Page 98 of Undefined Terms

‘Whatever it is,’ he says. ‘Sort it. I need your head on the steel, not on whatever’s got it spinning.’

He goes. The rattle of the heater. The cold coffee, the printout.

Forty millimetres.

I redo the section, takes an hour. The numbers come back right. Always were right, ten years of right. Just today, just the one time, just the forty millimetres.

The redo is humiliating. Me at a desk in a portacabin redoing a measurement a second-year apprentice could do. The pencil, the numbers. The line on the page that’s straight this time.

I finish, check it twice. Right, of course it’s right. Was always right except when it wasn’t and the wasn’t is still in the report, Dave’s copy, red circle, my wrong number in his file.

I leave the corrected printout on Dave’s desk. The carpenter’s pencil in my pocket, the flat one, the wood worn smooth where the thumb sits.

Walk from the site to the bar, five minutes, same five minutes every night. Gate, turn, alley with the bins, Turkish place.

Tonight the walk is. Louder. The boots on the pavement and every step is forty millimetres. Wrong and want using the same wire.

The barber’s is closing, the lights off, the pole going dark. The bin bags outside the Turkish place, the smell of lamb and diesel. Same lamb as the kebab shop on the Old Kent Road, same grill, same fat spitting. For half a second my feet try to turn left, the London left, the route home that doesn’t exist in this postcode.

Manchester in November. The cold that gets into the jacket before you zip it.

The bar, evening, Celyn at the table, the laptop open, the writing face, the one where the eyebrows pull in and the mouth goes flat and the world outside the screen stops existing.

Today: jeans, an olive cardigan that’s too big, the sleeves pushed up. One day of stubble, the thin line of eyeliner.

I sit, put the tea down, two mugs. Celyn doesn’t look up. The fingers on the keys. I watch them and think: forty millimetres.

‘How was the site?’ Celyn says. Still typing. The half-attention.

‘Fine.’

A lie. Celyn doesn’t catch it. Good.

The word sits in my mouth like wet cement. I could say it. I made a mistake today. Because of you. Because your mouth was in my calculations. Three sentences. I count them. They stay where they are.

‘The inspection’s done,’ I say. True. ‘Dave’s happy.’ Also true about the inspection. Not about the question Dave didn’t ask.

‘He sounds like a boss who doesn’t care who you shag as long as the steel’s straight.’

The steel wasn’t straight. Today the steel wasn’t straight. Because of you. Because of a lip and a pair of glasses.

‘That’s exactly what he is.’

‘I like him already.’

Celyn looks up, the eyeliner, the stubble.

The laptop closes, fully this time, the screen goes dark. The fingers leave the keys and wrap around the mug. Full attention, on me.

‘Tell me about the steel,’ Celyn says.

‘What?’

‘The frame. You said they’re doing the frame this week on Block D. How does it work, the columns, the beams? I’ve been watching from the street and I don’t understand how it stands up. It looks like, scaffolding that someone forgot to take down.’

I look at Celyn. Hungry.

‘Columns first,’ I say, the site voice but slower, smaller. ‘Bolted to the pad foundations. Then the beams, the horizontal members. They connect the columns. Then the bracing, diagonal. That’s the bit that makes it rigid. Triangles.’