Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
And the maths.
I can’t stop the maths from doing itself. This is what my head does in the dark when a new number has come into it. It runs the number against the other numbers. Until it balances or it doesn’t.
I am eighteen.
He is thirty-one. Thirteen years older.
Thirteen years during which he has been eighteen somewhere, and twenty somewhere else, and twenty-two, and twenty-seven. Thirteen years of rooms I have never seen, books I have never touched, people who knew how he took his coffee before I knew he existed.
And in one of those years, a boy older than me, with better handwriting than mine, wrote your Hugo in the front of a book and handed it over like it was nothing and everything at once.
That is the part I cannot do anything with.
Not Hugo, exactly. Hugo is only a name in ink. Hugo is evidence.
Evidence that Laurence has been known before me. Properly known. The Borges, the Cavafy, the vinyl shelf, the small private smile. Whatever it was that made Hugo decide that the man in a Cambridge quad was his, or close enough to sign for.
All of that happened before me.
All of that was catalogued, claimed, and written down by someone who was not me.
Then the maths of me.
Let me count.
No boyfriends.
One, maybe, if the boy who kissed me at thirteen in the changing room before PE counts.
Behind the row of hanging blazers, with someone’s trainers wet from the field and the whole place smelling of socks.
He kissed me like it was a dare he had given himself, then outed me a couple of months later to save himself in front of the whole school, so no. He does not count.
Hookups, mostly. An hour each, tops. A few that stretched into morning because we fell asleep and I missed my alarm. None of them asked for my number. None of them had a name I remembered a week later. None of them got further than a door, a mouth, sometimes a bed, and always a quick exit.
I have never had breakfast with a lad on purpose.
I have never learnt anyone from their bookshelf.
I have never signed myself into the front of anything with the word your and handed it over like I could afford to be his.
Zero mornings after. Zero dedications.
Laurence has been his.
This is the first time I have felt this.
It’s not jealousy of Hugo, exactly. It lives a story below jealousy.
The feeling you get when you realise the person in bed next to you has lived in a house you have never been inside.
Rooms. Corridors. A front door that opened for someone before it opened for you.
Hugo has been in that house. The house holds the furniture Hugo chose.
A hallway, Hugo walked down barefoot, on his way to hand Laurence a book.
A kitchen where Hugo made coffee without being asked.
A bathroom where his aftershave sat on the shelf behind the towels for years until Laurence moved cities and put it back on a shelf behind new towels because throwing it out would mean deciding about Hugo.
I have never had a house. I have had doorways.
My empty shelf, his full one.
And the thing I can’t say out loud, the one sitting lowest in my chest, making it hard to sleep with his arm across my waist and his breath in my hair: I don’t even know what word I would put on him.
Your Ewan scrawled into the flyleaf of a book I do not own, about a country I have never visited?
My mouth won’t hold it. I don’t have the weight for that word yet.
I am eighteen, and my whole romantic vocabulary is yeah, nice one, cheers, see you around, and none of those are a pen pressed into the front page of a book with the word your at the bottom.
He has been somebody’s. I have been nobody’s.
The asymmetry is not fixable by being smarter, funnier, or better in bed. It is a thing that happened to him and did not happen to me.
I press my face into the pillow. The pillow smells of him. Specifically, of the shampoo he uses, which I could now identify blindfolded at forty paces.
The ceiling has had enough of me.
A week passes. Six days, Thursday to the following Wednesday, during which you could do extraordinary things with that mind that lives in my skull like a second heartbeat: his words, my pulse.
I try to ignore it.
Can’t.
It arrives unbidden on the tram, and in the library and during a lecture on aggregate demand that I fail to take a single note in, and on Sunday night I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor of my room at Fallowfield with a notebook on my knees I haven’t opened since I left Lewisham.
The notebook is A5, hardback. Black. The edges were soft from the inside of a rucksack it lived in for three years.
The cover’s got a faded ring where a can of Red Bull sat on it in Year 12 and a smaller ring where a second can sat on top of the first. I bought it with my own money at a Rymans in Catford in 2022 because the maths I was starting to do wouldn’t fit in the margins of the A-level textbook, and I needed somewhere to put it.
Inside: eighty-seven pages. My handwriting aged from fourteen to eighteen.
Problems I set myself, proofs nobody read.
A whole section on sequences, patterns nobody documented, because at sixteen I didn’t know you could look things up on the internet for free and check if someone else had already thought of them. I just thought of them.
The last entry is three weeks before I arrived in Manchester. I stopped opening it on results day. Couldn’t make myself write in it once I had an offer from a place I wasn’t excited about.
I open it now, turn the pages. Read myself at fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen. The confidence of a kid who had no teachers watching and no examiners judging, and was doing this for nothing except the pleasure of following a line to somewhere true.
Page forty-three. A problem I set myself in the summer, I turned seventeen.
A question about convergence, not the ones the textbook gave me, a harder one, a version with a twist in the hypothesis I couldn’t resolve and kept coming back to.
Three attempts on three pages. All wrong, I remember the frustration.
I remember closing the notebook and not opening it again for weeks.
I remember the particular flavour of that frustration, too.
It had a conclusion attached: maybe I’m just thick.
The version of the thought that sits in a seventeen-year-old’s skull pretending to be modesty.
The version that whispers that the gap between what you can do and what the actual ones can do is the gap between a boy in Lewisham and a boy who went to the right school, so stop wanking on about it.
I closed the notebook and agreed with the frustration, and I haven’t opened it in twelve months because opening it would have meant risking that the frustration had a second conclusion I hadn’t reached.
I read the three attempts now, at eighteen, in a narrow bed in Fallowfield, with weeks of Laurence’s lectures on Mathematical Methods in my head and the problem sets I’ve been handing in humming in my fingers, and I see it.
I see it immediately. The mistake I was making at seventeen. The thing I was building towards. The half-step I was missing that would have taken me all the way.
I pick up a pen. My old handwriting underneath. My new handwriting on top, in a different colour, picking up where seventeen-year-old me gave up—three lines, a substitution, a reframing. Then the collapse, six steps condensed into two, and the conclusion settles.
The proof works. I write QED as I used to, with a little square at the end. I’ve always liked drawing the little square.
I look at the page. At eighteen-year-old me, finishing what seventeen-year-old me started.
A knot under my sternum. A thing I haven’t named since a sofa in Chorlton last Thursday.
I close the notebook. Put it in my bag.
Tuesday. Eight PM, his kitchen.
He’s at the table with a pile of papers I’ve already accepted; I’m losing his attention to them
I sit down. Put my bag on the linoleum. Take out the notebook.
‘Can I show you this.’
I’m doing this whether he says yes or not.
He puts his pen down. Pushes the papers aside. Watches me open the notebook without saying a word.
Because Laurence has learned, somewhere in the last weeks, when I’m about to hand him my mind instead of my body.
He likes my body. Fine. Established.
But this is the bit that keeps him still.
I find page forty-three. Slide the notebook across the table. Turn it so it’s facing him.
I have not done this before.
This specific configuration—leaning towards a man with a thing I made that has nothing sexual attached to it—is foreign to every part of my training.
I have offered mouths and arses and heat and compliance.
I have never put a page of myself on a kitchen table with the writing facing up and said look.
The notebook on the table between us is more naked than I have ever been with my clothes off.
‘I wrote the first three attempts when I was seventeen. I got stuck. The ones in blue I wrote on Sunday.’
He doesn’t say anything yet. His left hand comes up to the page.
Index finger tracing; not touching, hovering, along the first line of the old handwriting.
Then along the second. He reads in the pattern I’ve watched for weeks: top to bottom, once, quick; then top to bottom again, slow; then back to the line where the thing lives.
He doesn’t move. The face he uses when reading is the face he uses when not reading anything at all. Unreadable. One of the most annoying things about him, and also the thing I trust most.
I sit on my hands. Literally. Both palms under my thighs on the kitchen chair. If I leave them free, I’ll rearrange the mugs, pick at my thumbnail, reach across the table to physically reroute his attention back to my body, where I know how to be looked at.
He reads the old attempts. Then the new lines in blue. Then the final collapse, then the little square.