The Miranda by Geoff Nicholson

Author:Geoff Nicholson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944700379
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2017-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

I wouldn’t have claimed to know Miranda at all, but even so, I didn’t think she was the jealous type, and I didn’t seriously think there was anything in my life for her to be jealous about, certainly not my dealings with Darrell the mailman. And yet after she saw that Darrell had given me that statue of the Buddha, she became oddly, needlessly resentful. I thought it best just to let it go and say nothing about it. Talking cures are fine, but sometimes things cure themselves without talking. Not in this case, however. The next time Miranda came to the house to make a list and do the shopping, she was uncharacteristically moody, bristling with vague grievance. She went to the supermarket, came back, put away the groceries, and placed a couple of new bottles of booze on the kitchen counter: crème de noisettes and Drambuie.

“You know,” she said unhappily, “that kitchen counter’s getting pretty cluttered with booze.”

She was right, of course: the counter was crowded with liquor bottles, although I hadn’t particularly noticed, and that was because I didn’t really care. But I could tell she had something in mind.

“We don’t want everybody thinking you’re a boozehound, do we?” she said.

I didn’t care about that either, and there was definitely not going to be anybody looking around my kitchen and judging my drinking habits, but I didn’t argue.

“You wait here,” Miranda said, and she went out to her van.

I didn’t exactly wait. I walked another circuit of the path and then another, before Miranda returned. When she did, she was maneuvering, with some difficulty, a large globe of the world, maybe three feet across, the ornate, freestanding kind, with a wooden base and a carved spindle, and as Miranda demonstrated once she’d set it down on the path, thereby blocking my way, it wasn’t a solid globe, but the kind that opens up to reveal itself as a cocktail cabinet, a place to store or stash or conceal bottles of alcohol. A dusty smell of pencil shavings and yeast emanated from the interior.

“This is for you,” she said. “From me. Better than a damn Buddha, right?”

I didn’t immediately know what to say. I wasn’t sure that one was better than the other, and to be honest I didn’t really need either of them, but I didn’t want to appear ungrateful or antagonistic, so I said, “Thanks. That’s very thoughtful.”

“And neat,” Miranda added. “But more than that, it’s a globe of the world, right? So as you clock up the miles on your walk, I can mark the distance on the globe.”

“You really don’t need to do that,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be your ‘real’ route,” she said, “because if it was real I’d have to draw thousands and thousands of tiny little concentric circles all in exactly the same spot. No, I’ll mark a theoretical route, as though you were walking around the equator, charting your progress mile by mile.”

She looked closely at the equator on the globe, traced it with her index finger.

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