The Folded Leaflet

The leaflet opened flat between the two glasses on Roscoe’s kitchen table.

Veda had picked it up while he fetched supper from the oven. She recognised the cover from the library and the public session, but this was the first time she had read the back panel slowly.

Fishers can move to alternative grounds or straightforward opportunities in the growing shore economy.

She read it again. Straightforward had been given a whole line to itself by the fold.

“Did you see this before it was printed?” she asked.

Roscoe put down the oven dish. He looked at the sentence under her finger.

“Yes. I signed off the wording with the others in April.”

“Before we were seeing each other.”

“Yes.”

“After we’d met at the first consultation.”

“Yes.”

He stayed standing. Veda wanted him to sit, then didn’t. She wanted the sentence to belong to a version of him she had not held in her bed three nights ago.

“You knew I worked those grounds.”

“I did.”

“And you thought this?”

“We were trying to say there were alternatives worth examining. We weren’t promising a job to every—”

“Read it.”

He stopped.

“Please. Read what it says.”

Roscoe sat. The kitchen smelled of the supper he had cooked. His hand rested beside her glass, near enough that she remembered its weight at her waist, and the memory made her angry. It should have been possible to stop wanting him while he explained her life away.

“It says straightforward opportunities,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That was too broad.”

“It was useful.”

He looked up.

“It let you ask for this without carrying the price in the same sentence.”

He drew a breath. She could almost see his good intentions assembling themselves: volunteering, unpaid evenings, the need to reach people who would not read a long report. She knew those things were true. None of them could make the printed sentence mean something else.

“Do you think I want you unemployed?” he asked.

“No. I think you’d like the consequences of what you want to be kinder than they are.”

He leaned back. It was the first time since she had arrived that he seemed to hear something he could not answer by improving his explanation.

Veda folded the leaflet along its existing crease. Her fingers were steady. That was an old trick of hers, keeping the visible parts of herself useful while the rest came apart.

“I had an interview,” she said. “For sixteen hours. I might get it. I’ll earn less than I used to, and I’ll still have a boat to pay for. Arden has another offer. She may leave. Those are alternatives. None is straightforward.”

“I know more now.”

“You knew enough then to ask.”

He looked at her for a long time.

“Yes,” he said finally. “I did.”

The agreement hurt almost more than the defence. There would be no satisfying discovery that she had misunderstood him. This was a thing he had done, ordinary and thoughtless and connected to the thing she admired in him. He wanted the campaign to succeed. He had let a convenient account of other people’s work help it along.

“I wasn’t hiding it from you,” he said.

“I know. You told me about the leaflet at my house. That’s part of what hurts. It didn’t occur to you that I’d find this in it.”

He put both palms on the table. She watched the effort it took him not to reach for her.

“What do you need from me?”

“Don’t make that the first question.”

He frowned.

“If you correct it because I ask, then when you lose something over it, it’s mine. What do you think you should do?”

He looked down at the paper.

“I should say it’s wrong.”

“To whom?”

“The people we gave it to. The group. Publicly.”

She nodded once. She did not say that would make everything all right.

The timer on the oven sounded. Roscoe rose to turn it off. The small domestic action nearly undid her: the meal ready, the familiar room, a man she wanted making space at his table. She could stay and eat. They could find enough words to get through dinner, and then she could let his mouth quiet the hurt until morning.

She stood.

“I need to go home.”

He turned. “All right.”

“I don’t want you to follow me.”

“I won’t.”

She picked up her bag. Her keys were in the outside pocket; she had put them there without thinking when she arrived. It mattered that she could leave without a negotiation about transport, without somebody saying she was too upset to drive when she was only unhappy.

At the door, Roscoe said her name.

She looked back.

“I’m sorry. For approving it. And for trying to tell you what we meant before listening to what it said.”

The apology was the right size this time, and she still could not accept it as repair.

“Thank you for saying it.”

He nodded. There was nothing triumphant or relieved in his face.

She went home.

· · ·Scene break

The house was quiet when Veda opened the door. She hung her coat, filled the kettle and took it off again because she did not want tea.

There were no messages from Roscoe. He had heard her.

She made toast and ate it standing at the counter. The crumb caught in her throat; she drank water and resented the body’s insistence on ordinary maintenance during emotional difficulty.

She could end this. Nobody had trapped her. She could decide that loving somebody across such a disagreement cost more than she could afford, and it would not make her a coward or him a villain. She had been telling herself that since the park.

The problem was that she did not want to end it. She wanted the man who had listened beside her on the sofa to be the same man who wrote words other people would read. She wanted his consideration to survive beyond the rooms in which he wanted her.

She rang Arden, who answered with a drill running in the background.

“Have I given you the wrong charger?” Veda asked.

“No. This is my actual shelf. What is it?”

Veda described the leaflet, and the conversation, without sharing anything from their private nights.

Arden turned off the drill.

“Were you surprised?”

“Yes. No. I knew people in the campaign said things like that. I wanted him to have noticed.”

“Has he now?”

“I think so.”

“Then you’ll see what he does.”

Veda closed her eyes. She had rung hoping for comfort and received the only useful answer.

“I miss him already. That’s humiliating.”

“No, it isn’t. Don’t give being hurt every other room in the house.”

After they hung up, Veda sat at the kitchen table. She put the leaflet beside the cold-store job description she had printed for her interview. Two accounts of a life ashore: one contained a shift pattern, hourly pay and a probation period; the other contained an adjective.

She did not need Roscoe to abandon the habitat. She needed him to be as serious about this difference as he was about a damaged joint that looked sound from one side.

The phone remained silent. For tonight, that was the kindness she had asked of him.