The Map of Us. Jules Preston

Whatever it’s called.

       Have to start again.

       Bollocks.

       Idiot.

       Don’t have to start again.

       Just make the whole thing smaller.

       Done it before.

       What time is high tide?

       Should have done a bloody dolphin.

       Idiot.

       N

      Abby was standing just inside the school gates. She had pen on her uniform. Asha Jackson did it. Abby didn’t mind. Asha was her friend. They sat next to each other in class. Not all the time though. Sometimes she sat next to Francesca Drinkwater. She had long hair. Abby didn’t have long hair. She had short hair. It was easier for her mum.

      Abby was standing with a teacher. Abby didn’t know what the teacher’s name was. She was new. She wasn’t really a teacher. Not yet. She was something else. Abby didn’t know what.

      Abby was getting bored of waiting. Everyone else had gone home. It was just her and the teacher that wasn’t a teacher yet. Abby wanted to sit down. And something to drink.

      Another teacher came out and told them both to come back inside. She said it like she didn’t want Abby to hear, even though Abby was standing right there in front of her. She was called Mrs Whittle. She was the deputy headmistress.

      Abby’s mother wasn’t coming to collect her.

      Abby was six.

       boots

      At first Violet North sent her imaginary hero to sea, but it did not sit well with him. The blank expanse of blue water was not to his liking. The food was stale. His cabin was compact and stuffy. It was too near the engine room to sleep. The metal plates of the hull gathered condensation that seeped into his bunk. He shared the cabin with a fellow traveler who had bad dreams and tied his boots to his wrist so they would not be stolen. He could hear the cargo shifting. He worked his passage as far as the Azores and then disembarked, tired and disillusioned.

      Violet offered him a better cabin, but he would not leave the comfort of the shore. She made him the Captain of a merchant ship. And a smuggler. And a retired Admiral. But he would not go. He found cheap lodgings and ate plump grilled sardines and drank green wine, and as the sun dipped he stood on the harbour wall and wondered what it was he would do next.

      Violet sent off for a book to keep up with him. It was in Portuguese. Things could not continue this way.

      She gave him boots. They were stolen from his companion in the cabin. She had invented them. They were hers to steal. They did not fit, so she wrote that they were another size. That was better. He liked the boots more than he had liked the food onboard ship. He went for a walk to try them out.

       oversight

      Violet left him to walk in stolen boots for some time. She did not want a repeat of his disastrous voyage at sea. He was not turning out to be the man she had thought she imagined. Not at all. He had a mind of his own and a temperament that was combustible and a face she had not yet had the delicacy to finalise. His stride was long, and he had the hands of a violin player, or perhaps a pianist, and a voice that had not yet been tested. It was not until he had gone some several miles into an unwritten wasteland that she realised she had sent him on his way without a name. It was an oversight that she sought to quickly remedy.

      Violet thought of her father, but his name would not do. He was a cruel man who had shunned her and stayed away and led a life elsewhere that did not include a daughter who could not walk far and whose frailty was a downright disappointment. She did not wish to recall his name. Or the name of her brother who pinched and pushed and kicked and dropped things from a height. Sharp things. Heavy things. Just because her legs did not work did not mean that she could not feel.

      There were other names. Many. She wrote a list. And all the while a man with an uncertain face walked away from her into a shapeless void that had not yet been typed.

       name

      Violet’s house had four floors and an attic. It was detached and made of hard white bricks and was surrounded by a large garden that was already beginning to look unkempt and overgrown. There were 93 steps inside. The staircases were narrow with painted banisters and fluted spindles. Some of the spindles were broken or missing. The staircase from the ground floor to the first floor was carpeted. The rest were bare boards. The carpet was held in place by brass stair rods made by Galbraith & Sons of Edinburgh. That would be his name.

      The washbasin in the first-floor bathroom was manufactured by Arthur & Co. It sat on a cast iron stand and had a white marble surround. There were 14 steps and a small landing between the ground floor and the bathroom. It took Violet five minutes 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.

       kissed

      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.

       distance of paper

      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.