Chapter 6 #2
Allan appears from the bar. Same grin. He puts a drink in front of Femi, remembers what he likes again, the bastard, and slides into the booth close enough that they brush. Easy. Automatic. The way furniture finds its place in a room you’ve lived in for years.
They talk. I drink. A film they watched together, a housemate of Allan’s in crisis, and a plan for the weekend that involves cooking and staying in. The domestic architecture of two people building a life in daylight.
I am happy for him—the thing underneath, the happiness. Allan touches Femi’s knee. Casual, unthinking. Thumb circling once, and Femi’s face does the thing it does, the softening—the opening.
Nobody touches me like that.
A tightness behind my ribs.
The closest I’ve got to what’s happening at that table is forty-five minutes in a four-step office with a pen on a desk and a knee that did not move.
That’s the comparison I’m making, in a pub near campus, watching the lad I’m closest to be touched by a man who is allowed to touch him in front of me.
My knee against his under a desk is the thing I’ve got to put next to Allan’s thumb on Femi’s kneecap in a pub booth on a Thursday night, and they don’t belong on the same scale of measurement, and I know it.
And still. Still. If you asked me, right now, would I swap—would I swap the knee for the pub, the four-step office for the cooking-in—I don’t know what I’d answer.
I take a drink, a long one.
‘You alright?’ Femi asks, because Femi always asks.
‘Yeah. Tired.’
Awake. Thinking about a desk. A knee that didn’t move.
I replay the office hour in pieces: the pen, the look. If you need it, every fragment is a confirmation. Every silence was a gap he could have closed and didn’t.
But then: Femi’s face. The glow. Allan’s hand. The circle.
Two worlds. Femi walks through his in the open, parks, and pubs, and FaceTime with mothers. Mine fits inside a bathroom, a four-step office with the door shut and no words.
The bus hits a pothole. My bag slides, and I catch it. Zip still done up.
The knee is still burning where he touched it.
The bus turns onto Oxford Road. Streetlights count me home.
I’ve been looking at Ron’s text for three days.
The one that says Text me when you’re not in the library, which is Ron’s way of saying I don’t believe you went to the library, which is Ron’s way of saying I’m here when you want to stop lying.
I haven’t answered it. Haven’t deleted it.
I hold the phone against my thigh now, and I don’t type anything, and I don’t put it away.
A lad two seats up is on FaceTime with somebody, and they’re laughing about something I can’t hear properly. Normal noise. The ordinary sound of ordinary people being in contact with the people they love.
The phone goes dark in my hand.
I put it away.
The seminar room empties in under two minutes. Chairs are slightly misaligned—someone’s bag was forgotten under a desk. The air still holds the shape of voices arguing about convergence, and now holds none.
I stay.
Not deliberately. Or not in a way I’d testify to.
I’m putting my notebook away at a speed that would embarrass a glacier when Haldrey says, without looking up from his papers, ‘If you’re staying to argue, you’ll have to be quick. I’ve got the third-years in ten minutes.’
I don’t move closer. Don’t lean on the desk the way that says I belong in your space, with your attention. I stay where I am. Distance measured. Controlled.
‘I wasn’t going to argue.’
‘No?’ He glances up. Brief. The look that catalogues and files and moves on, except it doesn’t move on, because his pen stops against the paper and stays stopped. ‘That would be a first.’
The almost-smile. The one that creates the illusion of a shared frequency.
‘I had a question,’ I say.
He caps the pen. Gives me his full attention.
‘Go on.’
I hesitate. Not because I don’t know what I want to ask. Because I do.
‘When you talk about detachment in the Cauchy framework,’ I say, ‘you frame it as a tool. Something you pick up.’
His head tilts. Interested.
‘In most analytical contexts, it is.’
‘And if it isn’t?’
A pause. Not long. Long enough.
Haldrey leans against the desk. Folds his arms. The sleeves rolled to their usual precise midpoint, forearms exposed. Six inches from the wrist. Consistent across every lecture.
‘Then it’s usually misidentified,’ he says. ‘People frame avoidance as something imposed on them. In my experience, it rarely is. The mechanism feels external, but the function is almost always protective. The system detaches because detachment is cheaper than engagement.’
Clean. Structured. Every step is visible. A proof with its logic sound and its conclusion airtight.
‘Cheaper,’ I say. ‘Cheaper how?’
He tilts his head a fraction. Weighing whether I’m arguing.
I’m not arguing. I’m asking him to keep going because he doesn’t know I’m asking him to keep going.
‘Cheaper in the sense of predictable,’ he says.
‘A system that detaches pays a small, fixed cost for every interaction. A system that engages pays a variable one. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes ruin. Most agents optimise against variance, not towards reward. Usually they’re right to.
Detachment only looks irrational if you assume the reward is symmetric. It almost never is.’
He’s forgotten, for two sentences, that I’m a first-year.
He’s talking to a peer.
I was asking about the thing that happens everytime I walk out of this room, and the distance between this desk and the door feels like a unit of measurement I don’t have notation for.
Is this a choice? Am I choosing this? Or is this happening to me?
And he answered me like a textbook.
‘Right,’ I say.He watches me for a second longer. Expecting the push-back I always give him. The friction that makes his attention sharpen.
I don’t give him one.
‘Thanks.’
I turn before he can recalibrate. Pack the rest of my things with movements that have nothing wrong with them. The zip of my bag is louder than the room needs.
‘Mr Carrick.’
I stop. Not fully. Enough.
‘If the reading’s giving you trouble,’ he says, ‘I can point you towards a couple of supplementary texts that might help with the—’
‘It’s not.’
Too fast. Clipped.
He pauses. Adjusts.
‘All right.’
Neutral. Professional. Already gathering his papers for the third year.
I leave without looking back.
In the corridor, the noise of the maths building closes around me. Doors. A printer is running somewhere on the first floor. The vending machine on the landing is humming its one note.
I walk through all of it.
The question hadn’t been about Cauchy. Hadn’t been about any framework that fits inside a seminar room with strip lighting and plastic chairs.
And the problem, the real one, the one I’ll carry on the bus and into the library and into the gap between sleeping and not: he didn’t know.
The man who sees everything as proof. Who catches a planted error from three rows back. Who looked at my work and knew in seconds that I wasn’t struggling.
That man looked at me today and didn’t see what I was asking.
I’m not going to be the one who tells him.