Things by Rob Cox

Read by Martin Lamb

She collects. She collects things ; trinkets and keepsakes. Books. Statuettes. Miniatures. Cups and saucers. Bric-a-brac. Everything and anything. We have come here because she thinks a space is only truly empty when you know there was something that once filled it. She fills, and there is less space for us. So I took her away.

If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.

It's nothing fancy. Just a B&B by the sea. Not spending much - we only live down the road, it'd be stupid, splashing out, it's a treat but it's necessary too. They have a potted plant in the doorway, before you come in, and there are fag butts thicker than soil in its base. The carpet on the staircase is frayed - you can see the worn oak step and, of course, there's no lift. Doesn't need one. No, we'll take these up ourselves, thanks. The bedrooms are low, hollow - yellowed drapes across the window. You can only ever be in passing in places like this. I'm sitting in the room now because Marie's gone out for a stroll and through a gap in the drapes I can see the orange smudge of a streetlamp, caught in the same rain shower that nearly caught us.

It was getting out of hand, to be honest. We have a stack of encyclopaedias that she found in a charity shop - twenty quid the lot, a stack so high they're a danger to low-flying aircraft. And they might as well be empty, for all the use we have for them. In the downstairs loo she has an army of toilet roll covers; Bo-Peep, poodles, bears, Marie Antoinette, and never enough toilet rolls to cover. So they just sit there, with their blank eyes, and they stare. It puts me off. It does. I have to turn them all to face the wall in order to go. The conservatory is a bombsite. Packed with boxes: really packed. I can't see the patio. Sainsbury's apples. Tesco bananas. The brown box for a television that we got three years back. And nothing in any of them, but they're there because, according to Marie, they might one day need to be filled. But the real epiphany; the real turning-point for me was the other night, when I was just drifting off and beneath my pillow I found a tiny, glass stork. From her collection in the lounge. I held it in my palm, dazed. I don't know how it got there - Christ, it could have flown - but it was then I knew we had to get out.

Of course, it hasn't been easy. Not for seven years. I know that; I know there are worse things she could be doing. I understand that this is what she has to do, and because I love her I let her do it. And I love her. It makes sense that the things she needs to fill her space would eventually enter my own; I agreed to give her that when we got married. It's just sometimes - sometimes you need to go somewhere where there's nothing across the floor and up the walls and from the ceiling, hanging, that reminds you every single day that before she began to collect and hoard we already had something to fill our house. And it's been seven whole years since we lost Tom.

I lay back on the hotel bed and just admire. Admire the space we have here. The carpets. You can actually see them - and isn't that nice? I could do a full circuit of the room and not stub my toe once. Simple things please me now. The nightstand is home to one, solitary, lonesome lamp. Everything is without clutter. And then I think about Marie, not far off and huddled beneath her umbrella - stepping lightly over glittering puddles and into the pools of light from the shop fronts. And I imagine her pausing at a window. Imagine she'll browse the display there - the knick-knacks and the ornaments that make up the shops. I imagine her leaning in with a squint, peering closer, caught, and I hope, and wish, and pray, that there isn't some tiny trinket to catch her eye.

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Things by Rob Cox was read by Martin Lamb at the Liars' League Boys & Girls event on 10 April 2007.

Currently caught somewhere between finishing a degree and full-time work, Rob Cox is knackered, confused and slightly worried. He’s also an avid writer and reader, with a few stories under his belt and some vague plans for completing a novel. He divides his time between Loughborough and Bromley, in South East London, where his mum lives in sin with two greyhounds. "Things" is his first public work

Martin Lamb was born in Southport and studied at St John’s College, Oxford and GSMD. A freelance opera singer, actor and director, he has worked for some of the UK’s leading opera companies over the past few years and particularly enjoys developing new writing projects of all kinds.