Page 3 of Second Person

The tattoo happens in the third week, a shop off the Northern Quarter with a queue and a woman with more ink than skin who doesn’t blink when I roll up my hair and point behind my ear.

‘Semicolon,’ she says. Not a question.

‘Semicolon.’

A mark you use when you could have stopped the sentence and chose instead to keep going. I’ve read that somewhere, on the internet, in the corner of it where people post their wrists, and I know it’s not original and I don’t care, because a thing doesn’t stop being true for being said by other people first.

It hurts less than I expect and more than I let on. Small, precise, the size of a fingernail, done in under ten minutes, and I walk out into a Tuesday afternoon with a plaster behind my ear and the distinct, unfamiliar sensation of having made a permanent decision about my own body and having it go exactly as planned.

I told her it was a semicolon and not what it was for, which is that there was a stretch under the blue ceiling, the worst of the crying months, where the sentence of me looked finished, full stop, nothing after it worth the page, and the only argument I could find for the next clause was stubbornness dressed as hope, or hope dressed as stubbornness, I’ve never been able to tell them apart and have stopped trying. I put it behind my ear, where I can’t see it and other people mostly can’t either, because it was never a message for anyone. It was a note to myself, in a place I’d have to take somebody’s word for, that I’d made the choice once, on purpose, and could make it again if it came to that.

It hasn’t come to that, not since. But I keep the mark the way you keep a fire door: not because you expect the fire, but because knowing it’s there is half of what lets you stay in the building. I made a decision the year I turned twenty-two. The clause after the semicolon. Keep going. See what the sentence does if you let it run.

Three years, near enough — I’ve stopped counting the exact number, because exact numbers are for people who think the counting matters more than the living. The shop shutter still rattles at the same hour. I still catch the morning through the bedroom window. Somewhere in that stretch of ordinary mornings I stopped becoming someone and started, without a ceremony, without anyone in this city clocking the moment, being them.

I made a self out of nothing, is the sentence I’d write if I were writing it down, and for a long time I don’t, because the clean version is always a lie, and I’d built the whole self precisely to stop telling those.

Except out of nothing is the lie hiding in that sentence too, the neat tragic one, and I catch it every time I reach for it. I didn’t invent anyone on that train. I stopped translating. The person was always in there, doing the work in a language the house didn’t speak, and all Manchester ever did was let them say it out loud. I’m not what I made myself into. I’m what I already was, with the volume finally up. That’s the whole of it, and it isn’t a trick.

Nobody teaches you how to build a self. There’s no evening class. The identity I found on my own, in the dark, over years — that part nobody could have handed me, and nobody did.

I can date the exact night I stopped being a person a mirror happened to and started being one who happened to a mirror. Rhi’s bedroom floor, that first winter, both of us cross-legged, her make-up spread on a towel like a surgeon’s tray, and me thirty-one flavours of frightened and pretending to be none of them.

‘Stop blinking,’ she said, for the ninth time, a pencil a millimetre off my eye. ‘You blink like you’re expecting a slap.’

‘I’m expecting a pencil in the eye.’

‘Same reflex. Trust the hand.’ She did the line anyway, in one go, and turned my chin to the mirror. ‘There. Tell me that’s not a face.’

I looked. It was a face. It was the first time the thing in the glass matched the thing I carried around behind my own, near enough that the gap didn’t ache for a whole ten seconds, and I must have gone quiet in the way that means something, because Rhi, who catches everything, went brisk instead of soft, which is her whole genius.

‘Right, don’t cry, you’ll ruin it and I’m not doing it twice.’ She capped the pencil. ‘That’s the wing. You’ll do it worse than me for a month and then better than me forever, because you’re a swot and I’m not. The trick’s not the make-up. It’s the walking in after. Anyone can do a face on a bedroom floor. You’ve to take it out the door and dare the street to say a word.’

‘And if the street says a word?’

‘Then the street’s got a problem, and it’s not yours, and you keep walking.’ Flat, the way she says the true things, the Beddgelert vowels doing the work. ‘I spent my year’s head start finding that out. I’m handing it to you so you don’t have to spend yours.’

That’s the part the clean version leaves out: the craft of it, the wing and the nerve and the walking-in, I learned cross-legged on a towel from the one person alive who’d known me before I had a self to hide, who used her one year’s head start not to get ahead of me but to double back and carry my bag a stretch. You don’t build a self out of nothing. You build it out of the ones who got there first and reached a hand back down.

The clothes came after the face and were harder, because a face comes off with a wipe and a skirt does not, and because a face is a thing you do on a bathroom floor with the door shut and a skirt is a thing you do in a shop, in daylight, in front of a stranger with a till, in a cubicle whose curtain has never in its life met the wall.

The shop was directly under us. That’s the joke of the whole episode and Rhi worked it for a fortnight: two flights of stairs, a door, a shutter I’d been setting my body’s clock to since September, and in eleven weeks of living over the top of it I had been inside precisely never, having developed a route to the bus stop that went up the wrong end of Oldham Street for reasons I could not have defended in front of a magistrate.

‘It’s a charity shop, Cel.’

‘I know what it is.’

‘It’s got a bin outside with jigsaws in it. It’s got a rail of anoraks. It is not the Paris collections.’

‘I know what it’s got.’

‘Ten past ten on a weekday. There’ll be one volunteer, she’ll be seventy, and she’ll be doing a crossword.’

The volunteer was called Barbara and she was doing the quick crossword with a biro, and Rhi has never once let me forget the accuracy of that forecast.

Inside it smelled the way they all smell, which is other people’s wardrobes and a faint radiator warmth, a hot-water-bottle sort of smell, not unpleasant, just used. Rhi went at the rail like a woman dealing cards. She holds things up against you without asking, chin out, one eye shut, and delivers a verdict before the hanger’s stopped swinging. No. No. God, no. That’s a curtain, Cel, somebody’s made a curtain into a garment and put it out for the public. She was loud in a shop the size of a lift and Barbara did not look up once, because Barbara had four across and no intention of being distracted by two girls, as she later called us, one of whom she was going to short-change by fifty pence and refuse to discuss.

What Rhi did not do — and I only understood the size of it years later, when I watched other people do the opposite — was hand me a starter pack. No florals. No little cardigan, no pastel, none of the well-meant costume people reach for when they’ve decided to help you be a woman, which was not the errand and never had been. She picked by shoulder and by drape and by what a thing does when a body walks in it, because Rhi has an eye and no theory whatsoever, and an eye with no theory is worth six of the other thing.