Chapter 18 #3
The mattress dips when I sit. Celyn doesn’t move towards me. Doesn’t move away, the gap.
‘Maybe I can’t write.’ The voice steady. ‘Maybe the whole novel’s shit. Maybe I’ve been kidding myself for years and the tutor’s just the first person honest enough to say it.’
‘No.’
The word’s out before I think about it. Hard. Like a block hitting a level.
The eyes are red-rimmed. Past crying or before it.
‘You don’t even know.’
‘You read me two paragraphs about a woman on a hill and my hands were in fists.’ I don’t know where the words come from. They’re just. There. Like the right number in a column. ‘That’s not shit.’
Silence. Celyn’s hand on the laptop edge. The chipped yellow. The thumb picking at the nail, the nervous thing.
‘The problem’s the door,’ Celyn says. Quiet now. The writer voice. ‘She can’t open the door. I’ve tried everything, she pushes, she pulls, she breaks it down. Nothing works. She keeps ending up on the same side.’
I think about doors, with my hands. A door that doesn’t open. A woman on a hill.
‘Has he tried just sitting down and not trying?’
The words come out like the forty millimetres came out wrong. From somewhere that isn’t the brain.
Celyn looks at me, long. The face. I can’t. Eyes, mouth, the gap between them. The eyeliner’s smudged from the rubbing. The stubble. The t-shirt that’s mine and too big and the collar that shows the collarbone and the collarbone that catches the light from the lamp.
‘You’ve been solving my novel since before you knew you were in it.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ The voice cracks on the nothing. A hairline thing.
The half-smile, fragile.
‘Come here, Celyn.’
Celyn doesn’t move. For a second I think, wrong thing. Wrong words. Too many, too few, wrong shape. Then the laptop closes. Gets put on the floor. Celyn unfolds the legs and comes across the bed and settles against my side, the head in the space between my shoulder and my neck.
I put my arm around. The hand on the back. The t-shirt, my t-shirt, under my palm. The spine through the fabric. The heat.
Don’t know where I learnt this, the hand on the back. I’ve never done this. Dad never touched Mum like this. But the hand goes there and it knows the way.
‘It’s a good novel,’ I say.
‘You’ve heard four paragraphs.’
‘I’ve heard enough.’
‘You’re in love with me, Ron.’ Flat. Like stating a measurement. ‘You’re biased. You can’t see straight and you don’t read fiction and you work with concrete. You’re the last person who gets to tell me if the novel’s good.’
Celyn pulls away, barely. The head lifts off my neck and the weight goes and the gap comes back. The gap from before, the one I crossed when I said come here. Crossed and lost.
I sit there and take it because what am I going to say? Celyn’s right, about the concrete, about not reading fiction, about the rest.
‘That’s not fair.’
‘It is.’ The hand pulls through the hair. Tugs. ‘Everyone who loves me thinks I’m talented. Mum, Rhiannon, you. None of you are qualified. The one person who’s qualified just sent my chapter back covered in red and told me my protagonist is a mirror I’m too close to see.’
Silence, the street, a siren, far.
I don’t have an answer. I don’t have words for this: fists, paragraphs, the woman on the hill. Those aren’t arguments. They’re just my hands reacting. Celyn needs something my hands can’t give.
‘I can’t fix a door I can’t touch,’ I say. Quiet. Saying it, nothing more.
Eyes wet and cracking dry. The t-shirt too big, collarbone showing.
‘I know.’ Almost nothing. ‘I know you can’t.’
The weight comes back. Slower this time. Settling against me the way something settles when it’s tired of holding itself up.
My hand finds the back again. The warmth through the fabric.
Nothing’s fixed. The novel’s still broken and the door’s still shut and Celyn still thinks I’m too close to see straight. But the weight’s here, against me, that’s not nothing.
The sex is different tonight. Celyn doesn’t push, doesn’t pull, doesn’t guide: the body that’s always ahead of mine goes quiet and lets me carry it. I hold it. No reaching for the drawer tonight. Just skin, the length of us.
My hands on the hips, the t-shirt off slow, the skin I’ve learnt in the dark and the light. I move slow, slow enough to feel everything, the hip bones against my stomach, the ribs when I press close. The rhythm that isn’t about finishing. The one about staying.
Celyn’s hands in my hair. Holding still.
‘Ron.’ My name in the Welsh voice, the vowels gone round, the accent that surfaces when Celyn forgets to hide it. We come quiet, one then the other, the shudder going through both of us, the one starting in me and ending in them or the other way round, and I can’t tell and it doesn’t matter.
I don’t move after. Staying is the whole statement.
And when I finally do, slow, there’s a flannel on the bedside and a bowl of water gone tepid beside it, Celyn set it up earlier, before I came over, and I clock it only now.
Preparation. A small kindness written into the night before either of us said a word.