Jules Preston - The Map of Us - The most uplifting and unmissable feel good romance of 2018!

The table top was a slab of grey slate. It had a ring of wax where yesterday’s candle had burnt down. I didn’t pick at it. I wanted to though. I wondered how many other couples had sat where we were sitting now and had got together or broken up or talked about getting a dog or moving in together or celebrated or commiserated or decided to give it another go and had gone home hand in hand for the first time in months and made love and then separated for good. Maybe even while yesterday’s candle was burning down to a stub. I could see where today’s candle had been shoved into the candlestick holder on top of it and on top of other melted stubs for what looked like the passing of centuries.

‘10.37 am ?’ Matt said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Not 10.37 pm ?’ He said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh.’

He looked more confused than ever. Somehow it bothered him that our marriage had come apart in the morning. Before lunchtime even. Not at night. Did it really make any difference? The end result was the same.

We were sitting in our favourite wine bar – that wasn’t really ‘ours’ anymore – discussing who should take custody of the three-seater sofa from the living room. It had seen better days. So had we.

‘10.37am,’ Matt repeated absently. Like the title of a film that he had never seen, starring someone that he couldn’t quite remember.

How could I be so exact? I had an affair. It started at 10.37am on April 22nd. It was a Thursday. I have a graph that explains why. Not why it was a Thursday – why it started at 10.37am. It’s more of flow chart, actually. It’s on Page 5 of the report. We’ll get to that. Maybe later.

I didn’t really want the sofa. But Matt did.

Okay. Maybe writing a report on our marriage with footnotes and a summary and a series of conclusions was another spectacularly bad idea. But that is what I did.

Matt just wanted to blame someone and feel betrayed and hang up on me all the time. I could see his point. But I wanted something more precise. I wanted to look at the distribution of fault and the relative impacts of known and random variables. Everything could be quantified and evaluated and interpreted using samples and controls and baselines – even the ups and downs of our relationship. I wanted to make sense of it all. I wanted a number. A simple diagram. Something that I could understand at a glance.

It was just another Bearing Foods presentation. It was no different. Not really. First, I had to identify my research aims. Then I had to gather evidence. When I had analysed all the available data, I could make informed statements and recommendations.

I chose to use a large lever arch file for my report. Something that would accommodate items of evidence that weren’t all flat. I couldn’t think of any items that might possibly fit that category, but I wanted to be prepared for the eventuality that one might crop up.

Matt and I had been married for three years. Our time together was like a low-fat snack bar for the health-conscious sector. A low-fat snack bar that had actually turned into something resembling squirrel poo. Now I was going to pick through the sticky ingredients with my fingers looking for answers. It was the least I could do.

I was in Trish Hudson’s office. Trish is my boss. She’s the head of the Statistical Analysis Department at Compass Applied Analytics. She is also quite short, so she wears irresponsibly high heels and has a blow-up cushion on her chair and wears a lot of vertical stripes because she thinks they make her look taller and thinner. They are only partially successful. She walks with a strange juddering totter because of her irresponsible shoes, and the thin vertical stripes make her look like a clump of dry grass swaying in a gale.

I get called to Trish’s office quite a lot. I got called to her office the time that I was overheard making a comment about Helen being married and divorced twice in 64.726% of the national average. It was just a joke. But Trish doesn’t think that statistics are a laughing matter. That’s why she’s the head of department. I suppose.

My trips to her office had been tapering off nicely. I was hoping this was only a blip in a long-term downward trend.

Trish looked like she had a wasp in her ear. That was fairly normal. She always looked like she had a wasp in her ear. When you got summoned to her office it was sometimes hard to tell if you were in trouble or not.

‘Am I in trouble?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

That cleared that up then.

The cause of Trish’s constant expression of irritated malevolence was the subject of much discussion and conjecture in the office.

Most speculated that it was the result of botched plastic surgery around the eyes in an attempt to make her look younger. The high heels and vertical stripes seemed to support the hypothesis. She already went to a great deal of effort to look taller and thinner.

Another, smaller contingent suggested that the blow-up cushion on her chair was not just to enable her to reach her phone but hinted at some chronic problem with her unmentionables. It was hard not to laugh at this one. For lots of reasons. None of them kind. I am a bad person. I admit it.

A third group thought that she did actually have a wasp jammed in her ear. Poor thing. The wasp, that is.

I’m not sure what I believed. It didn’t matter now. I was fairly certain that the current look of squinty-eyed hostility had something to do with the Bearing Foods presentation earlier.

Blaming Helen would be futile. I knew that. Helen was the only bridesmaid at Trish’s lavish destination wedding last year. The venue was a remote island in the Indian Ocean that took 5 hours to get to by small boat. I wasn’t invited. I’m glad I wasn’t. It rained for nine days straight. I’ve seen the rainfall figures. They were the highest ever recorded. A little over 320% of the normal monthly average. It was impossible to get outside. In the end Trish was married in the main guest hut surrounded by overflowing buckets and the sound of palm trees being blown over.

Trish and Helen went to the same prestigious university too. I didn’t. I went somewhere less prestigious that had an infamous nightlife.

On Fridays they sometimes shared a car to work. Neither had ever accepted a lift in mine. I could see their point. It used to belong to my father. It was full of sand. I tried to get it professionally cleaned once. They took one look at it and said no. Then they asked me to leave their forecourt, but the car wouldn’t start because it was damp and it was French, and they had to push me down the road while I tried to bump start it and I only remembered to take the handbrake off when they had to ask more people to come out and help push.

Yup. There was no point blaming Helen. That much was clear. If this was about the Bearing Foods presentation, I was done for.

‘It’s about the Bearing Foods presentation,’ Trish said.

Nuts.

I tried not to shrug. I do a lot of shrugging. Especially when I’m about to get told off. I shrug at other times, too. Maybe it has something to do with hanging out in old French cars for so long.

Trish was wearing a cap sleeve shift dress with wide pink and white vertical stripes. She looked like a deckchair. A small deckchair. I could hear her blow-up cushion protesting as she squirmed in her chair and straightened to her full height. I could still barely see her over her laptop.

‘I’ve just had Daniel Bearing on the phone,’ she said.

Daniel Bearing was the CEO of Bearing Foods. We’d met, briefly.