She hadn’t imagined how fast the whole block would be worked away by her efforts. This was partly because the pen-and-paper thing was like life — mistakes were permanent. If you wanted to end up with something you wouldn’t be sorry to show someone, then you had to destroy attempt after attempt and keep starting again.
Which isn’t much like life, actually. Unless the drinking — the coming round again and drinking again and passing out and then coming round again — unless that’s an attempt at tearing up your own stupidity. Tearing and beginning and tearing and beginning — forever.
But I am here now and trying to start again. Forever. Different kind of forever.
Today. Forever inside today — I’m told I can pop it all, my everything, inside these twenty-four hours and that it won’t be too big to grip. I try to believe this in the AA way. I’m trying all kinds of things. I am.
I am sitting on a plastic chair and trying to listen while a wife goes on about her son getting drunk at a party for his first time and being terrified he’ll now do that every night. This doesn’t apply to me in any way — I won’t have children.
I do understand being terrified.
I can be terrified of paper.
For Mr August, she’d torn up so much paper. There had been so many tries for a clean start. For Corwynn August. And all the attempts at that first letter were the hardest. They felt like for ever.
I wanted to answer you, because
When you wrote you made me happy
When you wrote it made me happy
You make me happy
I had to answer
She almost gave up. Also for ever. After all, he’d written that she needn’t answer if she didn’t want to. Meg was paying him for letters, they would arrive anyway. But she did want to answer. Answering Mr August was as right as picking up the phone in that golden moment had been right — it was a right thing to do. She’d felt that for lots of reasons — most of them pathetic, but still there all the same.
And there was the forward-slanting shape to his words, this rush in his handwriting — and his choice of pale blue paper. And it seemed, when she read him, that he was being kind to her — which is what she’d paid for — but it also seemed that he didn’t have a friend, that how he was and what he was doing with these letters had been partly caused by not having a friend.
And I’m not the most wonderful human being — I know that — but a person can’t do well if they haven’t got anything friendly they can be with. Any friend to keep you going is what you need — that’s maybe not great, but it’s better than no one.
I am better than no one.
I could be really a step up from no one and all right.
And kind people should be able to live, they should be helped with that.
Finally, his third letter had been freshly opened and in her hands, was warm there and clear and had this decency, which was unusual and made you think you would like to have more of that around. And it made her want very much, this time, to write something she would send him.
She’d bought a dictionary from the Oxfam shop in case any faults of spelling might shame her. Her brain felt out of use and as if it would betray her in that area. For this attempt, she’d sat at the kitchen table, which she had wiped down and then dried and then dried again. She’d put out the paper again, tapped the edges of the little stack to make it neat again. She’d sat — on a wooden chair, not plastic. Her mother’s chair.
Meg’s thumb and forefinger, her fist, her forearm — all of her — was used to keyboards, typing on a screen. If she used paper at all then she was only scribbling lists and notes. And so the special paper — the downy texture of its skin — and the good pen … She could only make them produce unpleasant loops and scratches, unreliable forms that hadn’t been part of her since she left school and which had compressed and deteriorated. Everything she wrote looked fraudulent, but made plain the underlying truth — that here was a scrawling drunk, wet writing.
I have the hand of a woman whose cheques came back from the bank — refused. And not often due to lack of funds — it was mostly just that signing my name in the usual way was now beyond me. I could no longer write my name. Not every day, not on demand. Some accountant, me … Some human being …
That whole evening when she first tried to write a letter in the kitchen — it had crumpled into heaps around her. She had nothing but abandoned pages and a sore forearm. She’d written for longer and therefore gone more astray, made more errors. The effort had actually made her muscles sting — the unaccustomed effort.
Like at school — in exams, tests.
This is not a test.
Oh, yes it is, though. Yes, it is.
Everything’s a fucking test — forever.
Then she’d closed her eyes.
She’d thought that there must be some family tradition, some sweep and dip of every pen, some length of arm and pace of blood that meant she could write a fucking letter, one letter, be another woman of her family who sent words out in envelopes to please those she cared for.
Those she loved.
This one she loves.
We’ve got a tradition of paper and love.
Which I do, I do — I do believe. I did then and I do more now. And that can be forever.
It was almost midnight when she’d let some part of herself wade, or swim, or run out into a real attempt to tell him something — full effort — and had felt this rising thin coldness move across her, this strangely penetrating contact which seemed to shock. But it felt clean — wide and high and clean. She was in this new and wide and high and clean space where she would speak to Mr August and be true.
Then she’d opened her eyes.
Then she’d written down what she believed he ought to know — only that.
Dear Mr August,
You are dear and don’t make any mistake about that because I don’t and don’t let anyone treat you badly because they shouldn’t. You’re dear and if you forget then I’ll remember. I don’t forget.
I go about my days and I have what you write in my head all the time. It’s sweet. It’s serious and sweet.
Forgive me for sending this, but you mentioned that I could if I wanted and I do.
You’re a good man. I can tell.
Truly.
I think of you going about your days and being in your suit and busy. I hold you in mind. And I hope everything is gentle for you. It sounds as if it’s not, or not gentle enough. Do take care.
You said I might send you a photo, but I don’t have any good ones. I don’t think good ones are likely, not really. It’s maybe best if we keep on like this.
The kitchen had swayed in and out of focus as she thought — whole slabs and staggers of time simply falling away between one sentence and the next. The night had turned to morning when she’d done — and all she’d managed to produce was two sides of a single page, filled up with cramped and worried ink.
I got this prickle on my neck, as if he had already started reading, reading me — silly. Embarrassing.
She’d fought to keep her lines level across and across and across that cream-coloured oblong of paper, smooth as a new bed sheet and the shape of a window looking out, the shape of an invitation to look in. She was turning on all the lights that she could — she was trying to be honest. That meant he would really be able to see.