The Map of Us: The most uplifting and unmissable feel good romance of 2018!. Jules Preston
was the truth.
There was a pause on the line.
‘Why do you have to be such a bitch all the time,’ he said. Then he hung up.
We bought the three-seater sofa from a local secondhand furniture centre. It was hidden under a nest of tables and a glass-fronted display cabinet full of dog hair. It cost £55. I paid for it, and Matt said he would pay for his half when he got a full-time job. He had a full-time job for a while, but he didn’t pay me back. We were still 92% in love back then, so I didn’t mind that much. I minded when it suited me though. I used it against him sometimes. His unpaid half of the sofa had some value in a petty argument.
‘You still haven’t given me the money for your half of the sofa,’ I’d say.
‘Well I’ll sit on the floor then!’ he would say.
Then he would sit on the floor for about five minutes until he thought I’d calmed down. Then he would sneak back onto the sofa and hope that I hadn’t noticed. I noticed. It was a victory of sorts.
The three-seater sofa was dusty pink. It was tired-looking. Grumpy even. The zips on the cushion covers were all broken. The arms were covered in coffee stains. At least that’s what we hoped they were. It only had three casters. They were an unusual size that no one stocked anymore. We used a copy of ‘Elementary Statistics and the Role of Randomness’ to stop it from rocking backwards.
Matt liked to sleep on it in the afternoon when he was considering his future. He considered his future a lot. With his eyes closed. Gently snoring. He also got to sleep on it when our arguments weren’t quite so petty. He didn’t seem to mind. Matt and the grumpy pink sofa had some sort of connection that I didn’t fully understand. I had never slept on the sofa. Why should I? I paid for the double bed as well.
I’m 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