Making Notes — A Short Story
To celebrate the fact that I met my self-imposed but still — possibly more so because of being self-imposed — important deadline to get the first draft of the book done, here’s a short story of mine I wrote some time ago.
In the gap while I let the book stew in the drawer for a couple of weeks I’m going to write a new story. That will keep me writing creatively and, at the same time, stop me thinking about the book. I want to return to the manuscript with as fresh eyes as possible.
So, to get me in the swing for starting a new story, here’s an old one.
MAKING NOTES
July 28th
I think the kids are finally getting the hang of the notes. And finding them fun, I suppose. It’s a bit like finding surprises — or presents — round each corner. Each note carries one simple instruction so they can’t be confused. There’s no room for ambiguity. I make sure that each note is concise and precise.
Today is my birthday, as well as the day I decided to start recording my experiment with the notes in the house. The children had asked me ahead of time what I wanted for my birthday and I told them. It took me a while to convince them that a box of sticky notes was exactly what I wanted but, in the end, they realised that this would have less impact on their saved pocket money than they had budgeted for and so acquiesced graciously to supply me with what I estimate will be a one month supply of the little yellow stickies.
My only stipulation was that they be of a recognised brand. There is nothing worse than cheap imitations that lose their stickiness as soon as they hit the air and end up fluttering to the floor seconds after they have been fixed wherever I want them to stay.
I’ve been using notes in the house for a few months now but I intend to really up my game with them. The children are at an age where they need a bit more guidance on almost all matters of daily life. I’m known for my notes around the office and on many occasion have been singled out for praise by the senior partners for bringing order to chaos in larger projects. It is time to apply the same thinking at home.
My wife looked on as I unwrapped the box. Her expression was a fixed grin of distaste. She finds what she terms my fixation for instruction oppressive. But then, if anyone needed some marshalling of her life, it would be my wife.
But that’s by the by. It could be that the senior partner at home will not be quite so open to the benefits of the notes as those senior partners in the office. But that’s understandable: my wife has, of course, been less exposed to the pressurised demands of the business world.
I have a note in front of me that reads ‘Enjoy tea with the children’. There is no time stated, which is an oversight, but it is almost five in the afternoon and I think that is probably the time I had in mind. I shall return to this record later.
It is now just after ten in the evening. The children are in bed and my wife in the bath. I had attached a note to the taps reminding her to finish the old bottle of bubble bath before she started on the new one. Whether she followed this instruction or not I won’t know until she goes to bed and I can check but the fact that I heard her swearing loudly when she first went into the bathroom suggests she didn’t take the advice kindly. But one of us needs to take the problem of wasted money seriously.
I have written a short note to slip into my wife’s purse. In fact I shall attach it to the ten pound note I know is in there. The note simply exhorts her to ‘Think before you buy’. I hope she sees it an an encouragement to practise fiscal restraint going forward.
The tea with the kids started well enough. They brought down almost all of the notes I had left for them today. I say almost all because it soon became apparent that my wife had removed some, not only before the children saw them, but also without telling me. I let it slide, as it was my birthday and the cake she had made was quite delicious. I could have done without all the candles, however. A single candle for symbolism would have been enough. And less wasteful.
July 30th
Only a couple of days into the implementation of the notes regimen and I think the effect is already noticeable. There is an air of calm in the mornings and the children are lolling about less in front of the TV.
My wife appears to be smiling less, however.
August 3rd
My wife is refusing to sleep in the same bed with me. It’s all the result of a misunderstanding, of course, and I’m sure she’ll soon see reason. She has made a big show of moving into the spare bedroom (nothing more than a box room which we have long used for storing files and mementoes of the early years of the children) and using an old fold out camp bed. She is obviously not sleeping well and I’m sure this will drive her to see sense very soon.
What happened was this: It’s the first Friday of the month, so this is the night we set aside for sex. Before leaving for work that morning, I had written notes for my wife to remind her. I left one on her dressing table that stated simply “First Friday!” and one on her purse that reminded her to purchase new massage oil and a scented candle. (My wife enjoys rubbing my back and easing the tension from my shoulders before we get down to sex proper.)
The final note I put in her underwear drawer: it told her what I would like to see her wear that night when I came home.
Apparently, my wife finds the fact that I am looking forward to our night in this way oppressive. “It removes all spontaneity,” she said. I’m not sure where spontaneity comes in when we have an agreed day set aside for this. Then again, my wife also accused me of being the one who proposed this particular ritual. I don’t have the appropriate notes to hand so I can’t be sure but I would suggest that, even if the implementation of the idea were mine, it was probably done at her instigation. When I started down this path of debate, my wife grew increasingly angry.
The only thing left to me was to suggest that we simply have sex and miss out the massage.
I can’t bear to write down all the names my wife called me at that stage. While I had been prepared to schedule another day later next week, my wife obviously felt this was worth developing into a full scale argument. There were some choice descriptions of my character hurled my way, too. Some were insulting and some were obscene. The great majority of them, however, were simply fantastical and therefore neither hurtful nor relevant.
Although, thinking about it now, they could be said to be revealing of my wife’s increasingly unstable state of mind.
August 10th
I must admire my wife’s stamina. She is still on the camp bed in the spare room. Over breakfast in the morning she looks more tired each day. I have to say that the tiredness does not suit her because she looks years older than the woman who first stormed in there a fortnight ago.
She refuses to speak to me, of course. I say ‘of course’ because the situation feels like it has been scripted and my wife is playing her part to perfection. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the script so can only react to each new day and the events as they unfold by applying common sense. This morning, for instance, as I left for work, I attached a note to the hood above the cooker. It simply wished her a good day. I also noticed that some of the notes I had added to the fridge over the last few days are still there, meaning that tasks are incomplete.
Or the notes have been ignored.
August 11th
I am angry. And I am incredibly frustrated at the same time.
First, the anger. I realised that I have been spending too little time with my children. The boy, especially. Obviously, they receive notes constantly but a chance remark from one of the senior partners in a meeting this afternoon brought home to me that perhaps face to face contact was something the children might enjoy more of. So, when I came home this evening, I checked through the notes on my desk to make sure I had no urgent tasks and then went upstairs to their bedrooms. My daughter’s room is the closest to the top of the stairs, so I went there first.
My daughter was sprawled across her bed with headphones on and listening to music from her iPod. Her eyes were closed and her head was moving from side to side. I was about to step over to the bed when I noticed her waste paper basket. It was full, which I’m sure is no rare thing in a young teenager’s bedroom, but the fact was that I could see it was full of sticky notes. Notes that I had written. I quickly glanced at her walls and notice board. It was soon evident that all the notes that I had carefully and thoughtfully made for her over the past week or so were in that bin. I retreated through the door quietly and closed it behind me. I needed to think what to do about this.
The next door along was my son’s bedroom.
He wasn’t in there. The boy is popular, so it was not surprising that he would be enjoying a summer evening in the company of friends. No doubt my wife knew where he was but I certainly wasn’t going to ask her.
After what I had seen in my daughter’s bedroom, I checked my son’s waste basket. I needn’t have bothered. I knew what I would find: his basket, too, was full of discarded notes. At least I was now sure this was not a simple case of my daughter engaging in teenage rebellion. This was obviously the work of their mother.
While I was eating, my wife arrived in the kitchen with the waste paper baskets from my children’s rooms. Watching me as she did so, she held the baskets one by one up over the bin and tipped their contents in among the rubbish already in there. That done, she took the black bin bag from the kitchen bin and tied its top and carried it outside. When she returned, she sat down opposite me at the table and stared while I finished my food. It was obvious she was looking for a reaction. Perhaps even a fight.
I didn’t give her the satisfaction.
She soon got tired of staring at me and left the kitchen. I took out a pen and a pad of sticky notes. I wrote carefully — because my hand was trembling a little from the strain of all this and I wanted to make sure that the words were extremely legible — a short instruction for her. It said ‘Buy More Sticky Notes’. I put this on the front of the cupboard from which she is constantly retrieving her bags of herbal tea.
That, I believe, will show her.
The frustration is that with my wife refusing now to speak to me, I can’t explain just how this action of hers threatens to undermine the whole stability of the family. I don’t think it’s overstating the case to suggest that chaos could easily overtake us. And sooner than my wife might think.
In my job as a project manager I see almost first hand every day how ignoring a simple instruction or forgetting to account for a variable can derail even the smallest and inconsequential project. My family, my marriage, and my life are not inconsequential projects. My wife needs to learn this.
I can only pray that this is a temporary state of mind for my wife — perhaps the result of early onset menopause? — and that common sense will prevail in the next day or so.
August 12th (very early)
The solution was obvious, in the end. I didn’t go to bed. I pretended to go to bed but when I heard my wife close the spare room door, I walked down to my study.
Then I recreated all the notes she had destroyed. I can’t be sure that they are worded exactly in the same way and it is only natural that with the passing of time, not only will some notes require a different context, but also there is now a need for additional notes.
I found the process incredibly invigorating.
August 12th (later)
The family have gone. I am in shock.
After recreating the notes, I could hardly leave them in a pile on my desk. Of what use could they have been to anyone there? So, before everyone rose, I managed to creep around the house and put the notes back — as best I could remember — where they had been before my wife decided that chaos was the better option. It meant being very quiet in the children’s rooms but they both slept the sleep of the teenager. With my wife, I didn’t feel like risking the spare room, so left the notes stuck to the outside of her door. What if I had gone in and she had taken it as a sign of seeking reconciliation?
Being up so early, I decided to head off to work on an earlier train than usual. There was plenty I could do in the office before the first meetings of the day. I even treated myself — if that is the right phrase — to a breakfast at McDonalds and picked up a second coffee on the way into the office to drink at my desk. The jolts of caffeine saw me through the morning.
Then I came home.
When I saw a note on the kitchen counter, I was quite pleased. I thought that it must signal that my wife had finally accepted using sticky notes as a way to manage the unruly events of the household. And she had followed my own standard of conciseness.
Her note read, “We’re out of here”. There was a second note stuck behind it, which read, “You need help”.
The meaning was clear immediately and I didn’t go through any of that puzzlement and slow realisation so popular with second-rate authors. She had left me and taken the children. Her justification appeared to be that she thought I was mentally unsound.
Looking back at the previous fortnight and her behaviour during that time, it was obvious where the mental deficiencies lay, so that was an excuse.
I suspected there might be someone else involved.
August 13th
The house felt very quiet when I returned from work tonight.
I went into all the rooms and read the notes that will be there for them when they return. Obviously, some will need to be updated as time goes on but that will allow me to stay on top of things and, by setting them tasks, to maintain contact with my wife and children, however vicariously.
There was one especially sour moment. Scrawled at the bottom of a note in the spare room — a note regarding the airing of the room during the day — are the words, “In your dreams, tosspot”. If the handwriting had not clearly been that of my wife, I would never have believed she could write such a thing.
So childish and yet such a bad example to the children.
August 27th
I have been let go at work.
The PA to one of the senior partners called to ask me to come to his office. This was the first time I had been to the eighth floor other than for a meeting and, on the back of the praise I had received only a week or so ago, I was not past hoping that it might signal a promotion, if not an actual raise.
When the PA showed me into the office, I was surprised to see both the senior partners and the human resources manager. There was also a row of wastepaper bins in front of the desk. I could see from the door that the bins were full of sticky notes. It brought a bitter memory of my wife and I was unable to focus for a few moments on what the human resources manager was saying.
The conversation was short, mostly because I found it hard to accept what was being told to me. Apparently, my colleagues found me overbearing and a bully. There was a suggestion that I had a compulsive disorder. (It was my job to prevent disorder, I almost said.) The litany of my crimes against the poor souls who worked in the project office continued but I stopped listening.
I was offered a course of treatment — for what? — at the company’s expense or I could take voluntary redundancy with immediate effect and a generous pay-off. Pride insisted I accept the latter. There was an embarrassed silence and no handshakes.
I left their office and went back to my desk. Nobody offered me a farewell. These people I have worked with for nearly fifteen years and whose jobs I have made easier ignored me.
That hurt.
Is it possible that my wife has had a hand in this?
August 28th
I have had a day to think about things now and I believe that losing the job may be the best thing that’s happened to me. The financial implications aside — and I shall have to deal with those at some stage, to which end I have created a series of notes and attached them to the cabinet drawer in which I keep our banking records — the necessity to commute to work each day was definitely having a negative impact on the amount of control I could exert on the chaos that is domestic life. I have no doubt that had I lost the job some months ago I could have prevented the departure of my wife and children.
No doubt at all.
It is clear to me now that to suspect my wife would be behind me losing my job was merely a symptom of the stress that I felt immediately after being told to leave. I have made a note to call my wife later and to give her the good news.
As if to reinforce the fact that this was all part of some great plan — and I have the greatest respect for the planning of the power that watches over us — when I returned from my last day in the office, there were two boxes waiting in the porch. These were my order of new sticky notes.
The two separate boxes held a total of one hundred and twenty thousand individual sticky notes. I will have no fear of exhausting my supply for a while. I was a little annoyed at first that the delivery man had simply left such valuable items in the porch. But the satisfaction of receiving them on such a day outweighed the anger and I tore up the note I had written to remind me to complain.
August 29th
I found my note from yesterday plumb middle of my desk and called my wife.
Our conversation was not long. I worry for her mental health. She seemed to have difficulty understanding the point I was trying to make. Had the children been a little older I would have insisted on talking to them instead. As it is, I think my wife put the phone down on me. I’m not sure but after I had reiterated my argument for what must have been the fourth time, the line was quiet. We may have been cut off. I didn’t bother calling back and my wife didn’t call me.
It looks as if I will have longer on my own to set the place to rights here and to put the running of the house on a solid footing ready for the return of my family.
September 8th
I have been busy. Each day I have armed myself with a pile of sticky notes and chosen one room.
That’s the upstairs finished and most of the ground floor. My study took two days to do properly because there are so many administrative tasks to complete. It wasn’t just about the room itself, you see.
From tomorrow I will be working on the hall from the front door and then into the kitchen.
It will be a relief to have in black and white (or, strictly speaking, blue and yellow) the compete list of tasks required. Then, whenever I enter a room, I will know exactly what needs to be done. Pick up a note and take action. Almost no thought required.
September 12th
Something is wrong.
I’m not sure quite what has happened but there are notes that I find confusing. Some are even contradictory. When I came across the first of these, I even thought for a moment that someone had come into the house during the night and added them. But the writing is definitely mine. Could I be sleep-walking?
September 23rd
Back on track. I have clarified the ambiguous notes.
This has taken longer than I intended but it is all for the best. The only problem is that I am using my supply of notes more quickly than I had foreseen.
October 16th
A delivery of sticky notes arrived. I don’t want to run out again, so this time I ordered a total of 50,000 packs. It cost me almost the whole of my redundancy pay-off but I think five million stickies should see me through the next six months, at least.
It is an expensive investment, especially considering I am no longer earning, but absolutely essential if I am to keep moving forward in the right way. I have no doubt that I have made the right decision and when my wife returns I know she will agree with me.
I haven’t been able to work on finances for a while, so I’m not sure of the exact balance in my accounts. To be honest, I find the list of tasks in the study quite overwhelming and I have avoided going in there for almost a month. New tasks I identify for when I will be in the study I just stick to the door now. Next time I go in there I shall take them in and put them in their correct position.
November 18th
I have managed once again to correct the notes. I’m not sure how it happened this time but I must have been lost in thought about other things. I obviously wasn’t in the right frame of mind. The problem was lack of focus. That’s it.
Well, it’s all resolved now. I have examined every note on every wall and surface in the house and added a coda or rider to each to make sure that when next I look at it I am fully aware of what I meant.
This has been a slow process because there were notes that actually frightened me at first. It took patience and a lot of slow deep breathing to see that what was at first glance menacing or even a sign of creeping insanity was really just a matter of a spelling mistake or an obscure abbreviation.
December 5th
The notes are dangerous things.
I have tried to take some down but when I next look they seem to have reproduced. The walls are full of the same messages.
December 22nd
The kitchen is the only safe place now.
The notes that cover the windows keep the harsh light out.
I see I have notes about Christmas presents for the children but I am unsure how to follow through on the instructions.
January 3rd
I heard the telephone ring in the hall but I couldn’t get through the door. I think a large clump of notes has fallen from the wall next to the door and jammed it shut. My mobile phone ran out of charge a long time ago. Even if somebody comes to the door now, I won’t be able to answer it. I left a note on the door weeks ago suggesting visitors might be better served spending their time more constructively than bothering me. It must surely have blown off by now.
I’m sure I wrote a note about gathe
January 6th
I am finding notes that appear to finish in mid thought. Sometimes even in the middle of a word.
There appears to be no food left. I found a note attached to the top shelf — right at the back. It was in my wife’s handwriting. It said, simply, “Buy food”. I think it may have been a joke. I smiled a little as I remembered the early days of our marriage. She laughed at me when she found out I carried a small pad of sticky notes with me in my inside jacket pocket. And a pen, of course. There was a note on the hanger for my jacket that reminded me to check the pen in the pocket was still working. But I think she was also secretly impressed by the fact that I was so well organised. It came in very handy on our honeymoon when there was all the trouble at the airport.
Happy days.
I don’t feel hungry, though, which is strange. A little thirsty, perhaps. But the water appears to have stopped flowing. I can’t believe I’ve been cut off. I think it is more likely a frozen pipe. I haven’t been able to get to the boiler and restart it, so there has been no heating for a few days and last night was very cold. I slept on the table wrapped in the rug from beneath the table and an assortment of tea towels. The oven gloves make quite a comfortable pillow.
From the East Surrey Advertiser January 20th
Local Man Starved To Death In Kitchen
After a neighbour raised the alarm, police visited the house of Mr. Jonathan Prince of 289 Mead Way, Caterham, on Friday (January 15th). The body of Mr. Prince was found inside. He had been dead for at least a week, a police spokesperson said.
Police had to break down the door and make their way with difficulty through the house. The spokesperson said that much of the floors and walls were covered in sticky notes, all of which carried short cryptic messages. When asked to describe the messages, the spokesperson wouldn’t elaborate but said that they appeared to be instructions or separate tasks to be completed. Much of the writing appeared illegible.
The death is not being treated as suspicious and police are not looking for anyone else in connection with the death of Mr. Prince.
His estranged wife, Eleanor, said Mr. Prince had been suffering from a nervous disorder but she had not realised how bad it had become over the last few months. He had made no attempt to contact her or the children since September, so she had had no reason to suspect he was in difficulty. She said it had been a shock to hear that he had lost his job over two months ago. Her husband had given her the impression that he had been assigned a new role in the company with more responsibility.
On the table in front of Mr. Prince, he appeared to have been writing a note when he finally passed away. It read, simply, “Running out of”.
The body will be cremated in a service this Thursday.
THE END
