Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The kettle clicks off. The kitchen, if you can call three square feet of counter and a hob a kitchen, is cold. I’m in boxers and the t-shirt from the floor.
In the bed behind me: the weight. The thing we opened the door for. No closing it now.
I make two mugs of tea. The mugs are different: mine’s the blue one, the other’s white, chipped, the one Celyn brought over the first time and never took home. Didn’t think about why I’d kept it. Think about it now.
One sugar in the blue one. Milk, enough to make it the colour of wet sand. The spoon clinks and the sound is too loud for six forty-two and in the bed behind me Celyn’s breathing.
I stand at the counter. The two mugs. Steam coming up. And last night is. Right there, in the hands. The hands remember the clasp at the back and the angle and the heat and the sound.
Pick up the mugs, walk to the bed.
Celyn’s face in sleep. This is different in the morning light.
No makeup, nothing. The eyeliner’s gone, or smudged off in the night, a faint grey shadow under one eye like a bruise that isn’t. The lip tint gone hours ago. The faintest sandpaper across the jaw and upper lip. The hair everywhere.
The nails on the hand by the face. The yellow’s chipped now. Three nails still bright, two nearly bare, the polish cracked in lines like paint on old rendering. The ring, silver, thin, still there. Always there.
Nothing on, just, the face. The pale, the mouth slightly open. The breathing.
I put the white mug on the bedside table.
The blue one I hold. I drink. The watching isn’t wrong.
I’m not doing anything. I’m stood in my own flat holding a mug of tea looking at a person in my bed and the person is Celyn and Celyn is in my bed and last night I was inside Celyn and this morning I made two teas.
The eyes open.
Celyn wakes like a switch. Off, on.
The grey-green eyes focus, find me standing there, the boxers. The t-shirt that’s not mine.
‘You made me a cuppa.’
‘Yeah.’
Celyn sits up, and the sheet falls. Past the waist, past the hips, pooling at the tops of their thighs.
The flat chest, pale skin, the dark line of hair disappearing below. Their cock, soft, resting against one thigh, ordinary and real, and I saw it last night and I’m seeing it now and the seeing hasn’t got any easier.
‘One sugar?’
‘One. Like you take it.’
Celyn picks up the white mug, wraps both hands around it, the chipped yellow nails on the ceramic. Drinks, the throat moves. The swallow, the Adam’s apple.
‘What time’s site?’
‘Seven.’
‘It’s quarter to.’
‘I know.’
I don’t move, the tea, the watching. It tips up and the strand across the mouth is still there and I could move it. Tuck it back.
I drink my tea.
‘You’re going to be late,’ Celyn says. Eyes on me over the rim.
‘Probably.’
‘You don’t care.’
‘I care.’ I do. I’m the site manager, can’t be late, can’t be the boss who walks in after the lads and everyone knows. ‘I’m going.’
I don’t go, the tea, the steam. The face without anything on it, no colour, no liner, and the stubble catching the light from the blind and the mouth saying I want you last night saying nothing now and the nothing is.
‘Ron.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Go to work.’
I put the mug down. The clothes: jeans from last night, the hi-vis on the hook by the door. I dress with my back to the bed because if I look again I’m not going and the site won’t pour itself.
At the door I stop. Go back. The key, the spare one, the one the landlord gave me with the 4B fob, I put it on the counter next to the kettle. Don’t say anything. Don’t look at the bed.
‘There’s bread. If you want toast. The toaster does one side only, you have to flip it.’
‘Noted,’ Celyn says.
I close the door, run down the stairs and out into the street. The cold hits the face like a slap and my body’s still warm from the bed and the contrast is the same contrast.
The site’s loud. Block C, the formwork going up on the third floor, the crane at it since six, Dave already livid about the concrete supplier.
I step into it like stepping into water.
The noise closes over me, the rhythm of boots on boards, shouts across the slab, the radio from the portacabin playing football transfer news.
Good, this is good, the body knows this.
I check the rebar on the east wall, ties clean, spacing right.
Run my hand along the face of the shuttering, smooth, no blow-outs from yesterday’s pour.
The fingers move along the surface and the surface is plywood and the fingers remember a different surface and I pull my hand back and pick up the clipboard.
Noon, the portacabin, lunch. Dave’s doing the crossword, Thomas’s asleep with his mouth open. Gaz sits across from me, unwrapping a sandwich his girlfriend made, she writes messages on the clingfilm in Sharpie, hearts, little notes. Gaz shows everyone every day. Nobody cares anymore.
Gaz looks at me. Doesn’t say anything for a minute. This is unusual. Gaz says something every second of every day. It’s the only thing about him that could be considered a skill.
‘Still seeing the mystery person, then,’ Gaz says.
I eat my sandwich. ‘Eat your sandwich.’
‘That’s a yes. You’ve had the face all week. Like a man who knows where his next cup of tea’s coming from.’
‘Gaz.’
‘Fair play, boss.’ The grin. He goes back to the sandwich. The clingfilm with the hearts. Then: ‘What’s she like?’
The question, right there. Between the portacabin and the clingfilm and the crossword Dave’s getting wrong. What’s she like.
I could say. I could open my mouth and say, what.
They. The word’s right there. I use it in my head now without thinking, use it out loud with Celyn, with Ewan.
It’s the right word. But the right word in this portacabin with Gaz and his sandwich and Dave’s crossword and Thomas’s open mouth, the right word opens a door I don’t know how to walk through. Not here, not at noon on a Thursday.
‘She’s alright,’ I say.
‘Alright,’ Gaz says. ‘High praise from you. I’ll tell Steph you’ve met someone. She’ll be proper buzzing. She’s been saying you need.’
‘Don’t tell Steph.’
‘She’ll find out. She always finds out.’
‘Don’t tell Steph, Gaz.’
He puts his hands up. ‘Fine, fine. Not a word.’
I finish the sandwich, the bread’s dry. Could’ve had toast with Celyn. The toaster that only does one side, the white mug with the chip on the rim. Instead I’m here with Dave’s crossword and Thomas’s breathing and the she that isn’t a she.
Barely there.
Afternoon, the pour. I’m stood on the edge of the slab, the concrete coming down the chute, the vibrator going in, the mix settling to level.
Beautiful thing, a pour. Ugly work, the noise, the wet, the grey, but when it sets, when the forms come off tomorrow, the surface will be clean, solid.
You’ll walk on it and not know what it took.
The concrete, the settling.
She. Gaz said she. I didn’t correct. I said it back, she’s alright, and it came out easy, which is worse.
Everyone says she or her because I haven’t given them the other word and the other word is, four letters.
Four letters and I can’t get them past my throat in a portacabin with Dave and a crossword and a sandwich wrapped in clingfilm.
The concrete finds level, the vibrator hums. The air bubbles rise and burst and the pour settles into the shape the formwork gives it because that’s what concrete does: takes the shape of whatever holds it.
She is one shape, they is another, the concrete doesn’t care.
I do.
My phone buzzes. On the edge of the slab. I don’t look, you don’t check your phone during a pour.
After, the screen, one message.
Key’s under the mat. Your toaster is an act of violence. The bread survived, barely, C.
I read it twice. Three times. The key’s under the mat.
The key I put on the counter without thinking, without deciding, the hand just did it, like making two teas, like knowing the sugar.
I’m stood on a building site in Manchester and someone I’ve known for—how many weeks. Has the key to my flat under the mat.
My thumb on the screen. The portacabin behind me, Gaz and Thomas and Dave and the world hearing me say she’s alright and the phone saying C.
I type: Told you about the toaster
Send.
I don’t ask for the key back.
Then I type: Lock’s a bit dodgy pull the door hard
Send.
Then I put the phone away and go back to the slab and the slab is setting and the slab is solid and the slab doesn’t ask questions.
The she sits in the portacabin. Small, easy, almost nothing.
The key sits under the mat. Smaller, easier.
Neither one is nothing.
The site’s loud, Block C going vertical, Dave on the phone with the structural engineer, the concrete curing right on the edge of acceptable, and I’m checking everything twice because the work has to be perfect because nothing else is.
Gaz finds me at the slab edge.
‘You’re happy,’ he says. ‘That’s new. You’re never happy.’
I don’t correct it. Correcting it would take more energy than I’ve got.
‘It’s different,’ I say. This is the most I’ve said about it.
‘Different how.’
‘Just different.’ I pick up the sandwich.
‘Love at first sight?’ Gaz says. ‘That’s sweet.’
‘Wasn’t first sight. Was slow.’ I think about the weeks at the bar. The table. The months before that going to the Northern Quarter every weekend because I knew someone was there. ‘Was so slow I didn’t notice until, until they said something and then I noticed.’
‘And now.’
‘Now I gave them a key.’
Gaz grins bigger, ‘Mate. You’re gone. You’re actually gone.’
I’m not gone. I’m stood at a slab edge eating a dry sandwich and my hands know what to do on a pour and my body knows where the site is and the building and the concrete. But the key’s in my pocket and the spare’s under the mat and slow turns out to be the only way I know how to do things.
At the gate, half five. A girl waiting on the pavement, blonde, puffer jacket, jeans. Scrolling her phone, holding a thermos in the other hand.
Gaz spots her first. ‘That’s Steph.’ Fixes his hair under the hard hat, which has never helped anyone.