Page 24 of Second Person

She reads the subject line. Reads it again. Puts the phone down flat, very carefully, the way you’d put down something with a wire coming out of it.

‘Cel.’

‘I know.’

‘Cel.’ Louder. ‘Is that —‘

‘It’s the rest of it. She wants the rest of it.’

And she screams.

Not a squeal. Not the noise people make in films. An actual scream, from the chest, in a café at half two in the afternoon, both hands flat on the table, thirty years of a person coming out of her all at once at a volume that stops the espresso machine, and a woman two tables over puts her cup down in the saucer badly enough to send half of it across the tray, and Rhi does not so much as look round, and does not apologise, and does it again, shorter, into her own hands.

‘That’s —‘ She’s got the loud back under about eighty per cent control. ‘You know that’s the good one, don’t you. That’s not a nice-try one, that’s not a keep-us-in-mind, that’s —‘

‘I know what it is.’

‘You don’t, though. You’ll have read it four times looking for the bit where it’s not true.’ She points at me with a teaspoon. ‘Have you?’

‘Six.’

‘Six.’ She sat back. ‘Right. Listen to me, because I’m only doing this once and then we’re getting a cake. I’ve read every single thing you’ve written since you were fifteen and gave me nine pages about a girl on a bus who could stop time, and it was rubbish, and you knew it was rubbish, and you gave it to me anyway.’ The teaspoon again. ‘You’ve been doing this your whole life with nobody paying you and nobody clapping and nobody in that valley having the first idea it was a job. And a stranger in London has read three chapters and asked for the rest.’ Her chin did the thing. ‘Thirty years I’ve been waiting to say I told you so about something worth saying it about.’

‘You’ve never once told me so.’

‘I’ve been telling you so since we were four, you just weren’t listening.’ She got up to go to the counter and stopped and put both hands on my shoulders from behind, hard enough to hurt, and said into the top of my head, in the vowels, ‘Da iawn, ti.’ Then, at normal volume, to the whole café: ‘She’s written a book.’

Nobody in that café was under any obligation to care, and about four of them did anyway, and one man raised his coffee.

It’s the first properly good hour I’ve had in three weeks, and underneath the whole of it there’s still a shape missing from the celebration, a chair nobody’s sitting in.

There’s a specific loneliness to a good hour with a hole in it. Rhi screamed, and a woman spilled her coffee, and we laughed till my face hurt, and every second of it was real. I’ve had bad news I could carry alone; bad news is portable, you can grieve it in a corner. Good news is different. Good news wants a witness, wants a face to land on, and the face I’d built the whole enterprise to land on was the far side of a three-week silence and might not want the news, or me, and I sat in a café with my oldest friend and the best email of my life and understood, for the first time in a way that reached my hands, that I’d let something matter more than I’d let anything matter since I was a kid, and that the price of letting a thing matter that much is exactly this: its absence can hollow out a triumph while you’re still inside it.

I wouldn’t take it back. That’s the part that surprised me, sat there with the coffee and the scream still ringing. Three years ago I’d have read this feeling as proof I should never have let him in, filed it for the defence, alone-is-safer, and here I was reading it the opposite way: that a joy with a person-shaped hole in it is worth more than a joy with no holes, because there was never anyone in that one to leave one.

I hear him on the stairs before the knock comes. That’s the part nobody would believe unless they’d spent a year learning a person’s weight on a step the way you’d learn a piece of music, but I know his tread from anyone else’s who’s ever climbed to this landing, the particular unhurried heaviness of him, a man who doesn’t rush stairs because rushing never got him anywhere faster that mattered.

I don’t move for a second. I stand in my own hallway in joggers and a hoodie that isn’t his, hair unwashed, the manuscript still glowing on the laptop behind me like a held breath, and I do the same maths he must be doing on the other side of this door, except mine runs the opposite direction: not will they let me in but do I let him. Every version of the last month runs through me in the space of two seconds, the drawer, the toothbrush, the flinch that cost me a sentence I’d spent five days building, and underneath all of it, unkillable, the plainer fact that hasn’t gone anywhere in three weeks of silence: I’ve missed him the way you’d miss a load-bearing wall, not decoratively, structurally, the whole shape of my days tilted slightly wrong without him in them.

The knock comes. Once, a pause, then again, harder.

I stand at my own door a moment longer than I need to, my hand flat against the wood the way his has probably been flat against it from the other side, both of us braced against the same half-inch of painted timber, and I think, absurdly, of the manuscript behind me, of a woman who keeps testing whether a room can hold her weight and finally, exhaustedly, decides to test it anyway rather than live forever on the threshold.

It’s not lost on me, standing there, that I wrote this. Two years building a whole book on the arrogance of thinking watching was safer than crossing, and here I am on the wrong side of my own thesis, hand flat on the wood, doing precisely the sum I gave the builder to do and never once expected to have to do myself. The distance between the person who wrote The Threshold and the person standing in this hallway is exactly that half-inch of painted timber and the nerve to cross it, and I understand, with the cold clarity you only get at the worst hour, that a writer who won’t take their own advice hasn’t finished the book. They’ve just described the problem beautifully and gone to bed.

So I stop describing it.

I open the door.

I’m not going to tell you what either of us said. Some conversations you’ve already heard the whole of, from the other side, and rehearing them from mine would just be the same words wearing a different coat. What I’ll tell you instead is the part that happens after, the part nobody standing in that doorway with us could have seen: once the door’s shut and the flat’s gone quiet and the two of us are sitting close enough on the edge of my bed that his knee’s against mine, I reach past him for the manuscript, still open on the desktop, and I turn the screen so he can see it.

‘It’s done,’ I say. ‘While you weren’t talking to me. I finished it.’

He looks at the screen, then at me, and something moves across his face that I’ve learned, over a year of watching him do it, means more than most people’s whole sentences.

‘And an agent wants the rest of it. Emailed me Tuesday.’

‘Celyn.’ Just my name, but it’s carrying something now it wasn’t carrying three weeks ago.