Edited by Martin Cadwell, Sunday, 27 Apr 2025, 11:56
[ 15 minute read ]
Writing by numbers without numbers 6
(This is posted chronologically identical to 'Writing by numbers without numbers 5' and is listed after 'Writing by numbers without numbers 5')
Toby fell in love PART TWO
April 2024
In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector
and collected his belongings.
‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’
‘There’s twenty pounds
down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.
‘Move along'
Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved
on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through.
‘Wait!’
Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at
him today.
'Have you got a moment? I
need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to
hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped
a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had
noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such
fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he
recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser
suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half
itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.
'Okay, what's up?'
'Can I buy you a coffee, at
lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending
machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made
in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was
going to be a psuedo-date, off the premises.
'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby
smiled. Mimie smiled back. (Way too twee) Breakfast seemed too small
again.
Toby was intrigued, she didn't work
here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she
was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this
evening.
The lunchtime meeting with Mimie
Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the
High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her canines were the
same length as her incisors. It made Toby think of a friendly spider,
a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them
had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a
still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious
fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie,
guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with
slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent
speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him
trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being
dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a
metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been
free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he
couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found
it.
‘You let me find money in
the street’
Toby looked up.
She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now
her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up
interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the
twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks.
Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would
not look back at him.
‘The baby you saw me with,
its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in
an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.
Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She
waited. A bus passed by outside.
‘What’s your name?’
he said.
‘Mimie’, she
answered. ‘She died.’
‘The baby?’
‘No, my sister.
I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to
come back.’ She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The
father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby
but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any
more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t
want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the
baby now.’
She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and
started for the door.
Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a
wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she
looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed
herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and
went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.
‘Come on, silly’
she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them a cup of
tea each.
The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he
noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to
athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more
a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not
help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her
penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his
attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time,
or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.
‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’
he mused.
In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby
somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the
previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge
was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a
sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few
bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her lips.
His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was
ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship.
Something had broken her.
Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her
sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her
nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one
occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his
wife and her sister Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and
afterwards he apologised over and over again , wandering the flat
naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had
not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s
future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try
to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning
anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she
was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while
everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on an
ice-rink.
Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her
kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly
open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped
her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet
together, hopped backwards three times and bumped the fridge door
shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed.
Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and
resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took
what she freely gave.
The compassion he had felt for her in Winter, pushing a buggy with
a crying baby, and combined with his new understanding of her,
brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with
her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed,
She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between
them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and
what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at
him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw
her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him
up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that
said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again
because he knew other men saw it.
She had noticed his change towards her, and his soft concern, to
her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she
didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so
much. Every day she remembered her sister and how she had given
herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep alink with her, and
every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held
but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her
now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was
somehow broken. It made it worse.
(SUMMER 2024)
Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It
was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden,
overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home
delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate
gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a
little frigid and the heat from her was never scorching like he had
experienced, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly. Like old
slippers cliched
One warm evening, when he and Kate were alone in the garden,
shielded by her high fences and her neighbours oblivious to their
nakedness, a cold shower caught them, dozing. The exhilierating shock
on Toby’s warm skin made him think of Mimie. ‘Mimie’, he
thought, ‘I want you so much!’
Christmas 2024
Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to
having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby
left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the
late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to
share, literally the fruits of his labours in his garden.
In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops;
ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby
unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast
to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and
frozen raspberries Kate wanted to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby
fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese
platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He
would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that
morning, at 5am, by torchlight.
Later that evening
Keeping the engagement ring in his pocket he made his final
resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Chloe’s
widower, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by
the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.
Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up
knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have
been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.
Near the High Street, he knew there was a road junction where
young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first her
greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it
slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in
her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t
much going on that night.
‘I have something for
you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’
Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. Toby
knew then that he would never see her again. The look of horror he
saw was the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she
thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’
But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm
implacability on it.
‘This is a Mourning Ring.
It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is
connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond,
which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and
never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it,
but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and
looked down.
‘It’s….it’s worth something.’
It was worth more than something, he had paid three thousand
pounds and swapped an engagement ring for it.
She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her
mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it.
The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket still
held in the ring melted it.
Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her
casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked
away. His shoes crunched.
He had passed three houses before he heard her call to him.
‘Toby!'
He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile
forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved
goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy
Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.
Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now
bare hand.
‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’.
The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark
night air.
As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the
stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement
near Mimie, brushed her feet, and settled down again.
‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she
breathed. ‘Thank you.’
-end-
My thoughts go to all the young girls and boys who had their
hearts broken and have never found the secret magic shop with a kind
person behind the counter who fixes hearts for free; and the young
boys and girls who were trained for battle at home and are confronted
by minefields when they find romantic love. It is for the people who
are wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a lake, like Mimie, and
are trying to reach the edge, but can only see the ice shrinking from
the shore. This is for the people who grew up in an environment where
love was conjoined with pain and misery; from seeing too much, who
have safe love now but seek a frost on something warm. This is for
the people who need vinegar on their chocolate cake and for the
people for whom love once washed through an open ended street, but
now for them stops in a cold cul-de-sac that no longer has a path out
the other end; a dead-end that no amount of bulldozing with love will
open again; and it is for the people who cry in secret when they
love; because for all these people, love hurts.
Something I learned was that I could imagine a camp-fire as
a metaphor for a relationship, and personalities, or more fittingly,
people's love can be considered to be logs that change the quality of
the fire. There can be wood that gives off bad smells; ignites
quickly and burns brightly but quickly; wood that smothers the heat
of the fire by its size; cold and wet wood that dampens the heat;
choking smoke; long lasting embers; wood completely consumed by the
fire leaving a dry ash behind; and twigs and kindling that works as
treats in a steady and stable relationship in the form of outbreaks
of romantic actions.
Writing by numbers without numbers 6
[ 15 minute read ]
Writing by numbers without numbers 6
(This is posted chronologically identical to 'Writing by numbers without numbers 5' and is listed after 'Writing by numbers without numbers 5')Toby fell in love PART TWO
April 2024
In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.
‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’
‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.
‘Move along'
Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through.
‘Wait!’
Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.
'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.
'Okay, what's up?'
'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a psuedo-date, off the premises.
'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie smiled back. (Way too twee) Breakfast seemed too small again.
Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.
The lunchtime meeting with Mimie
Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her canines were the same length as her incisors. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.
‘You let me find money in the street’
Toby looked up.
She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.
‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.
Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’
‘The baby?’
‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’ She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’
She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.
Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.
‘Come on, silly’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them a cup of tea each.
The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.
‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.
In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her lips. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.
Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and her sister Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again , wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on an ice-rink.
Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, hopped backwards three times and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.
The compassion he had felt for her in Winter, pushing a buggy with a crying baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.
She had noticed his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep alink with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.
(SUMMER 2024)
Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid and the heat from her was never scorching like he had experienced, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly. Like old slippers cliched
One warm evening, when he and Kate were alone in the garden, shielded by her high fences and her neighbours oblivious to their nakedness, a cold shower caught them, dozing. The exhilierating shock on Toby’s warm skin made him think of Mimie. ‘Mimie’, he thought, ‘I want you so much!’
Christmas 2024
Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share, literally the fruits of his labours in his garden.
In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.
Later that evening
Keeping the engagement ring in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Chloe’s widower, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.
Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.
Near the High Street, he knew there was a road junction where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t much going on that night.
‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’
Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. The look of horror he saw was the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.
‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down.
‘It’s….it’s worth something.’
It was worth more than something, he had paid three thousand pounds and swapped an engagement ring for it.
She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket still held in the ring melted it.
Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched.
He had passed three houses before he heard her call to him.
‘Toby!'
He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.
Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand.
‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.
As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, brushed her feet, and settled down again.
‘Happy Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’
-end-
My thoughts go to all the young girls and boys who had their hearts broken and have never found the secret magic shop with a kind person behind the counter who fixes hearts for free; and the young boys and girls who were trained for battle at home and are confronted by minefields when they find romantic love. It is for the people who are wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a lake, like Mimie, and are trying to reach the edge, but can only see the ice shrinking from the shore. This is for the people who grew up in an environment where love was conjoined with pain and misery; from seeing too much, who have safe love now but seek a frost on something warm. This is for the people who need vinegar on their chocolate cake and for the people for whom love once washed through an open ended street, but now for them stops in a cold cul-de-sac that no longer has a path out the other end; a dead-end that no amount of bulldozing with love will open again; and it is for the people who cry in secret when they love; because for all these people, love hurts.
Something I learned was that I could imagine a camp-fire as a metaphor for a relationship, and personalities, or more fittingly, people's love can be considered to be logs that change the quality of the fire. There can be wood that gives off bad smells; ignites quickly and burns brightly but quickly; wood that smothers the heat of the fire by its size; cold and wet wood that dampens the heat; choking smoke; long lasting embers; wood completely consumed by the fire leaving a dry ash behind; and twigs and kindling that works as treats in a steady and stable relationship in the form of outbreaks of romantic actions.