Page 165 of Undefined Terms

‘Two bedrooms.’

‘One’s for writing.’

The sound Ewan makes isn’t a word. It’s the sound of someone who’s been waiting for something and the something arrived. A breath, almost a laugh. Relief and pride and something else, all at once.

‘You’re bringing Celyn home.’

‘Peckham. Not Lewisham.’

‘Close enough.’ A beat. ‘Ron.’

‘What.’

‘You did it. The whole thing. You did it.’

I don’t know what the whole thing is, the job. The person, the two years. The sitting still long enough for something to find me. All of it, maybe.

‘Tell Laurence I said hi,’ I say, because I can’t say anything else.

‘He already knows. He’s smiling.’

I hang up. Sit in the car park. The site, the cranes. The sky doing the thing Manchester skies do when the day’s almost done, wide, and soft, and not quite finished.

Evening, Celyn’s flat. I’m on the sofa with the tablet, the email’s open, been open a week. The offer, the start date, the number I’ve read forty times. I close it. Open it. Close it.

Then Rightmove, because Rightmove’s the part I can’t explain to myself yet. Not flats. Houses. For sale. London, the cheap end, Peckham, Camberwell, where nobody looks twice at anything. The wrecks, the ones the estate agent photographs apologetically. Damp in the corners, a kitchen from 1985, a garden gone to bramble. Every one of them a year of Sundays. Every one of them a job.

A house off Rye Lane, end of a terrace, cheap because it’s falling down. Two up, two down, and the small room at the back faces north. North light’s even. I know that from Celyn’s flat, from months of watching a person work.

A writing room should face north.

I’m looking for a room a person who writes horror novels could sit in. Stars on the ceiling, a fountain pen with green ink, the Shirley Jackson poster off the charity-shop wall. Measuring a stranger’s spare bedroom with my eye, for a desk that isn’t mine to place.

I’m looking at a house for two people.

I know. This time I know. The thing I can’t do is say it, not the way it’s meant to be said.

Tonight: jeans, Converse the old ones white and soft, the hoodie oversize grey, mine or Celyn’s, can’t tell any more, hair down, no makeup, stubble light, a day. And the nails: red, cherry red.

The first version. The one from the first night at the bar. The nails were red and the stubble was there and the face was the same face and I didn’t know then. I know now.

‘What are you looking at?’

I lock the tablet. Set it face down on my knee. The face-down does the same job a slammed drawer does. Tells the whole room there’s something in it.

‘Nothing.’

Celyn comes round the sofa. Stands over me. Waits the way you wait out a bad liar, which I am.

One drawer left. This one.

I turn it back over. House listings. London. For sale, not to let.

The colour goes out of the face.

‘London,’ Celyn says.

‘Yeah.’