Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Seven o’clock, the gate. Block C, the rebar. Tying. The wire, the pliers, the rhythm. The body knows. The body’s good at this.
The body’s good at other things too apparently.
I tie the next one. And the next. The fingers work and remember, not the wire. The grip on a hip. The waist that fit inside my hands. The skin under the t-shirt, warm, the heartbeat under my palm quick and getting quicker and.
‘Boss.’ Gaz, the grin. ‘You’re grinning. You never grin. You got laid?’
‘Get back on the ties, Gaz.’
He goes. I look down: scraped knuckles, concrete dust in the creases. Last night these hands were somewhere they’d never been.
Same hands.
By lunch, the portacabin, Gaz still hasn’t let it go. Jay looks over from his bacon roll. ‘You do look different, boss.’
‘I look the same.’
‘Nah,’ Gaz says. ‘You look like you slept. First time since you got here you actually look like you slept.’
I didn’t sleep, lay in the dark replaying every second on a loop that wouldn’t stop. But something feels settled, like a slab when the props come out and it holds.
Five o’clock. I shower, pull on the black shirt, check the mirror. Who am I dressing for. I know who I’m dressing for.
The bar. Celyn, corner table. A flower shirt tonight: big blooms, orange and purple, open over a black vest. Eyeliner smudged like it was put on and rubbed with a thumb. Violet nails.
Celyn looks up, the eyes, grey today, the half-smile. But wider than the half. Three-quarters.
‘You came back.’
‘Said I would.’
‘People say things.’
I sit, my chair.
‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘Say things I don’t mean.’
Celyn looks at me. The smile drops, not gone, changed. The eyes stay. The fingers wrap around the mug. The garden-tea smell.
‘No,’ Celyn says. ‘I don’t think you do.’
We talk. About the novel, the character’s found the light switch but the room’s changed shape. About the restaurant. A new waiter who dropped a tray of desserts and blamed the floor. ‘The floor was fine. The floor didn’t suddenly develop a grudge.’
I laugh, Celyn laughs, looser tonight, both of us.
‘How’s the site?’ Celyn says. Laptop closed.
‘Good. The set went clean. Pour tomorrow.’
‘Do you think about it? The concrete. After it’s poured.’
‘Think about it how.’
‘Like does it keep you up? Wondering if it set right?’
Nobody asks me this. Dave assumes it’s right because I checked it. Gaz doesn’t know enough to worry. But Celyn asks. And I open my mouth.
‘Sometimes. Yeah. The first night after a big pour. I lie there and I can feel it, the set, the cure, the temperature. If it’s too cold it doesn’t cure right. If it’s too fast it cracks. You want it slow. Slow and even.’
I stop. Celyn’s looking at me.
‘You talk about concrete how I talk about sentences,’ Celyn says.
‘You’ve said that.’
‘It’s still true.’
I drink the pint, Celyn drinks the tea. Tuesday, half-empty. The music’s acoustic, a bloke with a guitar and too many feelings.
‘Come outside,’ Celyn says.
The street. The air’s cold, Manchester cold, the damp kind that doesn’t hit you, just wraps around.
We walk, just walking. The NQ streets, the graffiti, the closed vintage shops, the bins.
Celyn stops by the wall where we kissed last night. Leans against the bricks.
I stand in front, close. The eyes. Looking up.
‘I thought about you today,’ Celyn says. Simple. Like saying the sky’s grey.
‘Yeah.’
‘At the restaurant. Cutting lemons. Thought about your hands.’
I look down again. Scraped knuckles. Concrete dust.
‘These hands.’
‘Those hands.’
I kiss Celyn. Slower than last night. The scratch.
The drag across my face and this time I lean into it.
My hands on the waist, big, still too big, but Celyn’s body presses into them and the fit is, the fit is right.
The mouth opens and the cold air and the warm mouth and I’m against the wall and Celyn’s against me and the flower shirt under the jacket is soft under my fingers.
‘Come home with me,’ Celyn says. ‘My room. I want to show you something.’
Celyn’s room. First time. Small, smaller than my flat, which is saying something.
A single bed against the wall. Books. Stacks of them, on the floor, on the desk, on the windowsill.
A poster, horror film, teeth and a face.
The laptop on a pillow. Clothes on a chair, and there it is.
A bra. Black lace, straps thin, draped over the arm of the chair.
And next to it, grey boxer shorts, cotton, crumpled.
And a pair of tights folded on the seat.
And a hoodie on top of the tights. And all of it is one person’s.
A horror writer who sleeps under other people’s nightmares, stacked on the floor.
Celyn makes tea. Two mugs, the kettle on the desk. Passes me one, our fingers touch.
‘Sit.’
The bed, we sit, close. The tea’s too hot. I hold it anyway.
‘The thing I wanted to show you,’ Celyn says. Reaches for the laptop. Opens it. The screen glows.
A page of text. The novel.
‘This bit. I wrote it today. At the restaurant, on my break. On my phone, in the kitchen, standing between the bins and the deep fryer.’
‘Glamorous.’
Celyn reads. A scene, two people in a room. The character touches a wall and the wall is warm and the warmth goes through her hand and up her arm and into her chest and the wall shifts and she shifts with it and she doesn’t pull away.
The voice, low. The Welsh pulling the words. The room’s dark except the laptop and Celyn’s voice and.
Celyn closes the laptop. Puts it on the floor. Looks at me.
‘Stay,’ Celyn says. ‘Just sleep. If you want.’
‘Yeah.’
‘No pressure. No. Anything. Just the bed and the tea.’
I put the mug down. Celyn puts the mug down. We lie back. The bed’s narrow, elbows touching, hips close. The ceiling bare above us. A horror writer with a black lace bra on a chair and grey boxers and a voice that reads walls like bodies.
Celyn’s head moves, finds my side. The weight of it, light, warm. The breath, slow, evening out. There, flat, still. Celyn’s breathing deepens. Slows. Sleeps.
I lie there.
The arm goes numb at half one. The shoulder aches.
The tea’s gone cold on the floor. The room’s gone full dark now, just the streetlight.
Celyn’s body is warm against my side, the breathing steady, the hand on my chest rising and falling with my own breath.
I don’t move. I stay perfectly still because moving would break something, and I’m not breaking it.
I stay.
The alarm on my phone’s set for half five. When it goes I slide out, slow. Celyn shifts, mumbles, doesn’t wake. The face on the pillow, the eyeliner smudged to nothing, the mouth slightly open.
I bend. Press my mouth to Celyn’s temple. Quick, light. I’ve never kissed anyone’s temple. Didn’t know it was something I’d do.
The stairs are narrow and they creak and I’m trying to do it without making noise because Celyn’s sleeping and I don’t want. I don’t want to wake them.
The room’s still warm. I put my jacket on. The pockets still have the smell of the bar, not the beer smell, the other thing, the Celyn smell that’s on everything now. The collar. The sleeve where Celyn’s head was at some point during the night when I wasn’t thinking about anything, just, was.
Outside. The cold hits different than it did last week. Last week cold was just cold. The bed was warm, the person was warm.
The streets are empty at this hour. The bar’s dark, the corner table waiting like a museum exhibit. Five hundred metres to site, thinking about what just happened and whether it shows. Whether people will look at me and know.
The thing is, the hands are the same. The body is the same. The site doesn’t know what they did for five hours instead of sleeping. The concrete doesn’t care, it just wants the pour. So I’ll give it the pour.
The rest of me won’t be there. The rest of me is in a room full of books and a sleeping person.
Two weeks in and I dream about Celyn.
All of it. All the versions at once, stubble, smooth face, the flower shirt, the black jeans.
The green hoodie with the sleeves past the hands.
The bare arms from the restaurant. The lace bra on the chair, the grey boxers.
The violet nails, the blue nails, the red nails, all of it, like the body keeps changing under my hands and I can’t keep up.
Fingers on my stomach, cold, the ring pressing. The nails, red, no, violet, no, nothing, bare, the small burns on the knuckles. The fingers go down, below the stomach. Below. No belt because we’re somewhere that doesn’t have belts, not my flat, not Celyn’s room, somewhere else.
The mouth on my throat. The stubble, the scratch, the drag, and then the stubble’s gone and the jaw is smooth and the lips are softer and there’s lipstick, I can taste it, something waxy, warm, and the mouth moves down my chest and the hair falls across my skin and it’s long and loose and it smells like the garden-tea.
Celyn says something, in Welsh, I don’t understand it. The sound goes through me like the vibrator goes through wet concrete. Shaking the air out, settling what’s underneath.
The hands again, on me. The grip. Firm, the ring cold, the angle right. Like Celyn knows. Like this body came with instructions I never got.
I come in the dream. The body arches and the dark goes white and the sound is mine, loud, ugly, not the kind I’d make if I had a choice, and I wake up.
The sheets are wet. My stomach, my hand.
I strip the sheets, put them in the machine. Stand in the kitchen with my boxers on and the kettle boiling and the clock saying 4:11.
Too early for the site. Too late to go back to sleep. Too much, lying there with the images still in my head.
I make tea. The mug’s got a chip on the rim. I drink it standing up, looking at the window. Manchester’s not up yet, just the streetlights, a taxi idling somewhere.
My phone on the counter. Celyn’s last message: the house says goodnight. So do I. Sent at midnight. I’d replied: night.
I drink the tea. The dream’s fading, the edges going soft. The middle sticks. It always sticks.