The Sound It Leaves by Curtis Garner

Edward sends Oden a text that turns into an all-day spiral.

I visit Big Ben sometimes.

I know it sounds like a strange ritual, but it reassures me that I live here.

I imagine the clock’s four gold-trimmed faces looming over the crowds, gleaming in the sun. Proud and ostentatious in its permanence, indifferent to my borrowed presence. I wait for it to mark time I’m never quite sure I have, sounding its solemn chime — a sound that feels like London itself. I feel briefly anchored looking up at it, like I’ve slipped into a version of my life that truly fits. In fact, that’s how the whole of London makes me feel, in all its chaos and illegibility and grandeur. This city is so unsure of itself, difference everywhere I look.

I almost miss my stop, distracted by the thought.

Hot air floods over me as I step onto the Northern line platform. The train squeals off into the dark. It’s November but I’m sweating. I have a knot in my stomach, a hollowing feeling that I try to suppress by focusing on my breathing. I stand there a moment — people rushing past me in their puffers and overcoats, lugging suitcases and stubborn toddlers — and count five seconds through my nose, five out through my mouth.

I’m carrying a paper bag from the coffee shop where I work — a fraisier and a chocolate cake, safe in takeaway boxes.

A mouse runs across the tracks and I think of Edward, who is petrified of mice. And rats. Anything furry with a tail.

He’ll no doubt already be waiting for me outside. Always early, always the instigator. Maybe that should comfort me more than it does.

I stand on the escalator, pass digital posters for toothpaste, “Cabaret”, Monzo, hair transplants. In an advert for nicotine gum, a woman presses her hands to either side of her head, her mouth open in a permanent, soundless scream. The walls curve close on either side.

I look up at the glass roof of the ticket hall, certain — as I always am when I leave Clapham Common station — that I belong to a bygone era. There is something about this area I recognize without having lived it: a distinctly British sense of ceremony, of Victorian leisure and eccentricity.

It’s also where Edward lives, so everything here feels like him.

Outside, the domed station stands fat and self-assured. The common is a void of black, broken only by bursts of yellow lamplight.

I zip my fleece up to my chin and hug myself from the cold.

I check my phone — it’s 9 p.m.

The sky is starless, green with the city’s reflected light.

Then, I see him.

Edward stands at the corner of the street checking his phone, likely to avoid having nothing to do with his hands. I remember him telling me — on our third or fourth date — that as a child he would always feel anxiety when he didn’t know exactly what was going on. When his mother was running low on petrol in her car, she would regularly have to give him a step-by-step plan of what would happen if they were ever stranded with an empty tank, to reassure him that everything would be OK. I suspect he feels the same way now.

He hasn’t seen me.

I pause the song I’m listening to and put my earbuds back into their case. A sharp, cold wind drills into my ears.

He’s got that expression on his face — of palpable calm, sheepish but innocent, suggesting the start of a smile at any given moment, like a little boy who’s done something wrong. It’s also a look of preoccupation, of being weighed down, as if he’s just been talking to God in his head like I do sometimes. It’s a look that makes me want to protect him.

I feel a sudden rush of love, that familiar desire to throw my arms around him and kiss every inch of his face — in the middle of his forehead, at the tops of his cheeks just beneath his eyes, in the warm crook of his neck. Then, the deflation of knowing I shouldn’t. Everything had been going so well; whenever I think about his words in that message, the finality of them thrums like physical pain. I can see them now, in their WhatsApp font.

I approach him, adrenaline causing a sudden lightness in my legs.

He’s wearing his blue fleecy jacket, the one with the tartan pocket on the chest. Beneath, the hint of a white T-shirt. Blue jeans. Blue Vans. He looks up from his screen, puts his phone immediately in his pocket.

“Hey,” he says, musically, followed by his automatic laugh. It’s quiet, misplaced, the one he uses when he’s nervous.

“Hi,” I say.

His smile back at me is confused, a bit agonized.

I think about the first time I’d walked up to him and witnessed that same innocuous smile. Or the first time his profile had appeared on Hinge: the photo of him I’d liked, standing at the top of the Basilica with St Peter’s Square and a panorama of Rome, one big, flat terracotta shape, behind him, as well as a hazy line of the surrounding mountains, cutting blade-sharp into the sky. He’s grinning in the photo, wearing a green corduroy shirt, handsome and studious with his little blonde curls and wire-rimmed glasses.

I remember his first message: Do I have to be good at badminton to win you over?, he’d written, in response to one of my photos.

It had made me laugh.

No, just attend, I’d said.

We played a game on our first date. He was terrible, but I liked him anyway.

He’s taking lessons now. I’m not sure he knows how much that means to me. That he finds something I love important.

“Can I hug you?” Edward asks.

“No.”

“OK,” he says.

Guilt lands immediately.

“Shall we go and talk?” I ask.

He nods, and we cross the road to the common. A teenage boy passes us, rapping into his phone. He throws his free arm around, wide-eyed as if possessed by his own manic burst of poetic inspiration.

I feel myself suddenly aware of the damp handle of the paper bag starting to fray between my clammy fingers. The sound of traffic reduces the further we walk from the high street, until it becomes a hum in the distance, low and hollow.

“How was your shift?” I can feel him looking at me as he asks.

“Fine. Busy.” I don’t tell him I’m so tired that I almost fell asleep on the tube. Edward’s an engineer, starts work at 7 a.m. and finishes at 4 p.m. I envy him for that regularity sometimes and often attempt to distract him from his blueprints, wanting to lure him back to bed when I have the day off or I’m waiting for a late shift and he’s glued to his desk.

“Thank you for agreeing to come,” Edward says, with a tone of formal reverence.

We sit on one of the benches along the path without really deciding on it — him on the left, me on the right, less than a person’s width between us. I put the bag in that space. I look at Edward then; he’s buttery under the yellow light of the streetlamp, prophet-like — if prophets smiled like children.

Our breath turns to clouds.

We both face forward. A lone magpie lands on the path — which Edward salutes — before flying off again.

No one is around.

“Right,” Edward says, bending his leg to pivot towards me. “Would you please tell me what I’ve done?”

I know I’ve been distant the last couple of days. Ignoring his messages or giving monosyllabic replies. I look at our hands — mine in my lap, his clasped around his thighs. “You really don’t know?”, I ask.

“No,” he says, with an earnestness I don’t recognize. “I really don’t.”

“I didn’t like what you said.”

Silence again. I feel my words in the air around us, the gravity of them.

“What about?” he asks.

“About the future.” I can’t look at him. I want to confess the pain not only of losing Edward, but of giving up my whole life here, in this city I do not want to leave. He’d helped me realize that. When we’d walked around on our second, third, fourth, fifth dates — holding hands, kissing in the street, Edward running his hands up and down my back as people passed us unfazed, unlike back in Manila, where loving another boy in public might have been tolerated but never accepted.

I think about my mother then, about the fact she still — all these months later — calls Edward my friend.

I want to shout it all in his face.

In the distance, a red serpent of taillights moves slowly along the road, behind the bare trees.

Edward tries to take my hand again. I pull it away. I’d come to London having never visited before and moved in with my sister in Ilford. She’s 38, working in finance. A second mother to me, really. But my visa status is uncertain. I don’t know if this place I love, this city and this person I’ve come to know as home, are going to be for much longer.

I turn back to Edward. “I’ll date you for as long as I can,” I say. “That’s what you wrote. I was telling you I was worried about having to move back to the Philippines after my master’s and you said, I’ll date you for as long as I can.”

I keep my eyes on him this time.

Edward searches for a response, rubs at his jaw as he often does, the tiny sound of his stubble crackling under his fingers.

I’m almost certain that I’m in love with him.

It’s the most awful feeling I’ve ever had.

It’s like floating out to sea knowing I won’t return to dry land. I’m watching the shore reduce and reduce.

Is this what first love is supposed to feel like? I have nothing to compare it to.

“For as long as I can.” I don’t know why I repeat it again. “It’s like you’d decided on our expiry date, and then expected me to just, well, be okay with it.”

“Do you really think that’s what I meant?” he asks with his slightly melodic West Country twang. I love the sound of Edward’s voice — the way he stretches out vowels, the rising intonation at the ends of his sentences so everything sounds like it’s ongoing, as if he’s never quite finished. As if everything in the world is one big question.

He’s smiling at me, but not in the way I’d first interpreted it. It’s like he’s trying to soften whatever has hardened between us, despite not understanding why. I find myself wondering what it must be like to be Edward, who feels so deeply but carries everything quietly. He once told me about a walk he took with his father, brother and sister on the Quantock Hills in Somerset, which is beautiful in that craggy, endless, postcard-picturesque way, just as I imagine the whole of England looks beyond London. The landscape, he’d said, had inspired Coleridge to write “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He and his siblings built a rope swing, which snapped when Edward was on it. He’d fallen badly but downplayed it. For days he was in pain but he’d said nothing, until his father took him to the hospital and it turned out his arm was broken. It is so entirely him — resilient in a way that almost feels stubborn, never wanting to be a burden to anyone.

But I’m feeling so insecure, certain I’m losing him. It’s agony, seeing him smiling. “This is my life,” I say. “I like you so much. It isn’t funny.”

“I know. I’m not laughing. But — ”

“Do you have any idea how it feels to settle somewhere and not be sure you’ll be able to stay? Living this provisional life, feeling like there’s an invisible rule I’ve broken without even knowing it. You haven’t got a clue what that’s like.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

Silence.

“I just wanted to say,” Edward adds, “that that is not how I wanted my message to sound.”

“Well, it did.”

“My wording was shit.” Edward reaches out his hand — to try and take mine again, I think — but it lands tentatively on my knee instead. He keeps it there, draws invisible squares with his index finger. “I didn’t say it properly.”

Again, he smiles.

“Please stop laughing at me,” I say, crossing my legs the other way, out of reach.

“I meant that I really want to be with you. I want to make the effort, even if you’re not here. I want to make it work.”

Edward’s words take a moment to settle. I feel myself giving way to some weight I’d been bracing against. My shoulders relax. I’m suddenly aware of my breath entering and leaving my body. I realize how much I’d been sweating — it’s cooled on my skin and now I’m close to shivering.

Edward lifts one leg up onto the bench so he can turn fully towards me. He’s over 6 feet and I’m 5-foot-6, so I’m used to looking up at him, used to the stretch when I want to pull him close to me. I’ve always liked it — that difference between us. There’s something in it that makes me feel held without him touching me. And yet he never carries it the way I’d expected — there’s a looseness to him, a slight uncertainty, all long limbs and clumsy movements (just watch him play badminton). His size is something I’m drawn into rather than dwarfed by.

I feel it now, my need to be close to him, to have him pressed against me, my face in his neck, smelling only his smell.

I don’t respond. I’m not sure how to.

“If you have to leave,” Edward says, “and this becomes long distance, I need to know there’s a plan.”

That’s Edward. He needs to repair, to forge a clear path, whereas I find myself withdrawing when things upset me, needing to protect myself. Letting my feelings overrun sense, losing my grip on the world as it is. He’s had a boyfriend before and ended up feeling like he was parenting him. The boy had come from a strict religious background — like me — and they’d drifted apart. Edward had been the one holding everything together, compensating for uncertainty. It breaks my heart whenever I imagine the same distance growing between Edward and me. I understand why he’s being careful with his promises, why he’s practical to the marrow of his bones. And I do think about those four years with his ex — a shared flat, a whole life built together — and how, when the spark died, Edward had said nothing, let them drift apart rather than risk the drama of naming it. His saying what he wants — now, inches from me, staring into my eyes — lands differently.

It feels like he’s choosing me. That he’s not just letting it happen.

Something pulses in my stomach.

“But if I have to leave London, would you still want to be together?” I ask.

“I can’t pretend the uncertainty doesn’t matter,” Edward says. “But I don’t want to lose you. So, I think we should do it. I’ve been so worried you’d lost interest in me.”

“You want to be with me?” I ask. “Really be with me?”

He laughs again, and this time I don’t mind. He takes my sweaty hand. “Of course I do.”

“So, you want to be my boyfriend?”

It’s hope. That hypnotic thing in my stomach.

He nods — a quick, small nod.

I feel myself smiling.

He smiles back, pokes his thumb into the dimple on my right cheek. He tells me it’s his favorite thing about me. “There it is,” he says.

“I brought you something,” I say, surprised by my sudden levity, by how much impact he has. How one person can drag me from my absolute lowest to my happiest with only a few words. How quickly the veil of grief can lift when it’s for something you haven’t lost.

I pass him the paper bag, feeling silly but no longer caring.

“Cake,” Edward says.

“I was going to give them to you anyway,” I say, unsure whether this is true. “Even if this went badly.”

“High-stakes cake.”

I look out across the common again, at the lamps casting their small, neat circles of light across the darkness that stretches all around us. In the distance, a figure passes beneath one, then disappears again.

We sit there, quiet, holding hands.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Me too.”

For the first time in days, I don’t think about being made to leave.

Not this bench.

Not my home.

Not him.

Curtis Garner is the author of the “instant queer classic,” “Isaac,” published in 2024 to critical acclaim. “Orange” is his second novel. Alongside his fiction, Garner’s writing has appeared in “The World of Interiors” and “Attitude.” He manages the publicity and marketing for Thames & Hudson’s successful fashion list, and he reviews novels on Instagram (@queer_novels). Born in Cornwall in 1996, he moved to London at 18 to study Creative Writing and English Literature, graduating in 2017 before beginning a career in publishing. In 2020, he completed an MA with Distinction at Manchester Writing School, where much of “Isaac” was written.