Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The phone goes at eleven. I’m on the sofa in boxers eating toast over the plate on my chest, crumbs in the belly button, the telly on, the window open a crack.
MUM on the screen.
I brush the crumbs off, sit up, clear my throat like she can tell I’ve been lying down.
‘Hiya, love.’
‘Morning, Mum.’
‘It’s eleven. It’s not morning.’ The kettle’s going in the background. Always the kettle. The woman runs on tea like a train runs on diesel. ‘You been sleeping?’
‘Course I’ve been sleeping.’
‘You sound tired.’
‘I always sound like this.’
‘You always sound tired. That’s what I’m saying.’ The kettle clicks off. The mug on the counter, the spoon, the milk, the whole routine I’ve heard a thousand times. The sound of Lewisham in a kitchen. ‘Ewan says the job’s going well.’
‘Ewan talks too much.’
‘Ewan barely talks. He texts. “Ron’s fine.” That’s all I get. I had more conversation with the postman this morning and he only wanted me to sign for a parcel.’
I eat the toast. She talks: new neighbours, the fence, Dad’s knee, bad again, won’t see the doctor, stubborn as furniture, the church roof fundraiser, auntie Maeve’s hip. The whole week in five minutes.
‘So,’ she says. The so that has a turn signal on it. The corner is coming. ‘Any nice girls in Manchester?’
I laugh, don’t mean to, too fast, too high. Shit catch at cricket. Fumbled.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Nothing. Nah. No girls.’
‘You sure? You sound different, love.’
Different, that word. I press my back into the sofa. Cushion, crumbs.
‘Different how.’
Mum does the pause. The one where she’s working out how much you can carry.
‘You sound like your brother sounded,’ she says. ‘Before.’
The toast, the plate. The telly where the bloke’s knocking through a wall and the dust is everywhere and his wife’s in the garden pretending not to panic.
Before, before what.
‘Mum. I’m fine.’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t fine. I said you sound different.’
‘Same thing.’
‘It’s not the same thing at all, Ronan, and you know it.’
Ronan, full name.
I don’t sit still. I change the road.
‘How’s Dad’s knee?’
‘I told you about his knee five minutes ago.’
‘Tell me again.’
Pause. Mum on the other end. Her kitchen, her tea. The house that changed and one son came back different and the other one’s here now.
‘Alright, love. His knee’s the same. He’s the same. Everything’s the same.’
Everything’s the same.
‘Give my love to Ewan,’ she says.
‘Will do.’
‘And to whoever’s making you sound like that.’
Nothing comes. My thumb on the red button. My mouth open and nothing in it. Phone goes dead. Telly. Wall getting knocked through. Dust.
Mum’s not stupid, never has been.
She’s waiting. Same patience she had with Ewan.
I put the phone on the arm of the sofa. The toast’s gone cold, the crumbs.
The telly’s still on, the bloke knocking through a wall, his wife in the garden pretending not to panic. This is the bit where they find asbestos or a structural fault, because every house has something wrong in it.
Mum heard it in the speed of my laugh. The too-fast one, the one your brain makes when someone asks if there are girls and you’re sat there thinking about a person who isn’t a girl and isn’t quite a bloke and fits the space between like a key that shouldn’t turn but does.
Celyn would know what to do with that. Would ring her back, say you don’t know yet but you will, and the Welsh would pull the vowels and it’d sound like respect.
I’m the bloke who says nah and yeah. I’ve got site vocabulary, the words for concrete and steel and how much weight a column carries. I’ve got no words for how Celyn laughs.
The house on the telly’s got load-bearing walls in the right place; the rest is cosmetics, fixable.
The family house in Lewisham’s got bones shaped a specific way.
Dad at the head. The sons across from each other.
The volume turned down when the shape goes wrong, Mum filling every crack with sound.
I bring Celyn to that table and the shape cracks completely, and there’s no Christmas dinner big enough to cover it.
And Ewan’s table would do the opposite. Ewan keeps the chair open, says it every time, no score, bring Celyn.
Laurence would have the kettle on before our coats were off.
That table wouldn’t crack. And I still haven’t gone, because it’s not them I’m scared of.
It’s what it makes me, walking Celyn through that door and saying this is who I’m with.
I eat the cold toast anyway.
Like your brother sounded.
Tuesday.
Two blokes in the corner with a chessboard, the bartender wiping glasses, the music low. Something with a piano and a woman singing words I can’t make out. Doesn’t matter.
Celyn’s at the table, the corner table, the one that’s been ours for. How long now, don’t count. Counting makes it a thing.
Laptop open, the typing, the stops. The lip between the teeth and the eyes on the screen and the focus that goes somewhere I can’t follow.
I’ve learnt not to talk when the typing’s happening, learnt it how you learn anything, by getting it wrong enough times.
Interrupted once in the middle of a sentence Celyn was writing and got a look that could strip paint.
I drink the tea, the tea’s good here, better than the beer, if I’m honest. Took me months to admit that, months of ordering pints I didn’t want because you don’t sit in a bar and drink tea. Except I do now.
Celyn tonight: the soft washed-out t-shirt, jeans, the trainers with the split sole that should’ve been binned weeks ago. One day of stubble. The hair’s a mess, actual mess, like the last thing that happened to it was a pillow. Or my hands.
The nails, bare. Short, clean, the ring still there.
The pull behind my ribs. Same as the first night. Every night, the same.
‘There’s a cat.’
Celyn points at the window without looking up from the screen. I look. Orange tabby sat on the windowsill outside. The tail wrapped around itself. Staring at us through the glass like we owe it money.
‘That cat’s always there.’
‘I know. I’ve named it.’
‘You named a cat Dave.’ Still not over it.
‘He looks like a Dave.’ Still typing. The fingers moving. The bare nails on the keys. ‘Judgmental. Disappointed. Probably a Tory.’
‘You can’t tell a cat’s politics from its face.’
‘You absolutely can.’
‘Gaz asked about you,’ I say. Don’t know why. The sentence just. There.
‘What’d he say?’
‘Asked if you were coming to the pub quiz. Thursday. The Wheatsheaf.’
Celyn looks up. ‘Is Gaz building a team?’
‘Gaz is building a team that doesn’t lose fourteen rounds in a row. His words.’
‘I don’t know anything about football.’
‘Neither does Gaz. That’s why they keep losing.’
Celyn laughs, the real one, the one starting in the chest and opening the whole face. I feel it in my knees. My knees, that’s a new one.
‘Tell him yes.’
‘Right.’
Typing, piano music, tea. I look at my phone: scores from the weekend, a text from Mum I haven’t answered, the weather for tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain, course it is, Manchester.
‘Ron.’
‘Mm.’
‘Look at this.’ Celyn turns the phone across the table. A headline, a photo, I don’t, it’s a picture of a goat wearing a hi-vis vest. A construction site in Wales where a goat walked on and nobody noticed for a week.
I look at the goat. Celyn’s grinning, waiting.
‘That’s not funny.’
‘It’s very funny.’
‘It’s a goat.’
‘On a building site. In hi-vis. Ron. A week.’
I don’t get why this is funny. It’s a goat in a vest. Goats are on sites sometimes. Animals wander on.
‘You’re not laughing,’ Celyn says.
‘I’m not a goat person.’
‘Everyone’s a goat person.’
Celyn takes the phone back, goes back to typing. The grin stays for a while. It fades as the words take over and the focus goes wherever Celyn goes when the writing’s happening and I’m just standing here.
The flat, later, nine, maybe ten. Lost track.
Celyn’s on the sofa with the laptop, the trainers off, kicked into the corner, one upright, one on its side. The feet are bare, the socks peeled off somewhere between the door and the cushion.
The toenails.
I’m in the kitchen making another tea. Four teas in one evening. Don’t know when that started. The feet are on the armrest, the toes curled slightly, and the nails are beautiful.
Purple. Violet. The same violet that was on the fingers before it chipped away. Like the fingers got the wear and the feet kept the secret.
Jeans and grey t-shirt and bare face and the toenails are violet. Nobody would know. Nobody except whoever’s close enough to see.
I bring the tea. Put the mug on the arm of the sofa. Sit.
The telly’s on, football, something in the league. Bottom half, two sides I’ve got no investment in. The commentary’s the kind where the bloke sounds like he’s narrating a documentary about paint drying. I watch it, don’t watch it.
Celyn closes the laptop. Sets it down. Gentle, always gentle with the laptop. Shifts, moves closer. The weight settling against my side. My arm goes around. The arm knows.
Celyn’s hand, under my t-shirt. Just the flat palm on my stomach.
The football, the commentary. The rain starting against the window. The sound of it, light, the sort that turns heavy by midnight.
Celyn’s breathing changes, slower. The weight gets heavier on my side. The stubble, one day’s worth, against my collarbone.
I don’t move, the telly talks, the rain falls. The hand stays on my stomach and the breathing stays slow and Celyn is asleep. On my shoulder, on a Tuesday, at ten o’clock. With violet toenails and a grey t-shirt and nothing on the face and the laptop on the floor and a novel half-written.
I reach for the remote. Turn the volume down. The noise low enough to not wake anyone and loud enough to fill the room.
The rain, the hand, the breathing.
It’s Tuesday, nothing happened.
The best night I’ve had in a long time and nothing happened.