Nine #2
It’s the most anyone in my family has said to me about my love life in the whole of it, and it arrived as a metaphor about heating, from a man who doesn’t know the first fact about the person it’s aimed at, not his name, not his trade, not that he’s a he, and it’s better advice than anything the cohort or the internet or my own overqualified brain has managed in three weeks of drafting sentences at a silence.
‘When did you get wise,’ I say.
‘I’m not wise. I’m a plumber.’ He hangs the towel on the rail dead straight, because Owain hangs everything dead straight.
‘Same thing, some days.’ And then, because forty years of Beynon men not saying things has to go somewhere and the sink’s had its share tonight, he puts his hand on the back of my neck once, rough, the exact grip from the station, the family’s whole vocabulary of love in one hold that’s gone before either of us has to have a face about it.
‘Text me. If it’s gone. I’ll bring the van. ’
‘Rhi’s already offered the van.’
‘Then it’s a convoy,’ says my brother, and puts the kettle on, because we are, whatever else, our mother’s children.
Dad finds me on the back step on Boxing Day, both of us out of the house for the same reason, which is that a house full of people you love is exhausting in a way you can’t say to any of them.
He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He’s not built for the question, and I’m grateful, because the answer would take the whole of the yard.
He stands next to me a while, looking at the dark shape of the mountain, and then he says, not quite to me: ‘Whoever it is. Up in Manchester.’ A pause long enough to lose a smaller man in. ‘They’d be lucky.’
I don’t ask how he knew. He’s a retired postman.
Forty years of reading which envelopes carry bad news off the weight and the handwriting alone, and his own kid comes home for Christmas with a face like a returned letter; he’s not going to miss it just because he’s never had the vocabulary for the sender.
‘It’s complicated,’ I say.
‘Aye. It would be.’ He blows on his hands.
Doesn’t say a partner, doesn’t say a name, doesn’t chance a they.
What he says instead, to the cold, in the only currency he’s got, is: ‘You’re not to let anyone up there make you small.
’ And then, because that’s cost him about as much as he keeps in the account: ‘Right. It’s brass out here. ’
He goes in. Leaves me on the step with the mountain and the winded, enormous fact of a man who can’t manage my pronoun telling me, in one flat sentence he’ll never refer to again, the one thing I most needed to hear from precisely him.
Mam worries out loud, in questions, in the kettle.
Dad worries in five-word sentences on a freezing step and then apologises for the weather.
Between the two of them, at their two different speeds, I have never once actually doubted that I was wanted in that house.
I’ve doubted whether they understood me.
Never whether they’d have me. Those turn out to be very different griefs, and only one of them is fatal.
I stayed out on the step a while after he’d gone in, because a sentence like that needs somewhere to land and the kitchen was too warm and too full of people for it.
My father, who has never once managed my pronoun clean, who reaches for the old word out of forty years of muscle and catches it late or not at all, had just told me, in the only register he owns, that I was not to let anyone make me small.
And the thing that undid me, out there in the cold with the mountain a darker shape against a dark sky, wasn’t the sentiment.
It was the accuracy. Because making myself small is the exact thing I’ve done my whole life, the compact version, the self edited down to fit a room, and I’d never once said that to him, never handed him the vocabulary, and he’d read it off me anyway, the way he read forty years of bad news without opening a single envelope.
He can’t say they. He’ll go to his grave reaching for it and missing by a half-beat.
But he clocked the one true danger to me from two hundred miles off and named it in five words on a freezing step, and I decided out there, and stand by it still: I’ll take a father who can’t manage my pronoun but sees my whole self over one who says every word right and reads none of me.
The pronoun’s the last mile. He’s done all the miles before it.
I’m not going to audit the last one to death when he’s walked me the whole rest of the way home.
The manuscript’s finished by Boxing Day.
I didn’t plan it that way; I’d told myself I was done with the first draft weeks ago and had simply been circling the last chapter the way you circle any ending you’re afraid will feel too small once you’ve actually written it.
But grief, it turns out, is efficient. I sit at the little desk under the sloped roof with my laptop balanced on a stack of Shirley Jackson, the whole house asleep, the frost thick on the window, and I write the final line of The Threshold in the same room where a swimming certificate still hangs on the back of the door with a name I don’t answer to any more.
I want to mark what it means that the book got finished there, in that room, because I didn’t plan it and I don’t believe in tidy symbolism and this was tidy enough to embarrass a lesser writer.
Two years of a novel, and the last line arrives under the blue ceiling of a room decorated for a boy who never came, in a house that got my name wrong for a quarter century and loved me through the wrongness, on the desk where I did my GCSE revision as someone I’ve since retired.
If I’d written that as a coincidence in a draft, Marged would have circled it and put ‘too neat’ in the margin, and she’d have been right, and life doesn’t care what’s too neat.
The frost was thick on the window. The house was asleep.
I typed the last full stop of The Threshold and sat with it a while, and what I felt wasn’t triumph, or not only.
It was the specific vertigo of finishing a thing that took the best of you and finding the room hasn’t changed: the mountain still out there in the dark, the swimming certificate still on the door with the old name on it, and you the only thing in the house that’s different, and even you only slightly, and only where the light can’t reach.
The last line isn’t about the house at all, in the end, though the house is the whole of what the book pretends to be about.
It’s about a woman standing in a doorway deciding whether the room on the other side is going to hold her weight, and choosing, finally, exhausted, to test it anyway, because the alternative, standing forever on the threshold, isn’t actually a safer place to live. It just feels like one.
I close the laptop at two in the morning with the whole book behind me for the first time in two years, and I don’t know, typing the last full stop in a room painted the wrong colour for the person who finally grew up in it, whether I’ve just finished a novel or finished something else as well, something with his name at the bottom of it that I haven’t let myself write down anywhere except in the shape of every unanswered text since the showcase.
I go to sleep under the blue ceiling with the manuscript done and the question still entirely open, and for once I don’t try to draft an ending for the part of my life that isn’t fiction.
Some doors you have to leave shut until somebody, somewhere, decides to come and stand on the other side of them.