Page 38 of Undefined Terms

We pour the second section at three. The concrete comes smooth, the work’s clean. My hands remember what they did twelve hours ago, my mouth remembers the taste, and I can still do this: pour and smooth and wait. The body holds two things at once.

Celyn.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ewan picks the pub. Not the bar, the pub. The Wheatsheaf on Deansgate, proper pub, sticky carpet, the telly on a football match nobody’s watching. Two pints of Doom Bar and a table by the window where the radiator makes a ticking noise.

Haven’t seen him in ten days. Facetime doesn’t count: it’s the top half of a face and bad lighting and Laurence in the background fussing with a casserole.

He looks good, thinner, the cheekbones sharper, same eyes. The Carrick eyes, dark. He’s wearing a jumper I don’t recognise, grey, expensive, Laurence’s.

‘You look different,’ he says.

‘I look the same.’

‘No. You look present.’ He tilts his head, studies me like he studies a problem. ‘Present. You look present. You’ve been on the phone the past month and I could hear you not being where you were. Now you’re here.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It means something.’

I drink, he drinks. The pub does its thing, the noise, the match. A bloke at the bar arguing with another bloke about offsides.

‘How’s the site?’ Ewan says.

‘Good. Block C’s on schedule. Dave’s happy, which means Dave’s not shouting, which is the same thing.’

‘And the flat?’

‘Fine.’

‘And the thing you’re not telling me about?’

I look at the pint. The foam’s settling, I’m stalling.

‘I kissed Celyn.’

Ewan doesn’t make the face. He drinks, puts the glass down. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Was it what you thought it’d be?’

I look at him. The Carrick eyes looking back. Waiting, just. There, like a plumb line.

‘You’ve been thinking about it for a year, Ron.’

A year. The word goes through me like cold water. A year. Said out loud, in this pub, with the sticky carpet and the ticking radiator and the football nobody’s watching. A year of the corner table. A year of the hands, the nails, the voice.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It was.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

I don’t know how to say it. I turn the pint on the mat, a quarter-turn, back.

‘I don’t know what I am.’