Page 23 of Second Person

The manuscript’s finished by Boxing Day. I didn’t plan it that way; I’d told myself I was done with the first draft weeks ago and had simply been circling the last chapter the way you circle any ending you’re afraid will feel too small once you’ve actually written it. But grief, it turns out, is efficient. I sit at the little desk under the sloped roof with my laptop balanced on a stack of Shirley Jackson, the whole house asleep, the frost thick on the window, and I write the final line of The Threshold in the same room where a swimming certificate still hangs on the back of the door with a name I don’t answer to any more.

I want to mark what it means that the book got finished there, in that room, because I didn’t plan it and I don’t believe in tidy symbolism and this was tidy enough to embarrass a lesser writer. Two years of a novel, and the last line arrives under the blue ceiling of a room decorated for a boy who never came, in a house that got my name wrong for a quarter century and loved me through the wrongness, on the desk where I did my GCSE revision as someone I’ve since retired. If I’d written that as a coincidence in a draft, Marged would have circled it and put ‘too neat’ in the margin, and she’d have been right, and life doesn’t care what’s too neat.

The frost was thick on the window. The house was asleep. I typed the last full stop of The Threshold and sat with it a while, and what I felt wasn’t triumph, or not only. It was the specific vertigo of finishing a thing that took the best of you and finding the room hasn’t changed: the mountain still out there in the dark, the swimming certificate still on the door with the old name on it, and you the only thing in the house that’s different, and even you only slightly, and only where the light can’t reach.

The last line isn’t about the house at all, in the end, though the house is the whole of what the book pretends to be about. It’s about a woman standing in a doorway deciding whether the room on the other side is going to hold her weight, and choosing, finally, exhausted, to test it anyway, because the alternative, standing forever on the threshold, isn’t actually a safer place to live. It just feels like one.

I close the laptop at two in the morning with the whole book behind me for the first time in two years, and I don’t know, typing the last full stop in a room painted the wrong colour for the person who finally grew up in it, whether I’ve just finished a novel or finished something else as well, something with his name at the bottom of it that I haven’t let myself write down anywhere except in the shape of every unanswered text since the showcase.

I go to sleep under the blue ceiling with the manuscript done and the question still entirely open, and for once I don’t try to draft an ending for the part of my life that isn’t fiction. Some doors you have to leave shut until somebody, somewhere, decides to come and stand on the other side of them.

TEN

Proofs came back. The margins are full of a stranger’s pencil.

The bar stops being mine somewhere in January. Not officially, nobody bars me from a corner table, but I stop going, because going means either seeing him at the counter with his back half-turned the way it used to be before either of us had a name for the other, or not seeing him, and I’ve discovered that the second one is worse, an empty chair doing more damage than a full one ever could.

I go past it once, in February, not in, just past, on the way to a shift, and I make the mistake of looking through the window, and the corner table’s got a couple at it, young, leaning in, entirely innocent of the fact they’re sitting in a ruin. That’s the trouble with the places a thing happened: they haven’t the decency to look haunted. The table’s just a table. The stool where I stood is just a stool. The whole geography of the best fourteen months of my life is being used, right now, by strangers, for the ordinary purpose it was built for, and it hasn’t the manners to so much as flicker.

I didn’t go in. I stood on the pavement long enough to clock the couple had ordered chips and to hate them, briefly, unfairly, for having the thing I’d let go quiet, and then I went to work and carried plates and told nobody, and wrote nothing that night, because some grief won’t go on the page while you’re still living in it. You can only write the room after you’ve moved out of it. Inside it, it’s just walls, and you’re just standing in them, and the pen stays capped.

I keep working, which surprises the people who think grief stops a writer. It’s the opposite. The restaurant still wants its plates carried, the MA still wants its Thursday pages, and I turn up to both with the specific competence of a person holding themselves together with routine, because routine is the outline you keep working to when the story underneath has stopped making sense. I carry lamb to table nine. I workshop Priya’s chapter and give her the note that unlocks it, generous, precise, a version of me with its whole act together, and then I go home to a flat where the only thing waiting is a finished manuscript I can’t send anywhere.

That’s the part nobody warns you about finishing a book that’s secretly about a person: you can’t hold the launch until you know how the life turns out, and the life’s not answering its phone. So the manuscript sits on the desktop, done, a full stop I’m afraid of, and most nights I sit near it not writing, which is its own grief for someone whose whole self is the writing. Three weeks of a cursor blinking at the end of a story I told and can’t post, in a flat gone quiet in the exact register the man went quiet in, until I can’t tell any more whether I’m mourning him, or the book, or the version of myself that finished something and has nowhere to put it.

Most evenings on my way past I feed a cat that isn’t mine, the ginger stray that’s decided the bar’s windowsill is a throne, scraps through the fire door, out of a loneliness I’m not proud of, because at least the cat doesn’t ask me how I’m doing and mean the question the way people mean it when they’re worried you might actually answer.

I don’t tell Rhi the whole of it. I tell her the shape, not the weight: we’re on a break, it’s fine, it’s not fine, don’t ask. She doesn’t ask, mostly, which is its own kind of love, the kind that lets you keep the worst of a thing to yourself for exactly as long as you need to.

She comes up twice that month all the same, unasked, with wine and a flat refusal to discuss anything heavier than telly, which turns out to be the exact right instrument. Thirty years she’s known me; she can tell a silence that wants breaking from one that wants sitting with, and she sits with mine.

She let herself in with the key she’s had since it was her flat, one Sunday I’d not have got out of bed for otherwise, took one look at me and the state of the place, said, ‘Right, that’s not grief, that’s a health hazard,’ and opened a window. She didn’t ask about him. She could read the whole story off the washing-up, and asking me to narrate it would only have made me perform a version with the edges filed off.

‘They’re knocking through,’ she said, appalled, wine in hand, at the telly. ‘Course they are. Everyone’s knocking through. Nobody wants a wall any more. You know what a wall is? A decision. This lot want one big room so they never have to decide which room they’re in.’ A gulp. ‘You’d never knock through.’

‘I live in a bedsit, Rhi. There’s nothing to knock.’

‘You’d keep the wall on principle. You like a threshold, you.’ She said it without weight, eyes on the screen, then heard herself, and glanced over, because Rhi reads me the way I read a bar. ‘That the title still? The book?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good title.’ Back to the telly. ‘He read it?’

‘Bits. Before.’

‘He’ll read the rest,’ she said, flat, certain, a woman stating a fact about a man she’d met twice and clocked entirely. ‘He’s not gone. I’ve seen gone. Aled’s brother’s gone, walked out on a christening, that’s gone. Yours is just frightened. Frightened comes back. Gone doesn’t.’ She topped up my glass without asking. ‘And if I’m wrong, I meant it. Aled’s got a van and I passed my test in a car park in Wrexham. I’d not even feel it.’

Thirty years. She knew the old name and never once reached for it, knew me at four splitting Quavers on a chapel floor and knows me now, and the whole of what she did that Sunday was open a window, insult some strangers’ extension, and tell me the man wasn’t gone in the one voice in my life I’d believe it in. ‘You’ll be alright,’ she said at the door, the once, the nearest either of us goes to naming it, in the flat Beddgelert vowels that are more the sound of home to me than any actual place. The flat was still a health hazard when she’d gone. But the window was open, and I could breathe in it, and I did the washing-up after, which is the nearest a person like me gets to hope on a bad month.

I name the cat that month, because everyone should have one small pointless act of authorship in a season when nothing else will obey them, and mine is deciding that the ginger stray on the bar’s windowsill is called Dave. He looks like a Dave: judgmental, faintly disappointed, the face of a creature who suspects everyone around him votes the wrong way and is too well bred to raise it. He isn’t mine. I’ve no claim on him and he’d be the first to say so. But I feed him scraps through the fire door on the nights the flat’s too quiet, and he permits it, with the air of a man doing me an enormous favour, and there’s a specific comfort in being tolerated by something that owes you nothing, which I need badly that January and would have died before admitting to anyone who had my number.

The email arrives on a Tuesday, three weeks into whatever this silence actually is, and I read the subject line four times before I let myself open it, because I’ve spent two months not letting myself hope about the thing inside it and hoping, right now, feels like a resource I can’t currently afford to spend on more than one part of my life at once.

We’d love to see the rest. Six words from a woman I’ve never met, about a book I finished in a childhood bedroom under a blue ceiling while the biggest thing in my actual life sat unresolved two hundred miles’ worth of silence away, and I sit on the edge of my bed with the laptop glowing and I don’t know whether to cry or laugh, and I end up doing something in between that isn’t dignified and isn’t meant to be.

I want to tell him. That’s the exact ache of it: the one person whose face I most want to watch reading those six words is the one person I haven’t spoken a real sentence to since the car park, and I sit with the email open and my thumb hovering over his name in the thread and I don’t send anything, because a piece of good news isn’t an apology, and I’m not going to use one to smuggle in the other.

I tell Rhi instead. She’s up on the Wednesday for a hospital thing of Aled’s mother’s and we get an hour in a café on Piccadilly with a floor that’s never been level, and I don’t lead with it. I let her do twenty minutes on the hospital car park first, because Rhi needs to arrive somewhere before she can be told anything, and then I turn the phone round on the table with the email up on it.