Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sunday, a week after Mum. The flat, and rain, committed rain.
I fix the bathroom tap. It’s been dripping since October, the washer’s gone, the rubber split, and the drip’s been keeping time with the flat like a metronome nobody asked for.
I’ve got the parts from the hardware shop on Tib Street, the one run by the bloke with the moustache who calls everyone ‘chief.’ Washer, O-ring, PTFE tape. Two quid forty.
I turn off the stopcock and take the handle apart. The brass is tarnished, green, the oxidation, the same thing that happens to copper on a site when you leave it in the wet. I clean it with a rag. Fit the washer, wrap the thread, tighten, turn the stopcock back.
Run the tap, no drip.
I stand in the bathroom and listen to the silence where the drip was. Four months of that sound, gone. The flat adjusts. The fridge hums louder without the counterpoint.
I make tea, sit on the sofa, the telly’s off, don’t turn it on. The rain on the window and the fridge and the radiator ticking and the silence from the bathroom tap. Four sounds. None of them need anything from me.
I wash the mug. Put the tools back in the bag.
The flat settles around the fix, the way buildings do. They absorb the change, recalibrate, carry on. Everything I touch ends up working.
Seven days since Mum. Seven evenings, me doing all the talking.
You about. A thumbs-up, nothing else. Bar tonight?
Read, no answer. You alright? Read, the little grey word and nothing under it.
Day three the thumbs-up stops. By day seven I’m texting into a thread that’s only got my side in it, blue bubble under blue bubble, a man talking to himself with a delivery receipt.
I ring once. Voicemail in two rings, which is a thumb coming down on purpose.
I know why. I put Celyn in a drawer. My mum sat in that chair and before she was off the train I’d moved the mug, the toothbrush, the second pillow, wiped the flat of a person the way I clear a site at the end of a job.
I never said it. You don’t have to be told you’ve been hidden.
You feel the drawer shut from the inside.
So I text into the quiet and the quiet keeps it. The showcase is Thursday. I’ll go and stand at the back whether they answer or not. That’s what being in the room means. Even when the room’s gone quiet on you.
Same room as the reading, same plastic chairs, same strip lights.
The showcase. Bigger crowd. The whole MA cohort, forty-odd, plus two external assessors in the front row with notebooks and the expressions of people whose job is deciding if other people’s work is real.
Pritchard’s at the side: navy blazer, grey hair, clipboard.
The hand that was on Celyn’s elbow back in February.
I’m in the back row, same row, same position. The jacket Ewan said makes me look like a bouncer. My hands on my knees.
We’ve not spoken since Mum, three texts and a thumbs-up between us. I came anyway, because not coming would say a thing I don’t mean.
Celyn walks to the lectern.
The skirt, the dark knee-length one, heels that click, full makeup, the stubble a day’s shadow under it. And the whole room looking.
Two external assessors. Forty students. Pritchard with the clipboard.
Celyn opens the folder, the hands steady. I can see from here: the nails are green, bright, the colour of something decided.
The door chapter. The one Pritchard said not to read.
Celyn reads.
The voice, the Welsh, the low register. The words fill the room the way concrete fills formwork: every space, every corner. The woman lies in bed and listens to the door opening by itself at three in the morning and she doesn’t move because whatever’s on the other side is hers.
The room holds its breath. I know this feeling. The reading at the bookshop, the same silence, the same arms going cold. But bigger. Forty people and two assessors and the strip lights humming and Celyn’s voice underneath all of it.
It’s brilliant. The room knows it. I know it. The woman in the front row has stopped writing.
Celyn finishes. Looks up. The silence holds for two seconds, three. Then the applause, real, the kind that comes from the stomach.
Pritchard stands.
‘Thank you, Beynon.’ Surnames, with Pritchard.
Always. The one thing the man gets right, the surname stepping clean over the he or she he never bothered to learn.
The voice carries. Pleasant, measured, the voice of a man who’s about to be reasonable.
‘I’d asked you to prepare a different section. We discussed this.’
The room shifts. The applause dies wrong, cut short, unfinished.
‘The protagonist’s passivity remains the core issue. She doesn’t act. She waits. Waiting isn’t a narrative strategy: it’s an absence of one.’ He looks at the assessors. ‘I’ve flagged this in supervision since October.’
I watch Celyn’s face. The postbox lips. The folder in both hands. The room looking. And Celyn doesn’t drop the eyes.
‘She doesn’t wait.’ Celyn’s voice, level, the Welsh under it, carrying the room without a mic.
‘She refuses. There’s a difference, and if the chapter didn’t land it, that’s mine to fix.
’ A beat, the room gone very still. ‘But “passive” is the word people reach for when someone won’t do what the room expects.
The door opens because she stops performing for it.
That’s not the absence of a strategy. It’s the strategy. ’
Pritchard’s mouth opens. The older external assessor, glasses, gets there first.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she says, to the room more than to him, ‘I’d have read that section too. It’s the strongest thing I’ve heard all day.’
And the room moves, not applause, a re-settling, forty people deciding at once which way the weight goes, and it doesn’t go Pritchard’s way. He sits. The clipboard flat against his chest.
Celyn closes the folder. Doesn’t hurry. Walks to the side, picks up the bag, and the heels click out, and it’s the sound of someone leaving on their own terms.
My hands were fists on my knees the whole time. Ready to stand, to say the true thing, the one I know in my hands and can’t get into words. And I never had to. Celyn did it from the front, in a sentence I couldn’t have built in a year.
I should feel proud. I do. There’s something else under it, cold, that I don’t look at straight: in a minute I’ll cross to the front and stand next to the thing she just did, and the whole cohort will do the maths.
Him. With them. And the back of the room felt safer than the front, and I hate that it did.
I go after Celyn, corridor, stairs, the heavy door, the car park.
Celyn’s against the wall, breathing hard, the folder still in one hand. Not crying. Lit up. Shaking with it, the way I am after a pour that nearly went and held.
‘Did you hear me?’ Celyn says. ‘I said it. To his face.’
‘You did.’
Celyn closes the gap. Still lit, still shaking with it, and a hand comes up to my jacket, the folder pressed flat between us, the mouth tilting up towards mine. Here. In the car park. The win has to land somewhere and I’m the place it wants to land.
And I go stiff. Seven days of silence, the read receipts, the thread with only my side in it, and now Celyn’s mouth coming for mine like none of it happened.
It throws me. The body’s gone to a plank and I haven’t caught up, haven’t worked out where the two of us even stand.
I don’t look round, it’s not the room. My hands stay at my sides, and I lean back, half an inch, off the mouth that just won the whole place.
Celyn feels it. Of course they feel it. They read a flinch the way I read a crack in a slab, before it shows. The hand comes off my jacket. The lit-up face goes out, the heels settling flat on the tarmac.
‘Right,’ Celyn says. Quieter. ‘Course.’
The heels on the tarmac, getting smaller. I don’t follow. And that’s mine, not theirs.
Five more days. The corner table empty every one of them.
Working, on the Tuesday, then nothing. Wednesday nothing.
Thursday I get to the keyboard three times, the cursor going, nothing worth the read receipt, and I put the phone face down so it stops being a thing in my hand.
Seven days and then five, a number I don’t want to total.
Friday I text You alright? The read receipt comes. No words after it.
Sunday I text Coming over. Read, nothing. I go anyway.
The buzzer’s broken. I text from the door and the lock clicks. The stairs, the carpet that used to be something. The door ajar.
Celyn’s on the bed, against the headboard. Knees up. The laptop on the floor, closed, put somewhere it can’t be reached without effort. Hoodie, the nails stripped back to nothing, the faint purple at the edges where the remover didn’t get everything.
‘Hey,’ I say.
‘Hey.’ The voice is wrong. Smaller. The Welsh thicker, the way it comes out more when the rest pulls back.
There’s nowhere to sit but the desk chair. I move a towel. Sit. The chair creaks. I’m too big for it, my knees hit the desk.
‘You went somewhere.’ Not about Pritchard. ‘At the showcase. I’d just done the biggest thing I’ve ever done and you stood at the back like I’d asked you to carry a fridge up the stairs.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you, though.’
The true thing’s in there. It’s got a shape. It won’t come up the throat, not here, not cornered, the load with no crane on site to lift it. So I don’t shove a wrong one out to fill the gap.
‘Your mum came and you put me in a drawer.’ Quiet.
Worse than loud. ‘The mug, the toothbrush, the second pillow. Gone in an evening. And you’re good at it.
That’s the part. You’re good at making a room look like nobody’s touched it.
’ The hands gone back inside the sleeves.
‘I never got a drawer to fold into. I learned to stand in the room and take it. You had one. You used it.’
‘I just want it to be —’ The flat word gets to the mouth first. Site voice, the one that doesn’t think about how it lands. ‘Simple. For one day. I want to walk into a room and not feel the whole room turn round.’
The straightening. The slow, careful one that has nothing casual in it. The mouth makes a shape I’ve seen before, not on Celyn. On Ewan, the year Dad stopped looking.
‘So I’m the complication. The thing that makes the room turn.’
‘That’s not what I —’
‘It never is.’ Not cruel. Tired, which is worse. ‘That’s the thing about it landing. It doesn’t care what you meant.’
A breath, the Welsh thick on it.
‘I’m not going to be the thing in your drawer, Ronan.’ The full name. The syllables precise and Welsh and deliberate, landing like the flat of a hand on a table. ‘I never had one. I’m not living in yours.’
Celyn stands. The movement’s clean, no hesitation.
The jeans off the desk chair, one leg then the other, balanced, not rushing, and the not-rushing is worse than rushing would be.
The jacket, the denim one. Every movement in order, a person who’s left a room before, who knows the steps because the body learned them somewhere else.
I should get up. The body that crossed a bar floor it had stared at for a year, that put a hand on a waist in the rain because the legs got there before the head.
It doesn’t move. First time it hasn’t moved.
I sit in the chair that’s too small and watch them dress to leave and my legs do nothing and my mouth does nothing, and that’s the whole problem in one picture.
‘Where are you going.’
‘Out.’ The keys, the phone, into the jacket pocket without looking. Then Celyn crosses to the door and holds it open.
‘Go on. I need to lock up.’
I get up. Cross the room. In the doorway my mouth opens and nothing comes.
‘When you’ve figured out if the problem’s me or you, let me know.’ Into my back. Level. ‘But I’ll save you the time. It’s you.’
I go. The door closes. The lock turns.
Landing. The stairs. The carpet that used to be something.
It’s you. Heavier than anything I said.