Page 12 of Second Person

I want to be exact about the fear, because it isn’t stage fright and I won’t have it filed as stage fright. Stage fright is worrying you’ll forget your words. This is standing in front of forty people with the mouth done in postbox red and the wing sharp and the whole armour on that’s also the truth, and feeling them run the calculation live — not is the writing any good, but is the person real, does the shape in front of us resolve — and knowing the one place I can’t control the reading is the room itself, where I’m not a paragraph they can go back over but a body they get one pass at.

So the dress is a dare and the reading’s a dare inside the dare. I could turn up plain. I’ve thought about it before every single one. Stubble-masc, no colour, give them nothing to catch on, read the pages and leave. And every time I do the opposite, because giving them nothing to catch on is just the compact version in different clothes, and I left home to stop handing that out, and a reading’s the one room I get to practise the uncompressed version in front of strangers who don’t know me well enough to be disappointed. I put on the sharpest version I own and stand up there dangerously visible and survive it, every time, and the surviving is the actual performance, the one nobody in the plastic chairs knows they’re watching.

I find him in the back row before I open the folder. I always do. It’s become part of the ritual, cheaper than a lucky charm and twice as effective: the big quiet shape at the back, arms crossed, a jacket that doesn’t belong to this room any more than I sometimes feel I do, and something in my chest settles half a degree the second I clock him there. I don’t let it show. That’s not for the room. That’s mine.

Rhi gets to me first when it’s over, the way Rhi always does, loud enough to clear a path through people who’d otherwise take twenty minutes to say what she says in one breath, and I let her have the whole of the hug because Rhi’s the one person in that building who wanted me to be good tonight for no reason except that she loves me, no email owed, no favour banked. Everyone else in the cluster around me wants something adjacent to the writing: a connection, a compliment returned, a chance to say later that they knew me before. Rhi just wants me not to have a panic attack in the loos, which I nearly did, and which she’ll never know I nearly did, because some kindnesses you keep from the very people who’d offer you the most of it.

‘You didn’t die,’ she said into my shoulder, which is what she says instead of well done, because she was there the first time I read in public, a student thing in a room above a pub, and watched me shake so hard I couldn’t hold the pages, and she’s never once let either of us forget the distance from that to this. ‘You read the cupboards bit and a woman near me actually gasped. Gasped, Cel. At cupboards.’

‘It’s not about cupboards.’

‘I know it’s not about cupboards.’ She pulled back and looked at me, and for half a second the loud dropped out of her and the thirty-years thing came up instead, the knowing. ‘I know exactly what it’s about. I’m the only one in that room who does, aren’t I.’ She wasn’t asking. She’s read the pages before anyone; she knows the woman in the watching chair is a door I hold shut. ‘Your secret’s safe. It’s a good secret. It’s a whole book of a secret.’ The loud came back up like a tide returning. ‘Now come and let a room full of people who think they discovered you buy you a warm white wine, and I’ll frighten off anyone who says the word “liminal.”’

That’s Rhi. She got me out of a corridor by a fire extinguisher and into a room I could survive, the way she’s got me out of every corridor since we were four: not by making the room safe, but by standing in it with me until it was.

I don’t stay for the whole cluster. I go and get him from the back wall the second I can do it without it looking like what it is, and Rhi clocks it, obviously, Rhi clocks everything, and doesn’t say a word beyond a look I’ll be paying for over a pint sometime this month.

The restaurant calls at half six, someone’s rung in sick, and I say yes before I’ve finished reading the message, because the money’s the money and the adrenaline’s still running high enough that four hours on my feet sounds, perversely, like relief rather than punishment. I get changed in the staff toilet, the postbox lips scrubbed down to a stain I can’t fully shift, the dress swapped for the black polo with the logo.

I go from someone forty strangers held their breath for to a person carrying plates of pad thai to a table of six who don’t once look up from their phones. A man at table nine sends his rice back twice, the second time with a note about texture I could write a better sentence for than he managed, and I smile the smile that’s a professional tool and not a feeling and I think, the whole time I’m carrying his replacement plate, about a mug that stays warm in an empty kitchen and a room full of strangers holding their breath, and about the fact that both of those things came out of the same hands that are currently holding a tray.

The restaurant’s where most of the book actually got written, which no interviewer will ever believe, because the myth wants a garret and what it got was a fire exit. I wrote The Threshold in ninety-second instalments between the pass and table nine, on my phone, thumbs going while the printer spat dockets, a sentence caught on the way past the bins and finished on the way back with two plates of laksa going cold in my hands. Chefs think front of house does nothing between courses. Front of house is composing a novel behind its own eyes and smiling at a man sending his rice back.

Marceau ran the pass and hated everyone equally, which I found restful; there’s no safer place to be different than a kitchen that despises you for being slow, not for being you. Nobody in that building asked me the question. They asked my section, my float, whether table six had paid, and the not-asking was the whole gift of the job, better than the money, and the money was needed. I’d come off a double with my feet ruined and a paragraph in my notes app better than anything I’d written at a proper desk, because a proper desk gives you time and time is when I overthink, and the fire exit gives you ninety seconds and ninety seconds is exactly long enough to write the true thing before the careful part of me wakes up and edits it down.

That’s the trade nobody tells you. The book you can afford to write and the book that’s any good are often the same book, written badly-lit, standing up, between other people’s dinners, by someone too tired to lie.

I text Ron on my break, something stupid and funny because the alternative is something true and I’m not ready to spend true on a text message between orders, and I clock off at eleven with my feet done in and my head still, somehow, three hours behind me in that room with the plastic chairs.

I don’t go to his. Some nights the right thing is your own bed, your own ceiling, your own version of quiet, and tonight is one of those nights, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why except that the version of me who read tonight needs to be alone with what I did before I’m allowed to be soft again in someone else’s arms.

I lie on the single bed with the laptop open, the cursor blinking at the end of the next chapter, my body still running on whatever the room did to it, the electric residue of forty strangers deciding in real time whether I was real and landing, narrowly, on yes. I don’t decide to touch myself. I notice I already have, one hand gone down inside the tights while the other stays on the keys, and for once the two aren’t competing for the same current.

I get the tights off one-handed, the grey boxers after, and take my cock in a dry palm first because I want the drag of it, the foreskin moving slow over the head, no rush, nobody waiting, nobody to steer. The other hand keeps typing. I fix a sentence. I work myself. I fix the next one. Both hands drafting the same night at the same speed, the body and the page deciding together what they’re allowed to want and how loudly.

I think about his hands. Not on me, or not only: flat on a wall, checking the set of a thing he built, that pulse-check I’ve watched him make a hundred times, and then the same flat palm dragging down my stomach, lower, and I spit in my hand and go slick and the rhythm stops being idle and turns deliberate. The builder’s line arrives in the gap between one stroke and the next, the one about learning the word for what he is and filing it under later, and I file nothing. I take the word out of the drawer and use it, out loud, in an empty room, because tonight the hand and the head and the page all want the exact same thing and I’m done making any of them wait their turn.

No audience for this one: no roomful of strangers, no calling rules, no places I have to keep a stranger’s hands off, because the only hand on me is mine and mine knows precisely where everything is and what it’s for. I come into my own fist with the other hand still resting on the keyboard, a half-finished sentence stranded on the screen behind me.

That’s the scene I’d never read aloud, not for the sex but for what the sex means, and meaning is the harder thing to perform. Every other time I’ve been in a bed there’s been a second person’s reading of me in the room, a narration, a verdict, a set of assumptions about what my body’s for that I’ve had to manage even inside the pleasure. Alone, there’s none of that: I wrote the manual, and the manual answers only to me. That’s not loneliness. People assume the solo scene is loneliness, the sad wank of a person nobody wants, and it’s the opposite: it’s the one room where the calling rules don’t need saying, because there’s no one who could get them wrong: self-possession, the plainest kind. The body and the page under the same hand, both mine, both drafting the same night at the same speed, and no breath in the room but my own, and nothing about me a favour anybody’s granting.

I came, and I sent the email, and I lay there after in a mess I was in no hurry to clean up, and the thing I felt wasn’t the shame the men before him had trained me to expect on the far side of wanting. It was ownership. Two years I’d write towards the sentence for it. It was mine. All of it: the body, the book, the want, the nerve. Mine, and enough, and nobody’s to price but me.

Afterwards I don’t clean up straight away. I sit with the laptop still open and I do the thing I haven’t told a single person I’m doing, not Rhi, not Ron, not the version of myself that still flinches at wanting things out loud: I open a new email, I attach the first three chapters, and I write four lines to an agent whose name I got from the visiting speaker’s card, and I send it before I can draft it into something safer.

Me, who drafts everything to death, who counts every sentence twice, wrote four lines to a stranger and sent them wet-handed and unedited, and that’s the tell I only read later: the two most reckless things I do all night, the hand and the email, I do in the same half-hour, on the same current, and neither asks anyone’s permission. I’ve spent a decade careful about wanting. Careful about being seen wanting. Careful, above all, about being caught wanting a thing big enough that losing it would show. And here, on a single bed, still catching my breath, I want two enormous things at once and reach for both with the safety off: a body that’s mine to spend how I like, and a future for a book I’ve told nobody I’m still writing. Same appetite, same nerve. I told myself for years the wanting was the dangerous part. Turns out the wanting was never the problem. The hiding was.

Nobody knows. That’s the part I keep, tonight, entirely for myself: not the sex, not the sentence about the builder, but the quiet, reckless, unwatched decision to want something this badly in a room where nobody’s holding their breath but me.

SIX

Chapter fourteen. A man falls. The woman walks to him in the dark and doesn’t explain herself.

Iclock her three seconds before she reaches the table, which is two and a half seconds more warning than I usually get.

You learn the walk. That’s not a claim to anything mystical; it’s the same skill a barman has for the drunk who’s going to be a problem in twenty minutes, or a nurse has for the one in the waiting room who’s actually ill. There’s a particular approach a person makes towards a table with two people at it when they’ve only come for one of them, and it’s all in the eyeline: they fix on the face they want and they don’t let the eyes travel, because letting the eyes travel means arriving at me, and arriving at me means having to decide something before they’ve got to the table.

She was Gaz’s, and I’d heard about her for months in the affectionate shorthand men use for each other’s girlfriends, and I’d have been glad to meet her. The rest of this is going to sound like a grudge and it isn’t one. I’d have liked her. She had a good coat on and a laugh that arrived a fraction early, and on any other approach vector I’d have moved my laptop and made room.