One #3
Except out of nothing is the lie hiding in that sentence too, the neat tragic one, and I catch it every time I reach for it.
I didn’t invent anyone on that train. I stopped translating.
The person was always in there, doing the work in a language the house didn’t speak, and all Manchester ever did was let them say it out loud.
I’m not what I made myself into. I’m what I already was, with the volume finally up.
That’s the whole of it, and it isn’t a trick.
Nobody teaches you how to build a self. There’s no evening class. The identity I found on my own, in the dark, over years — that part nobody could have handed me, and nobody did.
I can date the exact night I stopped being a person a mirror happened to and started being one who happened to a mirror.
Rhi’s bedroom floor, that first winter, both of us cross-legged, her make-up spread on a towel like a surgeon’s tray, and me thirty-one flavours of frightened and pretending to be none of them.
‘Stop blinking,’ she said, for the ninth time, a pencil a millimetre off my eye. ‘You blink like you’re expecting a slap.’
‘I’m expecting a pencil in the eye.’
‘Same reflex. Trust the hand.’ She did the line anyway, in one go, and turned my chin to the mirror. ‘There. Tell me that’s not a face.’
I looked. It was a face. It was the first time the thing in the glass matched the thing I carried around behind my own, near enough that the gap didn’t ache for a whole ten seconds, and I must have gone quiet in the way that means something, because Rhi, who catches everything, went brisk instead of soft, which is her whole genius.
‘Right, don’t cry, you’ll ruin it and I’m not doing it twice.
’ She capped the pencil. ‘That’s the wing.
You’ll do it worse than me for a month and then better than me forever, because you’re a swot and I’m not.
The trick’s not the make-up. It’s the walking in after.
Anyone can do a face on a bedroom floor.
You’ve to take it out the door and dare the street to say a word. ’
‘And if the street says a word?’
‘Then the street’s got a problem, and it’s not yours, and you keep walking.’ Flat, the way she says the true things, the Beddgelert vowels doing the work. ‘I spent my year’s head start finding that out. I’m handing it to you so you don’t have to spend yours.’
That’s the part the clean version leaves out: the craft of it, the wing and the nerve and the walking-in, I learned cross-legged on a towel from the one person alive who’d known me before I had a self to hide, who used her one year’s head start not to get ahead of me but to double back and carry my bag a stretch.
You don’t build a self out of nothing. You build it out of the ones who got there first and reached a hand back down.
The clothes came after the face and were harder, because a face comes off with a wipe and a skirt does not, and because a face is a thing you do on a bathroom floor with the door shut and a skirt is a thing you do in a shop, in daylight, in front of a stranger with a till, in a cubicle whose curtain has never in its life met the wall.
The shop was directly under us. That’s the joke of the whole episode and Rhi worked it for a fortnight: two flights of stairs, a door, a shutter I’d been setting my body’s clock to since September, and in eleven weeks of living over the top of it I had been inside precisely never, having developed a route to the bus stop that went up the wrong end of Oldham Street for reasons I could not have defended in front of a magistrate.
‘It’s a charity shop, Cel.’
‘I know what it is.’
‘It’s got a bin outside with jigsaws in it. It’s got a rail of anoraks. It is not the Paris collections.’
‘I know what it’s got.’
‘Ten past ten on a weekday. There’ll be one volunteer, she’ll be seventy, and she’ll be doing a crossword.’
The volunteer was called Barbara and she was doing the quick crossword with a biro, and Rhi has never once let me forget the accuracy of that forecast.
Inside it smelled the way they all smell, which is other people’s wardrobes and a faint radiator warmth, a hot-water-bottle sort of smell, not unpleasant, just used.
Rhi went at the rail like a woman dealing cards.
She holds things up against you without asking, chin out, one eye shut, and delivers a verdict before the hanger’s stopped swinging.
No. No. God, no. That’s a curtain, Cel, somebody’s made a curtain into a garment and put it out for the public.
She was loud in a shop the size of a lift and Barbara did not look up once, because Barbara had four across and no intention of being distracted by two girls, as she later called us, one of whom she was going to short-change by fifty pence and refuse to discuss.
What Rhi did not do — and I only understood the size of it years later, when I watched other people do the opposite — was hand me a starter pack.
No florals. No little cardigan, no pastel, none of the well-meant costume people reach for when they’ve decided to help you be a woman, which was not the errand and never had been.
She picked by shoulder and by drape and by what a thing does when a body walks in it, because Rhi has an eye and no theory whatsoever, and an eye with no theory is worth six of the other thing.
She came back with a skirt. Heavy black jersey, mid-calf, weighted at the hem like a stage curtain, three pound fifty on a paper label. And a shirt, men’s cut, charcoal, worn soft at the collar by somebody who’d owned it a long time.
‘You’ve the shoulders,’ she said, handing them over. ‘So you want the weight low. Otherwise you’re a coat hanger apologising.’
The cubicle had a curtain that stopped four inches short of the frame and a chair with a broken back and a mirror screwed slightly out of true.
I got the skirt on with my heart going in my throat like I was handling something that might be alive, and I did the shirt up to the second button, and then I made myself look.
The bedroom mirror, that first winter, had done a piece of arithmetic on me and come out level for about ten seconds.
This one did a different operation entirely.
It didn’t show me two things agreeing. It showed me somebody in motion — half turned, mid-step, weight on one hip, a person occupying three dimensions and evidently with somewhere to be — and I turned round to look at the back of it the way you’d walk round a building, and the person in the glass turned round too, and had a back, and had an outline, and was quite obviously going to have to be taken outside at some point that morning.
‘Well?’ Through the curtain. Not coming in. Rhi has never once come in.
‘It’s three pound fifty.’
‘That’s not what I asked and you know it isn’t.’
Barbara rang it through at three pounds, on the grounds that the label was faded, which it wasn’t, and put it in a carrier bag from a supermarket that closed in 2011, and said the skirt had come out of a house clearance in Sale and that the lady had had lovely taste.
Rhi paid before I’d finished getting my purse out, which is an old manoeuvre of hers and one I’ve never beaten.
Then, on the pavement outside, with the bag in my hand and the flat door six feet away and both of us knowing exactly what was about to be proposed:
‘Right. Upstairs. Put it on.’
‘Now?’
‘Now, or it lives in a bag for a year and you’ll tell people you tried.’
So I put it on upstairs, with the shirt and the wing and hands that were not as steady as I’d have liked, and then we went out the door and down Oldham Street, which is not a runway and never has been, at half eleven on a Tuesday in November, past the wholesalers and the bloke who sells phone cases and a queue at the cashpoint.
Here is the whole of what happened. A woman in a bus shelter looked up, and looked back down at her phone.
Two lads went past having an argument about a car and did not break stride.
A man unloading a van said alright love to Rhi, who is precisely the sort of person a man unloading a van says alright love to, and said nothing at all to me, and I have never been able to decide whether that was the best or the second-best outcome available.
My hands were freezing. The skirt was heavier than I expected and moved when I moved and the moving was the entire point and no one on that street was ever going to know it.
At the corner Rhi stopped, looked me over once, and gave it the full Beddgelert flat:
‘There. Took it out the door and the street never said a word.’
Then she went into Greggs, because she’d had no breakfast, and stood in the queue arguing with herself out loud about a steak bake, and I stood on the pavement outside in three pounds’ worth of a dead woman’s taste with my heart still coming down out of my ears, and nothing whatsoever had happened to me on Oldham Street, which was the finding, and I have never since been handed a better one.
The nails came in around then. I paint them by feeling, not by outfit, a private weather nobody else is qualified to read: green for a thing I’ve decided and not yet said, a bitten navy for the days I lose, orange for the loud ones when I mean to take up space on purpose.
And postbox red. Red’s the bravest bottle in the cabinet, the one I put on when I want to be seen and haven’t quite got the nerve to be seen without help, and I put it on more than I’d admit to, because most days the wanting-to-be-seen and the not-having-the-nerve turn up in the same body at the same hour.
People compliment the colour and I say ta and don’t explain that they’ve just read my diary off the ends of my fingers and understood not a word.