Page 40 of Undefined Terms

I think about Celyn, bar, typing. Me with the pint, not talking. Hours of it.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean.’

Ewan looks at me, the eyes, he knows. He knew before I said anything, before the kiss, before the year. He sat across the table at Mum’s last Christmas and watched me not say the name and he knew and he waited because that’s what Ewan does.

The pub, the second pint empty, I should leave. Should walk and think and maybe text Celyn something that doesn’t sound like an apology or a promise or whatever the hell this has become. But Ewan’s sat there with the leather jacket and the eyes seeing everything and he’s not moving, so neither do I.

‘You know what I didn’t say,’ Ewan says, ‘when you told me about the bar the first time?’

‘What.’

‘I didn’t say it was okay. I didn’t say it was normal. I didn’t say a single thing that would make it easier. That was on purpose. The easy things don’t help.’

The pint’s gone. The glass is empty except for the ring. The radiator ticks. Ewan’s hands are on the table and they’re the same hands as mine but they’re not. They’re steadier, they know something mine don’t.

‘I didn’t decide to be gay,’ Ewan says, quiet. ‘I just woke up and I knew I was. Took me longer to know what to do with it, but the thing itself was already there. And you didn’t decide this either. You woke up and Celyn was there, and the story you had for yourself didn’t fit any more. You can’t fix that by not going to the bar or not texting them back. The thing’s already happened. You’re just catching up.’

‘But what if they don’t.’

‘No what-ifs. That’s the trap.’ Ewan looks at the screen, not watching it. ‘You stay in the what-if long enough and you miss the actual thing happening. Me and Laurence hid for the best part of a year. And it didn’t even start as anything you’d hide a year for. It started as sex. That’s all I thought it was, for a long time. Feelings turned up later. Inconvenient timing, because by then hiding was a habit, and what it would cost him if it got out hadn’t changed.’

The match on the screen. The pub noise.

‘Then it got out,’ he says. ‘You know how.’

I know how.

‘I’m not saying it for sympathy. It’s done.’ His voice stays level. ‘I’m saying the worst day, the day every what-if I’d saved up arrived at once, we survived it. It was the hiding that nearly did us. That’s the maths on what-ifs, Ron. They cost more than the thing they’re about.’

‘Why’d you never say anything?’ The glass, the ring on the table. I turn it with one finger. ‘About me, I mean. You knew. Christmas. Before that, probably.’

‘Long before that.’

‘So why not.’

Ewan looks at the table, then at me. ‘Because waking up and being it, that’s the free part. The rest costs. There are idiots out there, Ron, proper ones. Blokes with one thought a week who’ll still have a verdict on you. I got called a faggot at school before I knew what the word meant. Had to look it up.’

His voice doesn’t go up. It goes precise, which is worse.

‘If I’d sat you down a year ago and told you what I could see, what would you have done?’

The honest answer. ‘Told you to piss off.’

‘Told me to piss off. And then spent a year proving me wrong instead of working it out. You had to get there on your own or it wouldn’t hold.’ He turns his glass once, puts it back on the same ring. ‘And the idiots, when they come, you stand in front of them yourself. Nobody can sit that exam for you. I could’ve swung at every one of them and it wouldn’t have moved you an inch.’

He stands. The leather jacket comes on. He’s a man who knows who he is and he’s my brother and he walked the thing I’m walking and didn’t have anyone to tell him it was alright. So he’s telling me.

‘Come to dinner,’ he says. ‘Bring Celyn. And Ron.’ He leans down. ‘Nobody’s keeping score. You just bring the person you want to be around and you show up and that’s the whole thing. That’s enough.’

The door closes. The pub’s warm around me. The match is over and nobody cares. I’m sat here with a glass ring on the table and a brother who went first, and the knowledge that sometimes the after-thing is just the thing. Just different.

I pay, leave a tip.

I walk home, the NQ, the cold getting into the lining of the jacket and staying.

The wall, our wall. I stop, put my hand on the brick. Cold, wet, just a wall.

Except my body knows what happened against this wall, and the body doesn’t forget. The hand feels the brick and the brick feels like Celyn’s back. A bloke passes on the other side of the street, hood up, doesn’t look. Nobody looks.