Two fronts, two men. Every day, the gap between this and catastrophe gets thinner.
Piccadilly Station on a Friday evening is a machine designed to process misery. Commuters and students and the lost, all funnelled through barriers and concourses, the overhead boards clicking through delays like a bored croupier dealing bad hands.
Ronan comes through the barrier. This isn’t a social visit. The jacket’s wrong. The one he wears to work. Rucksack strapped on, no smile.
‘Alright?’ I say.
He takes inventory: the weight loss, probably. The eyeliner, which he’s never minded but notes now. The whole of me, recalibrated.
‘You look thin.’
‘Cheers. Lovely to see you too.’
We walk. Tram to Fallowfield, my halls, my room, thin walls, the blind still broken on one side, the radiator clanking like it’s got an opinion.
I’ve texted Laurence:Brother visiting: three days, no contact. I’m sorry.The reply came in twelve seconds:Understood. Be careful.Then, two hours later:I’ll miss you.I read it four times and then locked the screen and put the phone face down on the mattress because the wanting had become unbearable.
Three days. No messages, no calls, no phantom vibrations. The phone in my pocket is like a severed limb still twitching. Every time I didn’t check it, the not-checking was louder than any notification.
I’ve never gone three days without hearing his voice. The absence since the first time has a texture. Dense. Uncomfortable.
Pathetic. Three days, people survive wars.
Friday night: takeaway in my room, Ron on the floor because there’s no chair, both of us eating chicken and pretending this is normal. He asks about modules. I tell him about Henderson’s econometrics. I don’t tell him Henderson’s lecture is the one I walked out of to get fucked against a door.
Saturday morning. The campus tour, my idea, preemptive, the performance of a student with nothing to hide. Here’s the maths building. Here’s the library I definitely use. Here’s the student union, where people drink and live straightforward lives in which nobody’s shagging their lecturer.
I’m good at this—the act. Ron walks beside me and asks questions, and I answer them with the right mix of boredom and detail—enough to seem genuine.
We pass Room 4.12 heading to the café. The door’s closed. My skin reacts, no, keep walking. Keep talking about module choices and library hours, and the load-bearing walls I’ve replaced with paper.
But Ronan doesn’t look at buildings. He watches how I hold my phone, how I react to sounds, the pattern of my attention. He’s not being subtle about it.
‘You check your phone every two minutes,’ he says, outside the engineering block.
‘Everyone checks their phone every two minutes. It’s 2026.’
‘Not like that. Not the screen, the lock, the screen again. You’re waiting for him.’
‘I’m not waiting for anything.’
Ron’s mouth does this thing. Not a smile, the ghost of one.For now.
Saturday night. The bar in the Northern Quarter, my choice, because Ron asked for ‘somewhere with good beer’ and this place has thirteen taps and the music’s loud enough to drown a confession.
‘I’ll get them in,’ I say. ‘What d’you want?’
‘Whatever’s local.’
I push through the crowd towards the bar. The ordering takes five minutes because the bartender is performing a personality and the bloke ahead of me can’t decide between pale ale and an existential crisis.
When I get back, Ron is different.
It shows subtly, in a way only someone who’s spent eighteen years reading him would catch. His posture’s changed. He wassitting back, one arm over the chair, the investigator’s sprawl. Now he’s forward. Both hands on the table.
I put the pints down. ‘Alright?’
‘Fine.’ Too fast. He picks up the glass. Drinks. The ice cubes catch the light, and he watches them.
