Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The gate’s locked, the padlock mine, and there’s a scaffold with a bent standard visible from the road.
Four days. The site’s shut for four days, and I’ve never had four days off that weren’t Christmas or a funeral.
The first one I spend at the flat: forms, calls, the scaffold engineer who arrives at nine and spends two hours looking at brackets and writing on a clipboard and saying nothing useful.
The second one I clean, which takes twenty minutes because the flat’s small and I don’t own much.
Then there’s two days left. The walls are close and the crack in the ceiling’s bigger. Or looks bigger.
On the second afternoon my phone buzzes. Steph. Hey! How’s the project going? My flatmate would love to see the site sometime x
I read it, put the phone down, pick it up, read it again. There’s nothing wrong with the message. Polite, friendly, the kind of text you answer with yeah sure, will sort something and forget about.
I don’t answer it. Don’t know why. The message sits on the screen and I look at it and the thing that should happen, the typing, the reply, the normal, doesn’t. Like a joint that won’t fit. The right shape, the right size, just. Won’t.
I make tea instead.
The third evening, Celyn says: ‘Come to the bar. I’m going mental in the flat.’
Celyn’s flat, not mine: the shared one, three housemates, the kitchen that smells like someone else’s curry, the room with the desk and the notebooks and the narrow bed we’ve used exactly once, for sleeping, because mine’s closer to the bar and doesn’t have housemates who can hear through walls.
Celyn’s in the skirt tonight, the dark one, Dr Martens, the stubble a shadow under the sharp eyeliner.
Our table, two pints, the laptop already open. The foot finds mine under the table and stays.
Celyn reads me the new chapter, the one about the house on the hill. The Welsh accent gets thicker when they read, the vowels rounder. I stop hearing the bar.
The chapter’s about the door, the one that opens by itself at three in the morning.
The woman hears it and doesn’t move. She lies in bed and listens to the door open and she doesn’t move because she knows that whatever’s on the other side is hers.
The thing she built, the house she chose.
The door that opens because she let it in.
‘That’s terrifying,’ I say.
‘Good. That’s the point.’
‘The woman doesn’t run?’
‘The woman never runs. That’s the other point.’
Celyn types. Then: ‘The department showcase is in November. Full chapter. In front of the whole cohort and two external assessors.’ The fingers slow on the keys. ‘Pritchard wants a draft by October.’
‘Pritchard.’
‘My tutor.’ The eyes still on the screen. ‘He thinks the protagonist’s too passive. Circles the house instead of entering it.’
Grey hair, navy blazer, the hand on Celyn’s elbow at the reading that stayed too long. So that’s Pritchard.
I drink the pint. I think about the door to this bar that I walked through when the body decided and the head hadn’t caught up. About the door to my flat that had a key under the mat.
The foot under the table. Celyn’s foot against mine.
I put my hand on the table. Celyn’s hand comes over it. The orange nails on my knuckles. The fingers cold from the pint glass. The weight, light, deliberate, not going anywhere.
‘That last bit,’ I say. ‘Where she opens the door and the house is. Wrong. That’s good.’
Celyn smiles. The full one, the rare one, the one that’s teeth and the lines by the eyes and the whole face doing a thing that my chest doesn’t—
The door opens, cold air, someone coming in.
Gaz.
He’s in the jacket, the bomber one he wears off-site, the one Steph bought him. He’s scanning the bar like a person looking for a mate and then his eyes land on our table and on Celyn’s hand on mine.
I feel it. Like a footing that takes weight, you can hear it in the concrete, the fractional sound before it holds or cracks. This sound. And my stomach does the—something. Drops. Tightens. Both.
Celyn hasn’t noticed yet, still looking at me, the smile still there.
Gaz walks to the bar. Orders. Doesn’t come to the table. I watch his back, the bomber jacket, the shoulders, how he leans on the counter and nods at the bartender and takes the pint and turns and then, briefly, two seconds. Looks at our table again.
At Celyn’s hand. At the skirt.
I feel Celyn feel it. The fingers on my hand change, not tighter, not a pull-away. A pause. What a hand does before it pulls away. Or doesn’t.
‘Friend of yours,’ Celyn says.
‘Gaz. From site.’
‘Does he know.’
‘No.’
Celyn’s hand stays. Celyn looks at me, the green underneath. Your move, the look says. Or maybe it says nothing and I’m making a thing out of a hand on my hand in a pub on a Thursday.
Gaz finishes the pint, puts the glass down, walks to the door. On the way past our table he nods. At me, at me. The nod that means: I’ve seen something. Filing it, haven’t decided where.
‘Night, Ron.’
‘Night, mate.’
The door closes, the cold air goes, the jukebox changes song. And the thing in my throat, the one that arrived when his eyes found the table, doesn’t go with it. Stays. Like something I swallowed wrong and can’t. Celyn takes the hand back. Retrieving. Puts both hands around the pint.
‘You alright?’ I ask.
‘Yep. You?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Fair.’
I drink, Northern Soul, pub, table. Laptop closed now, Celyn’s foot still against mine. A nod, a jacket disappearing through the door. Whatever just happened.
Morning, and the site’s back. The scaffold’s been signed off, new brackets, new boards, the engineer’s stamp on the clipboard.
The lads come back in twos and threes, like they do when something’s happened and nobody wants to be first but nobody wants to be last. Kenny first, Jay second.
Dean with the Guinness-coloured thermos. Thomas late.
No Marek.
I do the briefing: new brackets, new regs, the HSE follow-up due Friday.
The lads listen, nod, ask nothing. The questions they’d normally ask, how long’s the pour, who’s on the mixer, can we swap the Thursday shift, don’t come.
Just nods, just boots shuffling on the gravel and eyes that go to the scaffold and come back and go to the scaffold again.
The drill starts on the east wall. The site sounds like a site.
But quieter. The banter’s gone, the radio’s off, and when the new agency lad climbs the scaffold to take Marek’s position, three lads stop what they’re doing and watch him clip the harness.
Check the board. Check the bracket. Check the harness again. Nobody says anything. Nobody has to.
By noon, Dean has checked his own harness four times.
I counted. Jay won’t go above the first level, says his knee’s playing up, and maybe it is.
Thomas puts his hard hat on in the portacabin, which he’s never done, and leaves it on through tea break, and I don’t tell him he looks daft because he doesn’t look daft.
He looks like a man who heard a body hit the ground.
Gaz arrives at seven fifteen. Normal. Boots, hi-vis, the thermos with the football sticker. Nods at me, carries on. The one who acts like nothing’s changed, which is its own kind of tell.
Tea break, ten thirty, the portacabin: Gaz and me and the kettle and the mugs and the biscuits. Digestives, always digestives, from the Asda on the way in and nobody checks.
He stirs his tea, I stir mine, the spoon on the mug, the digestive I’m not eating.
‘So,’ Gaz says. Looking at the tea. The spoon going round. ‘Celyn’s not a—’
He stops. Doesn’t finish the sentence. Lets the word hang.
My tea. The spoon on the ceramic. The silence is mine to fill and I don’t fill it, because filling it fast would look like I’d rehearsed. I let Gaz watch me not rush. Let the portacabin breathe with the kettle cooling and the radio outside doing its low thing.
‘No,’ I say.
Gaz nods, the spoon stops; he takes a sip and puts the mug down.
‘Right. Cool.’ He picks up a digestive. Bites it. Chews. ‘None of my business.’
He goes back to the site. The drill, the east wall. The morning that keeps being morning.
I stand in the portacabin with the mug and the biscuit and the sentence. None of my business.
Four words. The best four words and the worst four words.
The best because they’re not what the fuck, Ron or you’re having a laugh or the silence that’s worse than words.
The worst because none of my business means: I’ve put this in a drawer.
Which means Celyn goes in a drawer. Which means what I am goes in a drawer.
Which means the hand on mine, the skirt, the stubble.
The foot under the table. The canal bench, the eggs.
The key, all of it in a drawer Gaz shut. Don’t know if it opens.
But he didn’t walk away. He said right. He said cool. He bought the digestives.
I eat the biscuit. Go back to the site.
The drill on the east wall, the new lad on the scaffold, the morning that keeps being morning.
I don’t know if that’s enough.
Evening, flat. Celyn’s not here, restaurant shift, and the portacabin’s still in my head. Spoon going round. Digestive. Those four words.
I text Celyn. Don’t know why, just need the thread open.
gaz came to the bar last night. saw us.
Three dots, ten seconds.
I know. I saw him see us.
I look at the screen. The message.
he asked today, at site. said “none of my business”
The dots. Longer this time.
That’s better than most people manage, Ron. Most people make it their business.
The phone on the counter. The mug, one mug, the blue one. The other one’s in the cupboard where I put it before Mum came and never took it back out. I reach into the cupboard. Celyn’s mug. The chip on the rim. The stain inside from six-minute tea.
I put it on the counter. Next to mine.
Two mugs. Where anyone can see them. Where Gaz could see them. Where Mum could.
The flat’s full of other people’s things.
Dave asked today, on the site. Dave doesn’t ask, he states and then walks.
He was checking the pour on Block C and I was level-checking and he said: ‘You look like someone who’s made a decision.
’ I said ‘about what’ and he said ‘don’t know, you tell me’ and then he left.
Just the statement, the implication, the leaving.
Dave doesn’t fish. Dave just puts the bait in the water and waits to see what surfaces.
Gaz knew before I did. Or he worked it out. Same thing. He saw the painted nails at the bar and he did the maths and he didn’t say anything which is the tradesman’s code, you keep what you worked out to yourself unless someone asks you to speak. Nobody asked Gaz. He kept it, put it somewhere safe.
Mum’s going to ask. She’s going to see Celyn’s mug and the second toothbrush and how Celyn says my place when talking about my flat like it’s not my place anymore, it’s, something else.
The flat’s already changed shape. It’s smaller now, or the same size with more in it.
The walls don’t feel close anymore. They feel, held.
Where I want them seen.
Mine, not Gaz’s. Gaz can keep his drawer shut if he wants. Mine’s open.