Twelve Words

The thing about a seed phrase is that everyone tells you to write it down and nobody tells you where, and in 2017 I was thirty-one and renting a flat in Bristol with a man called Ollie who I did not trust with anything, and the safest place I could think of was the inside flap of a box of Shreddies, written in biro, tucked behind the cookbooks. Twelve words. I remember "acoustic" was one of them. I remember thinking that was funny for some reason. I'd put in about four hundred quid. It wasn't a lot. It was the amount you put in when you want to be able to say you were in, and then you forget about it, which is exactly what I did. The exchange I'd bought on went under, but I'd moved it to my own wallet by then, like the forums said, like a responsible adult. Not your keys, not your coins. I had the keys. They were in a cereal box. Ollie moved out. I met Priya. We moved in together, a flat in Bedminster, then a house in Keynsham when the baby was on the way. Three moves. Every move you throw things out, and the thing about a flattened cereal box with some words on it is that it looks exactly like rubbish, because it is rubbish, unless you know. I remembered in 2024. I don't know what triggered it. Something on the radio. And I sat up in bed and said "the Shreddies box" out loud and Priya said "what" and I said "nothing" and lay there with my heart going. The four hundred quid was, at that point, worth about the deposit on the house we were sitting in. I looked. Of course I looked. Every box in the loft, every drawer, the garage, my parents' garage where some stuff went in 2021. I rang Ollie, which was its own humiliation. He said he'd never seen a cereal box with words on it and did I want to get a pint sometime, and I said maybe, and I did not.

Priya found me in the loft at midnight going through a crate of university notes. "It's gone," she said. Not unkindly. "It might not be." "Tom. It's gone. It went in one of the moves. It's in a landfill in South Gloucestershire under twelve years of nappies." I sat down on a box of her old textbooks. She sat down next to me. "How much," she said. I told her. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, "Okay. Here's what I think. I think you never had it. I think you had four hundred quid in 2017 and you spent it on a lottery ticket that paid out and then you lost the ticket, and the money was never in the house, so it never left. We're fine. We were always fine." "That's not how it works." "That's exactly how it works. You're just choosing not to let it." I've thought about that a lot. She's right and she's wrong. The money was real, somewhere, on a chain, in an address I can look up right now and see the balance of, sitting there, unspent, unspendable. I've looked it up twice. I've stopped. What I did do was buy a proper steel plate, the kind you stamp the words into, for the tiny bit I've put in since. It's in the safe. Priya knows the combination. So does her sister. I've told the baby, who's four and thinks it's a game about a treasure map, and honestly he's not wrong. "Acoustic," he says, when I ask him. It's the only one I gave him. It's the only one I've still got.