Chapter 15 #2
Then he reads it all again.
Then he looks up at me.
A third face under the lecturer and the lover.
The eyes that looked at me in the office the first time I showed him a shortcut, but deeper, because now he knows what my hand feels like and what my mouth tastes like and what I sound like at three in the morning, and on top of all of that, he is still looking at the maths.
‘You tried this at seventeen.’
‘Yeah.’
‘With no supervisor. No reading list. No one telling you which direction was the right one.’
‘I mean, I couldn’t do it before. This is after your lectures.’
‘Ewan.’ The flatness in his voice. The don’t deflect flatness. ‘I know colleagues at Cambridge who could not have closed this at eighteen. Some of them still couldn’t.’
The words are so specific, my armour’s all wrong.
‘It’s just a convergence thing.’
‘Stop.’
I stop.
He’s looking at the notebook again. Moves his hand.
The left hand is flat on the page now. The way a man puts his palm on a thing he’s trying to memorise through the skin.
The other hand is on the table. Fingers doing that small drum he does when the thinking gets fast, and he’s choosing which sentence to let out.
‘May I keep this open for a minute?’
‘It’s yours for a minute, ten. Forever, if you want it,’ I say, and realise I mean it.
The words stay out.
He reads the page a fourth time. Slower. Pauses at the substitution, pauses at the collapse. His mouth moves, a tiny, private shape. The shape of a man saying oh in his head.
Then he closes the notebook. Very gently, both hands.
He pushes it back across the table to me.
‘Who has seen this.’
‘Before tonight?’
‘Before tonight.’
‘Nobody.’
He flinches. Subtle, but there.
Looks at the closed notebook on the table between us. Then at me. Then at the notebook again.
‘Who told you you could do this?’
I don’t answer.
‘Not pass exams. Not be clever. This. Who told you you could think in structures? See the shape before the method? Close a problem because you understood what it wanted?’
He looks at the notebook again.
‘You think like a pure mathematician.’
Nobody.
The answer is nobody.
My Year 11 teacher said you’re clever, but you don’t apply yourself. I sat in the back row, didn’t put my hand up, did the minimum to pass, and learned how to go unnoticed.
No one ever said the word mathematician about me.
Silence is the answer.
He watches understanding dawn as if I’ve said it.
He reaches across the table. His left hand covers my palm. No grip, no squeeze. Just warmth, skin to skin.
‘I am telling you now.’
Three seconds. Four. His hand on mine, and the kitchen clock that he’s never bothered to fix, ticking two minutes behind the real time.
‘Laurence—I—’
‘Don’t deflect. Not about this. You can deflect about anything else in this flat. Not this.’
My hand stays under his. The notebook full of seventeen-year-old me sits closed on the table, and my sternum’s doing a thing that has nothing to do with sex.
Then, because I am who I am, and because what he just said is too heavy to hold, I turn my palm up. I lace my fingers through his, and I hold on.
He notices, of course, he notices. He strokes his thumb across my knuckle once and stays.
Neither of us speaks. The kitchen clock does the slow thing clocks do when the seconds are heavier than usual.
I am being seen.
I keep holding on.
Later—how much later I couldn’t say; the clock has given up on being useful—Laurence is making a fresh pot of coffee, and I’m still at the table with the notebook closed under my hand like a hot thing.
His flat breathes with background noise. Boiler tick, fridge hum. Rain deciding whether to come back.
He sets a cup in front of me. Sits down. Doesn’t reach for his own yet.
‘Who brought you up, Ewan?’
He asks it without embarrassment. With room in it for any answer at all.
I look at the notebook. Safer than looking at him.
‘Mum and Ron.’
‘Your mother and your brother.’
‘Mostly Ron.’ I rub my thumb along the edge of the notebook cover.
‘Mum was there. Mum’s always been there.
But Mum’s the one who kept the house standing and the fridge full and the shouting away from the walls, and that’s a full-time job with my dad in it.
She didn’t have a lot left over by the time she got to me. ’
Laurence waits.
‘And my dad stopped having a lot to say to me when I was thirteen.’
Nothing moves in his face except his attention.
‘I came out. Thirteen. Dinner table, fish fingers and peas. Not even planned. It just came out of my face in the middle of an argument about a PE kit. My dad went very quiet and put his fork down and looked at his plate for a long time. Then he finished his food, got up, and went to watch the football in the front room, and that was about it.’
I pick at the corner of the cover.
‘He still talks to me. Work. Weather. Whether the boiler’s making that noise again. He just doesn’t talk to me the same way. Not anymore. He hasn’t looked at me the same way since. It’s like there’s a version of me he stopped being able to see, and he hasn’t bothered finding the new one.’
Laurence nods once. Doesn’t speak.
‘My mum cried that night. Then she opened the door to my room and came and sat on my bed. Said, I don’t know what I’m meant to say here, but I love you and I’ll learn whatever I need to learn.’
My throat does something inconvenient.
‘My mum’s a good one. My dad’s not a bad one. He’s just a silent one.’
Laurence’s left hand is flat on the table between us. An inch from mine. The heat of him shifts at the boundary.
‘And your brother?’
‘Ron. Ronan. He’s eight years older than me.’
The maths arrives before I can soften it.
‘So when it happened, he was twenty-one. Doing his second year on site. Still living at ours because London rents are London rents. And when my dad pushed his fork away at the table, Ron stood up and said, right, I’m walking Ewan up the road.’
The cup steams between us.
‘He walked me round the block three times without saying anything. Then he said, you alright, and I said, yeah, and he said, good, and that was the conversation. That was the whole conversation.’
I look at Laurence’s hand. Don’t touch it.
‘What does he do?’
‘Construction. Left school at seventeen, proper apprenticeship, been on the tools since. Started out labouring, and now he runs things. Sites. Men. Materials. Problems everyone else has made expensive by pretending they aren’t there.’
Laurence’s mouth shifts faintly.
‘You’d think working on sites would make him, I dunno, the stereotype.
And it has, in the sense that he drinks one pint on a Sunday and talks about rebar and can’t be arsed with books.
But he’s the cleverest person I know, and it’s got nothing to do with paper.
He can look at a wall and tell you what’s wrong with it. He reads a room like I read a proof.’
I look down.
‘He’s not soft. Ron. Not performative. Ron is precisely as much as he says and usually a bit more.’
Laurence waits.
‘He knew before anyone else. Not because I told him. Because there was a window open when I was thirteen and I was on the wrong side of it.’
The flat goes very quiet.
‘Not like that,’ I say, because his face changes. ‘Not dramatically. Just badly. Just thirteen. Everything too big and nowhere to put it.’
Laurence doesn’t interrupt.
‘Ron found me. Climbed out after me in his socks, sat there till I stopped making a state of myself, then called me a stupid pillock and got me back inside.’
I look at the notebook.
‘He didn’t ask. That was the point. He knew enough not to ask.’
A beat.
Laurence looks at me for a long moment.
A breath.
‘He’s a Carrick man. Nobody in our house says love you out loud. It’s a whole thing. My nan used to say it at Christmas and the men would all get embarrassed and find a tea towel to fold.’
Laurence’s mouth moves, almost.
‘Ron’s never said it. He ends every phone call with this little pause, where the love you would go if he could work out how to say it. Then he says, right, and hangs up. Every time.’
Laurence looks down at the table. At my hand. At the inch between us.
‘Does he know,’ he says eventually, ‘that you’re—’
He stops himself.
Either not the question he wants to ask, or exactly the question he already knows the answer to.
‘That I’m here? No.’
‘No.’
‘He knows I’m—’ I hunt for the word ‘—seeing someone. I told him on the phone last week because he asked me four Sundays in a row why I sounded weird. I said there’s a bloke.
He said right. I said it’s complicated. He said is he a dickhead.
I said no. He said is he married. I said no.
He said alright then.’ I look up at Laurence.
‘He didn’t ask a fourth question. He doesn’t know you’re my lecturer.
He doesn’t know—’ I gesture at the flat. ‘—this.’
Laurence exhales, small through his nose.
‘And the question he didn’t ask.’
‘How old you are.’
‘Yes.’
‘He didn’t ask because he’s already chosen an answer he can live with.’
Laurence doesn’t move.
‘He thinks you’re like twenty-three. A PhD lad, maybe a postdoc.
Someone clever and slightly older and not technically anyone’s fault.
That’s the one he can explain to himself.
Every time he doesn’t ask the real question, it’s because he’s already built a version of you that doesn’t make him have to look too hard. ’
My thumb catches on the rim of the cup.
‘And I’m letting him build it, because the version I haven’t told him is the one where his little brother—’
I stop.
‘—is fine. I was going to say. But the word won’t come.’
Laurence’s left hand hasn’t moved. Hasn’t closed on mine. Hasn’t pulled away.
‘Ewan.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I would rather not be the reason you lie to your brother.’
I look at him properly for the first time since he said, Who raised you?
‘You’re not the reason,’ I say. ‘I’ve been building versions of myself for my brother since I was thirteen. You’re just the latest one.’
A beat.