Page 113 of Undefined Terms

‘Your mum came and you put me in a drawer.’ Quiet. Worse than loud. ‘The mug, the toothbrush, the second pillow. Gone in an evening. And you’re good at it. That’s the part. You’re good at making a room look like nobody’s touched it.’ The hands gone back inside the sleeves. ‘I never got a drawer to fold into. I learned to stand in the room and take it. You had one. You used it.’

‘I just want it to be —’ The flat word gets to the mouth first. Site voice, the one that doesn’t think about how it lands. ‘Simple. For one day. I want to walk into a room and not feel the whole room turn round.’

The straightening. The slow, careful one that has nothing casual in it. The mouth makes a shape I’ve seen before, not on Celyn. On Ewan, the year Dad stopped looking.

‘So I’m the complication. The thing that makes the room turn.’

‘That’s not what I —’

‘It never is.’ Not cruel. Tired, which is worse. ‘That’s the thing about it landing. It doesn’t care what you meant.’

A breath, the Welsh thick on it.

‘I’m not going to be the thing in your drawer, Ronan.’ The full name. The syllables precise and Welsh and deliberate, landing like the flat of a hand on a table. ‘I never had one. I’m not living in yours.’

Celyn stands. The movement’s clean, no hesitation. The jeans off the desk chair, one leg then the other, balanced, not rushing, and the not-rushing is worse than rushing would be. The jacket, the denim one. Every movement in order, a person who’s left a room before, who knows the steps because the body learned them somewhere else.

I should get up. The body that crossed a bar floor it had stared at for a year, that put a hand on a waist in the rain because the legs got there before the head. It doesn’t move. First time it hasn’t moved. I sit in the chair that’s too small and watch them dress to leave and my legs do nothing and my mouth does nothing, and that’s the whole problem in one picture.

‘Where are you going.’

‘Out.’ The keys, the phone, into the jacket pocket without looking. Then Celyn crosses to the door and holds it open.

‘Go on. I need to lock up.’

I get up. Cross the room. In the doorway my mouth opens and nothing comes.

‘When you’ve figured out if the problem’s me or you, let me know.’ Into my back. Level. ‘But I’ll save you the time. It’s you.’

I go. The door closes. The lock turns.

Landing. The stairs. The carpet that used to be something.

It’s you. Heavier than anything I said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Christmas Day, the early train, the 7:40, because I always go early. Give Mum a hand with the bird, carry the chairs up from the cellar, be in the kitchen so she’s not in it on her own. Ewan and Laurence are driving down from Manchester, they’ll be here at twelve.

Would have been the first. Eleven months and not a Christmas in it.

First Christmas Celyn and me aren’t doing together. Except there’s no together left to not do it in. They’ve gone to Wales: Catrin and Owain and the kids, and a dad who says ‘he.’ I’ve come to Lewisham. Not long ago there were two families and a careful line down the middle, the halves kept apart till one of us was ready. Now there’s no line to keep. Just the two countries, the whole map between them, and a thing I broke standing in the gap.

Mum’s kitchen: the goose fat, the bird, the cloth with the holly she’s had since I was six. I do the potatoes the way she likes, the fat smoking before they go in, carry the good plates through, set the table.

I set four.

Four’s what this table’s always been. Mum, Dad, Ewan, me. The hands lay it before the head catches up, and when it does it’s still four, just a different four. Mum. Ewan. Laurence. Me. Nobody at the head.

Mum’s in the doorway with a tea towel. Neither of us says anything about the place I didn’t lay.

First Christmas the chair at the head’s going to be empty. He moved his things out in October, what fit in his car, and the rest’s still here because leaving’s easier than coming back for a record box. The house he built.

Four places, none of them his, and I don’t know if leaving his chair where it is is habit or just the chair.

Ewan and Laurence come at twelve. Good drive down, no traffic, Laurence says, like the M6 on Christmas morning is a thing worth a sentence, and it is, it’s the thing you say when you don’t know where to put yourself yet. A tin of something he made, a bottle that cost more than the meal.

They’ve been in the same room, Mum and Laurence. His flat, his food, his ground, Mum asking about his mother and the house in Lancashire that backs onto the canal. But never the Lewisham kitchen with the holly cloth, never Christmas. First time for that, and Laurence knows it, you can see him clock the room, the photos, the chair at the head, and decide to be easy in it anyway.