It didn’t get much better throughout the day.
“You’re telling me you’re selling double glazing?” said the elderly gentlemen on the other line, sounding as if he had been offered a pink zeppelin.
“That’s right sir, we offer high quality glazing at an affordable price, and…”
“It’d have to be extremely high quality, this is a church.”
Oh bollocks, Graham thought, not again.
“I’m terribly sorry sir, our dialling system doesn’t recognise the location of the numbers…”
“I’ve been told this five times in the last month or two, can’t you just take me off your list?”
“I’ll take you off it right away, sir”, he said, knowing full well that no request to take someone off their list of numbers had ever gone ahead, and he might as well throw his phone out.
“I should bloody well hope so!” the vicar shouted, and slammed the phone down.

The day didn’t get much better. He got put through to three office blocks and a man who claimed he was avoiding such modern trappings as double glazing (“Why the bloody hell does he have a phone then?” Graham shouted inside his head), and the sensible leads he got just didn’t go anywhere. Coupled with that, the bus he was supposed to get simply didn’t show up, and the next one rook an hour to get there. The end result was a rather unhappy Graham storming in at about seven, and a somewhat put-out Miranda trying to hide her annoyance with a simple “how was work, dear?”
“Lets not even start,” was the sullen reply, “I’ll only get annoyed. What’ve you been up to today then?”
“Well, after I spoke to Miguel again last night,” she started, and sensing a load of art-talk, Graham decided to zone out, and focus on what bloody use he was selling double glazing to elderly vicars, and caught himself starting to pay attention again as he was told about a pigeon with three legs.
“Last thing we need, more bloody pigeons. The ones the people across the road alone are determined to paint your car white with shit, and that’s only two of them.”
“Well, its turning out to be a very nice sculpture, and Miguel says he might have a buyer interested in it if it turns out alright.”
“Miguel my foot, when was the last time he actually found a buyer who’d pay you something hard decent for your stuff? What happened to that old guy you used to have? Mr Boscombe or something?”
“He died last year, Graham.”
Not quite sure how to get himself out of that one, Graham went straight over to the matter of food.
“I had made dinner, but you didn’t call me to tell me you were coming back late.”
“Well, this bloody phone doesn’t actually charge properly, and Arriva seems to think sending out buses on time is a ridiculous idea.”
“One of these days, you’re going to realise it’d make life much easier if you learnt to drive.”
Graham was inclined to agree, but pride and a lack of money meant he couldn’t actually tell her this.
“One of these days, I’ll actually have the time and the money…”
“Rubbish, I’ve told you I don’t want to do that.”
“Because you don’t love me, I know full well…”
“Don’t start that again, for god’s sake.”
“Well, there’s got to be some reason you won’t let me help you, and if it isn’t because you don’t love me, I don’t know what it is. Let me tell you…”
And it led into another one-sided argument, concluding with Miranda storming off somewhere upstairs, and Graham left fuming in the lounge. Sick to the back teeth of never being right once in his life, he flipped the television on, and once again, the news filled his screen with yet another government blunder, with the Prime Minster personally losing three million peoplesworth of information on the train. Perfect for his mood.

Losing things seemed to be a common theme on the telly that night. Since Miranda evidently didn’t want to come back downstairs and finish what she’d started, and Graham didn’t want to finish what she’d started either, he stayed put and watched. After the Prime Minister losing things on the news, it went over to a program about gigantic people losing weight, and then some drama about a hunt for a missing person. Missing person… now why was that such a familiar idea? Shades of his thoughts from the night before started to creep back into Graham’s mind. Something about running away and seeing the world? That didn’t sound like a bad idea. But how? He had taken a handful of driving lessons, but those were nearly twenty years ago, and he’d probably forgotten half the things he needed to know to not get arrested. So how to get away? He knew he couldn’t go via London, he couldn’t afford the bus fare to the station there, let alone a way out of the country.

And then a few more things clicked into place. Instead of getting onto the continent via France, like everyone else in the county did, he could go across to Holland by boat. It’d been an idea some of the stoned individuals at university had suggested, based on the huge volumes of weed apparently available even then. And since he’d done German for his O Levels, he’d have a lot more luck with Dutch than French, the former of which he understood as being a bastard lovechild of English and German. Right, so that was where he had to go, the question was, how?

He could pretend to book some driving lessons, borrow the money off of Miranda, and use them to pay for a train ticket… but no, even though she pissed him off royally, he couldn’t go basically stealing her money, no matter how much of the stuff she kept splashing on utter crap. How about his savings? He had something like five hundred pounds kept aside for the wedding he didn’t really want to go ahead with anymore, that would be a start. He didn’t have anything particularly valuable to his name, apart from an old pocket watch his granddad had given him, and told him never to get rid of. Well, needs must when the bitch is driving, he thought, finding it in his safe deposit box, along with a twenty pound note he was saving for no particular reason. Might as well use that as well.

And the guidelines for his plan started to fall into place. Get the train… nah, save some money, get the coach up to Hull, get a ferry over to… where was it in Holland? Some research said Rotterdam was the port to be aiming for. He’d buy maps and things like that over there. But how and where was he going? Did it matter? Probably not. Perhaps get a bike in Rotterdam and cycle it somewhere. The important thing was getting away, anywhere away from here, and once he had some distance, start thinking about it then. He booked a coach ticket from Milton Keynes, found some buses, gathered a fairly good idea of what ferries from Hull were like, and by the time Miranda sloped back downstairs, was perfectly content to apologise for having done absolutely nothing, and acquiesce to the things she told him to do. Made sense, seeing as it’d calm her down for now, and by the time he had to do anything about it, he’d be long gone.

Several hours, a dozen lagers, and two thirds of a film later, and Graham’s opinion of himself, his world, and circumstances in general hadn’t improved much. He hadn’t quite realised that lager, once the fuel of a variety of good times at university, now only produced a somewhat maudlin introspection. If he’d been given to experiment, he’d have found that vodka was as much a party drink as it is for most people, whiskey would still leave him introspective, albeit happily introspective, and vodka would make him black out, possibly before being violently sick. Mind you, this tends to happen to most people drinking tequila.

His rationale was this. Most people he knew had achieved something by the time they were thirty three. His old roommate, Giles, had gone on the same graduate placement scheme as him, and done quite a bit better out of it. Possibly because he’d done a Business Studies degree, which, while being horrifyingly boring, meant he actually had a qualification that might be useful once in a blue moon. The last time they had met up, he was doing something in marketing for one of those big companies lurking in London. Many of his former drinking buddies had been able to do something similar. Even Greasy Mike, the perpetually stoned guy who lived on the landing downstairs and never went to his lectures, had set up his own business and was doing very well for himself. Admittedly, it was a web business selling customised bongs, but that was still more than he was doing, a thought he used to refocus his self pity on himself.

The big problem, he mused, was Miranda. He had met Miranda near the end of his time at university, and had fallen in love in a matter of minutes. She had started off being a lot less blatant, but by all appearances had eventually succumbed to his charms. It had been a wonderful first few years, they had moved in with each other, and then things started going bad.

“Jealous” and “controlling” weren’t exactly the right words. Unfortunately, “damn crazy” wasn’t the right word either. Something in the middle was defiantly needed. She had made some excuses about being hurt by previous boyfriends, but these stories ended up changing slightly with each telling, and by the time it was obvious she was talking where the sun didn’t shine, she was using the story in the same not-particularly-passive-aggressive way. Passive aggressive suggested something passive, something working calmly to be decidedly antisocial. Miranda didn’t believe in passive. Any arguments were to be solved by being the loudest, jumping in with telling Graham things that whatever he was doing was cheating on her, had cheated on her by doing things that sane people wouldn’t call unfaithful in any round of madness. And since Graham was already the easily dominated sort, he bent over backwards to keep her happy.

Thankfully, money was one of the few things that didn’t present a problem in their relationship. Somehow or other, Miranda had acquired a small fortune, possibly from a dead relative, and might as well have had an unlimited bank account. Quite why she still stayed with Graham when she could easily have afforded to keep some petty, subservient younger lad he didn’t understand: she claimed she couldn’t live without him, but she said lots of things.

Opening his last can, Graham turned this idea over in his mind. There had to be some reason Miranda stayed with him, but gave him all this abuse. He hadn’t tried breaking up with her for years, since that was when the passive aggressiveness went into overdrive. Maybe the best solution would be to just run away. Go where he couldn’t be found. He hadn’t taken a gap year after university - the idea simply hadn’t really existed when he was a student - and he hadn’t seen any of the world outside of England. Get a ferry over to France… no, everyone went to France. Maybe Holland? Maybe Norway….

The next thing he knew, he was still in his chair, but the lights were out. It was 3:14 in the morning. He must have fallen asleep. He shambled upstairs into bed, somehow managing to get upstairs without waking Miranda up. She didn’t even stir as he flopped into bed.

* * *

Miranda woke up at about nine in the morning, having been stirred half awake by Graham waking up, banging around, and setting off for work. Poor man, she thought. She had offered to support him, she had enough money sequestered away to keep them for many years, but he’d said something about not wanting to be dependant or something. But didn’t he realised how closely related dependence was to trust? How refusing her offers of support showed how little he trusted her? But it was alright. She loved him, and he loved her, and that was all that mattered.

She rolled out of bed, and went downstairs to the kitchen. There was plenty she had to do today, her meeting with her art dealer, Miguel, had gone pleasantly, but had requested some pieces in a more… he’d hovered around the word “modern”, but it was defiantly the one he was looking for. It was very hard, however, to define what exactly he meant by “modern” without being “abstract”. Abstract sculpture was a horrible term to Miranda. It suggested bizarre angles and unfathomable constructs that didn’t bear any resemblance to real things. And Miranda favoured real things in her work. Either something was, or something wasn’t, and if it was, it could be reproduced. And if it wasn’t, you couldn’t do much with it. So she’d have to disappoint him - not something she liked to do, because while she had enough money to keep her happy, Miguel made sure she didn’t have to spend more of it than she had to. So keeping him happy was usually better for her, for him, and perhaps for Graham as well.

Her thoughts then turned, with a twinge of sadness, to her fiancé. He obviously didn’t like the job he was in, but he didn’t seem to want to do anything about getting a proper job. Cold calling people all day trying to sell tat to people who didn’t want it simply wasn’t a job for a man. But she wouldn’t make him do anything, because she loved him.

She put some oranges in her juicing machine, poured out a bowl of muesli, then squeezed out the juice into a glass. She took her breakfast out onto the veranda, and once again admired the view. When she had been doing some painting, she had done a selection of scenes depicting this view. There was plenty to be said for the life of the artist. Thankfully, she didn’t have to suffer the terrible poverty the old masters of art had to, the money her three aunts had willed to her meant that she wouldn’t need to worry for money for many years to come. Content with this knowledge, if not with her circumstances, she put her breakfast things in the dishwasher, and went up to her sculpture room. Perhaps a large cast of a pigeon could take some modern influences somehow.

* * *

Graham was not happy again. He’d woken up early with an unpleasant hangover, managed to stumble through his morning routine without thinking about it too hard, and had managed to get to work with a head that only felt like it had been hit with a hammer. And coupled with that were the people he had to deal with.

“Good morning, Graham!” came the booming voice from the desk next to his. Wilbur was a gentlemen in his early seventies, who gave no impression of being anywhere near seventy. He had been something important in the city some years ago, before retiring a couple of years ago, quite possibly because he hadn’t been a particularly quiet old man, or indeed a quiet anything. Generally, Graham tolerated him, because he was quite amusing when loud noises weren’t a gift from the Devil himself.
“Morning, Wilbur”, he grimaced, hoping to be spared much more than that for now. Sadly, he wasn’t to be that lucky.
“Was it not a splendid evening for you too last night, my young friend?” he continued, in a splendid baritone that would have done wonders on the stage.
“Not too bad, stayed in, in front of the telly.”
“Ah yes, I forgot that you are bereft of your wonderful wife on the evening of a Tuesday!”
“She’s not my wife, Wilbur, we just…”
“So I imagine you suffer from a head brought on by the beverages of kings?”
“Yes, it’s a little tender.”
“Well, I daresay you’ll need a modicum of quietness. Mores the pity you’re stuck with this! Ha ha ha!” he concluded with a laugh that could only be compared to thunder.
“Ha, yeah, mores the pity for me”, laughed Graham, with absolutely no trace of real humour in his voice. Having Wilbur bellowing in his ear was the last thing he needed.