Field Notes on Love(7)

So if your name is Margaret Campbell and you’re interested in a bit of an adventure, please email me at [email protected] with the answers to these three questions, and if there’s more than one entry, I’ll pick the grand-prize winner once I’ve read them:

What’s your biggest dream?

What’s your biggest fear?

What’s the most important thing you’d bring with you on the train?

Good luck, Margaret Campbells of the world—I’m counting on you!

Cheers,

Hugo W.





They’re just about finished when they hear Mum calling them down for dinner. Out the bedroom window, a fog has settled over the garden, the edges laced with gold as the sun sets. Hugo presses his laptop shut, but Alfie reaches out and opens it again.

    “You didn’t post it.”

Hugo’s eyes flick back to the glowing screen. “I’ll do it after dinner.”

“This isn’t a homework assignment,” George teases him. “You don’t have to proof it a thousand times.”

“I know. I—”

Alfie frowns. “He’s pulling a Hugo.”

“I’m not…pulling a Hugo. I just need to think it through a bit more.”

George nods sagely. “That’s the very definition of pulling a Hugo.”

“Listen,” Alfie says, standing up, “you should know I think this idea is completely mad….”

Hugo waits for him to continue. “And?”

“And nothing. That’s it. I think this idea is completely mad.” Alfie grins as he walks to the door. “Which is exactly why you should do it.”

When his brothers are gone, Hugo takes one last look at the post, letting his finger hover over the button that would send it out into the world. But he can’t bring himself to press it. What if nobody writes back? Or what if they do? What if he accidentally picks a serial killer? Or, worse, someone who talks a lot? What if his Margaret sees it? Or what if his parents find out?

Earlier, after they all scattered for the afternoon, Isla sent a message to their group text asking who should break the news about Margaret to Mum and Dad. Assuming Hugo doesn’t want to, she added, which was a fairly safe assumption. He’d been with Margaret long enough that she became a regular fixture around the Wilkinson house, and Hugo can’t imagine telling his parents, who adore her. In fact, they like her so much he half suspects they’ll be cross with him for letting the breakup happen at all.

    Anyone but Alfie, he’d written back, half joking, and it had been Isla and George—the two most reliable ones—who did the job in the end. But now, when Hugo walks into the kitchen and is greeted by the smell of chicken curry—his favorite—and a sympathetic look from Mum, he wonders if he should’ve picked Alfie after all. If anyone could’ve figured out how to make this whole thing seem like a laugh, it would’ve been him, and then maybe they could’ve skipped straight over this part.

“How are you doing, darling?” Mum asks, standing on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek. She’s almost a foot shorter than any of her children, a diminutive woman with pale skin and flyaway hair who might seem a bit scatty if you didn’t notice the determination around the edges of her mouth. When his parents found out they were having sextuplets, she was the one who decided they needed to get creative, and from the moment the children were born, she started blogging about their lives. This eventually turned into a book on parenting, and then another, until there was a whole series about them. And though Hugo has always found the books entirely mortifying, they’ve also made it possible to keep a family of eight going on more than just his dad’s teacher salary.

But to Hugo’s alarm, his mum—who is usually in constant motion, sweeping through their lives like someone in fast-forward—is now looking at him with watery eyes and an intense stare. It occurs to him that she might try to have a talk about the breakup right here in the middle of the busy kitchen, so he gives her shoulder an awkward pat and sidesteps away as quickly as he can.

    “I’m fine, Mum. Really.”

She looks like she wants to say more, but the oven dings, so she just gives him one last look of concern before hurrying over to take out a loaf of garlic bread, another of Hugo’s favorites.

When his dad walks in, he’s wearing his Tottenham Hotspurs shirt, which makes Hugo laugh, because Margaret is a huge Arsenal fan, and he knows this is for him. To his relief, Dad just winks at him as he grabs a stack of plates from the cupboard and begins to set the table.

When everything is ready, Hugo slides into his usual seat between his sisters. Isla gives him a friendly shoulder bump, and Poppy makes a funny face at him.

“So,” Dad says, running a hand over the top of his shiny black head. Hugo can’t remember what his father looked like before he was bald; it’s as much a part of him as his smile, which makes his whole face brighten and his dimples come out so that he seems like a kid again, like he could easily be just another Wilkinson brother. On the first day of primary school, Hugo watched all the other children fall under the spell of that smile like bowling pins dropping one by one, and it gave him such a burst of pride that he’d run up to hug his dad at the end of the day, the word pounding fiercely through his head: mine.