"Quick, get in", Crabbe says, unusually urgent. "We have a lot to talk about." The sugar is laid on the table, and the tea pot is set like a vase in the centre. Crabbe takes a deep breath slowly, and with composure lifts the handle, and pours it first into Si's cup, and then his own. Crabbe is silent, lifts the cup to his mouth, sips, drinks, and is silent.
Si doesn't speak. Both know what they are doing, and leave me in the air, hanging, notknowing what I am seeing, notknowing if they both know what they are doing. Their heads are full or empty, the moment is long or short. The silence is deafening or nothing, the meaning is obscure or clear. The tea, on its journey through their bodies, is going cold or heating up.
If I was Crabbe, I would shatter the brittle silence and speak my bladed words and Si, if I were him, would be on the verge of getting up and rushing out before the arrow shot. Crabbe, Crabbe is thinking, is controlling Si, waiting for him to say the first, unavoidable word, and Si's mind is imploding. Si is thinking calm thoughts. It is like water, the way water has no law against the easy juxtoposition of a still, clear shard next to a living babble of water.
Or Crabbe and Si know no more of their own thoughts than of each other's. All the plot is inside them. Outsiders can see the stage but not the drama. Like a ladder where two sides might be paralleled or misparalleled, where between two people are a thousand rungs, all existing, each brought to mind at any moment. Crabbe and Si are the sides of the ladder; there is no one - they me or otherwise - to see the rung-shards between them, but they are there, thought-war-or-peace of stalagmites and stalactites.
