What You Make It Read online

  He couldn't think of any, and found the effort both tiring and actively depressing. Instead he settled for a long concluding paragraph, stopping himself at the last moment from including an excuse for the shortness of the letter. He'd used pressing appointments, the lateness of the hour and a desire to catch the post all before, and a letter was a letter, after all. Susan's were only longer than his because she drew from a much wider net of material. Her last letter had included over half a page on a couple he was fairly confident he'd never even heard of, much less met, and he was far from sure how he was supposed to feel about the problems they were having. He'd wondered in the past if there was some subtle point being made in these obscure vignettes, but had never been able to discern one and had long since given up trying.

  They did make for long newsy letters though, whereas at less than two sides this was his shortest yet. Still, as they were seeing each other at the weekend, surely it was the thought that counted.

  Pushing the completed letter aside, he lit a cigarette and turned his attention to the other lying on his desk. As he reread it he quickly saw that he was in no position to criticize Susan's letter-writing. The minutiae of his life were all here, interspersed with little reflections and jokes, described in happy detail over five pages. The difference, he realized, was not just due to the fact that he wouldn't be seeing Isobel for almost two weeks. Even the final paragraph was longer, and he hadn't needed to think of padding it out with an excuse.

  The chore finally over, he sat back and stared at the two unequal piles of paper on his desk. He hated writing letters, especially by hand. On a word processor you could just let the words flow down, carried forward by the speed of the typing and the momentum of transcription. More importantly, you could go back and fix anything which didn't come out right. Slogging it out by hand was different. For a start it was much slower, and worse, it was uncorrectable. If he was halfway down the second side and a sentence didn't come out right, he couldn't face the idea of tearing up and starting again. Instead he'd try to fix it in the next sentence, taking back streets and B – roads in an effort to cut back towards the point he'd been trying to make. Usually the sense ended up having to stay the night at some motel within striking distance of the intended destination, hoping to make it there the next time. The alternative was coldly planning and drafting, orchestrating a progression of facts in a letter that had duty rather than love between the lines. Neither was ideal, and he wished at least one of them didn't mind getting typewritten letters.

  Absently pulling a piece of jotting paper off the desk pad for the checklist, Richard ran his eyes over the letter to Susan a final time. It was okay. He sounded like him in it, at least. Or the him that Susan knew, anyway. He sounded like him in the one to Isobel too, of course, but it was a different him, and he shuddered at the idea of Susan ever finding out that he existed.

  As he pulled two envelopes out of the drawer, one blue, the other lilac, the phone went. Richard winced at finding Mr Baum on the other end, and immediately started feeling guilty. Mr Baum always had that effect on him. Having him as a client was like perpetually sitting in the corridor outside some headmaster's office.

  Mr Baum expressed himself keen, even anxious, to know when he was likely to see the preliminary designs for his new stationery. Babbling slightly, Richard rootled through the papers on his desk until he found the work he was supposed to have done for the businessman. By pure chance he'd actually finished it, and his hand went back into the drawer for a manila envelope.

  As Mr Baum chuntered on Richard glanced at the clock. To stand any chance of catching a post which would land the work on the man's mat tomorrow morning he would have to leave the house almost immediately, but he couldn't afford to irritate one of his most regular clients still further by chucking him off the phone. So while he made the assorted noises of agreement and contrition which seemed to be all that was required of him he folded the two letters and slipped them into the envelopes, writing Susan's address from memory and copying Isobel's current crashpad from his filofax.

  The conversation ended in an amicable draw, with Richard managing to slip in a deft reference to an unpaid invoice. He gathered his various envelopes to him, grabbed his coat and made it as far as the door. Then he went back to the desk, checked all the cigarettes were out in the ashtray, and headed for the door again. Swearing at himself, he then returned to the desk, picked up the ashtray and carried it to the sink. Quickly filling it with water he walked away without looking back, and finally made it out of the flat.

  He got to the mailbox at the bottom of the street with a couple of minutes to spare, and lobbed the envelopes through the slot with a feeling of relief. He was about to head back to the flat when he realized that he wasn't half as cold as he'd been expecting. In fact, he saw, the sun was in the sky and there was even a touch of spring in the air. On impulse he decided to take a walk down to the high street, maybe pick up something different for lunch. What the hell, he thought. Go wild. Buy a scotch egg.

  When he reached the high street he slowed from his usual intent stride to a more desultory stroll. This was partly forced upon him by the unusually high numbers of young mothers and old people meandering blinking into the sunlight, and partly an attempt to relax. Susan always said he shouldn't work so hard, and on that she was probably right. He felt tired.

  Within a few minutes he was back to walking quickly, barely glancing at the shops as he passed. Something about the street didn't feel right. Both Susan and Isobel had visited him here in the couple of months since he'd moved, and with them the high street had a purpose, a comfortable set of points to amble between. Susan liked to browse in the poster shop, and could never resist a pastry from the Jewish bakery on the other side. Isobel enjoyed poking around in the second-hand bookshop, and resolutely refused to pass the Italian café without going in for a coffee, issuing the laconic waitress with precise but forgivable instructions on how much cocoa powder she'd like on top.

  Richard thought he liked the high street, but today it seemed different. Today there was no track for him to follow, no reason for being here. He felt oddly displaced and lost, adrift in a gap between paths. Though the sun was weak his coat was heavy, and before long he was hot and irritable, buffeted by squealing children and peevish tramps. In the end he shopped briefly at the supermarket and turned back for home, feeling bluntly rejected by everything around him, as if he had no place there by himself.

  On the way back to the flat he tried to shake himself out of his mood, realizing it was the letters that had started it. Writing them always made him feel depressed, and lonely too.

  He knew that some men would think of themselves as pretty flash for having two women to write to, two women who had shared his double bed and lounged swaddled in his worn-out bathrobe in the mornings. Richard didn't. He realized it made him a bit of a bastard, and he didn't like to think of himself in that way. It didn't seem to fit, somehow. Or he didn't want it to.

  It didn't seem to fit because he hadn't courted the situation, and because he felt guilty about it about all the bloody time. He hated the constant undercurrent of potential disaster, hated having to find excuses to put the answering machine on when he was actually worried that the other might call, hated the idea of hurting either of them in any way. Feeling bad wasn't the same as doing something about it, of course, but surely it counted for something.

  He really hadn't gone looking for the situation, either. Somehow it had just happened. Susan had been his girlfriend since college, on and off. Fair-skinned and blonde, she still lived in Nottingham, wielding a variety of power suits as an up-and-coming solicitor. One of them made the trip to the other about every third weekend, and in between it was letters, phone calls, and mixed memories. Every now and then they talked of changing the situation, but it remained the same, and as time went on neither seemed more inclined to do anything about it.

  Isobel was dark with an unruly volley of thick brown hair, and a mouth that seemed always on
the verge of a smirk. The first time Richard had seen her had been across the room at a friend's party, and the memory of her grin then could still make him shiver. They had been too drunk to stand by the end of the evening, but somehow they'd managed to swop numbers and meet up for dinner. For five minutes it was strange, and then it was warm, and dark, and very exciting. She was an actress, in the sense that she'd been to drama college and the thing she spent most of her time not doing was acting. At the moment she was in Bristol, rehearsing for a play that seemed increasingly unlikely to ever make it to the stage.

  Both girls were slim, and tall, but there any resemblance ended. Susan was solid, dependable, and Richard knew when he could call and find her in. Isobel worked on Martian time, never being where she'd said she would, and calling him at random times in the small hours to tell him that she loved him. With Susan he went to plays and watched films with subtitles where nothing happened, but with Isobel he prowled drunkenly down alleyways and dark canal banks, trying to keep her in hand as she shouted up at windows and then ran gleefully away. Susan had a time and place for contact, and would never have suddenly clamped her mouth over his in public as Isobel sometimes did, but Susan always knew what he meant, and Isobel sometimes didn't. Susan held his hand and Isobel gripped it, Susan put her arms round his waist and Isobel draped them round his shoulders, Susan smiled at him and Isobel grinned that grin.

  So many differences, but in the end there was only one. With Susan there was always a backdrop, a context. Sorting out their problems, forgetting the past, getting back together, putting the bad things behind them: those were the things their dreams were made of. With Isobel everything was new, and different, and nothing had ever gone wrong between them. It was Love, not love, and after two quiet years he didn't think he could give it up now he'd found it again. Just as he couldn't give up the slow, tidal reassurance of shared times and thoughts, the comfort that comes with years and old love.

  As he unlocked the flat door Richard made a determined effort to put the whole thing out of his mind. He knew he didn't possess the willpower to deny himself either of them, and five months had passed without either finding out about the other. Okay, yes, he was a bit of a bastard. Maybe even a complete bastard. Fair enough. But let it go on a little longer, he asked quietly: it makes me happy.

  After lunch he sat back at his desk and kicked his computer into life. As today was Thursday he had plenty of time to clear his desk before the weekend. An afternoon spent hard at work would leave him comfortably ahead of schedule on his various commitments, which meant that he could take the evening off to watch television or do something equally untaxing. Remembering ahead of time for once that he should go shopping on Friday to get in the kind of food Susan liked, he reached across to make a note on the deskpad. Then, hand hovering over it, he stopped.

  Lying behind his keyboard there was already a piece of jotting paper. For a moment he wondered what it was doing there, and then he knew.

  He picked it up and turned it over, and then looked back at the front. There were no marks on the paper. None at all. Quickly, he tilted the monitor of his computer back enough to check if a piece of paper could have slipped underneath it. There was nothing there. He lit a cigarette and picked up the piece of paper again, feeling hollow.

  He hadn't done his checklist.

  Clasping his hands tightly in front of his face, he tried to remember the ten minutes before he'd left the flat, tried to picture himself doing the list, and perhaps throwing it away. He couldn't, and didn't bother to check the bin. He knew he hadn't done it.

  Suddenly it was as if for once there was only one thought in his head, and he went cold with the purest fear, the fear of being found out. Then parts of his mind leapt different ways to huddle up against the wall, taking terrified glances at the fear in the centre. Nothing to do with me, they squealed: someone else's problem. Wide-eyed, he got up and put the kettle on, trying not to pace around the kitchen area as he waited for it to boil.

  The checklist had developed slowly, as had his cigarette rituals. It was only in the last couple of years that he'd become so paranoid about leaving a smouldering butt behind that he'd felt compelled to do what he could to ensure they were all out. At first just rigorously re-stubbing all of them had been enough. That was okay, normal, and had only taken a few seconds.

  But once the worry had taken root it got worse and worse. After stubbing had come leaving the ashtray in the sink, and then filling the ashtray with water as well. Together with checking and rechecking that all of the windows were locked it took him about five minutes to ever leave the house. Unless he was in a real hurry, like today.

  By the time the kettle pinged at him, Richard was not only pacing but rubbing his upper lip with his forefinger as well.

  Somehow, and for some reason he didn't understand, he just didn't believe he did things. Setting the alarm clock every night took five minutes of checking and rechecking that the time was right, the alarm time was right, that the alarm time was a.m. not p.m., and that the alarm function was in fact on. He did this time and again, staring at the numerals as if this would somehow make the adjustment more real, more something that he had done.

  Coffee in hand, he sat back down at the desk and fruitlessly turned the piece of paper over again. It still had no marks on it.

  The checklist had arisen out of the fact that he always sat down to write to Susan and Isobel at the same time. It generally took him at least a day to build himself up to letter-writing mode, and he couldn't face doing that twice in one week. The problem being that he ended up an utter disaster waiting to happen, in the shape of two contradictory piles of paper. If they should ever reach the wrong people, all hell would break loose and nothing in the world he valued would be left at the end of it.

  At first he'd tried writing one and then the other, making sure the first was safely sealed inside its addressed envelope before starting on the next. The problem was that he couldn't refer to the first letter as a reminder of events already tediously dredged up out of his memory, and it also meant that he couldn't reread the first letter, which he liked to do before adding the final paragraph.

  In the end he'd developed the checklist, and had settled with that. He wrote the two letters simultaneously, and then put addresses on two different coloured envelopes. He noted the number of pages of each letter on a piece of paper, and rechecked it. He checked the name at the beginning of the letter, and the pet name used at the end of it, twice each before tucking the letter into the envelope with Susan's address on it. Then he wrote the name ‘Susan’ over her number on the checklist. After he'd gone through the same procedure with Isobel's letter, he took Susan's letter out, quickly scanned through it to make sure all of the pages were hers, bundled it into the envelope and immediately sealed it. Then he did the same with Isobel's.

  He knew the system wasn't foolproof, but that wasn't the point. Checking and rechecking the door didn't increase the likelihood of it being shut when he knew he'd done it properly the first time. He did know, in some sense, that he wouldn't have dropped a cigarette to the floor without noticing, just as he knew that he set the alarm properly first time. But in some other sense, he didn't know. He didn't trust his memory of events, even when he had no reason to doubt it. If you thought too hard about things you believed you'd done it became harder and harder to remember doing them with any degree of certainty, almost as if it wasn't really you who'd done them. And what was true for trivial things was even more so with the most important things in his life. Isobel and Susan.

  And today, thanks to Mr-fucking-Baum, he hadn't done his checklist. For once he'd behaved like a normal human being, which would have been fine if he hadn't found out he'd done it.

  But he had.

  When his hands were no longer actively trembling, he booted his illustration program and set about coming up with a logo for a local printers. At least, he set up a blank page. After that he moved the mouse around, watching the pointer flash over the scree
n. He typed in the name of the firm, and then erased it. He drew a series of shapes, and then deleted them too. He did all of this as if under time pressure, working quickly and accurately, foot tapping unconsciously on the floor.

  It would all be over in the first line, he knew. Both were easily well-acquainted enough with his handwriting to know it was him who'd written this letter to a girl with another name. They'd know before they were an inch down the page.

  He typed the firm's name again, and tried it in several typefaces. They all looked the same. He erased again.

  After that, the rest would just be the shit on the cake. Susan would read slowly through a letter that was over twice as long as the ones she normally received, seeing all the detail in his life he told her didn't exist. Isobel would see references to old times and deep friendship which she and Richard didn't have. And just as the horrible, fascinating novelty of yet another unfaithful sentence was beginning to wear off, they'd both read the other's final paragraph, and find new reserves of hate for him.

  No they fucking wouldn't. Furiously, Richard spun the mouse across the desk and stood up. He jammed his hands into his pockets and walked stiffly across the room to the other window. They wouldn't because he hadn't put the letters in the wrong envelopes. He hadn't done the checklist, but that didn't mean he'd done it wrong. It didn't mean anything.

  He walked back to the desk and tried to sit down, but was up again immediately. He took another cigarette out but before realizing there was one still burning in the ashtray, the end of the filter turning brown. He'd forgotten all about it.

  He stubbed it out viciously and lit the other. He had to do something. He couldn't tune this out. He knew he hadn't made a mistake. He knew that he was a normal, efficient human being, and that like anyone else, he'd have put the letters in the right envelope. But he couldn't remember doing so. He couldn't recall the moment clearly enough, and the harder he thought about it, the fuzzier it became.