unclaimed-recollection / 09 - Back to the Wall.md# 09. Back to the Wall > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Aurevia and the Reach > A night in Odran's house at Pinecliff, with a guest.  We did not talk, going to bed. I want it on the record that this was my doing. Sevran would have talked. He is not a man who fills a silence, but he will answer one, if you leave it open long enough, and I had been leaving it shut since the doorstep. At Resa's table I had looked at my bowl. On the hill path I had counted the lamps. In my own front room, with the door closed behind us and Anka's cup still on the table where she had left it, I took the cup to the sink and washed it, and washed it again, and Sevran stood by the hook with his hands loose and watched me do it. "Odran," he said. "Mm. Go on in. I will be a moment." He went in. I heard him sit on the edge of the bed, and the small complaint of the frame, and then the quiet of a man who has been told to wait and is good at it. I dried the cup. I put it back on its hook, where it did not belong, and took it down, and put it on the shelf. I was being immature. I will say that plainly, since there is no one here but me. I am thirty-eight years old. I have taken freight through a hazard hold on the Eastern Corridor and I have talked a Wellhead stationmaster out of a fine, and I could not say three ordinary sentences to a man in my own kitchen because the sentences had a sum at the bottom of them. It was unprofessional, too. A guide does not go quiet on a load in its last days. A guide makes the handover clean. A guide says *two days, here is what you will need, here is the name of the clerk at Tern,* and shakes the hand, and goes home. I know how it is done. I have done it before. I have never once wanted to do it differently. I stood at the sink with my hands flat on the board and told myself, in order, the things I tell myself. *Work is work.* It begins and it ends, and the ending is not a verdict on the beginning. I took a placement from Anka in the spring, I took it as I take them all, and in two days she would take it back. That was the arrangement. That was always the arrangement. *You should not have brought him home.* That was the one that did not go down. I had not needed to. There is a Guild room at Pinecliff, and there is the spare above Old Teva's shed, and there are, God knows, enough corners of the Reach where a man with no history could have been put up for a month on a chit. I had brought him here, to my own house, to my own table, to a bed I had never shared with anyone in eight years. I had told myself it was because the Guild room was damp. It was not damp. I had gone and looked. I knew what I had done. I had made a place for him, a little at a time, so quietly I had not noticed the shape of it until it was about to be taken away. I turned down the lamp. * * * The old light lives on the stool at the head of the bed, under a knitted cosy of Resa's making, a lumpy brown thing with a hole for the cord that does not exist. It is a plain one, a secondhand fist-sized lamp I bought from a Glasswater stall the year I came back from the Ember run and had a house to put it in. It is not an heirloom. It does not make a house a home. It sits and glows when someone is in the room. It had glowed for me alone for eight years, at about the brightness of a banked fire. Now, in the doorway, I watched it come up. Slowly, as it does, as if it were being asked a question. Under the wool its light went from a dull amber to something warmer and paler, the color of tea held up to a window, and I knew without looking that Sevran had lain down on the far side of the bed and was lying very still. It does that. It did it the first night. I had taken it for a trick of the cosy. I took my scarf from the hook and laid it over the wool. Two layers, to bring it down. An old light cannot be switched off. It can only be covered. *That is a fact,* I thought, *about old lights.* I stood there a moment longer than I needed to. * * * The bed is small. I had never thought of it as small until it was shared. It stands against the left wall, long side to the stone, with the head under the window and the old light on its stool at the pillow. I sleep on the wall side. It has been so since the first night, and neither of us had decided it. I lie on my back, flat, with his hands on his chest like a man laid out for a Guild funeral, and Sevran lies on the open side, turned onto his left, with his back to me and his face to the room. I had asked him, once, early on, if he was comfortable. He had said, "I have slept in stranger places," with the slight pause of a man who has just heard what he has said. I climbed in. I put my hands on my chest. I looked at the ceiling. Sevran did not move. He was awake. I could tell, as I can tell a train is on the line before I hear it, by a change in the air. "Odran," he said, very quietly. I waited. I felt him take the breath. I know the shape of it now: a long, careful intake, the kind he draws before a sentence he has built in advance and is not sure he is allowed to spend. He had a thing to say. It might have been *thank you,* which would have been unbearable. It might have been *I do not want to go,* which would have been worse. It might have been a question, any question, about Tern, about the debt, about whether the room had a window. I did not know which. I did not want to find out. "Sleep," I said. "Two days. There is time." He let the breath go. He let it go slowly, all of it, and the bed shifted a little as he settled, and I felt something that I do not have the vocabulary for, a gratitude and a shame tied together in one knot. "Good night," said Sevran. "Good night." I knew he had held the sentence back for my sake. I knew exactly what it had cost him, since I was doing the same thing. And I did nothing to open it. I had decided, back at the sink, that I would not stoke it, and it seemed to me, lying in the dark, that this was the one decent thing I could still do: to leave him what he had, undisturbed, and not go asking for the rest. He went quiet. After a while his breathing changed and lengthened. He does it so simply, sleeping, the way a child does, as though it were a thing he had always known how to do. I did not sleep.  * * * I tried. I will not pretend I did not. I closed my eyes and counted chimes, the way he does: Tern, and Kesh Ford, and the long falling one at Wellhead. I got through the Saddle Line and the Mountain Line and began on the Green. The house made its night noises. The roof ticked as the stone gave up the day. Somewhere on the hill a dog said a short thing and thought better of it. My hands lay on my chest, and my chest rose and fell, and I thought: *you are doing a very poor impression of a man asleep.* I tried to slow my breath, and could not do it without hearing it. I tried to stop trying, and found that this was also a kind of trying. I want to say what the trouble was. It was not complicated. It was that the bed was warm. That was all. It had been warm every night for weeks, with a second body in it, and I had grown used to it so quietly that I had stopped noticing, the way a man stops noticing a clock until the night it is taken from the wall. In two nights I would be sleeping in a bed that held my own heat and nothing else, and I would lie there, and it would be a very ordinary thing. It would be the thing I had always had. It would be the thing I had chosen. That was what I could not get past. It was not *I will lose something.* It was *I will go back to what I had, and it will not be enough, and nobody will have done anything wrong.* I turned over. I do not do that. I have slept on my back since I was a boy, with my arms folded across me, a habit from the freight cars, from the nights in the kit stores of Crownward when you slept as you would be found. A man on his back can wake with his hands free. A man on his side is in a posture of waiting. Sevran sleeps on his side. I had never done it, never once, in the whole of the time we had shared the bed, and I did it then, twisting carefully so the frame would not speak, until I lay on my right side with my face to the wall. The stone was cool against my nose. I could smell lime and old smoke and the faint iron of the window frame. Behind me, a hand's breadth away, he went on breathing. I kept my eyes open. I kept my breath slow and my shoulders loose. I was, I told myself, a man asleep. A man who had turned over in his sleep, as men do, to a wall. I do not know how long I lay like that. The scarf had slipped a little from the old light, and a thin bar of amber lay along the plaster in front of my face, and I watched it, as one watches a candle in a draught.  * * * The bed moved. It was a small movement. The straw shifted. The frame spoke, once, softly. I felt the blanket draw across my hip as the weight on the other side changed, and I held very still and did not breathe. *He has turned over,* I thought. *He is only turning over.* It was a thing he did, a few times a night. I lay and waited for him to settle. He did not settle. I felt him come closer. It was not much. The space between us had been a hand's breadth, and it narrowed, slowly, to nothing: the warmth of him arriving along my back like a lamp being carried into the room. And then there was an arm, laid carefully across my side, a hand opening against the front of my shirt, flat, light, the way you lay a hand on a sleeping animal to be sure it is still breathing. I almost twitched. I felt it start in me, the whole of me tightening at the surprise of it, the cold flash of *he is awake, he knows.* I felt my fingers begin to close on the sheet. I did not move. I let the twitch die. I made my breath go on, the same slow in and slow out, and I stayed exactly as I was, a freight-car habit, the trained stillness of a man who has been woken in the dark by a thing he did not understand. I told myself, very firmly, that I was asleep. That I had been asleep the entire time. That a sleeping man does not react. Behind me, Sevran gathered me in. He did it as he does everything, carefully. He drew his knees up behind mine, and fitted himself along my back, and let his forehead come to rest between my shoulders. His breath was warm through the cloth. His hand lay over my heart. I do not think he was awake. I will tell myself that, and perhaps it is so. I think he had been sleeping, and the cold along the wall had reached him, or some part of him had registered a man turned away, and he had done what a body does, which is to close the gap. I think there was no thought in it. I think, God help me, that it was the most honest thing anyone has done in my bed. I lay in the circle of his arm and did not move. It was warm. That was the whole of it, and the whole of what I had been afraid of. It was warm, and heavy, and perfectly right, as though the bed had been built to this shape and I had spent eight years lying in the wrong half of it. I closed my eyes. Something ran out of the corner of the left one, and down across the bridge of my nose, and was gone into the pillow. It was very small. I do not think it would have made a mark. *This will last until the morning,* I thought. *And then he will get up, and put on his boots, and go down to the platform to listen to the bells, as he does every day, and I will lie here, and the other side will be cold.* I was careful with my breath. I thought about every muscle in my face and told it to be still. If he woke he would find a man asleep, a man who had been turned to the wall all night, nothing more. I could not bear for him to wake. I could not bear for him to take his arm away. I did not want the moment to have a name, or an end, or an explanation. I wanted it to go on being the thing it was, a warm weight in the dark, until the roof ticked out its last tick and the hill went grey and the whole of Pinecliff, and all of Aurevia, and every platform and form and clause of the Field Guild had found something else to do. *Stay,* I said, not aloud. *Stay, please. It is only a little longer.*  * * * I meant to keep awake until the window turned. I do not know what I thought I would do. Lie and be held, I suppose, until I had it memorized, every line of it, in case I should need to take it out of a drawer on some bad night at Tern. I counted his breaths against my spine. I counted the chimes again. I counted, I think, the beats of my own heart, and found they had slowed to match his. Somewhere in the Green Line, I lost the count. * * * When I woke, the room was grey. It was the early light, the thin even gray that comes into a stone house before the sun has found the hill. The old light was dimmed beneath its scarf. The roof was quiet. I lay on my right side, facing the wall, with the blanket drawn up to my shoulder, tucked in at the back as someone had been careful to tuck it. The bed behind me was empty. I put my hand back, across the sheet, without turning. The place where he had lain was cool, not cold, but the flat even coolness of a bed that has been left some time. I lay and felt it with my palm. Out on the hill, very clearly in the still air, the Pinecliff bells began, the first, the second, and the third a little flat. And between the second and the third there was a pause, the length of one man listening. He was up, and about, and had been for some time, as it was every day. I did not move for a while. Then I turned onto my back, as I always do, and put my hands on my chest, and looked at the ceiling, and did what a guide does. I got up and made the tea. 