Page 10 of Second Person

‘Tell me the changes.’

Nobody’s ever asked it like that. Not what’s wrong, not what can I do. Just: what’s different, so I know where to stand.

‘No workshop today. Anywhere. Not even asking. If I want it I’ll say so.’

‘Right.’

‘And don’t —’ I stop, start again, because even the retired sentence costs something today. ‘Don’t tell me I look like myself. I don’t. I know I don’t. Don’t correct it.’

‘Wasn’t going to.’ He says it plain, no offence taken, filing it the way he files a spec change on site, and the bracing I’ve been holding since eight this morning lets go by about a degree.

I haven’t done my face. I’m in the same jumper I slept in, hair unwashed, the eyeliner from Sunday still ghosting under one eye in a smear I couldn’t be bothered to fix and didn’t, today, need to. Postbox red’s still on my nails from the weekend, chipped at three tips, and I look at my own hand round a chip and think about painting over it and don’t, because today isn’t a day for choosing a colour on purpose. It’s a day for whatever’s already there.

‘I don’t need you to look right,’ he says, at some point, not looking up from unwrapping his own chips, said sideways the way he says the things that matter most, so I don’t have to hold his face while I hear it. ‘I need to know how to look at you today. That’s different.’

I don’t say anything for a while. I eat a chip. He eats four in the time it takes me to eat one, and neither of us minds the quiet, which is its own kind of answer.

‘You can look at me like this,’ I say, eventually. ‘Just — not the eyes too long. Not tonight.’

‘Right.’ He doesn’t ask why. He never does, on a day like this. He watches the telly instead, some property programme with the sound half down, and every so often his hand finds my knee under the table, resting there, checking a wall’s still standing without making a show of the checking.

We don’t do anything that night that would go in a book. He stays on top of the covers again, the way he did the first time. Tonight asks for the distance, and he’s learned, by now, to read the day and not just the rules written down for the good ones.

Somewhere around midnight, in the dark, half asleep, he says, ‘Tomorrow’ll be different.’

‘Might not be.’

‘Might not.’ A pause, his voice going towards sleep. ‘I’ll ask again. Same question. Every day it’s a bad one, if there’s a hundred of them.’ Then, because he’s Ron and even half-conscious he can’t leave a sentence looking too much like a promise he hasn’t costed properly: ‘Not being soft about it. Just — good system. Works both ways.’

I don’t tell him that’s the first time anyone’s ever offered to keep asking rather than offering to fix it. I file it instead, the way I file everything, for later. Not tonight. Tonight I just lie there in yesterday’s eyeliner with a man who didn’t need me to look like anything, and let the day end the way it started, quietly, on its own terms, with somebody willing to sit in it beside me instead of asking me to explain it first.

FIVE

Chapter eleven. The builder learns the word for what he is. He files it under later.

Twelve copies, stapled, my name in the corner in a font Pritchard insists on because it’s the one the industry uses, and I hand them round the seminar table the way you’d hand round something live, careful not to let the pages fan.

‘First chapter of the new thing,’ Pritchard says, to the room, not to me, the way he introduces everyone’s work like he discovered it personally. ‘Celyn’s been sitting on this one.’

I haven’t been sitting on it. I’ve been writing it at a fire exit with a pencil between orders, but sitting on it sounds better in a room with biscuits, so I let it stand.

Marged reads with her whole body, always has, the copy held close, mouth moving very slightly on the good lines, and I watch her get to the paragraph where the woman first sees the man on the scaffold and go still in a way the others don’t. Tom’s already flicking to the end to see how long it is. Priya’s got a pencil out before she’s finished the first page, which is what the good ones do. Pritchard reads the way he reads everything, unhurried, a man tasting something he’s already decided he’ll approve of.

The two-minutes-of-praise-before-the-knife starts with Tom, who says it’s ‘really visual,’ which is what Tom says about everything, including the fire alarm test we had last week. Priya’s sharper: she likes the palm-flat-on-concrete gesture, wants to know if it recurs, and I say it does, careful, giving away exactly as much of the mechanism as keeps a workshop happy without giving away the mechanism.

Marged doesn’t say anything for a while. When she does, she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at the page, tapping the paragraph with one finger like she’s checking a pulse of her own.

‘She never lets anyone finish a sentence for her,’ Marged says. ‘The woman. Everyone in the scene keeps starting to explain her to herself and she keeps talking over the top of it. It’s not rude, exactly. It’s like she’s decided in advance she isn’t going to be told what she is.’ A pause, still looking at the page and not at me. ‘Where’s that come from.’

‘She’s stubborn,’ I say, which is true and also nothing.

‘Mm.’ Marged doesn’t push. That’s the whole danger of Marged: she doesn’t need to push, she just puts the true thing down on the table and lets it sit there being true while the conversation moves on around it.

Pritchard takes the room back the way he always does, hands flat on his own copy, and comes round the table under cover of making a point, the way he does, stopping behind my chair to lean over and tap a line on my own page with one finger — close enough that I feel his breath change the temperature of the air by my ear, his other hand landing, briefly, over mine where it’s resting on the desk, still, the way you’d steady someone about to interrupt. I don’t move my hand. Moving it would make it a thing, and I’ve learned exactly how much a thing costs in this room and decided, again, that it costs less to let it sit there three seconds than to make everyone watch me decide it matters.

He straightens up. Delivers the verdict I’ve been waiting for since I stapled the pages, back at the head of the table now, hand doing something useful with a pen instead.

‘This is very controllable material,’ he says, and I watch three other people nod at a sentence that means nothing and everything. ‘A woman watching a man work — the reader knows exactly what shelf this goes on. Domestic, aspirational, a bit of ache in it. You could sell this on the cover alone.’ He taps the table, pleased with himself, pleased with me by extension. ‘Keep the register there. Don’t let her get too clever. Cleverness is what makes agents nervous about who’s going to buy it.’