Chapter 12 #2
‘Look at the state of you.’ Celyn laughs into my neck, the hand working us slow. ‘Home five minutes.’
‘Your fault.’
‘I know. I’m very good.’ A twist of the wrist, both of us at once, and my hips buck up into the grip.
We grind into the fist, the wet building between us, Celyn’s cock thick against mine, foreskins catching.
Their thumb finds both heads at the top of every pull and works the slick down over the two of us, easing the drag, and that’s the filthiest part of it, that they thought of it, that they’re watching their own hand do the work with their bottom lip caught in their teeth.
I get a hand on their arse and pull them down harder, the muscle flexing under my palm.
They let me set it for a second, then take it back, slower, because they can.
‘Look at the state of you,’ Celyn says, low, pleased with themselves. ‘All worked up, and I’ve barely started.’
Then Celyn slides down the bed and takes me in, deep, no ceremony, the way you do a thing you’ve done enough times to be cocky about it.
The hand I put in their hair. The laugh they do halfway down because they’re pleased with themselves and won’t stop for it, the hum of it buzzing round my cock.
Two fingers of their free hand press up behind my balls, that spot, and my heels dig the mattress.
Quick in the end. Celyn does it like a dare they set themselves, the throat, the suck, the two fingers still pressed up behind my balls and working that spot, and it goes before I’ve got the word out to warn them.
One hand fists in their hair, the other twists the duvet, and I come down their throat.
Celyn swallows, the head of me held deep while they do, takes all of it, and slides off looking far too pleased with themselves.
The Wetherspoon’s still in my head. The five blokes at a table and the word I didn’t say. Four letters, that’s all.
The garlic’s strong. Celyn’s heavy-handed with garlic like I’m heavy-handed with sugar in tea, not a choice, just how it is.
The lamp’s on and the radiator’s clicking and somewhere on this bed a person is scrolling on their phone with orange nails and wearing my shirt and I didn’t say they at a Wetherspoon and I’m standing here eating pasta.
I wash up. Bowl, fork, pot, done.
‘The lads think you’re a girl,’ I say.
Celyn looks up, the eyeliner. The orange nails on the phone. The expression that isn’t surprise because Celyn’s never surprised by this.
‘Do they.’
‘Gaz asked your name. I said Celyn. He said Welsh, innit. Nice one. Bring her round.’
‘Bring her round.’ Celyn says it back. Testing the shape. ‘And you didn’t correct him.’
‘No.’
I wait, the counter. My hands on the edge.
The pasta warm in my stomach and the guilt, if that’s what this is, the thing in my throat not shifting away.
Correcting Gaz puts me in the sentence. Not Celyn.
Me. The word lands the second I open my mouth, and I stayed quiet to keep it off me.
That’s the shape of it, and the shape’s a coward’s.
‘I should’ve,’ I say.
‘Maybe.’
‘I didn’t know how.’
Celyn puts the phone down. Sits up. The t-shirt shifts. My t-shirt, the grey one, the neck too wide, the collarbone. Eyeliner, stubble. The face looking at me. Not anger.
‘What matters,’ Celyn says, ‘is what you call me when it’s us.’
‘They.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Always they.’
‘The rest catches up, Ron. Or it doesn’t. But you don’t have to fight every fight at a Wetherspoon on a Friday. That’s not where the fight is.’
‘Where’s the fight?’
Celyn lifts one side of the mouth. ‘In your head. And you’re further than you think.’
I look at the counter. The clean pot, the fork. The flat that has garlic in it and a person on my bed who made pasta and is wearing my shirt and has a key and knows the lock sticks and doesn’t need me to be ready for a Wetherspoon.
This is where this is.
‘Come here,’ Celyn says.
I go.
Bed, T-shirt. Hands on the back of my neck. Mouth. Stubble against my chin and the softness under it. I kiss back and the kiss tastes like garlic and chilli and whatever Celyn’s lip balm is. Coconut? Something, the kiss is slow.
This.
I pull back. Celyn’s forehead against mine, the eyes, close. The grey-green.
‘The rest catches up,’ Celyn says again, softer. The accent thick on catches. The breath warm.
I don’t know.
The lamp’s on, Celyn’s wearing my shirt, and everything in here is marked. This is how we live now.
The rest catches up, or it doesn’t.
Celyn’s hand on the nape. The weight on my shoulder.
I stay.
Everything’s right: seven fifteen, the site’s good.
The air cold enough to see my breath, the steel going up on the east elevation, the pour from Friday cured clean. I checked it myself, ran my hand along the edge and felt the set. Solid, no give. The finish tells you: the mix was right, the weather held, no one cut corners.
Bricklayers working the ground floor, scaffolders up top, second level, bolting the next run.
Kenny on the left, the Polish lad, Marek, on the right.
Radio on. Someone’s brought pastries from the Greggs on Deansgate and the box is on the site office desk, open, the sugar smell mixing with diesel and dust.
I’m in the office doing the weekly when I hear it.
The sound after the fall. The silence that comes first. The radio still playing, a drill still running somewhere, and then the silence underneath those sounds where a voice should be.
Then the shout.
I’m out the door before the shout finishes.
Legs moving, brain, the brain does this thing on site, the one they can’t teach you on the SMSTS course.
It goes flat. The panic’s in the legs, in the stomach, in the sweat that’s already on my palms. The brain goes somewhere else. Somewhere that’s just steps.
Marek, second level. The board gave, visible from the ground, the bracket slipping, the gap where the board was, the harness catching him halfway and then didn’t. He’s on the rubble pile by the east wall. The leg, the left one. Is at an angle that legs don’t go.
‘Nobody touch him. Gaz, call 999. Kenny, clear the access road. Jay. Shut the site down. Nobody on the scaffold. Nobody.’
My voice. Doesn’t sound like my voice. Sounds like my gaffer from the Rotherhithe job, the one who’d been doing this thirty years and spoke to emergencies the way other people speak to waiters.
I’m on my knees next to Marek. He’s conscious, eyes open, the whites too wide, the breath coming in short bursts that sound wet.
Don’t like the wet sound. The leg I don’t look at.
The hard hat’s cracked but on. Small mercies.
And the feeling in my throat is, not panic.
Something flatter. Something that sits there and doesn’t move.
Right. Focus.
‘You’re alright, mate. Ambulance is coming. Don’t move.’
He says something in Polish. Then: ‘My leg, I can feel pain.’
‘I know. Don’t move it. Keep your eyes on me.’
Nine minutes, I count them. I stay on my knees. Gaz brings a blanket, the office one maybe. I put it over Marek without moving the leg. There’s blood, not a lot, the trouser torn and something underneath the wrong colour, but the bleeding’s not pumping. Not the artery. He might be okay.
The paramedics arrive, two of them. The neck brace, the board, the careful hands that make my hands look like shovels. They ask me what happened and I tell them and the words come out in order and make sense and I don’t remember choosing any of them.
They take him, the doors close. The blue lights stay on until the van turns the corner and then it’s just the site. The drill that someone finally turned off.
I stand up. My knees are wet from the ground. My hands are. I look at my hands. They’re not shaking.
HSE arrive at eleven. Two of them, hi-vis over suits, clipboards, the expressions of people who’ve seen this before and have already started writing the report in their heads.
The site’s shut, two days minimum. The scaffolding company’s sending an engineer. I’ve got forms to fill and calls to make and the gaffer from head office wants a briefing by three.
The hard part is the seventeen lads standing in the car park with nothing to do. They just watched a mate fall. Nobody’s talking about it, smoking, kicking gravel, checking phones, texting wives. The thing nobody’s saying is that could’ve been me.
I do the briefing, I fill the forms. I call Marek’s wife. His emergency contact, a woman called Ewa who speaks English better than I do and takes the news with a steadiness that makes me want to sit down.