Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The key is a Yale, brass, small—held out between his index finger and thumb like a pin just pulled, his eyes on the hallway beyond, not looking at it, not looking at me.
‘So you don’t have to ring the bell.’
I take it, the metal cold from his pocket and heavier than a key has any right to be.
He drops his hand to his side, turns back into the flat, eyes forward—the conversation over because it was never a conversation. I close my fingers around the key, the teeth biting into my skin: trophy, evidence, admission of what we are.
I put it in my wallet, next to the condoms.
The routine builds itself. Nobody designs it; it just accumulates.
Every surface, every room. The flat is mapped differently now, not by furniture but by what we’ve done on it.
Other things, too. Things I didn’t know how to track when I was there.
He makes coffee on a hob moka, one tablespoon for the basket, waits for the gargle to drop half a register before he turns the gas off. Forty seconds of gargle. Not thirty. Not fifty.
He won’t use the microwave for anything hot except porridge.
He reads the Guardian Saturday edition on a Sunday because he buys it Saturday evening and saves it for the ritual.
He turns the bathroom fan on after a shower by reaching around the door frame without looking.
His fridge is organised by height, not category. He keeps butter out on a ceramic dish.
He irons on Sunday night with the radio on, which he turns down when the strings get dramatic, as if the music were a third person in the room he’s being polite to.
One map in daylight and one in the dark—both mine. Neither is acknowledged when anyone else is present.
Saturday. Rusholme. Curry Mile in the rain. Femi is in a waterproof jacket that has opinions about the wind.
Agreed it a week ago—mid-term reset, no laptops, proper food. Femi takes an agreement like that seriously, like a subpoena. He’s at the door before I am. Hood down, nose pink. Menu already open on the biryani page, order predetermined.
‘You look shifty,’ he says, before I’ve even sat down.
‘Nice to see you too.’
‘Nah, you’re shifty. Your eyes do the thing.’
‘What thing.’
‘The thing where you’re in the room but about ninety per cent of you’s somewhere else. Been doing it since November. Thought it was freshers’ stress. Changed my mind. It’s a person. Is that why you aren’t going out with us anymore?’
He says a person like the Crown says the alleged incident. I ordered a lassi for something to do.
‘Femi.’
‘Ewan.’
‘Can we have one meal where you don’t read me like a suspect.’
‘No.’ He opens the menu a second time purely for the drama. ‘Best mate. Legally obliged. Allan made me watch three episodes of some American detective show last night and I’m in my forensic era.’
‘Brilliant. Try it on someone else.’
‘Already did. This morning. I asked Allan are you seeing somebody else over his cornflakes, he said yeah, your mum, and then he left for his place.’
A proper laugh, the first real one in days.
The waiter brings lassi, poppadoms, little metal pots of chutney, and for seven minutes I’m not a bloke with a Yale key next to a condom in his wallet—I’m a boy in a Rusholme curry house with his mate, breaking a poppadom badly, bullying the mango chutney into cooperating.
Femi talks. Allan’s patterns—his own parents. Mum wants him home for half-term. Dad has decided on WhatsApp that Allan is a sensible young man, which in Femi-father is code for I will not fight about him yet.
I listen. Contribute the minimum. Twice I want to check my phone. Twice I sit on the hand that’s about to. Because this is one hour this week where nobody’s judging my age, and the relief is so specific it’s almost physical.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Alright.’ He pokes a chunk of chicken with his fork like he’s testing a concept. ‘Just saying; whatever the guy is, you’re allowed one Saturday afternoon that isn’t about them. That’s all I came to say. Said it. Will now eat my biryani in relative silence as agreed.’
‘Relative silence.’
‘Relative.’ He grins.
Tuesday morning, eight forty. Macroeconometrics is in an hour, in the wrong direction. I’m on a tram going the right way.
I didn’t plan it—or I planned it like I plan everything, by not planning and then finding myself already moving.
Showered, put on the jeans that fit right, walked out of the halls with my bag strap digging in, and my feet turned towards Chorlton before my brain had caught up.
By the time I was on the tram, I’d already texted: You teaching today?
He answered within thirty seconds. Not till eleven
No punctuation, no follow-up—just the one line, which is the most un-Laurence text message the man has ever sent, which is itself the answer to the question I wasn’t quite asking. I didn’t text back. I just kept going.
Outside the tram windows, Manchester is doing its thing. The rain isn’t falling so much as being thrown. Slanted, insistent, already finding the gap between collar and skin in the first three seconds, and lives there for an hour. The pavements are sheets of running water.
Thirty-two minutes. I know because I’ve counted before. I count again.
I walk from the tram stop with my jacket over my head, which is pointless; everything is wet now, shoes squelching, socks going cold around the ankles. The wallet in my back pocket has the key in it. The key has the teeth biting my thumb when I reach for it.
I let myself in, no doorbell.
He’s in the kitchen in a dressing gown worn at the elbows—something he’s had longer than me, longer than I’ve been sexually active, a garment belonging to the man who lives here when nobody else is watching.
Coffee in front of him, a book open at the table.
His hair’s still damp from the shower, sticking up on one side, and his glasses sit on the kitchen counter instead of his face, which means he was reading without them, which means he has a prescription he doesn’t wear all the time, and I didn’t know that.
He looks up when I come in, but doesn’t stand.
‘You’re drenched.’
‘Raining.’
‘Evidently.’ His mouth twitches towards speech. ‘Why are you not in lecture, Ewan.’
My name, regular use now, and I still feel it at the base of my spine every time.
‘Because I’m here.’
I cross the kitchen, drop my bag by the table, stand in front of him with water running off my jacket onto his lino, and my jeans heavy with rain, and my hair plastered down.
He takes stock: the wet, the eighteen-year-old skipping a morning and the look that crosses him is half despair and half the thing underneath it.
‘You’re going to catch your death.’
‘Then warm me up.’
It’s a line. A terrible line. A rehearsed, inauthentic line. I absolutely mean it anyway.
He finds nothing to say.
I lean down. Place my palms flat on the kitchen table, either side of his book. The words upside down under my fingers. My face is six inches from his. Water dripping from my fringe onto the page. One drop hits a word, and the ink blurs.
‘Tell me to go.’ I’ve started doing this. It started the first night in his hallway, and it hasn’t stopped being the only sentence I know how to offer him that he can refuse. ‘Say you want to be left alone, finish your coffee and read your book, and I’ll go. Right now. I swear.’
A pause. Then the name that’s been living behind my teeth for five weeks just walks out of my mouth, this time looking at him.
‘Laurence.’
It falls between us like a ring hitting tile.
I’ve said it in my head since the first office hours. I said it once into his mouth. I’ve never said it across a kitchen table with both of us dressed.
He changes, revealing the word before he speaks it.
He looks at the drop on the page. At my palm, at me.
He closes the book.
He reaches up, and he fists my wet t-shirt in both hands, and he pulls me down into his lap.
His dressing gown falls open. The cord was never tied. Underneath: nothing. A naked man was reading in his own kitchen on a Tuesday morning when his student let himself in with a key and dripped rainwater onto his book.
By the time I stand, the kitchen is warm, the chair still warm, his dressing gown still open, and he’s looking at me like he’s afraid of the next sentence.
‘I’ll make you more coffee,’ he says.
‘I’m not staying.’
He doesn’t move. Only his left hand closes around nothing on the table.
‘It’s raining.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ewan.’
I’m already walking to the sink and rinsing off and pulling up my wet jeans over skin that’s gone warm and finding my t-shirt on the floor and putting it on inside out because I can’t be bothered to fix it.
My jacket next. The key is in my wallet.
The wallet is in my back pocket—nine fifty-eight on the clock above his cooker.
He hasn’t moved from the chair.
I’ve just sucked him off in his own kitchen, and he is still half-hard and breathing wrong, watching me put my clothes back on like each movement is a word in a sentence he doesn’t want to finish reading.
‘You skipped your lecture to come here.’
‘I know.’
‘So you don’t have to go. Rest a bit, make yourself some lunch later on.’
I stop at the door. Rain on the window. The key in my wallet, the wet denim at my ankles, him behind me in his dressing gown, I won’t turn around.
‘I have to,’ I say. It’s the only true thing I can make my mouth shape.
Eyes forward, I leave without looking.
The rain hits my face like an agreement. I pull the hood up, and I walk, and I walk past the tram stop without stopping at it because the walking is the only thing that’s telling me which way is home.
Twenty minutes to the next stop. Water in my shoes.
Leaving is what I know. The shaking has no explanation I can hold.
I leave. Every time: eleven PM, midnight, sometimes one, shoes on, jacket, the door closing softly behind me, the stairwell in the dark, the street, the tram back to Fallowfield. Back to the narrow bed and the walls thin enough to hear the bloke next door still wanking on schedule.