Page 77 of Proof By Contradiction
I look at Laurence’s hand. Don’t touch it.
‘What does he do?’
‘Construction. Left school at seventeen, proper apprenticeship, been on the tools since. Started out labouring, and now he runs things. Sites. Men. Materials. Problems everyone else has made expensive by pretending they aren’t there.’
Laurence’s mouth shifts faintly.
‘You’d think working on sites would make him, I dunno, the stereotype. And it has, in the sense that he drinks one pint on a Sunday and talks about rebar and can’t be arsed with books. But he’s the cleverest person I know, and it’s got nothing to do with paper. He can look at a wall and tell you what’s wrong with it. He reads a room like I read a proof.’
I look down.
‘He’s not soft. Ron. Not performative. Ron is precisely as much as he says and usually a bit more.’
Laurence waits.
‘He knew before anyone else. Not because I told him. Because there was a window open when I was thirteen and I was on the wrong side of it.’
The flat goes very quiet.
‘Not like that,’ I say, because his face changes. ‘Not dramatically. Just badly. Just thirteen. Everything too big and nowhere to put it.’
Laurence doesn’t interrupt.
‘Ron found me. Climbed out after me in his socks, sat there till I stopped making a state of myself, then called me a stupid pillock and got me back inside.’
I look at the notebook.
‘He didn’t ask. That was the point. He knew enough not to ask.’
A beat.
Laurence looks at me for a long moment.
A breath.
‘He’s a Carrick man. Nobody in our house says love you out loud. It’s a whole thing. My nan used to say it at Christmas and the men would all get embarrassed and find a tea towel to fold.’
Laurence’s mouth moves, almost.
‘Ron’s never said it. He ends every phone call with this little pause, where thelove youwould go if he could work out how to say it. Then he says,right, and hangs up. Every time.’
Laurence looks down at the table. At my hand. At the inch between us.
‘Does he know,’ he says eventually, ‘that you’re?—’
He stops himself.
Either not the question he wants to ask, or exactly the question he already knows the answer to.
‘That I’m here? No.’
‘No.’
‘He knows I’m—’ I hunt for the word ‘—seeing someone. I told him on the phone last week because he asked me four Sundays in a row why I sounded weird. I saidthere’s a bloke. He saidright. I saidit’s complicated. He saidis he a dickhead. I saidno. He saidis he married. I saidno. He saidalright then.’ I look up at Laurence. ‘He didn’t ask a fourth question. He doesn’t know you’re my lecturer. He doesn’t know—’ I gesture at the flat. ‘—this.’
Laurence exhales, small through his nose.
‘And the question he didn’t ask.’
