Dearest Pip,

I’ve been trapped in this nightmare for almost three days and I can’t think why you haven’t sent the cavalry in to rescue me. Honestly, why I said I’d stay the whole weekend is beyond me – it should be a written rule that when one’s old school chums get married and procreate that visits are kept to a maximum of four hours and never never never extended overnight. The real shocker is how staid G has become. You know how he always used to go on about how crumbling the old pile was, and how dreadful it would be to have to keep it up, and how he was sure to sell it just as soon as the old dears both up and left him? All of that’s forgotten. His dear ma sits in the bath chair in the corner of the room, and he stands by the fireplace and solemnly promises to restore the place to its former glory. She wells up and cries about his dear old pa, and how he would have been so proud to see G returned to the family home and then they all fall about weeping. Frankly I remember old C as a complete b——— who would have sooner kicked G from one end of the tennis court to the other than he would have given him the key to the front door.

The other trouble is some wisp of a girl called Agnes they’ve unearthed from under a rock, who obviously has been wheeled in to try and tempt me out of bachelorhood. They will have to find better bait if they want to succeed. She’s mousey brown inside and out, no spark at all. Her mother is here too, keeps making pointed remarks about the girl’s hair and complexion since they arrived, as if the country air can correct the shade of the girl’s character. Last night at dinner they made me sit next to her (the girl not the mother) and I could barely squeeze two words out of her – it was like eating next to a tortoise. Unfortunately I had to extend an invitation to the wisp, after I mentioned the artist’s party to G&S, since she only animated herself once to exclaim how exciting it would be to finally be in town. Perhaps we can sit her next to that Branch fellow your Uncle has brought along. They would charm each other equally.

There’s the bell for tea, so I’ll wrap up and get this to Jeffers. I’m driving back tomorrow and will be coming straight round, so do make sure you’ve got the gin out.

Laurie

Blackberries. They remind me of him more than anything. His birthday was in the autumn, and he always said that in preference to a cake he’d prefer a crumble. If we were visiting the country we could go picking ourselves, stuffing carrier bags into our pockets and tramping down the worn paths to collect our free food. He taught me how to look for the little worms and grubs that burrow their way into the fruit, taught me how to love the feeling of stickiness on my fingers that intensified through the afternoon, eating half as many as we bagged. At home we could cook them with a little apple if they were too tart, or just fling handfuls of sugar onto the top of them. He had big hands. It was his job to make the crumble topping too, getting the flour and butter and sugar to meld between his fingers, letting it fall back into the bowl before lifting it up again. Sometimes he could be persuaded to add oats, but that was rare. Last autumn he refused.

“I want a pure crumble. Nothing added. Just blackberries, sugar, crumble. Like I had when I was a kid.”

We weren’t in the country that year, so it was a trip to the supermarket, loading up the basket with punnets, tutting about the cost. In the kitchen at home, I watched him make his own celebratory pudding.

(A wee break with the family last week, & a wee bit slow to start today.)

“Eat.” Always a command with my father.

“I’m not hungry, papa.”

“You think you’re not hungry.”

“No, I’m really not hungry.”

I was sitting at the dinner table anyway. It’s just where we all ended up. You come in, pull off your shoes by the rack in the hall, try to balance your coat on top of everyone else’s and then you come and sit down in the kitchen. It’s where papa will be.

“I made stew. Good beef at the butcher today. And I saw Angie Benson in the queue. You know her son, Jimmy, don’t you? She says he’s dropped out of university to become a mechanic.”

Papa had put a plate of stew in front of me, and now he was moving around me like a gentle whirlwind, putting down cutlery and condiments a a glass of water. When he stopped moving he leant on the edge of the sink with one hand, a tee towel over his shoulder, and picked up his evening beer.

“A mechanic?” I said.

“Can you believe it? He could speak french when he was seven, that boy. All As, all the way.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a mechanic, papa.”

“No, maybe not. But maybe there is something wrong with not using all the brainpower you’re gifted with. Why are you not eating?”

I looked at my plate, and yes, it looked delicious as usual. I sighed. “I’m not so hungry today.”

Papa’s answer was always to pile more food in front of you, and he dropped some crusty bread onto the side of the plate. “Mop some gravy at least. It’s cold outside.”

But it’s cold inside too, I wanted to say, here, inside my heart. I don’t think even papa’s gravy can warm that up.

The clock out in the hall chimed the quarter hour. The window rattled with the wind. There was a draft coming through it. Annabelle ran her finger backwards and forwards over the embroidered cushion. She used to pile the cushions up as a child and hide behind them, a barrier against the shouting in the next room.

“You can’t really be serious,” she said finally.

Her mother nodded. She lifted a finger to smooth a stray hair back into its set. “I know it’s a shock to you.”

“It’s impossible.”

“But we really have a lot of common ground. We’re older. The tensions are gone.”

Annabelle stood and went to the window. The yellowed leaves were beginning to drop from the trees. “He hurt you. He hurt me. He hurt everyone.”

“Annabelle.”

“He’ll do it again.”

“He’s my first love. We really were very much in love.”

“But that was before. How can you just forget everything that happened afterwards?” She turned to look at her mother. There were pearls in her ears, and on a string round her neck. She sat upright in a way women of Annabelle’s generation don’t know how to. “The women, mother.”

Her mother glanced down at her skirt and smoothed a wrinkle. “And the drinking. Yes, it’s very tawdry. And so cliched. It was a different time. We weren’t free.”

“And marrying him again won’t make you free now. You’ll be chained again. All the things you’ve built…” Suddenly Annabelle moved to sit beside her mother and take her papery hands. “You have a life. And it’s a good life.”

They had exactly the same eyes, Annabelle and her mother. They rarely looked each other in the eye, as if like magnets they would repel each other. Her mother lifted her chin and put one hand on Annabelle’s cheek.

“It’s a lonely life too, Annabelle.”

(From The 4am Breakthrough: #1 Parataxis)

“I have fantasies about you.”

We hadn’t been saying anything. He was cleaning the espresso machine and I was washing out the frappucino jugs. We’d hit a lull after the lunch rush, which is normally our time to clear up the kiosk from the chaos of lids and spoons and cups that get shoved anywhere when we don’t even have time to remember our own names. We had our backs to each other because that’s how the kiosk works – coffee machine faces out, sink faces the wall. I didn’t even turn around.

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes. I do.”

“Oh.”

We’d both paused after he’d said it, but now I saw out of the corner of my eye that he’d resumed his polishing.

“They’re not violent or anything. It’s not like that. I just think about you. And think about doing things with you.”

I started scrubbing again, vigourously. “Things. That’s a bit vague, Robert. Things could mean anything from shopping to fucking.”

“I thought you must have guessed. That I was thinking about you.”

Well, what girl doesn’t know when a guy has his eye all over her? Me. I’m the girl who doesn’t have a clue. The thing is that the kiosk is very small. You can fit three people in it according to the company, but then we all only have room to turn around on the spot, like one of those little ballerinas in a jewellery box, so most of the time it’s just two of us, working in a space three feet wide and six feet long. Who wouldn’t start feeling unnaturally close to their work colleagues? Hell, back in the bank we used to joke about being work wives and husbands for each other, and we each had a space three by six to call our own. We didn’t have to brush past each other a hundred times a day either. I miss my desk, my own personal workspace. The jar of nutella that I kept in my bottom desk drawer. I miss the pension too, and the share options, but that stuff’s not so ambiguous: there wasn’t any money left for anything, including renting the building and paying the employees. Financially, we were all fucked. I get that. But fantasies from a guy in a coffee kiosk? I have no idea if I should be terrified or flattered.