Missing Words

She used to be curious about the people who sat alone in pubs and cafés, wondering if they were lonely and wanted company; if they were friendless by choice or irritable and irksome by nature and good at driving people away. But now she sees that there’s a freedom in being unknown and alone, with time to think unhindered by conversation and other p

The sorting room is vast – the size of a small city block with an equally large population: men sorting packets and parcels and bulk mail and letters; men running machines; men dividing the post into neighbourhoods and streets, ready for local delivery; men pushing York trolleys around the floor; men laughing; men shouting.

Jenny listens a while to the steady rhythm of Simon’s breathing, then rolls on to her side and sees his profile silhouetted against the glow of early morning light that filters through the bedroom window. Sleep is deceptive, she thinks. It makes him look at ease with the world. When she watches him like this, without his knowing, when he is unguard

Jenny had saved the precious grains of sand in an empty Colman’s mustard jar and when she left home and married Simon she had taken the jar with her. Now and then, when she feels herself disappearing into his or Charlotte’s life, a minor character in their stories, she holds the jar to the window and watches the light glinting off the tiny crystals

Lying back in the bath, Jenny reads the message again. The couple would be in their early twenties, she decides: young enough to be traumatised by love, but old enough, hopefully, not to be destroyed by it. She remembers the depths of youthful passions – the physical pain of heartbreak – and the unbelievable joy of loving and being loved again.

When their marriage was still new, she never felt the need to lock it, and sometimes he would sit on the bathroom floor as she bathed and the two of them would talk about all the minutes and hours they’d spent apart. But after nearly twenty years together, it is as if their quota of words is almost gone and they have to ration them out, sparingly,

Deborah, I’ve been stumbling around out here unable to think of anything but you. I was stupid to walk out like that, and now I’m half a world away and worried I’ve lost you forever. Please forgive me. Life is nothing without you in it. I’ll be at my sister’s until the end of August. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll know it’s really over. Ple

She studies the stamps in the corner of the card. An eighteen-cent rainbow lorikeet and a thirty-cent kangaroo. They add an exotic feel to the photograph on the front. The card itself is like a hundred others that have passed through her hands – a cliché of a beach scene – but the stamps are extraordinary! Lifting the postcard to her face, she trie