Page 1 of What It's Like in Words
CHAPTER 1
THURSDAY
NOVEMBER 17, 2016
4:00 P.M.
Daylight has drained from the room, and the lights have turned on in the skyscrapers. Circles. Rectangles. Fluorescent vertebrates across the ceilings. I imagine them humming like machines that zap insects.
My cracked phone is a memento from the tube station last night, and there is another on my collarbone, below the trim of myMario KartT-shirt, like a club stamp from a night out: a bruise the size of a thumbprint.
Count to three and then stand up.
One.
Two.
Three—
I turn on the main light, and my bedroom is familiar. Desk with laptop; bed between two windows; table with a notepad by the Pixar lamp; bookshelf holding color-arranged books; wardrobe, with last night’s clothes crumpled at its foot like a chalk outline from a crime scene.
THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE.
Ruth bought me that shirt for Pride, but now the arms are broken and the spine is snapped. Ruth and I never used to argue before him. When we broke up a year ago, she told me that my first impression was the right one. But how can I separate the first impression from the last one?
Converse over the yellow line. White threads in the rip in his jacket. The murmur of the train.
The quiet Monday of the pub, two years, one month, and three days ago.
When I met him.
IT WAS OUR BIMONTHLYwriters meetup, and Amy, Chris, Hugo, and I were sat in a pub in Broadway Market with splayed crisp packets and printouts on the wooden table. It was my turn to bring a chapter to discuss, but it wasn’t finished. When I told the group that, they made the same noise at the same time and told me to just bringsomethingfor the next meeting.
Before we started, we ordered drinks and chatted. Chris remarked on how the pub had Halloween decorations up already. Hugo said that he was going to Torture Garden’s annual Halloween ball in a couple of weeks. Amy immediately changed the subject by telling us about the renovations that she and her fiancé, David, were making to their Stoke Newington home.
Can you believe I’ve only just discovered Farrow & Ball?
I asked her what Farrow & Ball was, and she looked at me like I had ruined the story. She continued explaining the differences between décor in our early twenties and décor in our late twenties (less color) when he arrived.
A tall stranger in a bleached denim jacket with a rip in the shoulder flicked his chin in vague greeting and reclined in the chair next to mine, resting large feet in old Converse next to my Malbec. Hugo and Chris exchanged a glance, I moved my glass, and Amy continued her anecdote, with the irritation of someone who just had a fly land in their drink.
… and I’ve turned all the books around in the bookshelf so they match the walls, she concluded. Then, as if she hadn’t been the one speaking, she asked if we could begin,please.
Chris kicked us off: Right. Yeah, so forme, Amy, the protagonist’sdesire for retribution was a tad reductive. You don’t want her to fall into an offensive trope.
But as the group discussed Amy’s novel, I was drawn to the stranger in my periphery. Downturned mouth, grayish-brown hair, deep lines framing unsymmetrical features, pen between his lips like a cigar. There was something grotesque about him. I glanced down at his arms, muscular, with a mole on his forearm like a planet.
Amy’s rebuttal was a skimming stone: Chris, how exactly is it an offensive trope? A male protagonist can do anything he wants as many times as he wants, but a female protagonist has to justify why she is or isn’t a trope?
I kept watching him: his face didn’t move; it was hard to tell if he was listening.
Amy wore a mohair jumper cinched with a belt. Her favorite shows were filmed before a studio audience, and she wrote crime fiction. Hugo wore a ponytail with a suit jacket and wrote erotic science fiction. Chris wrote about the “male experience.” He had a female cat called Humphrey and commitment issues. I knew what they might say and how they might say it; when Chris would be offended and when Amy would pretend to be. But I couldn’t work the stranger out. His age? His sexuality? Was he a good writer? Although, somehow, I already knew that he was.
Enola, how about you?
Is that a coffee stain on his T-shirt?
Amy tapped her paper with her pen. She was always impatient to hear feedback. It was one of the reasons that the others found her grating, that and the fact that they were jealous; her first book was being published next year. But, as always, her writing was brilliant and listening to her words increased my relief at not having brought my own.
