Twelve #2
I ring Rhi before I’ve even got the dress on.
Of course I do. She read the thing in pieces at a corner table before it had an ending, before it had a shelf, before a single person with the power to buy it had laid eyes on a page, and she’s earned every scream since we were four, and she gets this one before anybody.
She picks up on the second ring. I can hear the tea towel — you can hear a tea towel, if it’s Rhi’s, if she’s got the phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder and hasn’t seen fit to stop drying — and I don’t say hello.
‘Four editors,’ I say. ‘It went to auction.’
There’s about a second and a half of nothing, which for Rhi is a geological era, and then she gives it, and it’s louder than the café was, loud enough that I have to take the phone off my ear and hold it out over a box marked KITCHEN — FRAGILE, and somewhere behind her Aled asks, in genuine alarm, whether someone’s died.
‘Worse,’ she tells him, off the phone, not covering the mouthpiece. ‘Someone’s succeeded.’
Then a clatter, which is the tea towel going somewhere a tea towel doesn’t live, and Aled’s voice arriving nearer and wanting to know is that Cel, tell Cel, and Rhi telling him to get off, and Aled saying tell them congratulations properly, not shouted, and Rhi pointing out that she had said congratulations, she’d screamed it, and Aled saying that’s not the same thing, and the two of them conducting the whole of their marriage in six seconds down a phone line while I stood in a room with no curtains up.
Then, back to me, and the loud drops clean out of her the way it does maybe twice a year: ‘Say it again.’
‘It sold, Rhi.’
‘Say the number of editors.’
‘Four.’
‘Four.’ A breath. ‘The first three can read it in a shop like everyone else.’
I laugh so hard I have to sit down on the box, and she lets me, and doesn’t fill the gap.
Then: ‘Where is he, then?’
‘Site. He’ll be an hour.’
‘And?’ One syllable, and thirty years of load sitting on it, because she is the only living person entitled to ask me that particular question in that particular tone, and she has never once spent the entitlement carelessly.
So I said it out loud, which I hadn’t done yet, not to him, not to myself, not in the four hours since a woman in London used the word auction down a phone line at me.
That the money meant the house got a floor.
That I could stop counting shifts against a rent.
That a thing I’d hidden inside a woman in a watching chair for two years had been read by four strangers who’d no reason on earth to be kind to it, and wanted anyway.
And then the rest of it, the bit I hadn’t planned on hearing myself say: that the only face I wanted the news to land on was on the far side of London under a hard hat, and that I was going to have to stand in a hallway and hand it over with no scaffolding round it at all, and that I wanted to, badly, and that wanting somebody’s face that much used to frighten the life out of me and had stopped at some point in the last year without applying for permission.
‘Right,’ she said, when I’d finished. Just that, and let it sit. Then, because she’s Rhi: ‘Put the dress on before he’s in. The good one. Don’t you dare tell that man on the doorstep in a jumper, Cel, you’ll be regretting it in thirty years and I’ll be the one hearing about it.’
And after that she said the only sentence out of the whole day I’ve never repeated to anybody, including him: ‘Your mam’s going to have to learn how to say it out loud in a shop.’
And I sat on a box in an empty house in London with the phone against my ear and cried for about forty seconds, properly, the ugly kind, and my oldest friend stayed on the line and said nothing at all and did not once ask me why.
He comes home at a run, more or less, and I’ve had exactly long enough alone with the news to put on the dress and the heels and the full ceremony of it, because some victories deserve the whole costume, and when he comes through the door I tell him properly, the auction, the four editors, the specific vindication of a man in a supervision meeting a year and a half ago who called my protagonist passive and got it precisely, magnificently wrong.
He listens to the whole of it with his face doing the thing it does when he’s decided not to interrupt a good sentence, and then he crosses the flat and picks me up properly, off my feet, laughing into my neck, and for a minute neither of us says anything else at all, because some things, once you’ve said the two words that matter, don’t actually need any more language behind them.
He picked me up off my feet, is the detail I keep, because for a man that careful with his own weight it’s the least careful thing I’ve ever seen him do.
Two years of a person who checks a floor before he trusts it, who kept his boots on the first night in case leaving fast was ever asked of him, and here he was swinging me off the ground in a flat full of boxes without once checking whether the floor would take it, and it did, and he laughed into my neck, and I understood the man had finally stopped bracing.
The London of it was Ron’s doing, if we’re keeping the record straight, though he’d never phrase it that way.
A job came up, a big one, his name on it and a number under it he read forty times, twenty minutes from his mum’s, a career’s worth of up in one email, and all he had to do was leave.
He put it to me like it was a thing he was doing to me and not for us, braced for the no.
I didn’t give him the no. The book was portable; I was on enough for two, once the two words landed.
We bought a wreck in Peckham with a room in it that gets the morning, because catching the morning has mattered to me since a train three years and a whole self ago, and some things you decide once and just go on being true about.
The house needs everything. That’s what we could afford, a house that needs everything, in a bit of Peckham the estate agent called ‘up and coming’ with the straight face they train into them, and Ron walks through it on the first viewing with his palm flat on the walls the way he checks everything, reading the damp and the settlement and the forty years of somebody else’s bodges, and comes out the far side of the survey grinning like a man handed a problem he actually wants.
It’s the happiest I’ve seen him. Give the man a wreck and a decade and he’ll give you back a home; that’s the whole of what he does, and I fell for him doing it to a bar corner before he ever did it to a house.
I pick the room that gets the morning for the writing, and he doesn’t ask why the morning matters.
He just carries the desk up two flights without being told which room, because he’d already clocked which window I stood at longest on the viewing, and set it under that one, and that’s him entire: he doesn’t ask you to explain the thing you love.
He watches you long enough to work it out, and then he builds you the shelf for it.
Not every night in the Peckham house is a good one, whatever the postcode’s started meaning to us since.
There’s a Thursday in the second month, ordinary until the bathroom mirror hands me back somebody I didn’t invite — the old wrongness, the one that doesn’t knock first and doesn’t explain itself when it lets itself in.
I know this particular weather by now. What I don’t know yet, in a house that’s finally ours, is what to do with it when there’s someone in the next room instead of two hundred miles of silence to run it in front of.
He’s on the bed when I come through, some site paperwork spread over the duvet, and he clocks me in under a second, the way he clocks most things about me by now, and sets the papers down before I’ve said a word.
‘Not tonight,’ I say. Plain. No dressing it up as a headache or a mood. ‘Not that part, I mean. It’s not you.’
‘Right.’ He doesn’t come towards me and he doesn’t put distance between us either, which is exactly the correct amount of movement, and I love him a little for getting the maths right without being told, two years in. ‘Tell me what is.’
‘Everything else.’ I take the overhead light off and put the lamp on instead, because low and gold does more for me tonight than honest ever will, and I keep my shirt on, because armour isn’t always a lie — sometimes it’s just furniture you need in the room a while longer.
‘Just not down there. Not a hand, not a mouth, not accidentally in passing. All the rest of me’s open for business. ’
‘Understood.’
He gets me down onto the bed the way he always does, no rush anywhere in it, and starts at my neck instead of anywhere further south, which isn’t an accident, because two years of this has taught him exactly which real estate to lead with.
His mouth works down to my collarbone, my chest, and I keep the joggers on, low-slung, an actual physical border where the rule needs one to be honest about itself, and his hands stay north of it without me having to remind him twice.
‘Good?’
‘Good.’
He works my chest a long while, unhurried, thumb finding a nipple and staying there until I make the sound that means don’t stop, and I get my hands in his hair and pull his mouth back up to mine, because for a minute I want him close and not working.
He gives me that too. He’s good at knowing which minutes are for working and which are for nothing but the weight of him.
I turn us, eventually, so I’m the one on top, because a hip driving down of my own choosing reads different in my body than a hip arriving from somewhere I’m not steering it, and I get a thigh either side of his, still in the joggers, and grind down slow against the thick line of him through his shorts, nothing bared, nothing pointed at, just weight and friction and two years of knowing exactly which angle does the work.
He gets both hands on my hips, not guiding, just holding on, which is the whole arrangement in one gesture.