Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Canal Street on a Saturday night is what happens when neon and vodka reproduce, and there’s nobody around to intervene.
Rainbow flags, bass leaking from every doorway, lads in mesh tops, girls in leather, drag queens smoking outside a kebab shop.
First time out in the Village properly. This is the real thing.
Doesn’t matter. The codes are the same everywhere. Eye contact, body angle, the tilt of a drink. How a lad leans against the bar tells you everything. Manchester’s gay scene runs on the same voltage as London’s: just more rain and worse architecture.
I like it here—the first place in this city where I can fully exist.
Femi’s beside me, wearing the same shirt with the breast pocket, and he’s got that look again. The one where he can’t contain it, all of him vibrating with it.
‘He texted me good morning,’ he says, as if reporting that gravity has reversed.
‘You mentioned.’
‘Every day this week, Ewan. Every single day. Is that normal? Do people just, do that?’
I take a sip of whatever this is, too sweet, not enough ice. ‘Some people do.’
‘He sends a little sun emoji with it. A sun. Every morning.’ Femi stares at his phone screen like it contains the formula for cold fusion. ‘Even on Sunday. Who sends a good morning text on a Sunday?’
‘Femi. You’re describing a weather report, not a potential boyfriend.’
He doesn’t hear me. He’s scanning the room for Allan, who appears two minutes later from the direction of the bar, carrying two drinks and wearing a smile that should come with a planning application.
‘Hey.’ Allan sets down the drinks. One for Femi, one for himself. He’s remembered what Femi likes. Of course he has.
They sit close. Allan’s hand on the back of Femi’s chair. Femi is leaning into the space he makes. Allan tilts towards him when he talks.
This. I study it. Like a proof I cannot parse.
Jealousy belongs to people built for it. This is more like watching someone speak a language I’ve never learned.
Whatever.
I finish my drink.
‘I’m going to find better music,’ I say, which means I’m going to find a bloke, which Femi knows because Femi knows me.
‘Be safe,’ he says, eyes still on Allan’s. Allan’s mid-story, and Femi’s laughing, surprised, delighted, nothing held back. I hear it all the way to the door.
His name’s Ryan or Brian or a name that doesn’t matter. Second year, sports science, body that matches. Arms that strain his sleeves, a stomach built from actual dedication. He’s got a flat five minutes from campus and a bed that’s marginally wider than my halls coffin.
Tonight, a bed feels necessary, for reasons I’m not examining.
His place smells of protein powder and clean laundry. Posters on the wall: some band I’ve never seen before, a calendar from last year still in March. He’s tidy like blokes fresh from home are tidy: surfaces clear, chaos stuffed in drawers.
He’s good. Credit where it’s due. Knows his angles, knows what to do, and, when he pushes me onto the mattress, he gets the positioning right on the first try. His grip’s right. His weight’s right.
He’s pounding into me, and the beach photo is all there is in my head.
‘Fuck.’
I come clutching the sheet, grip vice-tight on his cock. My body arches off the mattress and, for three seconds, the world is nothing but the faceless torso and the man behind it.
He finishes himself off while I’m breathing wrong. My hand isn’t moving.
He pulls the condom off and bins it. Flops beside me—normal behaviour.
‘Who’s Haldrey?’
Everything turns to ice.
‘What?’
‘You said a name. When you came. Haldrey.’ He’s looking at me with an expression that’s half amused, half offended. ‘Boyfriend?’
‘Nobody.’ I’m up. Pulling on my jeans. ‘Uni stuff, actually. I was thinking about a maths problem.’
The excuse is so catastrophically bad that it circles back around to the truth.
‘Right.’ He watches me dress. He’s seen this before. ‘You know, you could just say if you’re with someone, I’m not a jealous type.’
‘See you around.’
Door, stairs. Night air. October in Manchester, which means it’s already cold enough that my breath makes ghosts in the streetlight.
A maths problem. I told a bloke I was thinking about a maths problem while we were shagging.
My hands are shaking.
Haldrey’s name lives so close to the surface it fell out of me.
I walk faster.
Tuesday. Week three, nine AM. I’m in the back row with my hood up and a coffee I’m not drinking, and I’ve sworn to myself I’m going to be invisible today. No hand, no clever answer. No eye contact, arrive, sit, leave. Clean transaction.
The lecture happens around me like the weather.
Haldrey at the board, the measured vowels, the sleeve folded twice.
I write approximately four things in my notebook, and none of them are maths.
I write sleeve. I cross it out. I write the pen cap in his teeth when he’s thinking.
I cross that out harder. I draw a box around the crossings-out, as if it might contain them.
Femi’s got his notebook open and takes notes, because Femi is here for a degree.
Haldrey talks about continuity, but I miss it. His left hand stays on the lectern, and when it moves, I track it.
And then. This.
Mid-sentence. Mid-definition. He looks up once across the back row. Half a beat. Middle of the word uniform, the consonant snagging. He goes um.
Um.
Dr L. Haldrey. Week 3, two hundred freshers. Does not um.
Recovers. Steps back a word and finishes clean. Four lectures in and I’ve never heard him drop a single one. Nobody else clocks it. The lad two down is drawing a spiral in his margin. The girl in front of me is asleep on her arm. An um isn’t a crime. An um in a nine AM is weather.
But.
I write it in my notebook and cross it out, staring at the deletion like it means something. My pulse does a small disloyal thing.
The um wasn’t about the definition.
He asks about bounded sequences. A straightforward question, about whether a specific example converges, and the answer is no.
Still, it has two convergent subsequences, and everyone else in the room is sitting on their hands because it’s week three and the well of freshers willing to try has run dry.
He moves his gaze across the back row. Doesn’t stop.
I feel it not stop: tiny exhale, eyes up, the reflex living too close to my surface.
He’s already turned back to the board. I didn’t volunteer. He didn’t ask me. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened so loudly that it rearranged the wiring behind my sternum.
The lecture ends.
People funnel out, I stay seated. My excuse is on standby, dropped my pen, looking for it, sorry, but nobody asks, because nobody cares what a boy in the back row is doing at the end of a nine AM lecture. Femi stands, slings his bag, and hesitates next to my row.
‘Ewan.’
‘Go ahead. I’ll catch up.’
He finds my eyes, then the stage. The decision moves across his face. Say it, don’t say it. He settles on the small curt nod of a friend choosing not to be a problem. He goes.
The theatre empties in ninety seconds. Always faster than it fills.
And there’s me, and him.
He’s at the lectern in no rush, capping his marker, stacking his notes into the canvas bag he brings. The bag is waxed canvas, the strap darkened from wear. A small detail I’ve already mapped. He wipes the board.
He moves with deliberation. Everybody else in this building moves like there’s a bus to catch. He moves like whatever’s next will wait.
I get up. Slow. I take my time stuffing the empty notebook into my bag. I walk down the centre aisle because the side aisles feel furtive, and the centre aisle is a line I can pretend is the shortest route to the door. Seventeen rows, sixteen. Fifteen.
I’m not going to speak to him—that’s the second promise of the day—I’m going to walk past, out the door, back into the corridor, and whatever week three is meant to feel like.
By row five, my legs rebel, and my pace slows.
At row three, I stop altogether and pretend to fix the strap of my bag.
Haldrey doesn’t look up. Doesn’t acknowledge the straggler. He’s cleaning with a cloth the last of the lesson business with a sweep that goes from right to left because he’s left-handed—how have I only just noticed that? The small shift in my stomach is alarming.
‘Did you need something?’
He hasn’t turned round. He’s speaking at the whiteboard. The voice is calm, kind, almost, and the Did you need something is aimed exactly at where I’m standing.
My pulse goes stupid.
‘Sorry?’ I say. Buying the half-second. Pretending the question was ambient.
Now he turns, unhurried, cloth in hand. Glasses slightly down his nose from the wiping motion, he pushes them up with his knuckle—a small gesture, utterly domestic—and I want to put my teeth on his jaw.
‘I said, did you need something.’
The voice is the voice—the one from the lecture, but stripped of projection.
The Lancashire vowels sit differently without an audience: less performance, more breath.
He’s looking at me straight on. Glasses.
Eyes behind them—the full professional courtesy of a man asking if a student has a question, nothing underneath.
‘Nah,’ I say. The MLE slips out, too casual, too mine. I catch myself mid-word. ‘I mean, no. No, sir. I was just, the bag.’
I lift the strap slightly as if it’s evidence.
He glances at the strap. Looks at me. Glances at the strap again, briefly, and I can feel him clock that the buckle is intact, the strap isn’t twisted, and I’ve been fake-fiddling with a non-problem.
‘Right.’
That’s all he says. Right. A placeholder for a longer sentence he’s chosen not to deliver.
He goes back to the board. Wipes the last arc of residue, sets the cloth down.
Not leaving.
I say it before I can stop myself, because this whole term is eroding the borders: ‘Friday’s lecture was good.’
Haldrey’s hand pauses on the strap of his bag—half a second, then continues, buckling it. ‘Thank you,’ he says, not turning around.
‘The Squeeze Theorem. The way you did it.’
‘Mm.’
Mm. A sound, non-committal. A man refusing to be drawn, or a lecturer being polite to the fresher who answered a question last week and has now decided to hang back and chat about it. I pride myself on reading men, and he’s a closed book with the pages glued.
‘Office hours are Tuesdays,’ he says. The same unhurried voice. He’s slinging the canvas bag over his shoulder now. He still hasn’t looked at me full-on again. ‘If you want to go over the material. Second floor, maths building.’
Office hours.
Tuesdays.
Memorised from the staff page at two in the morning last week. The times and the room. It’s been in my head for days like a password.
But he said it, out loud to me. The same information my two AM laptop dig delivered, and hearing it from his mouth isn’t the same as reading it online. Same calories, different meal entirely.
He said it like a fact, like a departmental arrangement any student could use. If you’ve got questions about the material, and the absence of anything warmer around it hits cold. My stomach clenches like I’ve been dropped into a well I wasn’t allowed to look at.
It’s the most professional sentence a man can say. It’s also the first door he’s left even slightly ajar.
‘Right,’ I say, echoing his own word back at him. ‘Cheers.’
‘Mr…?’
He’s asking my name. Polite. The formal small-talk ritual of every lecturer who has decided to make a note. Mr, so he can fill in the blank.
My mouth is dry.
‘Carrick. Ewan Carrick.’
He nods, once, short. Registered. ‘Mr Carrick.’
Nothing in his voice. Nothing. It’s the flattest and most clinical use of my surname that has ever occurred, and it lights me up like a filament.
He walks past me down the centre aisle, not fast, not slow, the same pace as always, and I step aside to let him go.
As he passes, we almost touch but do not, quite, and then he’s gone through the double doors and the theatre is empty and I’m standing in row three with my heart in my throat and the word Tuesdays repeating itself like a coded signal I’ve been issued and told not to break.
I stand there for another ten seconds before I can trust my legs.
Then I walk out the side door to avoid following him down the same corridor.
The side door opens onto the stairwell. A glass panel is in the fire door opposite. Through it: the main corridor.
Haldrey. Stopped. Halfway down, alone, bag still strapped across his back. Head down. From this angle, through smudged safety glass, fifteen metres: His chest moving. Breathing. The way you breathe when you’re forcing composure back into place.
He doesn’t know I’m watching.
He lifts his head, pushes his glasses up. Straightens. Walks. The professional pace reinstalls itself in three steps, and by the end of the corridor, he’s Dr Haldrey again—unhurried, a man on his way to his next thing.
But for five seconds, he wasn’t.