Page 166 of Undefined Terms

Three seconds. Five. The Welsh comes up under the next one, heavy.

‘Are you leaving me?’

The words won’t come. They never come when it matters. So I do the thing my hands know. Thumb the email open and hold the tablet out, screen to them, because I can’t say it but I can show it.

Celyn takes it. Reads. I watch the eyes go along the lines.

Henderson & Roe. The Rotherhithe job. An offer now, with my name on it and a number under it I’ve read forty times. Applied back in the winter, told nobody. Up from where I stand. Twenty minutes from Mum. A career’s worth of up in one email, and all I had to do was leave.

‘That’s a step up,’ Celyn says. Careful. Reading more than the words.

‘Big one. Wouldn’t get the like of it here for years.’

Celyn keeps looking at the screen. Not at me. The hand not quite steady on the edge of it.

‘So you’re going.’

‘Only if you come.’ Flat, too fast, right for once. ‘I’ve not signed it. I’ll not. Not unless you’re coming with me. You don’t want London, I tell them no and find something here, Manchester, smaller, doesn’t matter. I’m not taking a job in the wrong city when you’re the right one.’

The tablet goes down in Celyn’s lap. Both hands flat on it.

‘You’d turn that down. For me.’

‘Yeah.’

Like it’s simple. It is simple. The simplest thing I’ve ever known.

Celyn doesn’t answer. Looks away, the window, the bar across the road. And I think: here it is. The kind no. The one that won’t say the word.

‘I built a self here,’ Celyn says instead. Low. ‘Out of nothing. Nobody handed it me.’

‘I know.’

‘And in London I’m what.’

‘Don’t know. That part’s yours, not mine.’ Then the rest, plain. ‘I’ve savings, eight years of them. I’d put the deposit down, the whole of it, that’s mine to give. We’d buy somewhere. Both names. And you don’t work a day you don’t want to, the book’s done, I’m on enough for two⁠—’

‘I’ll work.’ Quick. ‘I don’t know at what yet, and don’t you dare line something up for me. But I’ll work. I’m not crossing the country to be kept in a back room.’

‘Alright.’

A breath.

‘Is it near your mum?’

Not the question I’m braced for. Lands somewhere soft.

‘Twenty minutes. Bus near enough from the door.’ Then the real thing, the one under it. ‘Sunday roast’s twenty minutes off. She’d have you every week. She’s already asked.’

And that’s what wets the eyes. Not the job. Not the deposit. The roast. The mum twenty minutes away who’s already asked.

‘Show me the houses,’ Celyn says.

I thumb to the listings. The wrecks. Cheap ones, every one a job. Damp, bowed walls, kitchens from 1985, gardens lost under bramble.

‘They’re falling down.’

‘That’s why they’re cheap. I fix things.’ Shrug. ‘Worst house on the road, I’d make it stand.’