Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
July in Manchester is a rumour that occasionally comes true.
The sun appears at six and doesn’t leave until half ten, as if making up for nine months of neglect, and the city responds like cities do when they’re not used to being looked at, startled.
Grateful. Canal Street gets its tables out.
Chorlton fills with brunch queues. The Metrolink trams carry people in T-shirts instead of parkas, which is the Mancunian equivalent of a national holiday.
I work in a bookshop in the Northern Quarter.
Secondhand, mostly. Basement and a cat and old glue, and a cat named Euler who sits on the maths section and judges everyone.
The owner hired me because I alphabetised the philosophy shelf without being asked and because, his words, ‘you’re the first applicant who didn’t ask if we sell candles. ’
Laurence tutors. Three A-level students and two undergrads. The money isn’t much.
The position is still pending. Merton put a word in, and the paperwork moves at the speed of academic bureaucracy, which is the speed of continental drift with less urgency.
We live.
That’s the word. Live. Saturday mornings, I walk to the bookshop, and Laurence tutors at home, and we meet at the Chorlton café at noon. I’ve got dust on my fingers, and we sit at the table by the window and eat eggs, and the eating-eggs is so ordinary it makes my chest do this—thing.
We hold hands on Canal Street. In public, in daylight.
His hand around mine, the grip easy, not desperate, not stolen.
Just a man holding another man’s hand on a pavement in the sun.
Nobody cares. A drag queen outside a bar wolf-whistles, and Laurence goes red from the collar up, and I file this under things that are worth the entire past year.
We kiss at a traffic light on Oxford Road. Because the light was red and he was there, and I wanted to. So I kissed him. In front of two students, a bus driver, and a woman with a pram, who smiled.
Ordinary. Didn’t know I’d want it.
Somewhere in June, sex became funny again. I came home from the bookshop, and he was on the sofa reading, and I crawled on top of him, and his book fell, and we fucked on the floor with the windows open and the six o’clock news murmuring from the flat upstairs.
Afterwards, he said, ‘You’ve got carpet burn on your back,’ and I said, ‘That’s the best review I’ve ever received,’ and we ordered Thai food and ate it in bed and fucked again, and that’s what it is now.
Just a body I know meeting a body that knows me, and the knowing might be the best part.
Somewhere in June, sex became casual and funny again. I came home from the bookshop, and he was on the sofa reading, and I crawled on top of him, and his book fell, and we fucked on the sofa with the windows open and the six o’clock news murmuring from the flat upstairs.
Afterwards, he said, ‘You’ve got carpet burn on your back,’ and I said, ‘That’s the best review I’ve ever received,’ and we ordered Thai food and ate it in bed, and that’s what it is now.
Just a body I know meeting a body that knows me, and the knowing might be the best part.
July. Wales. A cottage near Harlech that Laurence found online for eighty pounds a night, which means the photos were generous. The ceiling sags. The shower makes a noise like a dying animal. The bed is narrower than the one in the halls, which I didn’t think was architecturally possible.
It rains, of course it rains. This is Wales.
We fuck with the windows open and the rain hitting the glass.
My legs around his waist. His mouth on my throat.
The angle that makes me grip the headboard and the headboard hits the wall, and the wall is stone, so the sound carries, and if the sheep outside have opinions, they can write a formal complaint.
After: his fingers on my ribs. Slow. Counting them, I let him.
Used to squirm. Used to deflect. Used to make a joke and reach for my jeans. Now I lie still and let someone touch me like I’m worth being careful with.
It’s during that first holiday as a couple that our first real argument happens.
It starts with the email, still pending, still no decision, still the bureaucratic silence that Laurence reads as rejection and I read as process. He’s at the kitchen table with his laptop, staring at the same wall he’s been staring at for months.
‘Maybe it’s not going to happen.’
‘It’s going to happen. Merton.’
‘Merton is eighty-two. His influence isn’t what it used to be.’
‘His influence got my results cleared.’
‘That’s different. That was justice. This is hiring.’
He shuts the laptop. Calmly, which is worse.
‘And I have a misconduct resignation on my record, Ewan. That doesn’t go away.’
‘So what, that’s it? You just stop trying?’
‘Ewan—’
‘You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and you’re acting like your life’s already over.’
‘Don’t.’
Sharp now. The sharpest he’s been since the kitchen, since don’t come back. His eyes harden.
‘Don’t turn my survival into something contemptible because it disappoints your idea of me.’
It hits and hurts because it’s right. What I said was wrong. I said it wrong. I said it like the boy who didn’t raise his hand.
I sit down. Across from him, the table.
‘I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.’
‘What did you mean?’
‘That you’re brilliant. And it scares me to watch you wait for people to notice what I already know.’
I stop. Because I hear Laurence in it, and the echo hurts.
Silence. The rain, the cottage creaking. Two people sitting in the wreckage of a fight without filling the silence with bodies.
‘I know,’ he says. Quiet. ‘I’m scared too.’
A pause. He rests his thumb on the rim of the mug.
No apology, no performance of resolution. Just the truth. And the truth is enough.
We don’t fix it. We sit with it, drink tea. Later, cook badly.
Femi and Allan come to visit us in Wales for a day. Allan drives a car so small that Femi’s knees are against the dashboard, and his expression upon arrival suggests the journey was a near-death experience.
The four of us are in the garden. The sun is out for once, the hills are green, and the sheep are maintaining their judgmental distance.
Beers. Crisps. Allan tells a story about a second-year student who got locked in the library overnight, and Femi interrupts to correct the details. Allan interrupts Femi’s interruption, and they argue with the fluency of long practice. The argument is the intimacy.
‘If someone had told me a year ago—’ Femi says.
He’s leaning back in the plastic chair with his beer and the sun on his face, and the sentence doesn’t need finishing.
I look at him, he looks at me. Just—looking. No sweep, no passing through. The look of someone who already knows and keeps looking anyway.
Sunday evening, the flat. Rain again, Manchester, not Wales, the familiar rain, the rain that sounds like home now.
Laurence is at the kitchen table. Laptop open.
‘Hugo emailed.’
I look up. His voice is neutral, studied neutral. The neutrality of a man testing whether a grenade still has its pin.
He turns the laptop towards me. First time. Every other Hugo conversation has been held at a distance, told, not shown. This is the screen itself—the email.
I read it briefly. Friendly. Something about a conference, a paper Hugo published, a casual sign-off. No undercurrents. No blades hidden in the pleasantries. Just a man writing to another man about work once the wreckage has been cleared.
‘Fine,’ I say. And mean it. The jealousy that would have eaten me alive six months ago is muted. Laurence chose me. Hugo can email, Hugo can publish, Hugo can exist in his tailored shirts and his perfect fucking face.
I looked him up last week. The jawline still exists. It just doesn’t land anymore.
I’m the one sitting on the sofa.
Laurence types a short reply. Closes the laptop. ‘That chapter is closed.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I’m not.’ I go back to the book. ‘I’m secure in my position, Dr Haldrey. Though the job security’s a bit shaky.’
Laughter doesn’t break.
FaceTime. Ron’s face fills the screen; the angle is bad, and the ceiling of his Lewisham bedroom is visible behind him.
‘I went back to that bar last weekend. Sorry I didn’t came to visit.’
I wait. Every nerve says push, but pushing is the old move. It’s always the wrong move with Ron.
‘They were there. Writing, as usual. The pencil.’ He shifts his gaze, the distant focus of someone watching a scene in their memory. ‘I sat at the next table. Didn’t say anything.’
‘And?’
‘They looked up. And smiled.’ He pauses. ‘Like they recognised me.’
I sit with it. Between Lewisham and Manchester, between two screens.
‘Next time,’ I say, ‘say hello. And offer them a pint.’
‘Yeah.’ He rubs his palm. The circuit. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’
The screen goes dark. I put the phone down. Laurence is watching from the kitchen doorway. Coffee in hand. The knowing on his face.
‘I think Ron’s in love,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t know how to start.’
Laurence smiles and sets the coffee down. Crosses the room.
‘That,’ he says, ‘runs in the family.’
His mouth on my forehead. The press of it. Warm.
Outside: Manchester in July, long light. The sun is not quite setting.
Inside: a sofa, a book, a man’s mouth against my skin.
The summer is not ending yet.