Page 17 of Second Person

Then blank.

He was awake. He’s rubbish at pretending, his breathing goes obvious. And I turned the notebook round and held it open for him to look at, which I have never done for another living person, and he looked at the page and did not read it. I watched him not read it. He kept his eyes on the shape of the thing and off the letters, the way you’d look at somebody’s medical notes on a desk you happened to be standing at.

‘You don’t have to show me,’ he said.

‘I know.’

That was the whole exchange. I told him I write definitions, sometimes for words that are mine and sometimes for words I haven’t found, and he said yeah, and the yeah had understanding in it, actual understanding, not the polite kind: a man whose entire trade is making a thing that will hold a load recognising, without needing it explained, that this was also that.

The notebook went back on the nightstand. Pen on top, no cap, the way it always is.

I said stay where you are.

He said I’m not moving.

I texted Rhi four days later. Not an apology; I’d have got the apology wrong in text and she’d have known I’d drafted it.

The window’s open.

Three words, which is one more than the two I’d use for the best news of my life two years on, and she rang inside forty seconds and neither of us referred to any of it, ever, beyond one sentence about eight months later when she said, apropos of nothing, in a car, you were right that I’ve had it easy and I was right that you’ve never rung me first, and then put the radio on.

I never wrote the definition. It’s still blank in that notebook, on a shelf in a room in Peckham that gets the morning, with three crossings-out above it and a bent cover.

I’ve come to think the blank is the entry. Some things you can only define by the width of the space you leave for them, and thirty years is a very wide space, and the pen was never going to be the right instrument for it.

He never asked. That’s the definition too, if you want it, and it took me years to see that it was: a man who had every fact required to ask and didn’t, lying on top of a duvet six inches away with his boots off and his joggers on, at a distance calculated by somebody who has never in his life calculated anything except loads, so that there was nothing for me to receive and nothing for me to be.

SEVEN

Summer holds. Scaffolding down, and the walls stand on their own.

The site’s a foreign country I’ve been granted a visa for, hi-vis and a hard hat that swims on me, boots two sizes too big borrowed from the portacabin because mine would fail whatever inspection this place runs on rubber soles.

I go up because he asked, casual about it in the specific way he’s casual when something matters to him more than the tone lets on, come and see it if you want, seven words doing the work of an invitation he’d never phrase as one. I go because I’ve written a building out of nothing for two years and I’ve never once stood inside the real kind, the kind with weight, with a person who checks it with his palm like a pulse, and there’s research in that, I tell myself, though research isn’t really why I’m climbing a temporary staircase in someone else’s boots with my heart going faster than the climb accounts for.

Sally shows me the roof line on the old warehouse they’re folding into the new build, the two of them talking trusses and load paths in a language I only half catch, and I watch her watch him the way you watch a colleague who respects someone properly: no performance in it, just two people who trust the same maths. I like her for it. I like, more than I expected to, watching him in a register that has nothing to do with me: competent, unhurried, the version of him that existed for years before I ever clocked his face across a bar.

Gaz calls something up from the scaffold below, a joke I don’t fully hear, and the whole crew’s attention flickers my way, assessing, and I feel it land and pass, the specific weightlessness of being clocked and accepted in under a second by men who’ve decided, collectively, without a meeting, that I’m allowed to be here. Nobody makes a thing of the dress I’ve got on under the hi-vis. Nobody makes a thing of anything. It’s the least remarkable I’ve ever felt walking into a room full of strangers, and I don’t tell him that, not yet, because I haven’t worked out how to say it without making it sound bigger than the small, ordinary miracle it actually is.

I write the tour that night, obviously, because I write everything, but I don’t write it as it happened. I write the shape of it instead: a woman walking through a building that’s still becoming itself, watching a man who knows exactly where every load goes, and not being frightened by any of it for the first time in the whole manuscript. My editor, when I eventually have one, is going to ask what changed in the middle of the book, and I already know the honest answer and I’m never going to give it to her: I went up some scaffolding in borrowed boots and stopped being afraid of buildings the same week I stopped being afraid of him.

The crew clears out by four, off to wherever crews go when the light’s still good and the week’s nearly done, and the site goes quiet in the specific way a loud place goes quiet, the silence still shaped like the noise that was in it an hour ago. He does the last walk-round, checking what needs checking, and I trail him because I’m not ready to leave yet, because something about watching him work has put a low, steady charge through me that four hours hasn’t burned off.

He locks the gate on the compound from the inside, out of habit, and turns round and finds me already close, closer than the site rules would strictly allow, and there’s a half-second where I watch him clock the distance and decide, deliberately, not to step back.

‘You’re not meant to still be here,’ he says.

‘Neither are you, technically. You clocked off an hour ago.’

‘I’m always here.’

‘I know.’ I get a hand flat on his chest, feel the heart going, steadier than mine, always steadier than mine, and that’s half of what I want tonight: to be the thing that finally makes it not steady. ‘That’s the problem.’

He doesn’t ask what the problem is. He’s learned, by now, that some of my sentences are doors and some are just the sound a door makes when you lean on it, and he waits to see which this one is.

I steer him back against the cabin wall, behind it, out of the sightline of the gate, the corrugated metal cool through his shirt when my hand presses flat there, and I go down onto my knees on the hardstanding in front of him with the evening light doing something gold and stupid to the whole yard, and I look up and say, ‘Here.’

‘Here’s mad.’