Page 151 of Proof By Contradiction
His hand is on the table. Mine is next to it. The first time in our lives that our hands are allowed to exist in the same space without looking away. The first time we’re not performing, brothers. Just: two men in a pub, the distance between their palms the smallest it’s ever been.
I need to talk to my parents, I know that. Laurence wanted to come with us but I need to do this by myself, I need to act like an adult that wants an adult relationship.
The 8:47 to Euston. Ron sits opposite with a paper cup and the expression of someone heading towards a conversation he’d rather avoid.
The Midlands scroll past outside, flat, green, country that exists purely as a gap between places that matter.
‘Their name is Celyn,’ he says. Softly. Into the coffee cup. Like if he says it to the cardboard, it counts as practice and not confession.
I look at him. ‘How d’you know?’
‘I asked the barman.’ He stares out the window. ‘Last time. When you were in the toilets. Just said, “The person at that table, do they come here a lot?” And the barman looked at me like he already knew exactly what was happening.’
He rubs his thumb on his palm. The circuit.
‘He said their name. Celyn.’
‘And what does that change?’
He drinks, winces at the coffee.
‘I’ve always thought I was straight, Ewan. Twenty-six years.’ The words come out rehearsed, like he’s been saying them to himself and checking whether they still hold. ‘And this person. They’re not—I don’t even know the right words.’
‘You don’t need the right words.’ I hear myself say it, and it’s true, and the truth arrived recently, through a specific and expensive set of mistakes. ‘You just need to be honest.’
Ron’s look: recognising his younger brother as a source of advice and not entirely sure the universe should allow this.
‘When did you get wise?’
‘I’m not wise. I’m slightly ahead in the discipline of fucking up my life over someone I can’t stop thinking about.’ I take a sip of my own coffee. Equally terrible. ‘You should talk to them.’
‘I can’t even?—’
‘You can. You’re Ron. You boss a crew around for a living. One person with a pencil in their teeth isn’t going to kill you.’
He attempts a smile. The muscles contract, but the smile doesn’t land because we’re thirty minutes from Euston, and what’s waiting there is worse than a pencil.
Lewisham looks the same. The 171 goes past at the end of the road with the same twelve-minute heartbeat. The terraced houses. The corner shop with the optimistic fruit display. The pavement I’ve walked since I could walk. Every crack memorised.
Mum opens the door before we knock. She’s been watching from the window. I can tell because the net curtain is crooked and Mum’s net curtains are never crooked. Her face is, she’s been crying. Days ago.
‘Boys.’ She hugs Ron first. Then me. Her arms around me are tighter than usual. Still processing. She smells of the kitchen, onions, and baking bread—the scent of a mother who cooks when she can’t talk.
The hallway. Same wallpaper since I was ten. The photo of Ron and me, seven and fifteen, Margate, his arm around me, both squinting into the sun. I was wearing a shell necklace. Ron was wearing the expression of someone already burdened with responsibility.
The living room. The sofa with the throw Mum bought to cover the stain from 2014. The telly is off, which is how you know this is serious; the telly in this house is never off. It provides the background radiation of a family that communicates better through Coronation Street than through direct conversation.
Dad’s in the armchair. Sean Carrick, arms crossed. Looking at a point approximately six inches to the left of wherever I am.
I sit. Ron sits next to me. Mum hovers between the kitchen and the door—twenty years of standing in the gap between her husband’s silence and her sons’ damage.
‘Mum. Sit down.’
She sits, perches, really. The edge of the sofa. Her hands are in her lap, doing the thing they do, rubbing the ring finger where her wedding band has worn a groove so deep the skin is permanently indented.
‘As you know, I’m seeing someone. We’re… I’m in a serious relationship,’ I say.
Dad’s mouth tightens. Almost imperceptible. The telly is off, and only the clock on the mantelpiece is ticking, the same clock since before I was born.
