It rains, which I notice has become something of a recurring motif in my life over the past three weeks, and I walk with my hands in my pockets and my shoulders hunched against the cold, though hunching is also simply a default posture, an accommodation so deeply habitual I am no longer always aware of it. I take the long route, away from the main street, into the quieter roads where the restaurants are closed and the windows of the residential buildings glow amber and I am, out here, simply a large shape moving along a wet pavement.
No one to file the tusks for out here.
I think about Livia at seven years old, probably, with a bookshelf and a set of coloured pens for her organisational system, building the infrastructure of the precise and careful person she became. I think about her apartment, which I have learned over three weeks, the particular geography of her shelves and her kitchen and the small chaos she maintains on her desk which she defends vigorously as afiling system that works for her.I think about the way she laughs, the full one, not the polite one, which involves her entire face and occasionally her shoulder and which she sometimes redirects into her cardigan sleeve when she's in public and doesn't want to be loud.
I think about what it costs her to have me in those spaces.
The rain finds the gap between my collar and my neck. I pull the coat tighter and keep walking, which is not a solution to anything but is an available action, and available actions are sometimes the best the model can offer.
I should call her. I know I should call her. I know that leaving without saying anything is precisely the behavioural pattern that resulted in her appearing in my office three weeks ago with the energy of someone prepared to conduct a hostile takeover, and I know that she will be concerned, and I know that the correct, considerate, non-avoidant action is to call her. I reach into my pocket and hold the phone.
I put it back.
The problem with calling her is that I do not currently have a version of the conversation that doesn't arrive at the same model output, and I have not yet identified the variable that changes it, and I am better at this when I have the variable. When I can sayhere is the risk, here is the mitigation, here is the revised probability.I need to find the revised probability before I can have the conversation, or I will say something clumsy and she will hold my knee again and look at me with the expression that means she has already decided I am worth the expenditure, and I will believe her, and the cost will still be what it is.
I turn up a road I don't know particularly well and walk until I find a low concrete wall outside a closed pharmacy and sit on it, which takes a degree of structural confidence in the wall's loadbearing capacity that I don't technically have the data to support.
The rain comes steadily. The city makes its organism sounds around me, distant traffic and voices from the pub down the road and the specific percussion of water through the drainage system, and I sit with my hands on my knees and my glasses getting rained on and I think about spreadsheets and probability and the wordbarbaricand the way Livia's hand felt on my knee under the table like a coordinate that meantyou are here, this is where you are,and I think about how very much I do not want to be a cost she has to absorb indefinitely, how very much I would rather be something else, something that fits cleanly in her life without requiring her to hold the gap shut every single time.
I think about this for a long time.
My phone vibrates. I look at the screen.
Livia calling.
I watch it ring. The screen pulse with her name and goes to voicemail, and the small notification appears, and I put thephone back in my pocket, and I sit on the wall outside the closed pharmacy, and I attempt to locate the variable.
CHAPTER 13
LIVIA
The table goes quiet in the particular way that means everyone heard it and no one is going to acknowledge it, which is somehow worse than if they'd all laughed.
James sets his wine glass down. Maya straightens her fork. Priya looks at the ceiling. The joke is still sitting on the table like a bill nobody wants to pick up.
I look at Narod.
He's already pulling out his wallet.
"Please excuse me." His voice is the polite one, the formal one, the one that sounds like a professionally worded email, and I know that voice now. I know what it costs him to use it. He sets several folded notes down on the white tablecloth with the precision of someone who has already calculated exactly what proportion of the evening he is financially responsible for, even though we'd agreed to split it, and he tucks the wallet away and he smiles at the table, which is the worst part. The smile. Perfectly calibrated, entirely hollow.
"Narod." I reach for his arm.
"I think I'll get some air." He stands, and the table rocks slightly as his thigh catches the edge, and he apologises for that too, quietly, and he walks to the door and leaves, and my friendsstart filling the silence the way they always do, rushing in with noise to cover what they don't want to examine.
"He's very sensitive," James says, in a tone that means he thinks this is the problem.
I grab my bag.
"Liv, come on, it was just?—"
"Finish your food." "I look at each of them, James with his professional smile and Maya with her careful neutrality and Priya, who at least has the grace to look ashamed. "Actually, no. Don't. I've known you lot for nine years and I've excused a lot of things that I told myself weren't worth the argument. This is worth the argument." I pull my coat on. My voice is very level, which means the anger has passed the processing stage and arrived somewhere much colder. "That was cruel. You were cruel to him. He sat at your table in his best suit with his ridiculous tiny fork because he was trying, and you made him feel like a punchline, and I need you to understand that I am not angry because I'm in a new relationship and I'm being precious about it. I'm angry because you have always done this to people who don't look like what you expect, and I have always let it go, and I'm not doing that anymore."
"We were just?—"
"I'm done with just." I shoulder my bag. "Call me when that changes."
I walk out of the restaurant and the night air hits me, cold and damp, and I look left and right and there's no massive green shape in either direction.
