A Line of Blood. Ben McPherson

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СКАЧАТЬ told her next to nothing about myself. But something had made me say it.

      ‘You’re good at smoking. You slept with me on the second date. You have slightly inverted nipples. And you’re foreign. What’s not to like?’

      ‘Don’t try to charm your way past the question, Alex.’

      ‘OK. Sorry.’

      ‘Do you? Like me? I kind of need to know.’

      ‘Yes, I like you.’

      On the fourth day she flew back to the States without much explanation. She came back ten days later. She had broken up with her boyfriend. Moved out of their rented apartment. Sold her things and come to Europe.

      ‘Your boyfriend? Your apartment?’

      ‘It wasn’t working out.’

      A bolter, friends said. Watch yourself. But I was younger then, and I was flattered by the impulsiveness of her choices. The girl I met in the pub.

      When I asked her where her luggage was, she pointed at her bag. She had taken a courier flight from LAX. One large leather handbag. She really had sold everything. She had a week’s worth of underwear. Two t-shirts. Two skirts. One pair of trousers. She had £1,500 in cash. She would work, she said. You can’t, I said, you need a permit.

      ‘About that,’ she said. ‘I had a couple of thoughts.’

      So we entered lightly into marriage; so, at least, it seemed to me then.

      I lay still in our tiny double bed, listening. I had a memory of her sliding from the bed at first light, of her whispering something to me, tender and loving.

      Birds and traffic. A family shouting on a back patio. And computer keys.

      I got up and pulled on a clean pair of pants. Max’s door was open, his room empty. I opened the door to Millicent’s office. A desk, a chair, a computer and Millicent in her kimono dressing gown. A spare bedroom without room for a bed. Millicent didn’t look round.

      ‘That bad?’ I said.

      ‘What?’ she said, typing, her fingers floating elegantly across the keys, fast and precise. Her feet twitched reflexively.

      ‘You’re typing with your feet. You’re nervous. What are you worrying about?’

      She turned, gave me a look of mock irritation, then turned back to her screen.

      ‘I’m preparing a little. For this evening.’

      ‘I thought it was unscripted.’

      ‘It pretty much is.’

      ‘Looks scripted to me, Millicent.’

      ‘So kill me, I’m nervous,’ she said. ‘Also, a guy with a drill just fitted a lock to the neighbour’s front door. Which is more than a little disconcerting. Why would they feel the need to do that, Alex?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘He just … I can’t believe he just … went like that.’ Her eyes clouded, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to cry.

      ‘London,’ I said.

      ‘Maybe so,’ she said. ‘Yeah. Maybe it’s London.’ She sighed. Then she drew herself together again and the sadness was gone. ‘How many words is two hours, Alex?’

      ‘Three words a second,’ I said. ‘Makes 180 words a minute, 10,800 words an hour. Call it 21,000 words. Minus commercial breaks, which are about a quarter of the programme. So 15,000 words.’

      ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘That is a lot of words.’

      ‘It isn’t,’ I said. ‘Not really. Where’s Max?’

      ‘He fixed his own breakfast and went to school.’

      ‘He seem OK to you?’

      ‘So far. And yeah, I’m watching him for signs.’

      She went back to typing. My wife at her desk.

      I tried to distract her by cupping her breasts in my hands. She looked up at me and smiled, continued typing while she held my gaze.

      ‘How do you do that?’ I said. ‘Without looking?’

      ‘Neat, huh?’ she said, and turned back to the screen, carried on typing. I kept my hands on her breasts.

      ‘It’s a conversation,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to prepare. They ring, they tell you their problem, you answer their questions.’

      ‘So I’m talking, what, half the time?’

      ‘Less,’ I said.

      ‘So, that’s what, 6,000 words?’

      ‘Forget the word count, Millicent. You can’t script this. And you can’t write 6,000 words in a day.’

      ‘I never did this before, and I am super-nervous. Also, it’s forbidden to swear. And to smoke in the studio.’

      ‘You’re allowed to be nervous. You won’t swear. People will call. The station will filter out the hostile callers. You will help people who need help. The station will pay you. You can smoke outside during the commercial breaks.’

      ‘You think? You really think all of that?’

      ‘And as soon as you’re in it, you’ll remember what you know.’

      Self-Help for Cynics. Millicent’s books had no truck with self-pity. They didn’t propose chanting, or detoxes, or relentless positivity as solutions to relationship breakdowns and bereavement. They were tough and funny, but had at their core an understanding of real emotional pain.

      Make your play and move on. Books for people like us, a generation of people who layer themselves in irony, people who would never be seen buying a self-help book because that would be absurd. Then, suddenly, the same eternal question: what to do? Or, as Millicent put it:

      ‘Which version of you are you planning to be, when you climb out the well you just filled with your shit? Sooner or later you’re going to have to swim to the top and drag yourself out. Make your play, and move on.’

      Millicent’s cynicism, of course, was a well-constructed front. She could speak the language of the cynic, but she knew – and I know she still knows – that she’s an idealist to the core. She believes in love, and she believes that people are redeemed through loving each other. She could never allow herself to say as much – Millicent knows it would destroy the brand if she did – but Self-Help for Cynics worked because it was one bruised romantic talking to other bruised romantics, using the language of the disaffected.

      People began to write to Millicent. ‘I don’t know why they’re thanking me,’ she said to me when the first letters had begun to arrive. ‘It’s pretty obvious. Get some sleep for Chrissakes. Consider СКАЧАТЬ