Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Ineed someone who knows about buildings. Seven in the morning, toast going cold in one hand because I forgot to buy butter, crumbs on my work polo.
I stare at the screen, phone in the other.
What kind of buildings?
Old ones, Victorian. The warehouse on Jersey Street. Do you know it?
I know it. Drove past it on the way to site last week, red brick, boarded windows, the kind you can’t touch and can’t knock down.
Yeah.
I’m writing a piece for the paper. About the Ancoats warehouses, the ones they haven’t converted yet. I need someone who can tell me what I’m looking at. Structurally.
The phone, the crumbs on the polo. Seven in the morning and Celyn’s asking me to look at a building and I should be on site in half an hour.
When?
Tonight, after my shift, I finish at nine.
I should say no, I’m knackered. The pour went wrong yesterday: set too fast, Gaz had to re-do the finishing, Dave gave me the look. I need sleep, an early night, something normal.
Yeah alright. Where do I meet you?
Jersey Street. Bring a torch.
I finish the toast, brush the crumbs off, phone away. The screen’s still warm.
I’m going to look at a building. That’s all.
Site, the day goes long. A problem with the steel delivery: wrong gauge, the supplier’s blaming the order form, Dave’s on the phone for an hour.
I’m checking footings on block three and the measurements are clean and the levels are good and my hands know what they’re doing even when the rest of me doesn’t.
Gaz comes over at lunch and we’re sat on the steel stack eating sandwiches.
I bite the sandwich. Ham, no mustard, should’ve bought mustard. Added it to the same mental list as butter.
‘You’re quiet,’ Gaz says.
‘I’m always quiet.’
‘If you say so.’ Gaz looks at me sideways. He’s twenty-two and his face hasn’t learnt to hide things yet. ‘Got a girl?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve got a face like you’ve got a girl.’
‘What face is that?’
‘The one where you check your phone every ten minutes and pretend you haven’t.’
I put the sandwich down. Look at my phone. I didn’t notice picking it up.
‘Bollocks,’ I say. But he’s not wrong.
Jersey Street, nine-fifteen, the light gone, proper dark. Manchester dark in January, streetlights making orange patches and the rest nothing. The warehouse is a shape against the sky, no lights, the windows boarded with plywood that’s warped from rain.
Celyn comes round the corner with the torch already on. The scarf’s wrapped one too many times, the wrap you do when your hands are looking for something to do and the scarf is what’s there.
A grey hoodie, hands shoved in the front pocket. Jeans, trainers. The hair pushed back under the hood. Three days of stubble, maybe four, darker than I expected, covering the line down to the throat. No makeup. The nails, I look, because I always look, bare.
Tonight a stranger would read Celyn as a bloke.
The kind you’d see at the pub and not look at twice.
The hoodie hides the waist. The jeans are shapeless, the trainers are scuffed.
If I’d never met Celyn before, if the first time was right now, this corner, this light, I’d think: lad. That’s it, some lad.
And my stomach does the same thing. The same drop. The same heat below the ribs. The same, because it’s the same person, the same hands coming out of the hoodie pocket to wave, the same voice.
‘You came.’
‘Said I would.’
‘I know. But you came.’
The smell hits when we get close to the warehouse door. Under the hoodie, under the deodorant, something sweet, fruity, warm. Same as the other night. The smell doesn’t match.
Doesn’t need to.
My throat dries.
I look like a bloke, the smell says. But I’m not. The smell is mine and the stubble is mine.
Celyn doesn’t say this. Celyn doesn’t say any of this. Celyn pushes the plywood with both hands and the board swings open and the dark inside is total.
‘Torch,’ Celyn says. ‘You brought one?’
I take it out. The site torch, heavy, metal, the beam cuts the dark. The warehouse opens up.
Inside, I’m alright.
Better than alright, this is mine. Columns, cast iron, Victorian, fluted, the capitals intact.
The floor’s gone in places, timber, rotted, the joists exposed.
I can see the structure, the bones of it: brick bearing walls, two-course headers, the arches over the windows carrying the load down.
Iron tie rods running wall to wall at the first floor, the plates visible on the outside.
I know this building. The warehouses they built when Manchester was cotton and money and the canals were motorways.
‘These columns,’ I say, and the torch follows my hand, ‘they’re doing all the work.
See how the floor loads transfer through the capitals?
The iron’s in compression. Beautiful casting.
Look at the fluting. That’s not structural, that’s someone showing off.
A hundred and fifty years ago some foundry bloke was proud of his columns. ’
Celyn’s writing, the notebook small, leather, the pen moving fast. Looking up at where the torch points, then back down. The hood’s fallen back.
‘And the tie rods. See those? Wall to wall. They’re holding the whole thing together. Without them the walls push outward from the floor loads and the whole lot spreads. Like.’ I stop. ‘They keep it standing.’
‘Mm.’ Celyn’s writing. Then: ‘What happens when one breaks?’
‘Depends which one. Some you can lose and the building compensates. Others, if that one goes.’ I point the torch at a rod running through the centre of the space. ‘This wall moves. Slowly. Might take years. But it moves.’
‘The building changes.’
I look at Celyn. In the dark with the torch and the notebook. ‘Yeah.’
‘Like the house. In the novel.’ Celyn’s voice, the half-voice, the one that’s thinking while speaking. ‘The house changes depending who’s inside it.’
‘Suppose.’
‘The main character’s been in my head for about a year.’ Celyn’s writing, not looking at me. ‘Maybe longer. Before I knew her name I just knew the way she stood in doorways.’
A year. Celyn’s had this character for a year. And I’ve been coming to that bar, every other weekend, when the London jobs let me, for a year. Longer, nearly fourteen months. The torch is on the columns and my head’s on the structure.
‘She stands in doorways because she’s afraid of rooms,’ Celyn says. Still writing. ‘She’s afraid that if she goes in, the room will change around her and she won’t be able to find the door again.’
‘So she stays on the edge.’
Celyn stops writing, looks at me. The torchlight catches one side of the face. The cheekbone, the eye. Dark and grey and looking at me like I’ve said something that matters.
‘Yeah,’ Celyn says. ‘She stays on the edge.’
We walk deeper. I talk about the brickwork, the headers, the stretchers, the lime mortar that’s softer than the brick and that’s the point, the mortar absorbs the movement, the building breathes. Celyn writes, asks questions. Good ones, sharp, specific.
‘Walk me through a day on site,’ Celyn says.
So I do. The morning, 6:45, before the lads, checking the overnight.
Pour schedule. Deliveries. Steel comes in and you check every piece, because the steel doesn’t care what the order form says.
It is what it is. You measure it. If it’s wrong it’s wrong.
The afternoon, the pour itself, the pump, the screed, the trowel work that’s done by hand because no machine does it better.
Fresh concrete smells, that wet, earthy thing.
The weight of it. It starts liquid and ends solid.
There’s a window, four hours, maybe five, where you can shape it.
After that it’s done. Set. Whatever you made is what it is.
Celyn’s stopped writing, stood there, looking at me. In the dark with the torch between us and the columns rising and the smell of damp brick and Celyn’s perfume. That sweet thing that has no business on a person in a derelict warehouse at half ten.
‘What?’ I say.
‘Nothing. Keep going.’
‘I’ve finished.’
‘No you haven’t. You were talking about the window. The four hours.’
I was. I was talking like I talk on site when I’m explaining something to a new apprentice, with my whole body, the words coming because the subject’s mine and it’s built into my hands. And Celyn was listening. Properly.
‘It sets,’ I say. ‘That’s it. Liquid to solid. Once it’s set you can’t undo it.’
Celyn nods, writes one more thing, closes the notebook.
Outside, the air’s cold. It hits different after the warehouse. My skin prickles. The streetlight makes Celyn’s hoodie look grey-orange.
We walk, shoulder to shoulder. The pavement’s wet. Rained while we were inside.
Celyn stops.
I stop.
‘I want to kiss you,’ Celyn says.
Like saying it’s cold. Like saying the mortar’s lime-based.
A fact, stated. The mouth that said it. The grey eyes looking at me in the streetlight and not flinching.
The hoodie, the ripped jeans, the trainers, the hands in the pocket.
The most male Celyn has looked since I’ve known them and the sentence is I want to kiss you and.
My chest stops.
Just stops.
‘Not tonight,’ Celyn says. ‘When you’re ready. But I wanted you to know.’
The voice is calm. How the vowels move, tonight gets an extra beat. Calm like the columns.
Celyn starts walking. The sound of trainers on wet pavement.
I stand there, my hands are shaking. I put them in my jacket pockets and they shake in there instead.
Street, warehouse behind me, orange light, rain on the ground. A person with a sweet perfume that doesn’t match anything just said I want to kiss you and my body said yes before the sentence finished. There’s no place in my head for this and the word for wanting doesn’t fit.
Something else. A person with grey eyes.
I stand on Jersey Street and the rain’s on my face and Celyn’s halfway down the block and the body, my body, is still saying yes.
The walk back, the cold.