Page 11 of Second Person

Controllable. I write the word down in my own margin, because I’m going to want it later. It isn’t insult. It’s closer to relief — and under the relief, the thing I don’t want: he’s read it almost right. Not the whole shape, not what’s actually underneath the house and the walls, but close enough to the true mechanism that I go home that night and reread every page for the seam he might have felt, and I find two, and I fix them, and the fixing feels less like craft and more like closing a coat.

I’d wanted to be read. And here was a man reading almost right, and my first instinct wasn’t good, he sees it. It was cover better next time.

Rhi’s outside on the low wall by the entrance when I get out, coat done up wrong, a chip cone going cold in one hand, and she doesn’t ask how it went, she just holds the cone out and lets me take three before she says anything.

‘Well?’

‘Pritchard called it controllable.’

‘Pritchard would call a house fire controllable if it sold film rights.’ She takes the cone back, eats one, considers. ‘What’d the scary one say? The poet.’

‘Marged.’

‘Her. What’d she say?’

I tell her. Rhi goes quiet in the specific way that means she’s actually thinking and not just waiting for her turn to talk, which for Rhi is a rare enough event I always clock it.

‘Cel.’ She says my name like she’s about to ask something she already half-knows the answer to. ‘Why’s it a woman.’

‘What d’you mean, why’s it a woman.’

‘The one watching the fella. Why’s it not you.’ She’s not looking at me when she says it, looking at the chip cone instead, which is its own kindness, giving me a place to land my eyes that isn’t her face. ‘You watch men exactly like that. I’ve seen you do it. You’ve never once written it as you.’

I could give her the workshop answer, the one about market categories and reader comfort and the difference between what a room will let a woman narrator get away with and what it won’t forgive in anyone else. It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole of it either, and Rhi’s earned better than the compact version, even if I’m not ready to hand her the rest tonight.

‘Because a woman in the watching chair, nobody asks what she is,’ I say, in the end. ‘They just ask if she’s likeable.’

Rhi looks at me a long moment, the loud gone quiet the way it does maybe twice a year, and doesn’t say the thing I can see her deciding not to say, which I’m grateful for, because I’m not ready to hear it out loud yet, not even from her.

‘Right,’ she says instead, and holds out the last chip, and I take it, and we walk back towards the bus stop not talking about it any more, which is its own kind of mercy, the only kind either of us is any good at handing over on a Thursday night in the cold.

Twenty minutes before a reading I go somewhere nobody’s allowed to follow, not Rhi, not Pritchard, not even the version of myself that’s going to walk out there in a minute and perform being unbothered. I stand in the corridor by the fire extinguisher with the pages in my hand, and I read the first line to myself, silently, lips barely moving, the way you’d check a knot before you trust your weight to it.

Pritchard finds me there. He always does, some instinct tutors have for the exact moment a student least wants company, and he puts his hand on my elbow and leaves it a half-second past anywhere it needs to be. I’ve stopped examining the grip. Examining it would cost more than letting it sit. This reading series is his, he put my name on the programme when he didn’t have to, wrote the email that got the visiting agent into the room tonight, and men like Pritchard don’t do favours, they extend credit, and they collect it in small physical currencies at the precise moments you can’t afford to make a scene. The elbow is tonight’s instalment. I let him have it and keep the change.

‘You’ll be marvellous,’ he says, which is what he says every time, the sentence worn smooth from reuse, and I say thank you, and mean the thanks more than I mean the smoothness of it, and we go in.

I’ve decided how I feel about Pritchard, which took a while, because the easy readings are both available and both wrong. The easy villain: an older man trading access for the small currency of a hand on an elbow, and me the vulnerable student paying it. The easy gratitude: a generous mentor who put me on the programme and got the agent in the room, and I owe him. Both are true and neither is the whole, and I’ve learned to hold the two without collapsing them, because collapsing them is how you become either a victim who can’t act or a debtor who can’t say no.

What’s actually true is smaller and greyer. He opened a door I couldn’t open myself. He also charges a toll I never agreed to and can’t refuse without losing the door, and he knows it, and I know it, and we conduct the whole thing in the smoothed-over language of mentorship because naming it would cost us both the fiction we need to keep working together. The writing stays mine; no toll he levies gives him a share of it. That’s the deal I’ve made and the one I’ll break the day I don’t need the door, and not a day before, because I grew up watching my mother keep a warm voice on a phone for people she was quietly pricing, and I know exactly how to be pleasant to a man while I count.

I don’t perform the pages here. You’ve read them, or you will, the version with the kitchen and the cupboards that weren’t there yesterday, and there’s no use my writing the writing again; a thing only gets to be new once, and I already spent that once on the room itself, forty-odd strangers holding their breath in a row of plastic chairs that don’t fit anybody’s knees.

The pages are a lie, is the thing nobody in that room knows, and the lie is the whole art of it. On the surface: a woman moving through a house a man is working on, watching him find the load-bearing walls. Clean. Sellable. A story with a shape the cohort recognises and Pritchard can tick against his rubric. What none of them clock, because I built it not to be clocked, is that the woman is a door I hold open so nobody looks through it at me. Put a woman in the watching chair and the whole thing reads as a nice sad heterosexual ache, categories intact, everyone comfortable. Put me in it and it’s a different book, one that hasn’t got a shelf yet, one I wasn’t ready to hand forty strangers in plastic chairs.

I’d learned that trick before I learned any other. It’s the same one I did at family tables for years: the compact version, the self edited down to a size the room could seat. The Threshold is only the professional application of a childhood skill, encode the true thing inside a shape the reader’s already agreed to love, let them love it, and know, privately, that they’re loving a cipher and calling it a novel.

The cohort workshop it like it’s about property, or grief, or the housing crisis, and they’re not wrong, exactly; a good cipher reads true on both sides of the code. One of them, a poet called Marged who sees more than she admits to, said once that the watcher felt ‘a bit male, for a woman,’ and I said ‘does she,’ and moved us on, and went home and didn’t sleep, because getting caught by the one reader sharp enough to feel the shape under the shape is the exact terror and the exact point of the whole enterprise.

The MA is a year of people learning to say what they mean and a smaller number learning, harder, what they mean in the first place. I sit in the second group and keep quiet about it. Twelve of us round a seminar table on Thursday afternoons, Pritchard at the head, and the whole ritual — the copies passed round, the praise rationed out ahead of the knife, the way a workshop finds the one true thing in a draft and then talks about everything else — is a language I picked up fast because it’s the one I already spoke at family dinners: say the safe thing first, bury the real one where only the sharp reader finds it.

There’s Marged, who scares me because she reads with her whole body. There’s a lad called Tom who writes autofiction about his gap year and takes criticism like a christening, beaming, absorbing nothing. There’s Priya, who’s the best of us and doesn’t know it, and Pritchard, who does know it, and rations his attention to whoever’s most useful to be seen mentoring that term. You’d learn the economy of a room like that in a fortnight, if you grew up the way I did, cataloguing exits.

Pritchard’s good at the work, properly, the kind of reader who can put his finger on the exact line where a chapter stops believing itself. He put my name on the programme. He got the agent in the room. Chosen family is Rhi. Pritchard is something else.

They workshop the house and the woman and the load-bearing walls, and I sit there taking notes on my own encryption in a room full of people who’d need a different book to actually meet me, and I go home and put the true thing one layer deeper, and call it revision.

What I can tell you, the part that isn’t on any page, is what it costs to stand up there and be looked at by that many people at once while wearing the version of myself that took forty minutes and a full face of product to build. Every reading’s a dare. I look like this on purpose — the postbox mouth, the black dress, the wing, the orange on the nails like somebody’s hi-vis gone up a register — and somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph I stop being able to feel my own hands, the specific vertigo of forty strangers deciding, in real time, whether the person in front of them is convincing. Not the character. Me.