10

   Leon

Me: You could have found each other again. Love finds a way, Mr Prior! Love finds a way!

Mr Prior is unconvinced.

Mr Prior: No offence, lad, but you weren’t there – that’s not how it worked. Of course, there were lovely stories, girls who thought their lads were long dead, then came home to find them traipsing up the path in their uniform, fresh as a daisy . . . but for every one, there were hundreds of stories of lovers who never came back. Johnny’s probably dead, and if he’s not, he’s long since married to some ­gentleman or lady somewhere, and I’m forgotten.

Me: But you said he wasn’t on that list.

I’m waving a hand at the list of war dead I printed, unsure why I’m pushing this point so hard. Mr Prior hasn’t asked to find Johnny; he was just pining. Reminiscing.

But I see a lot of elderly people here. I’m used to reminiscing; I’m used to pining. Felt this was different. I felt Mr Prior had unfinished business.

Mr Prior: I don’t think so, no. But then, I’m a forgetful old man, and your computer system is a new-fangled thing, so either of us could be wrong, couldn’t we?

He gives me a gentle smile, like I’m doing this for me, not him. Look closer at him. Think of all the nights when I’ve arrived to chatter about visitors from other patients, and have seen Mr Prior sitting quietly in the corner, hands in his lap, face folded in neat wrinkles like he’s trying hard not to look sad.

Me: Humour me. Tell me the facts. Regiment? Birthplace? Distinctive features? Family members?

Mr Prior’s little, beady eyes look up at me. He shrugs. Smiles. It folds his papery, age-spotted face, shifting the tan lines like ink on his neck, left there from decades of shirt collars of precisely the same width.

He gives a slight shake of the head, like he’ll tell someone later how barmy these modern nurses are, but starts talking all the same.

*

Thursday morning. Ring Mam for short, difficult conversation on bus.

Mam, bleary: Is there news?

This has been customary greeting for months.

Leon: Sorry, Mam.

Mam: Shall I call Sal?

Leon: No, no. I’m dealing with it.

Long, miserable silence. We wallow in it. Then,

Mam, with effort: Sorry, sweetheart, how are you?

Return home afterwards to find pleasant surprise: home-baked flapjack on sideboard. It’s filled with colourful dried fruit and seeds, like Essex woman cannot resist clashing colours even in food, but this seems less objectionable when I see the note beside the tray.

Help yourself! Hope you had a good day night. Tiffy x

An excellent development. Will definitely endure high levels of clutter and novelty lamps for three hundred and fifty pounds per month and free food. Help myself to large slice and settle down with it to write to Richie, filling him in on Holly’s condition. She’s ‘Knave Girl’ in my letters to him, and a bit of a caricature of herself – sharper, snarkier, cuter. I reach for more flapjack without looking, filling page two with descriptions of the stranger Essex-woman items, some of which are so ridiculous I think Richie won’t believe me. An iron in the shape of Iron Man. Actual clown shoes, hung on the wall like a work of art. Cowboy boots with spurs, which I can only conclude she wears regularly, looking at how worn they are.

Notice absently, as I fiddle with the stamp, that I have eaten four slices of flapjack. Hope she really meant ‘help yourself’. While biro is in hand, scribble on back of her note.

Thanks. So delicious I accidentally ate most of it.

Pause before finishing the note. Feel I need to repay her in something. There is really hardly any flapjack remaining in tray.

Thanks. So delicious I accidentally ate most of it. Leftover mushroom stroganoff in fridge if you need dinner (on account of having hardly any flapjack left). Leon

Better make mushroom stroganoff now.

*

That was not the only note left for me this morning. There’s this one on the bathroom door.

Hi Leon,

Would you mind putting the toilet seat down please?

I’m afraid I was unable to write this note in a way that didn’t sound passive-aggressive – seriously, it’s something about the note form, you pick up a pen and a Post-it and you immediately become a bitch – so I’m just styling it out. I might put some smiley faces to really hammer the thing home.

Tiffy x

There are smiley faces all along the bottom of the note.

I snort with laughter. One of the smiley faces has a body and is pissing towards the corner of the Post-it. Wasn’t expecting that. Not sure why – I don’t know this woman – but hadn’t imagined she had much of a sense of humour. Maybe because all her books are about DIY.

11

   Tiffy

‘That is ridiculous.’

‘I know,’ I say.

‘That was it?’ Rachel yells. I flinch. Last night I drank a bottle of wine, panic-baked flapjack, and barely slept; I’m a little fragile for shouting.

We’re sitting in the ‘creative space’ at work – it’s like the other two Butterfingers Press meeting rooms, except annoyingly it doesn’t have a proper door (to convey a sense of openness), and there are whiteboards on the walls. Somebody used them once; now the notes from their creative session are ingrained in dried-out whiteboard marker, totally incomprehensible. Rachel has printed out the layouts we’re meeting to discuss, and they’re spread out across the table between us. It’s the bloody Make a Stir baking book, and you can really tell I was hungover and in a rush when I edited this the first-time around.

‘You’re telling me that you see Justin on a cruise ship and then he gives you an I want to fuck you stare and then you go on about your business and don’t see him again?’

‘I know,’ I say again, positively miserable.

‘Ridiculous! Why didn’t you go looking for him?’

‘I was busy with Katherin! Who, by the way, gave me an actual injury,’ I tell her, yanking my poncho out of the way to show her the angry red mark where Katherin pretty much stabbed my arm mid-demonstration.

Rachel gives it a cursory look. ‘I hope you brought her manuscript delivery date forward for that,’ she says. ‘Are you sure it was Justin? Not some other white guy with brown hair? I mean, I imagine a cruise ship is—’

‘Rachel, I know what Justin looks like.’

‘Right, well,’ she says, throwing her arms out wide and sending layouts sliding across the table. ‘I can’t believe this. It’s such an anticlimax. I really thought your story was going to end with sex in a cabin bunk! Or on the deck! Or, or, or in the middle of the ocean, on a dinghy!’