Humbugging.

The following story has come under two titles. Firstly 'The Girl Who Hung The Moon' (it came before the illustration of my sister and I) and secondly, 'Everything You Want'.

Neither of those titles seem befitting.
Nevertheless, here is the story...

I have always considered meeting people to be like picking up a new book. Discovering a person’s name is the title of the book – and so, the “Smith’s” and “Jones’” of the world are more or less doomed to become socially dusty.

I like dusty. I am content with normal. I’d be overjoyed at dull.

Work had been boring. I had had way too much time to think. A few phone calls broke up my day, giving me the chance to use my exceptionally standard English accent to render the complainiacs remarkably less passionate about their grumbles. I had watched the clock for the last fifteen minutes of my shift and was so tired of my thoughts that I hadn’t even practiced my daily contemplation of why the clock appears to stop ticking when you look at it. Walking up the stairs to my flat I heard the buzz of people talking to the background of music – I had forgotten my flatmate, Steve, was having one of his gatherings. Organised with an excuse such as a promotion or an obscure public holiday, they were essentially his way of convincing women from work to spend time with him in a social context. What could this be for? Perhaps it was just a celebration of it being Tuesday. Whatever, I was content in my role as the pessimistic flatmate, and although I did quickly wipe my mouth on my sleeve to check there were no remains of a milk moustache (I had been drinking it from the carton on my way home) I was still in no mood to indulge in people tonight.

When you’ve had the title of the book, you get the blurb or perhaps even the first page, depending on how interesting the person considers themselves to be. Here, people will tell you things of little importance, trivial yet safe things, things which ensure the individual’s social standing to be impregnable. Letting myself into my flat which was full of people I hardly recognised, I made my way towards the kitchen. I placed my milk in the fridge and when I shut it she was there.

Her staring eyes awakened a part of me I hadn’t known for years and I wanted, I needed, to tell her everything about me and in turn discover everything about her. I wanted to read her cover to cover, re-reading her until I knew her off by heart. 

“Eva,” she said, a delicate hand extended confidently towards me.

“Jack,” I replied, to which she raised an eyebrow as if she already knew that there was more to me, “I killed a man.” I told her. I needed her to walk away then, to confirm my thoughts that I would never be able to talk to anybody about this but instead she took a slow, careful step towards me.

“Three tomatoes are walking down the street, Mummy tomato, Daddy tomato and baby tomato,”
“What?”
“The baby tomato starts lagging behind and Daddy tomato gets angry –so he squishes him and says ketchup!” She stayed close, smiling before popping a smartie in her mouth. Looking down to the paper plate she was holding I saw she had picked out all of the purple ones.

She just stood there, crunching smartie after smartie until, with another raise of her eyebrows, she walked away.

A new day:  a knock on my office door.

I called “Yes?” as invitation for her to enter. I didn’t need to look up from my desk to know who it was. She plonked herself down on the chair opposite me, assuredly but without serious imposition. Her brown leather satchel slumped against the chair leg, awaiting her next move. She seemed to charm everything and everybody around her and nobody seemed to mind.
“Why did you kill him?”
 “Why didn’t you ask me yesterday?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me,”
“But you told me that joke, the one about the-“
“The tomatoes, yes. You told me something important to you and I reciprocated.” Her voice was so level, so completely unaware of the ridiculous point she had just made that it only frustrated me more.
“I really don’t think jokes and death are quite on the same level.”

My frustration with this stranger was stunted only by the telephone ringing. All the time I was on the phone she had sat perfectly still, not a single movement, no impatient tap of a finger on the desk or a twitch of a restless foot. She was so serene, looking into her eyes I saw the part of her I had seen the previous night that had made me want to tell her everything.

This inexplicable power she had over me scared me. I was far too average for a romance like this. My life is far too regular to include a chance encounter that would change my life, and so I got out of my seat and left her sitting there in my Ikea-furnished office.

“Don’t blame you for taking lunch early,” said the security guard as I scrawled my name in the signing out book. I smiled: a sign of unity between lazy nine-to-fivers.
“Eleven thirty and not a single client,”
“Yeah,” I agreed, thoughtlessly, “not a single… wait.” I leaned over the desk and spun the monitor to face me. Sure enough my office was empty, the chair where I had left her, empty. I pressed rewind: I watched as a four inch tall, slightly pixelated version of me picked up the phone, spoke, put down the phone and then stared straight ahead, lips moving as though talking to himself: all the while, the chair opposite remained empty.

Feelings of confusion came in waves, making me feel sick. I re-wound the tape and watched it again, convinced I would see her sitting there. The security guard just sat there watching me, the way you watch the person on the bus rootling through their bag to find their keys, mesmerised by someone else’s frustration and confusion.

I hadn’t spoken for a while now. She tapped her pen impatiently on her knee, the movement breaking into the picture of the empty chair, a picture that my mind had framed and hooked up in front of me. I closed my eyes but the image remained, tattooed on the inside of my eyelid.
“Jack,” her usually calm voice was now tainted with irritation, probably because she was not doing this for me. This was not a psychological journey, as it was with most of her patients, but an investigation. A police investigation. “How did he die, Jack?”

We both knew she was already well aware of the cause of death. She would have seen the photos from the autopsy and read of his eight broken bones, countless fractures and internal bleeding. But she needed me to say it; she needed me to tell her how I hurled my car into him, how I was so overwhelmed by emotions that I just had to take it out on the next person I saw.

She took her glasses off from their perch on the end of her nose and leant forwards. Her identification card was in a plastic case, pinned to her shirt breast pocket. The weight of it pulled the material away from her body, the movement borrowed my attention. Doctor Lindsay Warren, the card read. She was smiling broadly in her photo; a contrasting appearance to the photos of the police officers, which all looked the same: broad foreheads wrinkled in contempt, thin lips and eyes empty of anything other than severity and duty. It made me wonder if she did this often, murder inquiries I mean. Her photo seemed far more suitable for home visits, or for patients to come to her home. One room at the front of the house set aside for work, decorated in various neutral tones: mellow mocha, simply pearl and Irish cream.

It is fascinating how you can feel like you have been thinking for hours yet only a few seconds have actually passed.

“You were angry Jack; you were drink driving on your emotions. That day, at the office, you finally realised Eva doesn’t exist, that she’s in your mind, Jack.” I used to thrive on the sound of my average name, how the ‘k’ reverberated for a few moments after you’d said the word, but now I hated the way she kept using it.

“Eva was in the car with me, we were arguing, she wanted me to tell her my real name and I wouldn’t. I wasn’t looking at the road.”

“We have footage from a speed camera, Jack! You were alone in the car and you were alone in the office that day.”

“I did not murder him.”

“And explain to me, if you can, why you told ‘Eva’,” she used her fingers to make quotation marks, “that you had killed a man before you actually did?”

A break in the exchange made me realise that I had been keeping my eyes shut tight. I opened them and light flooded in. My eyes streamed.

“I have to go to the bathroom,”

I did not think about where I was going but let my legs carry me along the corridor to the bathroom. I rubbed my forehead hard as if in an attempt to erase my confusion. Suddenly my head crashed into someone’s shoulder, sending paperwork and a bag of smarties all over the generic dark green carpet found in all public buildings.

“I am so sorry,” I muttered, scrambling to gather the papers together into some form of pile.

“It’s fine, really.” A polite reply and a kind attempt to save me further embarrassment. The victim of my flustered mind took the papers from me as I pointlessly tried to scrape the smarties together. “And don’t worry about that, I’ve finished with those anyway.”

She had eaten all the purple ones.

Home-away-from-home-sick.