I wanted his company, but I thought he maybe ought to be spared mine. Women are lousy company — they usually don’t drink enough, or if they do, they get strange too quickly. They get nasty. Or they cry, which is too complicated to deal with. Men are simpler.
Men see you’re not right and they find where you’re soft and get in there and hurt you more. They pick who’s easiest to hurt. That’s simple.
But Jon isn’t like that. And I’m not drinking.
Even when he was Mr August, when he was Corwynn, and he was just his letters — he still made you different. What he wrote worked in under your clothes and kept you cosy. You could be in the world by yourself, but not look alone.
And when he turned up at the PO box, I did know him. He moved in exactly the way that he wrote. He was all of a piece — that’s what happens when you’re honest.
That funny little drag step he does sometimes, it’s got the same bounce that he slips in his voice, that he seals up in envelopes and sends me.
He wants to be an R & B man which is silly, because he already is — he has an R & B body.
Nobody told him.
But it’s really clear and so I knew him.
But if I’m honest and all of a piece myself I will eventually tell him — when I’m sure he won’t mind — that I dived out of that fucking coffee shop four times before I ran to him.
The first time was a sort of misunderstanding: in the letters Jon said he was ‘unfortunately tall’ so I caught sight of this bloke who was massive, just huge, and he didn’t look a proper fit in any other way, but I had a go and went and asked if he was Corwynn. Silly — thinking some wrestler-looking creature would be him. That was more for practice than a proper mistake, I think.
The man had been startled and then amused that he might be confused with someone else. He had a small tattoo on the side of his neck. Mr August wouldn’t have a tattoo. He wouldn’t have a frame that suggested protein shakes and whey powder and sweating over weights.
Silly cow. Don’t know what I was thinking.
I wasn’t thinking — I was scared.
Then there was the one who looked fussy, somehow, and who was tallish and dressed for an office job — but I realised, once I was outside, that he’d gone in with letters and come out with none and that was probably the wrong way round. And his eyes weren’t as they should be. When he looked at me, they had the wrong type of light.
She had only glanced at him and not advanced across the square and into asking him if he was Mr August.
And there was a ginger person in a very lovely suit. I wasn’t sure about him. I thought gingerness would have been mentioned, if it had existed. Jon said he was going grey … and there was no sign of grey. So I said nothing to Mr Ginger — we just stared at each other and then I ran for it, because I’d needed to get in close to check the hair properly. He may have thought that I had some problem with his crowning glory …
My dad always talked about his crowning glory — didn’t just call it hair. My dad whom I chose to know less and less as he got older and I drank more. He was delicate with himself over going bald. I did notice that. Not much else.
The idea is to notice who you love before they die.
That would be the civilised idea.
Meg had seen Jon once through the café window, stood up and made it as far as the entrance before she was foxed, pressed back by what seemed to be the rapidly congealing air. If you believed you could tell from letters and letters and letters the way that a person should be, then he was Jon. This man was neat and tired-looking, soft in the ways that he moved, careful. He was wearing a quiet suit — the relative silence of the jacket and trousers, of the unbuttoned coat both concealing and framing them, didn’t stop them being plainly good. The way he’d groused about other people’s clothes let you be sure that he’d watch how he turned himself out for fear of being ugly. You could guess that he hated and pondered his own appearance more than anybody else’s, that he walked about inside this rawness, this sense of horror.
Another man being delicate about what he thinks are his failings.
He had a haircut that made him seem a tiny bit like a schoolboy — the haircut of someone who doesn’t quite take himself seriously. He had gently, tenderly thinning hair. And he’d carried a briefcase that wasn’t new, or gimmicky, that seemed to fit his hand and be used to him.
Most of all, I knew he should be Corwynn August, the man who was calling himself Corwynn August, because he seemed to be walking under something — like a man who had to be brave and walk about beneath some swinging danger, something not quite securely fastened up above. You could see that he’d stopped expecting the something would go away.
She’d loitered until he came out of the PO box office again and she could study his face. She was trying to be quick about it … She didn’t want to scare him. She didn’t want to spoil everything. But she did have to be sure. And would her Mr August be so tense and have a mouth kept tight with what was perhaps irritation … and also these straight-scored lines coming down from near his hairline to his eyebrows — the marks you get from being angry. These details made her doubtful.
I avoid the people who get angry, the men who do that. What might have been true, shown to be true when you saw his face, was that he had sad habits and also rage, but also this softness. The rage was mostly about himself.
The softness came first and last — it held him.
I think that’s what made me believe it was him.
Her man was a fast walker, though. He’d been gone before she could guess what she should do, before she could fight the solidified air, or else give up and leave him and never come back there — surrender. Alcoholics, after all, are fond of giving in.
Self-defence. Self-harm.
And he seemed very formal and our letters weren’t and I didn’t want formal. Formality’s just a way of not being around.
And if it was him, he was a man who worked at speed — alive and fast and with someone who rushed like that you couldn’t quite be sure of what would happen …
She’d let him go and done nothing, just slipped back into the café and watched what was left of her cappuccino go cold. Then she’d gone home.
It’s Jon’s outside that’s formal. That part of him is to do with his job, but it’s self-defence, too. And self-harm. I’ve watched the insides of his wrists and how he hides them — where he’s tender — and I’ve noticed his fingers comforting each other and the way he bends his knees a little to be level with you so he can speak — he doesn’t want to loom — and then there’s the way his intentions, soft intentions, make themselves plain in his eyes. There’s this quick light that shows. It makes you think you’ve spotted where he really is.
I don’t see him often, haven’t met him often, but I have noticed him a lot. I make up for our lost time. I have studied the way that he is.
Jon’s an education.
She’d kept going back to Shepherd Market, kept waiting, kept close to the time when she’d first caught sight of him.
And then he was there again and I was there and I was walking over and saying his name, calling it out so that something familiar would reach him before me — and then he heard, he realised …