Kit: A Room with a Brick Wall

The accommodation confirmation arrived while I was trying to remove a strip of old tape from a microphone stand.

It was not a grand moment. The tape came off in tiny grey pieces, my fingers were sticky, and Luca was reading a list of missing props aloud with increasing disbelief.

“One artificial lemon,” he said. “How do you lose one artificial lemon?”

“Someone might have mistaken it for a real one.”

“In which case we have a larger problem.”

My phone vibrated on the desk. I read the email, then read it again. The room was reserved subject to the final paperwork and first payment. The funding had been confirmed. There were still forms, but there were no longer forms standing in for a decision.

“I've got the room,” I said.

Luca lowered the list.

“The brick wall?”

“The brick wall.”

He smiled. “Congratulations on your view.”

I laughed and then unexpectedly wanted to cry. He noticed without making me explain it.

“Go ring them,” he said. “I'll investigate the lemon.”

Dad answered the shop phone. Mum was in a meeting, so I sent her a message and promised to wait until she got home before opening anything that required a signature. Dad said we'd get fish and chips. This was his response to both major success and any evening when nobody had remembered to defrost something, but I knew which one he meant.

I called Nell next.

She was in the library with Celia, going through the publicity copy. I heard her excuse herself and move into the corridor.

“It's happening,” I said.

There was a small silence.

“That's brilliant.”

I could hear the effort and the truth in it. Both mattered.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I mean, I knew. It's just a room with an actual number now.”

“And an actual brick wall.”

“Very exclusive.”

I leaned against the arts-centre wall and looked at the patch of sunlight on the floor. “We should talk about it properly.”

“I know.”

“Not this second.”

“No. Tonight?”

We met after dinner at the end of my street. Nell had brought two cans of lemonade, still cold enough to dampen her bag. We walked to the little recreation ground behind the shops, where the swings were occupied by children too young to find them embarrassing.

“I don't want you to think I expect you to change your mind,” she said before we sat down.

“I don't.”

“Because I don't. Expect it, I mean. I want you to go.”

I opened my lemonade. It fizzed over my thumb.

“I want to go,” I said. “And I want this.”

She watched a child negotiate with his father for one more turn.

“We could try,” she said.

“That's what I was thinking.”

“We don't have to make a whole timetable now.”

“I might make a small timetable.”

She smiled. “Of course you might.”

We talked about visits without pretending money and trains were abstract inconveniences. I wouldn't be able to come home every weekend. Nell would have school, the paper and whatever work she found. We could call without making every missed call into evidence. We could say when something wasn't working rather than producing a cheerful version for the other person's benefit.

It was not a promise that nothing would change. I would have distrusted that promise, even if I'd wanted to hear it.

“I've never done this before,” Nell said.

“Neither have I.”

“I don't just mean distance.”

I took her hand. The swing chains squeaked behind us.

“I know.”

She leaned against my shoulder. For a while, that was enough of an answer.

On the walk back, she told me about the publicity feature. Celia wanted it more personal, less like a committee report. I said that made sense, provided it didn't stop being accurate.

“She thinks people need one clear story,” Nell said.

“People manage books with more than one character.”

“Advertising people are a delicate species.”

I laughed. “You can write it in your voice. That's not the same as pretending you did it alone.”

“I know.”

She squeezed my hand. I believed her.

At my door, I kissed her longer than I had meant to. We were getting better at the part where neither of us immediately tried to turn feeling into a joke.

Upstairs, I cleared a space in the folder for the accommodation papers. Under the map was the photograph from the failed film screening. Nell was laughing with rain in her hair. I had asked whether I could print it for myself, and she'd said yes, then asked for a copy of the one where I was laughing too.

I put mine against the desk lamp.

For the first time, the room in Manchester contained something in my head besides a bed, a wall and the person I hoped I might become. It contained this photograph, and calls home, and the possibility that leaving did not require becoming unrecognisable to the people who stayed.