Page 25 of Second Person

‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know if we were the kind of people who told each other things any more.’

He doesn’t say anything clever back. He never does, that’s not his register, and I’ve stopped wanting him to. He just takes my hand, the whole of it, the calluses and the split knuckle and the pale band where the silver ring sits, the one he takes off on site, and he holds it the way you’d hold something you’d genuinely thought you might not get to hold again, and we sit like that a long time, the cat that isn’t mine somewhere three streets away on its windowsill throne, the manuscript still glowing behind us with six words from a stranger promising a future neither of us has fully dared believe in yet.

There’s a packet of stars in a drawer three streets away, eighty pence off the charity shop under my own flat, a detail I will be years in learning, bought months ago and never opened, a whole ceiling’s worth he has never once mentioned. I don’t know that yet. I won’t know it for weeks. But I fall asleep that night against a chest that’s finally stopped bracing, and somewhere in the dark, unwritten, undrafted, the next chapter starts without either of us reaching for a pen.

ELEVEN

The first reader is never the one you wrote it for. Then, once, he is.

He asks to read it on a Sunday, ten days on from the door, both of us still moving round each other with the specific care of people who know exactly how fast the whole thing nearly broke.

‘Just the start,’ he says. ‘Don’t need the whole thing tonight. Just — what you’ve been at all this time.’

I say yes before I’ve thought it through properly, because saying no would cost more than the fear of him reading it, and I’ve spent two years discovering which fears are worth the toll and which aren’t. I put the laptop in front of him at the kitchen table, open to chapter one, and then I don’t know what to do with my body, so I make tea neither of us needed, loose leaf, six minutes, because the ritual of it gives my hands something to be doing that isn’t watching him read.

I fail at not watching him read. I sit across the table pretending to look at my phone and watch him instead, the exact thing I did for fourteen months at a bar before either of us had a name for the other, except now the watching’s got nowhere to hide, both of us at the same small table in the same bad light.

He reads slowly, having never been a fast reader, which I know the way I know the rest of the small facts that add up to a person, and I watch his face do almost nothing for the first two pages, careful, giving nothing away, the exact face he wears on site when he’s deciding whether a wall’s a problem before he’ll say so out loud.

Then something changes round page three. I see it happen: his hand goes still on the mouse, the scroll stopping, and I know, without needing to look at the screen myself, exactly which paragraph he’s landed on, because I wrote it about him without once using his name — the builder, palm flat against the wall, checking the set of the thing the way you’d take a pulse.

‘That —’ He stops without finishing it, and reads the paragraph again, which I can tell by the way his eyes go back up the page, and this time when he looks up at me his face has done the thing it does when he’s clocked a fault line he wasn’t looking for.

‘That’s the wall thing. I do that.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve had that in a book two years.’

‘Longer.’ I turn my mug a half-turn on the table, needing something to do with my hands that isn’t watch him find himself inside a stranger’s manuscript. ‘Before I ever spoke to you.’

He doesn’t say anything for a while, and reads on, and I watch him find the doorway habit next — the character standing half in, half out of rooms, the way Ron does, the way I clocked him doing it at the bar before I’d have called it a tell — and this time he doesn’t say anything at all, just goes very still, the good still, the one that means something’s landed properly.

He reads for the better part of an hour. I make more tea I don’t drink. I watch a whole page go by where his face doesn’t move, and then I watch it move on a page where, I happen to know, nothing about him is in the text at all — a scene I invented whole cloth, the character doing something Ron’s never done and never would, a small cruelty I gave him for the plot’s sake, to make the reader doubt him for three chapters before I let them trust him again.

‘Hang on.’ He scrolls back up. Reads a paragraph twice. ‘This bit. Where he —’ he taps the screen, doesn’t finish the sentence, tries again. ‘This isn’t me.’

‘No.’

‘You sure? Because the wall thing, and the door, and —’ He gestures at the screen generally, at two years of borrowed gestures he’s only just found out he lent me. ‘That’s all bang on. This bit’s not me at all.’

‘It’s not meant to be.’ I’ve drafted this exact conversation more times than I ever drafted the confession at his back, and none of the drafts prepared me for how plain it would actually feel, sat at a kitchen table with cold tea between us. ‘I didn’t write you, Ron. I took the true gestures — the palm, the doorway, the way you go quiet before you say the hard thing — and then the character walked off with them into a life you’ve never had. He’s not you. He’s what I built out of watching you and not being brave enough to ask the rest.’

He sits with that a long moment, looking at the screen and not at me, which I recognise, because it’s the exact trick I use myself when a thing’s too big to say to a face.

‘So which bit’s actually me.’

‘The gestures. That’s all I had. Everything else is invention.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’ He looks up now, and there’s nothing accusing in it, just the specific patient attention he gives a wall he’s trying to read properly before he touches it. ‘I asked which bit’s me. Not the character. Me. In the book. Somewhere.’

I understand, sitting there, that he’s asked the one question I built the whole encryption specifically to survive not being asked, and that I’m not going to get to keep the compact version this time, because he’s earned better than that and I’ve run out of ways to make the true answer smaller.

‘The woman,’ I say. ‘The one watching him work. That’s the closest thing to me in the whole book.’ I don’t give him the whole of the reason why she had to be a woman at all — he doesn’t need the workshop answer, and I’ve already spent it once, on someone else. ‘She’s the closest I could get to true and still sell it as fiction.’

He doesn’t say anything for a second. Then: ‘That’s not me.’

‘No.’