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For a new collection of fiction to be published this week, some of our best writers were asked to turn their hands to the neglected art of the love-letter. Their pieces remind us of how enticing words can be. The brief was simple: each piece had to be addressed to someone and concern a heightened state of emotion.

From: Alisha Garrison [mailto: Alisha.Garrison@gmail.com]
Sent: 12 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour <skaminski2@aol.com>
Subject: No Games Seymour,

I realise that all the how-to books on love – which would also admonish me never to drop the L-word even in passing at this early a juncture – would command me to wait to contact you until days, perhaps even weeks have elapsed since our reluctant parting. I shouldn’t seem too eager, too desperate, too “needy”. And after getting no sleep whatsoever last night, I ought really to be taking a good long nap! But when I got home to Shepherds Bush, I was so agitated, so excited, so intoxicated with the sudden gloriousness of life in general that sleep was out of the question. We dispensed with so much in fast-forward; surely we’re already beyond childish romantic games. I cannot, I will not, be coy. Acting politic, hard to get, unhurried would not only be a lie, but would besmirch with scheming and calculation the clarity, honesty and instant mutual recognition that we discovered so serendipitously. So though it’s only been a few hours, they already seem squandered. All this time I might have been writing to you!

First things first: you said this address was the best way to reach you since your mobile had just been stolen. (Being set upon along the South Bank by a gang of ruffians no more than ten years old must have been so, well, unmanning! But I admired that you told the story honestly. Most men would have put 15 years on their assailants just to save face.) I promised to lodge my phone number in your e-mail queue, since all we could lay hands on at Mandy’s party was that grubby napkin on which you scrawled “skaminsky@aol.com”. I’m touched you were already so concerned that these fragile, paltry digits that could nonetheless prove the password to so much happiness be stowed in a safe place. So enter this in your mobile’s phonebook when you replace it. For that matter, have it tattooed somewhere private, on a patch of skin I never want another woman to glimpse again! (020) 7274-6738. (I know, I must be the only woman left in London without a mobile. You see – before last night! – I fancied my solitude, and wending my way through the city had no desire to be reached – perhaps in any sense.) Please ring, my sweet. I know you don’t have a landline, but such a marvellous man must have many friends with phones! I cannot wait to hear your voice again. This is such a frustratingly cold medium in comparison to the heat of your touch, the warmth of your smile, the glow of your expression when you catch my eye.

Of course, the disadvantage of writing so quickly is that I have little to report – yet everything to report! After a single night, you have utterly transformed my whole landscape. Even on the Tube home, all the passengers looked so fascinating, pulsing with poignant stories that broke my heart. Do you know they stared at me? I know I looked a tad dishevelled (your fault!), but I don’t think that’s why I drew so much attention. I think I had a look. I was exploding with satiety, with a positively obnoxious self-satisfaction! They all appeared so miserable in comparison. And even the colours have changed. You know that A.A. Milne poem, from When We Were Six, I think – The cold is very cold; and the hot seems so hot? (Isn’t it funny that we grew up with the same enthusiasm for Pooh – although I do hope you don’t spot a scatological fascination in the word.

As you discovered, my sexual inclinations are deliciously normal!) It’s been like that. The yellow’s so yellow, and the black’s so black! Oh, and I can’t bring myself to shower. I can’t bear to wash away the smell of you, which makes me giddy, like sniffing glue. (Not that I sniff glue! Isn’t it funny, that you can write “like sniffing glue” and have no idea what that feels like, yet at once be certain that you have lit upon absolutely the perfect image?)

I’m torn between telling you everything you need to know about me for pages and pages, and getting this off so that we can talk and arrange our next rendezvous. Because I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m free this very night, I’ll tear myself from this e-mail and send it hurtling to your computer. I’ll stay in this afternoon and await your call. Already pining,
Alisha

From: Alisha Garrison
Sent: 14 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: Double-checking

Seymour (and I’ve been thinking about your name – “See more” – it’s metaphorical, isn’t it? You make me see more, for the vividness of colour has not abated. And mour recalls amore, as in “That’s amore!” You make me see amore!)

I hope you don’t mind my resending that first e-mail a few more times over the weekend. I’ve had trouble with Google in the last several weeks; I’ve had hardly any mail at all, which is quite impossible. In fact, in the previous year several other gentlemen – who shall go nameless, since I’m not a manipulative sort of girl who would try and make you jealous! – have informed me that they never received an e-mail that I most certainly sent. At your end, AOL doesn’t have an exactly sterling reputation for reliability, either. Isn’t it rumoured that the company is going bankrupt? Partly because customers like you are so exasperated with uneven service provision? The Internet is not nearly as sure a form of communication as we’ve been led to believe! And I should loathe for us to founder on so capricious and arbitrary a matter as a technical glitch.

Even if you did get one of the notes in bottles that I dropped into the ocean of cyberspace, maybe there’s something about that particular message that won’t send properly. I can’t say that I’m any kind of computer wunderkind, but wouldn’t it be just my luck that that e-mail of all e-mails was doomed, marked like Cain for destruction? So I thought I’d send a fresh one. In case you never received the earlier one, my phone number is (020) 7274-6738. Commit that to memory, recite it as you fall asleep! (Look at me, already bossing you around like a wife of 20 years. Don’t I have cheek!)

Of course, you can’t have had time to get a new mobile yet, and I know how hard it is to find a working phonebox on the street these days. They say that it’s only a matter of time before BT eliminates them altogether. And you may very well have tried to ring, borrowing a friend’s mobile or something. (I do think it’s best to keep a landline for just such emergencies as this, even if you claim that with a good price plan it’s unnecessary. Whoops! There I go, bossing you around again!) You see, while I did try to stay in for the weekend to await your call, I’m afraid I ran short of provender, and had to nip off to the supermarket for a few things on Sunday afternoon.

Although my telephone provider should have recorded any message, I’ve had simply dreadful experience with One.Tel’s voice-mail service. You would not believe how many times I’ve been told later that someone definitely left a message, and I never got that interrupted dial tone indicating that it was awaiting me, much less listened to a recording of any description. The system simply eats messages for breakfast! Honestly, Seymour – See-amore, my new pet name for you! – nothing seems to work as faithfully as need be when so much depends on the successful meeting of electrical wires, the twist of mere cables!

Then again, you may just be terribly busy. I could tell how responsible you were, and however powerfully you might want to distract yourself, work has to come first. Perhaps you’re saving ringing me up as a little treat for yourself. If so, think of me as a sweetie in your pocket that’s going to get all sticky and gooey if you let it sit there too long. Unwrap your little candy, darling! I can’t receive private calls at work, so I’ve taken a personal day today. And I’ve laid in so many provisions that you’d think I was a Mormon awaiting Judgment Day! (I confess: I was hoping to lure you to dinner, and wanted to make sure that I had all the fixings just in case you rang and said you wanted to call by at the last minute. Isn’t it funny, how you have to plan, even to be spontaneous?) So I shouldn’t have to leave the flat at all. That way I don’t have to depend on One.Tel!

I do hope you like smoked salmon. With wheaten soda bread, a squeeze of lemon, capers and thinly sliced red onion. As for the red onion, I’m of two minds. It provides a wonderfully sharp counterpoint to the salmon, but I wouldn’t want to spoil our breaths. On the other hand, if we both eat raw onion, doesn’t that rather cancel out the unpleasant effect? Goodness, these days to be lucky at love a girl has to be a biochemist! Trying to be patient with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that technology is err to,
Alisha

From: Alisha Garrison
Sent: 26 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: Drop dead

Seymour – or how about See-mort?

Who do you think you are? Or, more to the point, who do you think I am? Some harlot who isn’t even smart enough to charge? Some vapid vessel for your seminal fluids, like a toilet bowl? Didn’t you appreciate that you were dealing with a woman of some cultural sophistication, so that if she stoops to a cliché like, “I don’t usually do this” she’s only making that trite an assertion because it happens to be true?

I suppose you’ll also be happy to know that I kept the smoked salmon for so long that it spoilt, which I thought was metaphorical. Something that started out fresh and delicious and nourishing gradually grew slimy, rank and poisonous! So I fed the salmon to my neighbour’s Pomeranian – our lovely dinner literally going to the dogs! It’s been two weeks! And don’t tell me you didn’t get my last e-mail either, because I sent it at least a dozen times, and from my neighbour’s computer as well for good measure. (In case you imagine that I brutally use people, like a certain someone who shall remain nameless, I was comforting her about her dog.) I ran out of personal days, and had to ring in sick – anathema to me, since I am renowned for my integrity. That’s why the floor manager never questioned whether I was truly ill. In fact, unlike some people, he seemed very sympathetic! Which, as it happens, he should have been. Because I am sick.

Of you!

Did you assume that, because I was willing to slip off to Mandy’s guestroom, I was cheap? Could you conceivably imagine that I pour out my heart like that on a nightly basis, to just anybody? I am a very private person! And now I feel I have entrusted my innermost thoughts, my deepest yearnings and longest-lasting passions, like my love of Pooh – and that’s with an H, you dirty-minded cretin! – to a rake and a charlatan, like throwing my finery into a sewer!

So this morning I finally took a shower, and I’ll tell you I did so joyfully, I did so singing! “I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair!” I belted, at the top of my lungs! I rinsed away every dandruffy flake of you, every rancid trace of sweat, every sour drop of your foul testicular emanations.

You would be foolhardy in the extreme to make use of the phone number I entrusted to your keeping. Please destroy it. I assure you that were you to ring now I would not only fling the receiver to its cradle, but direct One.Tel to change my number forthwith! Icily,
Alisha

From: Alisha Garrison
Sent: 31 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: Please forgive me

See-more, my dearest,

I’m terribly sorry for that last e-mail. I fear that when I wrote last I’d had a drop too much to drink, and you know how in an information vacuum one’s mind can run rampant.

Can we just agree to draw a line, and start from scratch? I’m not saying that you like playing games any more than I do. Still, even if we touched our very souls against each other that night, in an everyday sense we know each other only so well, and you may have got the wrong impression of me.

I’m usually very guarded, if anything too civil and polite, so that people take a long time to get to know me, and sometimes mistake me for frosty. You should know first-hand that I’m anything but frosty! I suppose it was such a relief to let that guard down and show my true colours – those yellows so yellow, and those blacks so black! – that I may have got ahead of myself.

Tell you what: let’s pretend I never wrote anything at all. This time around, we can take it slowly. Maybe we shouldn’t have let our passions run away with us that night. What would you say to rolling back the clock, and meeting for lunch, or a drink, or even an innocent cup of coffee?

Perhaps we need to get to know each other on an ordinary level, before we see to the touching-souls part. Isn’t it funny that I know your truest, deepest nature, but I don’t even know your middle name, what languages you speak, or whether you play the piano?

Hoping to see you soon – and on my best behaviour!
Alisha

From: Alisha Garrison
Sent: 31 August 2006
To: Kaminsky, Seymour
Subject: I’m frightening myself

Seymore – as I see less . . . I know I shouldn’t be writing to you, but I don’t know to whom else to turn. I can barely drag myself out of bed, and after my taking those two weeks off work the floor manager from Asda rang to inform me that “my services would no longer be required”. I don’t have any appetite, and when I looked in the mirror just now I almost didn’t recognise myself. For the last two days I’ve barely eaten anything other than the last two pints of Banana Split Häagen-Dazs, and my cheeks are cadaverously sunken.

Outside the sun is beating, bright and mocking, but my head is swirling with darkness and dread. When I lean out the window I feel the summer air sucking me out; I look down and I’m drawn giddily to the vertiginous plummet to the pavement from my first-floor window. The knives in my kitchen glitter with allure like jewellery. I can’t gaze upon my top sheet without envisioning it twisted and looped from the overhead light fixture, swinging, tempting me with its release. The oven door gapes open and offers up its hot-breathed maw, except that I read somewhere that natural gas these days has had the lethal component removed, and the Sylvia Plath route has been confounded. I don’t think that’s very considerate, do you? Just because you work at Asda – or used to work at Asda – doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve a poetic departure.

I was happy before, or whatever it is you call not knowing what you’re missing. I was living on bread and water, and for one night I tasted cake. Oh, See-more, I cannot return to a prison diet once more. So if you read about me in the papers, just know that you blessed this poor inmate with one glorious night of freedom and escape. If I only truly lived for one night, so many of us sad little moths seeking out the light never live at all. I suppose that I’m lucky. But if I’m so lucky, why do I feel so despondent, so beyond caring? Sorry to trouble you,
Alisha

From: Sam Kaminski
Sent: 31 August 2006
To: Garrison, Alisha
Subject: Re: I’m frightening myself

look lady i dont know if this guy yr writing scammed u with a fake e-mail address or weather yr completely whacked and he’s a fig newton of yr imagination (haha) but im a new jersey boy born and bread and u and me never spent no night together eating cake or nothing. id never have loaded yr e-mails to begin with what with the virus alerts and stuff cept that the subject line of the first one made me mistook it for having to do with the video game i was bidding for on ebay (dark messiah of might and magic and some dipshit beat me out). so dont stick yr head in the oven on my account especially if it dont even work. and if you don’t mind me tossing in my two cents from the peanut gallery if yr buddy “seemore” did palm off a bullshit address and flee the scene of the crime so to speak the guy’s a fucking smart cookie (or fig newton haha) sam

Four Letter Word: New Love Letters , published by Chatto & Windus on Thursday at £12.99, is available from Times BooksFirst at £11.69,(P&P free), 0870 1608080

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