Page 82 of Undefined Terms

‘Shut up.’

‘Cramp. Very romantic.’

‘Shut up.’ But I’m half-laughing and the ceiling’s blurred at the edges and I let it.

Celyn gets up. The walk to the bathroom, the tap, the cloth. Comes back and cleans me up like it’s nothing, between my legs, the mess of it, the most ordinary thing in the flat, and I let that happen too, lie there and let someone’s hands do the job my hands would normally do. The cloth warm. The care in it. Twenty-seven years being the one who fixes the room. Tonight I’m the one being put back together and I haven’t got the will to stop it.

Celyn drops the cloth, gets in beside me, pulls the duvet over us both. My arm goes round on its own. The hair under my chin. The stubble against my collarbone, two days of it, the thing that doesn’t match the dress in a heap on the floor.

‘You went quiet,’ Celyn says. Into my chest.

‘Yeah.’

‘Good quiet or bad quiet.’

The site that left my head. The name that left my head. The hands that finally had nothing to carry.

‘Don’t know yet.’

‘Fair.’ The hand on my ribs. ‘You don’t have to.’

Nothing changed.

Everything changed.

Morning, the alarm.

I get up. Shower, the water too hot.

Boots. Polo. Hi-vis. Hat. The order matters because if I go in the wrong order I’ll have to think and I’m not thinking. Hands find the buttons and the laces and the bag.

Don’t look at the bed.

I look at the bed. Celyn’s asleep. The hair on the pillow. The makeup smudged. The dress on the floor. The lace on the floor. Last night in pieces on the floor of a flat in Manchester, and I’m putting on a polo to go pour concrete.

I lock the flat, walk, five minutes. Boots on gravel.

Same hands, east wall, drill. Kenny, Callum, morning briefing.

Under the polo, on the shoulder, the lipstick stays. Nobody sees it. I feel it all day. The mouth-shaped mark. Lace and earrings and held me down and took me apart and is making toast in my flat right now. None of this has a name. The toast’s burning.

The pour that needs checking. The level in my hand.

The walk to the pub takes twelve minutes. I know because I count, not the minutes, the steps: the boots on the pavement and the rhythm of walking.

Seven hundred and something, past the barber’s, past the Turkish place. Past the bar, the lights on, the table visible through the window, the shape of someone bent over a laptop that isn’t Celyn because Celyn’s at the restaurant tonight. Someone else sits at the table and uses the wifi and doesn’t know the table belongs to us and the thought, us, the table belongs to us, and my ribs close around it. Trapped.

Under my polo, the mark. Faded, the smudge barely there after two showers. The bruise underneath, the shape of a mouth.

Thomas. Keep it separate. The lad’s got a wife and three kids and a Range Rover on finance, a life that fits. Mine doesn’t, and that’s his problem with it, not mine. He said it out loud and it landed like he aimed it. He aimed it.

The two lads from before come back into my head. The held hands. The thing Dad would clock at fifty paces and the word he wouldn’t say but his face would.

Don’t think about Dad.

Ewan’ll be there in eight minutes. Ewan’ll read me through the door. Mark or no mark, Ewan’ll know. He’s been waiting to know.

The pub’s on Oldham Street. The pub is ours, mine and Ewan’s. The carpet, the draught. The neutral ground where brothers can sit and say things they wouldn’t say in kitchens.