Chapter 12 #3
By four the site’s empty. Just me and the fence and the scaffold with the gap and the rubble still holding the shape of a man in it.
I lock up, walk. Don’t go to the bar. Don’t go to the flat. Walk. Along the canal, the towpath, the old mills with their new flats and wine drinkers on the balconies. Walk until my legs remember they’re legs.
My phone buzzes. Celyn.
How was your day?
I stare at it. The question that on any other Monday would get alright or long or knackered. The canal. The light going. A runner passes, headphones, doesn’t look at me.
I type: Bad day on site. Someone got hurt.
Three dots, then:
Are you okay?
Am I okay. Don’t know what that means right now. The body or the head or the bit where I can’t move.
Yeah, think so.
Where are you?
Canal, near Castlefield.
Stay there.
I stay, don’t know why. Celyn said stay and my legs agree with Celyn and the canal doesn’t ask questions and the bench is cold and the phone goes dark and then, twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, the footsteps. The Converse on the towpath. The sound I know before I see anything.
Celyn sits, doesn’t touch me, doesn’t ask. Just sits on the bench in the dark. A coat I haven’t seen before, long, dark, buttoned up. The hair’s down. Can’t see the nails in this light.
We sit.
‘He fell from the second level,’ I say. After a while. Don’t know how long. ‘Marek. The scaffold board, the bracket slipped. I was in the office doing the—I should’ve been on the floor. Should’ve checked everything.’
Celyn doesn’t say anything, the canal. A narrowboat with the lights on, someone inside cooking. I can smell it. Onions.
‘His leg.’ Marek’s leg at the angle. The wet breathing. My hands when they shouldn’t have been. ‘It was bad.’
A hand, on my knee, cold fingers, just there. Like a sandbag on a wall when the weather turns.
‘You need to eat something,’ Celyn says. The accent on something. ‘Not toast.’
I laugh, shouldn’t laugh. Laugh anyway, the short kind, the one that comes out like a cough.
We sit, longer. The narrowboat passes, the lights go, the onion smell fades, the wake laps against the stone edge. The canal goes dark again. Just the streetlight from the bridge and the reflection of it in the water, broken, moving.
I look at the hand on my knee. The fingers. Can’t see the nail colour in this dark but I know it’s there. The fingers cold from the walk to find me. Twenty-five minutes. Celyn walked twenty-five minutes from—wherever Celyn was.
People don’t walk twenty-five minutes for you. Not in the cold, not in the dark, not without asking why.
‘The bracket was rated for the load,’ I say. To the canal. Not to Celyn. ‘I checked it. Last week. Thursday. Checked every bracket on that run. They were right.’
‘Then it wasn’t your fault.’
‘His leg was broken.’
‘Ron. Was it your fault.’
I look at the water. The broken light, the cold.
‘No.’
‘Then it wasn’t your fault.’
The sound of a body hitting ground. The wet breathing. The angle of a leg. But Celyn’s voice underneath, the Welsh, it gets in there too.
My hands start. On my knees, in the cold. The hands that didn’t shake once today, not on the rubble, not on the phone to Marek’s wife, not on the forms, pick now to go, a fine tremor I can’t stop. All day I was the steady one in a room full of people who weren’t.
Celyn takes them. Both, between both of theirs, cold over cold, and holds them still. Doesn’t say anything about it. Doesn’t make it a thing. Just stops the shaking with the grip, the way you’d steady a length of rebar before you tie it off.
The steady one tonight isn’t me. And I let it not be me.
‘I’ll make you something,’ Celyn says. ‘At yours. Come on.’
I go. Because Celyn said come on and the bench is cold and the canal doesn’t have food.
Key, Celyn’s key, the brass ring. Celyn moves through my kitchen like it’s Celyn’s kitchen, knows which drawer has the fork, which cupboard has the pan, the hob that runs hot on the left burner and cold on the right.
Eggs, cheese, the pan I never use properly.
I eat at the counter. Fork, plate, crack in the ceiling.
My phone buzzes, the gaffer from head office. HSE update: two days minimum, possible three. The scaffold company’s engineer tomorrow at nine. Paperwork by end of week.
The phone goes face down on the counter. The eggs are good. The cheese is the wrong kind, Celyn buys the one with the rind, the one that costs three quid for a tiny block, but it works.
Celyn sits on the bed and reads on the laptop and doesn’t ask me to talk about it.
The laptop sounds, the safe place.
Except the site was the safe place too. And now there’s a gap in the scaffolding, a bracket that slipped, a man in hospital. And I’m eating eggs and cheese in a flat that smells like someone else’s cooking, and the only thing mattering in the whole day is the hand that was on my knee.
Which makes Celyn the—I don’t know what that makes Celyn. Something I don’t have a—
One safe place left.
I wash the plate, the fork, the pan.
Celyn looks up. ‘Come to bed, Ron.’
I go.