Page 96 of Undefined Terms

Dean’s nearest the gate. He looks at Celyn, looks at the charger, opens the gate. ‘Alright.’ Dean’s whole speech.

Gaz comes over wiping his hands on his shorts. ‘You’re the writer.’ Puts his hand out. Gaz shakes like it’s a site visit, which it is. ‘Gaz. The talented one.’

‘Celyn.’

‘I know,’ Gaz says, and doesn’t look at me when he says it.

Steph’s by the mixer. I watch her clock Celyn, and I watch the half second, the same half second from the bar, the eyes deciding where to land. This time she crosses the yard. ‘Hiya. Steph. We sort of met.’ To Celyn, first, before anything else, the eyes landing and staying.

It’s not a big thing. It’s a hello. It lands where the last one didn’t, and Celyn takes it the way Celyn takes things, with the nod that gives nothing away and writes everything down later.

I do the crane. Walked Sally round the formwork already, so this one’s Celyn’s. The base, the ballast, the counterweights. How the whole thing stands up because somebody did the sums on a thing that looks like it shouldn’t.

Celyn looks up the mast for a long time and says, ‘It’s a sentence, isn’t it. One end holds the other end up.’ I don’t know what to do with that, so I say the safe working load. Celyn writes something in the notebook. I don’t ask. Asking’s not how the notebook works.

It’s the notebook that finishes my tour. Sally asks what Celyn’s writing down, and Celyn tells her. Horror. Houses.

‘Houses,’ Sally says.

‘Houses that aren’t right,’ Celyn says. ‘Where the wrong wall’s load-bearing.’

‘There’s a chapel in Gorton.’ The phone’s out, then it isn’t, then it’s her hands, both of them, drawing the thing in the air. ‘1890s. They’re letting it rot. The roof truss is still holding two tonnes of slate nobody’s touched in thirty years. King post, queen struts, the lot. It’s standing on spite.’

‘Standing on spite,’ Celyn says. The notebook’s out, the pen moving. ‘I’d put a family under that roof. And not let them leave.’

Sally looks at Celyn like she’s found the matching half of something. ‘God. Yes.’

Twenty minutes at the hoarding, the two of them. Sally mends ruins, Celyn collects them, same religion, different orders. Steph stands between them holding both coffees, learning what I learned at the corner table: you don’t keep up. You hold the drinks.

Steph catches me at it. Not Celyn, me, the face I’m making at the back of Celyn’s head. She reads it in a second and a half, longer than the half second she gave Celyn at the bar. Something in her mouth starts and doesn’t finish. Then she looks back at Sally and drinks from the coffee that isn’t hers, and the knee from under the table months ago goes wherever she’s decided to keep it.

Filed. Same as Gaz. Nobody on this site says the thing. They find a drawer for it and shut it quiet.

Kev rings at noon. London number, a pour going on behind him, gulls, somewhere south of the river. ‘Carrick. When you coming home? There’s that much work down here they’re paying silly money.’

I watch Celyn at the hoarding, the crew moving round the visitors the way water moves round a stone. No fuss. New shape.

‘I am home,’ I say.

Kev laughs like I’ve made a joke. I let him keep it.

They leave before the tea run, the three of them, the market, Sally’s number in Celyn’s notebook. Gaz stands next to me at the gate, watching them go.

‘She’s—’ he says. Stops. Looks at me. Doesn’t fix it.

I don’t fix it either. The fixing’s mine and I’m not doing it at a gate with the slab going off behind me. There’ll be a table for it. A pint. A right time, or no right time. Just a time.

‘Good pour,’ Gaz says instead.

‘Good pour.’

The slab cured clean, no cracks. You check anyway. Checking’s free.

Celyn’s things stopped being Celyn’s and turned into ours without anyone saying so. By the time the clocks went back, I’d stopped counting how long it had been.

Monday, Dean brings cake.

Proper cake, home-made, in a Tupperware with his mum’s handwriting on a label that says DEAN DO NOT LOSE THIS BOX. Chocolate, thick icing, sticking to the knife. His mum makes one every time his niece hits a birthday and Dean gets the leftovers and brings them to site.