The Comfort of Empty Rooms: An Inventory of Absences

I keep a running list in my head of the spaces I have hollowed out. Not rooms, exactly, but the negative spaces between the life I built and the life I am living. It is not a ledger of guilt; that would be too simple. It is an inventory of what is not there. I am an unfaithful husband in Liverpool, and I have become an expert in the architecture of absence.

Let me explain. My name is James. I am 39 years old. I make bespoke furniture, which means I spend most of my days in a workshop that smells of cedar and Danish oil. It is a solitary profession, measured in grain and glue. There is a particular satisfaction in coaxing a curve out of a block of walnut, in the quiet violence of a sharp chisel. My neighbour, a man named Marc who restores vintage motorbikes in the lock-up next door, says I have the patience of a saint. He does not know the half of it.

My family life is a solid, well-made thing. My partner and I have been together for fourteen years. We have two children: an eight-year-old boy who is obsessed with the defensive tactics of Jürgen Klopp, and a six-year-old daughter who wants to be a marine biologist. We live in a house in a part of the city where the terraced streets slope down towards the water. It is a good life. A comfortable, predictable, stable life. Which is precisely why I started to dismantle it, brick by invisible brick.

I began with the phone. Not the act of using it, but the space it created. I bought a second handset—a cheap, anonymous thing I keep in the false bottom of my tool chest, beneath a plane iron that hasn’t been sharpened in years. The first time I turned it on, in the workshop at dusk, the glow of the screen was the first blank space. A room with no furniture. A silence I could fill with my own words.

The Sunday Dinner

The ritual of the family Sunday dinner is supposed to be a pillar of connection. The roast, the Yorkshire puddings, the inevitable argument about what to watch on the telly. For me, it became a study in sensory anticipation. I would sit at the table, the smell of rosemary and roasting potatoes thick in the air, but my senses were elsewhere. I could hear the faint, phantom buzz of the second phone, even though it was miles away in the workshop. I could feel the weight of a different kind of silence waiting for me.

Klopp recently spoke about his dream of returning to Liverpool, according to the Liverpool Echo, sending a message to Andoni Iraola about the intensity needed for lasting success. I understood that intensity. The focus required to ignore a child tugging at your sleeve while your mind is calculating the hours until you can slip away. The polite smile while your partner talks about the school run, and you are already tasting the coffee you will drink tomorrow morning in a city-centre café, the one with the terrible lighting and the feeling of a hand resting on your knee.

The Boxroom

We have a boxroom upstairs. It is a holding cell for orphaned possessions: a broken desk lamp, a box of baby clothes that no longer fit, a stack of my father’s old engineering manuals. I inherited his tools. They are heavy, well-worn, and they smell of his workshop in Birkenhead. I keep a chisel of his on the mantelpiece in the living room. It is an anchor, a piece of his integrity.

I think about that chisel during the wait. The wait between two meetings is the most exquisite torture. It is not the meeting itself that matters; that is merely the punctuation. The real sentence is the ninety-six hours that stretch before it. On Thursday mornings, I drive to a timber yard in the north of the city. It is a legitimate errand. I order a specific grade of oak. The man who runs the yard, an old fella named Terry, always asks after the kids. I tell him they are fine. I tell him the truth.

But on the drive back, I take a longer route. I stop at a petrol station near the docks to buy a bottle of water, just to feel the cold glass in my palm. I listen to a podcast—a documentary about the French New Wave director Jacques Rivette, who made films about long, meandering conspiracies. I think about the invisible threads that connect people, the secret networks of attention. The film Céline and Julie Go Boating is a masterclass in playful duplicity. That is what I am, I suppose. A man in a long, meandering conspiracy with himself.

The Mobile Signal

The most powerful moment is always the one I do not describe, even to myself. It is the moment that happens in the gap between two sentences in a text message. The screen goes blank. You stare at it. You listen to the hum of the wind in the rigging of the boats moored in the Albert Dock. You smell the rain on the cobblestones. You wait.

And then it comes. A vibration. A name. A time.

The aftermath is a different kind of architecture. I walk down a street in the business district, past the glass towers, and I can feel the ghost of that woman’s perfume on my scarf. It is a synthetic floral scent, something from a duty-free shop. It clings to the wool. When I get home, I hang the scarf on the hook in the hallway, next to the bright yellow raincoat my daughter wears on the school run. The two scents, the floral and the damp wool, exist in the same air, unconnected. Another blank space.

I read a sad piece of news recently: Cody Gakpo, the Liverpool striker, and his partner announced the loss of their unborn baby. It was reported by the BBC Sport website. The story was about grief, public and private. It made me think about the silent griefs we carry, the ones we never name. The grief of a stable life you are slowly dismantling. The longing for a parallel version of yourself, a man who does not keep a secret phone in a tool chest.

The Return Journey

The structure of my double life is not a triangle. It is a series of concentric circles. At the centre is a room I have never been in. It is a hotel room I imagine, with heavy curtains and a single lamp. I have never booked that room. I will never book that room. Because the anticipation of that room, the infinite possibility of a door closed behind me, is far more potent than any reality.

I know the date of our next meeting. I have known it for five days. I have already played out every second of the journey, from the moment I leave the workshop to the moment I walk through the door of a quiet pub on the Wirral side of the Mersey. I can hear the clink of glasses. I can smell the brass polish on the bar rail. I can feel the weight of a coat sleeve brushing against mine.

I will not tell you what happens then. That is my room. The empty one.

Instead, I will tell you about the taste of the coffee I drink the next morning. It tastes of nothing. Or rather, it tastes of a memory that is already fading. I sit in the kitchen, the house quiet, the children still asleep. I see the chisel of my father’s on the mantelpiece. It is a tool for carving a shape out of a solid thing. I wonder what shape I am carving out of my own life. A negative space. A hole in the shape of a man I have not yet met, and a man I am no longer sure I am.

This is not a confession. This is simply an inventory. I am an unfaithful husband in Liverpool. I own my choices. I live in the gaps between them. It is a strange way to live, but the view from the empty room is surprisingly clear.