Page 14 of Second Person

What came back was four words of information and about eleven of subtext.

Bad day on site. Someone got hurt.

I read it twice, and the subtext is the reason I was already reaching for my boots before I’d finished the second read, because in a year of asking that man questions I had never once had a bad day back. I’d had long one. I’d had knackered, and then an evening of nothing, and then fine by Wednesday. A man who answers how was your day with someone got hurt isn’t filing a report. He’s got a hand out of a window and no idea he’s put it there.

Are you okay?

Yeah, think so.

Which is the answer of a man who has been asked a question he hasn’t got the equipment to open.

Where are you?

Canal, near Castlefield.

I typed Stay there and sent it and then I stood in my own hallway for about four seconds with the phone in my hand, doing the sum, because I’m not going to pretend I didn’t do the sum. Twenty-five minutes on foot in the cold on a pair of legs that had done ten hours on tile; a tram most of the way if I could face the walk to it, which I couldn’t; a taxi I couldn’t afford that month and could have afforded, obviously, if I’d been willing to be the sort of person who says it doesn’t matter, and I wasn’t, that month, quite.

Four seconds. Then I put on the coat.

The coat was the long dark one I’d bought for the reading in November and hadn’t worn since, hanging in the hall in its own plastic like a threat, too good for a Monday, too good for a towpath. I took it because it was the warmest thing I own and because it was nearest the door, and if there’s a version of that evening where I chose it on purpose I’ve never been able to find it in myself, though I’ve looked, because it would be a better sentence. He noticed it on the bench and never once asked.

No makeup either, and I’d taken it off after the shift the way I do, and I did not put it back on, and there is a version of me from three years earlier who would not have gone out of that door with a bare face for anybody living, and she didn’t so much as raise her hand.

Twenty-five minutes, the last of it along the water with the cold coming up off it, and the Converse doing nothing at all against the wet, and my feet past complaint and into the numb bit on the far side of it. I saw him from about eighty yards. You always see him first; that’s the whole architecture of us. A big shape on a bench with his forearms on his knees, doing that thing he does with his hands when there’s nothing in them.

Here’s what I decided on the last thirty yards, and it was a decision, and it’s the only thing I did that night that I’d call skill.

I decided not to ask.

Everybody asks, and it’s a decent reflex, and in that specific weather it is useless. What happened. Are you alright. Do you want to talk about it. Every one of those is a small demand with a kindness painted on it: it requires the person on the bench to organise the worst thing that has happened to them that year into a shape fit for another person’s ears, and to do it now, out loud, while they’re still inside it, and to manage your face while they do.

I’ve been on that bench, or on the equivalent of it, and I know precisely what it costs to be asked a caring question you haven’t got the sentence for yet.

So I sat down, and I didn’t touch him, and I didn’t ask him anything, and I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the water, and we sat.

It’s the hardest thing I have ever done next to another person, and I’ve done a public reading in a room of forty strangers with my hands shaking too much to hold the page. Sitting still next to someone in pain is a discipline, because every instinct I own is a language instinct: name it, define it, find the word, put the word on the thing and the thing becomes carryable. I make my living doing exactly that. And what that man needed at ten past eight on a Monday was not my trade — if I’d reached for one of the tools, the definition, the reframe, the sentence that turns up pre-shaped and leaves the person holding it feeling handled, I’d have made his worst day into a demonstration of my competence and left him with the job of admiring it.

So I brought none of them, and that’s the thing I actually withheld, and withholding it is the most generous thing I’ve got. Not language. The equipment.

He talked, eventually, the way water finds a crack: the second level, the scaffold board, the bracket, I should’ve been on the floor. And somewhere in the middle of it a name went past, once — Marek, a lad off his crew, said the way you say a name when the person it belongs to is strapped to a board in an ambulance — and I didn’t repeat it back to him that night and haven’t since, because a name handed to you in that state is not yours to use.

I put a hand on his knee and left it there, cold fingers, no weight in it, and I let the rest go by without catching any of it, because catching it would have handed it back to him with my fingerprints on.

‘You need to eat something.’ A beat. ‘Not toast.’

He laughed, and it came out like a cough, and it was the ugliest sound I’ve ever been proud of.

Then twenty minutes of nothing at all, a narrowboat going past with somebody’s onions on the go and the wake slapping at the stone, and me on a wet bench in a coat I’d bought to be looked at in, with no face on, in the dark, next to a man who hadn’t asked me to come.

Then he went back to the bracket, and said it to the canal rather than to me: that it had been rated for the load, that he’d checked it, Thursday, every bracket on that run, and that they were right. Which wasn’t information at all, but a question with the question filed off it, handed sideways to the water in case anybody happened to be listening.

I allowed myself one sentence. I want that exact, because it’s the only place in the whole evening where I used the trade deliberately, and I built it the way he’d have built it: as a load path, not a comfort.

‘Then it wasn’t your fault.’

‘His leg was broken.’

‘Ron. Was it your fault.’