Page 147 of Undefined Terms

Celyn doesn’t speak for a moment. The hands bare, the nails chipped from yesterday’s shift, the ring catching the kitchen light.

‘Is she okay?’

Not: are YOU okay. Not: what did he say. Is she okay.

‘Yeah. She’s. She’s Mum. She’s fine.’

‘She’s not fine. She’s holding it.’ Quiet. ‘Mothers hold it. That’s what they do. And then one day the holding gets too heavy and nobody notices because they’ve been holding so long everyone thinks it’s the shape of them.’

‘He might call,’ I say.

‘Then we wait.’

We, we.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

He calls at four, I’m on the sofa. Celyn went to work at two, the Monday shift, the long one. Kissed me at the door. Held my face with both hands. Looked at me and didn’t say good luck because Celyn doesn’t believe in luck.

Dad.

The screen, no photo, never set one. The number with no face.

I pick up.

‘Ron.’

The voice, lower than Mum’s, flatter. The Rotherhithe under it. Lewisham smoothed it out but it’s still there in the vowels. The voice of the man who put up the crooked tiles and never fixed them.

‘Dad.’

Silence, three seconds, five, I can hear, the telly, low, he’s at home, the flat. The flat he moved into after Ewan, the one-bed above the bookmakers on Deptford High Street. Mum told me the address. I’ve never been.

‘Your mum said something.’ He stops. The pause. Choosing. Dad chooses words like I choose them. Slowly. One at a time. The apple and the tree.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She told me.’

‘Both of you.’ My hand on the cushion. Tight. Said the way you’d say ‘it’s raining’ or ‘the match is off.’ A fact. Both of you. ‘I don’t, I don’t understand either of you, Ron.’

The honest sentence.

‘You don’t have to understand,’ I say.

‘I know that. Your mum says that. Ewan said that, before.’ The ‘before’ with the weight. Before the silence. Before two years of the nothing. ‘Everyone says I don’t have to understand and I’m telling you I don’t. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how to do this.’

‘You don’t have to understand. You have to not disappear.’

Silence, longer, the telly. The flat above the bookmakers. The man in the chair.

‘I’m not disappearing,’ he says. The voice, lower. The Rotherhithe gone. Just the flat voice underneath, the one that has no geography. ‘I’m not, I didn’t disappear on Ewan. I’m trying.’

‘Two years, Dad.’

‘I know.’

‘Two Christmases. Mum crying in the kitchen. Ewan pretending it didn’t happen.’

‘I know, Ron.’