Page 84 of Undefined Terms

He doesn’t tell Mum, he never did.

‘Ron.’ Quiet. The pub noise around us but his voice underneath it, close. ‘You’re falling in love with someone and the thing you’re worried about is what people think of you.’

Guinness. Foam. Sticky carpet. Draught from the window.

‘I’m not falling.’

‘Ron.’ He leans forward. The elbows on the table. The face closer. I know this face. This is the face from when he was thirteen and said I need to tell you something and I held it and carried it and never put it down and now the weight is reversed.

‘I watched you not-look at a person for six months. I watched you move cities. I watched you sit at that table every night and pretend you were there for the beer.’ A pause. The pub. The telly. ‘You’re in love. The only person who doesn’t know is you.’

The word. Love. It sits on the table between the two pints like a third glass nobody ordered. Can’t pick it up, can’t push it away. Can’t pretend it’s not there.

I drink. The Guinness is half gone. When did that happen.

‘I’m not in love.’

The pint goes down, the sticky carpet. Ewan’s face doing the brother thing where he knows exactly what you’re thinking and he’s going to make you sit with it. The telly’s got the volume off or my ears have. The rest of the pub is far away.

‘You remember Charles? The summer you were twenty. Next door’s eldest brought him back from uni for the holidays, and he was about the whole summer, and the two of you were inseparable, and you didn’t talk about anything else.’

‘What?’

‘I was thirteen. I watched the whole thing. And for the record, Charles was gorgeous, properly gorgeous, and I fancied him rotten and he never once looked at me. Eyes only for you, all summer. Which I have made my peace with.’ He drinks. ‘The bank holiday, the pair of you got steaming on Dad’s cans in the back garden, and you put him to bed in your room and climbed in after him. And in the morning you were up before anyone, cooking. Toast, eggs, beans, “might as well,” sweating so much you could’ve dripped on the pan. Breakfast for eight. Nobody said a word. I clocked it and kept it.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘The point is I clocked you before you clocked yourself. You shared a bed with the fittest lad either of us had ever clapped eyes on and cooked half the kitchen for him in the morning and called it nothing. I was working myself out that summer. I didn’t need a word for me. I watched you not have one for you.’

‘We didn’t touch.’

‘I know you didn’t.’ The voice doesn’t change. He sets the pint down. ‘I’m not asking if you touched him. I’m asking what you’d have done if he’d tried it on.’

I don’t answer. The Guinness, the condensation on the glass. Charles that summer, the uni talk, the whole of July and August I found a reason to be wherever he was. The two of us in my single bed, the lager and the dark, his back against my chest, and me hard and wide awake and rigid with not moving, telling myself it was the beer, antsy for hours and not letting myself work out why.

Him gone in September and me not knowing what the flat feeling was. The answer to Ewan’s question is the not-answering. We both hear it.

‘I wasn’t ready.’

‘Course you weren’t. You were twenty and you didn’t have the word and nobody in our house was going to hand it to you. You had girlfriends, Ron, real ones, I’m not rewriting that. You also couldn’t breathe right for a whole summer over a lad. Both true. You just couldn’t hold both in the one head, so you dropped the one that didn’t fit the story and called it nothing.’ He picks up his pint. ‘And you’re still at it. Telling me you’re not in love when you moved cities for a person and can’t sit still saying their name. That’s not different. That’s just the toast again. More expensive toast, your own rent now, same thing.’

I press the mark through the fabric. Ewan’s not wrong. Ewan’s never wrong about this.

‘Laurence’s the first one I didn’t make breakfast for,’ Ewan says. ‘That was different. That was. I was scared, not hiding it. Big difference.’

‘And?’

‘And he fed me. He made the breakfast. I didn’t have to cook it. I didn’t have to pretend it was for company. And it was terrifying and perfect and the only thing I want to do now is wake up and do it again.’

The pub, the pints.

‘What if he works you out?’ I say. ‘What if he figures out you’re only with him because you got tired of the cooking?’

‘He already knows I’m a lazy bastard who burns toast.’ Ewan pushes the empty glass away. ‘He made me the toast anyway. That’s the whole thing, Ron. That’s everything.’

The third pint, the sticky floor. The word in the glass between us that Ewan said and I can’t put back. Love. Four letters that fit in the bottom of a pint glass and don’t come out.

I finish the pint. Ewan finishes his. He goes to the bar. Comes back with two more. Sets mine down, sits.