Her Fearful Symmetry

Edie lay in bed waiting for Jack to fall asleep. Usually she tried to get to sleep first, because Jack snored, but tonight her mind was racing and she knew it was pointless to even try. Finally she turned onto her side and found Jack facing her with his eyes open.

“It’ll be all right,” said Jack. “They’ve been away before and it was all right.”

“This is different.”

“Because it’s Elspeth?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or, just-it’s so far away. I don’t want them there.”

He put his arm around her waist and she burrowed into him. I’m safe. I’m safe here. Jack was her bomb shelter, her human shield. “Remember when they were at Cornell?” he said. “How great it was to have the house to ourselves?”

“Yeah…” It had been a revelation: married life without children was a blast. For a while, anyway.

“They’re twenty years old, Edie. They should have been long gone. We should have sent them to separate schools,” said Jack.

She sighed. You don’t understand. “It’s too late. Elspeth’s taken it out of our hands.”

“Maybe she’s done us a favour.”

Edie didn’t reply. Jack said, “When you were their age you were very eager to be on your own, as I recall.”

“That was different.”

He waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he said, very quietly, “Why, Edie? Why was it different?” But she pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. He said, “You could tell me.”

She opened her eyes and smiled. “There’s nothing to tell, Jack.” She turned again, so she faced away from him. “We should try to sleep.”

That was close, he thought. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved. “Okay,” Jack said. They lay together for a long time, listening to each other’s breathing, until Jack began to snore and Edie was alone with her thoughts.

Bleach

THE INVENTION of the Internet had allowed Martin to abandon the outside world. Or rather, the Internet had enabled him to relegate that world to the role of support system for his world, the one that flourished inside his flat.

Martin had not expected Marijke to leave him. She had acquiesced in his rituals, had aided and abetted his increasingly stringent compulsions, for almost twenty-five years. He couldn’t understand why she would leave now. “You are like a bad pet,” she’d told him. “You’re like a human squirrel that never goes out, that just sits in the flat all day and all night, licking the same spot. I want to be able to open the windows. I want to walk into my own flat without having to put bags on my feet.” They’d had this conversation in the kitchen. The windows were taped shut and papered over, and both of them were wearing plastic bags over their socks. Martin was empty-handed; he had nothing he could use to counter Marijke’s assertion. He was a human squirrel and he knew it. But who would take care of him if she left? “You’re a fifty-three-year-old PhD with a telephone and a computer. You’d be fine. Get Robert to take out the rubbish.” Two days later, Marijke was gone.

She left him with two weeks’ worth of frozen meals and a list of websites and telephone numbers. Sainsbury’s delivered groceries and cleaning products; Marks & Spencer sent pants and socks. Robert posted his letters and carried the rubbish down to the dustbin.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t a bad way to live. There was no one to please but himself. He missed Marijke terribly, but he did not miss her reproving glares, her loud sighing, the way she rolled her eyes when he asked her to leave a room and come in again because she’d entered with the wrong foot first. Marijke wasn’t there to frown when he ordered five thousand pairs of latex surgical gloves from a dodgy outfit on the Internet. While he was at it, he also bought a kit for measuring blood pressure, a gas mask and a desert camouflage army-surplus jumpsuit which the site claimed could withstand chemical weapons.

There were bargains to be had. From a different site he ordered four fifty-litre drums of bleach. This brought Robert to his door.

“Martin, there’s a bloke downstairs with an enormous amount of bleach. He says you ordered it, and it has to be signed for. Do you think it’s safe to have that much bleach around the house? The containers have all sorts of scary pictographs of hands with smoke coming off them, and warnings galore. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Martin thought it was a brilliant idea; he was always ru

The more Martin delved into the cyber world, the more he realised that there was absolutely nothing he couldn’t have brought to his door, for a fee. Pizza, cigarettes, beer, free-range eggs, the Guardian, postage stamps, lightbulbs, milk: all this and more appeared when required. He ordered books by the dozen from Amazon, and soon the unopened boxes piled up in the hall. He missed browsing in Stanfords, the map shop on Long Acre, and was overjoyed when he discovered their website. Maps began arriving, along with guidebooks to places Martin had never visited. Inspired, he ordered everything Stanfords offered on Amsterdam, and covered his bedroom walls with maps of that city. He traced what he imagined might be Marijke’s routes. He guessed, correctly (though he did not know it), that she lived in the Jordaan district. He assigned her a routine and mentally accompanied her as she rode her bike along canals and shopped for all the odd vegetables she loved that he wouldn’t eat. Fe

Martin’s desk was an island of normality in the wreck of his flat. He had succeeded in keeping his workspace compulsion-free; if an obsession began to trouble him at his desk he would get up and take it to some other part of the flat to deal with it. Aside from cleaning rituals at the begi

But now the Internet began to interfere with his cherished desk-isle, and he found himself monitoring eBay auctions of aquarium filtering machines and checking Amazon every ten minutes or so to see how his crossword books were selling. They always had depressing numbers like 673,082 or 822,457. Once his latest had made it up to 9,326. It had given him a happy afternoon, until he logged on before going to bed and found it at 787,333.