I looked at it for several seconds.
And then, strangely, I smiled.
I have thought about that smile a great deal since, because it worried me at the time.
It was relief.
For three weeks I had been carrying a low, tiring uncertainty about whether I was being unreasonable, and at four minutes past seven that uncertainty ended.
He had made the decision for me, and I was free.
I went in, made coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and thought.
By the bottom of that cup I knew exactly what I was going to do.
Nothing destructive. Nothing that would get me in trouble. No shouting in a hallway, no letter, no solicitor, nothing in writing to him at all.I simply needed a way to make him understand that what looked like nothing from a fourth-floor balcony was becoming somebody else’s problem underneath.
It took me most of that afternoon to get ready.
Not because it was complicated. Because I did it properly, and because I threw away the first three versions.
The first version had a heading. Please stop.
The second had an arrow and a flat number.
The third had a paragraph at the bottom explaining the towel and the cushion, and I wrote about ninety words of it before I stopped.
Because every single one of those versions turned the board into me.
The moment there is a sentence on it, somebody is speaking, and the second somebody is speaking you can disagree with the person instead of the thing.
The finished version has no sentences on it at all.
It is the only piece of writing I have ever done where the work was entirely in taking things out.
I went to a shop and bought a grey felt pinboard, a box of steel pins, a pad of plain white labels and a fine black pen.
Then I came home and I did the part that took the time.
I had kept them.Not all of them, and not out of any plan. I had been dropping them into a bucket by the back door since about the second week, because I could not bear to walk them through my own kitchen to the bin every single morning, and then I had stopped emptying the bucket.
Thirty-eight tea bags.
I laid them out on newspaper on the kitchen floor and let them dry, and while they dried I wrote the labels.
