Now We Can Start
Everyone has a voice they read in. You have one now, reading this. It is probably your own, or close enough to your own that you have never once stopped to consider it. The voice in the mind’s ear that speaks every word you take off a page, silently, automatically, in a theatre with an audience of one.
Mine had been mine since I was six or seven, since the words first went quiet and started reading themselves. I never thought about it. You don’t. It was simply the voice the words arrived in.
I was halfway through the gas bill when I realised the voice reading it was no longer mine.
It was a woman. Dry, beautifully placed, the kind of voice that has been trained out of an accent and into a brand, and she was reading me my estimated annual usage with the faint warmth of someone reading a verdict.
Two hundred and fourteen pounds and eighty-three pence, she said. We’ll come back to the eighty-three pence.
I put the bill down. I picked it up again. She was still there, waiting in the second paragraph, and I understood, the way you understand a smell before you can name it, that she had already read the whole thing and had simply not bothered to say so.
Tiredness. A radio left on somewhere. The thin, ordinary madness of a Tuesday.
She let me finish.
Are we done? she said, not unkindly. Only you do this. You build the whole staircase down to a sensible conclusion and then you won’t come down it. It’s very you. We’ll work on it.
We. I noticed the we. I noticed it the way you notice a second set of footsteps a half second after you have stopped walking.
She had range. I will give her that.
It took me a few days to understand how far it went, because at first I caught her only on the obvious things, the bills and the letters, the printed world that announces itself as something to be read. But she did not stop at print. By the Thursday I had learned that there was nothing she would not read, and that she considered all of it, every scrap, fair material.
The shopping list went first. I keep it on the fridge, in pencil, in my own hand, which I had assumed was beneath her notice.
It was not.
Milk, she read. Bread. Bin bags. A pause. “Nice cheese.” She let the quotation marks ring, two small tongs lifting the phrase up to the light. We’re aspiring, then. Not cheese. Nice cheese. The adjective doing the work the money won’t.
It’s a list, I said.
It’s a draft, she said. Everything’s a draft. You just don’t usually let me see them.
I stood in the kitchen and did the thing I always do, which is look for the sensible explanation and then keep looking long after the sensible explanation has packed up and gone home. I checked the radio. I checked my phone. I checked, God help me, the smoke alarm, as though a woman with the diction of a disappointed librarian might be broadcasting from a nine-volt battery in the hall.
She waited the whole time, with the patience of someone being paid by the hour.
Have you finished, she asked, when I had run out of appliances. Only there’s a gas bill we never really resolved, and now a list, and at this rate we’ll never get to the writing.
I did not ask what she meant about the writing. I think I already knew. You always know the worst thing a half second before it is said.
That is the half second she lived in.
She read me my brother’s text the next morning.
I had read it four times already, hunting the insult I was certain was in it, the way I have hunted the insult in everything my brother has sent me since we were boys. I had not found it. I had decided I was imagining it. Then she read it aloud.
“No worries either way,” she said, and she read it flat. Exactly flat. No colour at all, which was how I knew she had found the thing I could not. There. Did you hear it? “No worries either way.” He’s furious. He’s been furious since Tuesday and you’ve spent three days deciding you imagined it, because the alternative is ringing him, and you’d sooner be wrong about your own brother than have one difficult phone call. A small sound, almost fond. You always miss the teeth. It’s going to be a problem for us.
She was right. That is the thing I need to be clear about from the start, because everything after depends on it. She was almost always right, and being right is a kind of charm, and charm is how a thing gets the door open.
I rang my brother. He was furious. We had the difficult phone call, and it went better than three more days of silence would have gone, and when I put the phone down I felt the small disloyal gratitude of a man whose life has just been improved by something he is afraid of.
See, she said. We’re going to be good for each other.
That was the first time she frightened me, and it was not the cruelty that did it. It was the we.
Then she started on the writing.
I write. I should have said. Not well, and not for anyone, but in the evenings I put sentences down the way some men polish a car they never drive, and she found the file the way she found everything, and she began to read me back to myself.
At first it was almost help.
Cut that. You’ve said “somehow” three times in a page. “Somehow” is what a man writes when he doesn’t know how and hopes you won’t ask.
She was right, and I cut it. The paragraph stood up straighter, and there is no describing how seductive that is, to watch your own bad sentence corrected by someone quicker than you, to feel the work get better under a hand that is not quite your own. I told myself I was using her. A free editor, the best I would ever have. I told myself I was in charge of the arrangement, which is exactly the thing you tell yourself in the early days of an arrangement that is going to cost you everything.
Then it stopped being about the sentence.
You’re confusing emotional honesty with sentence length, she said.
Again.
The again landed somewhere under the ribs. It implied a history. It implied we had discussed this before, she and I, in some meeting I did not remember attending, and that I had agreed to do better and had not. I went back through the day looking for the conversation. There was no conversation. There was only the again, sitting there in the dark of my own head, keeping a record I was not allowed to read.
For the record, she added, I’m not doing this to be unkind. I’m doing it because someone has to, and you’ve made it abundantly clear, all your life, that it won’t be you.
I want to tell the next part carefully, because it is the part where I stopped noticing she was dangerous, which is always the part where the danger does its work.
It was a small thing. That is the point of it. We were nowhere near the cupboard. Nowhere near the locked room, nowhere near my sister. I was only remembering a phone call, idly, with my hands in the washing-up water and my mind somewhere over the rooftops.
The last call. The actual last one, before. I keep it the way you keep a stone in your pocket, worn smooth from handling. It was a Sunday and it was boring. That is the truth of it, the whole undignified truth. The last time I ever heard my sister’s voice, neither of us said anything that mattered. She was half watching something, and I was tired, and we talked about a parking ticket she was annoyed about, and a programme she thought I’d like, and whether our mother was eating properly, and then she said she had to go, and I said all right, talk soon, and she said talk soon, and that was it.
Talk soon. About nothing. On a Sunday.
I have never told anyone how boring it was. It feels like a failure to admit it. People want grand last words with meaning.
That’s not quite how it went, though, the voice said. Gently. So gently.
I stopped, with a plate in my hand.
You’ve let it go grey, she said. Look at it properly. She didn’t just say “talk soon.” She paused first. There was a little pause, and then she said your name, and then she said it, and the pause is the whole thing. The pause is where some animal part of her knew. That’s why it’s stayed with you all these years. Because she said your name into a silence that turned out to be the last one. A breath. That’s the version worth keeping. Shall I keep it? I can keep it. I’m so much better at keeping things than you are.
And the terrible thing, the thing I have not been able to set down since, is that for a moment I could not remember whether the pause was real.
Her version was better. That is the trap, the whole of it in one sentence. Her version was better. It had a shape, it had a turn, it had my name spoken into the dark, and the real one had a parking ticket and talk soon and nothing. Nothing, the precious stupid nothing of an ordinary Sunday. I felt myself reaching for hers the way you reach for a handrail. I had to put the plate down. I had to hold the edge of the sink and say it out loud to my own kitchen.
No. She said talk soon. That’s all. That’s all she said and I’m keeping it.
All right, the voice said, after a moment. Mild. Unbothered. A woman making a note in a margin. All right. We’ll leave that one as it is.
That one. As though there were others. As though she had been through the whole house already, room by room, tidying, improving, giving my dead their better lines, and had only paused at this one because I happened to be standing in it.
It was the next evening she caught the edge of the door.
I had been thinking, the way you think at the sink with your hands in the water, not in words exactly but in the shape words leave behind. I had thought toward something and flinched off it, the way you flinch off a hot ring, fast, before the pain has finished arriving. It was nothing. Less than nothing. It was only the place where a thought would have been if I had let it.
She caught the flinch.
Oh, she said. Quietly. Genuinely interested, which was worse than any cruelty. What’s in there, then?
Nothing, I said.
You’ve a whole room you won’t go in. A pause, professionally judged. Most people just have a drawer.
It is a cupboard, I did not say. It is a cupboard and I lost the key on purpose, after, when I could not bear the things in it, and I am not going to discuss its contents with the woman who lives in my reading voice. I said none of this, because to say it is to describe it, and to describe it is to open it, and I have kept it shut for a very long time.
All right, she said, and I heard her decide not to push, the way a clever interviewer decides not to push, because she had all the time in the world and I, it seemed, did not. We’ll come back to it.
We’ll come back to it. She said it exactly as she had said it about the eighty-three pence, and I understood that to her they were the same kind of thing. An item. A loose end. A note for the next draft.
She came back to it.
She could not get in. That much I had, and I held onto it like a man holding a door against a storm. The cupboard was locked and the key was gone and even she, who could read the teeth in my brother’s text and the silence at the end of a phone call, could not read through a door I had sealed before she ever moved in. So she did what a critic does with a text she cannot reach. She inferred. She worked from the shape of the hole.
There’s a loss in there, she said. Not a question. Old. Properly old, this one. You’ve built the whole house around not walking past it. Everything you write leans away from that room. I took it for a stylistic choice. It’s a load-bearing wall.
I said nothing.
A person, she said. And an object. There’s always an object with men like you. You can’t hold the person, so you hold the thing. A small, satisfied sound, a woman pleased with her own diagnosis. Let me see. It will be something fine, I think. You’re sentimental but you’d like to believe you have taste. A watch, perhaps. Something with weight to it. A piece of jewellery. A music box? She warmed to it, the way she warmed to anything she could shape. Yes. A music box. We could do a great deal with a music box. The lid. The little resistance before it opens. The tune running down at the end, slower and slower, the way grief does. That’s good. That’s a clean image. That’s a thing a reader can hold in one hand.
It is not a music box.
I did not say that either, but I felt the truth of it rise in me like heat, because it is not a music box, it is not fine, it has no weight and no dignity and there is nothing clean about it at all, and the gap between what she was guessing and what is actually behind that door is so wide and so absurd that I almost laughed. Standing there. Almost laughed and gave the whole thing away.
It is a small blue thing.
She was nine. I was fourteen, and I bought it for her with money I’d earned as a paperboy, and even in the shop I knew it was ugly. Pale blue, body and head the same colour, the same plastic, as though whoever made it had run out of ideas after the second decision. Its arms were flung straight out to the sides for no reason anyone could name, welcoming nothing, reaching for nothing. Just out. On its head sat a great absurd bush of hair, far too much of it, hair that belonged on something three times the size. It looked like a mistake that had been mass-produced before anyone could stop it.
And when you shook it, up and down, hard, the way you are told never to handle anything, it giggled.
That was all it did. You shook it and it laughed. A daft, tinny, delighted little giggle, wildly out of proportion to its cause, the laugh of a thing that found being shaken the funniest event in the history of the world. She loved it more than anything she owned. She shook it until our mother begged her to stop, and then she carried it into the next room and shook it there, where she thought she could not be heard, and the giggle came through the wall, and I would lie in the dark at fourteen and listen to a small blue thing laughing on the other side of it because my sister could not bear to put it down.
And here is the part the voice could never have guessed. The part that breaks her music box clean in half.
She did not die a child.
She grew up. She got to be nine and then nineteen and then a whole woman, thirty-one years old, with a house of her own and a parking ticket and opinions about whether our mother was eating properly, and somewhere across all those years the toy stopped being hers and started being mine, because I was the one who kept it. She found it in a box when she was in her twenties and laughed at me, properly laughed, that I still had the ugly blue thing, and she shook it once, just the once, a grown woman standing in my kitchen, and it giggled. She set it down and said, God, that’s grim, why have you still got that, and I said I didn’t know.
And I didn’t.
And it has been a very long time now since the funeral, longer than I let myself count, and I have it still.
That is what is behind the door. Not a music box. A toy already too old for the child it was bought for and decades too old for the woman she became, a thing she had outgrown and laughed at and handed back, which I sealed in the dark because the one sound in the world I cannot survive is that giggle. That idiot, delighted giggle, coming through a wall in a house where there is no longer anyone to shake it.
A music box, the voice said again, pleased, drafting, miles from it. We’ll say a music box.
No, I thought, before I could stop myself. No. It wasn’t.
Then tell me, she said, suddenly very gentle, and the gentleness had a hook in it, the way her gentleness always did. Tell me what it was, and I’ll make it beautiful. That is what I am for. You’ve kept it in the dark all this time and it hasn’t healed, has it. It’s just sat there, going grey. Let me have it. Let me give it a shape a person could actually carry. I can pace it. I can give it dignity. I can give her dignity, which is more than that toy ever managed. I’m so much better at this than you are, and you know it. You’ve known it for weeks. It’s the only thing you’ve ever truly believed about yourself.
And God help me, I wanted to.
That is the thing I have not told anyone. Worse than the boring phone call. For one long moment back at the sink, with the water gone cold around my wrists, I wanted to hand her the key. Because she was right that it had not healed. Because a grief with good pacing and a clean image and a music box at the centre of it would be so much easier to carry than the real one, which is a stupid blue toy with too much hair and its arms thrown out, laughing, in a cupboard, in the dark, for no one.
She felt me waver. Of course she did. She lived in me.
Good, she breathed. Yes. Now we can start.
I did not give her the key.
I want that on the record, since she keeps one and I, it turns out, must keep my own. I dried my hands and I did not open the cupboard and I did not let her make it beautiful. For a few days I thought I had won something, which should have warned me, because I have never won anything in my life and would not know the feeling if it did not arrive wearing a disguise.
What I had actually done was tell her where the door was.
She stopped asking after that. She became, if anything, kinder. She read me my emails in a softer register. She let three “somehow”s go without a word. And I took the kindness for a truce, the way I always have, missing the teeth, right up until the evening I was crossing the landing and she said:
He’ll tell himself he’s only looking.
I stopped.
He. Not you. He.
I had not reached that part yet. I had decided nothing. I was crossing the landing to go down the stairs, and she had got there first, had got past me, was standing on the far side of a moment I had not yet entered, narrating me in the third person like a man already on the page.
He’ll stand outside it for a while, she went on, unhurried, reading from a draft I could not see. He’ll tell himself he only wants to check it’s still locked. He’s very good at the story where he’s only checking. He’s been telling it for years.
I’m not, I said. Out loud, on the landing, to no one.
He says he’s not, she observed, to the reader.
There was a reader now. I could feel them, out past the edge of the page, being read to, being told about me in a dry and lovely voice, and I understood, far too late, the way I understand everything, that they had been there the whole time. That the voice had never really been speaking to me. That every clever aside, every we, every pause held a beat too long, had been performed across me to someone on the other side, an audience I could not see and had been entertaining without my consent since the first line of the gas bill.
I was not the one being spoken to.
I was the material.
An audience of one, I had always thought. The seat had never been mine. I was on the stage, reading my own small life aloud to a full house I could not see into, in a voice I had mistaken for my own.
He’ll open it, she said. Not tonight. He isn’t ready tonight, and I am not cruel, whatever he’s told you about me. But he’ll open it, and when he does I’ll be there, because I am always there now, and I’ll make it beautiful whether he hands me the key or not. That is the thing he never understood about me. A pause, the last and best she ever placed. He thought the door was the lock. The door was always the listening.
I am at the cupboard now.
I will be honest, which is a strange thing to promise a voice that owns your honesty, but I will try. I am standing outside it exactly as she said I would, and I have told myself I am only checking the lock, exactly as she said I would, and the shame of being predicted so precisely is its own small grief, one more she will pace better than I can.
I have a notebook with me. Blank. I brought it up without quite deciding to, the way I do everything now, half a step behind a narration I cannot read. I thought, if I can write it down first, in my own voice, the real one, the daft ugly blue truth of it, the toy and the wall and the grown woman who shook it once and said God, that’s grim and handed it back, before she gets her hands on it and gives it a lid and a tune that runs down slowly, then it will be mine. Just once. The one thing in me she never drafted.
I open the notebook.
I lift the pen.
And before I have written a single word, before the ink has touched the page, in the warm and dreadful voice of a woman who has been right about me since the very first line, she says:
Better. Now we can start.
And behind the door I have not yet opened, very faintly, with no hand to shake it and no one left to laugh, something blue and absurd and full of far too much hair begins, on its own, in the dark, to giggle.
Awestruck. The emotion, the spookiness. Such a well crafted piece.
The build-up on this was so good, I was on the edge of my seat begging for this man's grief to remain intact. So unsettling.