Five
Chapter eleven. The builder learns the word for what he is. He files it under later.
Twelve copies, stapled, my name in the corner in a font Pritchard insists on because it’s the one the industry uses, and I hand them round the seminar table the way you’d hand round something live, careful not to let the pages fan.
‘First chapter of the new thing,’ Pritchard says, to the room, not to me, the way he introduces everyone’s work like he discovered it personally. ‘Celyn’s been sitting on this one.’
I haven’t been sitting on it. I’ve been writing it at a fire exit with a pencil between orders, but sitting on it sounds better in a room with biscuits, so I let it stand.
Marged reads with her whole body, always has, the copy held close, mouth moving very slightly on the good lines, and I watch her get to the paragraph where the woman first sees the man on the scaffold and go still in a way the others don’t.
Tom’s already flicking to the end to see how long it is.
Priya’s got a pencil out before she’s finished the first page, which is what the good ones do.
Pritchard reads the way he reads everything, unhurried, a man tasting something he’s already decided he’ll approve of.
The two-minutes-of-praise-before-the-knife starts with Tom, who says it’s ‘really visual,’ which is what Tom says about everything, including the fire alarm test we had last week.
Priya’s sharper: she likes the palm-flat-on-concrete gesture, wants to know if it recurs, and I say it does, careful, giving away exactly as much of the mechanism as keeps a workshop happy without giving away the mechanism.
Marged doesn’t say anything for a while. When she does, she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at the page, tapping the paragraph with one finger like she’s checking a pulse of her own.
‘She never lets anyone finish a sentence for her,’ Marged says.
‘The woman. Everyone in the scene keeps starting to explain her to herself and she keeps talking over the top of it. It’s not rude, exactly.
It’s like she’s decided in advance she isn’t going to be told what she is.
’ A pause, still looking at the page and not at me. ‘Where’s that come from.’
‘She’s stubborn,’ I say, which is true and also nothing.
‘Mm.’ Marged doesn’t push. That’s the whole danger of Marged: she doesn’t need to push, she just puts the true thing down on the table and lets it sit there being true while the conversation moves on around it.
Pritchard takes the room back the way he always does, hands flat on his own copy, and comes round the table under cover of making a point, the way he does, stopping behind my chair to lean over and tap a line on my own page with one finger — close enough that I feel his breath change the temperature of the air by my ear, his other hand landing, briefly, over mine where it’s resting on the desk, still, the way you’d steady someone about to interrupt.
I don’t move my hand. Moving it would make it a thing, and I’ve learned exactly how much a thing costs in this room and decided, again, that it costs less to let it sit there three seconds than to make everyone watch me decide it matters.
He straightens up. Delivers the verdict I’ve been waiting for since I stapled the pages, back at the head of the table now, hand doing something useful with a pen instead.
‘This is very controllable material,’ he says, and I watch three other people nod at a sentence that means nothing and everything.
‘A woman watching a man work — the reader knows exactly what shelf this goes on. Domestic, aspirational, a bit of ache in it. You could sell this on the cover alone.’ He taps the table, pleased with himself, pleased with me by extension.
‘Keep the register there. Don’t let her get too clever.
Cleverness is what makes agents nervous about who’s going to buy it. ’
Controllable. I write the word down in my own margin, because I’m going to want it later.
It isn’t insult. It’s closer to relief — and under the relief, the thing I don’t want: he’s read it almost right.
Not the whole shape, not what’s actually underneath the house and the walls, but close enough to the true mechanism that I go home that night and reread every page for the seam he might have felt, and I find two, and I fix them, and the fixing feels less like craft and more like closing a coat.
I’d wanted to be read. And here was a man reading almost right, and my first instinct wasn’t good, he sees it. It was cover better next time.
Rhi’s outside on the low wall by the entrance when I get out, coat done up wrong, a chip cone going cold in one hand, and she doesn’t ask how it went, she just holds the cone out and lets me take three before she says anything.
‘Well?’
‘Pritchard called it controllable.’
‘Pritchard would call a house fire controllable if it sold film rights.’ She takes the cone back, eats one, considers. ‘What’d the scary one say? The poet.’
‘Marged.’
‘Her. What’d she say?’
I tell her. Rhi goes quiet in the specific way that means she’s actually thinking and not just waiting for her turn to talk, which for Rhi is a rare enough event I always clock it.
‘Cel.’ She says my name like she’s about to ask something she already half-knows the answer to. ‘Why’s it a woman.’
‘What d’you mean, why’s it a woman.’
‘The one watching the fella. Why’s it not you.’ She’s not looking at me when she says it, looking at the chip cone instead, which is its own kindness, giving me a place to land my eyes that isn’t her face. ‘You watch men exactly like that. I’ve seen you do it. You’ve never once written it as you.’
I could give her the workshop answer, the one about market categories and reader comfort and the difference between what a room will let a woman narrator get away with and what it won’t forgive in anyone else.
It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole of it either, and Rhi’s earned better than the compact version, even if I’m not ready to hand her the rest tonight.
‘Because a woman in the watching chair, nobody asks what she is,’ I say, in the end. ‘They just ask if she’s likeable.’
Rhi looks at me a long moment, the loud gone quiet the way it does maybe twice a year, and doesn’t say the thing I can see her deciding not to say, which I’m grateful for, because I’m not ready to hear it out loud yet, not even from her.
‘Right,’ she says instead, and holds out the last chip, and I take it, and we walk back towards the bus stop not talking about it any more, which is its own kind of mercy, the only kind either of us is any good at handing over on a Thursday night in the cold.
Twenty minutes before a reading I go somewhere nobody’s allowed to follow, not Rhi, not Pritchard, not even the version of myself that’s going to walk out there in a minute and perform being unbothered.
I stand in the corridor by the fire extinguisher with the pages in my hand, and I read the first line to myself, silently, lips barely moving, the way you’d check a knot before you trust your weight to it.
Pritchard finds me there. He always does, some instinct tutors have for the exact moment a student least wants company, and he puts his hand on my elbow and leaves it a half-second past anywhere it needs to be.
I’ve stopped examining the grip. Examining it would cost more than letting it sit.
This reading series is his, he put my name on the programme when he didn’t have to, wrote the email that got the visiting agent into the room tonight, and men like Pritchard don’t do favours, they extend credit, and they collect it in small physical currencies at the precise moments you can’t afford to make a scene.
The elbow is tonight’s instalment. I let him have it and keep the change.
‘You’ll be marvellous,’ he says, which is what he says every time, the sentence worn smooth from reuse, and I say thank you, and mean the thanks more than I mean the smoothness of it, and we go in.
I’ve decided how I feel about Pritchard, which took a while, because the easy readings are both available and both wrong.
The easy villain: an older man trading access for the small currency of a hand on an elbow, and me the vulnerable student paying it.
The easy gratitude: a generous mentor who put me on the programme and got the agent in the room, and I owe him.
Both are true and neither is the whole, and I’ve learned to hold the two without collapsing them, because collapsing them is how you become either a victim who can’t act or a debtor who can’t say no.
What’s actually true is smaller and greyer.
He opened a door I couldn’t open myself.
He also charges a toll I never agreed to and can’t refuse without losing the door, and he knows it, and I know it, and we conduct the whole thing in the smoothed-over language of mentorship because naming it would cost us both the fiction we need to keep working together.
The writing stays mine; no toll he levies gives him a share of it.
That’s the deal I’ve made and the one I’ll break the day I don’t need the door, and not a day before, because I grew up watching my mother keep a warm voice on a phone for people she was quietly pricing, and I know exactly how to be pleasant to a man while I count.
I don’t perform the pages here. You’ve read them, or you will, the version with the kitchen and the cupboards that weren’t there yesterday, and there’s no use my writing the writing again; a thing only gets to be new once, and I already spent that once on the room itself, forty-odd strangers holding their breath in a row of plastic chairs that don’t fit anybody’s knees.