Page 22 of Second Person

Nobody notices. That’s its own kind of mercy and its own kind of loneliness at once.

Owain’s two are still small enough that Christmas is mostly a negotiation about who touched whose selection box. The girl, three-going-on-four, decides somewhere around the afternoon film that I’m hers for the duration, climbs into my lap with a book about a tractor, and demands I read it in a voice, and I do the voice, all of them, a whole cast of agricultural vehicles, and she laughs the uncomplicated laugh of a person who hasn’t yet been taught that anyone at this table is complicated, and something in me eases that I hadn’t clocked was clenched.

She doesn’t know what I am. That’s the whole gift of a three-year-old: she hasn’t got the boxes yet, the ones the adults spent a valley’s worth of kindness trying to fit me into. I’m the one who does the tractor voice. I’m Auncle — some collision of the two words she already had, landed on herself, no committee, and nobody corrected her towards or away from anything, and it’s the least loaded word anyone’s called me all year, and it came out of the one person at the table young enough not to have learned words are meant to be a problem.

Mam watched us over the top of a cracker joke nobody laughed at, the tractor book and the girl and me, and said nothing, but her face did the thing it does when a sum she’s been carrying comes out even. Later, drying up, she said only: ‘She’s taken to you.’ And I said kids do, and she said, ‘Not all kids. Good ones. They can tell,’ and left it there on the draining board, the nearest my mother gets to a benediction, and I took it, because you take what your mother can give in the currency she’s got, and hers is tea and washing-up and one flat sentence a fortnight that turns out, if you save them up, to be a whole life of being wanted.

I go up to my old room that afternoon while the others watch something loud and Christmas-coloured on the telly, and I find the box at the bottom of the wardrobe I always find when I’m home and never quite ready to open: certificates, mostly, the swimming ones with the name in a teacher’s careful capitals, a school report from Year Nine that uses the same name six times in four sentences, a birth certificate I’ve never once needed to look at because I’ve had the fact of it memorised since I was old enough to resent it.

I don’t cry over the box, which surprises me a little; I’ve cried over smaller things this month. It sits open on my lap instead, in a room that was painted blue before I was born, for a boy who never once showed up to inhabit it, and I think about how strange it is that the room got the colour right for nobody and the shelves got filled, eventually, by someone real, one book at a time, until you could stand in the doorway and tell, if you knew where to look, exactly whose room this had actually always been going to become.

The name’s on all of it, of course. I read the birth certificate once, because I make myself, the way you press a bruise to check it’s fading and not spreading. It’s just a word on paper. That’s the deal I’ve made with it and kept: it lives in ink, in boxes, in the archives of institutions that need a legal thread to follow, and it never once comes out of anyone’s mouth, not mine, not Mam’s, not a doctor’s, not on the phone to Owain, because a name you’re not called is a fact and a name you’re called is an argument, and I retired that one before I left this room. Written, it can’t reach me. Said, it could. So I let the box keep it, the way you let an old address hold your post a while after you’ve moved, and I don’t forward it on.

I put the certificates back. Close the box. Don’t take any of it with me, because it isn’t a wound I’m carrying home this year, just a fact I’m allowed to visit and allowed to leave in the wardrobe when I go.

Owain corners me at the sink on Christmas night, which is where this family conducts all its actual business, the washing-up the closest thing we’ve got to a confessional. He’s got a tea towel and I’ve got my hands in the water and neither of us is looking at the other, which is the only way a Beynon man can say a true thing, side-on, both hands busy.

‘You’re quiet,’ he says. From Owain that’s a welfare check with a blue light on it.

‘Long term.’

‘Aye, you said.’ He dries a fork he’s already dried. ‘Mam thinks it’s a fella.’

‘Mam thinks everything’s a fella since she found out fellas were on the table.’

He huffs, which is Owain laughing. ‘Is it, though?’

I could lie. I’ve lied to easier people. But Owain asked me if I’d sorted a flat and if the job paid and whether I had a proper coat, three years ago at a station, because those were the questions he had the tools for, and he’s asking this one now out of the same toolbox, plainly, no internet in it, and a lie would be the worse answer to a man who only ever asks what he means.

‘It was. It’s gone quiet. I don’t know if it’s gone or just quiet.’

He thinks about that the way he’d think about a system losing pressure and not showing him where. ‘Quiet’s not gone,’ he says, eventually. ‘Gone’s gone. Quiet’s a fault you’ve not found yet.’ He puts the fork in the drawer. ‘You find the fault, or you sit and wait to see if it clears. You don’t rip the whole thing out because it’s gone quiet on you. That’s how you turn a repair into a new boiler.’

It’s the most anyone in my family has said to me about my love life in the whole of it, and it arrived as a metaphor about heating, from a man who doesn’t know the first fact about the person it’s aimed at, not his name, not his trade, not that he’s a he, and it’s better advice than anything the cohort or the internet or my own overqualified brain has managed in three weeks of drafting sentences at a silence.

‘When did you get wise,’ I say.

‘I’m not wise. I’m a plumber.’ He hangs the towel on the rail dead straight, because Owain hangs everything dead straight. ‘Same thing, some days.’ And then, because forty years of Beynon men not saying things has to go somewhere and the sink’s had its share tonight, he puts his hand on the back of my neck once, rough, the exact grip from the station, the family’s whole vocabulary of love in one hold that’s gone before either of us has to have a face about it. ‘Text me. If it’s gone. I’ll bring the van.’

‘Rhi’s already offered the van.’

‘Then it’s a convoy,’ says my brother, and puts the kettle on, because we are, whatever else, our mother’s children.

Dad finds me on the back step on Boxing Day, both of us out of the house for the same reason, which is that a house full of people you love is exhausting in a way you can’t say to any of them. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He’s not built for the question, and I’m grateful, because the answer would take the whole of the yard.

He stands next to me a while, looking at the dark shape of the mountain, and then he says, not quite to me: ‘Whoever it is. Up in Manchester.’ A pause long enough to lose a smaller man in. ‘They’d be lucky.’

I don’t ask how he knew. He’s a retired postman. Forty years of reading which envelopes carry bad news off the weight and the handwriting alone, and his own kid comes home for Christmas with a face like a returned letter; he’s not going to miss it just because he’s never had the vocabulary for the sender.

‘It’s complicated,’ I say.

‘Aye. It would be.’ He blows on his hands. Doesn’t say a partner, doesn’t say a name, doesn’t chance a they. What he says instead, to the cold, in the only currency he’s got, is: ‘You’re not to let anyone up there make you small.’ And then, because that’s cost him about as much as he keeps in the account: ‘Right. It’s brass out here.’

He goes in. Leaves me on the step with the mountain and the winded, enormous fact of a man who can’t manage my pronoun telling me, in one flat sentence he’ll never refer to again, the one thing I most needed to hear from precisely him. Mam worries out loud, in questions, in the kettle. Dad worries in five-word sentences on a freezing step and then apologises for the weather. Between the two of them, at their two different speeds, I have never once actually doubted that I was wanted in that house. I’ve doubted whether they understood me. Never whether they’d have me. Those turn out to be very different griefs, and only one of them is fatal.

I stayed out on the step a while after he’d gone in, because a sentence like that needs somewhere to land and the kitchen was too warm and too full of people for it. My father, who has never once managed my pronoun clean, who reaches for the old word out of forty years of muscle and catches it late or not at all, had just told me, in the only register he owns, that I was not to let anyone make me small. And the thing that undid me, out there in the cold with the mountain a darker shape against a dark sky, wasn’t the sentiment. It was the accuracy. Because making myself small is the exact thing I’ve done my whole life, the compact version, the self edited down to fit a room, and I’d never once said that to him, never handed him the vocabulary, and he’d read it off me anyway, the way he read forty years of bad news without opening a single envelope.

He can’t say they. He’ll go to his grave reaching for it and missing by a half-beat. But he clocked the one true danger to me from two hundred miles off and named it in five words on a freezing step, and I decided out there, and stand by it still: I’ll take a father who can’t manage my pronoun but sees my whole self over one who says every word right and reads none of me. The pronoun’s the last mile. He’s done all the miles before it. I’m not going to audit the last one to death when he’s walked me the whole rest of the way home.