Page 7 of Second Person

So writing Ron wasn’t only wanting him. It was the one method I had for staying, and every night I sat with the builder instead of texting the real man again was a night I chose the page over the exit. Two years of proof that I could stay. Not a love story. A demonstration, for an audience of one, that the person who leaves first had finally found something worth not leaving.

Three nights. I count them the way you count anything you’ve told yourself you’re not counting, which is to say precisely, and with a private shame about the precision.

On the third day I nearly break my own rule. I’ve got the phone in my hand, the thread open, his name at the top of it, and I type no pressure, was nice talking to you which is a lie built out of exactly the right number of true words to pass as honest, and I delete it before I send it, because a lie built to be believed is still a lie, and I’m not in the business of writing those, not on the page and not in a text message either.

On the fourth day I go to the restaurant and cut lemons for four hours and think about his hands the entire time, the flat-palmed pulse-check gesture, and I write a paragraph on my break standing between the bins and the fryer, on my phone, thumbs going faster than the thought behind them, and it’s the best paragraph I’ve written in a month, and none of it is usable, because it’s not fiction, it’s just want with the serial numbers filed off.

Day two I told Rhi none of it, which is how she knew all of it. We were at hers, Aled out, and she watched me not eat a curry she’d made specially and said, ‘You’ve texted him and he’s not answered,’ and I said it wasn’t like that, and she said, ‘It’s exactly like that, you’ve got your not-eating face on,’ and let it go, because pushing me is a thing she gave up around the time we were nine.

What I didn’t tell her, because I’ve never told her, is that the silence didn’t only frighten me. It interested me, which is worse, and truer, and the exact thing that makes me the kind of person who ends up alone with a notebook. Somewhere under the wanting-him-to-answer was a second, colder engine, taking notes: this is what it feels like from the inside, the not-knowing, the watching the door you’ve told yourself you’re not watching. Use it. Part of me stood slightly apart from my own dread the whole three nights, pencil out, and I’ve never settled whether that part is the writer saving material or the coward keeping one foot out the door so the fall stays survivable. Probably both. Most of my worst habits and the whole of my living come out of the same drawer.

On the fifth day he comes into the bar.

I don’t run the numbers on it as a test passed or failed. That’s not how it works, whatever the neat version of this story would have you believe. He sits at the counter, orders the same drink, and I feel something in my chest do the thing it did the very first Saturday, months and months ago, before either of us had a name for the other: the settling. Not relief, exactly. Recognition. The specific, quiet confirmation that the shape I’ve been watching all this time was worth the watching.

I don’t go over straight away. I finish the paragraph I’m pretending to write, I let two more sentences queue ahead of him in my head even though nobody’s actually waiting, because some habits you keep even after they’ve stopped being necessary, the way you’d keep locking a door in a city where nobody’s ever tried the handle.

Then I say it anyway, because three nights of a man sitting at a bar with his back straight and his pint going warm taught me something the fourteen months hadn’t quite finished teaching: that watching is a discipline, but it isn’t a life. At some point you have to close the notebook and offer somebody the other chair.

I don’t tell him about the test. I never do, not the real one, not the one about the book surviving contact with him. Some things you keep for the page and the page only, because saying them out loud spends them, and I’m not ready, not yet, not for a long time still, to spend the one thing in this city that’s turned out to be entirely, unexpectedly, mine to keep.

FOUR

HE SLEEPS LIKE AN APOLOGY.

Itold him later. I remember saying it, the word doing its small useful job of buying me a night I wasn’t ready to spend properly, and later arrives the way later always does when you’ve actually meant it and not just used it to get out of a room: on its own schedule, a few days on, a Sunday with nothing else claiming it.

He comes round for tea, ordinary as anything, and I make it properly, loose leaf, six minutes, the timer on my phone because I don’t trust my own sense of when a thing’s steeped enough, and I put the mug in his hands and sit him at the table rather than the bed, on purpose, because what I’ve got to say needs a table between us, furniture that means business.

‘You said you’d tell me the words,’ he says, before I’ve worked out how to start, which is exactly like him: he doesn’t make me find the opening. He hands it to me, plain, the way he’d hand you a tool you’d asked for without making you explain what you needed it for.

‘I did.’

‘So tell me.’

I’ve drafted this conversation more times than I’ve drafted anything in the notebook, which is saying something, because I draft everything to death, it’s the one professional habit I can’t seem to leave at the restaurant door. I’ve imagined making it clever, making it funny, wrapping the whole thing in enough charm that it doesn’t sound like what it is, which is: a map of a body that other people have narrated without permission for the better part of a decade, and a list of the words they used while they did it.

The rules didn’t come free. That’s the part I don’t put in the notebook, and won’t put here beyond this: every line of that map got drawn over the top of somebody who’d already had a go at sketching their own, in pencil, without asking. There was one who called the workshop by a word I’d told him not to, mid-way, breathless, like the word was a compliment and I was ungrateful for flinching. There was one who treated the place further back like a door I’d left unlocked by accident and he was doing me a kindness pointing it out. There was one who was gentle, genuinely, and who narrated the whole of me anyway, a running commentary on what I was and wasn’t, as if a body needs a voiceover, as if I couldn’t be trusted to follow the plot of my own skin.

So I wrote the rules the way I write everything: because the draft that came before was wrong and I couldn’t stand to leave it uncorrected. The zones. The words that are mine and the words that are retired. The flat fact that nothing about me is a favour anyone’s granting me. I drafted them alone, out loud, in a run of flats where the walls learned them before any man did, and by the time I put the mug in Ron’s hands at this table I’d been rehearsing the speech for years, arming it against the follow-up question, because there was always a follow-up question.

I don’t do the clever version. I look at the table, at the ring going round and round on my own finger the way it does when I’m choosing a sentence carefully, and I just say it.

There are two words, family words really, the ones a doctor or a form or a childhood used before I had any say in the matter, and I say them once, flat, unweighted, so he’s heard them from me in a voice that isn’t ashamed of them, and then I tell him they’re retired. Not forbidden because they’re shameful. Retired because they belong to a person the paperwork invented and I’m not required to keep paying rent on a name and a set of terms I never chose.

There’s a place I call the workshop, low, the part of me most people would reach for first out of habit, out of a script they didn’t write and don’t examine, and I tell him: touch it like everything else, don’t touch it like it’s the point. Let it be one instrument in a room full of them, not the reason the room exists.

There’s a place further back I don’t have a joke for, and I tell him that too, plainly, that it’s mine, that it isn’t unavailable forever, only unavailable until I say otherwise, and that when I say otherwise I’ll say it in words, not in silence he has to interpret.

The safe move, the one those first couple of years would have counselled, is to keep quiet about a door you’re not ready to open. I told him because a locked door somebody doesn’t know about isn’t a boundary, it’s a trap, a thing that turns into a wound the first time a hand tries it in good faith. The men before him didn’t fail me at the door. They failed me before it, by never being told there was one, so a no arrived to them as a surprise and a rejection instead of a rule they’d agreed to keep. I wasn’t going to build that trap for Ron. I told him the door exists, and that it’s mine, and that it opens in words and not in silence he has to guess at, precisely so that the day it does open, if it does, he’ll know it was a choice I made and handed him, and not a lock he happened to pick.

That’s the whole difference between the map and a wall. A wall you run into. A map you’re given, so you always know where you are, and so does the person walking it with you, and nobody ends the night having trespassed somewhere they were never told not to go.

He listens the way he does everything, with the whole of himself, no fidgeting, no rushing to fill the gaps between my sentences with reassurance I haven’t asked for. When I finish he doesn’t say thank you for telling me, which is what most people say, a sentence that’s really about them, about proving they’ve received the information correctly. He says, ‘Right,’ the way you’d say it after someone’s shown you where the stopcock is in a house you’re about to live in. Useful. Filed. Not going to be the last conversation, just the first one done properly.

I keep going, because I’ve drafted the whole speech and a speech interrupted is worse than one not given, and I tell him the last part, the one about the words. That when he wants me, in the moment, he’s to use the ones I’ve handed him and not reach for the ones off some script he didn’t write and never examined. That the map isn’t a restriction on him. It’s the difference between a man touching a person and a man narrating a body he’s decided he understands.

‘I don’t narrate,’ he says. Not defensive. Checking he’s got the spec.