For the woman who made us walk nine kilometres to dodge one phone call

Us, So Far

It begins with a missed train, your refusal to telephone anyone alive, and nine kilometres of pavement spent on the plot of a film I have still never watched. All of it is on here, in order, including the stretches where I was the problem.

Aarav & Ishita

On the clock since the missed train

steps, conservatively

It started when the departures board went blank and you announced, brightly, that walking was basically free. Nine kilometres later I agreed with you. I have been agreeing with you ever since.

That is the version I tell at parties.

Here is the true one.

You would not phone your brother.

You would not phone a taxi.

You wanted the nine kilometres,

could not think how to ask,

and let the train leave instead.

Exhibits A through E, in the order they got me

March 2021
The night we missed the last train
You would not phone a single person, so we walked nine kilometres in shoes you had already complained about at dinner. You spent most of it explaining a film I have still never watched. Somewhere around the flyover you stopped explaining it and just held my sleeve, and I worked out that the walk had been the point all along.
That winter
The flat with two burners and no counter
Two burners, no counter, and a windowsill we used as one. You chopped on a breadboard balanced across the sink. We cooked in that kitchen every single night and ate sitting on the floor because there was nowhere else to sit, and I have not eaten better anywhere since.
August 2022
You brought my mother the wrong sweets
On purpose. She had said once, months earlier, that the proper ones were overrated and that everyone bought them out of fear. You remembered, bought the wrong ones deliberately, and handed them over without explaining the joke. She worked it out halfway through the evening. She has brought it up every month since.
The bad spring
The months when everything went at once
You did not try to fix any of it, which I could not have survived. You just refused to leave. Three weeks running you stayed in that kitchen while I was unbearable, and you never once made me thank you for it.
Last month
Nothing happened at all
You fell asleep halfway through the episode with your feet on the radiator and I did not wake you. That is the whole memory. It is here because the nine kilometres and the two burners were always walking towards an evening exactly like that one.

Photographic evidence, largely kitchen-based

An alarming proportion of these are the two-burner flat. Nobody chose that. The archive refused to move out.

Sincere bit. Brace. It is about the exams.

Two years of revision on a windowsill, and not one complaint.

You revised on a windowsill. Not a desk — a windowsill, with two burners going on one side and your notes curling in the steam on the other, because that flat did not believe in worktops and neither, it turned out, did we.

Two years of that. On the frightened mornings and, far worse, the bored ones.

I have not been flawless here. For a while I called it the thing you do at the table, in the tone people reserve for pottery classes, and I knew precisely what I was doing when I said it. I have thought about that sentence every day since the Thursday I said it.

For the record, and at volume: I am not waiting on a result before being proud of you. That was decided at the window, somewhere between the steam and the second burner.

Right. The uncomfortable part.

Starting with the sentence about the table, since I raised it.

It was a Thursday. There was a pan going. You asked me to test you on the cards and I said after, in the voice I keep for things I have unilaterally decided are optional, and then — out loud, in a kitchen with two burners and no counter — I called it the thing you do at the table.

You did not argue. You put the cards down, finished the cooking, and let me sit in it for eleven days, which was significantly worse than arguing and which you knew at the time.

There is more. The drive back from my mother’s, where she ran the sweets joke twice and I said nothing on either occasion while you worked out, in real time, from the passenger seat, that I was not going to.

And the bad spring, where you flatly would not leave, and I thanked you for it with four days of silence.

I am sorry. Properly, and not as a device for ending the conversation.

Non-binding legally, load-bearing otherwise

Five promises for five failures, then two I am adding unprompted.

01Never again to call it the thing you do at the table. It is the work. I will use the word.

02To test you on the cards when you ask, not after. There is no after. There is only the pan, and the pan can wait.

03To answer my mother the first time, in the car, out loud, so you never again have to work out on your own whether I will.

04When the next bad spring arrives, to say I am frightened on day one instead of going quiet for four days and calling it coping.

05To finish an argument on the day it starts, even when I am winning it. Eleven days is not a strategy.

06To ask twice on the days you answer fine in the voice you used all through the bad spring, and to keep the second Tuesday of every month free so there is somewhere for the answer to go.

07To cook on both burners. Whatever kitchen we end up with, to still be the two of us in it every night.

Legally ours since kilometre four

The song you played at kilometre four and ruined forever

You put this on at roughly kilometre four, handed me one earphone, and — for the first and possibly last time that night — stopped narrating the film. Nine kilometres, and this is the bit I would keep.

Emergency supplies. Rationed.

Written at the kitchen table over a week, largely while you were asleep, which is the only reason they are honest.

Put this down and phone me. I am aware you would rather walk nine kilometres than telephone anybody, and I am telling you the phone is allowed. It has never once been the less important thing.

You revised for this on a windowsill with two burners going and the steam coming up through your notes. You have been ready for a while. You are only frightened, and frightened is not the same as unprepared. Turn the pan handle in and go.

Then we do the windowsill again. I am not saying that lightly and I am not saying it to be kind. I watched you do two years of it from the other burner. I know exactly what I am volunteering for.

I am still here. I am probably in the kitchen being dramatic in the general direction of a pan. Eleven days was the old way and we agreed to stop doing it, so come and find me tonight.

So do I, which neither of us expected. Two burners, no counter, and the floor to eat on. If this place ever stops feeling like ours, we start cooking every night again and it comes back.

You bought my mother the wrong sweets on purpose because you had listened properly to one sentence months earlier. Nobody listens like that. I noticed the same evening she did.

Two burners. No counter. No hope.

We ate on the floor for a year

and called it a dining arrangement.

Given the lot again — missed train,

nine kilometres, one bad spring —

I would take that floor over anywhere I have lived since.

Stand up, I am doing the speech

To the missed train, and to low standards magnificently met.

To the last train we missed, and to whoever was running the timetable that night.

To nine kilometres, the wrong shoes, and a film I now intend never to watch on principle.

To two burners, no counter, and a year of eating on the floor.

To the wrong sweets, delivered deliberately, and to my mother still telling that story.

To the bad spring, and to you refusing to leave during it.

And to the eleven days, which we are not doing again.

One more thing, from the windowsill

I registered a star from that kitchen.

Not as a metaphor. A real one, catalogued and registered, with paperwork and a set of coordinates you can check.

I did it the week the bad spring finally let go. You were asleep on the sofa and I was sitting up at the windowsill being no use to anybody, and it turns out you can buy a star at two in the morning from a kitchen with two burners in it.

It sits in a part of the sky we cannot see from here, which felt about right for something bought that way.

One I have successfully avoided saying for years.

I knew on the walk. Somewhere before the flyover, with you still talking about that film. Then I waited eleven months to say anything, because I did not want to be the one who went first.

Scratch here

Right, last one

I have bought a star. Two, technically, which is very on brand.

It had to be this pair. Read the description and you will see I did not really have a choice, given everything I have just admitted.

Mizar and Alcor

Ursa Major, the great bear

Designation: Zeta and 80 Ursae Majoris
Constellation: Ursa Major, the great bear
Right ascension: 13h 23m 55s
Declination: +54° 55′ 31″
Magnitude: 2.2
Distance: 83 light years
Type: Naked-eye pair · six stars in total
Dedicated to: Aarav & Ishita

The pair in the handle of the Plough that people have used as an eyesight test for centuries — if you can separate them, your vision is good. Look closer and there are six stars there, not two. Everyone can see the pair; almost nobody sees how much is actually going on.

Everyone can spot the two. Almost nobody notices there are actually six up there doing the work. Which is more or less what I have been saying since the walk home, only with better lighting and less shouting.

Northern sky. Look up on a clear night and it is there.

Right. Sincerely. No jokes for a bit.

Fourth attempt. The first three were written at the kitchen table and were all, somehow, about the kitchen rather than about you, which tells you something about my priorities or something worrying about the kitchen.

So. Two burners. No counter. A windowsill doing the work of a worktop, a desk and a drying rack. Objectively that flat was a disgrace. It was also the year I stopped performing at people, and I did not notice until much later, the way you only notice a fridge once it stops humming.

You never once told me to sit down. You simply kept turning up and cooking on the left burner while I ruined something on the right.

That is what I was trying to say on the Thursday. Instead I said the sentence about the table, which I will be paying off for some years.

One day there will be counters. Possibly a dishwasher. I fully intend to stand in that kitchen and tell anyone who will listen about the floor we used to eat on.

Wherever the burners are, I would like to be on the other one. Nine kilometres, eleven days, one bad spring — all of it again, wrong shoes included.

— yours, still on the wrong burner

One missed train.

Nine kilometres, wrong shoes, one film, endlessly.

Two burners. No counter. A year of floor dining.

The wrong sweets, delivered deliberately.

One bad spring you flatly refused to leave.

Eleven days I would give back.

Eleven months I would give back.

The rest of it I am keeping.

Happy anniversary, you.

No idea what the next kitchen looks like. Fairly confident there will be two of us in it, one on the wrong burner, and nobody phoning for a taxi.

made instead of finally watching that film