Double Texting

No sad boys near trees in this week’s story, but a bit of a content warning for creepy, obsessive behaviour. Nothing in the ‘I have been reading...’ section about handling old books with gloves, either. It seems I simply cannot keep a bit going.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

The train was a hundred miles long. You got on at the back, and you made your way down the length of it, and once you got to the front you had reached your destination. It was never delayed and it was never cancelled, and in the first dozen or so carriages, seats were plentiful. The journey, severely slowed by tucking in to let people come past the other way, took me a week. Now and again I stopped to barter with the weary, bearded men who ran the trolley service. It wasn’t the worst train I’d ever been on, all in all.

Tuesday

The day I left my job all the world’s lost things started coming to me. It started with socks in the laundry, odd socks in colours I’d never owned. Keys in my pockets for cars parked who-knows-where and houses soon to have the locks changed. Coins in a hundred currencies dropped out of my sofa and rolled along the floor. The shoebox under my bed filled up with love notes and photographs. The back seat of my car filled up with phones and laptops and important-looking folders. Clutched in my hand one morning I found a little carved bird, and a note, and I never found out what they meant.

Wednesday

You’re like a knife, she said. I thought of how I used to cook all her meals, slicing vegetables into little flowers for her. I thought of the nasty cut I got trying to open a plastic package with my teeth. I thought of all the tips bent up or broke off from being used to pry. I resolved to be more knifelike: simple, useful, true.

Thursday

The cranes swang around on the horizon. That was all they did. There was nothing to build with, and never had been. But swinging the cranes around was good fun for the bored young men they paid to do it, and the sight of them on the horizon helped us remember we were small. After everything, they couldn’t bear to let us have a clear sky or a still day. So they swang the cranes, around and around. They would do it until they fell to pieces with the bored young men still inside them.

Friday

I could charge a good price for my little bottles of shame. With a mister top or a dropper, depending on how you planned to apply it, they were terribly convenient. Everybody knows somebody who needs a little more shame. I heard from people whose spouses had stopped drinking, whose bosses had stopped screaming, whose landlords had lowered the rent. And I heard from people, too, who put a drop on their partner’s pillow just to keep them in line. That was good. It kept the supply up.

Saturday

She scrunched the letter into a loose ball and threw it into the fire. It was an electric fire, with the flames projected on a little screen, and she would have to pick the paper out later. But for the moment, it felt suitably dramatic. She turned her back and walked away, stopping at the door to decide where she should go. When she came back, the letter had opened itself out. It flickered red and orange, and by the light of those cold flames, she saw she had misread it.

Sunday

After the wreck they stayed in the lighthouse. It was the only shelter with room for them, and though they felt resentful of it for failing to save them, they were grateful for its strong walls when the winds blew again. Gray spent the days hauling scraps of their boat up onto the beach, laying them out just so, finding the grooves where his hands had once rested. He never asked what Blue was doing. She wouldn’t come out with him. One day he came back, and she had repaired the light.

I have been reading...

• Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard, a novel about family and community and secrets, what it means to keep them and what it means to let them slip. I liked this book a lot, and I hope Ridgard will pop back up with another sometime.
• Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, essential reading for anyone interested in the state of the online world, or indeed the wider economy. Doctorow’s bloggy style is sometimes a little slapdash or digressive, but he makes his case well.
• Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, my book club's Imbolc pick. A painful, powerful collection about resistance, in which hope and despair seem not opposite but interdependent.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Double Texting

They shared a smile and a wave as he passed her desk on the way out of work. She was on a call and her gestures were small, considerate of the person on the other side of the screen. He mirrored her smallness, considerate of her constraint, or making fun of her, or both. As he waited for the lift he texted: “Hope whoever you’re stuck talking to lets you go soon!” She reacted with a middle finger that changed to crossed fingers a few seconds later, and he smiled again, picturing her fumbling with her phone held just out of frame.

They didn’t message again that evening, and he liked that. It felt easy and secure, to let a fingers-crossed emoji stand for “good night” and “see you tomorrow”. There was a time he looked for reasons to text her, and resented other friends when his phone buzzed from them instead of her. Now there was nothing to fear or test or prove. When her status showed as “online”, it was like sitting in companionable silence. He slept without trying and dreamed unremarkable dreams.

The next day he traded a few words with her in the kitchen, normal stuff about his cat and her son and their similar behavioural issues. In the afternoon meeting she took his side when it seemed nobody would, and he sent a surreptitious “thanks x” under the table. Later, she replied “of course :)”, and he loved that she said it even though she didn’t need to.

That night he sent her a photo of the book he was reading, with the caption “Should I recommend this to you or did you already recommend it to me?”, and she replied “pleeeease don’t recommend any more books I’ve got way too many to read already”, so he said “Tough, I’m officially and formally recommending it”. She sent back an eye-roll emoji accompanying a photo of a pile of books. He laugh-reacted and wrote “Sorry, I don’t make the rules” and closed the chat without looking at the titles on the spines.

The next day she wasn’t at her desk and he messaged to say he hoped she was OK. She wrote back a little too quickly and put three hearts at the end to show she appreciated his concern, and that annoyed him. So he opened up his archived chats and found the conversation with the other woman and told her what she had done wrong, and the other woman quickly replied to apologise and promise that it wouldn’t happen again. After that he felt a little ashamed of how he had reacted, but he wasn’t sure it was appropriate to say sorry to the other woman to make himself feel better, so he just deleted the message with the hearts. She didn’t come in for the rest of the day, and they didn’t text each other either.

The silence kept up for a few days longer, although she returned to work and they exchanged a few words there. It wasn’t that he was angry, and if he was angry, it was with the other woman. But the easy trust between him and her was missing, just for now. When he thought about texting her, he thought about what she might be doing at that moment, whether it was an appropriate time, if she would think it was weird, the nervous way he did with everyone else. On the fourth day, she sent a photo: her and her son posing with an alpaca, and he responded, face with hearts for eyes, but as he did so he noticed the picture’s Instagram squareness and wondered why she would send this to him, who had never met her son. For a time, small smiles in the office marked the boundary of their relationship, the way they always had before.

These were painful days for him. He remembered dreaming as a child that he was setting off on holiday, before waking and trudging to school. He hoped that somebody would notice he was down and ask him about it, though he had nothing to say if they did. He ate an entire box of chocolate breakfast cereal and tried several times to read a book. Once, he had broken a tooth, and for a while it hurt so much if he chewed on that side that he would almost faint. But it wasn’t the pain he couldn’t bear: it was the need to avoid it so carefully every time he ate. The thinking so much about something that ought to need no thought at all. This felt like that.

The thaw came, as it always did, from a moment’s forgetting. Just long enough to send her a photo of the cat without thinking: the one thoughtless step it took to fall back into another reality. From there, they could pick back up as though nothing had ever happened. And when they did, he found he could write to the other woman too, in the oblique style he had always favoured, like the other woman was a friendly ear helping him figure things out. “It’s weird how she doesn’t talk about her husband. It’s like she thinks I’m into her and she doesn’t want to upset me. It’s almost like she feels scared of me sometimes. I wish she felt more comfortable talking about him. What do you think?” A few days later, she mentioned a cake her husband had made, just in passing.

There were times, during those painful periods where the dream slipped, that he wondered whether he and the other woman could be true friends instead, one day. But then things went back to normal, and he remembered how much better normal was.

On her birthday he sent her two happy birthdays, one in the work group chat, one just to her. Then he copied the one that was just to her and scrolled down the list of chats until he found her name again. It was a different contact photo, her with a false moustache and an exaggerated frown, and it hurt him to see it but he made himself look a moment longer than he thought he could stand. When he opened the chat there were nearly as many datestamps as messages, all months apart: functional exchanges about moved meetings and forgotten laptop chargers, and that one brief conversation about a film she recommended. That had been two years ago. He pasted his birthday greeting into the message box, looked at the photo again, and closed the app without pressing send.

On a busy day in November, he returned to his desk with a cup of coffee and saw he hadn’t locked his computer. On one screen, his email, doubtless in breach of the data security procedures nobody followed. On the other, WhatsApp Web, open to an innocuous group chat but with her name next in the chats list. Her name, with the wrong photo and the first words of a message she had never sent him. He closed it with such adrenaline speed that afterwards he wasn’t sure he had really seen it. But the churning in his guts, the itching in his throat, told him he had. He slipped into his chair and started clicking around his emails, giving his shaking hands a reason to move, reading each subject line in turn to steady his breathing.

He was split in two: one of him convinced that she had seen it, or that someone had; the other assured that nobody looks that closely at their colleagues’ screens, that he hadn’t been gone long, that nobody was interested enough in him to snoop on his messages. And there she was, across the office, looking perfectly relaxed, not even glancing his way, not pulling aside her manager for a private meeting or on the phone to HR.

He calmed, slowly. His confident self was winning out. To be discovered was impossible, because the discovery was unimaginable. This thing he had done was so absurd as to be beyond suspicion. His breath settled and the world began to open around him again. He changed her surname in his contacts, sent the other woman a photo of a stranger scavenged from Google Images, and ten minutes later he left his desk again, WhatsApp Web on full display so that prying eyes could realise their mistake.

That night he wanted to text her. He felt scared and shamed and alone and he just wanted his friend. But when he opened up his phone and saw that new name and that stranger’s face, he felt more scared and more shamed and more alone. And this time, he knew there might be no thaw. They might stay like this forever, as she drifted down his list of recent chats until she sank out of sight. And he would keep paying the other woman, every month, no longer buying an illusion but only the hope of one.

He began to wish that she had seen it. To be discovered, to be humiliated and fired and shunned, that would at least have some solidity. Perhaps he should confess. But no, confession would be cowardly. Dragging her into the mess he had made of himself. She would be upset, afraid, revolted. Keeping his secret was the one good thing he had ever done. He would stay hidden, to spare her from seeing him.

The winter passed slowly at first. He supposed he had always known the way a thing’s absence could take up so much more space than the thing itself, but he had never felt it like this. Though he knew how it would look, he had never thought her a big part of his life. It was a silly thing, really, just to make the days a little easier. The other woman had told him it didn’t seem strange to her, that everyone needed this kind of connection to survive and if you weren’t getting it the usual way it was only natural to seek it out. He had never tried to make her a lover, or a best friend. Just a friend. Some days he hadn’t even thought of her. Now he thought of her every moment, like she had barbs to tear him open on the way out.

Jammed in with his obnoxious family, he just wanted to wish her a merry Christmas. He even took out his phone to do it. But she wasn’t there any more, just the imaginary person he had created to hide her. He could have her back, he knew. He could message the other woman, and the other woman would change the picture straight away and reassure him that it was all OK and he wasn’t hurting anyone. She would wish him a merry Christmas back, and a happy new year, and put just the right emoji after “see you next year!” to make him feel like she was really looking forward to it. But it was Christmas Day. He couldn’t ask all that of the other woman on Christmas Day.

On the 29th of December he tried to write her a letter. He hadn’t written a letter for fifteen years, but there was some old writing paper in a drawer at his mother’s house and one of the pens on the kitchen counter worked. He wrote “I’m sorry” and stopped. He didn’t know what came next, and it felt like there were eyes over his shoulder. He looked at the writing and found he couldn’t read it: it was tight and small, written the way a child says sorry, too quietly to hear. He wrote it again, in bigger letters, then bigger again and bigger again, then he folded the paper over before anyone could see it and took it down the road to a public bin.

When the year turned, he texted her “Happy new year x” and blocked her number. He sent the other woman a thousand pounds, cancelled his standing order, and blocked her too.

By April he felt much better. They still exchanged their little smiles and pleasantries, but it didn’t seem to matter so much now. Before there had always been an idea of more, something he grasped for and never reached. Now he knew what less felt like. Whether they were friends of acquaintances or colleagues, it was a little shred of warmth snatched back from the emptiness. And yet he felt it would be the same even without what little relationship they had, even if they never saw each other again: there was a warmth that came just from knowing that the world had people like her in it. He was trying to bring that feeling to everyone, now, without asking for anything else.

Early in June, they were talking in the office kitchen about something inconsequential when she picked up her mug, and smiled, and spoke a little strangely, like it was rehearsed.

“Hey, so,” Annie said, “we’re having a barbecue at the weekend. You should come. It’s nothing fancy, no special occasion or anything, just, you know, burgers and beers in the back garden. But it would be really nice to have you there.”

And he smiled back, and he thanked her, and he made his excuses. As he walked back to his desk, he thought he felt his phone buzz.