‘Yeah.’
‘Ewan.’
‘Never had this before. I’m the world’s best sleeper—trains, libraries, everything. Tonight my head won’t shut up.’
‘Is it this afternoon.’
The office, the colleague, all of it.
‘I don’t know,’ I say again, which is a lie, and he knows it’s a lie, but he doesn’t call it.
‘Tell me what your room looks like.’
It disarms me. I’m expectingyou should try to sleep, orwe can’t do this over the phone, the professional reset I’ve been half-hoping for and half-dreading, and instead he asks like a man asking for proof I’m somewhere real.
‘Small.’ I look around for him. ‘There’s a stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy. Carpet on the floor the colour of a wound healing wrong. A desk under the window with a mug I haven’t washed. A poster the last tenant left up. Some band I’ve never heard of. The blind is broken on one side so the streetlamp comes in diagonal.’
A small exhale on his end. Almost a laugh, not quite.
‘Describe the stain.’
‘Italy, I said.’
‘Yes, but what shape of Italy. A healthy Italy, a sick Italy. A holiday Italy.’
I blink at the ceiling.
‘It’s a brown Italy. The boot’s there but the heel’s weird.’
‘Mm.’
‘What’s your ceiling.’
‘White.’ A beat. ‘That’s a terrible ceiling.’
‘Yes.’
I slide down the headboard until I’m flat on my back, phone against my ear on the pillow, his voice very close now—not performed-close, actual-close. The hair on my neck rises.
‘Laurence.’
I say it into the phone, and the dark takes it. Second time out loud, getting easier, not easy.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want you to say anything sensible.’
‘Alright.’
‘I want you to talk about something that isn’t me and isn’t us and isn’t anything that happened today.’
A pause. Then, in the same low voice with the same Lancashire underneath it:
‘I’m reading a book about the Loire valley. A travel guide from 1987. The photos are appalling. The author is desperately in love with his own adjectives. In chapter four he describes a château as “a confection of masonry suspended between terrestrial and dreaming” and I had to put the book down and have a glass of water. Chapter five is about a goat cheese. He can’t decide whether it isassertiveorphilosophical.’
My chest cracks. Tenderness. Just the fact of him, making himself ridiculous for me.
‘Keep going.’
