by A. S. Hatch
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.
