Page 4 of Second Person

She came back with a skirt. Heavy black jersey, mid-calf, weighted at the hem like a stage curtain, three pound fifty on a paper label. And a shirt, men’s cut, charcoal, worn soft at the collar by somebody who’d owned it a long time.

‘You’ve the shoulders,’ she said, handing them over. ‘So you want the weight low. Otherwise you’re a coat hanger apologising.’

The cubicle had a curtain that stopped four inches short of the frame and a chair with a broken back and a mirror screwed slightly out of true. I got the skirt on with my heart going in my throat like I was handling something that might be alive, and I did the shirt up to the second button, and then I made myself look.

The bedroom mirror, that first winter, had done a piece of arithmetic on me and come out level for about ten seconds. This one did a different operation entirely. It didn’t show me two things agreeing. It showed me somebody in motion — half turned, mid-step, weight on one hip, a person occupying three dimensions and evidently with somewhere to be — and I turned round to look at the back of it the way you’d walk round a building, and the person in the glass turned round too, and had a back, and had an outline, and was quite obviously going to have to be taken outside at some point that morning.

‘Well?’ Through the curtain. Not coming in. Rhi has never once come in.

‘It’s three pound fifty.’

‘That’s not what I asked and you know it isn’t.’

Barbara rang it through at three pounds, on the grounds that the label was faded, which it wasn’t, and put it in a carrier bag from a supermarket that closed in 2011, and said the skirt had come out of a house clearance in Sale and that the lady had had lovely taste. Rhi paid before I’d finished getting my purse out, which is an old manoeuvre of hers and one I’ve never beaten.

Then, on the pavement outside, with the bag in my hand and the flat door six feet away and both of us knowing exactly what was about to be proposed:

‘Right. Upstairs. Put it on.’

‘Now?’

‘Now, or it lives in a bag for a year and you’ll tell people you tried.’

So I put it on upstairs, with the shirt and the wing and hands that were not as steady as I’d have liked, and then we went out the door and down Oldham Street, which is not a runway and never has been, at half eleven on a Tuesday in November, past the wholesalers and the bloke who sells phone cases and a queue at the cashpoint.

Here is the whole of what happened. A woman in a bus shelter looked up, and looked back down at her phone. Two lads went past having an argument about a car and did not break stride. A man unloading a van said alright love to Rhi, who is precisely the sort of person a man unloading a van says alright love to, and said nothing at all to me, and I have never been able to decide whether that was the best or the second-best outcome available. My hands were freezing. The skirt was heavier than I expected and moved when I moved and the moving was the entire point and no one on that street was ever going to know it.

At the corner Rhi stopped, looked me over once, and gave it the full Beddgelert flat:

‘There. Took it out the door and the street never said a word.’

Then she went into Greggs, because she’d had no breakfast, and stood in the queue arguing with herself out loud about a steak bake, and I stood on the pavement outside in three pounds’ worth of a dead woman’s taste with my heart still coming down out of my ears, and nothing whatsoever had happened to me on Oldham Street, which was the finding, and I have never since been handed a better one.

The nails came in around then. I paint them by feeling, not by outfit, a private weather nobody else is qualified to read: green for a thing I’ve decided and not yet said, a bitten navy for the days I lose, orange for the loud ones when I mean to take up space on purpose. And postbox red. Red’s the bravest bottle in the cabinet, the one I put on when I want to be seen and haven’t quite got the nerve to be seen without help, and I put it on more than I’d admit to, because most days the wanting-to-be-seen and the not-having-the-nerve turn up in the same body at the same hour. People compliment the colour and I say ta and don’t explain that they’ve just read my diary off the ends of my fingers and understood not a word.

Not every day held. I won’t pretend it did — the version where it’s all semicolons and clean edits is exactly the lie I left home to stop telling. There were mornings the mirror handed me back a stranger and I stood in a cold flat over a shut shop and hated the whole slow redraft of myself, wanted to skip to the person I could feel myself becoming and couldn’t yet afford. But I’d learned one useful thing on that lino in Wales, with a word nobody picked up sitting between the kettle and the cake tin: you don’t get the end without the middle, and the middle is just days. You keep the appointment with yourself on the days you’d rather not. Especially those.

I tried, those first couple of years, to do the thing you’re meant to do in a new city. I let Rhi drag me out. I met men. Only men, that part was never the complicated part; I’ve known where I look since before I had a word for the looking. The complicated part is what my looking lands on. My type, if you want to be reductive about it, and everyone does, is the big quiet ones, the ones with working hands and a stillness to them, built like they could carry a fridge up the stairs and would rather not talk about it. And the trouble with that type, out in the actual world, is that it comes in two main varieties: the ones who’d sooner die than be seen leaving a place with someone like me, and the ones with a ring already on and a wife in Sale who thinks he’s at five-a-side. Homophobes and husbands. That’s the catchment, when your eye points where mine points.

The last one asked me to turn round — that was simply what he wanted, the back of me, the spine, a view that could’ve belonged to anyone, and for three months I called it a preference, because a preference is easier to live with than a diagnosis. He never once needed my face for anything. I found out about the wife the way I’d found out everything else about him: not face-on. His phone lit up on my counter — her name, something about the kids’ bedtime — and I read it upside down without meaning to. I didn’t shout. I made the tea anyway, because some news you take standing up, politely, the way you sign for a parcel you never ordered.

The rest reached for a label the second drink in, what are you, though, like, do you take or give, as if I were a form with a blank box they couldn’t rest till they’d ticked. Or they reached for the body instead, hands going exactly where I’d said not to, with the confidence of men who’d decided the rules were foreplay. One of them, when I moved his hand back the second time, sighed, like I was hard work, like being asked to listen was a tax on his night out.

So I did the sums, the way I do, and came out the far side with a decision that felt at the time like maturity and not like a wound: that I was better on my own. That a self I’d built this carefully wasn’t for handing to anyone who treated it as a puzzle to crack or a rulebook to haggle down. I stopped going out to be met. I went out to watch instead, which is safer, and which turns out to be the whole of what I do for a living anyway. Alone was better. I had the evidence. I believed it right up to the point where a big quiet man on a bar stool started failing to do a single one of the things the evidence had promised me he would.

The bar’s two streets over. Rhi got me through its door the first time, and I kept going through it long after she’d moved out and across the city, because watching a room turned out to be the one hunger I’d decided I was still allowed.

There’s a man who comes in every other weekend or so, on his own, and orders the same drink and takes the same stool at the counter, angled so the room stays where he can feel it, out of habit rather than fear. He doesn’t talk much. When he does, it’s short, considered, like every sentence has gone through a costing exercise before it’s allowed out of his mouth. I clock him the way you clock weather: something worth noting, not yet something you plan your day around.

His name stays unknown for months. I learn his face first, the particular economy of it. I’ve got his face memorised before I’ve got a single word of who he is, and there’s something in that I recognise, some version of my own arrival: you learn the shape of a thing long before you learn what to call it.

I go home some nights and write. Not about him, not yet, not directly, but there’s a character starting to take up room in a notebook that used to belong to someone else entirely. I don’t know yet that I’m going to spend the best part of two years inside that. I only know it won’t leave me alone, the way the bar won’t, the way this city that took me in without asking a single question won’t, and I let it stay, the way I’ve learned to let things stay: quietly, without announcing it, the shelf filling one book at a time until one day you look up and it’s a library.

TWO

He checks the concrete with his palm, like a pulse.

Six months. I know the number the way you know the length of a piece you’ve drafted and redrafted so many times the word count’s stopped meaning anything except this is how long it took me to get it right. Six months of Saturdays and the odd Sunday, before I ever learned his name, and I could tell you the shape of every single one of them if you asked, though nobody ever has, because nobody thinks to ask the fixture at the corner table what the laptop’s actually for. You decide what a thing is and stop looking at it. It doesn’t occur to you it’s looking back, and taking notes.