Eleven #2
Betws-y-Coed is where it starts. That’s the mile where my shoulders come down whether I’ve given them permission or not, and I’ve never once been able to prevent it or to explain it, and he clocked it happening and said nothing, which is how I know he’d clocked it.
Then the last bend, and the stone wall and the river, and I pointed at the house and heard my own voice do something I hadn’t authorised.
‘They’ll call me Gethin.’
I’d been drafting how to say that since Manchester. What came out was four words with no architecture at all, because there wasn’t a good version and I’d known it since the M56.
‘I know,’ he said.
And I gave him the rest of it in a rush, which I never do, the whole mechanism: that I don’t respond to it.
That it isn’t a fight. That I just don’t turn, and there’ll be a gap where the name hangs in the air, and nobody will say anything, and then Mam will say it again louder because she’ll think I haven’t heard, and that I hate myself for it, the nails going white at the tips on my own knee.
He put his hand over mine and said I’m here, and nothing else.
He has never once in his life reached for the impressive sentence, and it’s taken me years to stop reading that as a shortfall and start reading it as the discipline it actually is.
The impressive sentence is for the speaker.
I’m here is for me, and it’s got no author in it at all.
Here’s what I was actually frightened of, and it wasn’t the name.
The name is a thing I have costed. It’s a bill I’ve been paying at that address for three years, and I know the amount, and I’ve made my peace with paying it, and I’d have paid it that weekend alone without it doing me any real damage.
What I was frightened of was the hallway.
There are eleven photographs going up the stairs in that house and I am in nine of them, and I know exactly which one is the last good one — eight, maybe nine, holding a fish off the bank at Llyn Dinas with a grin that goes all the way to the ears — and I know exactly what happens to my own face in every single frame after it.
School uniform, a blazer bought big to grow into, a haircut, and then the half-thing that isn’t a smile, over and over, up the wall, chronologically, like a graph.
I have watched people look at that wall.
My tutor, once, in a different life. A boyfriend, years back, who did the kind thing and said you were a sweet kid and I could see him not knowing where to put his eyes.
It is the single most exposed square metre on this earth as far as I’m concerned, because it’s the only place where the encrypted version isn’t available: no makeup, no name, no book, no watching chair, just a child with the lights off in a good coat, being loved wrongly, in public, at a stranger’s eye level, on the way to the loo.
I could not have stopped him looking at it. There was no arrangement of that weekend where he didn’t go up those stairs.
He stopped at it. I heard him stop; you can hear a man that size stop on a staircase. He was up there a while.
He came down and did not mention it, then or ever, and what he did instead was go out to the van with Owain before the tea was cold and get his head under the bonnet of a boiler that wasn’t his problem.
Two years later I asked him, once, in bed, what he’d thought.
‘That they loved you,’ he said. Then, after a while, because he doesn’t leave a true thing at half its length once he’s started: ‘And that you weren’t in any of them.’
That’s the whole wall. Nobody else who has ever climbed those stairs has got it in eleven words, and one of the people who has climbed them is a poet.
Catrin took my face in both hands in the kitchen, thumbs on the cheekbones, and kissed my forehead and didn’t use any name at all, which is a thing she has learned to do and which costs her, and I let her, with my eyes shut and the cat sliding off my lap.
Then she poured tea and said, easy as breathing, ‘Gethin says you’re in construction.’
Then the gap.
I didn’t move, because twenty-five years of a name says itself the way a door swings on a worn floorboard, and I know that, and I’ve decided about it, and my whole policy in that kitchen is stillness: I don’t turn, I don’t correct, I don’t perform the wound.
The policy is not forgiveness and it isn’t defeat.
It’s a person with a long horizon deciding that a mother’s mouth is going to arrive about four years behind a mother’s heart, and that auditing the difference every Sunday will cost me the mother.
The policy has one flaw, which is that it requires me to sit inside the gap on my own while it’s happening, and the gap is about a second and a half long, and it is the loneliest room I know.
He got into it.
‘Celyn did,’ he said. Into it. Level. Not loud, not pointed, no glance at me, no glance at her. ‘Site manager. Victoria North, the big restoration in Ancoats.’
And Mam said ‘lovely’ and asked about milk and poured the tea, and the surface of that kitchen did not so much as ripple, and I sat on the counter with my fingers in a cat’s fur and something structural in me went over.
You have to understand what he did, because he doesn’t and never has.
He did not correct my mother. Correcting her would have been about him: a man performing an ally, making a small scene in somebody else’s kitchen, buying himself a good opinion of himself at a cost to be paid later by me, alone, at the sink, in Welsh.
And he did not let it pass either, which would have been the coward’s kindness and is what almost everyone does.
He stood in the gap. He put my name in the air in the ordinary register of a man answering a question about a job, gave her something true and useful to go on with, and gave her no reason on earth to notice that anything had been done at all.
I have written for a living for years and I would not have been able to design that. It requires knowing, precisely, that the wound is not the name but the silence after it, and that the repair therefore isn’t a correction, it’s an occupancy.
Then he found my hand under the table and pressed it, one second, two.
You’re not alone in the gap.
He’d not have put it in words. He’d have gone red.
But that is what the pressure said, and I pressed back, barely, and said ‘please’ to my mother about milk in a voice I got out of somewhere, and that was the entire event, and nobody in that kitchen except the two of us knew that anything had happened in it.
Owain came in the back and put a hand round the back of my neck and pulled me in the way he’s done since he was fourteen and I was eleven, said something filthy in Welsh about my hair, and then sat down and started talking to Ron about foundations.
I’d like to tell you I engineered that, and I didn’t, and what I’d have engineered would have been far worse; I’d have sat them in the front room with the good biscuits and steered the conversation like a woman docking a ship.
What happened instead is that two tradesmen found each other over a kitchen table and forgot the rest of the room existed.
Underpinning. Victorian brick. Steel reinforcement.
Then a job in Caernarfon with a gravity-fed system, and a compression fitting that cracked at minus four, and the pair of them leaning in over a cloth with faded flowers on it, tea going cold, my brother doing the hand gesture our father does, and Ron doing the low right he does when he’s actually listening and not just waiting.
And I sat on the counter with the cat gone and a mug I wasn’t drinking and I could not get my face to hold.
I’d like to be more dignified about this.
I’ve had two years and a book contract to compose a better account of it, and the honest one is: I went.
Mouth soft, eyes wet, the whole undignified apparatus, sat up on a worktop in my mother’s kitchen in front of nobody, because my brother was talking to my bloke about pipes.
I was not frightened that they’d be cruel.
My family isn’t cruel; that’s what makes it complicated.
I was frightened that he’d be a visitor.
That he’d be polite and enormous in a small kitchen for two days, and hold his mug wrong, and be got through, and that afterwards we’d get in the Corsa and I’d have to do the drive back translating both directions, defending Beddgelert to Manchester and Manchester to Beddgelert, which is the job I have done my entire adult life.
And instead he ate the bara brith and asked Owain a follow-up question about the gravity feed, and I was, for the first time since I was nineteen years old, in a room with my family and not the interpreter in it.
Nobody needed anything from me. Not the brother, not the mother, not the man. All three of them were getting on with it and none of them required me to stand between any two of them and convert.
I’ve spent my whole life being fluent. It’s the thing I’m proudest of and it’s the thing that has cost me the most, and I did not know, until I was sitting on a worktop with wet eyes at the age of twenty-five, that fluency is also a job, and that I had never once been off shift.
He looked up mid-sentence and caught me at it.
‘So the compression fitting cracked,’ Owain was saying. ‘Minus four outside and the whole joint froze.’
‘Right,’ Ron said. Still looking at me. ‘Nightmare.’
They put us in the blue room, which was my room, which has a ceiling I painted at fifteen with the door shut and the radio up, a blue that was meant to be night and came out closer to a swimming pool, and which nobody in that house has ever offered to repaint because nobody in that house has ever quite worked out what it was for.
The bed is a single. He is six foot three.
He got in it anyway, on his back, with his feet off the end and one arm along the wall so there’d be room, and looked up at fifteen-year-old me’s idea of a sky.
‘Did this yourself.’
‘Two coats. I was fifteen. I did it in a weekend Mam was in Bangor.’
‘Why blue.’