Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The calendar on the kitchen wall has a circle around today’s date. Black pen, Laurence’s handwriting, the neat loop that says: this matters. Don’t lose track.
September. One year.
I’m looking at the circle while he’s looking at the dishes, and the dishes are looking at both of us with the mute accusation of objects that know they’ve been there since the day before.
‘Your turn,’ he says.
‘It’s been my turn for three days. That’s not a turn, that’s a sentence.’
‘You said you’d do them when you got home from work.’
‘I said I’d do them. I didn’t specify a century.’
He gives me the look. The Haldrey look, the one he used to deploy in lectures when a student offered a proof that started from the wrong axiom. I used to find it devastating. Now I find it mildly annoying and deeply attractive.
‘Laurence. The dishes can wait.’
‘The dishes have been waiting. The dishes have developed patience. I’d argue the dishes have shown more—’
‘If you say the dishes have shown more commitment than me I’m moving back to halls.’
He laughs, the real one.
The jaw I mapped in October, traced in November, and bit in December.
I took his life apart. He took mine apart, too. Neither of us had that in the plan.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’ll do the dishes.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I’m doing them badly. On principle.’
The bookshop is closed on Mondays. The second year starts next week, registration, new modules, and the campus is filling up again after the summer emptied it.
I walk through the Northern Quarter heading to the tram, and the route is muscle memory now: the mural with the bee, the vintage shop that smells of someone’s grandfather, the bar on the corner where Ron sat three times pretending he wanted craft beer while staring at a corner table.
He comes up more often than Lewisham-to-Manchester justifies. Brings wine. Always from the same shop. ‘The one near the bar,’ he says, which means the one near Celyn, which means the geography of Ron’s shopping has been permanently rerouted by a person with a pencil between their teeth.
Last month, he brought a bottle from Mum. The card said Dear Ewan and Laurence, Sean and I say hello. We hope you’re well.
The ‘Sean says hello’ was a lie; Dad hadn’t actually said hello. Dad had grunted in the general vicinity of a greeting while watching the football, but Mum included it because Mum builds bridges out of whatever materials are available, including fictional hellos.
The card sat on the mantelpiece for a week. Laurence looked at it every morning.
He didn’t say anything. The look was enough.
Femi texts: Registration Tuesday. Allan’s driving us.
Pray for my knees. Some things don’t change.
Others do. Femi and Allan have a flat now—a proper one, not halls.
With a kitchen and a door that locks, and a sofa they chose together.
The normalcy of it used to make me ache.
Now it makes me glad. Glad that someone got it right on the first try, glad that the mirror version of my disaster is a nice boy from Lewisham and a warm boy with a small car.
Laurence has the position. Research fellow, applied mathematics, a department that doesn’t contain any of the corridors where we were almost caught and the storage cupboard where we were almost found. A different campus, a different context.
He walks to work without the terror of seeing his own name on a list of people who’ve lost the right to be trusted.
It’s not what he had. It’s not the teaching, not the lectures, not the two hundred faces looking up at him while he writes elegant proofs on a board.
He misses it. I see the missing in the mornings when he puts on the blazer, and it’s for a research meeting, not a theatre full of students.
But the missing is the scar, not the wound. And scars can be lived with.
Proof that we’re living at our maximum.
His phrase, not mine.
Merton’s office. The shelves bow under decades of thinking. The chairs creak. The window overlooks the same courtyard where I once walked out of a review panel and stood in the rain with nothing to hold onto.
‘You have an unusual mind,’ he says.
He’s said this three times now. Each time the same intonation, the same slight emphasis on the unusual.
‘Pure mathematics,’ he says. ‘The real thing. You’ve been hiding in the wrong department.’
I haven’t been hiding. Except I have. I was sitting in the back row of a lecture I didn’t choose, watching a man I couldn’t stop watching, solving problems I pretended didn’t interest me because interest meant caring, and caring meant—
‘I’ll transfer,’ I say. ‘For second year.’
‘Good.’
He dunks a biscuit. The biscuit breaks. He regards the mug with betrayal. Forty years of dunking and still no mastery.
‘Don’t waste it, Mr Carrick.’
I tell Laurence over dinner. Pasta. His is improving. Still slightly underdone, but the effort is the thing.
His face when I say pure maths shifts. Wordless. He doesn’t say I knew. Doesn’t say I told you.
He reaches across the table and puts his hand on mine, and the hand is warm, and says everything his academic precision would ruin by articulating.
‘Merton called my proofs elegant,’ I say. ‘Your word.’
He tightens his fingers.
He’s not my teacher anymore. But he’s the person who saw it first. The distinction is the whole point.
I’ve never been more proud of myself.
Happier, too.
Maybe because someone I love is proud of me.
The balcony is too small for two people and too cold for September, and we’re on it anyway because the sky over Manchester is doing the thing it does in early autumn, the light going amber and long, the city below in its end-of-summer dress, the canals catching the last of the light.
‘Greece,’ he says. ‘Next summer.’
‘Spain.’
‘Greece. The islands. Maths was born there.’
‘Maths was born in Mesopotamia. Greece took credit.’
His arm around my waist. Pulling me closer.
My back against his chest, the heat of him through two layers.
The box in the wardrobe, the toys, the rope, the things we collected in the months when everything was a dare, are still there.
We still open it, still use it. But the real intimacy isn’t in the box.
It’s in this, his face pressed against my neck, his breath on my skin.
‘Are you going to be pedantic about everything for the next fifty years?’ He stops. Realises the sentence has no end. The next stretches out in front of us without a horizon. ‘For the foreseeable future?’
‘Probably.’
He smiles, and I drink my coffee. The mug, the blue one, the one with the chip, the one I claimed in October, and he never reassigned, sits solid. Ordinary. Still here.
‘Would you have imagined this?’ he says. ‘A year ago?’
‘A year ago I only wanted to fuck you, Dr Haldrey.’
The name, the title. The echo is different now. It’s a joke—a private one.
He laughs, and I kiss him. Slow now, no crash, no detonation.
The kind of kiss that contains a year, the wall, the desk, the storage cupboard, the office with the cold coffee, Vienna, the courtyard, the key given and returned, and given again.
All of it compressed into a mouth I know like I know proofs: completely, from every angle, without needing to check my work.
‘You’re a mess, Dr Haldrey.’
‘So are you.’ His mouth against my temple. The accent unguarded, the vowels wide open, the voice that only I hear. ‘But it’s our mess now.’
Our mess. Two words that don’t need proving, the proof is us standing here, on a balcony too small for two people, in a city I didn’t ask for, with a man I didn’t plan.
I didn’t know he’d do the same to me. Didn’t know I had a composure to crack.
I wasn’t choosing. I was afraid.
The pieces, put back together, make a different shape. The shape of a boy who raises his hand now. Who unpacks, who stays.
The light over Manchester. September.
His hand in mine on a balcony.
Staying.