By Marianne Archbold

He’s hunched over. His Bic, bitten and blue, scratches on the crappy paper.
“Put that bloody pen down!”
He’s surprised, off-guard. He looks at me with the face, the eyes, of a slapped puppy.
“No more lists.”
This does not compute. How could he not make a list? He makes another list of reasons why he should never stop making lists.
“I’m going out.”
His eyes flick to the windows, through the streams of condensation inside to rivers of rain out, then down to my pale suede sling-backs. He shrugs. He returns to the notebook and scribbles. I step around the suitcase.
Outside, the farmyard is slop-brown and reeking. I pull up my collar, and slam the flimsy caravan door. Twice. I kick the car tyre. In the gathering evening gloom, the farmhouse is dark and absurd – a ridiculous relic. I walk up to the front door and vainly search for a knocker, then I kick the door too.
Seconds stretch into minutes. I bite at my lip and try not to notice the giant spider wrapping herself a very late packed lunch on the web strung between the broken light and the door. There’s a shuffling from within. As the door creaks open, the web breaks. An apron-clad woman from 1955 greets me, dusting flour from her podgy hands with an ERII Coronation tea towel. I smell fresh bread and ginger biscuits. Her face is unreasonably cheerful and pink. I want to cry.
“Yers? Oooh! You’re from the van? The young couple? Honeymoon, isn’t it? Shouldn’t’ve expected to see you for a couple of days!” she snorts merrily. I fight the urge to kill her.
“Have you a phone?”
She looks blankly at me.
“A phone?” I make the universal hand gesture of thumb-stuck-in-ear-and-little-finger-over-mouth, shaking my hand to make the meaning clearer. I can see she’s racking her brains. She knows she should say something but isn’t sure what.
“I Need To Use Your Phone! My battery’s flat and the car’s buggered.”
This snatches some of the roses from her cheeks.
“Sorry. There’s no phone here now. It’s gone to the pub.”
My day brightens a little. There’s a pub.
“Where is it?”
“Clowben – next valley over but one.”
“How far’s that then?”
“Oh, about fourteen miles by car,” she chuckles. “But seein’ as how your car’s broke, you’ll need Shanks’s pony!”
The rain is dripping down my neck. I pull the printout from my pocket and squint as the raindrops find the ink and dance with it.
“Can I speak to…? Mr Pearson?”
“Yes.” She stands still, smiling.
“Well? Could you get him?”
“Oh, he’s not here, my dear. You can speak to him – just not now.”
I regret not killing her.
“Where is he?”
“He’s gone over to Clowben to see a bloke in the pub about a ram. You’ve just missed him. Pity. He took his phone or you could have used that. He’ll be back at eight, unless he starts suppin’, then he’ll sleep in the truck and be back tomorrow.”
I tut and look at my watch. She just smiles.
“And that caravan is disgusting. I wouldn’t put a dog in it. We won’t pay.”
I turn on my heel and stamp across the filthy yard.
He’s still sitting at the Formica table scratching away in the notebook he found with the board games in a cupboard. The cover is torn and someone else’s kids have scribbled swear words on most of the pages.
“What are we going to do?”
He frowns at the trail of mud I’ve left from the doorway to the gaudy 70’s-style banquette.
“Did you find him?”
“No. He’s at the pub, the lucky sod, with his phone. Oh yeah – there’s a pub, but it’s miles away. What are we going to do?”
“Don’t panic. I’ve got it all figured out.”
 

*

That’s what I loved about him first. He always had a plan. Everyone else would be sitting round the boardroom table, yelling, chewing their fingernails or pulling at their hair, but he stayed calm. He always saved the day. He became a superhero. ‘Plan-Man: saving the world one plan at a time.’
When we bumped into each other at the water cooler I beamed, as he talked about spreadsheets and time-management and his eyes sparkled. It started respectably. He emailed me with a question about trunkage and I answered with a quote and a smiley face. He replied with a request for linear footage breakdowns and I didn’t respond at all, meaning he had to come to my office and see me. He stayed for 43 minutes and still went away without the figures.
Our first date was fun. He took me to a quiet Chinese restaurant and ate with chopsticks so badly that even the uncomfortably polite waiters laughed at him. We ignored them and ordered more apple wine. He dropped me off at home and we kissed on the driveway. We didn’t meet again for a week, though we emailed or texted twenty times a day.
His superhero planning skills came into their own then. He organised and premeditated, so no one at work had the faintest clue we were dating. Under his guidance, I got to work early and stayed late. I never missed a meeting and remembered, and completed, all the action points Mr Jansen tossed about like pennies at a wedding. I became the perfect employee.
Funny then, that the only schedule that was entirely mine should be the end of our fun.
 

*

It’s almost dark now. There’s no electricity in the van so we light a couple of smoky candles and the ancient oil lamp. I’m hungry and feeling light-headed. He rubs his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.
I’ve never seen his hair this ruffled before. It always struck me as weird – he washes his hair every day then gunks it all up with that greasy, oily stuff, but it’s very obvious now why. After our long journey and the last few miles pushing the car, he’s not quite so well turned-out. His super-power is fading here, away from his organised life. He can’t soak up the energy from a tatty notebook like he can suck it up through his fingertips from his keyboard.
“I need food.” I rub my belly. He gets up and opens the cabinets, again. There’s still just the forgotten tin of store-brand beans, some battered plastic beakers and four small tins of curry powder, all opened and with a spoonful or so missing. They’re over their use-by date. He finds one melamine plate, three teaspoons and a ladle. He takes out the beans and scouts around for a pan. There isn’t one. He pours half of the beans on to the plate and places it on the table for me, with a teaspoon. He sits and peers into the can.
“Bon Appetite!”
I sit opposite him. Watching him eat cold beans from a can is like watching Superman scrounging in dustbins or Batman on the loo. The beans are foul. The sauce is tasteless and runny and they’re hard like bullets. I spit them into a paper hankie. He watches me, but carries on eating.
I get up and squeeze by the suitcase to fetch my holdall.
“Do we have to leave it there?” I grumble.
“Later. Move it later,” he sighs between mouthfuls, dabbing away juice from the corner of his mouth. I carry my bag back to the banquette and rummage under my trainers and useless, powerless laptop for the sweets I’d had earlier in the car. There’s half a bottle of water too.
“I need a lie down,” I say and manoeuvre again around the suitcase to the tiny ‘bedroom’.
“Yeah. OK,” he mutters, but he’s already thinking of something else.
The room is dark and smells damp. The stained nylon bedcover may never have been new; I carefully curl up on his coat so I don’t have to touch it.
He wakes me at two. Outside, the rain has stopped and the sky is deep purple. There is a tiny glimmer of lilac-grey in what I guess to be the east. He closes the van door quietly and we shuffle across the yard. Our trainers squidge and we stop after every couple of baby steps to shush each other.
He has a tiny little torch and a map he printed only yesterday. Once we’re out of view of the house, he shows me where we’re headed. I see why he picked this place.
“We should be back here by 3:30 at the latest. We’ll be home again by 10,” he says. We struggle on.
 

*

I don’t know who was more surprised: him, me… or her? I guess it was her, because she was the one who fainted on the stairs. I suppose I probably would have too, if I’d encountered my husband trying to restrain a half-naked woman, unaccountably prancing in our hallway.
It seemed like such a good idea; tracking down his address, black lace and red satin, underneath a long raincoat, Champagne in one hand, ‘Who’s the Daddy?’ balloon in the other, “SURPRISE!” as he opened the door…
So that was why we’d always stayed at my place or he booked wonderful hotels and quaint B&Bs. He wasn’t just an old romantic, or newly-divorced and staying in a bedsit at all, unless ‘newly-divorced’ meant still very married and living in neat semi with your wife.
She lay at the bottom of the stairs. A crumpled up little woman, untidily folded in on herself. I think she was still breathing.
“It’s OK,” he said. He stroked my face. “It’s OK. I can figure this out.”
He went into the lounge, to get the phone, and I looked at her. I cried. She didn’t move. Her eyes didn’t flicker open. She didn’t point a recriminating finger, or curse me from her bloodied lips.
He came back with the phone. He spoke into it calmly as he held a cushion over her face. He asked her father if he’d seen her today, after joking about the cricket. No – nothing to worry about, he was just wondering where she was, that was all. Yes, he’d give her his love when she got in.
I followed him into the lounge. His laptop was still on.
Just before he became a widower, before he knew he was a father-to-be, he’d been researching out of the way places. He did not explain why. He clicked and printed and clicked some more.
He studied a poorly designed website and phoned a crackly mobile to book a week in a static caravan on a forgotten farm. Mr and Mrs Jones, he said. Newlyweds. Cash.
We called by my place for a change of clothes. I grabbed a holdall, but didn’t pack anything sensible.
 

*

The tarn is beyond black; so dark I blink to make sure my eyes are actually open. We’re perched on a little ledge, jutting over the water. I feel dizzy as I look down. He takes off her hastily-filled backpack, and drops it. It doesn’t even make a splash; it’s just swallowed up and no longer exists. We manoeuvre the huge suitcase between us and soon she follows. A faint ripple spreads out across the surface.
 

***

The farmyard is filled with flashing lights and people when we get back. Mr and Mrs Pearson are soot-streaked and very surprised, relieved, to see us. The caravan is burned to ash as is our car and the barn beyond. The farmhouse is even blacker than before. A solemn policeman approaches us for a statement. What now, Plan-Man?
 

*****

© Marianne Archbold

Advantages of a Meticulous Scheme was first published in The Journal, 15 October 2011