The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones Page B

cinema, a supermarket, launderette and Gus’s bohemian hairdressing salon.
Not that I’ve availed myself to any great extent of the local attractions; I have worked every shift offered to me, including on-call duty over both Christmas and New Year’s Day.
    We also have two charity shops, one of which sold me fifty jigsaw puzzles for twenty-five pounds. The puzzles range from five hundred to two thousand pieces printed with detailed images of the
countryside, the sky at night, and everything that lies between the two. I have even bought myself a specifically designed jigsaw mat, so I can roll up my work before turning in for the night.
After my first four weeks in a single room in the Lavender Lodge, the ‘premier suite’ became available – double bed, TV, toilet, shower, bay window, mini kitchen and folding
table. So I packed my bag and moved up one flight of stairs. Occasionally I venture beyond my small triangle to hit pads, jump rope and shadow box at a shabby boxing gym nudging the southeast
border of the borough. Otherwise, I work, watch old movies, assemble poster-sized jigsaw puzzles and think.
    I think about how I have exiled myself from my family and my home, how I have escaped to one of the most vibrant cities in the world, only to live like a hermit, shuttling between work and the
sofa where I eat meals for one in front of old black and white movies I’ve seen dozens of times before. If I measure my life now against the one I ran out on, the significant differences are
that I am now crushingly lonely but much improved at jigsaw puzzles. It’s depressing.
    I call my parents once a week, my mother alternating between tearful hostility and weepy melancholia, Dad talking about the pub, the weather, the fight if there’s been one. In the first
few weeks following my exile I called Brian, too, but we’d never talked on the phone before, other than to name a time and a pub, so our cross-country phone calls were awkward, tentative
affairs. Maybe because the default topic was so uncomfortable. In the immediate aftermath of the ruined wedding, anyone even closely associated with me, meaning Brian, meaning my parents, was
contaminated with the fallout. There was a general belief in the first wave of hysteria that the best man must have been complicit, and Big Boots had to physically restrain both Mad George and
April’s father as the mania turned into physicality. The Black Horse was boycotted, the way the home of a serial killer might be; a local embarrassment fit only for demolition or burning.
Small pubs operate on a precarious profit margin at the best of times, and if it hadn’t been for April’s intervention, my parents could easily have gone out of business. Hearing this
– how she would drink defiantly at the bar with my mother, and stand beside Big Boots in front of the big screen on fight night – I felt myself admire and . . . maybe even love her,
more than I ever had before. This realization has caused me more than once to doubt the wisdom of my early morning flit, but I would never say as much to Brian. With stubborn parochial elasticity,
village life appears to have contracted back into shape and routine, returning more completely to its old form the longer the irritant has been removed.
    And if a year from now, I were to walk into the village, whistling a jaunty tune with a bindle over my shoulder and a cheeky apologetic grin on my face . . . what then? Certainly no fatted
burgers would be thrown on the barbecue. No, the obstinacy that keeps small towns constant comes with a long memory. The can of old vitriol would be opened, stirred and thrown over me and all
within splashing distance. Probably, this is why Brian and I no longer talk. All for what? How, when and where does it end?
    I think about this a lot, and I think I have the answer.
    The answer, I think, is love.
    Gus towels my thatch semi-dry and transfers me back to the chair in front of the mirror.
    ‘Date?’ he asks,