Chapter 18 #2
I redo the section, takes an hour. The numbers come back right. Always were right, ten years of right. Just today, just the one time, just the forty millimetres.
The redo is humiliating. Me at a desk in a portacabin redoing a measurement a second-year apprentice could do. The pencil, the numbers. The line on the page that’s straight this time.
I finish, check it twice. Right, of course it’s right. Was always right except when it wasn’t and the wasn’t is still in the report, Dave’s copy, red circle, my wrong number in his file.
I leave the corrected printout on Dave’s desk. The carpenter’s pencil in my pocket, the flat one, the wood worn smooth where the thumb sits.
Walk from the site to the bar, five minutes, same five minutes every night. Gate, turn, alley with the bins, Turkish place.
Tonight the walk is. Louder. The boots on the pavement and every step is forty millimetres. Wrong and want using the same wire.
The barber’s is closing, the lights off, the pole going dark.
The bin bags outside the Turkish place, the smell of lamb and diesel.
Same lamb as the kebab shop on the Old Kent Road, same grill, same fat spitting.
For half a second my feet try to turn left, the London left, the route home that doesn’t exist in this postcode.
Manchester in November. The cold that gets into the jacket before you zip it.
The bar, evening, Celyn at the table, the laptop open, the writing face, the one where the eyebrows pull in and the mouth goes flat and the world outside the screen stops existing.
Today: jeans, an olive cardigan that’s too big, the sleeves pushed up. One day of stubble, the thin line of eyeliner.
I sit, put the tea down, two mugs. Celyn doesn’t look up. The fingers on the keys. I watch them and think: forty millimetres.
‘How was the site?’ Celyn says. Still typing. The half-attention.
‘Fine.’
A lie. Celyn doesn’t catch it. Good.
The word sits in my mouth like wet cement. I could say it. I made a mistake today. Because of you. Because your mouth was in my calculations. Three sentences. I count them. They stay where they are.
‘The inspection’s done,’ I say. True. ‘Dave’s happy.’ Also true about the inspection. Not about the question Dave didn’t ask.
‘He sounds like a boss who doesn’t care who you shag as long as the steel’s straight.’
The steel wasn’t straight. Today the steel wasn’t straight. Because of you. Because of a lip and a pair of glasses.
‘That’s exactly what he is.’
‘I like him already.’
Celyn looks up, the eyeliner, the stubble.
The laptop closes, fully this time, the screen goes dark. The fingers leave the keys and wrap around the mug. Full attention, on me.
‘Tell me about the steel,’ Celyn says.
‘What?’
‘The frame. You said they’re doing the frame this week on Block D. How does it work, the columns, the beams? I’ve been watching from the street and I don’t understand how it stands up. It looks like, scaffolding that someone forgot to take down.’
I look at Celyn. Hungry.
‘Columns first,’ I say, the site voice but slower, smaller. ‘Bolted to the pad foundations. Then the beams, the horizontal members. They connect the columns. Then the bracing, diagonal. That’s the bit that makes it rigid. Triangles.’
‘Why triangles?’
‘Push the top of a rectangle and it deforms. Parallelogram. Can’t do that with a triangle. The shape’s fixed. Every force gets distributed through three members, not two.’
Celyn’s eyes are doing it, the thing where something I said just became material.
‘You’re going to put that in the novel,’ I say.
‘The house has a frame,’ Celyn says. The mouth doing the half-thing. ‘Everything has a frame. The thing you can’t see that holds the thing you can.’
I drink my tea.
I don’t say: today I nearly put a structural fault in a building because I was thinking about your mouth. I don’t say: you’re in every room now, even the rooms where I need you not to be.
The mug goes up, comes down. Warm still.
‘You’re off tonight,’ Celyn says.
‘I’m always like this.’
‘Different than your different.’
I don’t know what to do with that. Glasses come off, get put on the table. Laptop closes halfway. Attention shifts, full, on me.
‘Ron.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Work nothing or real nothing?’
Celyn. The face.
‘What?’
‘You do that thing,’ Celyn says. ‘When something’s wrong at work. Your hands go flat on the table. Like you’re measuring something that isn’t there.’
I look at my hands. Flat on the table.
Bollocks.
‘Long day,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’
‘It’s not the work.’ Not a question. The dry sanded off the voice. ‘You’ve had the look a while now. The one a man wears when he’s keeping a door behind him, one hand on it the whole time. Like you’re half gone already and haven’t decided which way.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Didn’t say the street.’ The grey-green holds me a beat. Two. Then Celyn lets it go, the way you set down a thing you’re not finished with. ‘Drink your tea, Ron.’
The laptop opens again. The typing resumes.
The bar, the table, the sound of Celyn typing over the rim.
We stay until the bar closes. Celyn writes, I sit.
The typing comes and goes, fast, then nothing, then fast. The rhythm of the novel, the rhythm I’ve learnt to sit inside without needing to understand.
Sometimes Celyn reads me a sentence, ‘does this sound like a door?’ and I say yes or no and don’t know what I’m agreeing to but the face tells me I got it right.
At ten Celyn closes the laptop. The stretch. Arms above the head, the cardigan riding up, the stomach, the skin. I don’t look, I look.
‘Walk me home?’
‘It’s three minutes.’
‘Three minutes of company. I’ll survive.’
We walk, three minutes, bar behind us. Street cold and Manchester doing Manchester. Celyn’s body touches mine at the turn, doesn’t move away, stays close.
Celyn comes to mine most nights now. The toothbrush, the key, the side of the bed that’s theirs.
Tonight Celyn asks for their own door instead, and I know why.
I’ve been a wall all evening, the forty mil behind my eyes, and Celyn doesn’t push at walls.
Just clocks where they are and goes round.
Gives me the night. It’s the kind thing and it’s the lonely thing, both, and I let it happen because I haven’t got the words for the other one.
At Celyn’s door: ‘Night, Ron.’
‘Night.’
The stairs, the street. The head that’s not on the steel, the head that’s on the lip and the glasses and the cardigan sleeve over the wrist.
Dave doesn’t mention it again. Next morning he checks my numbers before the pour without asking, stands at my shoulder while I mark the forms, says nothing, moves on.
Celyn rings at half nine and the voice is wrong before the words start.
I know the wrong voice. I know all the versions: writing, flirting, the post-shift voice that’s all vowels and no consonants. This one’s different, tight, the vowels pulled in. The Welsh underneath pushing up like a bruise.
‘Can you come over?’
I’m already putting my boots on.
Celyn on the bed, cross-legged. Laptop open but the screen dark, not writing, staring at the screen that isn’t on.
One of my t-shirts, the grey one, the one I left last week, comes to mid-thigh: legs bare, feet tucked under, nails yellow, chipped now.
Wednesday, the colour’s survived the week badly, one thumb almost bare.
‘Pritchard,’ Celyn says. Flat. ‘Email this morning. Opens “Beynon.” Just the surname, no hello, the way he does, like reading a register. Then the chapter back, red pen. “The protagonist’s indecision reads as the writer’s indecision.
” Underlined writer’s.’ The voice flattens.
‘He published two realist novels in the nineties. Thinks horror’s not proper literature.
Told me first term that genre fiction is an excuse not to do the real work.
’ A breath. ‘The showcase is in three weeks and he’s telling me the main character doesn’t know what she wants.
Like I’m writing autobiography and getting it wrong. ’