Page 16 of Second Person

‘You’ve had thirty years of getting a proper look at me.’

‘Have I?’ And she said it lightly, which is how Rhi does the ones that go all the way in. ‘I’ve had thirty years of the very good edition. Which I love. Which I’d choose over anybody else’s whole self.’ A breath. ‘You’ve not once, in your life, rung me first when it was bad. Not once, Cel. I find out after. I’ve always found out after.’

And I said the thing.

I’m not going to soften it, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t remember it word for word, because I do, and the remembering is the sentence’s only punishment.

I said: ‘It’s easy to be the honest one when nobody’s ever needed you to be anything but what it says on your birth certificate.’

Then, in case that hadn’t done enough: ‘You got the whole ordinary thing handed to you at four, and you’ve spent thirty years being brave about mine.’

Silence with a kitchen in it.

‘Right,’ she said. And put the phone down. And Rhi does not put phones down; Rhi is congenitally incapable of ending a call inside four minutes of the goodbye starting; and the click was the loudest thing I’d heard all year.

It wasn’t a lost temper. I don’t lose my temper. What I did was reach, at speed and with total accuracy, for the one thing that would hurt her, and the reason I could reach it that fast is that I’d been keeping it, filed, for years, without ever once intending to use it.

That’s the bit that frightened me. Not the cruelty. The inventory. I’d been walking round for a decade with a full and current record of the softest place on my oldest friend, kept up to date, in case.

And what was it defending? A note; a true note, from a reader who’d earned the right to give it, about a book I already knew was doing the thing she said it was doing. She hadn’t accused me of anything I hadn’t accused myself of at three in the morning a hundred times. She’d just done it out loud, in her voice, in the vowels, and out loud in that voice it was unsurvivable, and I razed her to the ground to make it stop.

I rang back within the hour. It rang out. I rang again at nine. It rang out. I rang once more at half past ten, knowing it would ring out, doing it anyway, because a call you know won’t be answered is the only apology available to a coward at half past ten at night.

Then he came round, because it was a Thursday and Thursdays were his, and he took one look at the flat and made tea instead of asking.

He put the mug on the nightstand next to the notebook and sat on the end of the bed with his back to the headboard, two feet off, and drank his own tea and said nothing at all.

That’s what he did. That’s the whole of the intervention.

I didn’t touch mine. I watched it go cold over about a quarter of an hour, and the fridge clicked on and off, and the rain did the thing it does in that flat where you can hear it changing its mind, and at some point my phone went face down on the nightstand and I did not look at it and he read the name off it before the screen died and never, in the rest of our lives, asked me a single question about it.

Not one. I’ve thought about that more than I’ve thought about most of the kind things I’ve been handed. He had, sitting on the end of that bed, a name and three unanswered calls and a person crying with their face turned to the wall, and every single ingredient of a reasonable question, and he did not ask it, that night or any night after, because I’d told him a year earlier that asking is the thing I can’t have and he’d filed it the way he files a spec.

The wrist went, when I reached for the mug. Same tremor as his on the bench, three weeks the other way round, and if he clocked the symmetry he never said, and I don’t think he did, and I’d rather he didn’t.

I said sorry. It came out about a third the size of my normal voice.

He said don’t.

I said I’m not, I’m not —

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to.’

And then he put his mug on the floor and lay down on top of the duvet, on top, in his joggers, with six inches between us and his back to my back, not touching, the lamp still on.

I have never been so precisely met by anyone in my life. Not held. Held would have been a demand: held means you have to receive it, arrange your face, be grateful in some legible way. He lay down on top of the covers at a distance of six inches like a man lying on a mat between sets, like he wasn’t staying, like the whole arrangement was provisional and I could end it by breathing wrong — and that provisionality was the gift. He’d made it costless. There was nothing to accept and therefore nothing to perform.

I got the notebook.

The word was câr.

Three letters. Welsh, obviously; you can see it in the hand, the consonants standing closer together than English lets them. It’s an old word and it’s gone soft in modern usage, it survives mostly inside caru, to love, and in the vocative you still hear in kitchens. But it’s a noun, properly, and what it means is: one of your own. A kinsman. Not blood, necessarily, though it’ll do for blood. A person who is yours.

I’ve kept the notebooks since I was seventeen. A shelf of them now. They’re not a diary and they’re not drafts; they’re definitions, because I worked out early that the language I’d been handed had a hole in it exactly my shape, and that I could either spend my life apologising for not fitting the words or I could get a pen. Some of them are for words that are mine and that nobody else uses that way. Some are for words I haven’t found yet, and those ones are just a heading and a lot of white.

That night I was trying to write the definition of câr, because after thirty years I still haven’t got a word for what Rhi is. Friend is an insult. Sister is a lie and a theft — I’ve got a brother, the word’s spoken for, and Rhi’s got her own family and I’m not applying for a place in it. Chosen family is a phrase from a leaflet. And I sat there with the pen and I wrote câr at the top and looked at it and knew it was wrong, because câr still means one of your own, and the whole content of the evening was that I’d just proved I don’t know how to be one.

I wrote it. Crossed it out. Wrote it again with a qualifier. Crossed that out. Three more goes, all crossed, the last one hard enough to bend the leather.