Second Person (The Carrick Brothers)

One

He builds rooms for other people to live in.

The train drags Wales into England without a border, without so much as a sign, just the hedges getting shorter and the sky getting wider until there’s nothing out the window to tell you where you came from. I don’t turn round to watch it go. You don’t, when you’ve decided.

Celyn.

‘Neither.’

The word landed on the lino between the kettle and the bara-brith tin, and she looked at it a moment, and then she nodded, the way you agree to a thing you can’t yet see the shape of, and she said, ‘Wel. That’s going to take some getting used to.

’ And she meant it, both halves, the getting and the used-to, and she never asked again.

Neither read to her, that afternoon, as nothing — a subtraction, a child who’d taken something out of the house and not said what.

It’s the opposite of a subtraction. It took me years to find the words for that, and by the time I had them she’d half worked it out on her own, in logistics, the way she loves: a chair kept, a mug kept, the warm voice kept on the phone.

Her heart got there years ahead of the vocabulary.

Most of them do, the ones who make it. The vocabulary’s just the last mile.

Dad was the harder one, and I’ll put it on the record that harder isn’t worse.

He loves me out loud, across a table too small for everyone on it.

He just can’t get the word to come. He still says he, some years more than others, reaches for it out of years of habit and catches it a half-beat late, or doesn’t catch it — a retired postman who spent his life carrying other people’s messages and can’t quite manage the one his own kid handed him.

He tried, once, that first year, in his way: started a sentence about how if it was that I was, you know, that way — and I watched him grope for the only word he had, the one off the telly, because gay was a box he’d at least seen the shape of and neither wasn’t, and a man that age reaching for any box at all is a man trying.

He never landed it. He says he and means love, and I’ve decided, against a fair amount of advice, that this counts.

Love that turns up incompetent is still love.

I’d sooner have a dad who mangles it every Christmas than one who says it clean and means it like a knife.

Owain drove me to the station. My brother: older, married, radiators and boilers for a living, a man who has never once in his life used a word he didn’t need.

He didn’t understand it either, what I’d told them — maybe less than Mam did, because Owain’s whole world runs on things that are one thing or the other, on or off, hot or cold, a valve open or shut.

I’d watched him try to make neither compute and fail, and, crucially, not mind failing, which is its own kind of grace.

He didn’t ask me the questions the internet had taught everyone else to ask.

He asked if I’d sorted a flat. He asked if the job paid.

He asked, loading my bag into the boot of the car, whether I had a proper coat — as if I hadn’t been raised in the wettest valley in Wales, as if Manchester could teach a Beddgelert kid the first thing about rain.

It’s how he worries: in coats, in valves, in proper footwear.

At the barrier he said, not looking at me, ‘You’ll be alright, then,’ which out of Owain is a fourteen-line sonnet, and I said yeah, and he said, ‘Text Mam. She’ll not say she’s worried.

She will be.’ And then, because he’s my brother and twenty years of Beynon men not saying things has to go somewhere, he put his hand on the back of my neck, once, rough, the way you’d steady something you didn’t want to watch fall, and let go before either of us had to have a face about it.

That was the whole ceremony: no banner, no speech, just a boiler engineer telling me to text our mother, and the 10:41.

I wasn’t running from them. That’s the part people get wrong when I don’t tell them, which is always.

I love them — the whole awkward lot, the dad who mangles it, the mam who kept the warm voice on a full minute too long, the brother with a sonnet’s worth of you’ll be alright in him.

They were never the problem. The problem is you can’t become yourself in a house that’s already decided who you are.

They’d built me a room and painted it and hung a name on the door, all of it kindly, and I had to leave the room to prove I’d never been the boy it was painted for.

You don’t only flee cruelty. Sometimes you flee the kindness that’s got the wrong person in mind, because staying lets it keep being right about you.

I didn’t cry on it. I’d done the crying already, months of it, and I was empty in a clean way, scoured, the way a pan comes clean once you’ve burned the worst of the thing off it.

What I felt instead, ninety miles of it, was the vertigo of a person who’s just handed back the only name they were ever issued and hasn’t picked anything up to carry in its place.

For an hour and a half I was nobody at all.

It should have frightened me. It was the freest I had ever been.

The flat’s above a charity shop on Oldham Street, and at the start it isn’t mine.

It’s Rhi’s. Rhiannon, who I’ve known since we were four years old and splitting a packet of Quavers on the floor of a chapel hall two valleys over from mine, both of us the wrong sort of kid for the place in ways it took us years to find the words for.

Rhi got out a year before I did, came to Manchester for the writing course I’d end up on myself, and when I finally packed the one bag, she was the fixed point I packed it towards: a spare room, someone who’d known me at four and would know me at whatever I was turning into and never once need the change explained line by line.

‘You’re having the room, and I’m not taking no,’ she said, loud, the way she’s said everything since we were small.

Not a kindness dressed as an order. An order dressed as a kindness, the only sort I can take: the kind you can obey without admitting you needed it.

So my first stretch in Manchester I’m not alone at all.

I’m on the good side of a wall from the one person alive who knew the old name and has never once reached for it, who does the crossword out loud and burns toast with real commitment and reads my pages before anyone else is allowed near them, and who loves me for reasons that predate every version of me this city will ever meet.

Below us the shop shutter goes up six days a week, the rattle-and-slam of it, and I set my body’s clock to a stranger’s till, and Rhi learns which mornings I’ve lost to the mirror and puts the kettle on without a word about it.

Then Rhi meets a fella called Aled at her cousin’s christening, and it’s the real thing, fast and unembarrassed, the way she does everything, and inside a year there’s a ring and a lease somewhere across the city with two names on it, and she moves out with the guilty face of someone leaving a mate at a bus stop in the rain.

She left me the flat, the whole of it, and I unpacked the one bag onto a single shelf a second time, in a place that was finally, for better and worse, only mine.

The last box goes down the stairs before nine, Aled taking the corners too fast the way men do when they want witnesses to think the job’s easy, and Rhi stands in the empty second bedroom with her coat already on, working out how to leave without leaving.

‘Come with,’ she says, not for the first time this week.

‘I like it here.’

‘You like being on your own so much you’ve never once tried it.’ Light, the way she says the true things, testing whether I’ll flinch. I don’t, or not so she’d catch it. ‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Right.’ She looks round the room like she’s counting what’s staying, which is everything, all of it mine now by default rather than by choice, and for a second the loud goes out of her, the twenty-two years thing coming up in its place.

‘You’ve got the key still works both ways. I’m not giving that back.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean it, Cel.’

‘I know you do.’

She hugs me too hard for someone moving two miles and not ninety, and I feel her decide, mid-hug, not to say the rest of what she’s thinking, which is its own mercy, because I already know the shape of it without needing the words.

Then the door. Then the stairs, two flights of them, Aled’s voice floating back up asking has she got everything, and hers floating down that she has, though we both know that isn’t true, because she’s left me the kettle and the good pan and a note on the fridge in her handwriting that just says CALL ME, DON’T JUST THINK ABOUT IT, which I will, eventually, and not tonight.

The hatchback pulls away from the kerb. I watch it from the window until it turns onto Oldham Street proper and I can’t any more, and then I stand there a while longer anyway, looking at a road with nothing on it worth looking at.

I don’t cry, not tonight. Whatever’s left of that got spent somewhere else, months back, under a different roof, and there isn’t much left in the tank for a woman I’ll see Thursday.

The shutter goes up at six the way it always does, the rattle-and-slam of somebody else’s morning starting under my floor, and I lie there in the grey light listening to a sound I’ve slept through for the best part of a year without once noticing I had a witness in the next room while I did it.

I get up because staying in bed and calling it grief felt like a decision I hadn’t earned.

I put the kettle on. I get two mugs down before I’ve finished the thought — Rhi’s and mine, the reflex older than the reason for it — and I stand there a second holding the wrong one, the ghost of a routine with nobody left on the other end of it, and I put it back on the shelf, careful, the way you’d put back something that might still be breakable even though it’s china.