not sleeping. Not really. I sleep for an hour, then I wake up and listen. I’m not sure what I hope to hear. Breathing maybe. The bed feels wrong. Not empty so much as at the wrong angle. Too flat. I’m used to Matt being there. I told him we should have got a futon in the first place, but he didn’t listen.
If I do get to sleep, I don’t dream. Nothing. Not even fleeting glimpses. I have tried eating strong cheese before bed. And spicy food. It didn’t work. Not in the way I hoped for anyway.
I miss dreaming. I used to dream. I don’t know where my dreams have gone. I hope it’s only a temporary thing. I hope they come back to me. Maybe they are unhappy, too? Maybe my dreams are having trouble adjusting?
I was going to draw a graph for the report, but I couldn’t see the point. There was nothing to show.
Matt called back an hour later.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
I didn’t say anything for a while.
That’s when he hung up again.
Great.
We’ve been having a lot of conversations like that. Not really conversations. Single words followed by about a thousand miles of tense silence. ‘Sorry’ was fairly common. We’ve both said it. I’ve said it more. Not that I’m counting or anything.
We used to a talk a lot. Nothing profound. Just normal stuff. Endlessly.
I miss it and I don’t.
Sometimes I wanted to talk about things that mattered to me. That didn’t happen so often. That took preparation and timing. Maybe a takeaway. Or a rented DVD from the corner shop. And a bottle of wine. Always a bottle of wine. Or two.
I had to pay for the preparation. Sometimes it worked. I couldn’t always make him listen though. That’s where the timing came in. After the takeaway was normally too soon. After the film had finished and Matt had watched all the special features and deleted scenes and alternate endings – that was my chance. After the bottle of wine was too late.
I don’t buy as much wine now. Or takeaways. I haven’t rented a DVD since he left.
I lied about the wine. I still buy about the same amount. I just get better wine, and it lasts a lot longer.
I’m getting used to the quiet. It’s hard. I talk to myself. There’s no one else.
I decided early on that the centrepiece of my research would be a detailed questionnaire. It would be a paper-based document of as many pages as were necessary. I had a large lever arch folder to fill.
I knew that the answers to certain questions would carry more weight than others, so it would be subdivided into several different sections that I would score separately when it was complete.
I would call it ‘The Compatibility Index.’ It sounded great. I wrote it down on a piece of paper with a purple felt tip pen. It looked great, too. So I outlined it in yellow pen. Then I drew little green stars around the outline. Then I drew larger red stars around the green stars. Then I filled the space between the inner green stars and the outer red stars with small orange hearts. The I drew a rainbow in the background with all the wrong colours and realised I had probably gone too far. It was a mess. My brother was good with pens. I wasn’t. Maybe I was being overly critical? I reminded myself that if Jack had drawn the same thing it would all be blue, including the rainbow, which would rather defeat the object.
I got out another piece of paper and wrote ‘The Compatibility Index’ again, this time in ordinary pen. It looked sad, like a room after you take down all the party decorations. It could not be helped. I punched some holes in the sheet of paper and clipped it inside the vast empty folder. That was even worse. Now it looked sad and lonely, like a room full of decorations when no one shows up to the party. I knew that feeling. I’ve had birthdays like that. Let’s not go there.
I stuck the messy rainbow picture on the wall by my desk. The tape would probably tear the wallpaper off when I tried to take it down, but it didn’t matter. It was my flat, and I didn’t like it all that much anyway.
I liked the little orange hearts best. I went to get some chocolate. I was having fun already. Yeah. How hard could it be?
I haven’t always been good with numbers. For a long time, I had a disagreement with the numbers 3 and 5. They looked exactly the same to me. It sounds stupid. But however hard I looked I could not tell the difference between them. I tried. I practiced writing them down and always got them wrong. Reversed. Mirrored. Substituted one for the other. I wrote whole pages of perfectly formed numbers only to discover they were not the numbers I thought they were. My brother used to laugh at me. He was older. It was his job to laugh and point and call me names and make me the object of his ridicule. Jack wasn’t good at numbers either. His disagreement ran much deeper. He had a problem with all of them. They were a foreign language to him.
Jack liked coloured pencils. I liked coloured pencils too, but I couldn’t get them to do the things he could. He made coloured pencils sing. I made them squawk. He could do the same with felt pens and crayons and chalk and poster paint. He was rarely without colour. On his hands or face. Under his fingernails. On his clean shirt. If he could not find paper or a wall to draw on, he drew on his trousers. Every six months my parents had to buy a new washing machine. And more trousers. I liked trousers, too.
Katherine was not like us. Not ever. She liked dresses. With flowers. She brushed her hair and wore socks.
I failed exam after exam. Dates of important events muddled. Sums confused and incomplete. The world conspired against me. Everything had a 3 or a 5 in it. Or both.
Then one day it stopped. Just like that. 3 and 5 were suddenly not the same any more. They were different. Individual. Unique looking. I don’t know how it happened. I was eleven. Nearly. I remember. It was the same day that Mr Everson from across the road backed his caravan over our tortoise. He said it was an accident. I don’t know if the two things are linked somehow. I doubt there is a correlation. Nothing that I can prove now anyway.
Helen had been in my office again. I could tell. I don’t leave traps or anything. That would be childish. I used to though. I could tell because there was a card waiting for me on my desk. It had ‘I Am Sorry’ written on it in silver glitter with a picture of a sad hamster holding a wilting daisy. It wasn’t signed. I knew it was from Helen. She left the price on the back.
Helen and I have a love hate relationship that is heavily skewed towards the loathe and detest end of the spectrum. Apparently I have a better office than her. It has a window that overlooks the canal. The canal is a toxic slick of greeny-brown
