air was stale inside the tiny room. My mother was on her back, her head turned to the side on her pillow. I cracked open the window and looked out down the coast. The sea was crashing against the tide barriers and exploding high into the air like powder.

A few days went by with no contact from Victoria. On the fourth night as I lay awake in bed, I had what I now know was a panic attack. I was at a loss why. Was it stress? Was I lonely? Was this what loneliness feels like? I had to do something. So I did what anyone of my generation did when trying to solve a problem in their life: I googled it.

I typed I THINK I’M LONELY into the search bar and was presented with lists of suggestions, things I could do. For hours I sat in the glow of my old laptop, scouring these lists, searching for something. Find a hobby. Buy a pet. Fall in love. None of them were the answer, but I was on the Google merry-go-round, which, once you’re on, is impossible to get off, and I kept searching into the wee hours, graduating to YouTube videos. And then finally, I found something.

In black-and-white, a man lies on his bunk inside a prison cell. He looks depressed. The music is sad. Cello, soft piano. A trolley is pushed along a corridor. Its wheels squeak. The prisoner becomes excited at the sound. The music becomes more hopeful. A hint of percussion. The prisoner stands up, his face now a picture of anticipation. There’s a knock on the cell door and the hatch opens. Into the cell pours brilliant white light. The whole screen then fades to white. The sad cello is usurped by exultant strings and we see the prisoner, now in full colour, sat on his bed reading his letter. The voiceover says, ‘Prisoners are people too. Become an Inbox Inmate today and change a person’s life.’ There was a warning: Only begin writing to an inmate if you can commit. Abandoning your Inbox Inmate can have disastrous consequences for their mental wellbeing. I clicked the link.

That night I dreamt I was in prison. Dark and silent with endless corridors of vacant cells. Victoria beckoned me to follow her and then turned and walked away from me. Each time I reached the cell into which she’d disappeared, she was gone. Dan! Dan! Victoria’s voice called to me from somewhere unseen. Dan! Dan!

‘Dan! It’s half-ten! Why are you in bed?’ Victoria was stood over me, shaking my body. I opened one eye. It took me a second to realise this was not part of the dream.

‘You’re back,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell me you forgot?’

Half an hour later we were in the fertility specialist Dr Williams’ office. He began asking Victoria a series of questions. He looked intently at his computer screen and clicked his mouse with every answer.

‘Nausea?’

‘No.’ Click.

‘Have you been to the toilet more?’

‘No.’ Click.

‘Has there been any spotting?’

‘No.’ Click.

‘And your period is due …?’

‘Now. Today. And I’m like clockwork.’ Double click. Then silence. He typed something. Victoria’s leg bounced nervously. I wanted to reach out a hand, to touch her, calm her. But something stopped me.

‘OK, I’m going to order some bloods.’

‘You mean?’

***

Usually, when I’m writing I can block everything out. But this afternoon my attention was distracted by a buzzing sound outside. I stood on my chair to peer out of the window and scan the wide expanse of grass that comes right up to my window. I leant as far forward as I could, trying to look skyward. A circular black object, a tiny UFO, swooped out over the grass from directly above my window. Replete with rotors and antennae, the thing flew at speed towards the woods. It got so far and then slowly, in a controlled manoeuvre, set itself down. After a few moments it took flight again, rising straight up into the air, and flew off. I sat back at my desk and picked up my pen but my rhythm had gone. I can’t force this thing. I mustn’t. I can’t write with a mixed-up head. All I could think of was the drone and the muggy heat in this room and the mirror frame Gordon has now asked me to make.

***

We were pregnant. And suddenly it was all Moses baskets, pushchairs, breast pads, stretch-mark lotion, expandable pants, nappies and body pillows. After Dr Williams told us the news there was a moment of stunned quiet, a sharp intake of breath, a deep reddening of her face, a single tear. But if Victoria felt any elation she had contained it. Like Superman swallowing a bomb. On the drive back to Beryl Avenue I caught her smiling. But there was no great reconciliation. No magical rebinding. I still couldn’t touch her.

And yet I craved her love. But there was no formula for producing it. Her love was bestowed on you or it wasn’t. Being with Victoria was like driving at night with no headlights. Occasionally, objects emerge from the dark and you steer away from them, you stay alive but you don’t know where you’re going. And if you stop to get out, where are you then? In the dark in the middle of God-knows-where. So your only option is to keep driving and hope the lights come on, all the while bracing yourself for a smash.

I built a rosewood cot and carved my name into one of the slats. I didn’t tell Victoria about this. It would be my secret, my way of feeling closer to the baby. I made a chest of drawers with a little gulley on top for nappy changes. I made a rocking chair for nursing. I made a mobile from offcuts; trains, elephants, stars, the moon. I was trying.

One Saturday morning in July Victoria appeared in the workshop wielding two mugs of tea. I stopped working and looked at her. She was finally showing. In profile her belly was the shape of a teardrop of sap rolling down a tree. It finally hit me. I could see it. Touch it. Victoria offered me a mug. I stopped working and looked into her eyes and for the first time since this whole thing began, saw them looking back with warmth into mine. My hand went to her belly but stopped short of touching it. She grabbed it and pressed it onto the broad flank of the bump. It was taut and warm. We stood there for a while, not talking but occasionally looking up at each other and laughing.

Over the next few weeks, as we neared the end of the first trimester, things improved. We kissed one another goodnight again and occasionally reached out a hand to touch the other’s arm. It was like we were a pair of nervous teenagers playing at being a real couple. Love recovers, it seemed. At least then.

July turned to August. One Tuesday night, while Victoria was at Yoganatal class, I moved all the new furniture into the nursery to surprise her. As I looked at the wooden slat with DANIEL carved into it, I realised the scope of my feelings had expanded now to encompass this other, this third. It had happened without my noticing. And it didn’t feel as though my love had halved. It rather felt as though it had replicated and doubled, like cells dividing through mitosis.

Once all the furniture was in place I switched the light off and backed out of the nursery onto the landing. I heard a sound outside: an engine. Deep and thunderous and menacing. I went to the nursery window to look out onto the street. Victoria was approaching the house, her yoga mat under her arm. She was early. Then a black sports car – a souped-up coupé – rolled up alongside her. She waved to it. A friendly wave. A thank-you-for-the-ride wave. The coupé then screamed off down the street. Victoria was almost at the house now.

‘You’re back early,’ I said descending the stairs. I followed her through to the kitchen. I decided not to ask about the coupé, I would give her the opportunity to bring it up herself. She retrieved one of her pre-prepared dinners from the fridge and put it in the microwave. Then she grabbed a plate and fork and filled a glass with water. She was saying nothing. If I wanted to know, I’d have to ask, she said silently. ‘Did you get a lift?’ I asked finally, I couldn’t hold it back any longer.

‘Yeah,’ she said, too casually.

‘From who?’

‘Oh, just my PT. He was going this way anyway.’ She downed half the water.

‘You know if you don’t want to walk home any more I can get you.’

‘No, it’s fine, I like the walk.’

‘Just not tonight?’

‘People are kind of insistent when you’re pregnant. If you saw me get dropped off why are you even asking if I got a lift?’

‘I didn’t see you get dropped off. I saw you walking up the street and then wave to that car. At first I thought it was just someone you knew driving by. But since you told me you did get a lift I assume it was in that car?’

‘Yes. What’s going on here? I’m home ten seconds and you start grilling me?’

‘So why did you get out halfway down Beryl Avenue?’ I continued pushing. I could sense a lie. ‘Why didn’t you just get dropped off at the house?’ DING. The microwave went off. She guided the steaming dish onto a tray and immediately filled her mouth with too-hot food, blowing to cool it even while she chewed. Buying herself some thinking time, I suspected.

‘He says it’s better to finish every journey on your own steam. Scott is really into wellness …’

‘Scott?’

‘… he thinks of the body and the mind not simply as being connected to one another, but as one entity.’ This she said with an ecstatic grin on her face. ‘His sessions aren’t just about physical strength. We meditate. Focus on mindfulness. He’s very intuitive. He can sense when his clients are imbalanced. There’s a WhatsApp group. He sends us inspirational quotes every morning.’

‘Wait. He has your number?’

‘He has all his clients’ numbers. When he heard I was struggling to conceive – ’

‘You told your trainer about that?’

‘I tell Scott everything. It’s part of his philosophy. Clear mind, healthy body.’

This went on and on. With every word I grew more convinced of her delusion. I had begun to feel like she’d come back to me. But the truth was only her body had returned. Her mind remained out there, lost in some impenetrable pseudo-spiritual fog. We went to bed still talking about Scott’s ‘philosophy’, about the women on the forums and their beliefs. As we lay there in the pitch darkness, birdsong in the air, we could’ve been two campers on the jungle floor. And as she explained the effects of ‘pure cognitive energy’ on the body, which involved ‘willing your best self into being’, I could think only of how surreal my life was and how great the distance between us had truly grown during those bleakest months. But the baby in her belly was mine. We were chained together now, for life. Whether or not she liked it.

I woke up in the middle of the night and was alone.

I got to my feet and left the bedroom. On the landing I heard a soft noise in the nursery. In all the Scott talk I’d forgotten the surprise I’d prepared for her. She must have woken in the night and found it herself. I approached the nursery door and knocked softly. She did not respond. I opened the door. She was sat in the rocking chair but did not turn to look at me as I entered. The light was off. I paused in the doorway, anxious not to encroach on what seemed a poignant moment, and simply watched. An image of my father doing this same thing came to me. He had built my first cot, my first bed, everything I owned. Jesus was a carpenter, Victoria had said to me all those years ago. Yes, as was his father, I thought now, and Jesus was his apprentice. It was Joseph who crafted the things of Jesus’ life, not God, Joseph who had given him chairs to sit on and tables to eat at. Had my father found Ivy in the middle of the night like this too? Had Ivy sat in a chair he made and pretended to hold me in her arms, as Victoria did now? Had Ivy cried and cried with the sheer power of this new feeling expanding like a balloon inside her heart, as Victoria did now? I went to her. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to put my hand on her belly and feel the warmth of the blood pulsing through it. I wanted to feel the rhythm of her heart, and the jazz percussion of our baby’s erratic movements. I looked down over her shoulder and saw that she was not pretending, that she held something in her hands. I whispered to her:

‘What are you doing?’ Incredible heat radiated from her. She was burning up. Her body shook violently beneath me as she suppressed convulsions. ‘What’s wrong?’ I moved round to see her from the front. ‘Vic?’ I tried to soothe her, tried to get her to look at me but she would not look up from her lap. I followed her gaze.

I thought it was a doll. A doll made out of clay. Tenderly, she cradled it in her lap, which was soaked with blood. I knelt at her feet to look more closely at it, at the thing in her hands.

***

From the gravel path I can see my window. In the opposite direction lie the woods. The drone came down on the grass between the woods and my window. Sometimes I stare at the black wall of trees. I wonder: what’s in there? What lies beyond the woods? I do it because I can’t get the image of Victoria in the rocking chair out of my head. Sometimes at night I go to my window and focus all my cognitive energy on one spot at the wood’s edge, a gap between two trees perhaps, and will her to emerge from them, to walk across the grass, place her palm on the reinforced window, smile.

Today on my walk I saw someone out on the grass. I have never seen anybody out there. I don’t even know how to access it, it’s blocked off by a tall fence. He was looking for something, with a long stick in his hand. It was hot and the man removed his hat and ran a tissue across his forehead. He started walking towards the path. When he saw me he waved.

‘Dan the man!’ he shouted. It was Gordon. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. What’re you looking for?’

‘Oh, someone mentioned something about another drone. You never saw anything flying around yesterday by any chance?’

‘Actually I did. It came down there,’ I pointed roughly to where he’d been swiping his stick, ‘and then flew off.’

‘Which direction?’

‘Woods.’

‘You haven’t seen anyone out there?’

‘On the grass? Of course not.’ Gordon looked towards the woods.

‘How’s that mirror frame coming along?’

***

It didn’t hit me until weeks later that we’d lost a son. Conceived without us ever touching. An immaculate conception.

Victoria was never the same. The shock left her hollow, like the socket of a pulled tooth. Listening to Dr Williams’ explanation-cum-theory of the reason for the miscarriage she did not react. She sat and played with her hands. And she did not share her grief with me. I barely saw her. I felt even my appearance was painful to her. When she came home she ate standing up in the kitchen then went straight to bed.

There is one photo of him. He is laid on a woolly blanket, swaddled in white cloth. His skin is red. His eyes are closed. His half-formed mouth is open as though in a stifled scream. He is about the size of an onion.

Inside the clinic’s on-site chapel we were invited to name him by the female chaplain. Victoria refused. The chaplain turned to me. I could think of nothing. I said I was sorry. The chaplain said it was OK, God would name him. As we watched the tiny box move along the conveyor strip towards the open hatch, I felt my throat constricting. I squeezed but no tears would come. Victoria stood with her arms crossed. As the curtain came down I was suddenly seized by panic. I whispered my own name: ‘Daniel’.

I wasn’t about to leave the naming of my son to Him.

Victoria never spoke of him. I did however see that his photo had become the wallpaper for her iPad and her smartphone. Some nights, while I lay on the couch unable to sleep, I heard her crying in the bedroom above me.

As the sun set earlier and the afternoons became darker until eventually there was no afternoon, only morning and evening, Victoria’s body went through another evolution. The goal before had been to create a healthy vessel: a body ripe for creation. Now, seemingly, the goal was to create a battering ram: a body capable of destruction. She was battling with everything. With her body, with the world, with God, even the seasons. As winter deepened, she made her appearance summery. She got spray-tanned and dyed her already blonde hair even lighter. She went running in the cold in crop tops and hot pants and when she got back her skin would be pink and numb.

One Sunday as I was leaving the house to visit my mother, Victoria suddenly appeared and slipped her jacket on. I watched her zip it up.

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ she said.

When we got to Jerusalem, the car park was fuller than usual, as it was in the run-up to every Christmas. Inside, the nurse at the front desk signed us in.

‘Where is she?’ Victoria said. I pointed to my mother in the bay window, looking skyward. Victoria darted off in her direction. I grabbed her by the arm.

‘Wait. She hasn’t seen you for a long time. Let me go and tell her you’re here and then I’ll wave you over.’ I walked around to the front of Ivy’s chair and looked her in the eye. She smiled. Relief. Always relief when she recognised me. I kissed her head.

‘Daniel,’ she said.

‘Hello Mum. I’ve brought someone to see you today.’ I signalled to Victoria.

‘Hello Ivy,’ she said, kneeling before her.

‘Victoria?’ Ivy said. Victoria nodded and I could see she was beginning to cry. ‘Victoria,’ she said with more conviction. ‘You’re so thin.’

Victoria didn’t respond to the comment. She began rummaging in her jacket pocket.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said. She produced a small square of glossy paper. It had been folded twice and she had to work it over repeatedly with the butt of her wrist to flatten it out. ‘Look.’ She placed it into Ivy’s hands. Ivy held it up to her nose and squinted.

‘That’s your grandson.’ Ivy looked up at me. Her eyes betrayed profound confusion.

‘I have a grandson?’

‘Yes Ivy. You have a grandson.’ Ivy stared hard at the photograph of little Daniel’s tiny swaddled body.

‘He’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘What’s his name?’ Silence fell upon us. We had never discussed names.

I cleared my throat. ‘Daniel,’ I said.

‘Daniel,’ Ivy repeated, ‘of course.’ Victoria looked sheepishly up at me and smiled as if to say thank you. ‘So, where is he?’ Ivy said, her eyes widening.

‘He’s sleeping,’ said Victoria. This seemed to satisfy my mother and she went back to staring intently at the photograph. Perhaps in Victoria’s mind this was her only chance to ‘be’ a mother, to pretend, even if just for an afternoon. Perhaps it was her gift to a dying old woman. Perhaps it was her way of exorcising pain.

‘Does your father know he’s a grandfather?’ Ivy said, as though to confirm the cruelty of the world.

‘No Mum. We haven’t told him yet.’

‘He’ll be so happy. Can I keep this?’ she said, pressing the photograph to her chest.

‘Yes of course. It’s for you,’ Victoria said.

When we left Jerusalem I felt some kind of peace. Victoria looked like a person who had shed a great burden. She walked ahead of me to the Transporter. As in childhood I felt drawn to the seafront. I wanted to watch the retreat of the clouds. My mother and I used to yell at the sky after a storm had passed: Go away clouds! You’re not welcome! In the north the outline of the Lake District’s peaks began to show, and to the west the oil rig at the outer reaches of Wilder Bay. Victoria joined me, and we stood side by side in silence, just looking out.

Ivy died four days later, on Christmas Eve.

The funeral took place on New Year’s Eve. Victoria didn’t come. She went the night before to stay at her parents’ house and sent me a text on the day saying:

I CAN’T FACE IT. SORRY.

I wasn’t sure she’d ever come back. As the casket moved slowly, mechanically, towards the hatch, I pictured Daniel’s sad little box. It’s OK, the vicar had said, God will name him. Emotion came like a wave now and I was shaken by grief, deep and strong. The injustice was too great. Nobody else here knew about him. I was alone in my sadness. I kept turning around, hoping Victoria had changed her mind and slipped into the back of the church. I noticed a few of Frank’s family had turned up. The sight of them made me sick.

Following the ceremony there was a buffet laid on at the cricket club.

Throughout the afternoon various people approached to shake my hand, to offer perfunctory condolences, and, more pertinently, to inform me they had to leave to get to their New Year’s Eve parties and that they didn’t want to hit traffic and so on. I didn’t care. I wanted them gone. At one point Frank’s sister, a crusty, overly made-up old woman, came over. She said she thought it was losing Frank that’d killed my mother, that she must’ve begun to die of a broken heart when he passed.

Once everyone had left I returned to the crematorium to collect the ashes. There was nobody there to greet me, but the outer door to the chapel was open and I went inside to find my mother’s urn on a leaflet-covered table. There was a note from the vicar:

Daniel,

I had to leave to make my New Year’s Eve engagements.

Please do take your mother’s remains.

Yours with faith, love and best wishes for the New Year.

I placed the urn on the passenger seat and drove home. Though it was still early, parties were already in full swing. Fireworks going off, girls walking arm in arm through the windy streets clutching bottles of cheap prosecco.

Victoria used to keep a bottle of ‘emergency’ champagne under the kitchen sink so we’d be ready if ever there was cause for a sudden celebration. I poured myself a warm glass and shoved the bottle in the fridge. I hadn’t eaten all day and the champagne went instantly to my head. Grimacing, I poured another glass and went through to the living room to watch telly.

A whole bottle of champagne later, bored and listless, I turned my laptop on. I went to my email inbox and saw an unread message at the top, with the subject

NEW YEAR’S EVE – It’s not a party for everyone

It was from Inbox Inmate. Dear Daniel, it said, tonight is a time for celebration, remembrance and looking to a brighter future. But for inmates, it can be a time of desperate loneliness and despair. Some may feel they have no future. Tonight, more than on any other night, they need you. Write to a prisoner now! You could save someone’s life.

How ironic, I thought, that I was being asked to save somebody’s life, when I was sat here tallying up the ways in which my own had been destroyed.

Click here to send a message.

***

I have arrived at a critical juncture. I can’t really go any further without a little commentary about the trial.

They took our letters. My letters to her and hers to me. Both sides; the prosecution and defence both believing they’d find something within them that would shine the requisite light onto the dock. Character constructing. Or destructing. They took Victoria’s iPad and smartphone and my old Nokia. But it was the letters we sent through Inbox Inmate that they really wanted, and that the press wanted (and somehow acquired).

Some of them were read aloud in court. The papers printed some choice lines but they didn’t print the letters in their entirety. Like the prosecuting barrister, they needed a villain and a victim and it didn’t serve their ends to provide the public with the whole story. She was the apple of the press’s eye for a time. Beautiful and dangerous and with a tragic backstory.

If you’ve been mining the web for ‘facts’ you might have seen the letters yourself. I have copies of them all here. If the press hadn’t got hold of them they would’ve been lost to me, behind a wall of legality. The Freedom of Information Act is a wonderful thing. But the thick black blocks of ink through the redacted places and names give the letters an air of secrecy and criminality that wasn’t present before, when they were written. They were simply the missives of two damaged souls, reaching out for a connection.

***

Here is what I wrote that New Year’s Eve:

Dear Prisoner,

Today I cremated my mother. She’s been ill for a long time. Dementia. I have her remains here with me as I type. Ivy. That was her name.

Vic didn’t show up.

I have no idea who I am writing to. Forgive me.

I am suddenly very tired.

Happy New Year.

Dan

I hit ‘send’ and fell asleep on the couch.

When I woke up, 2016 was six hours old, and my first act of the New Year was to run upstairs and dry-heave over the toilet.

In the living room my laptop was open on the floor. No more messages had arrived. There were no missed calls or texts on my Nokia. Nobody wanted to wish me a Happy New Year.

The next day I had an appointment with the solicitor about my mother’s will. BAINBRIDGE & SON, the sign outside read, though the son had long since left Wilder and never returned. Bainbridge’s ‘office’ was the converted garage of his semi-detached house. My father had done the conversion.

‘This won’t take long Daniel,’ he began. ‘Let’s begin with your mother’s financial assets.’

Bainbridge then informed me that my mother’s life savings – that is, the money she still had left from her inheritance from Frank (roughly thirty-six thousand pounds), who had been, besides an abuser and a domestic tyrant, a relatively successful property developer and landlord – was being donated to the Bowland Forest Shelter for Battered Wives. Bainbridge winced as he told me this, as though bracing himself for an angry reaction.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘OK then. Moving on to her physical assets.’

‘What physical assets?’

‘Your mother owned a small property, Daniel, in the country. Bequeathed by her late partner. You didn’t know?’

***

Forgive me this interlude Lucy, but there is something bothering me and I can’t concentrate.

I have this neighbour, Robbie. Robbie the Widower. He likes to come over to sit on my bed and watch my telly. He talks a lot. Asks a lot of questions. He comes over semi-regularly to sit and watch my telly. I barely watch the telly myself any more but I don’t mind him watching it. He just likes to have some company and he isn’t doing any harm. I just get on with my writing. The last time he came over he was very interested in your photograph. Who’s the dish, he asked. I thumped him in the arm. His life hasn’t gone the way he wanted it to either. He’s hunched and scrawny and shrivelled up. But he is a sweet guy. And I like his company. But he does ask a hell of a lot of questions. What was I writing? I told him. Who’s Lucy? I told him who you are. You’re a dark horse, he said. Who’s Ruby, he asked. I didn’t answer that one. I moved the completed pages into the drawer. She your girlfriend? I closed my eyes and breathed and reminded myself that Robbie is lonely, that he is very lonely and this is just his way. Every visit of his ends with some sad comment about his departed wife. Today’s was: My Maud used to have her secrets too.

The reason I’m bringing him up is that it has just struck me that I haven’t seen him now in over a week, which is very odd. It didn’t occur to me until I was down in the workshop this afternoon. It was the silence. After running the arris off a particularly sticky joint, I stepped back to admire my work and it suddenly hit me. I’ve got used to Robbie’s presence. His company. I’ve come to value it as I thought he did mine.

Tomorrow I will seek out Gordon and ask him. If anyone is likely to know what’s happened to Robbie it will be him. I hope he’s all right.

***

So, I was finally a homeowner. I left Bainbridge’s office with the deeds to Frank’s cottage. In the Transporter I read the address on the front page. There was no street name or suburb, just a postcode and a name: Lanes End. I put the documents back inside the envelope and drove home. When I put my key in the front door I knew instinctively that Victoria was back. I found her downing a glass of water at the kitchen sink. I put the keys and deeds down on the worktop. She was still dressing exclusively in orange. I wondered if this was simply through habit or whether she hadn’t yet truly given up on having a baby.

‘These are the keys to my mother’s cottage. It’s mine now. She left it to me in her will.’

‘What? No way! Just like that?’ She snatched the keys up and inspected them closely as if to verify that they were real. I nodded. A smile spread across her face as she picked up and began flicking excitedly through the deeds. ’What will you do with it?

On the drive back from Bainbridge’s I had thought that I would sell it or rent it out, but seeing Victoria’s happy reaction gave me an idea.

The next morning we drove to Lanes End. We drove through the centre of Wilder. Past key cutters, gold pawners and pound shops. We drove out past the empty marina, the lighthouse and the North Point Hotel, once visited, according to Wild’ un lore, by Queen Victoria in 1900. We drove over the disused level crossing, out of the town and into farmland. Through lanes and lanes we drove and never once saw a single other vehicle. We got lost and turned back on ourselves numerous times and eventually – using Victoria’s intermittent 4G signal – we identified the entrance to the property.

The cottage itself sat at the far end of a large grassy clearing surrounded on three sides by dense dark woods. To the right of the cottage were a couple of outbuildings. I parked the Transporter in a shale-covered space, a courtyard of sorts, between the outbuildings and the cottage. There was a large shed at the farthest end of the clearing.

We went in the cottage’s side door. It was dim and cool. An old wax jacket hung from a peg on the wall. I reached what appeared to be the centre of the cottage: the point at which two corridors crossed. A half-open door beckoned me into a large bedroom. I walked to its bay window, which overlooked the clearing out front, and listened. It was so quiet.

There was a sitting room with a hearth, and a kitchen in which I found the half-rotted, blackened corpse of a mouse, stuck fast to the floor, and some letters addressed to a Ms Constance Lovett. She must’ve been the tenant Mr Bainbridge told me about, who had died here alone, the last of her family. Holding her unopened mail in my hands I wondered how she’d died. Where. The shelves were bare except for a single plate commemorating the wedding of Charles and Diana. There was no power. It must’ve been cut ages ago. ‘Imagine living in this little dark place by yourself,’ Victoria said, wandering in. She went to take the plate down from the shelf but fumbled it to the floor. Bits of it went everywhere. ‘Shit!’ she hissed. I found a shovel leaning against a corner and used it to scoop up the fragments of Charles’s broken face and the mouse’s body and threw them into a dustbin outside the back door. Outside I took a few crunching steps across the shale towards the pines. I could hear the sea. When I returned to the kitchen I saw that the mouse had left a stain on the red tile; an imprint of its bones. I scraped at it with my boot but it seemed indelible. It would require chemicals.

Victoria had disappeared. I called to her and followed her voice to a tiny bedroom. ‘Look at all this stuff,’ she said as I entered, indicating the stack of plastic storage cartons in the corner. I pushed the door open wider, flooding the room with dim grey light. One of the cartons lay open on the bare single bed beside her. ‘It’s someone’s old things. It’s creepy. And there’s no power. And there’s dust and leaves everywhere.’ I left her and entered the only room I hadn’t been in yet. Though it was identical in dimensions to the box room adjoining it, it felt bigger thanks to a large south-facing window. I walked across the room and pressed my forehead to the glass.

‘Oh,’ I heard Victoria say behind me. I turned and saw her standing in the doorway, a hand raised to her mouth. I followed her gaze to the back corner of the room, to a wooden swinging cot. She walked to it and touched it. The cot swung stiffly on its hinge.

‘You really see us living here,’ she asked.

‘I’ll do it up.’

‘There’s barely any furniture.’

‘I’ll make furniture. And I’ll fix the electrics and the water and everything else. Vic,’ I said, moving closer to the cot, ‘I really think this place could be our fresh start.’

‘I don’t know, Dan.’

‘I thought if we moved here, maybe we could try again.’ I let this hang in the air between us. She placed both her hands on the rim of the cot and stared down into it.

Beryl Avenue was draining the life from us. But I had a mission now: I would make Lanes End into a home and get us out of that place. I felt invigorated, giddied by a new sense of purpose. I saw weeks and weeks laid out before me. It was a race against time, against the sinking of the ship. I would have to work all the hours available to me.

When we arrived back at Beryl Avenue, Victoria paused with a hand on her seatbelt buckle. She seemed about to say something to me but then changed her mind and went inside. Dressed all in orange, she disappeared into the dark hallway like a lantern into the night sky.

That evening while Victoria was at Battle Ropes class, I received an email from Inbox Inmate. It took me right back to New Year’s Eve. How petulant and foolish I’d been to write anything at all that night. Mortified – and curious – I opened it. What crazy, tattooed convict had responded to me? How would he react to the drunken missive I’d fired off after my mother’s funeral? I scanned the message top to bottom and noticed something strange. A woman’s name? Surely, that must be a mistake.

Ruby.

Reading her name for the first time I felt, as you feel fine dust settle on your arm if you sit very still, a tiny speck of danger attach itself to my life.

***

Lucy, forgive me.

A little over a month ago you so kindly wrote to me and have had nothing by means of reply from me since. I could not blame you for wondering if everything you’ve heard about me were true after all. I daresay you’ve had to endure a few I told you so’s.

At times over the past month it has felt like you were here in this little room with me. This sensation has made it so much easier for me to set things down on paper; to imagine I am not writing these words for you to read (or ignore) in the future but that I am simply speaking them to you.

I’ve been at such pains to paint you the fullest picture possible that I lost my grip on time. I realised, as I wrote her name just now, with a right hand that aches and closes in on itself like a claw, that to continue writing this as one letter would only lengthen my silence. I feel myself rushing these sentences. But Ruby is not a topic I can rush. So I’ve decided to drop the curtain here and insert an intermission.

Please don’t feel the need to respond to this first letter, though of course I should be very glad if you did. It’s late now, I will sleep and begin again in the morning.

Affectionately yours,

D