2

RUBY

September 2033

Dear Lucy,

I’m sick.

Three nights ago I went to sleep thinking happily of waking and picking up where I left off, picturing a full and peaceful morning’s writing here at my desk with the sun shining down on your photo. But I awoke with a woozy head and haven’t written a word since. When I place my foot on the ground I feel like I am trying to step from a moving train.

Your half-finished gift lies untouched down in the workshop. But this pencil in my hand feels like a crowbar; I can’t imagine lifting an actual tool in my current state.

It is now the third day of September and I haven’t spoken to another person for nearly two weeks.

Yesterday I was completely wiped out. I felt hot then cold then hot and I had a muddled brain and I couldn’t focus on anything without feeling a terrible strain at the back of my head. I spent the day sleeping or half-sleeping and nibbling dry crackers under my sheet. In the middle of the night (or was it day?) I thought I heard a sound outside my window. Rustling, like something moving through the grass. I hauled myself to the window to investigate. I couldn’t see anything out there. But once my eyes adjusted, the black trees caught my attention. Propped against the wall I watched them gently sway. To my mind, which had begun to play tricks on itself, it was like a giant wave hello. A smaller black thing, a figure, entered my field of vision, scurrying and skulking like an animal, fast, towards the trees. But it wasn’t an animal, it moved on two legs. I tried to focus on it but my head stung and I had to squint and then turn away as a cold wave of nausea washed over my body. When I looked again, the figure was gone.

I am writing this after a very strange visit from Gordon. He called this afternoon out of the blue. I let him in, sat down on the bed – which is where I have lived now for four days – and offered him the chair. Straight away I could tell something wasn’t right with him. He was oddly stiff. He made me nervous. I fidgeted with the bed sheets, started pulling them around me. Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook was on the telly. I switched it off. The chef’s strident laughter was hell.

‘Is everything all right?’ I asked. Gordon sat at my desk slowly, wearily. Still he did not speak. He looked for a moment at your photo and then opened the desk drawer. I hadn’t the strength to protest.

‘What’s this?’ he produced the pages I managed to get down a couple of days ago. ‘A letter?’ I nodded. ‘Lucy eh?’ he said and then looked up at your photo. He laughed. ‘Good for you Danny. I haven’t seen you out on your walks recently. You’re normally so consistent. I can tell what time it is from where you are along the path. I was thinking, as I was tucking into my roast beef last night and looking across the table at my wife, I haven’t seen Danny for a while. I’ll call on him tomorrow.’

‘I’ve been unwell. Virus, I think. I’m over the worst of it now.’

‘I see.’

‘I’ve been in bed for four days.’

‘You need a wife, Danny.’

‘Yes.’

He turned at one point and stuffed his fingers into the video-cassette slot in the telly. He rummaged around in there for a few seconds then inspected the dust on his fingers.

‘Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’ I offered, to break the silence more than anything.

‘Some concerns have been raised,’ he said, leaning forward conspiratorially.

‘What concerns?’

‘Over unsavoury behaviour.’

‘Unsavoury?’

‘Yes. In the woods.’

‘Oh.’

‘You have a view of everything from here. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?’

I thought of the black figure rushing across the grass towards the treeline last night. But as the words bubbled to the surface, it suddenly seemed foolish to mention it. I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined it. I shook my head.

‘I’m looking into it, trying to put people’s minds at ease. So if you do happen to see anything out there, let me know.’ He rose to his feet.

‘Have you seen Robbie lately?’ I asked as he reached the door. ‘I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks. I knock but there’s never any response. I haven’t checked for a few days because I’ve been ill.’

He put his hat back on and looked at me blankly. ‘I hope you’re feeling better soon Danny,’ he said. Then he left.

***

This is Ruby’s first letter to me:

1 January 2016

Hello Dan,

First things first. Happy New Year! I know it’s not exactly been a happy start to the year for you but it feels weird not to say it on January 1.

I’m so sorry to hear about your mother. Ivy is such a great name. I love ivy. If the world ended ivy would take over.

Do you believe in God? I never used to, but lately I’ve started to wonder. There’s so much badness, it can’t all be coincidence. Did you know there is a type of flea that is perfectly designed to burrow into your heel and then feed on your blood and expand up to 2,000 times its size inside your foot?

No one has ever written a letter like yours before. People write to me because I’m in prison but they don’t know what to say to me because I’m in prison. It’s the elephant in the cell. I get so many of the same letter. I can feel their unease. They’re writing on eggshells. Some are like news bulletins updating me on current events in the world. I’ve been having a yearlong conversation with an elderly man about politics. He doesn’t realise we have TVs here. I humour him. How many people would take the time to hand-write letters to a person they’ve never met? He must be very lonely. Perhaps he’s a widower? I can sense the questions he really wants to ask me bubbling beneath the surface. But he never does.

People write to me about ‘safe’ things. The letters are like press releases. Everything in them is perfect and sweet. Which is nice, but I read the words and I feel like I’m having a conversation with someone through a car window.

Your letter was different. It was raw. I could sense your pain. I couldn’t wait to write back to you. Reading it I felt like Julia meeting Winston for the first time! (Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four? Sorry, if you haven’t you won’t get the reference. If not, you must!) I want to know more about you. I want to hear about Ivy and this mysterious ‘Vic’. Don’t worry, I’m not some weirdo who leeches off the pain of others. I just like to listen and help people where I can. My twin says that’s my fatal flaw. You’re a fixer, she says. I prefer to say that I’m just addicted to people. My sister is so sweet. Of course she’s right; I do love to fix problems. Or try to. I was an art psychotherapist before. In here I’m a Listener, with a capital L. I volunteer for the Samaritans. I woman the phones, listen to people. Do my bit. Most of the other volunteers do it for a change of scenery, for some time away from their cell. I do it because I love to help people. The trouble is, every time you ‘listen’ you get new people. You never get to speak to the same person twice. There’s no way of reconnecting. Once the caller goes, another one comes through and you don’t know if what you’ve said has helped. I like to believe that it does. Kind words always help.

When I read your letter I sensed a person reaching out. I got the impression that the words you typed came from an honest desire to connect.

I used to get people to paint and draw their feelings. I used art as a sort of distraction therapy. Just paint what you feel, I’d say. And out would come these amazing pictures – sometimes abstract, other times perfectly legible – like scans of the contents of their souls. And it was a starting point; we’d analyse their work together and they’d begin to describe what they’d done and they didn’t realise they were in therapy any more. It was like crushing and hiding a pill in the dog’s dinner.

I hope you write back. You’ll be surprised at how much it helps to just get stuff down on paper. So, Dan, just write what you feel.

Ruby

I didn’t intend to write back to her. But of course I did.

Our tenancy at Beryl Avenue would expire at the end of June. I had just under six months to whip Lanes End into shape.

The day I rewired the cottage and reconnected the electricity felt like a major milestone. Restored to light and power, the cottage seemed to offer a glimpse of a life. I discovered a trove of antique furniture inside the smaller of the outbuildings. Chests, chairs, tables, wardrobes, a grandfather clock, even a Chinese folding screen, all tucked away under dustsheets. There was enough furniture to fill the entire cottage. Buoyed by the discovery, I drove home quickly.

A black coupé was parked outside the house. I pulled onto the drive and approached the car. The coupé’s engine fired into life. I knocked on the tinted window and it lowered with an electronic wheeze.

‘Scott, is it?’ I thrust my hand through the open window towards him. He gripped it limply. I could feel thick callouses on the palm of his hand. ‘You’re Vic’s personal trainer right?’ The coupé growled and hummed. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘He’s here to pick me up,’ Vic’s voice came from behind me. She was wearing a tracksuit top and yoga pants and had her gym bag slung over her shoulder.

‘What time is it?’ I said.

‘Six.’

‘You don’t normally go to the gym this early in the evening.’

‘Class times all changed in January.’ She walked around the front of the coupé and threw her bag onto the back seat. ‘You’ve been at the cottage so much lately you mustn’t have noticed,’ she said, across the roof of the car. She got in.

‘What time will you be back?’ I said, bending down to Scott’s window again. She looked at Scott, then at me, and said:

‘Around eight thirty.’ This sounded like a question.

‘Right.’ Scott pushed a button on his steering wheel and a thumping dance track erupted from the car like thunder.

‘Turn that down!’ Victoria barked at him. There was a tone of familiarity in her voice that I disliked very much.

‘Well, have a good workout or whatever. It was good to meet you,’ I said, these last words drowned out completely by a couple of monstrous engine revs. Scott’s side window rose and the coupé sped off.

I watched the empty street for a while and listened to the coupé’s engine recede farther and farther away. I went inside, fed Alfred and sat at the dining table with my laptop. As the old machine whirred into life I began already composing the opening lines of my first proper letter to Ruby.

Here is what I wrote:

16 January 2016

Dear Ruby,

I am so embarrassed by what I wrote on New Year’s Eve. I wasn’t myself that night. I could not have expected such an understanding response.

It feels nice to be writing to a Listener. I feel like I haven’t been listened to for a long time. Vic hears me but she doesn’t listen. The ‘mysterious’ Vic is my partner by the way. We’ve been together just over five years. These days I can’t figure her out. She’s maddening and evasive. She did not come to my mother’s funeral, that is true, but she had her reasons. I can’t believe I’m opening up like this to a stranger!

As it happens I have read Nineteen Eighty-Four and I understood your reference. My father was big into books. He was a carpenter, like me, but his great passion was reading and he encouraged me to read as much as possible growing up. He used to say the only reason he became a carpenter was so he could make himself a nice reading chair. Don’t be like me, he’d say. He was referring to his profession of course, he didn’t want me to work with my hands. But he was such a peaceful soul, so calm, so in control of everything, so content. There was always this serene almost enlightened smile on his face, as though he was privy to some secret of the universe nobody else was. As though what he knew removed any worldly concerns from his head. How could I not have wanted to be like him? He died when I was twelve. I used to read all the time. I used to lie on the rug at his feet and read ‘serious’ books to try and impress him. I haven’t read a single page of a book since he died.

My mother left a cottage to me in her will. I’m renovating it. I want to move there with Vic and start over. I finally got the lights to work today, which sounds insignificant now that I’ve typed it, but it felt like a big deal. I wanted to tell Vic but she dashed off as soon as I got home so I’m telling you about it instead.

Please, Ruby, tell me about you too. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Is your twin identical?

Sorry, there’s no order to this letter. I am writing these thoughts as they pop into my head. Are you analysing me as you read? Am I being selfish writing to you like this? I feel I should be asking about you, not burdening you with my problems. But you’re right, it is cathartic to get stuff down. It’s only taken me twenty minutes to write this letter, I haven’t stopped typing. It has come pouring out of me like water from a tap.

Can I trust you? Are you real?

Dan

I wasn’t entirely sure what I had begun, and with whom, but I was so lost and so alone that there seemed nothing to lose in seeing it through.

You’ve been at the cottage so much lately. Vic’s words came back to me. The implication, that I was the one who had pulled away, the injustice of this, made me burn with anger. What were a few harmless letters in the face of her infidelity (I was sure of it now)?

It was nine o’clock when Vic came home. I was in the workshop. She looked at me from the bottom of the driveway. Our eyes met. She pretended she hadn’t seen me and went inside. I heard Scott’s coupé drive off.

That night I dreamt about Jerusalem. It was empty apart from a single person sat in the bay window. Down on the beach my mother was leaning backwards into the wind. I watched her for a while, like I was the parent. Behind me the person sitting in my mother’s chair spoke. It was Victoria. She wore a white nightgown, bloodied between her thighs. Oscar was in her lap, his little wings flapping frantically. There were green feathers at her feet. She stared out of the window, an oddly intense look of concentration on her face. It dawned on me that she was throttling the bird. Suddenly, just when it seemed he was about to stop struggling, she released him and he flew away. You saw that, right? she said. Tell me you saw that?

A couple of days later I got this reply from Ruby:

23 January 2016

Dear Dan,

You can trust me. I am real.

I understand why you ask. I’m not offended. It’s hard knowing who to trust. You can spend a lifetime with a person and not really know them. I don’t blame you for questioning me. After all, who am I? Just a name on your computer screen.

I’ve needed something like this. A true exchange. You’ve come along at just the right moment. I promise never to judge you for anything you share with me. Will you promise the same?

Your father sounded like a wonderful man. It must have hit you very hard when he died. My sister Jade (yes, we’re identical) and I never really knew our father growing up. He left our mother and moved to Spain with his girlfriend when we were two. Once every couple of years he’d fly us over to his villa. We’d play in the pool all day or go to the market with his maid. And after a few weeks of that he’d drive us to the airport in his convertible and check us in with the chaperone service and wave us off. My two precious stones, he called us.

How is Vic maddening? People talk about the ‘seven-year itch’ in relationships but it can occur at any moment. You’ve been together for over half a decade. It’s reasonable to have some doubts. Or have I completely got the wrong end of the stick here? If it would help to talk about this then do. I’m not trying to analyse you.

Seeing as you asked so nicely, here is a bit about me: I practised art-psych in sunny Stoke-on-Trent, where I grew up. I wanted to be a painter but had no real talent so I spoke to a careers adviser who told me I should look into being an art therapist. That or retail. So I applied for the course and after four years I was a fully fledged psych with my own little NHS clinic in Stoke. And I loved it!

My problem was becoming too attached to patients. If they didn’t show for a session I’d become frantic. I’d call all the numbers in their file. I’d visit them at home. I’d want to know why. I needed to know why. That was easily the hardest part of the job. In order to do my job well I had to care. But then how do you switch it off? How do you let someone leave your clinic and go back to what you know is an awful home situation and just move on to the next patient? I struggled with that problem for the whole time that I practised.

I suppose that’s what did for me in the end. I met Lee through the clinic.

Changing the subject: did you grow up in your mother’s cottage? I bet it’s hard being there, seeing her things and smelling her smells? Describe it to me. I’m picturing stone walls and daisies, grass, trees, birds.

Ruby

This letter was breezy – like her first – but in this one I sensed something, a darkness, behind her words. She said she had problems detaching herself from patients. Had something in her own life made her that way? Certainly, it seemed her relationship with her father was a source of pain.

And who was Lee?

I realised, when I finished reading her letter, that I had been shaking the entire time. Was I afraid? Or was I excited?

January ended, giving rise to the annually occurring false hope that the worst of winter was over. Of course, the season found a way to deepen, as it does every February. I decided to wait a while until I wrote again to Ruby.

In the process of moving the antiques from the smaller outbuilding into the cottage – including an ornate and unfortunately defunct old grandfather clock – I discovered that the outbuilding would make a perfectly sized workshop.

Despite being filled now with furniture, the cottage still felt desolate. There was something unnerving about its atmosphere. Each day, in the moments between packing up my tools and walking across the shale to the Transporter, I would stand where the criss-crossing corridors met and listen. Old houses talk when you listen, my father used to say. But Lanes End didn’t. The only sounds came from outside: the rustling of the pines and the distant crashing of waves.

One night in early February I came home from Lanes End to a surreal situation. The door to the back room – Alfred’s room – was closed, which it never was, and I could hear an unfamiliar voice on the other side. I could just about make out the words Hi, I’m Vicky, then a pause, then Hi, I’m Vicky again with a slight change in cadence. I opened the door and went in. Victoria screamed. She was clad fully in exercise gear. A yoga mat had been rolled out on the floor. There was a tripod on the dining table and a digital camera was screwed in place on top. The room resembled a film set, with a pair of spotlights rigged up on boom stands pointing at her from the corners of the room.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. She began fighting with the camera, which emitted a series of double bleeps that ascended and then descended in pitch.

‘Fucking thing. Stop recording!’

‘Sorry. What exactly did I interrupt?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What is all this stuff?’

‘What does it look like? It’s Scott’s vlogging rig,’ she said, looking closely at the camera and mashing its many buttons.

‘I thought Scott was a personal trainer.’

‘For crying out …’ She put the camera down on the dining table and held the back of her hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes and took a few slow deep breaths. Then she said, in a voice stripped of anger, ‘Scott is not just a PT. He is a wellness coach. He also happens to be a vlogger.’

‘Why do you have it?’

‘Scott wants to reach out to as many people as possible. He’s expanding his channel and has asked me to get involved. He wants to empower women.’

‘His channel?’

‘His YouTube channel.’

‘I had no idea he had a YouTube channel.’

‘Why would you? You never ask about my life, about any of this.’ She threw a hand in the air to indicate that she meant everything. We fell silent.

‘What’s his channel’s name?’ I asked after a while.

‘Live Well With Scott … You think it’s stupid?’

‘How does he empower women exactly?’

‘Dan, if you’re just going to …’

‘… I want to know. I’m interested.’

She looked at me sceptically and then said, ‘Wellness is just as much about the mind and soul as it is the body. That’s his core principle. He wants to touch as many people as possible. An important part of his vision is the inclusion and empowerment of women. He wants to get more women watching his channel and taking an interest in their spiritual and physical fitness. He asked me if I’d be interested in getting involved and I said yes.’

‘So you’ll be making videos of yourself doing yoga?’

‘To start with. And then maybe nutrition advice and meditation techniques as well as some gym-based workouts for women.’

‘I remember when I couldn’t even get you to walk to the shops with me.’

‘Yes, well,’ she coughed dryly, ‘that was a long time ago. Scott has a real sense of mission,’ she added sombrely, addressing her feet.

‘Would you like to come see the cottage soon?’ I surprised myself by asking. As I heard myself saying these words, tears began inexplicably to form in my eyes. I looked to the ground so she would not see.

‘Maybe,’ she half-whispered.

So much invisible weight hung in the air between us. I felt it, this weight, pushing me down, pinning me in place, crushing me. Did she? Knowing now how she acted that October, I feel certain that she must have. But then, looking down and being mesmerised by the complex and baffling patterns on her orange trainers, and being unable to open my mouth to say … what exactly? … I felt alone in my despair. The heat from the spotlights was unbearable and I began to sweat. Victoria stood before me serenely. Ruby had asked me how Victoria was maddening; this was how! I wanted to scream, to rip and tear at her flesh and drag out the real Victoria, my Victoria, who was trapped inside.

‘When will I be able to watch you?’ I said, miserably.

‘I don’t know. Scott says I should practise until I’m comfortable in front of the camera first.’

‘I see. Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Do you want the door shutting?’

‘Please.’

I went into the kitchen and stood at the sink. I looked at my reflection in the black window. Like my mother in Jerusalem, I was diminished, distorted and blurred, half filled in with darkness. I heard Victoria’s suddenly loud and happy voice from the back room. Hi, I’m Vicky …

Later that evening I wrote again to Ruby. There’s no need for me to describe how I felt writing it. It is better simply to copy it out below:

3 February 2016

Dear Ruby

I’m fairly certain Vic’s having an affair with her personal trainer.

I met him recently. He is a cartoon character. All muscle and hair. She sits there texting him night and day and thinks I don’t notice. Well I do, and I am a fool and a coward for not saying anything. I think she knows that I know. And I think she knows that I will say nothing, will do nothing.

How did we get here? We tried for years for a baby but couldn’t conceive. The failure hardened her. Then, through IVF, we finally conceived but she miscarried at thirteen weeks. Too young for a birth certificate.

There was time before the miscarriage and there is time after. We stopped trying.

And now there is Scott. I don’t know what to do. What if she loves him? What if he has found a way to insinuate himself into her life?

And now I have this cottage. Building us a new home, making a place for us to begin again is all I feel I can do now. I fear that if I confronted her about Scott, I would be handing her something with which to twist and wrench free the last nail holding us together.

I want to leave this place, this ghost house. I want to tear it down. I want to destroy it. I want to destroy him.

Writing this letter has not made me feel better, as I hoped it would. But it has at least aired the wound, allowed me to look down and see what I’m dealing with.

Dan

I spent the following days wandering around in a stupor. I didn’t want to think about him, them together, or anything. But I found myself looking at her, watching her texting him (undoubtedly him!) and smiling that smile which used to be shown only to me. I was tired and irritable all the time. I told myself it was stress, cumulative fatigue. Every night when I went up early to bed she’d say ‘I’ll be up soon,’ but I could never stay awake long enough to feel her lying down beside me. And every morning when I awoke she’d already be up and gone.

I continued working on Lanes End. By the time I finished the kitchen, most of February had passed. Ruby still had not replied to my last letter. One evening I sat at the kitchen table and wondered: have I said too much? Had I scared her off? I felt my face blaze with shame and embarrassment. Had I been abandoned now by a convict, as well as my girlfriend?

As I looked up and watched the bare light bulb swing in the draught, which seemed impossible to eradicate, I had a premonition that I was destined to inhabit this place by myself, that it would become a tomb.

***

I’m almost better now. Today I felt strong enough to go outside. Happily, I haven’t completely missed summer. The light is still soft, the air warm. I couldn’t wait to get out there and feel the sun on my skin. It was so beautiful, I was surprised not to encounter anyone else on the path. But I did see a man in a baseball cap shambling around, hands in his pockets, head bowed. I recognised his hunched gait. Was it …? I began to trail him. At one point he stopped and turned around. I had been sure it was Robbie but when I saw his face I didn’t recognise it. The features were wrong. He began talking to a small group of people congregated in the shade of a wall, people I did not recognise or know Robbie to have an association with. He did not take his hands from his pockets as he spoke, and when their brief interview was over he continued on along the edge of the gravel and around a corner. I followed him but when I rounded the corner he was gone.

At around quarter to two the sun darted behind a cloud and I felt a droplet of rain on my nose. Before I returned inside I called on Robbie but he did not answer. I have written him a note (copied below), which I will slip under his door tomorrow.

Robbie

I haven’t seen you for nearly a month. I’m worried. Have you seen Gordon lately? He’s acting weird. Call soon.

D

If he doesn’t come over after that, I will have no choice but to report it.

***

After some more fretful but productive days I finally received a response from Ruby. I took my laptop up to bed to read it while Victoria sat playing on her smartphone in the lounge.

Here is what she wrote:

22 February 2016

Dear Dan

I cannot even begin to imagine what losing a child feels like. I had patients who lost children. But I never really knew what to say to them. Their problem seemed so much bigger than my experience. I felt totally unequipped to help them. All I can say to you is that I am so terribly sorry.

Regarding this Scott person, sometimes people just do things and they couldn’t tell you why if you asked them because they haven’t even stopped for a second to ask themselves the same question. Sometimes people just act. No thought, just action. Especially when they’ve been through something awful they become sensory creatures, operating purely on the basis of what feels good or least bad.

You spoke of anger in your letter. Be careful, Dan. If you let anger build up inside you it will find a way to come out by itself. Trust me on that. Jade says that I absorb the feelings of others, that I’m like a jar of water a painter uses to wash his brushes. In my line of work I was exposed to so many extreme situations. I had to listen and not react. I cried sometimes, in the toilets while they were drawing or painting. It was like opening a valve, releasing the pressure. I felt I could have cried for days. I controlled everything pretty well for a time. But when I met Lee everything changed.

Lee was a patient. We became lovers. Ethically it was wrong, morally it was wrong. Plus, yes, stupid. Nuclear stupid.

Lee was quiet during our sessions. A big guy but softly spoken. As a child he was beaten regularly by his father. He’d seen his mother beaten half to death and spent three months in care while she recovered. He asked me out after our last session together. To begin with I said no but there was this attraction I couldn’t overcome. One evening about a month after he left my care he turned up outside my clinic. He asked me out again. I couldn’t help myself. We went to a bar and that night I slept with him. For a long time it was great. But I could tell he was acting. He was conscious of his issues – anger, general anxiety disorder, panic attacks, we’d discussed them in the clinic – but when we were together he hid them.

We moved in together. Things began OK. But then he started being cold towards me, snapping at me over little things. And then he started to hurt me. He’d grab my arm a little too firmly or shove me aside with his shoulder. He hit me once – out of nowhere, over a squabble – and then immediately fell into torrents of tears and begged for forgiveness. He didn’t hit me for ages after that. But he devised another, far more insidious way to hurt me. Piece by piece, he arranged everything in our lives so that every move I made resulted in my own defeat. Let me explain.

First, he began announcing the time when I arrived home. ‘Six forty.’ ‘Six thirty-nine.’ ‘Six forty-one,’ when I came through the door. If I got home even just one minute later than he expected he’d be displeased for the rest of the evening and I’d be fighting to win back his approval. He used this to get me to have sex with him every night. I was too afraid to disappoint him again, so I just went along with it. My work suffered. I zoned out thinking about which route to take home. I found myself rushing the last couple of patients so I could get away sooner. The odd time I had a cancellation in the last session I’d race home and park around the corner until it was the ‘correct’ time for me to arrive home. Then he put all the household bills in my name. He didn’t like being left alone, so if I ever went to visit Jade or a friend he’d say ‘you’ve got one hour’ and for every minute I was late he threatened to run up all the bills until I got home; he’d call expensive numbers, turn on all the appliances, stuff like that. So I started cutting short my social engagements to make sure I was home on time. Inevitably, I stopped seeing people altogether. He made me sell my car and started ferrying me to and from work himself. Without my car I was cut off, completely isolated. Now I relied on Lee for everything. He convinced me to let him have control of my money. He made me add his name to my bank account. He didn’t work. When I got paid he transferred the money into another account, his own I suppose, and then he’d pay me a weekly allowance of £50. This was for everything. My personal hygiene began to suffer. And I was so tired. He had me up until one or two in the morning having sex. It always hurt. I started fantasising about buying soothing gel for my vagina that could take the burn away. But I couldn’t afford anything like this. So I sat on bags of ice wrapped in paper towels. One day the bag burst. I was too ashamed of the real reason my trousers were damp so I told my manager I had ‘had an accident’.

He rarely hit me, and he was savvy enough never to touch my face. He’d jab me in the base of my spine or in the stomach. He broke my right big toe once under the heel of his boot. I couldn’t walk without pain for weeks. This violence only ever happened about once or twice a year. But it was enough to keep me in line.

This went on for about two years. One day a patient asked if I was OK. She’d suffered similar abuse herself and I could tell she recognised the signs. I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop. I was hysterical, struggling to breathe. She comforted me. She understood. He’s controlling you, she said. You have to leave him. I knew then, as I was crying in front of her in my office, that it was over. The next day I called Jade from the office and asked her to meet me. As soon as I saw her I cried. I managed only to say the word ‘Lee’ and she intuited the rest. She said she knew some guys who could hurt him. When she left me that day she simply said: sit tight.

That night during dinner the doorbell went. Lee looked at me across the table. He put a finger to his lips. The doorbell rang again. He dropped his fork onto his plate and went to open the door. I saw two men in baseball caps. Lee tried to slam the door shut but one of them shoved his arm through. In the struggle I ran upstairs and out of sight. My phone rang. It was Jade. She told me to get out now. I heard the front door slam and the chain lock go on. Then I heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. Oh my god he’s coming, I said and hung up. I was on the landing. When he was almost at the top of the stairs he reached up and yanked my ankle from beneath me. I fell backwards onto the landing, stunned and winded. He climbed on top of me and began punching me in the stomach and ribs. I kicked and struggled and managed somehow to rise to my knees. He wrapped his arm around my waist and started to pull me down again. I grabbed the banister. He was trying to pull me free so he could throw me down the stairs but he lost his grip and fell backwards himself. I turned to look down. The thick wooden post at the bottom of the stairs had been snapped like a cocktail stick. His legs were bent completely back at the hips. His feet touched the floor either side of his head. His right arm was underneath his body. His left arm was out by his side but facing the wrong way. I heard then the sound of the door being kicked. It burst open and the two guys in baseball caps came in, their fists primed. But they took one look at Lee’s broken body and ran off.

Jade waited with me for an ambulance to arrive. They took me to hospital and treated my injuries, which were many but not serious. The next day a female police officer interviewed me from my hospital bed. I told her everything. I should’ve held my tongue. But I thought I was the victim. I thought I was just giving a statement, helping them sew this thing up. I’d suffered Lee’s supremacy for years; it didn’t even occur to me that I might be in trouble.

The next morning I was arrested and charged with attempted murder. I was facing a sentence of twenty-four years.

The prosecution accused me of plotting to kill Lee. Jade had put the idea in my head, they said, and we had been scheming for weeks. The kicked-in door, the fact that the two guys had ran off both proved this, they said. They used our relationship with our father as ‘evidence’ we hated men. Lee testified that I’d pursued him romantically when he was my patient, that I manipulated him into being with me. He made out I was the one who’d been controlling him. He gave a real performance, making out he was on sedatives and anti-depressants because of me, when the truth was he’d been on various combinations of drugs since he was thirteen. My lawyer tried to convince the court that Lee had been the one controlling my life for years. But I wasn’t the one with the history of mental illness. I was the one in a ‘position of authority and trust’, trust I had criminally abused, the judge declared later. Everything was stacked against me. The jury cleared me of attempted murder but found me guilty of grievous bodily harm. The judge gave me seven years. The two baseball cap guys were handed warnings and ordered to pay the cost of replacing Lee’s door. My lawyer had the charges of conspiracy against Jade thrown out. A few months later my countercharges were brought against Lee in his own trial. I testified, again giving a full account of everything that had happened. But it was no good. By that point my case had been in the local papers, the jury would have known who I was. I was a head case, a monster. He was given a suspended sentence of twelve months for what he did to me. He’s never seen the inside of a prison. Three years later, I’m still here.

So now you know everything. I have debated for weeks whether or not to tell you. I was scared that if I did you wouldn’t write to me any more. But you shared your biggest secret with me. It wouldn’t be fair if I held mine back now.

I appreciate this is a lot to take in. I’d understand if you needed some time to process your thoughts. But please do write back soon. Your letters help me.

Ruby

The letter raised a number of questions: How could such a dreadful miscarriage of justice occur without anyone outside of Stoke-on-Trent knowing about it? Was this the whole truth, or was she tricking me?

And then another far more troubling question.

Can I stop this, whatever this is, now?

The letter also made me think of my mother. I remember as a boy overhearing her on the phone saying I was the only thing preventing her from leaving Frank. I felt such guilt over that. Still do. I remember her muffled sobs. The air was so heavy in our bungalow, thick and hot like before a storm. Thinking of it brought that horrible heat back to me. I kicked off the duvet but it was no good. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of water. As I drank I was suddenly seized by an irresistible idea. I would google Ruby!

Back in bed I searched. It took a while but eventually I found a hundred words about it in a local paper. The headline:

GUILTY: LOCAL THERAPIST
GETS 7 YEARS

The reporter’s account seemed to align with Ruby’s. I didn’t learn anything more than what she had chosen to share. Of more interest to me was the photo accompanying the article. Evidently, it had been cropped from a portrait (the photo was credited to Facebook). The caption: 7 years: Ms Holland. Ruby’s mouth is smiling but the slope of her tired eyes betrays her true feelings. Looking into those eyes it was difficult to mistrust what she had told me. She was very beautiful. Her wavy brown hair was tied back but a lock had escaped and hung, like a pincer, on her cheek. Large, clear eyes stared out intently. Full lips softened the grimace of her teeth, transformed it – just about – into a smile.

***

Someone has pushed a note under my door. It says:

Don’t trust G.

I have it here in my pocket. I will dispose of it later. Could the G refer to Gordon? If not him, whom? I don’t know any other Gs. But who could want to warn me about Gordon? Gordon is everyone’s friend. At least he makes out he is.

I don’t recognise the handwriting. The note was clearly written in haste; there’s a uniformity to the lettering that can only be achieved when one is writing quickly, from muscle memory. The pencil (a carpenter’s, I’d recognise 2H lead a mile off) has dug deep down into the paper and the full stop has pierced all the way through it. Did Robbie write this? If so, where is he and how did he convey it to me?

I knocked again at his door earlier and got no answer. Until I can safely dispose of the note I will hide it where Gordon will not find it should he come around snooping again.

***

Throughout the rest of February and March 2016, Victoria and I settled into a curious new routine: an intricately woven dual schedule designed so we would hardly ever see each other. It was like a ballet; a scene where two lovers, soloing at opposite ends of the stage, cross paths again and again and very nearly but never quite touch. She began spending more time at her parents’, often staying the night. But in her absence, I slept like a baby. I spreadeagled in the big bed and because she was not there beside me physically, she faded from my mind.

On one of these nights I wrote again to Ruby. I kept the laptop in the bedroom now. Peculiarly, knowing now what Ruby looked like, having an image of her in my head made the task of writing to her feel somehow different. I found it difficult to start. I typed out half a dozen first lines and discarded them all. I was hesitant, nervous even. But why? I knew what I wanted to say in the letter, roughly what I wanted to convey, but whereas before I could type with abandon now I found myself taking pains over the wording, measuring my language. Was I trying to sound clever? Was I, in crafting my letter, being less honest? Writing to her in bed felt intimate. Victoria was gone. And here with me, in a sense in her place, was Ruby.

Here is what I wrote:

1 March 2016

Dear Ruby

I am humbled that you decided to share your story with me. Do you know where Lee is now? Has he ever tried to contact you in prison?

I once knew a man like Lee. My mother’s second husband Frank. He lived with us throughout my adolescence until he died. He used to abuse her. Night after night. Systematically. I saw the marks on her calves, her thighs and arms, her wrists where he’d tied her up.

Frank was a religious man. He talked about Jesus a lot. About Jesus’ suffering. The crucifixion. On the day he moved in with us he hung a cross in every room. He went into my father’s workshop, grabbed a claw hammer and a box of nails and went around the whole house. The cross in the bathroom was on the back of the door so when you were sat on the toilet you had no choice but to stare at it. My father was devoutly secular. I have hated the idea of religion ever since Frank entered our lives with his prayers that went on for ages at the dinner table, with his King James Bible that he quoted from all the time, with his insistence that Christmas morning was spent at church and not at home with marmalade and best butter on toast opening presents in our pyjamas.

I was just a boy, afraid of him too. Once I told my mother I was going to call someone. She begged me not to, made me promise to say nothing. I had never seen fear like that in a person before.

She used to be so energetic, so bright. She’d throw parties, barbecues in the summer, and my father’s family would come to spend a weekend at the seaside with us. Always a glass of wine in her hand. Always a smile. She changed so much when she was with Frank. He shut off her oxygen, her sunlight, and she withered away. To see the person she’d become by the end, a sort of faded photocopy of my mother, holding his hand dutifully at his bedside in hospital, made me so much angrier than the beatings themselves ever did.

Over the years following Frank’s death she gradually regained some of her lost colour. But Frank’s reign still cast a shadow. She’d jump at the slightest thing, a toilet flushing, a letter being pushed through the letter slot, a car horn. Frank’s bruises had long since disappeared but the psychological marks he left never faded.

The cottage was Frank’s. He left it to my mother and she left it to me. But as far as I know she never set foot inside. So there is nothing associated with her inside. No memories, good or painful.

In a sense my mother’s dementia was a relief. I liked to believe that she was now living in a world in which Frank didn’t exist, the world before they met. I liked to believe that she was – in her head – with my father again. Probably, I thought this to soothe my own guilt.

Dan

PS This town has gone referendum mad. A gazebo has gone up in town and a bunch of old former trawlermen sit on plastic chairs and yell Let’s take back our seas! Let’s take back our livelihoods! through a megaphone and thrust leaflets into people’s hands. I don’t think I’ll vote. I’ve enough to occupy my mind. At any rate the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion.

One evening I drove to Vic’s parents’ house. I parked the Transporter out of sight around the corner and crouched behind a bush where I had a clear view into their living room. At around ten o’clock, she walked into the living room wearing pyjamas clutching her iPad. Her mother and father, whom I had watched watching telly for two hours, both turned to her. They exchanged some words and then Vic leant down to kiss each of them on the cheek. Then she yawned and left the living room. Seeing her like this allowed me to see her for what she was: a woman in pain. I wanted to rush into the house, to barge upstairs and take her in my arms. To say such nice things to her, to tell her everything would be all right now, that I’d come to my senses and I was sorry and I loved her. But I did not. I could not. Instead I crossed the road, slipped quietly up their driveway and into the back garden. The gate squeaked just as I remembered. I settled myself in a bush at the rear of the lawn and looked up at Vic’s bedroom window. The curtains were drawn but there was a light on. At some point, I lost track of the exact time, I saw, through the conservatory windows, Vic’s mother go into the kitchen, fix herself a glass of water and plod upstairs to bed. For a while my heart would not stop pounding. But it felt good to watch over Vic like this. Even if she didn’t realise I was there, I always was.

I stayed until I was satisfied the whole family was in bed then I walked back to the Transporter and drove slowly home. A terrible sickness swirled in my stomach.

Over the next couple of months Ruby and I wrote to each other many more times. At the height of our correspondence we were writing every other day. After the intensity of our early letters, they became lighter in tone. Long rambling notes. Some a dozen pages long. We talked about everything, and nothing. She told me about her childhood in Stoke. She told me about her patients including a Syrian refugee, a gifted artist, who went on to make a living selling paintings. I told her about my own childhood, my friends, what I was into as a kid. I told her about the time I found a bike wrapped up downstairs on Christmas Eve and how I took it for a spin through the empty streets and how a patrolling policeman found me and drove me home and how my father couldn’t hide his pride and amusement. Sometimes whole chunks of text were greyed out, censored, and I wondered what it was she’d tried to say to me, what details had been rubbed out like dirty secrets. I wondered also which parts of my own letters had been redacted and whether these omissions might in some way have skewed the picture she’d assembled of me. She said writing to me made her feel good. I told her the same.

Throughout this time Victoria began contributing to Scott’s YouTube channel, silently demonstrating exercises while he explained. She lunges and holds the lunge and Scott crouches beside her and runs his finger in the air along the perpendicular lines of her thigh and shin. This is the angle you want, he says. She lies on her back with her hands behind her head and touches an elbow to her bent knee. When you reach this point, squeeze.

Ruby’s letters were like a drug. I began checking my emails obsessively, refreshing the page over and over. Brazenly, I wrote to her even when Victoria was around. Vic didn’t notice. Invariably, she was either in the kitchen filming herself cooking dinner or doing burpees in the back garden. Ruby’s outlook, I noticed, was changing. She started talking less about the past and more about the future. She made jokes. She wrote haikus:

Building a new home,

Danny, with a heart of gold,

I want to see it.

Danny, by the sea,

Free and breezy like a bird,

Floating on a draught.

She asked me to describe myself. She painted me but she would not send the portrait unless I OK’d it. Disclosing my personal address was forbidden by Inbox Inmate, for obvious reasons, but there was a safe way through the programme that inmates could convey physical objects to their correspondents if both parties agreed. I wanted badly to see the painting, to see how she imagined me, and considered getting her to send it. But having our relationship cross over from the virtual to the physical felt like a step too far. Inside my computer Ruby was safely contained. Having something in my hands that she had touched would have felt somehow illicit.

Or was I simply afraid of what Vic might do if she ever found it?

By late May, Lanes End was liveable. One day I found a piece of the smashed Charles and Diana plate on the kitchen floor. Diana’s head had broken off cleanly. I stood her up on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. After a bit of minor surgery the grandfather clock began to work again. Its ticking gave the cottage a pulse. I put it in the sitting room opposite Diana. The cottage now had a head and a heart.

I officially converted the smaller of the two outbuildings into my new workshop, meaning I now never worked at Beryl Avenue. It felt good to work at Lanes End, I had more room and more light. Its four square windows looked out onto the clearing, which filled with sunlight like a bowl every afternoon. I worked with the door open and I could hear the wind in the pines and the tide at the bottom of the rocks beyond the pines and occasionally the distant blaring of a foghorn out in Wilder Bay.

One evening, as I was enjoying the peace and the blood-coloured evening sunlight, I realised I still hadn’t been inside the shed at the end of the clearing. I grabbed my torch and went over. A broken padlock hung uselessly from the latch. Inside was dark and cool. As I moved I kicked something metallic. I shone the torch at the ground. It was an empty tuna can. I ran my torch in a circle around my feet. More empty cans. Beer bottles. A tattered sheet of tarpaulin hung from four pins in the ceiling. There was a newspaper on the floor. The headline: FIVE MORE DAMNED YEARS. The date: 8 May 2015. Over a year old but too recent to have been Constance Lovett’s. Was someone using the shed for shelter? Lanes End was miles from town; why would a vagrant come all the way out here? The cottage was surrounded on three sides by woodland and on the other by the sea. There weren’t any villages or settlements anywhere near Lanes End that I was aware of. It would’ve taken ages to get here from town on foot. Where are they now? I thought, sensing suddenly that I was being watched. Hiding somewhere out of sight in the woods? I moved swiftly outside and stood in the sun scanning the dark trees, looking intently in every direction, wanting and also not wanting to see something, someone move. But I saw nothing, heard nothing. Warily, with one eye on the treeline, I closed the shed and replaced the padlock.

I told Ruby about the shed. She thought it was ‘exciting’. She made up this whole back story about an old man who’d once lived in the cottage as Constance’s lover, who’d been thrown out when he had an affair and then, unable to let go, lived in the woods for years keeping watch over her, suffering the pain of seeing other men enter and leave her life, and moving on only after she died a lonely old woman in an unkempt house with overgrown grass.

I decided I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of anyone being on my property, not even the postman. So I built a letter box and installed a new gate at the turn-off from the road, farther from the cottage than the original gate. I was busy securing a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign to the gate when I heard a vehicle pull up on the road behind me. Muffled soft rock blared inside it. Then I heard the engine switch off and a door open and slam shut. I turned around and saw the back of a man wearing a waxed jacket and flat cap taking a leak into the bushes beside a muddied old Land Rover. He was still zipping his fly when he turned to face me. He had an inhospitable face, a resting grimace that became even less hospitable when he broke into a smile. I did not return his smile. With a wave he began to approach me, crossing the narrow road without looking. There was no need to look; there were never any cars.

‘Howdy!’ he called, removing his cap and running his fingers through greasy hair. He came and stood on the patch of grass beside my new letter box. He put his cap back on and leant casually against it.

‘Afternoon.’

‘So you’re the new owner eh?’ He reeked of booze. I nodded. He looked down the lane behind me. ‘Lot of land.’ I did not respond to his observation. ‘I’m sorry, where are my manners? I’m Max. Gray. Allow me to welcome you to the neighbourhood,’ he said with a grand sweep of his right arm. He offered me a filthy hand.

‘Dan,’ I said.

‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ His handshake was limp. His fingers collapsed in my grip like a bundle of flower stems. The repulsive shock of a limp handshake always makes me feel seasick. I relinquished my grip and his hand slithered from mine. ‘Did you know Ms Lovett?’ he asked. The question completely threw me.

‘No.’

‘My boys used to bring her farm surplus. Eggs. Milk. Suppose you’ll be wanting the same?’

‘I’ll have to talk to the missus.’

‘You local?’

‘I’m a Wild’ un. Lived here all my life.’ He nodded approvingly. Then, after another pause he said, ‘Well, I was just driving by and thought I’d pull over and say howdy.’

‘It was nice to meet you.’

Gray flashed his small sharp teeth at me, rapped his knuckles against the letter box and walked away. He was halfway across the road when he turned sharply on his heels, holding a finger in the air, and called, ‘I almost forgot!’ He went to his Land Rover and opened the boot. He climbed fully in and, after some frantic rummaging, came out wielding a long wooden post. A square sign was secured to one end of the post. He dragged it across the road upside down. ‘Here you go,’ he said, flipping the sign around and holding it up beside him. In large white lettering on a red background it said: LET’S TAKE BACK CONTROL. VOTE LEAVE. ‘What do you think? It’d be good here,’ he said indicating a spot next to the letter box. He passed the sign to me, removed his cap and began running his grubby fingers through his hair again. ‘Private property eh?’ he said, looking at my new sign. ‘You talk to your missus alright?’ Then he got in his Land Rover and drove away.

***

Yesterday I was in the workshop trying to work on your gift. Usually, work carries my mind away. But today all I could see was the note ‘Don’t trust G’ and Gordon’s suspicious fingers in my video player and the black figure running towards the woods. What does it all mean? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be involved. I’m tired of mystery.

Perhaps my ultimate weakness is that I care too deeply about others. I assume their pain, like Ruby did. I wring my hands. I get too close. I allowed Ruby to get too close and I have allowed Robbie to do the same. It exposes me. The note is gone now of course, disposed of, but since it arrived I feel like I’m walking through thick fog. I can sense around every corner someone waiting to attack me. And so today, though the bright outdoors beckons, I have not left this room. I have sat here reading Ruby’s old letters and feeling the old feelings creep slowly up my body like vines, wrapping around me, squeezing me.

Sleep last night was difficult. But there’s a man down the way who makes his own booze. I tried it once. It’s disgusting but it’s strong. I think I’ll pay him a visit.

***

There were only two weeks left on our lease at Beryl Avenue.

Victoria hadn’t seen Lanes End since January. One evening, I reminded her as much. She was sat on the couch looking pensively down at her iPad at a photo of herself which she’d spent half an hour altering in various ways; cinching her arms and smoothing her skin until she resembled a grotesque alternate version of herself.

‘It’s totally different now,’ I said. She had begun working on the gap between her thighs, widening it somehow so that more of the light from behind her shone through.

‘When does our lease run out again?’ She carried on zooming in and zooming out, tapping and pinching, removing, sanding, reducing, editing her true self from the picture.

‘The twenty-sixth. We’re moving in on Heritage Day, Saturday the twenty-fifth.’

‘You can take me that week.’

‘You promise?’

‘If it means you’ll stop nagging me about it.’

That night a new letter arrived from Ruby. I could see immediately that this letter was different from the ones she’d sent recently. It was a lot shorter for starters, to such an extent that I assumed it had been truncated by some computer glitch. I scrolled to the very bottom, to where it says ‘Click here to reply to your Inbox Inmate,’ and I caught a glimpse of the last line of the letter, ‘… please don’t hate me’ and I knew something was up. I sensed the tectonics of my relationship with Ruby were about to shift. How had I become so perceptive about a woman I’d never met, but lost all sense of connection with Vic?

I have copied out her letter in full below:

6 June 2016

Dear Dan

I’ve been lying to you.

The version of me that you’ve been reading in these letters hasn’t been entirely true. When we started writing six months ago, I was in a terrible place. I don’t cope with life in here as well as I make out. Friendship doesn’t exist here, love doesn’t exist. No one makes eye contact. Everyone is so guarded. I hoped every morning that I would wake to some calamity, a riot, a suicide, a fire, anything that would break the pattern of petty cruelties, of loneliness. New Year’s Eve was particularly hard on me. Jade was meant to visit but couldn’t come because of some delay on the motorway. I woke up on the first of January feeling nothing of the renewal of a new year. I felt only a renewed hopelessness. So when I got your angry little letter it jolted me, made me realise that there was still a world out there. Made me realise how I’d slid into despair. So I engaged. I told you stories about my past, about the reason I’m in here. They weren’t lies. Where I have been less honest is in my feelings. I feel we’ve become so close over these past months. You’ve told me your darkest secrets. I have told you mine. Without your letters I don’t know how I would have survived. In my head we are the only two people in this world who are awake, just like Winston and Julia! I feel I can call you my true friend.

I have been surprised though, to find myself thinking of you even when I’m not looking at your letters or writing to you. Though I have only your description of yourself to go on, still I find myself thinking of you. When I’m walking in the yard, I think of you and how nice it would be to walk beside you. When I’m eating in the canteen, I think of you and I picture us talking and laughing over a meal. When I’m lying in my bunk and looking at my painting of you, I think of how I want to touch you, and be touched by you.

I never used to think of the future. It only made things harder. But since we found each other I think of the future now with excitement. I know now that happiness is as simple as loving someone and being loved back for no other reason than that you deserve it. That is the future I envisage for myself. I’m sorry if this comes as a shock to you. And I’m sorry if I have misjudged the situation, but I don’t think I have. I know how hard it has been for you too, out there, alone. We both deserve so much better.

I won’t be in here forever, Dan. Do you think, one day, I could come to visit you? I would ask no more than friendship from you. If I love you without receiving anything in return it would be a better life than to have never known you at all.

You must think I’m crazy. I nearly deleted this whole thing just now, my finger was hovering over the key. But I have denied my feelings for too long. And I feel you’re about to make a terrible mistake. If I don’t tell you how I feel now, it will be too late. Please don’t hate me.

Ruby

Was it true? Was it even possible? Could a person fall in love with another person simply through letters? I went into Alfred’s room, to the open window overlooking the back garden. ‘… you’re about to make a terrible mistake’. Was Ruby right? I had the sense that this thought was already there inside my head, cloaked in some dark corner, and that Ruby had simply shone a light onto it.

Ruby’s confession had put me in an agitated state. It was suddenly intolerable to be inside. I ran out of the hot house into the back garden. The sun was setting. The trees were black. Someone somewhere was playing a cello. I took off my shirt and sat on it and pictured Ruby’s beautiful, sullen face in the newspaper. I lay back on the grass and its coolness on my skin seemed to snap me into consciousness. I tried to order all the things I knew about her:

She was my friend. She was a criminal.

She had painted me and written poems for me. She had nearly killed a man.

She was beautiful. She was dangerous.

She loved me.

This last thought stood alone. There was nothing to prove that she didn’t love me. It must be true, I thought. She loved me. ‘I know how hard it has been for you too, out there, alone,’ she had written.

My body trembled with strange energy. I sat up and felt the warm air against my back, which was damp with sweat. Was I shaking with gratitude, excitement, or fear? This was a test, I decided. I could not allow my head to be turned by a character in a story. Because when you boiled it down, that was all Ruby was. Words on a screen, a photograph in a newspaper. Our relationship was virtual.

I remained in the garden a while longer, listening to the dark melody of the cellist. The music seemed to rise out of the very earth itself. Its deep notes rose ominously up into the darkening sky.

***

I knock on Robbie’s door every day after lunch. I call his name. I linger. I listen. I never get a response or hear movement. Today there were voices. Two. One of them was much louder, deeper than the other. I did not knock. I stood and pressed an ear gently to the door. The louder voice was angry, sharp. The quieter voice – Robbie’s I presumed – spoke only in timid monosyllables. I strained my ears but I could not recognise the louder voice. A couple of guys walking by saw me bent at Robbie’s door. I straightened up as they passed. Our eyes met. They shot me a suspicious glare. One of them was familiar to me. Where have I seen him before? When they were gone I pressed my ear back to the door. Now silence. It occurred to me that the voices might be listening for listeners. If I moved at all I’d have given myself away. I had no choice but to remain still. I closed my eyes. I slowed my breathing. And then, suddenly, the sound of something large and metal smashing to the ground. The louder voice launched into another diatribe. Its tone indicated the interview was coming to an end. I had to move now or risk being caught. I walked away, briskly, as far from Robbie’s door as my feet could carry me. I sat and rested while my heart slowed. When I had a moment to think I of course assumed that the louder voice belonged to Gordon. But then I saw Gordon, out on his daily stroll, talking with people and smiling, nowhere near mine or Robbie’s. So who was it? Is Gordon not ‘G’ after all? I have no idea what’s going on any more, Lucy.

***

I stopped writing to Ruby. Went cold turkey.

Months of constant contact, mutual support, affection even, and then poof, nothing. Gone. I could’ve written her a short note; I’m sorry, I can’t do this any more, or just quit the programme entirely; at least that would have sent a clearer message. But I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing her letters again. I read them over and over. They had offered me such comfort. They had guided me to the other side of a raging sea that had tried to push me down and drag me to the bottom. But in doing so they had served their purpose. Victoria and I would soon be leaving this place. It no longer mattered what I felt for Ruby. Just as it didn’t matter any more what Ruby felt for me.

But the letters continued.

10 June 2016

Dear Dan

I’ve been trying to remind myself over the past few days that you’re busy moving house, getting things ready. Give the man a break, I thought, be patient. It took all my willpower not to write again yesterday. You’re being stupid Ruby, I told myself, a silly teenager; he’ll write soon enough. But today is day four. You haven’t taken this long to reply since February. Today when I logged in and saw that you still hadn’t written I couldn’t help myself.

I don’t regret telling you how I felt. But if you don’t feel the same way please don’t punish me. My life consists only of punishment. I don’t need another layer of it. If you haven’t written because you don’t know what to say, or because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, just know that you can’t say anything wrong. I just want you to be honest.

I hope you write soon.

Ruby

I sat for hours that night with the laptop open, my fingers twitching above the keys. I could sense her pain and I knew that in just a few keystrokes I could obliterate it. I focused on the telly, on the football match unfolding on it. I sat and watched the players – the French in blue, the Romanians in yellow – run around after the little white dot. It was soothing: the constant drone of the crowd rising and falling in time with the action, the hypnotic movement of the ball across the screen in graceful arcs. Super slow-motion close-ups of players’ faces revealed expressions of anguish, frustration, ecstasy. I envied the simplicity of the game. I wanted to be like those men: only one thing on their unfettered minds. Picture the goal, I told myself, think only of scoring. When the match was over I knew I would never write to her again.

The next day there was another letter.

11 June 2016

Dear Dan

It suddenly occurred to me last night that something may have happened to you. What if he’s lying in a ditch somewhere in his van, what if he’s in hospital and he physically can’t get to a computer to write to me? I felt like a fool for being so impatient. I felt so ashamed. I couldn’t sleep thinking of you. But then it was this same thought that brought me solace. I don’t want you to be hurt, Dan – I never want that – but the thought of you being somehow prevented from writing to me is so much easier to accept than you choosing not to.

Please write back soon.

Ruby

And another the next day:

12 June 2016

Dan

I’m starting to think I conjured you up. You’re my creation. Last night I looked at your portrait on my wall, into your dark eyes, and I whispered to you: Are you real? You did not answer of course. You’re very quiet lately. Tell me Dan: Are you real? Who do I love? Where is this love going to? Where has it been going to all this time? I’m desperate. Please just give me a sign.

Please write. I’m sorry. I’m going out of my mind.

Ruby

And the next:

13 June 2016

Dan

Why did I end my last letter with an apology? I’m NOT sorry. You’re the one who should be sorry. It’s been a whole week since I told you how I felt, since I laid myself out before you like a newspaper. How could you do this to me? I’m so humiliated. I know you’re getting these messages. You could end my suffering with one word. I don’t even care now if that word is ‘no’. I just can’t stand this silence any more.

Ruby

And again:

14 June 2016

I laughed today. I knew there’d be nothing from you again, and I was right. So I laughed.

You’re cruel. Heartless. I’m swinging on your hook and you don’t even have the courage to put me out of my misery. I can’t stand that I still have this hope inside me. It brings me down here to this overheated computer room to log on, to look at your old letters. All the other girls type away furiously, their tongues poking out like dogs. I wish I could go back to being like them. I wish I could go back in time; I would never have written back to you. The numbness of before was far better than this burning pain I feel throughout my whole body now. I hope one day you look back at these letters from me and you feel regret.

I hope you suffer how I am suffering.

Ruby

And finally:

15 June 2016

Dan

How has it come to this? How can a person be one thing and then the next day something else: nothing? This is the last you’ll ever hear from me. You’re no better than him.

Ruby

PS Victoria is going to leave you.

It was a suicide vest of a letter. She meant to hurt me with it. The confidence of the statement frightened me. It was an unwavering stare into the camera. She is going to leave you. She is. Not a warning; a foretelling.

What lingered most was the feeling I had made a dangerous enemy. Look what happened to the last man to cause her pain, I thought. I reassured myself that she had no idea where I lived. Apart from that it was somewhere coastal in the Northwest of England, my address was unknown to her. Plus, by the time she was released – which wasn’t for another three years – her rage would have subsided, she’d have another me, another outlet. Maybe I was just the latest in a long line of men she’d become entangled with online. Perhaps I wasn’t so unique a figure in her life after all.

But still at night I started dreaming of a man lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his broken legs bent back at the hips. And in the dreams, as I knelt over that broken body, I could sense her presence.

The next day Victoria agreed to see Lanes End. I picked her up in the Transporter from work and drove east out of town. With the setting sun behind us, Wilder became silhouetted in my rear-view: a mouth filled with crooked blackened teeth.

‘Here we are,’ I said as I rounded the bend of the lane onto the clearing. The low sun shone a spotlight on the front of the cottage. I got out of the Transporter and let her in the side door. She walked ahead of me slowly, opening each door just enough to poke her head inside.

‘Why don’t you use the front door?’ she asked later.

‘You can if you prefer.’ I handed her the keys.

She unlocked the front door and surveyed the clearing. I felt then, as I looked at her silhouette in the doorway, that we would be happy here. She stepped outside and I heard a sound like glass breaking. I went outside and saw that a pint of milk had been placed on the step. She’d knocked it over and globules of milk had spilt onto the shale. A tray of eggs had been placed next to it, half of which were smashed.

‘Fucking Gray,’ I said under my breath.

‘What are those doing there?’

‘I don’t know,’ I lied.

On the drive home Victoria began rooting frenziedly through the glove compartment.

‘What are you after?’ I asked.

‘A charger.’ She held her lifeless phone in her hand and pressed its one button over and over as though trying to resuscitate it.

‘I don’t have a smartphone,’ I reminded her.

When we got home she rushed through to the living room and plugged her phone in. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. After a few moments I heard the phone’s text notification tone go off multiple times. Ding. Ding. Ding. I went upstairs to begin packing for the move, and to distract my mind. As I passed the living room door I saw her typing away rapturously, her feet curled up beside her on the couch. Outside the light was fading, the day finally ending.

Over the next few days Victoria packed too. She refused to do this with me present. She said she needed space and that I ‘got in the way’.

There were precisely three photographs in the house. They had all been stood up in frames to the right of the telly the entire four and a half years we’d lived there. One was of Vic’s parents on holiday. The second photo was of my mother. It was taken at the old bungalow in the kitchen. Post-Frank. She is mid stride, marching towards the camera in her Sunday apron, her eyebrows raised and her right index finger pointed in mock warning. Probably I had tried to steal a Yorkshire pudding. Her lips are pursed, on the verge of saying something, no doubt an admonishment. But she looks happy. This was how I liked to remember her.

The third photo was of me and Vic. We are stood outside a church. I am holding a little girl’s pink toy umbrella over both of us. Vic is wearing a long dark green dress. Her shoulders are hunched slightly against the cold but she is smiling. I on the other hand look positively aloof. I am thinking only of getting out of the weather. I am not thinking of the woman stood next to me, who loves me, who is pressing into me for warmth. I used to hate that picture but Vic liked it because of the way her dress fitted. Now I couldn’t bear to take it down.

The evening of Thursday 23 June 2016 was balmy. There was almost no wind. Occasionally a little gust would blow in your face and die and then another gust would blow on the back of your head as though the wind couldn’t make up its mind.

Everything was packed. Everything was ready to go, except the telly. We still needed the telly. It was the fulcrum of the house. Without it we might have had to talk to each other. We sat on the couch with takeaway pizza and watched Friends in silence. At about half past ten Vic got a text and insisted we put on the news. She changed the channel. The anchor said: Let’s go now to Gibraltar where I understand they are about to declare the first result of the night… Suddenly my eyes felt heavy. I craved sleep. The total number of ballot papers counted was … I yawned. I rubbed my eyes, missed the numbers. I was so tired. The broadcast returned to the studio. The anchor said: So there you have it; Gibraltar votes to remain in the European Union. Stay with us for all the reaction from the … The channel switched back to Friends. Vic was back in her usual position, curled away from me, feet tucked beneath her body, phone face down on the arm of the couch. I took the pizza boxes into the kitchen. I looked back at her from the doorway. A burst of canned laughter erupted from the telly. I looked left into the hallway and watched the light alternate white, then red, then white, then red, depending on whether Chandler or Monica spoke. There was no other light left. I heard the channel change again, back to the news. I stood in the living room doorway for a few moments watching. A grey man said, If this kind of result is replicated across the country it could be a very long and bloody night indeed for Leave.

‘I’m going up,’ I said.

‘OK. I’m going to watch a bit more.’

‘Night,’ I said, turning to leave.

‘Dan?’ Vic said softly behind me.

‘Yes?’

She did not immediately say anything. I looked into her eyes and smiled. Then she did something she hadn’t done in more than a year and a half. She touched me. She reached out a hand and, stretching over the arm of the couch, brushed my hip tenderly with the tips of her fingers.

‘Goodnight, Dan,’ she said. My eyes suddenly filled with tears. If I spoke I’d crack. I went upstairs and climbed into bed feeling that everything was going to be OK.

Everything was packed. Everything was ready to go.

Everything was fine.

The next morning Vic had already left for her morning run. I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. It was Friday, 24 June 2016 and tomorrow we would leave this place and start again. It seemed I had awoken into a new era. I felt light, unencumbered. I turned on the telly. Friends was still showing, seemingly as always. I looked over to where Vic had been sitting, to where she’d reached out to me. I hadn’t imagined it. Her seashell imprint in the couch was indelible. Friends finished, and in the ad break I channel-hopped. There was a niggling thought in the back of my mind. I flipped back to Friends but Friends wasn’t on. It was something else. Another programme! A theme song I’d never heard, characters I didn’t know. I looked ahead in the schedule for the next episode of Friends. But there was no more Friends for the rest of the day.

The house was empty and quiet. I was deeply agitated. Alfred was fluttering crazily in his cage. I began pacing up and down the living room. I looked out onto Beryl Avenue. There were no people anywhere. No cars. I turned to BBC News and watched it with the sound off, not taking anything in, just looking at it. BBC News calmed me. The slow-moving text across the red ticker, the sensible-looking man looking directly into my eyes, the hazy figures of people moving industriously behind him. The words passing along the bottom of the screen started coming into focus. POUND FALLS TO LEVELS NOT SEEN SINCE 1985. PRIME MINISTER DUE TO MAKE STATEMENT SHORTLY. I was comprehending the words but not understanding them. VOTE IS A ROAR OF DEFIANCE AGAINST WESTMINSTER. Frozen with the remote in my hand, the scale of what had transpired overnight began to dawn on me. FTSE FALLS 7 PER CENT IN MINUTES AS MARKETS OPEN. Where was Victoria? Did she know? Something felt terribly wrong. The prime minister appeared on-screen outside Number Ten. I unmuted the telly. Gravely, he began to speak. The prime minister’s wife stood apart from him, off to the side. I heard a strangely familiar sound outside, deep and thunderous, but I did not look to see what it was, I could not break my gaze from the prime minister’s ashen, disconsolate face. I heard the front door open.

‘Dan.’ I heard Victoria’s voice in the doorway.

I did not look to her. ‘Have you seen this?’

‘Dan,’ she repeated.

‘There are times when it is right to ask the people themselves,’ said the prime minister.

‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.

‘Dan, we need to talk.’

‘Head, heart and soul. I held nothing back,’ the prime minister insisted.

‘What’s going to happen now?’ I said.

‘Dan, I’m not coming with you tomorrow.’

‘This is not a decision I have taken lightly,’ said the prime minister. I had heard Vic’s words but they were muffled, as though she were in another room.

‘I’m leaving you.’

‘There’s no need for a precise timetable today,’ said the prime minister.

‘I’m going to live with Scott.’ The camera zoomed slowly out to a wider shot to take in the prime minister’s wife. She looked on the verge of breaking down, and it was only the sight of this, of another person’s sadness, that triggered my own emotions. I felt heat building up behind my eyes. I was still staring at the telly. Vic was stood behind me in the doorway. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ The prime minister’s wife reached out towards him. The gesture, the way she held her hand out in the air towards him, like a mother waiting at the school gates for her son, was the same gesture Victoria had made last night. They disappeared into Number Ten, the prime minister rubbing tender circles into the small of his wife’s back. I understood now that Victoria’s touch was ‘goodbye’.

Rooted to the spot, I watched the horror unfurl on the telly while Vic made repeated trips up and down the stairs to fetch her suitcases and boxes. ‘Dan?’ she said after a time, I have no idea how long, ‘The TV?’ Finally, I looked at her. Why was she asking me about the TV? ‘The TV is mine.’ She gently removed the remote from my grip.

My trembling fingers stayed open, caged around nothing. She unplugged the telly and then with some difficulty carried it away. I heard the boot of a car close outside. Moments later she came back into the living room. I was still motionless, mouth agape, quite insensible. ‘Are you going to be alright?’ she said. A vision of her appearing from the dancing crowd that first Christmas Eve came back to me. My breaths became shallow and rapid. I closed my eyes and the memory played in reverse; she receded into the crowd. I opened my eyes and watched her remove her house key from the keyring and place it on the coffee table. Then she left and I heard the coupé fire up outside. I don’t remember anything after that. I have no recollection of the rest of that day.

At ten the next morning – moving day – the landlord came to collect the keys.

Not long after, I was in the Transporter and driving away, finally, unhappily, from Beryl Avenue with Alfred beside me, his shrouded cage strapped into the passenger seat.

The traffic into Wilder town centre was unseasonably heavy. It was hot and sticky in the van and I had to crack a window open. I heard the sound of faraway whistles and tooting horns. I looked in my rear-view and noticed that the car behind me was decorated with coloured tinsel and paper. A Union Jack had been tied to the bonnet.

It was Wilder Heritage Day. I had completely forgotten. The town bustled with people like it never did for the 364 other days of the year. The street was lined from the promenade all the way east towards the edge of town and the marina with gazebos and tables, people serving cakes, orange juice and beer. I could hear a brass band and pounding dance music and both above and beneath them the unintelligible and disorienting sound of three and a half thousand clamouring voices. I rolled slowly along the high street, piercing through the crowd like a boat through thick swampland. People were walking in the road, touching the Transporter with their hands as I passed them. A group of costumed girls danced an Irish jig in front of Poundland. A police horse was being petted on its nose by a group of children and moving backwards in jittery circles while its handler tried to soothe it. A lamppost had been dressed as a maypole and around it a group of men clad in traditional English white pranced and leapt.

I heard something slam violently into the Transporter. I looked up to see the swaying figure of Max Gray. A half-smoked cigarette hung from his mouth. He was clutching a can of Special Brew in one hand and a blue carrier bag in the other. He held his can aloft like a trophy. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be dancing to some music inside his head. The ash on his cigarette was an inch long. It began to dawn on me that he didn’t recognise me; that he hadn’t slammed my bonnet in salutation but simply because my bonnet was there. Eventually, he staggered off the road and onto the pavement, tripping over the kerb. A pair of lanky boys followed after him. One was wearing a tracksuit, the other jeans and Union Jack T-shirt. The one in the tracksuit, the smaller one, spat on the road in front of the Transporter.

After Gray I felt shaken. Alfred flapped inside his cage, perhaps in protest at the noise and the heat. The sky shimmered and vibrated with a superabundance of energy. People dabbed their foreheads, the elderly with handkerchiefs and tissues, the young with the bottoms of their T-shirts or their sleeves. The Fire Service had set up an antique fire engine outside the station and were spraying a fine mist over the street. Topless children ran through its rainbow arc squealing. The firewomen and firemen were clad in full uniform but had peeled the top half of them down like bananas.

I turned left towards the marina. Here the crowd was even thicker. I saw the spot where my father used to park his van and point out the boats as they passed by. The now-defunct RNLI station rose above the marina. On its balcony, as was tradition, an appointed old and snow-bearded man announced each passing vessel. Without exception every boat flew a Union flag. Here’s Reg Turner aboard the Princess of the Sea, said the old man. Reggie has been campaigning against the CFP for decades. Everyone, show your appreciation for good old Reg. Give him a round of applause. The crowd clapped. Then the old man began to shout: No longer will our livelihoods be dictated to by fat cats in Brussels! No longer will the likes of Reggie and his family suffer because of anti-British laws. We told Brussels we want our seas back! And that’s what we’re gonna get! A roar went up around the marina. The people lining the edge of the water produced, almost in unison, little paper Union flags and started waving them hysterically about their heads. This happened for each boat. I had no idea the people of Wilder even cared. But apparently, after all, they did. And they were frenzied in their emotion. They waved their flags and bounced their babies as if we’d just won some glorious victory. I didn’t care like they did. I didn’t feel like they did. In that moment I had no feelings, my nerves had been sanded down and cauterised. I could only gawp at these people as at strange exotic creatures in a zoo. This joy on their faces, this display, this turnout. It was unfathomable to me. These people were inscrutable. I rolled out of town away from the horns and the whistles and the klaxons and the voices, like a loner leaving a party early.

I was alone in taking the left turn into the country lanes. Everyone else went right.

The relative silence of the countryside was intense. The trees were lush, the fields pregnant and swaying. The cows kneeled in shade and moved their full mouths in slow circles.

As I approached the turn-off to Lanes End I spotted a yellow sign by the gate. It said: SAVE OUR COUNTRYSIDE. SAY NO TO FRACKING. I stopped to open the gate. I checked my new mailbox. It was empty. I drove along the lane through the woods and pulled up on the shale. Clutching Alfred’s cage by the handle I went to the front door. The sun was hot on my back. A gust of sea wind flared and the tall trees surrounding the cottage made sounds like conspiratorial whispers.

***

Today was the last day of September. Robbie came back. He just flounced in and switched the telly on. I was slightly overcome at the sight of him. He sat with his back to the wall. Still writing letters? he said, totally deadpan. You’re so old-fashioned. Don’t know why you don’t just pick up the phone. His face was covered in bruises, cuts, welts. His right eye was swollen shut. It wept constantly. I asked Robbie everything. He did not answer any of my questions. I told him I had been looking for him, that I had been worried about him. He would not engage except when I rose from my chair to announce that I was going to report his assault. He leapt from my bed and pleaded with me not to. He pulled at my sleeves and prevented me from leaving the room. The fear in his eyes reminded me so much of my mother when I was a teenager and she stopped me from going to the police over Frank. It disarmed me and I fell heavily back into my chair. Clearly, he’s suffered a significant trauma and I will have to be patient with him. I promised him I wouldn’t report it. I calmed him, got him to sit back down on the bed. His left eye had wept a shiny trail all down his face. I fetched him some more tissues. He looked so pathetic forming one into a soft point and dabbing it into his eye. Watching him, I was moved. He was like a child.

I wonder if you have read my first letter.

Lucy, I am getting now to the bit you must be waiting for and dreading. I promise to leave nothing out. I will simply replay everything in my head and transcribe what I hear. It is time now for bed, I am writing this by moonlight. I will start again tomorrow, in October.

Affectionately yours

D