The drawer

Fiction, about two adults over 18. A hairbrush, a ribbon, a card and a cheap kitchen timer, and what the removal men will never know about the box they are carrying.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I have done the whole house except this drawer. Books, boxed. Kitchen, boxed, apart from four mugs and the kettle. The loft took a weekend and produced two bags for the tip and a photograph of my mother that I have propped against the skirting board because I cannot decide where it goes.

This is the bottom drawer of the chest on my side of the bed, and I have been walking past it since Tuesday.

The hairbrush is at the front, which means somebody put it back in a hurry, and that somebody was me, because he is meticulous and I am not.

It is oval, dark wood, and it cost four pounds fifty in a chemist in Haywards Heath in the year we moved here. I have never once used it on my hair. There is a chip out of the handle from the night it went into the radiator, which happened because I flinched and knocked it out of his hand, and we both watched it bounce and then laughed so hard that the whole evening had to be started again from the beginning.

That is the thing nobody puts in the books. Half of it is funny. We have stopped in the middle of things because of the cat, because of a delivery, because he said something in a voice that was meant to be stern and came out like a Radio 4 continuity announcer. Once because I got hiccups.

I hold it and it is a four pound hairbrush and it is also eleven years, and those two facts sit side by side without arguing.

Under it, the ribbon. Navy, about a foot long, folded in three.

It came off a box of chocolates his sister brought at Christmas, the year I was made redundant. I was not good that winter. I was doing the thing where you are extremely capable in the day and then lie awake from two until four with your heart going, and I would not talk about it, because I had decided that being made redundant was not a thing a grown woman was allowed to be flattened by.

He tied it round my wrist one evening in January. Loosely. It did not restrain anything, it could not have restrained a cat, and he said something like: while that is on, none of it is your problem. Half an hour. Then I will take it off and you can have it all back.

I have never told him what that did. I am not sure I could have, at the time. Somebody looked at the mess I was in and did not try to fix it or reason with it, and instead offered to hold it for thirty minutes, and thirty minutes turned out to be exactly long enough to remember that I was a person rather than a situation.

We used it perhaps ten times over two years. It is a piece of ribbon off a box of chocolates. If I dropped it in the street nobody would pick it up.

Then the card, and this is the one I have been walking past the drawer to avoid.

It is a bad card. A watercolour of a harbour, blank inside, the sort of thing you buy in a garden centre in a pack of eight. His handwriting, which slopes backwards.

I got it wrong. I am sorry. I will not do that again and you were right to stop it. Whatever you want to do next, including nothing, is fine with me. I love you.

March, six years ago. He went too far. Not catastrophically. Nobody went to hospital and I have friends who would say I was making a fuss. What happened was that I said the word and he did not stop instantly, he stopped about two seconds later, and in the ordinary run of things two seconds is nothing.

It was not nothing. Something went out of the room and did not come back for three months.

I could not explain it to him at the time and I made a poor job of trying. What I understood later was that the entire arrangement rested on one thing, and the thing was not trust in the general sense that people mean when they say it at weddings.

It was much more specific. It was: if I say the word, the world stops. That is the whole contract. Everything else, the hairbrush, the ribbon, all of it, is decoration on top of that one clause, and for two seconds the clause did not hold.

He did not argue. That is the part I want to put down properly. He did not explain, or tell me he had been about to stop anyway, or point out that two seconds is nothing. He said, "I know what happened," and he went and bought a terrible card from a garden centre, because he is not a man who can say things out loud but he can write four lines and leave them on a worktop.

We did nothing for three months. Then we talked, properly, several times, and changed two things about how we do it, and started again slowly like people learning to drive.

I kept the card. I had not re-read it until today and I do not know whether keeping it was healthy or whether it was a small stone I wanted to be able to put my hand on. Possibly both.

The timer is a plastic egg thing, white, ninety-nine pence, from the shop at the end of the road that closed in 2019.

It is the most used object in the drawer and the least dramatic. Twenty minutes, set on the windowsill in the bedroom, and until it goes off I am not to speak and neither is he and nothing is required of either of us. It started as part of something else, corner time, penance, whatever you want to call it. It stopped being that quite quickly and became the thing we do when one of us has hit a wall.

I have knelt on the floor by that windowsill and listened to that cheap plastic tick through more difficult evenings than I can count. The week his father died. The week of my scan. The Sunday after the redundancy, when he set it and then just sat on the end of the bed reading, so I was not alone in the room but nobody was talking to me.

It cost ninety-nine pence. When it eventually breaks I will have to go on the internet and buy a new one, and it will not be the same, and I have been quietly dreading that for about four years.

The men come at eight on Thursday.

They will carry this box down the stairs with a hundred others and it will say BEDROOM in my handwriting on two sides, and they will put it in the van next to the box of saucepans, and it will weigh almost nothing. A brush, a ribbon, a card, a timer, and about four hundred quiet evenings that are not visible in any way to anybody but the two of us.

That is what I keep turning over. The whole architecture of the last eleven years of my private life fits in one shoebox and looks, to any observer, like the contents of a drawer nobody has cleared out.

So. What goes.

The ribbon goes, and I am surprised how easily. It did its work in a bad winter and the winter is over and I am not the woman who needed her wrist held any more. Into the bin bag, with the dead batteries and the phone charger for a phone neither of us owns.

The timer comes, obviously. The timer is not sentimental, it is equipment.

The brush comes. Chipped handle and all. I am not starting again with something from a website that arrives in a jiffy bag.

The card I stood holding for a long time, long enough that my tea went cold on the windowsill.

It comes. Not because I want to be able to reach for it, and not to hold anything over anybody. It comes because the arrangement I am packing into a shoebox is not the hairbrush and it is not the ribbon. It is a man who got it wrong once and then did the difficult thing properly, in backward sloping handwriting, on a watercolour of a harbour.

I put it at the bottom, under the timer, where I will not see it every time.