Page 20 of Second Person

‘Fourteen months,’ he said. ‘That’s nothing.’

‘Cheers.’

‘No. I mean.’ He turned onto his back, looked at the ceiling, easier than looking at me for this one. ‘I clocked you before that. Long before. First time I came up to see Ewan, two years back, near enough. Went in that bar because it was by his and it did a decent pint, and you were at the corner table with about four notebooks and a pencil in your teeth, and I,’ he stopped, started again, ‘I couldn’t tell you what I ordered. Stood at that bar and forgot the English language.’

I didn’t say anything. I’ve built a whole career out of knowing when to shut up and let a person keep going.

‘Every time I came to Manchester after that, I went back. Told myself it was the pint. Wasn’t the pint. You were always there, same table, writing, and I’d sit where I could see you and not say a word, for months. Months, Celyn. Like a coward. Couldn’t cross a bar floor. Me. I’ve walked live sites with the roof half off.’

Here’s the thing I never got the measure of, and told him only the half of: I knew he looked. I said so in the first weeks, with a half-smile on, and enjoyed the saying. What I hadn’t costed was the length of it, or what it took out of him. Fourteen months of me at that bar, congratulating myself on my patience, my craft, on being the quiet perceptive one who sees what a hundred other people miss, and the whole superior stillness of it was going on three tables from a man doing the exact same thing to me, and hating himself for it just as quietly.

Two cowards. One bar. Each of us certain we were the only one paying attention.

‘I asked the barman your name,’ he said. ‘In the end. Couldn’t manage hello, but I managed that. Said, the person at that table, do they come here a lot. And he looked at me like he’d been waiting weeks for somebody to finally ask.’ A pause. ‘Said they straight back to me, no blinking. First time anyone handed me the word for you and I didn’t have to work out what to do with it. It just fit. You just fit. Before I had a single fact about you except red nails and a pencil and the way you never once looked up for anyone.’

Red nails. Of course it was the red. I’d worn it that whole stretch because red was the bottle I reached for when I needed the nerve to be looked at, and never once clocked that the looking had already started, that the colour I put on to feel brave was the exact colour that had walked a straight man face-first into the question of his own life.

I’ve thought about the symmetry of it more than I’ve told him, because the symmetry undoes me every time I take it out and look at it. I had a whole theory of myself built on being the observer, and the loneliness of it was a price I’d decided I was mature enough to pay.

There’s a version of that story that’s tragic, two lonely people wasting fourteen months. I don’t read it that way. I read it as the only proof I’ve ever had that I wasn’t broken in some way particular to me. The watching, the not-approaching, the wanting filed under later, I’d always half believed those were my personal defect, the damage a specific childhood in a specific valley did to a specific kid. And then here was a Manchester builder with a completely different life doing all of it too, for love, the same as me, and it turned out the thing I’d carried as a private wound was just what wanting looks like on anyone taught to be careful with it. That’s not tragedy. That’s company.

I didn’t tell him that either. I just moved closer, put my head on a chest that had finally stopped bracing, and let the two watchings become one, at last, in a bed above a charity shop, two years late and exactly on time.

EIGHT

Draft twelve. The builder stands in the doorway and calls it a wall.

There’s a night in the run-up I keep for myself, the way you keep the good proof back to check it holds before you show anyone.

He’d had a week of it, the site behind on a pour, his mother’s visit coming on like weather, and he turned up wound tight in the way that means he wants to be taken out of his own head and won’t ask, because asking isn’t in his grammar. I know his tells the way I know my own sentences. I got him flat on my bed and I said, into the side of his neck, ‘Let me,’ and felt the whole of him go still, and then, slower, go loose, the yes arriving in his body a good beat before it reached his mouth.

We’d done it this way before, but not often, and never without me clocking what it costs him and what it gives: a man built to hold everything up, letting himself be the thing that gets held instead. He turned over for me and I took my time with him, because taking my time is the whole of what I’ve got that the site and the mother and the world don’t, and I used all of it. The lube, the cold click of the cap he flinched at and then didn’t. My fingers first, careful, unhurried, reading him the way he reads a wall, until the tension went out of him by degrees and what was left underneath was only want.

‘Alright,’ he said. Wrecked already. ‘Celyn. Now.’

The condom, the second click, the slick of it, and then I was pushing into him, slow, all the way, watching the breath go out of him and his hands find the headboard and grip. There’s a thing that happens to me in that exact moment that I’ve never managed to get onto a page and I’m not going to manage here either: the flat power of being the one who’s trusted to go carefully. Every man who ever narrated my body, who ever decided what I was and did me the favour of it, and here’s the biggest and quietest of them opened up under my hands, holding a headboard, letting me set the pace, letting me be the whole size of what I am with nothing filed down.

I moved in him and he took it, the way he takes everything from me, like it was always going to be allowed, and I got a hand round his cock and worked him in time, and the sounds he made weren’t ones the site or the mother or the corner-table version of him would ever have owned to. His head went back. The tendon in his neck. The whole of him, held, the way he’d put it later, in the one word he uses for this and for nothing else: held, like a structure when the frame’s right and the load’s true and the thing finally just stands.

He came first, over my fist, with my name in his mouth in a register I keep the memory of like a line I’m saving. I followed, buried in him, my forehead dropped between his shoulder blades, and for a minute the flat and the site and the mother and the whole freight of the coming autumn went quiet, and there was only this: a man who couldn’t cross a bar floor for two years, holding a headboard and letting me all the way in.

Afterwards, the flannel, the tap run warm, the ordinary tending, and him gone quiet in the good way, loose-limbed, an arm thrown over his own eyes. I lay there with the enormous unfamiliar fact of it settling in my chest: that I’d been handed a body to be careful with, and I’d been careful, and it had cost me nothing I wasn’t glad to spend.

I should have known that a week with that in it couldn’t also contain nothing going wrong. But you never clock the high point while you’re on it. You only ever spot it later, looking back up.

I decide to say it three hours before the showcase, in the shower, water running cold because I’ve stood under it too long thinking instead of washing, and the decision arrives the way the best lines always do, not built, just suddenly whole: tonight, whatever happens with the folder and the assessors and Pritchard’s clipboard, I’m going to say it to him. Not the careful version. Not a joke with the true thing folded inside it where he can pretend not to have caught the shape. The actual words, the ones I’ve been drafting since roughly the second time he laughed at something I said and looked surprised at his own laughing.

I’ve never said it to anyone and meant the whole weight of it. I’ve said it the way you say it to family, out of habit and love that doesn’t need examining, and I’ve said it once, badly, to someone who wasn’t the right shape for it and flinched at the size of the sentence, which taught me to keep the size down after that.

I want to be honest about the size of what I’d decided to hand him, because from outside, three words is nothing, a thing people say to get off the phone. For me it’s the whole estate. I’ve spent a life handing out the compact version — the compact self at the family table, the compact body to the men before him, the compact book to a room of strangers in plastic chairs — and every one of those was me deciding, before anyone else got the chance, that the full thing was too much to ask a person to carry. Saying the words to Ron isn’t a report on how I feel. It’s the first time I’ll hand anyone the uncompressed file and trust them not to send it back for being too big. That’s why it took three hours and a cold shower to decide. Not because I doubted the feeling, but because I’ve never once, in my life, let the whole of a thing out of my mouth without first editing it down to a size I could survive being refused.

You know what happens at the lectern. I’m not going to write it again; I already spent it once, on the page, in the room, and a sentence only gets to detonate the first time. What I can tell you is what happens underneath the words while I’m saying them: I’m not performing the fear on the page tonight, I’m performing the courage of having said something true in front of Pritchard’s clipboard and having it land exactly as hard as I meant it to. I walk off that stage with the whole of myself still switched on, current running through every part of me that’s usually kept low for public consumption, and there’s exactly one person in that car park I want it running towards.

I want to be exact about what I walked out of that room carrying, because the flinch is coming and it’s going to eat the memory of everything before it, and the everything before it mattered. Three years ago I couldn’t hold a page in a room above a pub. Tonight I stood in front of Pritchard’s clipboard and a visiting assessor and forty people and read the true thing out loud in a room built to judge it, and my hands stayed still, and the stillness wasn’t armour for once. It was just steadiness, the thing you get when you’ve finally stopped being frightened of the exact activity you’re doing.

I go to him lit up like that, the folder still in my hand, three hours of a decided sentence sitting right behind my teeth, and I close the gap between us meaning to open my mouth and let the whole thing out at once, the real one, the uncompact one, I love you, and instead I get his stillness. His arms, not moving to meet me. The half-inch of him leaning back from a mouth that was about to hand him the biggest thing I’ve ever built.

I feel the flinch before I understand it. My body reads it the way you catch a wrong note in a line you’ve read aloud a hundred times, before the mind’s caught up to what the ear already has, and the sentence I was about to say doesn’t so much stop as get overwritten, mid-draft, by a much smaller and much safer one. Right. Course.