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I stare at them.What do I do, what do I do?
Ralph.
I’m going to call Ralph. Sweet, sweet, sweet, sensible Ralph. He’ll know what to do; healwaysknows what to do. He’s logical. Optimistic. And so, so ridiculously smart. (Although I’m unsure whether his cleverness quite extends to what to do when your private emails have accidentally been read by the world as much as it does mushroom species, but cleverness is a transferrable skill, isn’t it?)
Ralph answers the phone, whispering down the line, like someone hiding during a hold-up at a bank, ‘Millie? I’m about to go into work.’
‘I know, but—’
‘We’re not allowed our phones once we’ve passed through the shop floor, remember. My boss, the one with the hip replacement—’
‘Ralph, it’s an emergency,’ I blurt. ‘Like .?.?. huge.Giant.’
A pause. ‘Gosh, really?’ In the background, I can hear a deep, hollow dog’s bark. (Ralph works as a cashier at a huge pet shop with its own on-site groomers. He calls the dogs themselves, customers. ‘Walter, one of our customers, really enjoys the pigs’ ears .?.?.’) ‘Millie, are you all right?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I really don’t think I am OK, Ralph, and I don’t know what to do.’ I imagine Ralph’s round, bespectacled face on the other end of the phone now, his troubled forehead scrunching up, his shiny cagoule peppered with rain, done up, as always, right to the Adam’s apple. Oh, poor Ralph. Moments ago, plodding along to work, probably listening to that Tea and Fungi podcast he listens to, then, along I come, steamrolling into his simple, sensible life of swimming groups and neat Tupperware lunches, firing flares into the sky. ‘Ralph, it’s my emails.’
‘What, is it all still offline?’
‘No. No, the servers came back on, but – my emails. They’re gone. They’re allsent.’
‘What?’
‘When the servers came back on, all of my emails somehow got sent. All of my .?.?.drafts.’
‘Your drafts? Your –oh.’ The penny drops and Ralph makes a doomy-sounding noise – a mini death rattle that makes me gasp an ‘I know!’ down the line. Ralph is one of the only people on earth who knows about The Drafts. Well. Besides Lin in the sales team. It was originally Lin – unconventional, principled, girl’s girl Lin Kye – who had casually suggested the whole thing two years ago. ‘Try writing an email, and just don’t send it to the fucker,’ she’d said after finding me puffy-eyed in the work kitchen a few weeks after Owen had broken up with me. ‘Something about writingtothem. Tricks the brain, you know? Helps you process it all.’
And after a few weeks of writing them, I’d proudly told Ralph about it. I hadn’t long moved in with him, as his lodger, and it was one of the first late-night, bonding conversations of our friendship. I’ll always remember it. Me, Ralph, chatting standing up at the breakfast bar with midnight cups of tea, the soft, barley sugar glow of the low, pendant lights, Ralph smiling sleepily, me feeling a weight starting to lift. And I’d told him because writing themhadhelped, and I was so relieved something had. It felt like progress. These emails, quietly contained in that safe, going-nowhere folder. And yet, here we are. Here. We. Bloody. Are.
‘How many?’ Ralph asks simply, now.
‘So many.’
‘How many is so many?’
‘One hundred—’ I swallow, scrunch my eyes closed. ‘One hundred andseven,Ralph.’ And the numbers rush out like a last-minute confession on one of those daytime murder mystery series my dad loves.It wasn’t Father Frederick who stole the church’s money. It was .?.?. me!
‘Christ, Millie.Shit.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say, and tears pool now, wobbling at the edges of my eyes. ‘I’m in hell. Like, absolute hell, and I don’t even know how or why this has even happened.I mean, I’m a good person, right? You always talk about karma, and giving out good energy, and I .?.?. I smile at dogs. I try to never gossip. I .?.?. I rinse my recycling!’
And on the loo seat as an extractor fan rattles on the wall above me like wind-up chattering teeth, I give Ralph a slightly hysterical capsule version of what happened this morning. From walking into work and going upstairs to make a cup of tea, to that sinister, ‘Millie, can we speak to you please?’ and the agonising, embarrassing boardroom meeting with the nose hair and sighing and disappointed, pinstriped Paul Foot.
‘All right, Millie, listen to me,’ says Ralph, calmly. ‘Everything .?.?. everything is going to be OK.’
‘Will it?’
‘I .?.?. I mean,yes,’ says Ralph, flusteredly. ‘As a matter of a fact, it already sort of –is?You were sent away by your bosses without consequence, yes?’
I nod, pointlessly, from the loo seat.
‘And Petra is quite correct. Who hasn’t wanted to say certain things to colleagues?’
I groan. ‘But it’s everyone else, Ralph. It’s everyoneoutsideof work I’m worried about. Plus, wanting and doing are different things, aren’t they? We all think things every day that we would sooner die than actually say.And I’ve just .?.?. said it.All of it. At once. Like that.Bleugh.Out there.’
‘Yes,’ says Ralph. ‘Yes, Millie, I understand.’ And I can tell even Ralph’s wondering how on earth I’ve ended up here; running it all through his mind, observing it, methodically, like he does when one of his plants isn’t doing what he expected. This would never happen to Ralph. He’s too sensible to have drafts full of unsaid things; too autonomous and straightforward. Unproblematic. It’s probably why I’ve never written an email to him.I might have only known Ralph two years, but he is one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had. One of those people who feel so ‘meant for you’ that you’re convinced the time before you met them was just time spent getting a bit lost on the way to finding each other.
‘Tell me what to do. Seriously, Ralph, tell me what to do. I’m really freaking out.’
