My phone vibrates. Ron.
‘Coming to Manchester next weekend.’
‘Celyn’s got a reading at the uni. Said I could come.’
Celyn. The name, out loud. Notthat person,notthem at the bar,not the pronoun-only references he’s been using for a year, the coffees, the adjacent tables, the slow migration fromstranger in the cornertosomeone whose name I say on the phone to my brother.
‘Ron. Are you going to ask them out, or are you going to sit at the next table until you’re both pensioners?’
Ron goes quiet, the kind where the sentence is being constructed internally, stress-tested before release. ‘I don’t even know if I like them or if I just.’ He stops, starts. ‘I’ve never felt this.’ The stops are the sentence. ‘How did you know? With Laurence. How did you know it was real?’
I look across the sofa. Laurence. The glasses, the jaw. The man who uncapped a marker in a lecture theatre and changed the molecular structure of my being.
‘When the maths stopped working without him in the equation.’
Silence. Then: ‘That’s disgustingly romantic for you.’
‘Fuck off.’
We both laugh.
I hang up. The phone buzzes again immediately. Mum, this time.Don’t forget Sunday. Laurence’s mum is bringing that walnut cake.
I read it twice—the tone. Thedon’t forget Sunday.The baseline assumption that Sunday is a thing in my diary involving Laurence’s family and my family under one roof, eating walnut cake. +
Families reknit more slowly than I thought they would. They reknit anyway. The threads don’t go back to exactly where they were—the pattern changes—but the jumper still covers the cold bits.
‘Mum,’ I say, reading it out. ‘Sunday roast. Walnut cake. Your Mum.’
‘Noted,’ Laurence says. Soft, the way he says things, when a year ago the sentence would have been impossible.
Laurence looks at me over the arm of the sofa.
‘Your brother again?’
‘He’s coming to Manchester.’
‘He’s been coming a lot.’
‘Must be the beer.’
The look, the long one. The unguarded one. I lean into it. Let the looking be the thing.
A year ago, he said our mess was now on a balcony in September light, and I thought that was the landing. Didn’t plan for the rest of it—the cooking, the trust, the fighting about dishes, the partial differential equations, the key in my wallet, the mornings wherehe makes coffee and I make the bed, and the making is what keeps us.
The shelf above the sofa has thirty-odd books on it. His. Mine. The ones we’ve argued about whether to alphabetise by author or by category, an argument that will outlast the relationship and possibly Manchester.
Second row, third from the left. The Erdos biography. Spine cracked worse than when he first put it in my hand, because the book lives now. Gets lent. Gets argued over. Gets quoted back at me when the margin is tight.
I pull it out. Flip to the inside cover.
For E. Because you remind me of why I started.
TheEcurves the same way it did. Pen pressure unchanged. A sentence that looked like a door when I first read it and still looks like one, only now it’s a door I’ve walked through, turned round, and looked back at.
I have a new notebook in my bag. Not lecture notes anymore. Proofs, ideas, the beginnings of something that might eventually become publishable if I’m brave enough.
I take it out. The green pen, from my birthday, the first pen he ever bought me.
