Page 28 of Second Person

Nobody needed anything from me. Not the brother, not the mother, not the man. All three of them were getting on with it and none of them required me to stand between any two of them and convert.

I’ve spent my whole life being fluent. It’s the thing I’m proudest of and it’s the thing that has cost me the most, and I did not know, until I was sitting on a worktop with wet eyes at the age of twenty-five, that fluency is also a job, and that I had never once been off shift.

He looked up mid-sentence and caught me at it.

‘So the compression fitting cracked,’ Owain was saying. ‘Minus four outside and the whole joint froze.’

‘Right,’ Ron said. Still looking at me. ‘Nightmare.’

They put us in the blue room, which was my room, which has a ceiling I painted at fifteen with the door shut and the radio up, a blue that was meant to be night and came out closer to a swimming pool, and which nobody in that house has ever offered to repaint because nobody in that house has ever quite worked out what it was for.

The bed is a single. He is six foot three.

He got in it anyway, on his back, with his feet off the end and one arm along the wall so there’d be room, and looked up at fifteen-year-old me’s idea of a sky.

‘Did this yourself.’

‘Two coats. I was fifteen. I did it in a weekend Mam was in Bangor.’

‘Why blue.’

I could have given him the good answer, which I’ve since put in an interview twice: something about wanting a ceiling that didn’t belong to the house. And I gave him the true one instead, because it was one in the morning and there wasn’t room in the bed for a performance.

‘Because I wanted to be somewhere else and I couldn’t get somewhere else, so I did the sky.’

He didn’t say anything for a while. Then: ‘It’s a good sky.’

Not that’s sad. Not oh, Celyn. Not the sympathetic noise which I had braced for the way I brace for all of them. Just a man lying in a child’s bed assessing a fifteen-year-old’s paintwork on its own merits and finding it sound.

I fell asleep on about a foot of mattress with a stranger’s weight against the whole of my left side, in a house that had called me by another name six hours earlier, under a swimming-pool sky, and slept properly, and woke up when a three-year-old opened the door without knocking to inform us that nobody was allowed in the garden till they were hid, that being the rule, and having always been the rule.

Back in Manchester he wanted the four of us at his, which is the size of a van.

Ewan offered Chorlton and the proper kitchen and Ron said no, mine, and I understood the whole of that refusal without needing it explained, because I’d watched him for fourteen months across a bar not be able to keep a person at a table, and a year on he was fighting his own brother for the right to feed him badly in a kitchen where somebody has to stand up so somebody else can get past.

I’d not met Laurence properly. I’d had him described — by Ron, in about eleven words, which is Ron’s whole method of description — and I’d built a professor out of them, cold, tall, precise, and then a man came through the door with a Victoria sponge and flour on his collar.

He is precise. That part was right. What nobody had told me, because Ron hasn’t got the vocabulary for it and Ewan is too close to see it, is that the precision is the shy version of something else entirely, and that he cannot take a compliment about a cake without going the colour of the jam.

We talked for four hours and I do not think either of us ate properly.

He’d clocked the shelf inside a minute. He said ‘you’ve read Shirley Jackson’ the way another man would have said you’re bleeding, urgently, with a slight accusation in it, and I said I’d read everything she wrote, and that was the last either of us contributed to the general conversation.

The sentence structure is the horror. The commas are wrong on purpose. He said exactly, exactly twice and did a thing with both hands that I recognised instantly and could not place for about ninety seconds, and then placed, and had to look at the table for a moment: it’s the gesture Ron’s brother does. Ewan does it constantly. Three years of a man’s hands and Ewan’s picked them up whole, and neither of them has any idea, and I sat there watching one man’s hands come out of another man’s body and thought, not for the first time, that the actual evidence of love is never in anything anybody says.

Laurence had his hand on the back of Ewan’s neck for most of the argument about the opening line of The Haunting of Hill House. Not for anybody’s benefit; he wasn’t even looking at him, he was looking at me, mid-sentence, mounting a defence of Austen I did not accept then and do not accept now, with his thumb going in a small circle at his brother’s hairline. And Ewan tilted the half-centimetre into it without breaking off what he was saying.

That’s the thing I took home from that table, and I have never told any of the three of them.

I had a category for the two of us. I’d built it: the improbable one, the one nobody’s got a shelf for, a builder and a writer who both spent fourteen months not crossing a floor. And I sat in that kitchen with the pasta and the third Victoria sponge of the month and watched a man who teaches mathematics rest a hand on the neck of a man thirteen years his junior, absently, while losing an argument about Shirley Jackson, and understood that the improbable one was in fact the family register, and that I had married into — I hadn’t, not yet, not for two more years, but the tense of it was already wrong — a set of people for whom the impossible thing had simply become Tuesday.

Under the table the two brothers kept knocking knees, on purpose, all night, like boys in a pew.

Nobody explained me to anybody. Nobody had to.

His mother came up in May and I cleaned his flat before she got there, which he has never mentioned and definitely noticed.

I had the good mugs out, and biscuits on an actual plate, and I’d put the chipped one at the back of the cupboard where a stranger would have no business finding it, and Eileen found it inside four minutes and set it down in front of me, and I watched her son not breathe for a second, and drank out of it, which was the correct answer to a question she hadn’t asked, and which tells you everything about the woman that took me the rest of that year to learn properly.