Page 2 of Second Person

She hugs me too hard for someone moving two miles and not ninety, and I feel her decide, mid-hug, not to say the rest of what she’s thinking, which is its own mercy, because I already know the shape of it without needing the words. Then the door. Then the stairs, two flights of them, Aled’s voice floating back up asking has she got everything, and hers floating down that she has, though we both know that isn’t true, because she’s left me the kettle and the good pan and a note on the fridge in her handwriting that just says CALL ME, DON’T JUST THINK ABOUT IT, which I will, eventually, and not tonight.

The hatchback pulls away from the kerb. I watch it from the window until it turns onto Oldham Street proper and I can’t any more, and then I stand there a while longer anyway, looking at a road with nothing on it worth looking at.

I don’t cry, not tonight. Whatever’s left of that got spent somewhere else, months back, under a different roof, and there isn’t much left in the tank for a woman I’ll see Thursday.

The shutter goes up at six the way it always does, the rattle-and-slam of somebody else’s morning starting under my floor, and I lie there in the grey light listening to a sound I’ve slept through for the best part of a year without once noticing I had a witness in the next room while I did it.

I get up because staying in bed and calling it grief felt like a decision I hadn’t earned. I put the kettle on. I get two mugs down before I’ve finished the thought — Rhi’s and mine, the reflex older than the reason for it — and I stand there a second holding the wrong one, the ghost of a routine with nobody left on the other end of it, and I put it back on the shelf, careful, the way you’d put back something that might still be breakable even though it’s china.

One mug, loose leaf, six minutes, the timer on my phone because I don’t trust myself to know when a thing’s steeped without somebody to check my work against.

I find the notepad Rhi kept by the toaster for the shopping list and write looking for a lodger? — three words and a question mark — then sit with the pen still in my hand long enough to clock what I’m doing, which is exactly what I told myself I wasn’t going to do: fill the flat before the quiet gets a chance to ask me anything.

I tear the page off. I don’t put it up anywhere. I fold it in half and then in quarters, small enough to lose, and I put the kettle back on for something to do with my hands that isn’t finding a stranger to move into my old room before the sheets are even off the bed.

I do my face at midday for no reason at all. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s going to see it, which is exactly why I do it, sat cross-legged on the bathroom floor with the little mirror propped against the side of the bath because the flat hasn’t got a proper one yet, lining one eye and then the other with a hand that doesn’t wobble the way it used to, because Rhi taught it not to, on a different winter, and it came with me anyway, the way the useful things do.

I look at the finished face in a cracked hand mirror in an empty flat and think: that’s mine. Nobody granted me that. Nobody’s here to grant it. It’s just true, the way the kettle’s true, whether or not there’s a second cup to prove it happened.

The night’s the hard part. I knew it would be.

I eat at the table instead of the sofa, because eating standing up at the counter felt like the first surrender and I wasn’t making that one on day one. The flat gets loud around nine the way an empty room gets loud: the fridge, the radiator ticking itself down, a car alarm two streets over that isn’t mine to worry about and worries me anyway, going off and off and off until somebody, somewhere, finally gives in and turns it off.

I’ve got my phone in my hand more than once. Thumb over Rhi’s name. Both times I put it down without typing a letter, because I know exactly what I’m reaching for, which is a voice to prove the silence hasn’t got teeth, and the whole quiet unglamorous point of tonight is finding out whether it has.

It doesn’t. Or it does, a little, around eleven, when the radiator gives up for the night and the flat goes properly, structurally still, the kind of still you can hear the edges of, and I sit on my own bed in the dark for longer than I’d admit to anyone, doing the thing I do when a feeling hasn’t found its shape yet, which is nothing: sitting with it, waiting to see if it’s going to introduce itself or get bored and leave.

It gets bored and leaves. Not gone; quiet’s not gone. I sit there anyway, past the hour I’d have given up at before.

I open the new notebook near midnight, the one I’ve been leaving shut since I got here because starting it felt like admitting I meant to stay in a flat that was never going to be only mine until tonight.

I don’t write about Rhi. I don’t write about the room down the hall with its stripped bed and its bare picture hooks. I write one line, unplanned, the kind that shows up whether you meant to let it or not: a woman standing in a doorway. I don’t know yet what she’s the start of. I close the notebook on the one sentence and I don’t reopen it, because some lines you earn by leaving alone.

I go to bed in a flat that’s finally, entirely, only mine. The shutter will go again at six. I already know I’ll hear it, and that I won’t mind hearing it alone, and that both of those are new information about a person I’m apparently still finding out the specs of.

Being left the flat was the first test I set myself without meaning to. Alone in Rhi’s old flat I found out the self held up when nobody was looking at it, which is the only test that counts, and the one I’d been most afraid to sit.

Turns out I liked my own company. Turns out the person I’d built was decent enough to spend a night alone with. I’d not have believed that during that first Manchester year. It took a valley, a train, a name, and one friend’s spare room emptying out for me to run the experiment, and it came back the way the best ones do: quietly, conclusively, in my favour.

The restaurant takes me on, a trial shift, no questions past can you carry four plates and are you free weekends, and I say yes to both without checking whether either is true.

Four plates is a lie I make true within the hour.

The kitchen’s loud in a way I like, the clatter of people who’ve stopped needing to explain themselves to each other, orders called and caught without a wasted syllable. Nobody in that kitchen asks me anything I don’t want to answer. They ask my section, my float, whether I can run food to table nine before the lamb goes cold. It’s the first conversation I’ve had in months that doesn’t have a second question folded inside the first one.

The woman training me in was called Bev and had worked there since the Blair government and had the specific unbothered authority of a person who’s seen every kind of new starter and buried most of them. She looked me up and down once on that first shift, the whole of me, the hair and the nails and the eyeliner I’d done at seven that morning with my hands not quite steady, and I braced for the question, because I always brace for the question, and Bev said: ‘Can you carry four plates or not, I’ve not got all night.’

That was it. That was the audition: not what are you, not which one, not the once-over that ends in a verdict. Four plates. I carried three that first go and dropped nothing, and she said ‘four next time’ and moved on, and I stood by the pass with three plates of somebody’s dinner and something going in my chest that had nothing to do with the plates.

‘She likes you,’ the kitchen porter said, later, out the back by the bins, rolling a cigarette he offered me half of. ‘Bev. Not shown you the good knife yet, but she will.’

‘How can you tell she likes me?’

‘She’s not sacked you.’ He lit it. ‘That’s Bev for a valentine.’

I learned the room the way I learn every room, fast, cataloguing, and what I catalogued that first night was the absence of a thing I’d carried into every job before it: the wait. The little pause while a new set of people decide what you are and whether it’s going to be a problem. In that kitchen nobody decided anything about me except whether I could clear a table before the mains landed. First place I’d ever stood in where the only fact anyone needed was whether I was any good, and I found, carrying the fourth plate by the end of the week, that I was, and that being any good was, in that steamed-up clatter, the whole of an identity, and enough of one, and a rest.

I clock off at eleven, feet done in, apron stiff with someone else’s spilled gravy, and walk home the long way because the long way goes past a canal with the city lit orange on the water, and I stand on the little bridge for exactly as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette I don’t actually want, because standing still on a bridge in a city that doesn’t know me yet feels like something worth doing slowly.