No Cardamom by Patrick Gray
It’s difficult to know exactly when cardamom stopped existing - it must have just slipped away quietly. Whilst being lodged in my peripheral vocabulary it wasn’t exactly a word in everyday parlance for me or anyone I know. When called upon I can cook a mean lasagne or prepare a lovely soft boiled egg but I’m not a chef by any stretch - our cupboards at home contained nothing fancier than jars of curry sauce, some salt, pepper, dried mixed herbs and something called ‘Allspice’ tucked in at the back behind the casual condiments we all acquire over time. Cardamom just isn’t a common thing… well, that’s especially true now…
I noticed on a Wednesday afternoon in April. I generally try to do a good stint of work in the morning, start wrapping up after lunch and spend a couple of hours answering simple emails and getting some quality procrastination in before getting off home. By 3.30 I was checking Facebook and playing a spot of online Scrabble with an old school friend who lives in the States. I was very pleased with myself – on my rack was C,A,R,D.O,A,M and a blank. The word ‘FORUM’ was stacked vertically with last letter on an empty bottom row and I worked out it would have scored 92 points… but it was not to be.
‘Sorry, CARDAMOM is not a valid word, please try again’.
Not a valid word? Must be spelling. After all, it’s not a common word, and my spelling isn’t perfect. Opened up a tab on Google to check the correct spelling…
‘Did you mean: cadmium cardium cardinium cardam’
Underneath were a variety of results, mainly selling mother’s day cards and birthday cards for ‘mom’ as well as articles about cadmium poisoning.
Over the next half an hour I searched every possible spelling. Cardomam, cardamum, cardamon, cardemam… then I Googled curry ingredients. Curry leaves, tamarind, coriander, ginger, garlic, chili, pepper, poppy seeds, mustard seeds, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, nutmeg, coconut, turmeric… other variations popped up depending on type, geography and complexity, but nowhere in any of them was there a mention of cardamom.
At 4.30 I called Andrea. No answer. I didn’t leave her a voicemail, instead I sent a text -
‘Silly question: How do you spell cardamom? Does that look like the right spelling? Spellcheck and Google no help x’
Five minutes later, no reply from Andrea. I copied the text and pasted it into Messenger and sent it to her, this time adding a sad face and a frustrated monkey emoji. Five more minutes passed, still no response. I messaged her again –
‘Did you get my message about cardamom? Or is it cardomam? Or cardomum? Strange, can’t find answer anywhere! x’ This time, three undulating dots appeared almost immediately.
‘WTF? Was this why you were hassling me at work?! I don’t know what you’re going on about. Haven’t a clue what you’re on about. If it’s not on Google it’s not a thing.’
Not a thing? I wasn’t an expert on spices and my ignorance about cardamom had been cruelly exposed but I was pretty sure it had ‘thing’ status.
‘Of course it’s a thing. Cardomom maybe? Pods? Powder? In curries, you know? xxx’ Noticing Andrea’s lack of a kiss I put three at the end of this message – my casual one kiss sign-offs perhaps hadn’t been noticed if she was busy at work.
‘On the bus. See you at home.’
‘Maybe I should pick up a curry from Asda for tea? Then I can check the spelling on the ingredients – two birds with one stone! xxx’
‘Bring milk x.’ The kiss was reassuring, she can’t have been too mad with me.
‘OK - what kind of curry do you fancy? Shall I bring a Peshwari Naan? Xxx’
Two minutes passed without reply, then the green dot went off by her name.
A fruitless search on the internet was followed by a trip to Asda. Cardamom was nowhere to be seen in the spice aisle, so I checked the curry sauces, then the ready meals. Nothing. Perhaps there was a worldwide shortage, maybe the crop had failed in Madagascar or Kenya or Peru or wherever they grew it. That happens… I remember the year there were no Ginger Nuts because the McVities factory was flooded. You couldn’t get Ginger Nuts for months.
With all the fuss I didn’t get home until after seven that night – Andrea was in the bath, I could sense the still, moist warmth behind the locked door as I stood on the landing. A faint aroma of vanilla indicated she had lit a candle and was in for the long haul. I asked her if she wanted some chicken korma but she said she’d had some salad, but had I brought milk? When I said I’d completely forgotten with all this business over the cardamom I heard a slosh as she shifted her bodyweight and I think she slipped her head under the water to wash her hair. I ate chicken korma alone as Andrea bathed. It wasn’t very good, it tasted flat and unappealing.
The following day I rang in sick and went along to the central library to do some old-school research. I scoured a dozen books about herbs and spices, looked through a botanical encyclopaedia but the only reference I could find between ‘Caraway’ and ‘Carob’ in any reference book were entries for ‘Carbohydrate supplement’ and ‘Carnitine’ – neither of which, I was pretty certain, were ingredients in a curry. I also did some research on ‘plants with pods’, but as I had nothing more to go on it proved a pointless exercise. For lunch I popped into the Taj Mahal on the High Road and asked for a table for one. I spent an unconscionably long time studying the menu – by the time I finally called the waiter across I was already halfway down the pint of Cobra I’d ordered to assuage them. He asked if was ready to order yet in a faintly exasperated tone.
“Erm, hi, yeah… erm, could you tell me… do any of these contain Cardamom?”
“Excuse me sir?”
“Um… cardamom? You know, like the pods?” The waiter glanced down at his shoes for a moment and straightened the thick white cloth over the forearm of his burgundy jacket. “…No sir, I don’t believe so… but I can check in the kitchen for you. Cadomum?”
“No – Cardamom. Car-da-mom… or maybe Car-do-mum… anyway, yeah, maybe you can ask?” The waiter bowed his head as he shuffled off to the kitchen. As I sipped at my lager I noticed the thick blue carpet was worn down to a fraying tapestry of matted string in the path between the kitchen door and the tiny bar near the entrance. The waiter emerged after a minute or so, head still down.
“No, sorry sir, the chef uses nothing of that name… would you still like to order sir?”
“Lamb Bhuna please with some Pulau Rice and a Peshwari Naan,” I sighed despondently.
I ate curry in some form at every meal for three weeks solid. Andrea came to the curry house with me a few times but then said she was getting sick of it and could we go somewhere else like a Chinese or Italian. I said I wasn’t sure if I remembered cardamom in either of those cuisines but how about a Thai? I was pretty sure there might have been some in a Thai. Of course everywhere we went to eat I studied the menu word for word before asking the same question which always returned the same answer. At the Thai as I began to ask Andrea reached out and gripped my arm tightly, hissing under her breath that she’d like me to stop harassing people everywhere we go about this cardamom thing. I said no, it’s important, I have to get to the bottom of it. She clattered the table at this point and stormed to the toilet, knocking an empty wine glass onto its side.
Two nights later I got home after a meal at one of those posh Indian restaurants near the cathedral. As I made a cup of tea I told her they had a firepit and all the plates were square and a new shade of white brighter than any other. They had no Cardamom and the portions had been tiny. She didn’t seem to care and just asked if I’d sleep in the spare room because she was sick of the stink of curry every night and just wanted a break. I sighed but agreed - I spent most nights in the spare room anyway researching at my laptop so it was no hardship.
Cardamom Disappearance - Notes : Possible scenarios
1. Delusion. I’m going nuts. Perhaps cardamom never existed and my diseased mind has just created this thing. But why? It’s a strange delusion, after all, for the world to be fine except for just one tiny insignificant thing. How would my brain possibly come up with something like that, and if it did, why did it ensure I knew hardly anything about it? Couldn’t my feverish imaginings conjure up what cardamom smells, tastes or looks like? I wish I could remember more about it. I suppose it keeps me occupied.
2. Global conspiracy. Somebody has gone to a lot of trouble to expunge cardamom from the world and make people forget about it. OK, for this to be plausible we’d have to work out firstly how it was done. Mass hypnosis combined with a manipulation of the internet and printed matter… perhaps the mass hypnosis could deal with that, maybe the information is still there but nobody can see it. No, that can’t be right, because obviously the hypnosis didn’t work on me. Even without the how there’s also the why. Something pretty serious and heavy must be at play to warrant a cover-up on that scale. What are they trying to hide? And who are they anyway? They must have some hefty resources to organise a conspiracy on this scale.
3. Parallel worlds. At some point I slipped into a parallel reality where cardamom just doesn’t exist and never has. This begs a couple of questions. Firstly, how did I get here? How did I manage to slip through the cracks into another reality? Is this proof of the multiverse theory? Did anyone else slip through? Or did other people slip into separate universes where nobody has double jointed thumbs or Dorothy didn’t have a dog in ‘The Wizard of Oz’? In which case the possibility exists that people slip into other universes all the time but they’re so imperceptibly different that barely anyone notices… maybe I should ask around to see if anyone else has noticed this but hasn’t mentioned it for fear of sounding like… well, I refer you to number one above.
4. I’m dreaming. It’s one of those dreams that seems to go on for days and even weeks but any minute I’ll wake up and turn to Andrea and tell her that I’ve had the oddest dream, everything was just the same except for the fact Cardamom didn’t exist, and she will kiss me gently and say what a strange dream and we’ll get up for breakfast and even by the time I get down the stairs I’ll have forgotten all about this.
…I think it’s either 3 or 4. More research needed.
Six weeks and a day after I noticed Cardamom had gone, Andrea packed a case and went back to live with her mum. She told me she would be back for the rest of her stuff on Friday while I was at work and she would post the key through the letterbox. I replied that I wouldn’t be at work as I’d left my job a week ago. At this she sucked her teeth and her face visibly tightened like someone was pulling it hard from behind. ‘Just make sure you’re not here then,’ she said as she slammed the door.
I honestly thought I’d have been more upset at losing Andrea. At first I consoled myself with the fact I was busy researching and would be finished soon so I could devote more time to her and then she would probably have second thoughts and come back. After all, you don’t just throw away two years just like that. She didn’t come back though - in fact a month later, three weeks after her relationship status changed to single it changed again to in a relationship with Paul Morgan. I recognised his photo - he was a gangly lad who had been in the year above me at school. Two days after that, Andrea blocked me. The thing was, I didn’t really mind, I was in a way quite pleased that Andrea was able to get on with her life. We occupied different worlds now - I still lived in the one where an innocent spice had been eradicated from existence whereas she carried on blissfully ignorant of this.
After weeks of trawling social media looking for any traces of cardamom I turned my attention to looking for any other strange symptoms of a world off its axis. I found Google was no help - there was just too much information for me to sort through in search of anomalies. The big library in town still had Encyclopaedia Britannica and Oxford English Dictionary so I found a table, started at the beginning and made notes. I learnt a lot - the first piece of information I picked up was that after the tiny but magical word a, aardvark is not the first, second or even third word in the dictionary. Thus I learnt that aa is an ancient word for a stream, an aal is an Indian mulberry tree and aapa is an Urdu word for sister.
The library more or less became my home. As my savings were quickly running out I had to downsize to a pungent bedsit overlooking the common so spending my time in a big warm room enveloped by the smell of worn paper watching the people come and go was no hardship. This was a relief as my task was a thankless one and three weeks in I’d only got as far as Byzantine Art. I’d explored the known universe so far just from A to B and it was difficult - not only was I looking for a needle in a haystack, the needle was something that wouldn’t be there.
My life in the library wasn’t so bad. I got to know the regulars - a couple of mature students in their sixties doing proper old school research, a number of homeless gentlemen who came in to pretend to read while it was raining and often fell asleep in a corner, a lady in a wheelchair who always had a bag of American Hard Gums and always offered one to me when there were only white and green ones left.
I also got to know the librarians pretty well. Mike - a gentle soul with glasses and a beard - knew everything there is to know about Hong Kong, new wave cinema and malt whisky. Ann had a wiry grey birds nest of hair, only ever wore black and tutted a lot. Jayne was a few years older than me and jangled when she moved. She smelt earthy and sweet and spoke with confidence as if she knew everything she said was funny and interesting but when she thought nobody was looking she would bite her bottom lip and pull at the sleeves of her sweater. Jayne was fascinated with my quest to solve the mystery of Cardamom (I’d asked them all for research tips and explained the whole sorry tale to them) and began spending her breaks and lunchtimes with me poring over the books, much to the dismay of Mike and Ann who were wary of me. Jayne was intrigued though, she said she liked that I had a ‘thing’, the cardamom thing, something that marked me out as unique. Nobody else was looking for an imaginary foodstuff and that marked me out as special. I was a little hurt by her use of the word ‘imaginary’ but flattered by her attention.
Jayne was a soul that had never found anywhere to fit in. She was the sort of woman you would swear had a number of cats although she lived alone in a small, neat flat with no company except for me when we would go out after the library closed and drink red wine. I always slept on the couch but one evening after an ill-advised third bottle I ended up in her bed. Nothing happened but the next morning I resolved not to go back to the library - I had become distracted from my task. I’d just reached ‘T’ and after ‘Taxidermy’ I closed the books with nothing to report. I pushed a note through Jayne’s letterbox explaining that she wouldn’t see me again and that was that. I hope she didn’t cry or anything. I think she might have liked me.
It was November and the nights were long and cold. I got myself a job restocking shelves at a supermarket after it closed. It suited me fine - I’d get up in the middle of the afternoon, go out for a walk and a think, do a little research online (I’d gone back to the computers - books only got me into trouble) then work from 11 until 6 in the morning. As the world was waking I’d go back to my flat, sleep and the day would reset.
A few weeks into January the routine had got tired and old. I was putting on weight, drinking too much on my days off and I’d all but given up on my quest. I’d resigned to myself that I was lost - in a world I didn’t belong to, in a world where cardamom didn’t exist. I didn’t want to live in that world. I’d have happily drunk myself to death right there but one thing stopped me - I didn’t want to die without knowing the truth.
In March I started a Facebook page called, simply, Cardamom. I explained my problem on this and invited people to spread the word and find out if there was anyone out there who knew what had happened to the absent spice. I invited all my friends to like it but by then I didn’t have many left. Nine people liked my page - I suspect they thought it was a band or something.
Just before Easter I noticed the community noticeboard at the supermarket. It was mainly used to advertise charity coffee mornings and stuff for sale like old cars, cream leather sofas and baby buggies on the nearby estate. I asked for a card at the customer service desk and wrote as neatly as I could -
‘SEARCHING FOR CARDAMOM - Where did it go? Any information, please contact (and then my phone number and email)’.
It couldn’t do any harm, I thought. I’d tried everything else.
After four weeks without a reply to my plea I stopped waiting for the ‘phone to ring. I even started to drink less and also cut down my research time – after all, I had just about exhausted every option and often just ended up falling down a YouTube hole and watching old music videos, public information films, clips of dogs in hats or conspiracy theory videos. Once or twice a week I even did something else other than work and research, I started going swimming after finishing work a few times a week and it made me feel better. I wouldn’t say I was getting my life back on track – if it ever had been on track in the first place – but I was approaching some kind of acceptance of the situation. Then, one Friday, the last evening of May, I received a ‘phone call.
The first time it rang, I answered and there was silence on the other end. It wasn’t call centre or wrong number silence though, it was the kind of swollen silence you get when someone has worked up to saying something important and the words are too heavy to come out at normal speed. I spoke first.
“H-hello? Do you know wh-“ The line went dead before I could ask anything. Thirty seconds later though, it rang again. This time, even before I could speak, I heard a woman’s voice blurt out one word – Cardomom.
“Yes?! Do you know about Cardomom? Did you read my card?”
“I remember it,” replied the voice, a strange mixture of wistful and excited “…or at least I think I do. Either that, or I’m going mad.”
“If you are, then so am I! What’s your name?”
“Erm… Delia…” I suspected it was a false name but gave her my real one – I had no reason not to. I suggested that we should meet. She agreed, but added straight away it should be somewhere public. I suggested the Costa by the railway station, at 11 O’clock the next day.
I was so excited I got to Costa at 10.15. I figured that if it was busy it would give me time to manoeuvre myself into a good seat by 11. At 10.50, after three strategic moves and two Americanos, I was seated at a prime table by the big window, able to keep an eye on the various comings and goings and visible enough for anyone to see the word ‘CARDOMOM’ written in marker pen on a sheet of A4 in front of my cup.
I knew as soon as she entered at 11.03 that this was the person. She looked troubled, expectant, and like me, somehow as if she didn’t belong. Delia spotted my calling card immediately and shot me an unsure look of recognition dusted with a faint, nervous smile. She ordered a pot of tea and a slice of millionaire shortbread and slid onto the chair opposite. She offered a slender hand with her introduction. Her hair was copper brown, tied into an untidy pony tail. Her eyes were mossy green and matched her coat.
We talked apprehensively at first, in hushed, stilted sentences, asked one another unimportant questions about our lives, testing out whether we should trust the face before us. After a while we both relaxed enough for me to bring up the big one.
“So, what do you remember about cardamom?”
“A bit… What do you remember? “ Her guard was up again.
“Not much really. I only know that for something that played such a small part in my life, the world just isn’t the same without it. Things are just …wrong. I don’t know when it disappeared but I found out about a year ago. I remember that cardamom pods were a thing, I think that’s how it was spelt but I’m not sure, and even though I can’t conjure up how it tasted or smelt I know curries don’t taste right without it.” Delia sighed, bit her lip and nodded slowly. Then she reached into her bag and took out a leather-bound notebook.
“OK, I can fill in some gaps. Firstly, you’re spelling it right. Secondly, I’m pretty sure of the date it disappeared. March 16th last year, sometime between 8am and 11am. Look…” Delia opened up the notebook and slid it across to me. It bore two neatly handwritten recipes on concurrent pages, both for carrot cake. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be noticing.
“I make cakes, every single day except Sunday. I own a teashop, a little place behind Leak’s Bookshop. Do you know it?” I shook my head. She sighed again.
“Yes, not too many people do, they’d prefer to come here, and eat this,” she lamented, pointing to the shortbread with a corner bitten away from it. I felt terribly guilty and blushed.
“It’s OK, I do well enough to make a living, just… but I make better cakes than this, you really should try them. Anyway, see that?” She jabbed a long index finger into the pages of the book. “Those are my recipes. Why would I write two more or less identical carrot cake recipes?” I didn’t have time to think of an answer, she was gathering momentum. “Yes, well, of course I didn’t. You see, until March 16th last year, the recipe on the right was for carrot and cardamom cake. It was different. I was going to make it, I’d checked my ingredients. I put them to one side, baked a lemon drizzle cake, served a few customers and went to get started. Then I noticed my little pot of cardamom had gone. I looked everywhere… but…” she trailed off and took a sip of tea. “anyway, I went to check the recipe and suddenly all traces of cardamom had gone from this one on the right. Gone from the title, gone from the ingredients, gone from my method…Gone. It didn’t make any sense.” At that point a lazy little tear appeared beneath her left eye. It wasn’t in a hurry to do anything. I felt I should have done something at this point, touch her hand reassuringly maybe, but decided against it, aware we were still relative strangers despite this random connection - that we may have been the only two people alive who realised the world was broken.
“…So I’m not going crazy, cardamom is - or was - a real thing after all… “
“Well the chances of us both being utterly delusional about something so specific are pretty slim I’d have thought,” she half-smiled.
“OK, but the question remains then, even though we’re not delusional we don’t have any idea what is going on.” I retrieved my notebook of theories from my rucksack.
“I’ve narrowed it down to three theories. We can cross out number one, that I’m going mad, but we still have unexplained phenomena. The first theory I had was mass hypnosis but…” at this point Delia pushed her chair back from the table. I looked at her face and it was a mixture of fear and revulsion. I realised I’d come on a bit strong – over-caffeinated conspiracy theorist isn’t a good look on anyone. She made her excuses saying she had to get to work, thanked me for my time and as she made for the door, added, “I’ll, erm, call you. Lots to think about. Lots to take in.”
I sat there for another half an hour, dazed and numb. I’d finally found something, someone who could give me some answers, who could possibly make sense of things – and I’d blown it.
That evening I waited outside the library at closing time. If Jayne was surprised to see me she hid it well, greeting me with a wry, wordless grin. She walked straight by me with a wiggle and said, “Come on then, you’re buying.”
Over a large glass of Merlot, Jayne said she’d been thinking about me a lot lately.
“So how has your noble quest for cardamom been going?”
“I… found it. Well, kind of… at least now I know I’m not mad.” I told her about my meeting with Delia and her eyes sparkled.
“Oh wow! This is amazing! The grand romantic denouement! Well you can’t let her go, this is a sign! For one reason another fate has thrown you together. You’re fellow outcasts, destined never to belong in this world but with one another… Hey, congratulations!” She raised her glass to me and smiled with sad eyes. She told me I must go to her as soon as I could. I explained that I’d scared her off with my eagerness earlier on. She sucked her teeth and blew out her cheeks.
“Naah. She knows. She just needs to adjust - and to let you sweat a little. Go to her. Go to her café tomorrow. She’ll talk to you.” At that Jayne gulped down her wine and rose to her feet. “Well it’s been fun catching up but I’ve got to get home. Let me know how it goes. I love a happy ending.” I suspected she was lying.
Turns out Jayne was right. At about half past nine Delia called.
“Sorry I ran out on you earlier. It was a lot to take in and I freaked a little.” I said it was OK, quite understandable, she didn’t have to explain anything. She said we needed to talk. I agreed and she suggested I go to her café at closing time the next day. “If you’re lucky you might get a slice of leftover carrot cake.”
“If I’m extra lucky it might be a carrot and cardamom cake,” I remarked. At this there was a long pause on the other end of the line. After about 5 seconds she said, “Cardo-what? Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” For a second I felt like someone on a rollercoaster the second the car tips over the edge and leaves your internal organs at the top. Then, after another chasm of silence I heard the tiniest sound like a stifled snort, followed by an uncontrollable and joyous outburst of laughter. “Oh, I’m sorry! I just couldn’t resist that!” I could hear tears in her voice.
I went to work as normal that night but took a notepad with me and spent my time while I stacked shelves running through all the questions I’d struggled with over the past year and pausing now and then to write them down - perhaps some answers were coming at last? I was so preoccupied with this I dropped a jar of piccalilli and stuck out my foot to stop it smashing on the hard floor. It bruised the top of my foot so badly the supervisor sent me home early. As I limped back to my flat the birds were announcing the dawn from aerials and shed roofs. They weren’t the birds, aerials and shed roofs of my world. They were imposters. I wanted my world back, even if my world had rejected me and sent me to this doppelganger purgatory. I was willing to forgive it.
I arrived at the tiny tea shop at around 4.30 and it took a seat at a small round table with a white tablecloth and two old chairs that didn’t match. When Delia saw me she gave me a nervous smile and waved but carried on making up an order. Two minutes later she brought over a pot of tea and a plate of cinnamon toast to the couple sat at the back and on her way back she placed an Americano and a slice of lemon drizzle cake in front of me. ‘On the house,’ she said. I thanked her and she said she’d be with me in about twenty minutes.
The lemon drizzle cake was truly wonderful, as was the coffee - it was like waking up after a really good sleep. I felt so guilty that I’d been lazily going to Costa all this time.
When the couple left it was just me so she turned the sign on the door and came to sit with me. She had with her a small glass spice jar. ‘Close your eyes’, she said, unscrewing the lid from the jar and handed it to me. ‘Go on, smell it, take a deep breath.’ I held it in two hands and inhaled - the smell was sweet and musty, aromatic and fleshy all at once. ‘Lemon juice and rind, black pepper, a touch of smoked paprika, star anise and a little nutmeg. It’s not perfect but it’s the closest I can get to what I can remember. Little pods a bit larger than a lemon pip, a kind of greyish pistachio colour. That was cardamom.’ She reclined in her chair and sighed heavily.
‘Seriously? You had to mix all those ingredients to get close to the smell of cardamom? That’s crazy.’ She sighed again.
‘No, what’s crazy is this,’ she exclaimed in exasperation. ‘I mean, what the hell happened? And why? Why just cardamom? It is just cardamom, isn’t it? I mean, I did try and do some research, Google, the library - I even went down to the British Library in London, stayed a few days with a friend. Nothing.’ The British Library, I wish I’d thought of that. She was crying again - it was clear she had the answers to no more questions than I. This time I did reach out for her hand, and as I did she collapsed into me and I held her as she sobbed onto my shoulder and told me of all the things that had happened to her since cardamom disappeared. Her boyfriend didn’t believe her when he came home from work the night it had happened, even after she had showed him the recipe book. The fact she had written out the same recipe on two pages next to one another was just an indication to him that she had been overdoing things and she should maybe take some time off, close the café for a bit, go and see a doctor. As time went on and her supposed obsessive behaviour increased he tried to involve her parents who thought she was having a breakdown and tried to force her to get treatment. She eventually split from her boyfriend and moved in with a friend, deciding never to talk to anyone about cardamom again, right up until the day she saw the word in big capital letters on a notice board in Tesco.
We talked until it got dark outside - it was such a relief to know we weren’t crazy, and just being able to speak to someone else about it lifted such a weight. If this were a film, it would be at this point I’d walk her back to her flat and we’d kiss outside and it would fade to black and the next scene would be of us getting married and there would be a song playing and various friends who appeared in this story would appear for a few seconds doing a little dance and smiling. This isn’t a film though, not in the world with or without little green-grey pods. Instead we said goodbye and promised to let the other one know if they found out anything more about cardamom. I went to the tea shop a few times after that and complemented her on her wonderful cakes and she sat down one time for a little chat about this and that but then a customer came in and she had to get back to work. As the autumn came I started going back to Costa because it was a bit closer and cheaper to work, so I haven’t seen her in a few months. I’ve got a job at a cinema now, and now and then a few of the staff go out for a drink after work and I tag along. I kind of like it, I have a few drinks and pretend to be a part of this world for a few hours. I never talk about cardamom to them.
“This particular story I started in 2018. The first person who read it when I finished it in 2019 said it was a bit like the film ‘Yesterday’ which was such a kick in the guts – firstly because it made it sound like I copied the idea and secondly I watched that film and it’s a hateful mess with ridiculously flawed logic.
The reason I’ve given up on this is similar to the reason I suppose I’ve given up on all my writing. I don’t think anybody is interested. At one point I tried to get an agent with the intention of securing a publishing deal. I have a folder full of rejection letters, underneath the sympathetic words of the two that showed some faith in me. One said my writing was great and she loved my idea for a novel, saying it was redolent of a charming Ealing comedy... but she wouldn’t be able to sell it. The other said I had talent but I didn’t have a profile already so they couldn’t take me on. I write because I must – it’s a compunction. I had convinced myself that I don’t care if nobody reads my work, it’s just for me... but I’m lying to myself really, I do want someone to read it.”