Eleven #4
Because the verdict I can’t survive isn’t dislike. Dislike is fine, dislike is material. It’s pity. And pity only ever attaches to a person a stranger has read as unresolved.
She stopped in the doorway, and I counted.
One. Two.
Three.
‘You must be Celyn.’ Warm, and immediate, and pitched exactly the way she’d pitch it at a neighbour who’d come round with a baby. ‘I’m Eileen. The kettle’s on. Good. Sit down, love, I’ll pour.’
And she took his kitchen off him in under a minute, and told him his fridge was a disgrace, and I sat down at his table and had tea made for me in my own boyfriend’s flat by a woman I’d met ninety seconds earlier, and did not have to do a single thing.
She asked where in Wales and told me about six days of rain and Sean falling in a stream.
She said he deserved it. I laughed, the real one, the whole-face one, the one that gets away from me, and I watched her watch me do it, and there was nothing on her face at all.
Not adjustment. Not the little recalibration you learn to spot at forty paces.
Nothing. Just a woman watching somebody laugh at her joke about her husband.
Later she said ‘she’ and corrected it inside a second, unprompted, a gear change with no grinding in it at all, and said ‘they’re lovely, Ron’, and did not look at me while she did it, because looking at me would have made it a favour.
I want to say something about that correction, because I have had a great many of them made in my vicinity and most of them are for the corrector.
There’s a way of doing it where the person makes a small production of the mistake, apologises to you, waits, and what they’ve actually done is hand you the labour: now you have to be gracious, now you have to reassure them, now you have to manage the feelings of the person who just got you wrong. I’ve spent whole evenings on that.
Eileen said it, corrected it, and carried on with the sentence she was in the middle of.
The whole thing took under a second. She did not look at me, she did not apologise, she did not require anything, and the reason is that she wasn’t performing an accommodation.
She was just getting it right, the way you’d correct yourself on somebody’s name or the number of a bus.
Her son does exactly the same thing and has never once been told where he got it.
She took me to the bar afterwards. My bar, the corner table.
I want that on the record for its own sake: the first person from his family to sit at that table with me was his mother, on a Wednesday, in May, over a half of Guinness she ordered by informing the barman she’d not be having anything with Northern Soul in the name of it.
I told her the risotto story. She laughed so hard the Guinness went up her nose and I handed her a napkin and said careful, Mrs Carrick and she said oh, call me Eileen, none of this Mrs Carrick nonsense, and Ron sat between us with a pint going warm in his hand and said practically nothing for an hour, and looked, the entire time, like a man watching a wall come in true.
Here’s what I clocked that afternoon, and it took me most of the walk home to have the sentence for it.
She never once asked me the question.
Not the polite version, not the interested version, not the if you don’t mind me asking.
An hour of talk — Lewisham, the writing, the restaurant, my mother, her tiles — and not one question about my body, my history, my paperwork or my pronouns, and I have met perhaps four people in my adult life capable of that, and two of them are in that family.
And it isn’t incuriosity. She’s the nosiest woman I have ever met; she asked me my rent.
It’s that she’d sorted the whole matter out in three seconds at a doorway and had not, at any point since, revisited it, because as far as Eileen Carrick was concerned the question of what I was had been settled on arrival and the remaining business was whether I’d give her the pasta recipe.
She pulled him aside by the loos on the way back. I know what she said to him there, because he told me, in bed, months later, in about nine words, the way he tells anything that matters: she said both of you.
I had to ask him twice what was significant about it, and then he explained about his father, and the same two words in a living room in Lewisham with the football on, and how a man can hand you a sentence like a diagnosis and a woman can hand you the identical sentence like a fact she’d known longer than you had.
That’s the whole difference and it’s got nothing to do with the words.
I’ve built a career on the position that the words are everything, that if you get the sentence right the thing is carried.
Twice in eight weeks that year I was shown otherwise — in a kitchen under Yr Wyddfa where a name in the air did no damage because a man stood in the gap it left, and in a corridor with a broken hand dryer where two words that had been a wound became, in a different mouth, a floor.
I’ve never got that into a book. I’ve tried. It comes out as an essay every time, and the reason, I think, is that it isn’t a sentence at all. It’s a load path. It only shows up in what stands.