Kit: The Word We Didn't Use

Nell put the photograph of the purple hat in the shared folder and named it DO_NOT_USE_UNDER_ANY_CIRCUMSTANCES.

I replied in a comment that the naming convention lacked subtlety. She wrote that subtlety had failed to prevent the photograph existing.

I did not use it. I did look at it once more before closing the folder.

The project was beginning to have a shape. Pages spread across the library table: routes, costs, opening information, short pieces of writing that sounded like Nell without crowding out the practical details. My photographs showed benches with people on them, hands holding books, the worn edge of a sign, the harbour at a time of day when the light was ordinary rather than promotional.

We had also begun to have a shape together, though I trusted that less. There were habits returning before either of us had approved them. Nell made tea for two. I brought the spare charger she always forgot. She left room in her sentences for my corrections, and I tried not to make every correction sound like evidence against her character.

On Thursday, Jo asked us to test the short sound-recording activity in the community room. The idea had grown from the book Nell chose for me. People would make a tiny scene using ordinary sounds: footsteps, a door, water in a cup, paper, a chair moving. No expensive equipment required. Just a phone recorder, some attention and a willingness to sound ridiculous in front of another person.

Nell was willing to sound ridiculous only after establishing that the recording would not be posted publicly.

“Agreed,” I said.

“In writing?”

I wrote PRIVATE TEST RECORDING on the top of the page. She nodded solemnly.

We chose a scene: someone entering a room they were not supposed to be in. Nell wanted a dramatic door. The library door had excellent hinges and refused to provide one. We used a chair leg against the floor for a creak, then discovered that I could make a more convincing floorboard sound by slowly bending a piece of thick card.

“This is fraud,” Nell said, delighted.

“It's sound design.”

“Respectable fraud.”

She recorded footsteps using three different pairs of shoes Jo found in the costume box left from a children's event. One pair squeaked. Another made her walk as though she was trying to avoid a personal enemy beneath the carpet. We laughed so hard that the recording became unusable.

The next attempt worked. We listened back with one earbud each, sitting close because the cable was short. I could hear the real Nell breathing beside me while the recorded Nell crept through an imaginary room. It was a strange, intimate overlap: the person and the version we made together.

“That's good,” she whispered when the final sound ended.

“You can speak at normal volume now.”

“I don't want to frighten the person in the room.”

I laughed. She kept the earbud in a moment longer, looking at the waveform on the phone.

“Do you want to do this all the time?” she asked. “The sound work.”

“A lot of the time.”

“I didn't know that before.”

“There was a while when you didn't know much about me.”

She turned towards me. The cable pulled slightly between us.

“I know.”

I took out the earbud before the conversation could become physically constrained as well as emotionally difficult.

“Nell,” I said, “are we friends again?”

The question had been waiting for days. Asking it made me feel less sophisticated than every photograph I had ever taken.

She looked down at the phone, then back at me.

“I'd like to be.”

“That isn't quite an answer.”

“No. I'm trying not to answer for both of us.”

I considered that. “I'd like to be too.”

“Then yes?”

“Yes.”

The word was small enough to sound inadequate. It also changed the room. We were no longer pretending that making tea or saving a charger was merely efficient project management.

Nell smiled. It was not the big laugh from the photograph. It was quieter, with a little uncertainty left in it.

“I missed you,” she said.

I looked at the recorder because I could not immediately look at her.

“I missed you too.”

We did not hug. Maybe we should have. Instead we spent five minutes untangling the earbud cable, which gave us both something to do while the words found places to settle.

Later, we wrote the activity instructions together. Nell wanted the introduction to say that making something with another person could be easier than trying to think of interesting things to say. I suggested adding that the result did not have to be good to make the afternoon worthwhile.

She looked at me over the page.

“Ours was good.”

“Yes,” I said. “Ours was.”

There was another word in the room by then. Not friends. Neither of us used it.