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

Violet set Arthur Galbraith to walk upon the Great Moor. It was a place of beauty and sadness and longing and hope and regret and joy, and it would take a lifetime to walk, for some things are not as simple as distance and direction.

Arthur put his boots to good use. They were no longer stolen. They were his. He had rock and peat and plain earth beneath his feet. He had a long stride, an unknown purpose and a Great Moor stood before him. Unexplored. Uncertain. A place without a map. He would be its pen.

And as he walked a face emerged. Not a face that Violet could have imagined. It was his face. It was his to choose. And strong hands not meant for instruments and a voice that said little that it did not mean.

The son of a brass stair rod and a washbasin finally appeared on a hilltop overlooking the Great Moor and looked south and east and north and west and decided to refuse the stars their steady counsel and let love guide him. He had a long road ahead. Not straight or flat or without discomfort.

And that is where Arthur and Violet and a turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter began their journey together. Almost touching. Merely the distance of paper apart.

Matt called the day after our meeting in the wine bar. The fate of the three-seater sofa was still preying on his mind. The whole 10.37am thing had rather overwhelmed the conversation.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’

I knew who it was. We had been together for five years. Married for three. Just because we were separated now didn’t mean that I would suddenly forget, even if I wanted to.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Sorry about last night.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. I wanted to see where this was going before I said anything more definite.

‘Are you busy?’

This was a typical Matt tactic. He liked to make sure that I was in the middle of doing something so that I’d have to stop doing it and give him my undivided attention. I made a mental note to find some way of quantifying his approach in a graph.

‘Just stuff,’ I said, trying not to be curt.

‘I wanted to talk to you about the sofa,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’ He said.

‘Because you always want to talk about it,’ I said.

‘Oh’ he said. He sounded small and distant and brittle.

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. This was getting ridiculous.

‘You can have the sofa. Okay? I don’t want it.’ I said.

It was the truth.

There was a pause on the line.

‘Why do you have to be such a bitch all the time,’ he said. Then he hung up.

We bought the three-seater sofa from a local secondhand furniture centre. It was hidden under a nest of tables and a glass-fronted display cabinet full of dog hair. It cost £55. I paid for it, and Matt said he would pay for his half when he got a full-time job. He had a full-time job for a while, but he didn’t pay me back. We were still 92% in love back then, so I didn’t mind that much. I minded when it suited me though. I used it against him sometimes. His unpaid half of the sofa had some value in a petty argument.

‘You still haven’t given me the money for your half of the sofa,’ I’d say.

‘Well I’ll sit on the floor then!’ he would say.

Then he would sit on the floor for about five minutes until he thought I’d calmed down. Then he would sneak back onto the sofa and hope that I hadn’t noticed. I noticed. It was a victory of sorts.

The three-seater sofa was dusty pink. It was tired-looking. Grumpy even. The zips on the cushion covers were all broken. The arms were covered in coffee stains. At least that’s what we hoped they were. It only had three casters. They were an unusual size that no one stocked anymore. We used a copy of ‘Elementary Statistics and the Role of Randomness’ to stop it from rocking backwards.

Matt liked to sleep on it in the afternoon when he was considering his future. He considered his future a lot. With his eyes closed. Gently snoring. He also got to sleep on it when our arguments weren’t quite so petty. He didn’t seem to mind. Matt and the grumpy pink sofa had some sort of connection that I didn’t fully understand. I had never slept on the sofa. Why should I? I paid for the double bed as well.

I’m not sleeping. Not really. I sleep for an hour, then I wake up and listen. I’m not sure what I hope to hear. Breathing maybe. The bed feels wrong. Not empty so much as at the wrong angle. Too flat. I’m used to Matt being there. I told him we should have got a futon in the first place, but he didn’t listen.

If I do get to sleep, I don’t dream. Nothing. Not even fleeting glimpses. I have tried eating strong cheese before bed. And spicy food. It didn’t work. Not in the way I hoped for anyway.

I miss dreaming. I used to dream. I don’t know where my dreams have gone. I hope it’s only a temporary thing. I hope they come back to me. Maybe they are unhappy, too? Maybe my dreams are having trouble adjusting?

I was going to draw a graph for the report, but I couldn’t see the point. There was nothing to show.

Matt called back an hour later.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

I didn’t say anything for a while.

That’s when he hung up again.

Great.

We’ve been having a lot of conversations like that. Not really conversations. Single words followed by about a thousand miles of tense silence. ‘Sorry’ was fairly common. We’ve both said it. I’ve said it more. Not that I’m counting or anything.

We used to a talk a lot. Nothing profound. Just normal stuff. Endlessly.

I miss it and I don’t.

Sometimes I wanted to talk about things that mattered to me. That didn’t happen so often. That took preparation and timing. Maybe a takeaway. Or a rented DVD from the corner shop. And a bottle of wine. Always a bottle of wine. Or two.

I had to pay for the preparation. Sometimes it worked. I couldn’t always make him listen though. That’s where the timing came in. After the takeaway was normally too soon. After the film had finished and Matt had watched all the special features and deleted scenes and alternate endings – that was my chance. After the bottle of wine was too late.

I don’t buy as much wine now. Or takeaways. I haven’t rented a DVD since he left.

I lied about the wine. I still buy about the same amount. I just get better wine, and it lasts a lot longer.

I’m getting used to the quiet. It’s hard. I talk to myself. There’s no one else.

I decided early on that the centrepiece of my research would be a detailed questionnaire. It would be a paper-based document of as many pages as were necessary. I had a large lever arch folder to fill.

I knew that the answers to certain questions would carry more weight than others, so it would be subdivided into several different sections that I would score separately when it was complete.

I would call it ‘The Compatibility Index.’ It sounded great. I wrote it down on a piece of paper with a purple felt tip pen. It looked great, too. So I outlined it in yellow pen. Then I drew little green stars around the outline. Then I drew larger red stars around the green stars. Then I filled the space between the inner green stars and the outer red stars with small orange hearts. The I drew a rainbow in the background with all the wrong colours and realised I had probably gone too far. It was a mess. My brother was good with pens. I wasn’t. Maybe I was being overly critical? I reminded myself that if Jack had drawn the same thing it would all be blue, including the rainbow, which would rather defeat the object.