The word that landed

Fiction, about two adults over 18. A word on a list and the same word in a voice turn out to be two different objects, and there is no way to find that out in advance.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

We did the list properly. I want that on the record before anything else, because the point of this is not that we were careless.

A Sunday in March, at the kitchen table, with a mug each and a sheet of A4 ruled into three columns in biro. Wanted. Permitted. Never. His handwriting on the headings, mine in the columns, because we had agreed that the words should be put there by the person they would be said to.

It took about ninety minutes and roughly forty of those were spent laughing, because there is no dignified way to sit in your own kitchen on a Sunday afternoon writing that sort of vocabulary onto a sheet of paper next to a bowl of satsumas.

The never column was easy and short. Anything about my body. Anything about my mother. One word I will not write down here which I do not think anybody should say to anybody.

The wanted column was harder to fill in than I expected, because writing down what you want to be called requires you to admit that you want to be called it, in daylight, sober, at forty-three, to a man who will still be there on Monday.

And then permitted, which is the interesting one. Permitted was for the things I was not asking for but would not object to. Words I thought I could take. Words that seemed like they belonged in that world and that I had read in other people's accounts and had felt something faint about, but not enough to claim.

There were nine words in permitted. I wrote all nine of them myself.

October, then. Seven months of using the list, and it had been working. Twice he had used something out of permitted and both times it had done exactly what the column suggested it might: a small heat, no more.

We were about twenty minutes in. Ordinary evening, ordinary position, the sort of session where you both know roughly how it goes.

And he used one of the nine. Not the worst one on any reasonable ranking. If you had shown me the column and asked which of those would be a problem I would have picked three others first.

He said it in the flat, unhurried voice he uses, which is the correct voice, and it went into me like a needle going into a nerve.

I have tried a lot of ways to describe the difference and this is the closest I have got.

On the page, in March, that word was a specimen. It sat in a column with eight others and I looked at it the way you look at something in a museum case, interested, slightly amused, aware of it as a word that exists in the world and that other people use.

In October it was not a word. It was a thing that somebody who knows me had decided was true, said out loud into a quiet room with no other noise in it, while I was face down and not in a position to argue.

It also, and I did not see this coming at all, arrived attached to something. Not a specific memory I could produce for him. A shape. Something from my twenties that I have never thought of as a wound and would not have listed anywhere.

I did not say red. What I did was go completely still and stop breathing out, and the sound I made was not a sound I had made before.

He stopped instantly.

Not tailed off. Stopped, put the thing down on the chest of drawers where I could hear it land, and had his hand flat between my shoulder blades before I had finished the noise.

He did not say what is it. He said, "Done. We are done. I am here." Then nothing for what I would guess was a minute and a half, which is a very long time when somebody is waiting for you.

The first thing I managed was, "It was the word."

And the thing I will always be grateful for is that he did not say but it was on the list. It was on the list. He had every right to that sentence and he did not reach for it, then or later.

The explaining was awful, and not because he was difficult about it.

It was awful because I did not know what I was explaining. I could not tell him why that one and not the others. I could not connect it to anything you could write down. I kept starting sentences that had no ends, and at one point I said "I put it there myself" about four times, as if the fact that it was my handwriting made my reaction inadmissible.

He said, "You put it there in March. You did not know in March."

I said I felt like an idiot. He said something I have kept, which was that a list you have never been wrong about is a list you have not tested.

The other thing that happened in that hour, and I did not expect it, is that I had to talk him out of a decision. He had arrived at the view that the whole permitted column should go, that he would stick to wanted from now on, and that this was the responsible position.

It took me a while to work out why that made me feel worse rather than better. It is because it puts the cost on me. If the answer to one word landing badly is that he becomes cautious across the board, then what I have actually done by reacting is make my own evenings smaller, and the next time something lands oddly I will think about that before I say anything.

I told him that, badly, at about eleven at night. He thought about it for a day and came back and said I was right, which is a thing he does that I do not think I have ever properly thanked him for.

We redid it a fortnight later, same table, same biro, no laughing this time.

The word went in the never column. Two more went with it, not because anything had happened with those but because sitting there with the sheet again I found I could not say hand on heart that I knew, and the point of the exercise is not to be brave in a kitchen.

We added a rule at the bottom in his handwriting: anything in permitted gets used once, early, in a mild session, before it gets used anywhere that matters. A test flight. It is not romantic and it has caught one more since.

The other thing we changed is that permitted now has a date next to each entry, because I am a different person at forty-four than I was at forty-three, and it turns out that the list is not a document. It is a photograph of what I could bear on the day I wrote it.

People who write about this tend to present negotiation as though it were a solved problem. Agree it in advance, and then everything that follows is covered. I believed that in March and I would have told you it was obvious.

It is not that negotiating is pointless. It is that a system is not judged by whether it produces the right answer every time. It is judged by what it does on the evening it gets one wrong.

Ours put an implement down on a chest of drawers within a second, and never once said but you signed it. If anybody takes one thing from this, take that.