Her store card has £2,668.48 outstanding. Her allowance will easily cover the minimum monthly payment, but paying a similar amount on the rest of her cards leaves her feeling crippled. And it’s only four months until Christmas. And the only way she knows to cope with the stress is to buy herself something nice. Something she doesn’t really need. Something else she can’t afford.

That momentary high to break up the misery.

It’s a relief that the final letter has no transparent window detailing her name and address.

Save the best until last.

Ease the hurt.

Reward yourself.

She throws all the other letters into the bathtub to her right. She can’t deal with them now. And she makes a small incision at the corner of the flap, inserts her finger and runs it along the length of the envelope.

There are two pages inside. The first piece of paper contains only four words.

Nothing

Important

Happened

Today

And she is grateful to read mail that, for once, is not covered in red ink.

5

232 – POET

There’s a patch of blue ink connecting his torso to the bed sheets where his ballpoint pen exploded and leaked during the night. The notepad came to no harm. He finds it lying neatly atop a screwed-up T-shirt crumpled on the floor. He reaches down with his right hand, brings the pad up to his chest, finds the last page he wrote on and holds it above his face.

There isn’t the erratic scrawling he’s used to seeing when trying to get an idea onto the page quickly. It’s free-flowing. Nothing has been crossed out. No blue smudges or fingerprints or torn corners. Some of his best work, he thinks.

Then his arm starts to ache, his feeble bicep burning, but he reads it through again, smiling to himself at the words he massaged together, the verse he created from nothing.

He drops his arm down to the mattress and stares at the yellowing swirls of his ceiling. An effect as outdated as his parents’ values.

The skin covering his ribs feels tight where the ink has dried. He reaches his left hand around, instinctively touching the area, and it dyes his fingertips, pre-empting his crime.

He sits up, swivelling around so his feet touch the floor. He reads his words again; it’s rare to still feel enthusiasm the day after writing something. And he scratches between his legs, leaving three blue fingerprints behind. His mother would call it ‘evidence of perversion’.