Toothpicks

There are identical twins in the pet shop, young rosy-cheeked women with black hair and soft voices, and one might be forgiven for not knowing the pet shop employs a pair of identical twins until, as your eyes move across the tanks of guinea pigs, nestling rats, and clumsy rabbits, you see a young rosy-cheeked woman with black hair and soft voice signing people in at the veterinarian counter and another on the other side of the shop scanning a barcode on a punnet of crickets. I decline an offer of a receipt from the latter. She wishes me a good day; barely do I have the chance to wish her the same before she is greeting the customer behind me, who, I notice, is purchasing a cage for a dog. There is something about a dog in a little cage that makes me both sad & angry; so I do not dwell on it any longer but exit the shop and stop in my tracks before thinking where I will go next.
It is Sunday and I have no plans. More often than not I have no plans, no social engagements or appointments, no dates or parleys, and so I will draw up a long list of things to do, tick off, might I find that by being busy – even artificially – I will not wallow. It is very easy, I find, to wallow. One of my tasks was to take a walk and buy some cat food and a toy for her. Outside the pet shop I made sure that I was not in anybody’s way and thought for a moment what I would do next. On my list was—Toothpicks. I knew that they were not toothpicks but I could not remember their name, only that the word Toothpickswould remind me of exactly what I needed to buy: tiny brushes to push between the teeth. It is a large retail park in a horseshoe, nineties brickwork, red, a pockmarked car park with spaces painted in broken white lines like an old fishing net. There is a frost upon everything that deposited the night previous from a thick mist. You must be careful not to slip over. Everybody is swollen with coats and scarves. In all the textures of life, frost is one that really excites the eyes, because it is so fleeting and delicate. So timid! Put your finger to the frost and it runs away.

Because I cannot think of a proper introduction or greeting, I stand in front of her for a few moments before she looks up, smiles and greets me hello. We embrace. I have not seen her in months, certainly not since she got back from holiday, the traces of which still colour her skin against the brittle pale of January, but there she was in the retail park, spotted on my way to the pharmacist’s dental aisle. Milly is nine years, three-hundred-and-sixty days my junior, which I round to a decade. We sat next to each other at work for several years and often went out together to drink & dance. We were good friends then, speaking a lot, sharing a sense of humour, singing silly songs we would make up when we were bored at our desks.
‘One sec.’ She held her phone aloft and a slip of paper in the other—‘My dad’s asked me to put some bets on.’ I looked around, waited patiently. Her hair had lightened, too. You get used to not seeing certain colours outside of summer. ‘Who you thinks gonna win: Arsenal or Man’ United?’
‘Arsenal.’
‘That’s what he thinks, too… Southampton—Swansea?’
‘Southampton… Good holiday then?’
‘Oh!’ she gushed, stopped herself, tapped the screen some more—‘Sorry, if I don’t get these bets in, he’ll go mental.’ Then gave me her full attention. She restarted—‘Oh…’
I had seen it on social media: the twenty-third of December, her partner proposed on a beach in the Maldives. There were candles in the white sand arranged like a heart, a flower-laden table for two next to the water’s edge, the fronds of overhanging palms bordered the frame as Milly held a hand to her mouth, and he knelt on one knee before her among so much of the Indian Ocean. It was the result of meticulous planning, idyllic, and so I showed it to the person nearest me at the time: my mother as she took a tea break from Christmas day preparations.

I was in good spirits, too. The date was the fourteenth of November, 2019. As Milly was drunk and swooning, I was sober and vibrating with anticipation. If I might drink, then my excitement burned it as a blue flame and I was warm, sober. The next evening a friend was arriving on a train into Paddington and we were to be together for ten days. The two romances shared a starting pistol. Ten days were not enough; I wanted more. As rumours of Milly’s office romance began to circulate, I booked a flight to Helsinki.
The nineteenth of January, 2020.
There was happiness out there and it landed on the nineteenth of January, 2020.
When I went back for Valentine’s Day, there were already stories from China breaking on the news. Italy, then France. We convinced ourselves that it was nothing to worry about. Things were going perfectly between us, at least; we went together so naturally. It would not be an issue and she was moving over to London in September. We could be patient. There was nothing to worry about. And then there was something to worry about. And then we convinced ourselves that it would all blow over shortly. I moved back to the coast to be with my family during lockdown. My state of mind deteriorated fast, but only slightly faster than the romance. Because there was so much uncertainty everywhere else, I took it for myself and would never admit that it was over. In fact it all fell apart so quickly, both my life and romance, that I was left breath- and sleepless.

I envisaged our respective romances developing side-by-side, Molly’s and mine, the beginnings separated by only a day and the legal driving limit. We had been single for a stretch and the timing was notable. As mine started to die, she moved in him at the start of lockdown and eventually I stopped asking how it was going because it became a trifle painful. It was a glorious spring that year. Even with the daily death tolls being broadcast, it was a glorious spring. The time went on and on. I started therapy at the end of May.
Now they are getting married and I am still stuck on the nineteenth of January, 2020.
I did not want to hear about the wedding preparations, but Milly told me about the office shenanigans: the ketamine and fights, the closed bars and new bars, promotions and politics. We stood and talked until all the blood I had heated on my hurried walk had cooled and left my fingers numb. We embraced good-bye, as she disappeared into an oak furniture store.
It is now five years since that flight on the nineteenth of January. A five-year anniversary seems momentous. I am not sure if it is momentous, whether it is nothing at all, yet I cannot help but think of them a lot, these memories, which is a word very much like momentous.

London, 2019

Helsinki, 2020

The Evening Party—

The Pavement Appears