Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Mac
I am not using the phone. I am passing the alcove on my way back from the level two inspection when I hear it.
A frustrated sound. Low and bitten off, the sound of someone who does not want to be heard being frustrated and is not quite managing it.
I stop.
Rory is standing at the payphone with the receiver tucked between his ear and his shoulder and a piece of paper in his hand, and the expression of a man doing battle with something that is winning.
He is looking at the paper. Then at the phone.
Then at the paper again. He punches in a sequence of numbers.
Waits. Punches in another. Something clearly goes wrong because he makes the sound again, sharper this time, and hangs up and starts from the beginning.
I should keep walking. I have things to do. The level two report needs filing, and there are emails from head office that require responses, and my time is not unlimited.
I stay where I am.
Rory goes through the sequence again. Gets further this time, I can tell by the set of his shoulders, and then something fails at the last hurdle and he drops his forehead against the wall with a gentleness that suggests he has been at this for a while and his patience is not what it was.
“Your staff number first,” I say.
He spins around. His eyes go wide for a half second before he gets them under control. “I know that,” he says, and then, more honestly, “I keep losing my place.”
I look at the piece of paper in his hand.
It is covered in his handwriting, which is terrible, a row of numbers with arrows between them indicating sequence.
He has written call mum at the top and underlined it twice.
Underneath he has written don’t forget the codes and then written the codes and then written them again slightly differently, which suggests he copied them down twice and is not certain which version is correct.
I hold out my hand for the paper. He gives it to me without hesitation, which does something it shouldn’t to the space behind my sternum.
I look at the codes. The second version is correct. The first has two digits transposed, an easy mistake, the kind that happens when you write something down while thinking about something else, which Rory appears to do most of the time.
I hand the paper back, take the receiver, and punch in the full sequence. Rory’s staff number, international code, country code, area code, number. Twenty-four digits in the correct order without pausing. Then I hand the receiver to Rory.
He takes it. Stares at me. “How did you do that?”
“I just copied what you had written down,” I say.
“That’s what I was trying to do.”
“You would have got it.”
Rory looks at me with an expression I cannot immediately read.
Then the line connects and his whole face changes, opens up completely, and he says, “Mum, hi, it’s me,” in a voice that is entirely different from every other voice I have heard him use, softer and younger and completely unperformed, and I should absolutely walk away now and give him privacy.
I lean against the opposite wall and look at the noticeboard.
I am not listening. I am simply standing here for no particular reason while a noticeboard that has not been updated since March tells me about a fire drill that has already happened and a quiz night that has already occurred.
I am reading these things with great interest. I am absolutely not listening to Rory tell his mother about the Northern Lights in a voice that makes my chest do something inconvenient.
“You’d have loved them, Mum. Honest to god. Like someone had just. Painted them there. Just for us.”
Just for us. He said that to his mother. I file this away in the place I keep things I am not going to examine.
There is a pause while he listens. Then he laughs, the real one, the one that costs him nothing, and says, “Aye, I know, I’m always thinking about you too.”
And then he goes quiet. Just for a second. A strange stillness that passes quickly and then he is talking again, asking about the boiler, asking about the neighbor’s cat, laughing at something she says, and I look at the noticeboard and say nothing.
He wraps it up after ten minutes with a series of I love yous that he delivers with complete unselfconsciousness, no performance, just true, and hangs up and turns around and finds me still there.
“Thanks,” he says. “For the phone thing.”
“It’s just a sequence.”
“Not to my brain it isn’t.” He says it lightly, without self-pity, just a fact he has made peace with. He leans against the wall beside me, not touching, close enough that I am aware of every inch between us.
He opens his mouth to say something else, but at that moment Pete from catering comes around the corner, spots Rory, and stops with the easy warmth of a man who has time and inclination for a conversation.
“Alright Rory, got through did you?”
“Aye, cheers, Pete. Mum’s grand. Boiler’s playing up again but what’s new.”
Pete laughs. “Tell me about it. Mine’s been making a noise like a dying seagull since October. You get used to it.”
“The soundtrack of home,” says Rory.
“Exactly right.” Pete claps him on the shoulder. “Right, I’ve got a vat of something to get back to. You coming to the quiz tomorrow?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good man.” Pete nods at me briefly, the nod of a man acknowledging a presence without quite making eye contact, and heads off down the corridor.
I am scowling. I am aware that I am scowling, and I cannot immediately locate the reason for it, except that the whole exchange has produced in me a specific low-level irritation that I have never been able to fully explain or resolve.
Rory is looking at me with his head tilted. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“I have one face.”
“You have many faces, and that one means something bothered you.” He leans against the wall with his arms folded, comfortable and curious. “What was it?”
There was the whole hand on Rory’s shoulder.
A hand that wasn’t mine. And a whole lot of smiling and inane talking.
But my irritation has nothing to do with irrational jealousy.
Right now, I don’t know why it’s annoyed me so much, but it can’t be jealousy.
There is no reason to be jealous. I’m probably just irritated because inane conversations like that always leave me unsettled.
I look down the corridor where Pete disappeared. “I’ve never seen the point,” I say, “in all of that.”
Rory blinks. “All of what?”
“That.” I pause, trying to locate the correct words for something I have only ever experienced as an absence. “The.” I make a short gesture in the direction Pete went. “The boiler. The dying seagull. None of it meant anything.”
Rory stares at me for a moment. Then, slowly, his expression shifts into something that is not quite a smile but is warm in the same way. “Small talk,” he says.
“It’s not a conversation. It’s noise that sounds like a conversation.”
“Right.” Rory tilts his head the other way, thinking, and I have learned that this particular look means he is following something to its end, and it is worth waiting for. “You know when dogs meet?”
I look at him.
“They wag their tails. Or they don’t, and that means something different.
But the wagging, it’s not them saying anything specific.
It’s just.” He pauses, working it out as he speaks, which is how Rory thinks, out loud and in motion.
“It’s a signal. I’m not a threat. I’m friendly.
It’s safe to keep going.” He shrugs. “Small talk is that. Pete wasn’t telling me about his boiler.
He was wagging his tail. Showing me it was safe and he’s friendly. That’s all it is.”
I stand very still.
He is not looking at me. He is looking at the middle distance with the slightly unfocused expression of someone following a thought to its end, completely unaware that he has just handed me something I have been trying to find for thirty-eight years.
The mechanism. The thing underneath the thing.
Not a rule to follow but a function to understand, and once I understand the function, I can work with it, I can apply it the way I apply any procedure once the logic becomes clear.
It is not noise that sounds like a conversation. It is a sequence with its own internal logic. And I can follow sequences.
“Right,” I say. My voice comes out slightly differently than usual. I cannot help that.
Rory comes back from wherever he was and looks at me. Something flickers in his expression. “Did that actually help?”
“Yes,” I say.
He grins. Wide and warm and entirely himself. “Huh.” He says it like something has surprised him, like he has just discovered something about himself without meaning to. “Good.”
“You’re good at a great many things,” I say, and I mean it so completely and so plainly that it lands in the air between us with more weight than I intended.
Rory looks at me. His grin softens into something quieter and less performed, and the alcove is very narrow and the corridor is empty, and he is close enough that I can see the particular way his eyes look when the performance drops entirely.
I look away first. At the noticeboard. At the fire drill that already happened.
“I should file the level two report,” I say.
“Aye,” says Rory. He doesn’t move immediately. Neither do I. A moment passes that is warm and full, and neither of us names it.
Then I push off the wall and walk back down the corridor.
Behind me, I hear him, very quietly, starting to hum.
I think about dogs wagging their tails. I think about it for the rest of the day.