Six #3
I sat on the bed with the laptop and read and didn’t ask him to talk, and at some point I looked up and he was washing the plate and the fork and the pan, all three, slowly, in the exact order, and I understood that the washing-up was not the washing-up.
It was a man putting one small system back in working order because the big one had failed that morning and he had to prove to himself that something in the world still went where he put it.
I let him have all three items.
‘Come to bed, Ron.’
He came, which is the only instruction I have ever handed that man that he didn’t cost out first.
Here’s the thing I didn’t write down for two years, because it took me that long to be sure of it and I don’t trust a sentence I’m not sure of.
I’d spent my whole life auditing love for the moment it turns into an invoice.
Every kindness I’d been handed by a man came with a payment schedule somewhere in the small print, and I’d got so good at reading the small print that I could find it in kindnesses that genuinely didn’t have any.
And what I found out, on a wet bench, in the wrong coat, with my feet ruined, was that the fastest way out of that particular habit isn’t being loved well.
It’s loving somebody else with nothing in it for you.
Nothing happened to me on that towpath. Nobody looked at me.
Nobody read me right or wrong. I wasn’t seen, or wanted, or accepted, or any of the other things I’d built a self to go out and get.
I sat in the dark and was of use, and then slept in somebody else’s bed on a Monday with a ruined coat over the back of his chair and a pair of feet I still couldn’t feel at two in the morning, and I have not, before or since, been happier in my own body.
That’s the definition I’d been trying to write for about ten years, and it turned up while I wasn’t holding a pen.
The row with Rhi was three weeks after that, and I’m going to put it down properly, because you never got it, and there’s exactly one version of it in the world and it’s mine.
She’d read the draft. She’s read every draft since we were fifteen and I wrote nine pages about a girl who could stop time and gave it to her on the bus.
It’s not a formality. She’s the best reader I have and always was, better than Marged, better than Pritchard, because the two of them read a manuscript and she reads me, and one of those is a professional skill and the other one is thirty years.
She rang on a Wednesday with her verdict, and I could tell from the first four words that she’d decided something on my behalf before she dialled.
‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘It’s the best thing you’ve done.’ A pause with a kettle in it. ‘And you’ve hidden in it.’
I said something about narrative distance.
‘Don’t do that at me, I’m not the man with the tweed.
’ Rhi has never met Pritchard and has constructed a version of him out of two anecdotes and pure malice, and the version is, annoyingly, accurate.
‘Cel. It’s a woman standing in a doorway watching a fella work, for four hundred pages, and never once going in.
That’s not a novel, that’s a diary with a costume on. ’
‘That’s the whole —‘
‘I know it’s the whole design. I’m not thick.
’ She’d been building this, I could hear the shape of it, the way you can hear a person reading from something they’ve written down.
‘I’m saying you’ve done the same thing to a book that you do to a room.
You’ve put a version out that’s easier for everyone to sit with, and you’ve made it beautiful, and you’ve called the beautiful bit the point, and then you’ve gone and stood at the back where nobody can get a proper look at you. ’
‘You’ve had thirty years of getting a proper look at me.’
‘Have I?’ And she said it lightly, which is how Rhi does the ones that go all the way in.
‘I’ve had thirty years of the very good edition.
Which I love. Which I’d choose over anybody else’s whole self.
’ A breath. ‘You’ve not once, in your life, rung me first when it was bad.
Not once, Cel. I find out after. I’ve always found out after. ’
And I said the thing.
I’m not going to soften it, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t remember it word for word, because I do, and the remembering is the sentence’s only punishment.
I said: ‘It’s easy to be the honest one when nobody’s ever needed you to be anything but what it says on your birth certificate.’
Then, in case that hadn’t done enough: ‘You got the whole ordinary thing handed to you at four, and you’ve spent thirty years being brave about mine.’
Silence with a kitchen in it.
‘Right,’ she said. And put the phone down. And Rhi does not put phones down; Rhi is congenitally incapable of ending a call inside four minutes of the goodbye starting; and the click was the loudest thing I’d heard all year.
It wasn’t a lost temper. I don’t lose my temper. What I did was reach, at speed and with total accuracy, for the one thing that would hurt her, and the reason I could reach it that fast is that I’d been keeping it, filed, for years, without ever once intending to use it.
That’s the bit that frightened me. Not the cruelty. The inventory. I’d been walking round for a decade with a full and current record of the softest place on my oldest friend, kept up to date, in case.
And what was it defending? A note; a true note, from a reader who’d earned the right to give it, about a book I already knew was doing the thing she said it was doing.
She hadn’t accused me of anything I hadn’t accused myself of at three in the morning a hundred times.
She’d just done it out loud, in her voice, in the vowels, and out loud in that voice it was unsurvivable, and I razed her to the ground to make it stop.
I rang back within the hour. It rang out. I rang again at nine. It rang out. I rang once more at half past ten, knowing it would ring out, doing it anyway, because a call you know won’t be answered is the only apology available to a coward at half past ten at night.
Then he came round, because it was a Thursday and Thursdays were his, and he took one look at the flat and made tea instead of asking.
He put the mug on the nightstand next to the notebook and sat on the end of the bed with his back to the headboard, two feet off, and drank his own tea and said nothing at all.
That’s what he did. That’s the whole of the intervention.
I didn’t touch mine. I watched it go cold over about a quarter of an hour, and the fridge clicked on and off, and the rain did the thing it does in that flat where you can hear it changing its mind, and at some point my phone went face down on the nightstand and I did not look at it and he read the name off it before the screen died and never, in the rest of our lives, asked me a single question about it.
Not one. I’ve thought about that more than I’ve thought about most of the kind things I’ve been handed.
He had, sitting on the end of that bed, a name and three unanswered calls and a person crying with their face turned to the wall, and every single ingredient of a reasonable question, and he did not ask it, that night or any night after, because I’d told him a year earlier that asking is the thing I can’t have and he’d filed it the way he files a spec.