Chapter 1 #3
‘She sent a voice note, boss. A voice note. That’s like, that’s basically a date, innit?’
‘A voice note is not a date, Gaz.’
‘It’s intimate though. She chose to use her voice. Her actual voice.’
I think about a voice. Welsh, the vowels. The R in Ronan that nobody else says like that.
‘Ask her out,’ I say. ‘With your actual mouth. In a pub. Not a voice note.’
‘What if she says no?’
‘Then she says no and you stop boring me about it.’
Jay laughs. Dean doesn’t but I think the sandwich pauses for a second, which is Dean laughing.
I close my eyes. The portacabin’s warm, the chair’s plastic, the radio’s on low. Another woman, another man.
Behind my eyes: Celyn stretching after typing, the shirt riding up, a strip of pale skin above the jeans. The dip of the hip.
Open my eyes, drink the tea. It’s gone cold, drink it anyway.
Doesn’t help.
The radio switches tracks. A cover, old.
A bloke singing about a girl who’s gone.
I could tell him: the one I can’t shift isn’t gone.
They’re in a corner table in the Northern Quarter with a laptop and a coffee mug that probably cost more than my week’s pay, typing about houses that breathe, and I can’t shift the image of Celyn pushing the hair back.
No song’s got the word for it. Neither have I.
Jay catches me staring at the clock. ‘You going somewhere, boss?’
‘Just. Dinner.’
‘With who.’
‘Someone.’
Jay grins. Thomas comes in late with another excuse and Jay catches my eye like I’m in on it.
I’m not in on anything. Out of my depth, and I have been since the first night at that table without knowing it.
Built things for ten years. Concrete, steel, everything that stands up because the maths work.
This doesn’t have maths. It’s sitting across from a person and finding your hand wants to cross the table on its own.
The Welsh vowels, and the whole machine stops.
Twenty-seven and nothing’s stopped it before.
Gaz has got it too, over a bloody voice note. At least I’m not the only one.
Five o’clock, clock off. The walk to the Airbnb takes five minutes through the NQ streets, the graffiti and the vintage shops. The barber’s sign, the window dark.
I go up, drop the bag.
Shower. The water hot on the back of my neck where the concrete dust settles.
I wash my hair, the curls take the dust worst, hold it in the coils the way the mix holds aggregate.
Don’t usually wash my hair on a weekday.
Shave, not all of it: the beard stays, trim the edges.
Short, dark, fills in whether you want it to or not. Mum says it makes me look like Dad.
I put on the clean polo, the one without the concrete line. Jeans that aren’t the site jeans.
I’m looking at myself in the mirror. Trimmed, clean, the polo stretched across the shoulders because I bought a medium and the fit’s all wrong.
The arms, tanned from the wrists down, pale above.
The chest and the stomach, hard from carrying, not from the gym.
My face, the Carrick face. Same as Ewan’s but wider, heavier in the jaw.
The dark eyes, Mum’s, that look better on Ewan.
What the fuck am I doing.
Going for a pint after work. Normal. Blokes go for pints after work in clean polos. With shaved faces. At bars where someone sits at a corner table with a pencil between their teeth.
Normal.
I go.
Celyn’s there, same spot.
But.
Today is different. The hoodie, oversize, dark green, the sleeves past the hands. The hair’s up, clip, silver, small, holding it off the face. And the face is.
Smooth, clean, the jaw bare, the cheeks soft. There’s colour round the eyes, smudged, makes the grey-green bigger, warmer.
Same person, but different. The face without the stubble. The eyes with the dark around them. Yesterday I couldn’t file the combination and today there’s a new combination and I still can’t file it and the thing is, the thing in my stomach and my chest and lower is the same.
Same.
I sit down, the chair, my chair now. When did it become my chair.
Celyn looks up. The eyes, the darker eyes, the smudged edges. The look drops. My forearms, bare below the polo sleeves. Clean, but the site’s still there, the tan, the scratches, the concrete not washing off. It stays a second too long.
‘Long day?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You smell like work.’ A beat. ‘I didn’t say it was bad.’
Celyn leans forward, closer, breathes in. A centimetre. Not touching, the warmth of the breath on my skin and the closeness and the smell of the tea and a perfume, fruity, sweet, that doesn’t match the oversize hoodie.
‘Like a man who works with his hands.’
The voice is lower than usual.
Celyn sits back, picks up the mug, drinks, like nothing happened.
The pint’s in front of me. The barman brought it. When? Don’t know, I pick it up, drink it, all of it. The whole glass, the throat working, the beer cold and fast and I put the empty glass down and I’ve been in this bar for four minutes.
Celyn watches me finish.
‘Another?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Cheers.’
I drink three pints. Don’t feel any of them. Feel the centimetre.