第17章 Two Years of Silence

I did not go and see the boat. I want to be honest about that in a book that is otherwise full of me being honest about things, so: on the Saturday in June at half past one in the afternoon, in a yard in Anderry, a man left a two-inch space in the paint on a vice and asked me a question with two answers, and I said I wanted to see the boat, and I did not go and see the boat. I went home. I drove the eleven miles with the radio off and did not turn it on once, and I got to a flat in Anderry at a quarter past three and put my bag down and stood in the kitchen. Then I sat down at the low table with the eleven sheets and the log book, and I did what I have done every day since the May, which is the thing I have not told anybody about, which is that I write down the true thing every night and then in the morning I do not believe it. That is the whole mechanism. That is what a person does when they has spent nine years not saying things. You write it down at night because at night it is possible, and then in the morning you read what you have written and it is a document by a stranger and you put it in a drawer and you go to work. I have eleven weeks of that. I have eleven weeks of a piece of A4 with a date on it and my own handwriting and things on it that I would not say to a living soul, and the drawer is under the phone table, and the phone table is where the phone is, and I answer that phone every working day of my life. I want to describe one of them, because I think it is the clearest thing I have ever written. The ninth of June. I wrote: *I did not sleep on Saturday. I did not sleep because of the space in the paint and I have not been able to think about anything else and I have got a file to submit by Friday and I cannot make the file because every page of it requires a sentence I have not said. I am going to write the sentence here and then I am going to put this in the drawer, and that is what this piece of paper is, and it is a drawer.* And then I wrote the sentence, and I will put it in this book now because it is the only one that matters and because it is in a drawer in a flat in Anderry and it is not going anywhere, and because I am forty-one years old and I have decided that if I am going to have written it down at all then I may as well have written it down where somebody can read it. *I have been in love with you since a Tuesday in a kitchen in 2016 when you were doing a caulking compound and swearing at a tube, and I did not say it then, and I did not say it in 2018, and I did not say it to a solicitor in 2019, and I did not say it to two men in this practice who were extremely patient with me for eight months, and I did not say it to Ruth, who has known since 2017 and has never once raised it, and I did not say it to my mother, who left me a boat in a will four years before I found out, and I did not say it to a woman in a booth who worked it out in about nine seconds and told me to stop talking about the boat.* *I did not say it because I could not stand what would happen to my face when I said it.* And that is the true thing. Not a fear of rejection. A fear of the four seconds after, when a person's face does something, and there is no way on this earth to un-see a face doing that, and I would rather be rejected for the rest of my life than see it once. That is the actual disease and I have had it since I was nineteen and it is not about Jonah Pike and it was never about Jonah Pike. Nan rang on the Sunday. "You've not been to the yard," she said. "I've been to the yard." "You went on the Saturday, you stood at the back, and you left before the coffee, and I know that because Delia from the post office saw you and she's been on at me about it since." Nan has spies in every shop in Anderry and always has. "What did you want with him?" "I wanted to see the boat." "And did you see the boat." "No." "No," said Nan. "Right. And did you ask him a question." "No." "Good," said my mother. "You didn't ask him a question, and you didn't see the boat, and you went home, and you have been sat in that flat for a day and a night, and I know that because I rang the practice on Saturday morning and Ruth told me you'd rung in sick, which you have not done in nine years, and which means something has happened, and I have decided not to ask you what." "You always decide not to ask me what." "Roz," said Nan, "I ask you everything. I have asked you every question since you were nineteen. I asked you why you left a girl in Anderry at twenty-two and went to Manchester, and you told me, and I did not like the answer. I asked you about the practice, and about the flat, and about what you do with your money, and about why you never came to see me on a Sunday, and about the boat, and I have asked you about the boat for four years, and you gave me a different answer every time and none of them were true." She paused. "The not-asking is new. So the not-asking is because there's something to not-ask about, and I have decided to let it come, and I want you to hear the actual sentence, which is: I'm not going to hold your hand and I'm not going to wait for you, and if you have got something to say to that man then you have got about eleven weeks, because I have been told the mooring office wants the file by the end of the month and there is no extension and I have already had a letter about the practice from the bank and I am not going to be the reason you lose two things at once." "Mum—" "Ring me on Friday," she said. "Not to tell me things. Just ring me on Friday. And when you ring me you are going to tell me about the boat's pipe, because the man in the boat club told Delia and Delia told me, and I would like to hear you say the words *a man took a pipe out of my hull and told me about it in a book* out loud, because I have been waiting since 2016 for somebody in that family to do something that was not tidy." I put the phone down and I did not ring on Friday. That is the other half of this chapter and I am not going to dress it up. I did not ring on Friday. I did not ring on the Saturday either. And on the Sunday I went down to the yard at eight in the morning on the Sunday before the twenty-fourth, and Teddy was opening the booth, and she looked at me and said: "He said no." "He didn't say no," I said. "He asked me a question with two answers and I said one of them and then I didn't do it." "Sit down," said Teddy Vilar. I sat down on a stool in a plywood booth at eight in the morning and she made me a coffee and put it in front of me and then she leaned on the counter and said: "Two years." "What?" "That's the answer, isn't it," said Teddy. "He's not waiting for the third letter or the boat or the file. He's waiting because you went quiet for two years. Not one year. Two. And in the two years you've sent him a Christmas card and a birthday text and nothing else, and both of them were the same text about the carbolic, and I know that because he reads them out in the yard and makes everybody laugh, and then he goes quiet, and I have watched a man go quiet about nine hundred times in this yard." "Teddy—" "Two years is a long time to be the one that stopped," she said. "And the thing about two years is that it's not the length that matters. It's that everybody in this town has decided whose fault it was, and they have all decided it's yours, and he has never once said so, and that's not because he's a saint. That's because he's decided that if it's anybody's fault it'll be his, which it isn't, because he did the pipe and he told you, and he also sat on that pipe for four years while it was in there rotting your boat, and that's the actual fault and it's the one nobody's counting." "Then it's my fault." "No," said Teddy Vilar, "it isn't, and I'm not going to have you saying that in my booth either, and here's the last thing I'll say and then I'm opening the yard. Two people got into a mess and one of them wrote everything down in a book and the other one wrote one line and then went quiet, and the one who wrote everything down has been carrying the whole of it on her own for two years, and the thing that's happened is that she has got so tired of carrying it that she's started putting it in drawers." She opened the booth hatch. "And you can't put a person in a drawer, love," said Teodora Vilar. "That's the one thing a drawer is for. Not people. Go and be ridiculous at him for an afternoon and leave the boat alone, the boat'll still be there, it's not going anywhere, he's not allowed to sell it, he gave it to you, and I'd say that to him as well if he was here, which he is, he's in shed two and he's got a chisel out."