Page 112 of Undefined Terms

The room shifts. The applause dies wrong, cut short, unfinished.

‘The protagonist’s passivity remains the core issue. She doesn’t act. She waits. Waiting isn’t a narrative strategy: it’s an absence of one.’ He looks at the assessors. ‘I’ve flagged this in supervision since October.’

I watch Celyn’s face. The postbox lips. The folder in both hands. The room looking. And Celyn doesn’t drop the eyes.

‘She doesn’t wait.’ Celyn’s voice, level, the Welsh under it, carrying the room without a mic. ‘She refuses. There’s a difference, and if the chapter didn’t land it, that’s mine to fix.’ A beat, the room gone very still. ‘But “passive” is the word people reach for when someone won’t do what the room expects. The door opens because she stops performing for it. That’s not the absence of a strategy. It’s the strategy.’

Pritchard’s mouth opens. The older external assessor, glasses, gets there first.

‘For what it’s worth,’ she says, to the room more than to him, ‘I’d have read that section too. It’s the strongest thing I’ve heard all day.’

And the room moves, not applause, a re-settling, forty people deciding at once which way the weight goes, and it doesn’t go Pritchard’s way. He sits. The clipboard flat against his chest.

Celyn closes the folder. Doesn’t hurry. Walks to the side, picks up the bag, and the heels click out, and it’s the sound of someone leaving on their own terms.

My hands were fists on my knees the whole time. Ready to stand, to say the true thing, the one I know in my hands and can’t get into words. And I never had to. Celyn did it from the front, in a sentence I couldn’t have built in a year.

I should feel proud. I do. There’s something else under it, cold, that I don’t look at straight: in a minute I’ll cross to the front and stand next to the thing she just did, and the whole cohort will do the maths. Him. With them. And the back of the room felt safer than the front, and I hate that it did.

I go after Celyn, corridor, stairs, the heavy door, the car park.

Celyn’s against the wall, breathing hard, the folder still in one hand. Not crying. Lit up. Shaking with it, the way I am after a pour that nearly went and held.

‘Did you hear me?’ Celyn says. ‘I said it. To his face.’

‘You did.’

Celyn closes the gap. Still lit, still shaking with it, and a hand comes up to my jacket, the folder pressed flat between us, the mouth tilting up towards mine. Here. In the car park. The win has to land somewhere and I’m the place it wants to land.

And I go stiff. Seven days of silence, the read receipts, the thread with only my side in it, and now Celyn’s mouth coming for mine like none of it happened. It throws me. The body’s gone to a plank and I haven’t caught up, haven’t worked out where the two of us even stand. I don’t look round, it’s not the room. My hands stay at my sides, and I lean back, half an inch, off the mouth that just won the whole place.

Celyn feels it. Of course they feel it. They read a flinch the way I read a crack in a slab, before it shows. The hand comes off my jacket. The lit-up face goes out, the heels settling flat on the tarmac.

‘Right,’ Celyn says. Quieter. ‘Course.’

The heels on the tarmac, getting smaller. I don’t follow. And that’s mine, not theirs.

Five more days. The corner table empty every one of them. Working, on the Tuesday, then nothing. Wednesday nothing. Thursday I get to the keyboard three times, the cursor going, nothing worth the read receipt, and I put the phone face down so it stops being a thing in my hand. Seven days and then five, a number I don’t want to total. Friday I text You alright? The read receipt comes. No words after it.

Sunday I text Coming over. Read, nothing. I go anyway.

The buzzer’s broken. I text from the door and the lock clicks. The stairs, the carpet that used to be something. The door ajar.

Celyn’s on the bed, against the headboard. Knees up. The laptop on the floor, closed, put somewhere it can’t be reached without effort. Hoodie, the nails stripped back to nothing, the faint purple at the edges where the remover didn’t get everything.

‘Hey,’ I say.

‘Hey.’ The voice is wrong. Smaller. The Welsh thicker, the way it comes out more when the rest pulls back.

There’s nowhere to sit but the desk chair. I move a towel. Sit. The chair creaks. I’m too big for it, my knees hit the desk.

‘You went somewhere.’ Not about Pritchard. ‘At the showcase. I’d just done the biggest thing I’ve ever done and you stood at the back like I’d asked you to carry a fridge up the stairs.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you, though.’

The true thing’s in there. It’s got a shape. It won’t come up the throat, not here, not cornered, the load with no crane on site to lift it. So I don’t shove a wrong one out to fill the gap.