The machine wouldn't take the ticket. I fed it in four times, flipped it, wiped the strip on my sleeve as though that has ever worked for anyone, and behind me a woman with a toddler on her hip said, kindly, "I think it goes the other way round."
I turned and said, "Do you want to do it, then?"
I'm not going to soften that. It came out flat, with something underneath it that startled me more than it startled her. She took half a step back. The toddler stared at me with that unbothered animal curiosity small children have, and I got my ticket back out of the slot and went down to the second level with my ears burning.
Ninety minutes before that, I had been sitting on the edge of a hospital bed telling my wife's father a long story about a dog we had in 1987, doing the voices, holding his wrist when he laughed because laughing hurt him now.
It's the gap I keep turning over. Not the rudeness — I've been rude before and survived the knowledge of it. It's that two hours of genuine tenderness could be followed, in the space of a stairwell, by a man I'd cross the road to avoid.
There's a card in the bottom drawer of my desk, under the passports. When I left the department, Priya wrote on it: *You never once made anything harder than it needed to be.* I have kept that card for eleven years. I took it out again last spring, looking for something else, and read it standing up in the hallway with the drawer still open, and for the first time it didn't read like praise. It read like a performance review of a machine. Reliable. Frictionless. Never once.
Not once, in nine years, did I make anything harder. Think about the odds of that being honest.
I know where I learned it, and it isn't a mystery or a wound; it's a Sunday. I was nine, maybe ten. My mother carried a casserole dish two doors down to Mrs. Holland, whose husband had gone into hospital, and I went with her because I was holding the foil. Mrs. Holland opened the door and my mother's face did something I had never noticed before because I had never been standing beside her at the right angle. It resettled. The mouth went first, then the eyes came up to meet it. It happened in less than a second and it was completely convincing, and I understood, in the doorway, holding a square of foil, that a face was a thing you could operate.
In the car afterwards she said, "God, that woman." Then at the lights, without any transition at all: "Be nice to her at church, though. She's on her own now."
Both true. Neither cancelled the other. I've spent fifty years failing to work out whether that makes her a liar or a decent person, and I've come round to thinking it made her tired.
Because here's what nobody warns you about. The performance is not free, and the bill doesn't come to the people you performed for.
I sat in my own driveway for eleven minutes on a Tuesday in November with the engine off and a bag of shopping going soft in the boot. I wasn't upset. Nothing had happened. I had been agreeable from eight in the morning until seven at night — agreeable in a meeting, agreeable on the phone with a supplier who was quietly cheating us, agreeable at the pharmacy — and the thought of one more face was more than I could organise myself around. So I stayed in the cold car under the streetlight looking at my own lit kitchen window, where my wife was doing something at the sink, and I waited until whatever it was drained back down.
And at three in the morning, more times than I want to count, I've lain there replaying one sentence. Not a cruel sentence. A sentence like *no, honestly, it was lovely* said with a half-beat of delay, and the delay is what I hear, over and over, like a scratch in a record. Did she notice the delay. Does she think I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. Does she know.
Nell has an allotment four plots down from mine. She's eighty-one and grows more than she can eat and gives most of it away, which is not the same as being nice, as I have slowly come to understand. The first thing she ever said to me was, "You're drowning those." No hello. She was right; I was drowning them. And when Bryan from the committee came round about the shed regulations and spoke to her in that particular voice men use on old women, she looked at him for a moment and said, "That's a shame," and went back to her beans, and he stood there for a while with nothing to do with his hands.
She has fewer friends than I do. Considerably fewer. She also, as far as I can tell, sleeps through the night.
I tried it. That's the part I'd rather not write down. Last February at Marcus and Dee's, six of us round the table, and Marcus started on his theory about his son-in-law — the same theory, the fourth or fifth outing for it — and I heard myself say, "You've never actually asked him, though, have you."
The words were fine. The words were true. But the tone came out with fifteen years of pressure behind it, the way water does when the pipe finally goes, and it wasn't honesty, it was a small dark thing wearing honesty's coat. Dee laughed too quickly. Marcus said, "Well," and then, "anyway," and moved his fork about an inch to the left. I spent the rest of the evening being wonderful to him — refilling his glass, laughing at the thing about the boat — because the machinery had switched itself back on and, God help me, it was a relief. Like a limp settling into a familiar road.
So I can't tell you that dropping the performance feels good. It felt like standing in a room in my socks with the lights suddenly up.
What I can tell you is that the performance protects almost no one. It didn't protect Marcus; he knew something had gone through the floor. It doesn't protect my wife, who has spent forty years married to a man who is warm to everyone and can go strange and quiet in a car for no reason she can name. The only person it protects is me, from the possibility that somebody might weigh me up and put me down again.
Ray knew. He must have known for years. In the room with the green blanket and the machine that clicked every ninety seconds, I did the dog story and the voices, and he laughed until it hurt, and then he lay there breathing for a while, looking at the ceiling tiles.
When he spoke again, he didn't look over.
"Bring the crossword tomorrow." His hand came up an inch off the blanket and waved vaguely at his own face, then let go. "And don't do all that with me. I've been doing it longer than you have."
