Page 169 of Undefined Terms

I put the box in the boot. Get in. Celyn’s hand on my knee before I’ve got the key in.

Dad’s car in the mirror, getting smaller. The house getting smaller. The man on the ladder, fixing a light in a house he left, in a hallway where his son just walked past with a person he doesn’t understand.

Mind how you go.

But the door wasn’t shut.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The ring that doesn’t work on the hob makes a ticking sound at four in the morning. I know this because Celyn writes at four in the morning and I wake up when the chair scrapes and the corridor light goes on and I lie there listening to the broken ring tick and the keyboard clatter and I think: mine.

The flat’s in Peckham, second floor, two bedrooms, rented. A short let, six months. The landlord was glad of someone who’d sign without asking why. He showed us round in August, Celyn in a sundress and the stubble, and he didn’t blink. It was never meant to be the home. The home’s eight streets off. No kitchen in it yet, a skip out front, both our names on the deeds. This is where we wait while I make a wreck stand. We’re in by Christmas.

The corridor. The bedroom, ours, the one with the window that faces the street and the bus route Celyn’s memorised and I haven’t because I walk. The kitchen, small, the hob with the one ring that doesn’t work, the fridge with the photo, the building site one. Hard hats. Celyn grinning. Me not grinning. Except.

And the room at the end of the corridor. The writing room.

Celyn’s room. The desk, charity shop, scratched, solid. The laptop. The books, Jackson, du Maurier, Radcliffe, the spines cracked, the pages soft. The poster, the Shirley Jackson one, the one from the Manchester flat, the blu-tack marks still on the back. The notebook, the cover battered. And the stars. The eighty-pence stars from the charity shop. Peeled off the Manchester ceiling, stuck on this one. Some of them crooked, some of them missing the glow because they’re old now. But there. Celyn put them up on the second night. Stood on the desk chair in pants and my old t-shirt and stuck them on one by one. I held the chair and didn’t say be careful, because Celyn hates be careful.

Dave. The actual cat. Ginger, the judging face, the ribs filled out now he’s on proper food instead of bin chicken. Celyn carried him down from Manchester in a second-hand cat box. Yowling the whole way south, and dared me to say a word. Cat Dave has better management skills, Celyn told me once. Now Cat Dave manages the writing room. Sleeps on the warm corner of the desk. On Celyn’s feet. On the manuscript pages when they slide off. Celyn moves him, he comes back. The novel’s going to have ginger hair on every page.

The house gets a wall a week. Saturdays, Sundays, me and a wrecking bar and a skip on its third fill. Celyn comes when the writing lets them. Paints the small room at the back first, the north one, the one with the even light, the one I clicked on a hundred times before I had the nerve to ask. The garden’s still mostly bramble. Under it there’s grass. Come summer there’ll be a cheap barbecue and folding chairs and the people who actually turn up. Dave on the fence judging the lot of us. We move in at Christmas. The stars come too. They always do.

Rotherhithe, the site.

The first day was September. I stood at the gate, hard hat, hi-vis, the boots I’ve worn for four years. New site, new crew, same hands.

The gaffer’s name is Phil. Short, ex-Army, the no-nonsense type. He shook my hand at the portacabin and said ‘Dave speaks highly of you’ and I said ‘Dave speaks highly of concrete’ and Phil laughed. We’d be fine.

The Rose & Crown on Lynton Road, first Friday. I stood at the bar and ordered twelve pints. The barman was Scottish, young, red hair tied back, a paperback face-down by the taps. He built the round the way Dean ties a grid: no waste, no show, every pint level to the eye. The bloke next to me watched me watch him. ‘New lad, that. Callan. Started this month and he already pours better than the landlord.’ Then he put his own hand out. ‘Martin.’

Martin said ‘you got family down here?’ and I said ‘yeah. My partner and a cat.’

‘Nice one. Bring them round.’

Martin went back to his pint.

I’m on the sofa, the telly on, volume low, a programme nobody’s watching. The commute’s twenty minutes on the bike. Same steel, different project.

Mum came last week, the second time. Brought a cake, shop-bought, not Laurence-level, but she brought it. Called Celyn ‘love.’ The pronoun was right. Both times. She sat in our kitchen and drank tea.

The novel nearly didn’t sell. Three rejections in August. One editor who loved the house but wanted the ending changed. One who said horror doesn’t sell in literary fiction and literary fiction doesn’t sell in horror. Celyn sat at the writing desk for a week after that one and didn’t type a word. I brought tea, kept the door open, said nothing. The fourth editor rang the agent on a Wednesday.

The text: It sold

I left the site at lunch. Phil said ‘go.’ I went home and Celyn wasn’t crumpled on the sofa. Celyn was up, pacing, Dave tracking them across the room, the full makeup day, a dress, the heels already kicked off, a glass in one hand and the phone in the other.

‘Four editors went to auction,’ Celyn said, before I’d got the door shut. Cocky, lit, the grin that uses the whole face. ‘The first three can read it in a shop like everyone else.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ Then it broke, one second, the eyes going, the grin cracking down the middle, and set again, sharp. ‘First the whole cohort. Now this. Pritchard can put it in his supervision notes.’

The showcase and the contract. Two rooms, both won out loud, in front of people. Nobody put either in a drawer.

I sat on the sofa. Celyn climbed into my lap, the dress, the weight, the glass set down somewhere. I held on.

The dress was that tight black one I’d never seen before today. The mascara was on my t-shirt now, on my hand, and Celyn didn’t dab at it, wore it like warpaint that had done its job. The laptop stayed open on the coffee table, the email from the agent on the screen, the subject line I couldn’t read from the angle I was at and didn’t need to.