Six
Chapter fourteen. A man falls. The woman walks to him in the dark and doesn’t explain herself.
Iclock her three seconds before she reaches the table, which is two and a half seconds more warning than I usually get.
You learn the walk. That’s not a claim to anything mystical; it’s the same skill a barman has for the drunk who’s going to be a problem in twenty minutes, or a nurse has for the one in the waiting room who’s actually ill.
There’s a particular approach a person makes towards a table with two people at it when they’ve only come for one of them, and it’s all in the eyeline: they fix on the face they want and they don’t let the eyes travel, because letting the eyes travel means arriving at me, and arriving at me means having to decide something before they’ve got to the table.
She was Gaz’s, and I’d heard about her for months in the affectionate shorthand men use for each other’s girlfriends, and I’d have been glad to meet her.
The rest of this is going to sound like a grudge and it isn’t one.
I’d have liked her. She had a good coat on and a laugh that arrived a fraction early, and on any other approach vector I’d have moved my laptop and made room.
‘Ronan! Hi.’
Then she clocked me, and there was the half-second — I’ve stopped counting them and I still time them — and the smile held all the way through it, and the eyes went back to him, because he was the part of the table she understood.
‘This is Celyn,’ he said. Because he’s Ron and the fault in him has never once been that he doesn’t try, he put my name down between the three of us, careful, the way he’d set something down with a level on it and wait for it to read true.
She stepped over it.
I want to be exact about the mechanism, because the mechanism is the whole thing and everybody gets it wrong.
She didn’t insult me. She didn’t misgender me, which is what people expect you to be complaining about and is, in a way, the easier weather, because a wrong word is a thing with edges you can put a hand on.
She did something smaller and considerably more expensive: she declined to complete the transaction.
She let a name land in the air and left it there, and asked him instead whether he’d known she came here.
Then she pulled a chair over from the next table without asking anybody, and sat down, and stayed.
That’s the part I’d put in evidence if it ever came to evidence.
She didn’t drop a clanger and flee, which is what people picture when you tell them, and what you can forgive inside a week.
She sat down at a table that had two people at it and ran a full conversation with one of them for the better part of half an hour, and she ran it at an angle: chair squared to him, one shoulder turned off against my laptop, the way you’d stand to a window you’d decided in advance not to look out of.
The quiz had fallen through and she’d seen his head through the glass, and after that it was the site, the steel, the pour.
She was good on the pour, in fact, she’d clearly had it off Gaz over a fortnight of dinners and kept the whole of it, and she gave it back to Ron fast at first and then slower once he started answering, because she’d got him answering and wanted the going to stay slow.
And in half an hour she never once arrived.
That’s the entire event. Not a slight, not a snub, nothing you could carry to anybody without sounding like you’d gone looking: a woman talking competently about reinforced concrete eighteen inches from a person she had elected not to reach.
There was a version of that evening on the table the whole time where she asked me what I was writing.
It would have cost her one sentence. It never got within a mile of being said.
‘You on your own?’
My mug was on the table. My laptop was open between us, angled towards me, plainly mine. I was, by any ordinary reading of the room, on the table with him.
He said no, and she said oh, and then sorry, I meant, and didn’t finish it, and the eyes came at me and went off again quick as a dropped tool, and what she arrived at instead was whether he’d like the table by the window, bit more room, and the room she meant was the room I was in. He said he was alright here.
My hands stopped on the keys when she sat down and then I typed, which is what I did for the rest of it, steadily, at a sentence I have no memory of writing and later deleted, because the alternative was to look up and put a face on, and the faces available to me at that moment were all worse than the typing: the bright one, which is a performance and costs me the rest of the evening; the flat one, which she’d have read as rude and reported to Gaz as rude; or my own, unarranged, which is the one thing I’ve never once been able to hand a stranger who’s already decided not to look at it.
She asked for his number, for a flatmate who’s an architect and would die for a tour of a restoration, and it came out rehearsed, the way a thing does when somebody’s built it on the walk over and is grateful to have found somewhere to put it.
She touched his arm. She stood too fast and the chair went back on the boards and she said see you, yeah, to him, and nothing at all to me, not hello, not goodbye, because you can’t say goodbye to somebody you’ve managed not to have arrived at.
He said my name and I heard him do it, and that was the actual event of the evening, and he doesn’t know it was.
Ten minutes later I couldn’t have told you the colour of her coat.
We walked home at ten. Cold, my scarf doing its trailing thing, me half a step ahead the way I go when I’m running a sum I don’t want company for, and he asked if I was alright and I said tired, which was true and also the compact version, and then, because it was him, I gave him the rest of it two streets later.
‘She couldn’t look at me.’
‘I said your name.’
‘You did.’ And I didn’t slow down, because slowing down would have made it a conversation, and I wasn’t after a conversation, I was after him knowing. ‘Put it down careful. She stepped over it like a puddle.’
He tried the reasonable one. She was just awkward, I think, not —
‘Awkward still lands on me.’
I heard my own voice go flat on it, the register that arrives whenever a thing’s both true and old, and I let it, because that’s the register the fact actually lives in.
It happens a lot. It doesn’t get less shit.
Those are two sentences I have been saying, in one arrangement or another, since I was nineteen, and the reason they come out flat isn’t that I’ve stopped minding.
It’s that I’ve spent a decade learning to say them at a volume that doesn’t cost the listener anything, because a listener who’s been charged for the information tends to stop asking for it.
The cost isn’t the woman. The woman is nothing; she was uncomfortable for eleven seconds and went home and thought about something else.
The cost is the machinery. It’s that I ran the whole approach at three seconds’ notice — eyeline, gait, the crop — and had my hands doing something innocuous before she was in earshot, and none of that was a decision, all of it was reflex, and reflexes get built the way calluses do, one small abrasion at a time over years.
I’ve got a whole nervous system trained on a hazard that mostly doesn’t materialise and occasionally does, and the training is the tax, not the hazard.
And this: he’d said my name and she’d walked over the top of it, and what I sat there feeling, under the typing, wasn’t humiliation.
It was the small awful arithmetic of being with somebody good in a world with a variable in it.
He can be perfect. He was perfect. He said the name and put it down level and didn’t flinch when she declined it.
And it still didn’t work, because the transaction needed two people and only one of them was in it, and no quantity of him is ever going to be able to make a stranger arrive at me.
That’s the thing you don’t get told when you finally find the man who reads you right.
You think the reading’s the whole problem solved.
It isn’t. It’s the best half of it solved permanently, and the other half handed back to you outdoors, in public, at ten at night, with your scarf trailing, unsolved, for life.
I didn’t say any of that. I said awkward still lands on me and let him carry the rest of the walk in silence, and he did carry it, badly, the way he carries anything he can’t fix with a hand, and I let him do that too, because there’s a kindness in letting a man be useless next to you instead of sending him away to be useless out of sight.
Ten days later I was on the floor of my own flat at ten past seven on a Monday with my feet up on the bed, having covered a Monday I never cover, and there’s a specific ruin a restaurant makes of a body between the ankle and the knee that you only fully meet on the wrong night of the week for it.
And I texted him first. The version where a man reaches for me out of the dark is the better story, and it isn’t what happened: I reached for him, idly, off my own boredom, four words and a question mark sent up the road to somebody I liked.
How was your day?
What came back was four words of information and about eleven of subtext.
Bad day on site. Someone got hurt.
I read it twice, and the subtext is the reason I was already reaching for my boots before I’d finished the second read, because in a year of asking that man questions I had never once had a bad day back.
I’d had long one. I’d had knackered, and then an evening of nothing, and then fine by Wednesday.
A man who answers how was your day with someone got hurt isn’t filing a report.
He’s got a hand out of a window and no idea he’s put it there.
Are you okay?
Yeah, think so.
Which is the answer of a man who has been asked a question he hasn’t got the equipment to open.
Where are you?
Canal, near Castlefield.