The Gift

Dear Frieda,

I received your gift. Some weeks ago, in fact. I hate to think you’ve been pacing that cramped kitchen of yours all this time, worrying that the postman had misplaced it, or that you’d misremembered my – our – address. But the truth is that ever since I received your gift I haven’t known what to say. How ironic, you must be thinking, reading this letter with your coffee (black) and yoghurt (plain), perched over your noguchi table. How ironic that you, Julian, who have written me daily since our divorce only two months ago, should lay aside your pen the moment I finally reply… But how could I answer such a thoughtful present with a simple Thank you, Frieda; just what the doctor ordered? Even when I had landed upon a response, I needed a suitable gift to give back. So there it is, on the doorstep (I doubt you’ve brought it inside). Just promise me you’ll read this before you open that.

Still reading? Good. I admit, it’s a little smaller than yours, but I assure you that what’s inside is an adequate match for your largesse. And even yours, when I first confronted it, looked to be little more than a simple trinket, too intricately shaped to be anything of value in the conventional sense. At least that was my first impression when I saw it on the doorstep, on my way to take out the bins or mow the lawn or some other quotidian ritual, forgotten now, flattened under the immense significance of that week’s first step outside. Two foot tall, maybe one wide; although it had been wrapped according to the dimensions of a common box, the brown paper had warped, here and there, the way a shirt might cleave to the skin sweating behind it. The blue ribbon had remained intact; so too the bow tied on top, in one of those sailor’s knots you were always so good at. You needn’t have left the note with your name on it. I knew it was from you.

Gingerly, I picked it up, the way you used to pick up Simon on those few occasions when you did. It was heavy. I could feel the firm, thewy insides resisting the pressure of my fingers. I shook it, gently, relieved when it made no sound. Then I brought it straight inside, without mowing the lawn, or taking out the bins, or whatever it was I was doing.

I didn’t open it immediately. I could pretend that I was trying to preserve your near-perfect packaging, but the truth is that those Gordian knots of yours don’t unravel without a fight. I suppose I had already contented myself that it was an ornament of some sort, an enormous matryoshka, perhaps, to dwarf my humble collection; for that was where I placed it, at the flank of those colourful Russian dolls, arranged by height (and hated so very much by you). But when, an hour or so later, curiosity finally caught up, prodding me off to undress my patient guest, something else stopped me short: the realisation that when I did so, I would be forsaking forever this sense of excitement, this air of mystery, this unprecedented suspense.

So, instead, I just left it there, like a Christmas present in November; an ornament in its own right, and at the same time something else altogether. You always used to complain that my wooden manikins were too static, that I never played (played!) with my dolls or opened those empty, antique chasses along the mantelpiece. That their only function was to be bought and ignored, abandoned to be eaten by the cramming, ravenous backdrop of our bourgeois décor. And you were right, Frieda; for once you were right. But your gift brought something fresh and frankly exhilarating into this household. Amidst so much tack, so many precious yet passé accessories, my eyes fell flat upon it whenever I passed through the crowded (you’d say cluttered) hallway, suspended between the temptation to exhume the invisible thing within and the fear that, if I did so, I would have no choice but to bury the mystery in its place, having well and truly killed it. I talk about death, but what I’m really trying to say is this: your gift restored the life to Ridgegate.

***

The house hasn’t felt the same since you left. Creaking stairs and sighing pipes have filled the vacuum of your voice, and I suppose it doesn’t help that I spend all my time in the bedroom, drinking and writing these letters, leaving only to post them, to eat and excrete, to perform a chore or, on weekends, visit the corner shop and stock up for the week ahead. (Ibrahim has been asking about you.)

It’s during these domestic journeys that I pass the hallway, highlight of my day. But it wasn’t long before I had trodden them, too, into the powdery blandness of habit. And so, once again, I went to unwrap your gift. My fingers had barely brushed the paper however before I was suddenly and starkly reminded of you, as though I had at last identified behind that impassable paper veil a talisman in which your soul was trapped, writhing like a little bird. Even after a week, after the thick fog of novelty had evaporated, after my mind had become stuffed like a victorious divorcee’s storage cupboard (yes, I’ve seen your new trophy room) with all the dozens of possibilities of what might be waiting inside, my heart continued to levitate whenever I approached the hallway, and drop again as I left.

Did you ever consider how lonely this house would feel without you, Frieda? (Yes, yes, I hear you sighing, your yoghurt finished, your coffee cooled and potable – but listen.) When my parents perished, and long before I met you, I could at least share my solitude with Simon. And when you came gliding into my life I delighted in the fact that my family might grow again, even if no larger than the modest triumvirate of mother, father and monkey. But instead you left, barely a year in. And you took him with you.

Simon. I’ve been avoiding the matter of Simon, skirting around the monkey in the room in much the same way you used to, convinced he would rip off a finger if you ever tried to feed him. It would have been fine if you had merely ignored him. But you despised Simon, and though you rarely said so yourself, I never missed the verglas frosting over those otherwise lovely eyes of yours whenever you saw us together, whenever he climbed upon a windowsill, whenever he left his cage to eat or to play or to live as a monkey should. To you, he was nothing better than a hairy, screeching, simian appendage to what you thought would be a one-person show. You loved everything about me, but hated everything about him; and soon you began to hate something about me: that I loved him. Gulp that coffee down.

And yet, for all that you hated Simon, you demanded him in the alimony. You demanded a monkey, a mere barbary macaque (market price: £5,000), when you could have had half the manor itself (though God knows you took enough). You promised – and I quote – ‘to cherish him with the love and care he deserved but had never been given’, since according to those Londony lawyers of yours – and I quote – ‘anyone who treats his wife so poorly must treat his pet all the poorer’. They made it sound like an imperative.

The irony, indeed the reason we fell apart in the first place, was that I treated you both the same. Better than a monkey, worse than a woman: I was at least fair. Fastidious, at times, but also fair. Clever, too. Quirky, funny, suave, charming, well-endowed, wealthy. ‘I’ll never leave you, Julian. Not in a hundred years.’

And I quote.

***

A week or so after the gift arrived on my doorstep it started to change shape. Little changes at first, so that I couldn’t be sure of what I was seeing. Then, one Monday, as I was taking out the bedroom bin, I glanced again at the gift and could no longer deny that something was different about it. And I don’t just mean the way I was seeing it, nothing so phenomenological. The warped, puckered patches I had noticed upon confronting it for the first time were now deeper, the paper all creased, the ribbon sagging like a loose belt. Your gift was growing impatient; it was unwrapping itself.

All I thought was, you’ve lost weight, and with a grin went on hauling the binful of beer bottles back into the commercial circle of life. (I still recycle, Frieda.) But, gradually, as the days passed, the paper started to look a little damp, the brown going a wispy, blotchy grey. Then, on Friday, I spotted a small dark pool oozing out of the bottom, fondling the feet of the doll beside it. I was in a bad mood, now, Frieda, the same glowering rancour that I had been scratching like a rash during those final days of the divorce. But get this: I was only annoyed to discover that it wasn’t another doll.

It wasn’t until the gift started to smell that I realised that it couldn’t be a bouquet of flowers either. Or an upturned hamper, or a tall bowl of fruit. This was no post-sell-by smell, but an admixture of dishwater and sewage and mushroom so pungent that the first time I smelt it was when it woke me in the middle of the night. I knew immediately what it was, somehow, though it took me a few minutes to convince myself I wasn’t dreaming.

I thought about throwing it out. It was certainly too late to open it, and I know that’s what you wanted me to do. After all, what is the point of presents? You wanted me to unwrap the gift, thereby fashioning it into the very thing that would undo me, like one of those two-piece building sets you buy small children (or monkeys) to trick them into the belief of having created something. By taking Simon away from me, you thought you had dealt the killing blow, and that as a result this would all blow over – my neglect, your misery, the year we shared at Ridgegate. But I suppose all those letters of mine were enough to rekindle that tapering fire.

The funny thing is, barely touching it at all, in the end I did mould that gift of yours into something: a symbol of our love. No matter how much it festers, crumbles, decays, Frieda, I will never unwrap that. Because I really did love you, Frieda. In fact I still do. It’s just that I love Simon, too. Or rather I did.

Anyway, love is for sharing, symbolic or otherwise. So I present to you, alongside this letter, the only gift that could rival the one you gave me. The contents may seem slimmer, and you must excuse the leakage (not to mention the odour), but that inimitable blue bow should put you in no doubt. I delivered it myself – no postman could contend with that stench – and got myself a good look at your new place. All squat and modern, with smooth white walls and plain casements, it’s a far cry from Ridgegate; it suits you. The rooms are rather bare, however; they’d look homelier if you hadn’t locked so many of my belongings in a cupboard. I’m glad to see you’ve kept the cage. Just sad to see it empty.

Enough. This is the last you’ll hear from me, Frieda, at least for now. You’ve got what you wanted. You may open your gift.

But I don’t think you will.

Yours always, Julian