How did I become heartless?

Ian is talented and accomplished. His manners are fine and considered. He can wrestle single-handedly with a set of iron spiral steps, speak French and Italian, he can even do sign language; he can sail, windsurf, play the harmonica and cook. He is handsome and cultured; he is also lonely. We go out every Friday night from work and drink in different pubs because Ian doesn’t like to stay in one place for the evening. He thinks that if he keeps moving he increases the chance of meeting the One. Well, maybe. I met the One twenty years ago and I wasn’t even looking. I sometimes wonder what people think of us as we sit there, gesturing unexpectedly, me looking like a wild man, the shavings caught in my beard falling occasionally into my beer and Ian with the black-silk dust of iron-working leaving his dark, coffee-coloured face raccoon-like.

Sonja owns a delicatessen off Whiteladies Road, a beautiful, labyrinthine shop full of foreign mysteries. Much like Sonja herself. The delicatessen spreads through the ground floor of a beautifully proportioned Georgian house, fluted pillars with acanthus-wreathed capitals supporting a portico above the customers as they enter. They can tie their dogs there, on one of the pillars. Sonja has had a brass cleat fixed in the restoration mortar and puts out a terracotta bowl of water for the dogs, who gather in numbers, forming a maypole of tangled leads fanning down to the water.

I know this because I often pass the shop on the way from one job to another. If the traffic lights are red I can watch her move in her space, dressed in a dazzling white apron, her doubting grey eyes scanning the delicacies as if she’s never seen them before. I never try to attract her attention, I just sit in the truck watching her. I have eyes like a hawk. I can see that the wild boar sausages have gone up from £3.75 to £4.15 a pound. Outrageous.

When we first moved here to Bristol Sonja began to study for a Ph.D. in psychology. Then one evening, six years ago, she came down to my workshop in the basement and announced that she was bored by study, by her life of libraries and libidinous lecturers. She wanted to deal in something concrete.

‘Concrete?’ I asked, pulling at a jammed router bit.

‘Yes. Something in the world.’

My hand slipped and the razor edge of the bit sliced the ball of my thumb. ‘You don’t have to work. Do whatever you want to do.’

‘I want to do something in the real world.’ She moved to a stool, picked up the rusty jack saw on the seat, and sat, holding it in her hands.

‘Something to do with concrete?’ I sucked the blood hard and pressed my undamaged thumb against the cut. Sonja ignored the blood — a commonplace hazard of butchers and manual workers.

‘No. I mean something I can hold, something that’s corporeal.’