The ABCs of Love

by Sarah Salway

  John says he can’t bear it. He just wants things back to being as they were. He says I need to find a way round this.

  See also Nostrils; Utopia

  phantom e-mails

  The first time I e-mailed myself, it was just a joke. To see what would happen. I wrote:

  Dear Verity,

  You are my life. Every time I wake up, I wish you were next to me. Nothing is worth us being apart.

  And then one click of a button and it was gone. I forgot all about it, but the next time I checked my e-mails, I felt a rush of joy when I saw there was one waiting for me in my in-box.

  It was everything I could have wanted. Brian must have seen the smile on my face because he started teasing me. I had to admit that, yes, I had just received a wonderful note. “You are my life,” I whispered to myself. For the rest of that day, everyone was nicer to me than they usually are. I think they wanted to rub a little of my joy off onto their own lives.

  I kept checking all day, but there wasn’t another e-mail. Late at night, after a bottle of wine, I went on the Internet again. By the time I got into the office in the morning, there were three e-mails waiting for me, each one as magical as the first. This has made me see what I’m missing in my life, and how easy it would be to make it happen.

  See also God; Mistaken Identity; Zero

  phone calls

  Since I’ve started receiving the e-mails, I’ve been feeling better. I’ve also had more courage about contacting John at work. I rang him up once when I knew he was in a meeting. I imagined his little office full of people talking about kitchen equipment.

  “I can’t stop wanting you,” I said. “Do you want me too?”

  He told me yes, he believed he did.

  “Would you like to make love to me now, on the carpet, with everyone looking?” I asked. He said that that would be a consideration and that he would think about it very hard when it was more convenient.

  “I’d take off all my clothes,” I said, “and climb on your lap. You’d be wearing your suit, but I’d be able to feel how much you wanted me through the material. I’d rub my bare skin all over you.”

  He said that this was definitely a matter he needed to spend more time on. He wondered if it would be possible for us to talk about it later. When we could take it further. In more depth. Perhaps there were other angles he needed to investigate.

  I put the phone down then. When we did talk about it later, he told me that he suddenly realized that he was cradling the receiver like a baby and stroking the telephone cord like it was my hair. Everyone in the room, he said, was staring at him.

  He made me promise never to do it, ever again, but that night we made love for such a long time, he missed his train home and had to get a taxi.

  See also Codes; Marathons; Teaching; Vacuuming

  pop stars

  Last week after we’d made love, John told me that when he was a teenager, people used to think he looked like David Bowie. He asked me which pop star I used to fancy when I was young. The phrase sounded so odd and old-fashioned coming from him like that. Pop star. Fancy. I wanted to giggle.

  We were in bed. John had his eyes shut, and the way he was lying against the pillow made him look as if he had a double chin, so I found a little spot on the ceiling to concentrate on instead.

  Did I like David Cassidy or Donny Osmond? he asked, because in his experience, girls usually went for one or the other. Although, of course, he went on, his eyes still shut, if a girl was really cool, she’d go for Bryan Ferry. Kate had liked . . .

  By the time I turned to him, his eyes were wide open and he was watching me.

  It’s important to be able to talk about everything, I told him. But when I said who I’d liked when I was a teenager, he said he’d never heard of him.

  I wonder if that spot on the ceiling is damp. The people above have probably let their bathwater flow over. Sometimes they have no consideration. I keep watching it now every time John and I go to bed. I could swear it’s getting bigger.

  See also Youth

  positive thinking

  My mother was a great believer in the power of positive thinking. Her idea of a self-help book would be called Buck Up and Sort Yourself Out. I tend to agree with her, so why did I spend £8.99 at lunchtime on a book called How to Keep Your Man? I can’t stop thinking about Kate. Has she no self-respect?

  See also Happiness; Imposter Syndrome

  poverty

  John says we would be very poor if we lived together. I still haven’t told him about my inheritance. Instead, I tell him that I know what it is to be poor.

  After all, my father often told the tale about how when he was young, his family didn’t have enough money to buy him any clothes so he could never leave the house. But then when he was eighteen, they saved up enough money to get him a cap so he could look out of the window.

  Actually, I don’t think that story is true. But I do believe this one. My father’s family scraped up enough money to buy him one good coat for school. They were so proud the day he went off wearing it that they all stood in the road to watch him go. But at lunchtime he didn’t come back. Eventually, my grandmother went up to the school to find him, and he was in the changing rooms crying because someone had stolen his brand-new coat. There was only one coat left hanging up, but it was too big and very, very scruffy. Because she was so cross, my grandmother made my father wear it, and his own new coat was never found.

  John’s grandmother used to make clothes for the gentry. One day she had to make jackets for the local hunt. She used what material was left over to make winter coats for her children, including John’s mother. All the other children used to tease them, but the material would never wear out because it was of such good quality. It was hunting pink.

  I held John close after he told me that story. When I think of my father now, a picture of John comes into my mind. He’s in a very big pink coat, and he’s this little shrimp, all lost and white-faced, looking out.

  See also Fashion; Indecent Exposure; Objects

  promotion

  When you are happy, good things happen to you. It’s all a question of attitude.

  We were asked for suggestions as to how we could improve the atmosphere at work. John had just rung me up to tell me he loved me. I felt like I could rule the world.

  Why not turn the downstairs storeroom into a staff café? I wrote. Bring in plates of sandwiches every lunchtime, put jugs of fresh orange juice on the tables, have coffee machines so people can help themselves to fresh coffee. We can talk to one another about work, relax, forge a communal atmosphere, even invite clients there.

  Now everyone keeps coming up and telling me what a good idea it was. The chairman even stopped me on the stairs and asked how I was enjoying my job. Brian says I’m bound to get a promotion. I just need to keep up the good work.

  John hasn’t phoned me at all today. I have just spent an hour typing out John call Verity. John call Verity, over and over again. It’s an attempt at mind reading, but in reverse. A whole pile of work I’m supposed to be getting through is lying abandoned at the back of the desk. People are starting to get cross with me. Brian keeps harrumphing at me from the other side of the room.

  The trouble with the staff café is that I will have to spend my lunchtimes at work now. I won’t be able to sneak out and meet John.

  See also Bosses; Positive Thinking; Zero

  property

  I know exactly what road John and I will live on.

  I walk down there regularly checking out our new neighbors. I’ve worked out which ones John and I will be friends with. I even plan the little dinner parties we will hold.

  Once the front door of a house in the street was left open, so I looked inside. All I could see was the hall, but that was painted a cheerful yellow color, which seemed a good sign.

  I stood there and tried to imagine just what my life could be like, if I lived there. I could hear the low murmurs of us talking in bed at night, smell the foo
d I would cook for John, taste his lips when I kissed him good morning, feel his suit jacket brush against my skin when he left each morning for work. In the background, I could even make out other voices, children’s voices, like shadows in the wind.

  After a while, a woman came out of the house, stared at me, and slammed the door shut. I felt bereft but couldn’t move. A bit later, I saw her face in the bedroom window. I knew she was wondering whether to call the police. I wanted to tell her, Don’t.

  That we would be friends soon.

  It was like the sun going out. Seeing that navy blue door shut out the bright yellow of mine and John’s future. There was something so final about it.

  See also Omens; Stalking; Utopia; Yellow

  Q

  the queen

  The Queen thinks the world smells of fresh paint because everywhere she goes is freshened up especially for her.

  John thinks I wear black lace underwear every day. He says it’s such a change from Kate, who makes no effort.

  “It’s important,” I tell him, “not to take anything for granted.”

  See also Breasts; Underwear; Zest

  the queen II

  When I was sixteen, I went to Ireland with my parents on the ferry. We had just sat down to our fish-and-chips when a loudspeaker announcement said that the Queen was on a boat nearby and that the captain would be obliged if all passengers could go up on deck to wave to her. We ran upstairs, but when we got there, it was just the Britannia with all the sailors in white saluting at us. My mother said she could see the Queen, but neither I nor my father believed her.

  We had just got back to our meal when there was another loudspeaker announcement. The Queen was really there this time, it said. We made our way up more slowly. The Queen was on a motorboat, being taken back to the Britannia at high speed. She was wearing a green coat and dress with a matching hat, and she was standing up straight in the boat, but because it was going so fast and the sea was choppy, she waved to us so oddly that she looked like a mechanical puppet.

  Later, my father said it was not her but a cutout doll, but my mother told him not to be so stupid. Nevertheless, it was, my father said, a lesson in not taking things at face value.

  When I asked him what he meant, he said that the Queen probably thought that our waving to her from the ferry was an outbreak of spontaneous applause because we loved her so much.

  I’ve thought about this since. Surely no one could be that stupid.

  Or could they?

  See also Friends; Sex; Ultimatum; Zest

  questions

  What would you do?

  John keeps asking me this. He’s talking about his children. What should he do about them? I know what he wants. He wants me to make his mind up for him. But John is a Libra. If I tell him what I think, he will immediately start to see the other side. I will be in the wrong whatever I say.

  I told him to divide a piece of paper into two and write down the pros and cons of leaving on each side. He came through hours later and said that the trouble was that the children mean everything to him. I felt he’d hit me.

  “So do I mean nothing to you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “You mean everything to me too.”

  And then he started to cry.

  See also Horoscopes; Objects; Old; Tornadoes; Utopia; Vacuuming

  quick

  John has no sense of time. In this he is just like my mother. A strange thing I have noticed is that people who have no sense of time are always talking about it. They say things like “in a minute,” “quickly,” or “I’ll get it to you soon,” but the lengths of their minutes, quicklys, and soons are very different from those in the rest of the world.

  I can’t help thinking it is deliberate. Leaving only five minutes to catch a train or bus gives the same adrenaline rush to some people as bungee jumping or walking along a high wall does to others. Whereas for most normal people being late is an inconvenience, for those like my mother and John it seems to give them a sense of power, in the same way as spending too much money or leaving a lover’s letter out where it can be read allows people to live dangerously but within the controlled limits they have set for themselves. This way, they are the architects of their own disasters.

  Once I realized this, I felt better about John. I tried to forgive my mother, too, for all the times she’d left me waiting at parties when all the other children had been picked up, but I don’t think that was the same thing. I think she really did forget about me when I wasn’t there.

  See also Illness; Utopia

  R

  railway stations

  When you are in our position, you have to be careful in public in case anyone sees you. John and I meet in the next-door town, and afterward, I get the train home. He always walks me to the station, and we shake hands. It’s hard to explain, but when I get on my train after that, I feel a holy glow emanating from me. I walk to my seat as if I’m some kind of prim secretary who dreams of one day letting her hands touch her boss’s hair as she hands him the beautifully typed notes.

  But then I sit down and think of John going back home to Kate, and I curse.

  The other day, a couple got on just when the train doors were shutting. He was about fifty, close-cut gray hair, a business suit, the sort of boxer’s face you get on men who have made it to the top the hard way. She was beautiful. In her early twenties, with honey skin and lots of long dark curls. They sat back at first, puffed out from running and giggling, but then they started to kiss. After a while, I watched his hand delve into her lap. His breath became all catchy, his eyes blurry, but then just as the whole carriage started to watch, they pulled apart. Both looked out of separate windows for a bit, but then they were drawn together again. She stood up, and he guided her by the hips to sit on his lap. All us other passengers looked at one another and smiled. It was like being in the Blitz, with their lust careering round the carriage, hitting us like rifle-shot.

  Eventually, though, they went out into the corridor, and we lost sight of them. The only way you could tell they had been there was by the briefcase and newspaper left in the luggage rack above their seats. When the train came to my station, I left by their corridor because I wanted to catch sight of them. They were pinned up against the train door, wrapped in their coats, and moving so slowly and gently that it seemed they were in a dream. I thought about it all night.

  The next day at the station, just as John went to shake my hand, I pulled him to me and kissed him properly.

  When I got on my train and took my seat, I hoped everyone in the carriage had been watching.

  See also Marathons; Toys

  reasons...

  . . . why Kate and John got married:

  She was pregnant.

  They’d known each other for years and years.

  Their parents were good friends.

  They liked the same food, the same books, films, music. It was easy.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  The usual.

  (Imagine that—Princess Kate pregnant before they got married!! I tried not to look shocked for John’s sake. Just a bit prim, so he’d know that this was something I’d never do. But then I got to thinking. What is the usual? What is the usual? Why do people get married? Especially two people who have never really loved each other.)

  See also True Romance

  relatives

  John has twenty-seven first cousins. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to come from such a large family. I have two cousins. That is enough. Even when my mother and father were alive, we didn’t see much of them. My mother made sure of that. It’s not surprising that we don’t keep in contact now. I often think that we might meet up one day and not know one another. Blood is a funny thing.

  In my magazine the other day, there was an article about odd relationships. There was one woman who first met her future husband when he was eight years old and a guest at her son’s birthday party. They didn’t marry then, of course, bu
t it’s freaky to think she must have had her eye on him all that time. Another family consisted of two sets of identical twins who got married. Their children, therefore, were genetically brother and sister even though they were really cousins.

  It makes you think, doesn’t it? I know, for instance, that your cells renew themselves after seven years, so would it be possible for your seventeen-year-old clone to marry your twenty-four-year-old self? They would be completely different people. I try to talk about all this with John, but he only starts making silly jokes. He says he has had enough of reproducing himself forever, particularly at four o’clock in the morning when his children sometimes wake him up.

  I’ve never really wanted to have children. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for my mother to have me squirming away inside her stomach. Like an alien.

  See also Only Children; Stepmothers; Thomas the Tank Engine; Underwear

  revenge

  The chairman has been bringing his dog into the office every day now. It sits underneath his desk, and Monica has even seen it sitting in the passenger seat of the chairman’s car when he goes home at night.

  It turns out that the chairman’s wife tried to poison it using some doctored bacon. She was jealous because the chairman spent all of his time with the dog, feeding it tidbits, calling it beautiful, and whispering secrets to it while fondling its ears.

  We know this because the chairman’s wife left a message at the reception desk one day saying she would have felt better if the chairman had been as besotted with their bloody au pair. Brian says he bets the bloody au pair is probably a little bit more careful about what she eats in that house these days.

  See also Dogs; Tornadoes; Vacuuming; Wobbling

  rochester

  Sally and I often talk about books.

  We are searching for role models, but so far we have not found a second wife in literature who manages to keep her husband whole and healthy. We make lists of what physical deformities we would be prepared to accept—a burned Max de Winter versus a blind Mr. Rochester. Sally says she’ll take ingrown toenails as long as he isn’t wallet-less, but I’m secretly coming to terms with the idea of a limbless, sightless, and depressed John.