to reach it. She clung to the banister. The paint had worn off in places. There were many layers of paint hidden beneath. Violet hoped to see them all one day. That would be his name.
And so Arthur Galbraith was born. Not exactly born, but brought into the world of imaginary existence. He was the child of a brass stair rod and a first-floor washbasin with a marble surround. They represented the outer limits of Violet’s universe. A name should mean something. His seemed apt somehow.
Violet had been thinking about Arthur Galbraith’s face again, but she was yet to be convinced by any of the faces she had devised. None of them would do. She did not ask his opinion, for he had already shown himself to be difficult and ill-tempered when it came to making a choice.
Her problem was further complicated by a small technical matter. Almost every element of his face had an ‘e’ in it somewhere and the ‘e’ on her borrowed turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter often stuck. There was an ‘e’ in ‘nose’ and ‘ear.’ There were two in ‘eye’ and ‘eyebrows’ and cheeks’ and ‘teeth’ and ‘forehead.’ It was infuriating. Every time she would have to press a small button and the top of the Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter would pop open automatically, making the interior of the machine accessible. Then she would unstick the ‘e’, replace the top, press the backspace key and start again.
Only Arthur’s chin and mouth and lips were immune from the lengthy and annoying process. But they were not a place she cared to start. She knew something of chins and mouths, but a man’s lips were unknown to her. She found herself thinking about them far more regularly than his nose. Did it matter what an imaginary explorer’s lips looked like or felt like? She would never be kissed by such a man – and ‘kissed’ had an ‘e’ in it.
Violet set Arthur Galbraith to walk upon the Great Moor. It was a place of beauty and sadness and longing and hope and regret and joy, and it would take a lifetime to walk, for some things are not as simple as distance and direction.
Arthur put his boots to good use. They were no longer stolen. They were his. He had rock and peat and plain earth beneath his feet. He had a long stride, an unknown purpose and a Great Moor stood before him. Unexplored. Uncertain. A place without a map. He would be its pen.
And as he walked a face emerged. Not a face that Violet could have imagined. It was his face. It was his to choose. And strong hands not meant for instruments and a voice that said little that it did not mean.
The son of a brass stair rod and a washbasin finally appeared on a hilltop overlooking the Great Moor and looked south and east and north and west and decided to refuse the stars their steady counsel and let love guide him. He had a long road ahead. Not straight or flat or without discomfort.
And that is where Arthur and Violet and a turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter began their journey together. Almost touching. Merely the distance of paper apart.
Matt called the day after our meeting in the wine bar. The fate of the three-seater sofa was still preying on his mind. The whole 10.37am thing had rather overwhelmed the conversation.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’
I knew who it was. We had been together for five years. Married for three. Just because we were separated now didn’t mean that I would suddenly forget, even if I wanted to.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Sorry about last night.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I wanted to see where this was going before I said anything more definite.
‘Are you busy?’
This was a typical Matt tactic. He liked to make sure that I was in the middle of doing something so that I’d have to stop doing it and give him my undivided attention. I made a mental note to find some way of quantifying his approach in a graph.
‘Just stuff,’ I said, trying not to be curt.
‘I wanted to talk to you about the sofa,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’ He said.
‘Because you always want to talk about it,’ I said.
‘Oh’ he said. He sounded small and distant and brittle.
I sighed. I couldn’t help it. This was getting ridiculous.
‘You can have the sofa. Okay? I don’t want it.’ I said.
It was the truth.
There was a pause on the line.
‘Why do you have to be such a bitch all the time,’ he said. Then he hung up.
We bought the three-seater sofa from a local secondhand furniture centre. It was hidden under a nest of tables and a glass-fronted display cabinet full of dog hair. It cost £55. I paid for it, and Matt said he would pay for his half when he got a full-time job. He had a full-time job for a while, but he didn’t pay me back. We were still 92% in love back then, so I didn’t mind that much. I minded when it suited me though. I used it against him sometimes. His unpaid half of the sofa had some value in a petty argument.
‘You still haven’t given me the money for your half of the sofa,’ I’d say.
‘Well I’ll sit on the floor then!’ he would say.
Then he would sit on the floor for about five minutes until he thought I’d calmed down. Then he would sneak back onto the sofa and hope that I hadn’t noticed. I noticed. It was a victory of sorts.
The three-seater sofa was dusty pink. It was tired-looking. Grumpy even. The zips on the cushion covers were all broken. The arms were covered in coffee stains. At least that’s what we hoped they were. It only had three casters. They were an unusual size that no one stocked anymore. We used a copy of ‘Elementary Statistics and the Role of Randomness’ to stop it from rocking backwards.
Matt liked to sleep on it in the afternoon when he was considering his future. He considered his future a lot. With his eyes closed. Gently snoring. He also got to sleep on it when our arguments weren’t quite so petty. He didn’t seem to mind. Matt and the grumpy pink sofa had some sort of connection that I didn’t fully understand. I had never slept on the sofa. Why should I? I paid for the double bed as well.
