Chapter 1
The hands. That’s what my eyes do first. Fingers moving in the bar light, the ring on the middle one, the nails. Red. Postbox red.
Above them, they keep talking. Something about a bloke at the restaurant who sent back his steak because he’d only just realised steak was cow.
I’m not tracking the words. I’m tracking the colour on the nails and the way the ring catches when the hand moves.
Celyn. Three nights running. Counter seat, pint I didn’t need, corner table across the way, red nails on a keyboard. Knew the shape of them already. Knew the name. Knew nothing else. Just the hands and the thing in my stomach I used to blame on the beer.
‘—and he actually says, “I didn’t realise steak was meat.” At a steakhouse. Called the Grill and Heifer. I’m holding his chips thinking, has this man just been eating things his whole life without asking what they were?’
Celyn stops, looks at me. The eyes are grey or green, can’t tell. The mouth does a thing. Half a smile.
‘You haven’t heard a word.’
A statement, not a question.
‘I heard steak.’
‘You heard a word. Not the same thing.’
I drink, the glass is empty. Don’t remember finishing it, which means I’ve been sat here for a while. I check the phone, forty minutes. Forty minutes gone and I couldn’t tell you the steak bloke’s name.
Could tell you what Celyn’s wearing though.
Jeans, trainers, the heavy kind. A shirt with buttons undone, two, three, sleeves rolled past the elbows.
The wrists. The skin pale underneath, no makeup tonight.
Tuesday there was something dark around the eyes, precise, made them look bigger.
Tonight nothing, just the face. And the jaw’s got stubble on it. A day’s worth, maybe, he. They, Celyn.
The stubble and the open shirt and the chain sitting in the dip above the collarbone. My brain tries to sort it. File it, no file. The shirt says collarbone and a freckle near the chain and I shouldn’t be able to see the freckle from here but I can. Can’t stop.
I’ve been in Manchester a week. The Airbnb’s above a barber’s in the Northern Quarter. Bed, kitchenette, bare ceiling, job starts at seven. Victoria North, Block C, twelve storeys of residential I’m here to build for two years.
Good money, good project, close to Ewan.
That’s the list, three things.
First three nights I sat at the bar. Pint, silence, mind my own. Low music, brick walls, moody and dim. My sort of place has football on the telly and crisps behind the bar and nobody asks what hops you prefer.
But Celyn was here, every night. Corner table, laptop open, one earphone in. Sometimes a pint, sometimes tea that smells like a garden. Typing, reading, the pencil between the teeth. And I sat at the counter and didn’t look and looked and didn’t look and looked.
Tonight the bar was full. No stools free. I was stood with my jacket on like a spare part and Celyn looked up from the laptop and said: ‘That stool looks uncomfortable. There’s a chair here.’
So I sat down. Because of a sentence about a chair. Because my legs got there first.
‘I’m working on this novel,’ Celyn says. Between sips. ‘Had the idea a while back. Horror.’
‘Horror.’
‘You said that like I just told you I collect teeth.’
‘Nah. Just, you don’t look like horror.’
The second it’s out I know it’s bollocks. What does horror even look like.
‘What do I look like?’
The question’s direct. Can’t tell if it’s flirty. Celyn’s chin is on one hand, watching me, and I don’t know where to put my hands.
‘Dunno,’ I say.
True. Dunno what you look like. What you are. Dunno why I’m sat at this table with an empty glass and a pulse in my throat.
Celyn smiles. Wider. The teeth are slightly crooked and the crow’s feet show and for a second, just a second, I see the whole face. The face, nothing more, and the face is—
‘Walk me through your day,’ Celyn says. Chin still on hand.
‘What?’
‘On the site. What you do. From the start.’
Nobody asks me this. Dave tells me what to check. Gaz says cheers boss. Mum asks are you eating. And I open my mouth and start talking and don’t stop.
Site mornings go like this. The pour gets scheduled, the concrete truck breaks down on the motorway and Dave’s got his phone pinned to his ear like it owes him money. Gaz is eating crisps with his mouth open and doesn’t care.
‘Cheers boss,’ he says when I tell him to help Marcus move the formwork back. ‘Though we’d be pouring by now.’
‘We will. Truck’s late.’
Marcus comes past with a board under each arm. Doesn’t say anything. Marcus is the opposite of Gaz. Gaz talks enough for both of them and somehow it doesn’t annoy me because it’s just noise, just air moving. But Marcus notices things. He reads what isn’t said.
The formwork’s set, the level’s good. My hand on the steel cage.
The cold, the give. The hand knows before the eye does—twelve years and the body teaching itself how to read the work.
We could go back and wait in the portacabin or we could stand here and let the wind do what it does and not think about anything except the concrete that’s coming.
Except I’m thinking about the hands. Red nails on a keyboard. The soft R, that mouth.
‘You met someone,’ Marcus says. Doesn’t look at me. Just checking a tie on the grid, pulling it tight, the knot going through his hands like he’s done it a thousand times. He has.
‘No.’
‘Right.’
‘Not like that.’
‘That’s the exact thing someone says when they’ve met someone like that.’
Gaz’s listening now. The crisps paused halfway to his mouth. ‘She fit?’
‘Not your business, Gaz.’
‘That means yes.’ He eats the crisp. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Mate, you look like you’ve been hit with a spade. Your whole face is different. It matters.’
The truck comes through the gate. The mixer turning, the grey water in the drum. Dave stops shouting down the phone. Marcus picks up the screed. Gaz grabs the trowel.
‘Later,’ I say.
And they let it go because that’s what this crew does.
They know when to talk and when to shut up and they know that whatever’s wrong with me won’t get fixed on a building site.
But Gaz says it anyway, while Dave’s shouting about the schedule: ‘For what it’s worth, you look less shit now than when you got off the M6.
Whatever this is, the girl or the whatever, it’s working. ’
I don’t answer. But my hand finds the side of the truck and the metal is cold and the work begins.
I talk, don’t know how long. Celyn’s watching me and the laptop screen’s gone dark and the tea’s cold and the pencil’s behind one ear and nobody looks at me like this. Like what I’m saying about concrete and rebar has a shape.
‘The hand knows before the eye,’ Celyn says. Low. ‘That’s a line.’
‘It’s not a line. It’s just how it works.’
‘That’s why it’s a line.’
Don’t understand that. How Celyn says it, the Welsh pulling the vowels soft, the mouth, and I’m looking at the mouth and the hand comes across the table and lands on my wrist.
A landing. Mid-sentence, making a point about a character in the novel who reads walls by touching them. The fingers are cold.
One second.
Celyn lifts the hand, picks up the tea, keeps talking.
One second and my wrist has a heartbeat I didn’t know it had. And my chest doing it too and something lower, not the stomach, below, is doing a thing I know the name of. I shift on the chair. Sit straighter. Put both hands around the empty glass because the glass is cold and I need cold right now.
Celyn sees. I know because the eyes drop, quick, half a second, to where I shifted. And come back up, and Celyn says nothing, drinks the tea. But the eyes hold. Like a door that opened a crack and isn’t closing.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘I should—’
‘Early start?’
‘Seven.’
‘Course.’ The laptop closes. The earphone cable winds around two fingers. ‘Same time tomorrow?’
Said light, like it’s the weather, but it matters.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Alright.’
Celyn stands, Bag over one shoulder, the shirt hanging loose. Heading home the long way. Oldham Street’s two minutes from here, I’ve already checked the map.
‘Night, Ronan.’
The R is softer than anyone’s ever said it. The Welsh rounds the consonant and my name sounds different in that mouth.
‘Night.’
The door, cold air, gone.
I sit for three more minutes because standing up right now is a problem I’m not dealing with. The barman wipes the counter. Doesn’t rush me.
The Airbnb, the bed. The ceiling, white, blank, nothing to look at. So you look at whatever’s already in your head.
The room’s got that Airbnb smell, cleaning products and someone else’s laundry and the particular sterility of a place where nobody lives.
The sheets are white, the towels are white.
The mug in the kitchenette is white. Everything’s white and nothing’s mine and I’m lying here with the boots by the door and the hi-vis on the chair and the thermos Mum gave me on the counter and nothing else.
I should shower, should eat something. There’s a Greggs bag from lunch in the bin, empty, the grease stain on the paper.
Should call Mum, should text Ewan. Should do any of the things a normal person does at eleven on a Thursday in a new city where they’re starting a new job and everything’s sorted and the contract’s signed and the flat’s next week.
I don’t do any of those things. Thirteen hours on the screed and the arms are done. Shoulders locked, fingers won’t close around the phone properly. I lie on the bed and look at the ceiling.
The phone buzzes, Ewan.
how’s manchester
fine
how’s fine
fine’s fine
Three dots, typing, then:.
tomorrow come 4 lunch k. you sound weird
I’m texting I don’t sound like anything
you sound weird in text too