Six #4
The wrist went, when I reached for the mug. Same tremor as his on the bench, three weeks the other way round, and if he clocked the symmetry he never said, and I don’t think he did, and I’d rather he didn’t.
I said sorry. It came out about a third the size of my normal voice.
He said don’t.
I said I’m not, I’m not —
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to.’
And then he put his mug on the floor and lay down on top of the duvet, on top, in his joggers, with six inches between us and his back to my back, not touching, the lamp still on.
I have never been so precisely met by anyone in my life.
Not held. Held would have been a demand: held means you have to receive it, arrange your face, be grateful in some legible way.
He lay down on top of the covers at a distance of six inches like a man lying on a mat between sets, like he wasn’t staying, like the whole arrangement was provisional and I could end it by breathing wrong — and that provisionality was the gift.
He’d made it costless. There was nothing to accept and therefore nothing to perform.
I got the notebook.
The word was car.
Three letters. Welsh, obviously; you can see it in the hand, the consonants standing closer together than English lets them.
It’s an old word and it’s gone soft in modern usage, it survives mostly inside caru, to love, and in the vocative you still hear in kitchens.
But it’s a noun, properly, and what it means is: one of your own.
A kinsman. Not blood, necessarily, though it’ll do for blood. A person who is yours.
I’ve kept the notebooks since I was seventeen.
A shelf of them now. They’re not a diary and they’re not drafts; they’re definitions, because I worked out early that the language I’d been handed had a hole in it exactly my shape, and that I could either spend my life apologising for not fitting the words or I could get a pen.
Some of them are for words that are mine and that nobody else uses that way.
Some are for words I haven’t found yet, and those ones are just a heading and a lot of white.
That night I was trying to write the definition of car, because after thirty years I still haven’t got a word for what Rhi is.
Friend is an insult. Sister is a lie and a theft — I’ve got a brother, the word’s spoken for, and Rhi’s got her own family and I’m not applying for a place in it.
Chosen family is a phrase from a leaflet.
And I sat there with the pen and I wrote car at the top and looked at it and knew it was wrong, because car still means one of your own, and the whole content of the evening was that I’d just proved I don’t know how to be one.
I wrote it. Crossed it out. Wrote it again with a qualifier. Crossed that out. Three more goes, all crossed, the last one hard enough to bend the leather.
Then blank.
He was awake. He’s rubbish at pretending, his breathing goes obvious.
And I turned the notebook round and held it open for him to look at, which I have never done for another living person, and he looked at the page and did not read it.
I watched him not read it. He kept his eyes on the shape of the thing and off the letters, the way you’d look at somebody’s medical notes on a desk you happened to be standing at.
‘You don’t have to show me,’ he said.
‘I know.’
That was the whole exchange. I told him I write definitions, sometimes for words that are mine and sometimes for words I haven’t found, and he said yeah, and the yeah had understanding in it, actual understanding, not the polite kind: a man whose entire trade is making a thing that will hold a load recognising, without needing it explained, that this was also that.
The notebook went back on the nightstand. Pen on top, no cap, the way it always is.
I said stay where you are.
He said I’m not moving.
I texted Rhi four days later. Not an apology; I’d have got the apology wrong in text and she’d have known I’d drafted it.
The window’s open.
Three words, which is one more than the two I’d use for the best news of my life two years on, and she rang inside forty seconds and neither of us referred to any of it, ever, beyond one sentence about eight months later when she said, apropos of nothing, in a car, you were right that I’ve had it easy and I was right that you’ve never rung me first, and then put the radio on.
I never wrote the definition. It’s still blank in that notebook, on a shelf in a room in Peckham that gets the morning, with three crossings-out above it and a bent cover.
I’ve come to think the blank is the entry. Some things you can only define by the width of the space you leave for them, and thirty years is a very wide space, and the pen was never going to be the right instrument for it.
He never asked. That’s the definition too, if you want it, and it took me years to see that it was: a man who had every fact required to ask and didn’t, lying on top of a duvet six inches away with his boots off and his joggers on, at a distance calculated by somebody who has never in his life calculated anything except loads, so that there was nothing for me to receive and nothing for me to be.