Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Celyn gives me the novel on Wednesday.
The whole thing, printed. Two hundred and forty-three pages held together with a bulldog clip. The paper’s warm from the printer.
‘I want you to read it,’ Celyn says. Sat on the bed. My bed, our bed, the flat. The knees up, the chin on the knees. Hoodie, mine, the grey one, the one that’s too wide in the shoulders and too long in the arms and Celyn wears it like it was always theirs.
‘The whole thing?’
‘The whole thing. Start to finish. Don’t skip.’
I look at the stack. The whole novel. I’ve read pieces, the chapters Celyn left on the screen, the paragraphs read aloud at midnight with the laptop balanced on the pillow. The woman on the hill. The house that won’t hold still. The man in it who frightens her and won’t leave.
I’ve never read it whole.
‘I don’t read fast.’
‘I know.’ The mouth. The beat before a smile. The held breath. ‘That’s why I want you to.’
I start at seven, the bed. The pillow propped against the wall. Celyn’s in the kitchen, the kettle on, the mugs out, and then they move to the sofa and settle.
Page one.
The woman is standing on the hill above the village and the grass is moving in the wind that comes off the sea and she’s looking at a house.
The house is old. Older than her. Older than the village.
Old like a fact, the house has always been there how the hill has always been there and the woman is new.
Celyn’s writing is, I can’t, not beautiful, beautiful is wrong. It’s like watching someone lay brick. The sentences go where they need to go. No waste. The mortar between them invisible. You don’t see the craft. You see the wall.
I read.
Elin goes into the house, and the house is hungry.
Some rooms have things in them, folded into the corners, that unfold when the door opens: too many joints, a wet sound, a face she half-knows pressed flat into the wallpaper and still working its mouth.
Some rooms have nothing at all, only walls that lean in while she stands there, the gap behind her thinning to a line.
She learns to keep one hand on the way out.
She learns the house keeps what it catches, and that it is patient.
Page forty, my tea’s cold, I don’t get up.
Page sixty-eight. The man, the first time. On the threshold of the house, boots on the worn stone. Doesn’t go in. Doesn’t go out. Gone by the next page. But he was there before she was.
Page seventy, Celyn’s in the doorway, I don’t look up. Feel the look, the writer watching someone read the book. Celyn goes away.
Page one hundred. There’s a man in the house.
Not in one room, in all of them, the same man behind every door she dares open, sitting among the things that should frighten him and don’t.
He never blinks quite when he should. He’s always already facing the door she’s about to come through, as if he heard her choose it.
She should be more afraid of him than of anything else in the house.
Instead she keeps opening doors to find him.
A tightness in my throat.
Page one hundred and forty. She’s decided she’ll save him.
She tells herself he’s a man, and a man can be led to a door, and she tells herself that’s why she keeps coming back, and it isn’t, and she knows it isn’t.
She reaches for him. He lets her, halfway, the head tilting too far, the smile a beat late, and the whole time his eyes slide past her to the walls, to the slow breath of the house, like the house is the thing in the room he loves.
I put the pages down. My hands are close to shaking.
I pick them up. Keep reading.
The light changes while I read. The window goes black. The streetlamp comes on, a stripe of orange up the wall. Celyn turns the kitchen light off and doesn’t put another on. The flat goes quiet around the lamp and the page.
Page one hundred and eighty. She finds out what he is.
When the light drops there are too many joints under his skin too, the same wrongness as the things in the rooms, and he doesn’t hide it, he lets her see, the way you show someone the truth because you’ve stopped being able to lie.
The house didn’t make him and he didn’t make the house.
They’re the same thing wearing two shapes, and the second shape is running out.
Page two hundred. I read slow, every word, because the whole book has been walking towards this room and I can feel it.
The corridor had grown again overnight, longer and wetter, breathing through the wallpaper, and the door at the end gave onto a room that yesterday had been a bedroom.
It wasn’t a bedroom now. The bed had sunk halfway into a floor gone soft as a tongue, the walls had the give and the warmth of the inside of a mouth, and the man stood at the window with his back to her, still the way furniture is still.
‘I found a door,’ she said. ‘One that’s stayed a door three days. It’s holding. Come with me. Now, while it holds.’
‘You keep finding doors,’ he said, without turning.
‘And you keep not using them.’ She made herself step inside. The floor printed up warm around her shoe and let it go slowly. ‘I came back for you. Five times. I climb out of this house and I make myself come back. For you. Do you understand what that costs.’
‘I do. That’s the part I’m sorry for.’
‘Then come. One foot, then the other, I’ll go first, I’ll hold the door.’ She heard herself begging and didn’t stop. ‘Whatever it’s doing to you, it stops the second you’re outside. It has to.’
‘It isn’t doing anything to me.’ Gently, the way you’d correct a child. ‘You’ve had it backwards since the first room. You think the house has me.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘No.’ And he turned around.
She had told herself a story to get herself up the hill each night: that he was a man the house had taken, that under the wrongness there was someone who wanted out. She had loved that someone. She had built every return on him.
In the grey light there was too much of the man.
The joints fell at the wrong distances, an extra knuckle in every finger, a second hinge in the neck, and the skin stretched over them had gone the exact colour of the walls, plaster turning to meat and meat to plaster, no telling where he ended and the room began.
His hand on the sill had grown into the sill.
When his mouth opened to smile it opened too far and kept opening, small new teeth coming in even and endless along a gum with no end to it, and the smile was gentle, and it was the worst thing she had ever looked at.
‘I’m not caught,’ he said, and the voice came out of him and out of the walls at once. ‘I knocked. I asked it to let me in, and it did, and I have never once wanted out. Out there they kept asking me what I was. In here there’s no line left to stand on. There’s no edge to find.’
‘You’re a monster.’ It was all she had left.
‘Yes.’ Delighted. Grateful, almost. ‘So is the house. You spent a whole season trying to work out which of us it was. It was both. It was always both.’ The wall flexed and drew his shoulder smoothly into itself, and he let it, the way you lean back into a chair.
‘Don’t be frightened. Or be. It’s the same to me now. ’
And she ran.
She ran the way the body runs when the mind has seen too much, down the wet corridor with the walls leaning in at her shoulders, and behind her the thing that had worn a face she loved was laughing, soft and fond and delighted, in the voice that had said her name, and she did not look back, because some things you do not get to understand.
You only, if you are quick, get to leave.
Page two hundred and forty-two. Elin’s out, down the hill, and there’s one page left, and I look at it and I don’t turn it over. Not yet. My hands aren’t steady.
It’s the most frightened a book’s ever made me, and I’m not even at the last page.
And under the fear there’s the worse thing.
I knew him. The man in the wall, choosing it, telling the woman who loved him there was never anything to save.
You can’t tell, reading it, which one’s the monster, the house or the man, or whether there’s any line between them at all.
I know him the way you know your own face in a dark window.
I put the stack down. The bed. The pillow against the wall. My eyes are wet, close to crying.
The flat holds, the fridge humming, traffic. The creak of the sofa in the other room.
‘Celyn.’
Creak. Footsteps. Bare feet on the floor. Celyn in the doorway, my hoodie, chipped nails. Face watching me. Reading my face before I speak.
‘The one on the threshold,’ I say. ‘That’s me.’
Celyn doesn’t move. Doorway. Light from the kitchen behind. Hoodie, bare feet.
‘Yeah,’ Celyn says.
‘You wrote me into your book.’
Silence. Brief. A word being chosen.
‘I wrote everyone I’ve ever loved into my book.’ The voice. Low. The Welsh. The vowels. ‘That’s what writers do.’
Loved.
The word. Present perfect. The tense I wouldn’t know the name of except Ewan told me once and I didn’t listen and it stuck anyway.
Loved. Not ‘love.’ Loved, the one that includes everything. Every skirt and every stubble and every midnight paragraph and every morning where the pillow smells of vanilla and cologne and the body next to mine is warm.
‘Come here,’ I say.
Celyn comes across the room, bare feet, floor, bed, sits on the edge.
I can feel the weight of the mattress shifting, warmth, smell.
The cologne’s gone this late, just Celyn, just skin and the laundry soap from my hoodie and underneath that what I can’t name that I’ve been smelling for fourteen months.
I put my hand on the page. The stack, heavy.
Then I take my hand off the pages and put it on Celyn’s jaw.
The stubble, the grain of it under my thumb. The bone underneath, Celyn’s eyes close, a landing. The same landing as the first time. The face tipping into the hand like it was waiting.