Thank you, Lucy Caldwell.
With your story, ‘Cyprus Avenue’, you’ve given a wonderful example of this POV in action.
The Second Person Plural Future Tense. (You [both/all of you] will go...)
‘Cyprus Avenue’ was published as a ‘Heartwarming Festive Short Story’ in the Belfast Telegraph on 23 December 2017. It also appears in Lucy Caldwell’s collection Multitudes (Faber, 2016.)
Here’s a paragraph from halfway through —
You’ll get a round in and the two of you will stay talking until the flight — over four hours late, by this time — is finally called, and in the scrum of boarding you’ll manage to sit together and you’ll carry on talking all the way to Belfast, and all the time you wait at the luggage carousel, and all the way to the exit. When you walk down the shabby carpet whose Welcome to Belfast messages woven in four or five languages have always seemed tired and grudging, or ironic, Nirupam will proclaim in a ridiculous accent, Wilkommen an Belfast! and it will seem as if there’s never been a better joke and the two of you will laugh until you find yourself crying.
But as with our previous POV, the Second Person Plural Present Tense, the unanimity of the you soon breaks up.
With his joke, Nirupam re-emerges from the you, separating off from a First Person Plural you, a not-Nirupam, an unnamed main character.
It is she who ends the paragraph crying, not the both of them.
Here, he’ll say, and he’ll touch your arm. It’s ok.
I know, you’ll say, blowing your nose. I’m sorry. Look at the state of me. It’s just, you know.
I know, he’ll say.
The story begins and ends with this First Person Plural Future Tense you. Here’s the start —
December has always been hard, but this year will be the hardest December yet. You will feel yourself struggling to shoulder the weight of it; will want, more keenly than ever, to shrug it off, just this once, just for one year; and you’ll find yourself saying on the phone to your mum: I might not actually be able to get home. The last word will stick in your throat and you’ll hear her hear it, feel your heart beating.
And this is where one of the oddities of this POV becomes obvious.
There is no distinction, on the page, between you (singular) and you (plural). Although they mean different things, there’s nothing comparable to the visible or audible difference between the Third Person he or she (singular) and they (plural).
This means that, as in Lucy Caldwell’s story, an isolated you — who remains nameless to the end — can become part of a two-person you incredibly smoothly. But that you can also separate out from the temporary pair (‘you find yourself crying’) without a bump.
There’s something almost magical about this melding of one person into and out of a couple or a group. It’s a blindspot of the English language, but in this case a blessed one. A truly efficient grammar would have different words for you-alone, you-two, you-three-or-more and you-the-crowd.
It’s not hard to imagine other stories in which the dissolution of identity, perhaps forced, of idiosyncratic you into a faceless collective you is terrifying.
Do you know of any?
You will is, of course, the chosen POV of authority. It is how you-crowds are whipped up into hatred of they-others by demagogues. (‘You will not have to put up with them for very much longer because I will make sure of that.’) It is how armies are given orders (‘You will commence bombardment at 15:00 hours’.) It is how obedience of all sorts is enforced. (‘You will do your maths homework for Monday morning.’)
You will, and even more you will not.
The second-person singular you finds it very difficult to resist going along with the second-person plural.
Who, me?
Lucy Caldwell, by contrast, uses the possibility of incorporation to make something lovely and forgiving.
Toward the end of ‘Cyprus Avenue’, you-singular has invited Nirupam and his mother for a drink.
On Christmas Eve your father will light a fire in the living room and the five of you will sit around it drinking mulled wine and eating the mince pies that Mrs Choudhury baked herself. You’ll talk about Janey, of course, and Mr Choudhury, and Nisha. But you’ll talk of other things, too, of London, and books, and the way Belfast’s changing.
There’s something very beautiful about ‘the five of you’ — as if the grammar of the language itself is demonstrating how accepting it is of otherness.
In summary:
Second Person Plural Future Tense
Likely upsides
Weird, innovative, challenging
Possible downsides
Fragile, limiting, monotone
My Example
Second Person Plural Future Tense
You will look at your twin sister in the hall mirror just as she will look at you. The space around you will not be illuminated by the usual candles. Only the pale glow coming through the fanlight above the front door will reach the white of your faces. These, punctuated by black, untamed eyebrows, will float above your invisible dresses. When you lift your right hands to stroke one another’s closest earlobe, as you do for comfort, they will float into sight as if they were lopsided doves trying to escape from a lightless cave. You will start to hum the song but your voices will be rough from so little use. When you are alone together, you rarely speak, and after a few bars you will without conferring give up the attempt to sound nice. You will knit your fingers together, right and left hands, then turn inward until your faces are very close. Then you will rub noses like primitive peoples do.
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