Page 33 of Second Person

He blinks. Recalibrates, the way men like Pritchard do when the terms of an old arrangement quietly change without a meeting having been called about it.

‘I only meant —’

‘I know what you meant.’ I say it without heat, because there isn’t any left to spend on him, all of it gone into better places these last two years. ‘You opened a door for me. I’m grateful. I mean that properly, not the version you say to people at readings.’

‘Then —’

‘The door’s open now.’ I let that sit a second, watching it land, watching him do the maths I used to do for both of us. ‘I don’t need you holding it any more. You can let go of the handle.’

He doesn’t quite know what to do with his face. That’s the part I take with me, walking out into the corridor a few minutes later, past the fire extinguisher I used to stand next to shaking. Not triumph. Just the specific, unshowy relief of a sum finally closed — the credit and the debt reconciled to nothing owed on either side.

He put my name on a programme when he didn’t have to. He also spent three years collecting a toll I never agreed to and could never quite afford to refuse. Both of those are true, and I’ve stopped needing them to cancel out. He gets to be the man who helped. I get to be the one who’s not paying any more.

Marged catches me on the way out, no fanfare, just falls into step. ‘You alright?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He looked like you’d taken something off him.’

‘I did.’ I zip my coat against the October air, the campus lit orange the way the canal used to be, a whole different city ago. ‘Only what was never really his to begin with.’

She doesn’t ask what. Marged never needs the whole sentence to clock the shape of it, same as she never needed the whole book to feel the shape under the shape. She just nods, once, and we walk out past the last of the plastic chairs together, and I don’t look back at the room, because there’s nothing left in it I need a second read of.

I write the dedication last, after everything else, after the second night in the real house when I finally climb the desk chair myself and press eighty pence of plastic stars one by one into a ceiling that’s been waiting two years for them, crooked on purpose, because a ceiling somebody loves isn’t supposed to be level.

I open a new document, just the one page, and I don’t draft it fourteen times the way I’ve drafted everything else in my life. It arrives whole, the way the true sentences always do, and I write it in the second person because that’s the only grammar that’s ever actually described the two of us: not him and not me, but you, the word I use when I’m talking directly to the one person who’s never once needed the compact version.

For the man who bought the stars and didn’t have the nerve, and waited two years to find out they were never going to be daft. You held the chair. I did the ceiling. That’s the whole of it, and it was always going to be enough.

I close the laptop, climb down off the chair, and stand in the middle of a room full of crooked, glowing stars with the man who’s finally, after everything, stopped bracing for the answer, and somewhere below us Dave, the cat who used to belong to nobody and now, on no paperwork anyone signed, belongs to us, sharpens his claws on a fence he’s decided is his, and the house settles the way houses do once they’ve finally been told the truth about who lives in them, and I think: this is the room. This is the one I was building the whole time, long before either of us had a name for it.

The stars go where we go. I go where he goes. It turns out, in the end, that was always going to be the same sentence.

CODA

The Threshold has a last line. This isn’t from it.

Icould have finished on the auction. It’s the ending the story wants, the one a reader’s owed: the phone, the two words, the dress, a man picking me up off my feet in a flat full of boxes. It sold. Curtain.

But I’m the one holding the pen, and I’ve never let a story stop where it merely resolved when it could stop where it meant something instead. So I’m going back a few months, before Peckham, before the offer, to a garden in Beddgelert on Easter Sunday with the frost still lying in the shadow of the wall.

The house woke the way houses with children in them wake, all at once and from the wrong end, and I was got out of a single bed under a swimming-pool ceiling by two fingers and a three-year-old who had decided somewhere in the night that the day was hers and that I was to be informed. Her brother had the basket already and was dragging it. Owain came out behind the pair of them with a carrier bag held up over his head out of reach and the face of a man conducting a state occasion.

‘Nobody in the garden till they’re hid,’ he said. ‘That’s the rule. Always been the rule.’

‘You hid them by the dog last year,’ said the boy.

‘The dog’s entitled same as anyone.’

So the four of us stood on the step in wellies over pyjamas and were not permitted onto the grass, and for the whole of the wait the girl kept both arms round my leg, gripped on at the knee, as though I might be one of the things that had been hidden and she intended to be the one who found me.

The boy handed Ron the basket. Nobody asked Ron whether he wanted a basket and nobody asked me whether Ron should have one; the boy decided, the way that family decides things, by doing them.

‘You do the high-up ones,’ he told him, executive about it. ‘You’re tall. Celyn can’t reach. Dad always does one on the lintel.’

Ron took the basket the way you’d take an oath.

And then every egg in that garden came to me first. That’s the detail I’d keep if I could only keep one: not a single egg went into the basket before it had been carried across the wet grass and held up at the end of a small arm to be admired, and I admired every one of them like it was the first egg in the history of eggs, thirty-odd times, in the cold, and would have done it thirty more. She said my name the whole morning and never once got it wrong, because she’s three, and three hasn’t got the boxes yet, and nobody in that garden was managing me. I wasn’t being included. Nobody had had a meeting about me. I was simply the person the eggs got brought to, which is a job, and I did it, and there is no promotion in this life I have wanted more.