The Map of Us. Jules Preston

so good on the visual appeal of the product itself,’ I said.

      ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, looking up this time. Helen crossed her arms and looked at me too.

      ‘Only 29% of respondents were entirely positive about how the snack bar looked.’

      ‘We had a few comments, too,’ Helen said before I had a chance to stop her. ‘“Looks like squirrel poo,” mostly,’ she said.

      ‘Uh-huh,’ he said. The temperature in the conference room seemed to dip a few degrees. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was being overly sensitive. Helen took the awkward silence that followed as an opportunity to whisper in my ear.

      ‘Sorry to hear that you and Matt have split up, Tilly.’

      ‘Thanks, Helen,’ I whispered back.

      Pineapple.

      ‘It must be difficult for you both,’ she said.

      ‘Yes. Thanks, Helen,’ I said.

      Pineapple.

      ‘So, did your marriage last longer than the national average, or was it slightly less?’ She sneered.

      Suddenly it all made sense. This was payback for a comment I may have been overheard making about Helen being married and divorced twice in 64.726% of the national average. It was a statistics joke. We like that sort of thing around here. It was funny at the time. Helen waited patiently for a response.

      Pineapple, I thought.

      ‘Taste profile?’ The Marketing Executive said.

      I was glad that we were moving things on. The results for visual appeal were always disappointing with any granola-type snack bar. They all looked like rabbit food, or worse. ‘Chewy’ in the name didn’t help. If it had ‘Chewy’ in the name, you could expect a further 6-8% drop in positive responses.

      ‘Loved the taste,’ I said. ‘Significant approval ratings for the taste.’

      ‘Uh-huh,’ he said writing something down.

      ‘Once they got over the fact that it looks like squirrel poo, of course,’ Helen said.

      ‘Uh-huh,’ he said drawing a line through the thing that he had just written down.

      Pineapple.

      While I tried to murder Helen with the power of my eyes, he flicked through his notes dejectedly.

      ‘So, what you’re saying is that we have a fantastic product that could reshape the market in low-fat snack bars for the health-conscious sector if only it didn’t look quite so much like squirrel excrement?’

      ‘Essentially. Yes,’ I said.

      There was no getting around it.

      ‘In a nutshell,’ Helen said, trying not to grin.

      ‘Uh-huh,’ he said.

      Pineapple, I thought.

      ‘Seedy-Pea-Nut-Slices.’ So many things to love. Just a few important things that weren’t quite right.

      A bit like Matt really.

       2 years ago (still)

      The bottle of ‘sturdy’ Rioja we had chosen tasted thin and vinegary. It wasn’t our usual choice. It clung to the side of the glass in an odd way. I swilled mine around just to have something to do with my hands.

      The table top was a slab of grey slate. It had a ring of wax where yesterday’s candle had burnt down. I didn’t pick at it. I wanted to though. I wondered how many other couples had sat where we were sitting now and had got together or broken up or talked about getting a dog or moving in together or celebrated or commiserated or decided to give it another go and had gone home hand in hand for the first time in months and made love and then separated for good. Maybe even while yesterday’s candle was burning down to a stub. I could see where today’s candle had been shoved into the candlestick holder on top of it and on top of other melted stubs for what looked like the passing of centuries.

      ‘10.37am?’ Matt said.

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘Not 10.37pm?’ he said.

      ‘No,’ I said.

      ‘Oh.’

      He looked more confused than ever. Somehow it bothered him that our marriage had come apart in the morning. Before lunchtime even. Not at night. Did it really make any difference? The end result was the same.

      We were sitting in our favourite wine bar – that wasn’t really ‘ours’ anymore – discussing who should take custody of the three-seater sofa from the living room. It had seen better days. So had we.

      ‘10.37am,’ Matt repeated absently. Like the title of a film that he had never seen, starring someone that he couldn’t quite remember.

      How could I be so exact? I had an affair. It started at 10.37am on April 22nd. It was a Thursday. I have a graph that explains why. Not why it was a Thursday – why it started at 10.37am. It’s more of a flow chart, actually. It’s on Page 5 of the report. We’ll get to that. Maybe later.

      I didn’t really want the sofa. But Matt did.

       the marriage report

      Okay. Maybe writing a report on our marriage with footnotes and a summary and a series of conclusions was another spectacularly bad idea. But that is what I did.

      Matt just wanted to blame someone and feel betrayed and hang up on me all the time. I could see his point. But I wanted something more precise. I wanted to look at the distribution of fault and the relative impacts of known and random variables. Everything could be quantified and evaluated and interpreted using samples and controls and baselines – even the ups and downs of our relationship. I wanted to make sense of it all. I wanted a number. A simple diagram. Something that I could understand at a glance.

      It was just another Bearing Foods presentation. It was no different. Not really. First, I had to identify my research aims. Then I had to gather evidence. When I had analysed all the available data, I could make informed statements and recommendations.

      I chose to use a large lever arch file for my report. Something that would accommodate items of evidence that weren’t all flat. I couldn’t think of any items that might possibly fit that category, but I wanted to be prepared for the eventuality that one might crop up.

      Matt and I had been married for three years. Our time together was like a low-fat snack bar for the health-conscious sector. A low-fat snack bar that had actually turned into something resembling squirrel poo. Now I was going to pick through the sticky ingredients with my fingers looking for answers. It was the least I could do.

       clarity

      I was in Trish Hudson’s office. Trish is my boss. She’s the head of the Statistical Analysis Department at Compass Applied Analytics. She is also quite short, so she wears irresponsibly high heels and has a blow-up cushion on her chair and wears a lot of vertical stripes because she thinks they make her look taller and thinner. They are only partially successful. She walks with a strange juddering totter because of her irresponsible shoes, and the thin vertical stripes make her look like a clump of dry grass swaying in a gale.

      I get called to Trish’s office quite a lot. I got called to her office the time that I was overheard making a comment about Helen being married and divorced twice in 64.726% of the national average. It was just a joke.