Page 4 of Undefined Terms

I should shower, should eat something. There’s a Greggs bag from lunch in the bin, empty, the grease stain on the paper. Should call Mum, should text Ewan, should do any of the things a normal person does at eleven on a Thursday.

I don’t do any of those things. Thirteen hours on the screed and the arms are done, shoulders locked, fingers won’t close around the phone properly. I lie on the bed.

The phone buzzes, Ewan.

How’s Manchester

Fine

How’s fine

Fine’s fine

Three dots, typing, then:

You sound different

I’m texting. I don’t sound like anything

You sound different in text too

I put the phone face down on the mattress. The screen glows through the sheet for a second then goes dark. That’s the thing about Ewan. He reads the silences, always has. Thirteen, sat next to me on the roof, told me he was gay and I held it and carried it and never put it down. Now he’s reading me through a text message and getting it right and I haven’t even said what there is to get right. Because there’s nothing. A stranger at a bar. A wrist that held the cold of a teacup.

The phone buzzes again.

Call me when you’re ready to say it

I’m not ready. I don’t even know what it is.

On my back, I find my wrist, just there. The shape of where it happened sits on the skin still.

I’m hard.

I’m twenty-seven.

Except I know exactly when it started. ‘Night, Ronan’ and the soft R. The collarbone and the chain and the freckle near the chain. Celyn looking at me when I talked about concrete like I was making something out of the words too.

I close my eyes. The pillow smells of industrial detergent, not quite clean.

I turn onto my stomach. My hips push, once, into the mattress. Behind my eyes it’s the wrist and the freckle and.

I stop.

I stop because if I do this, if I let the body finish, it’s not the beer and it’s not the new city. It’s a person. A name I’ve been saying in my head for three nights. If I come thinking about that person then it’s real. Can’t undo real.

I don’t do it.

On my back, ceiling, white. Flat on the mattress, not touching anything. Waiting for it to pass.

Doesn’t pass, not for a while.

My wrist, the circle. The red on thin skin. The R that nobody else says like that.

I count the list again. Three things, same as the train.

Feels like there should be a fourth.

Seven o’clock, the gate. The site smells of diesel and wet concrete and the particular cold of a Manchester morning that gets into your boots before you’ve crossed the yard.