Chapter 29 #2
The cat’s gone. The tea. And the face.
The face shifts. New.
Something open. Mouth soft. Eyes wet. A sheen, the moment before.
Like when you take the formwork off a pour and the concrete’s set clean and the edges are right and the thing you built is the thing you meant to build.
Celyn’s watching me talk to Owain about pipe fittings.
Celyn was scared I wouldn’t come.
Celyn, who flirts with life, who reads their work aloud in pubs, who walks onto building sites in a skirt and doesn’t flinch, was scared. Of this kitchen. Of the name in the air.
I look at Celyn, Celyn looks at me, the grey eyes, the sheen.
‘So the compression fitting cracked,’ Owain’s saying. ‘Minus four outside and the whole joint froze.’
‘Right,’ I say. Still looking at Celyn. ‘Nightmare.’
Celyn smiles, the real one.
I turn back to Owain. Ask about the compression fitting. Drink the tea. Eat another piece of bara brith because Catrin’s watching and the butter’s good and the kitchen smells right and I’m here.
I came.
Later. Celyn’s gone out the back door for air. I give it two minutes, then go after.
The garden’s small. Stone wall. The mountain over it, black now, the sky past purple, going to dark. Cold already.
Celyn’s by the wall. The fingers on the stone, pressing into the gaps between. I stand next to Celyn. Don’t say anything.
‘She’ll say it after I’m gone,’ Celyn says. The voice flat. The bus-timetable flat. ‘Phone calls with Owain. He this, he that. A habit she can’t put down.’
I don’t answer.
‘I know I should care less.’
‘Don’t know about that.’
A dog barks, far off. Somebody’s dog, not theirs.
I could say Catrin will learn. I could say it gets better. I could say the things people say when they’re not the one being misnamed.
Don’t.
Celyn breathes out. A cloud in the cold.
The hand finds mine. The ring warm now, my thumb’s worn it that way. We stand.
Bed is Celyn’s old room, top of the stairs, under the slope of the roof. Single.
We don’t fit. We make it work anyway, Celyn’s back against my chest, my arm dead under the pillow inside ten minutes and me not moving it, because moving means saying out loud that the bed’s a single and we’re not seventeen.
The room’s wrong and it takes me a minute to place why.
It’s the colour. Pale blue, wall to wall, blue ceiling, white skirting, white wardrobe, the blue they paint a room when they’ve been told it’s a boy.
The decision got made before the kid turned up and never once got looked at again.
And then, against all that blue, books. Two deep on every shelf, the spines I’m learning, the names Celyn says like a service.
A window seat, the cushion worn flat to the board, the only thing in the room that ever really got used.
‘Blue for a boy,’ Celyn says into the dark, picking the thought up before I’ve put it down.
‘Mam did the whole room before I was even here. I asked for a library, later. You don’t get the walls changed, not in that house, but I got shelves, and I filled them, and you can still see the blue behind Shirley Jackson if you know where to look. ’
On the back of the door, many swimming certificates gone yellow. I can read them from the bed. Gethin Beynon. Fifty metres. The name in a teacher’s careful capitals.
‘I could swim,’ Celyn says, tracking where I’m looking. ‘I could win things. I could do every single thing they asked except be the kid on that bit of paper.’
‘I never met that kid,’ I say instead. The fifty metres. The capitals. ‘Not being hard about it. I just never did. I drove up a mountain in a car that can’t do mountains, for the person in this bed. Not the one on the door.’
The house ticks. A sheep somewhere objects to nothing.
‘They’re getting there,’ I say. ‘Your mam took your face in both hands tonight and put no name on it at all. Owain doesn’t trip.
Your dad works for it so hard you can watch it cost him, and he pays up every time.
The little ones don’t know there’s a thing to get wrong.
’ I find the hem of the t-shirt, the warm skin under it.
‘They had the wrong kid the best part of twenty years and they’d have walked through fire for that kid the whole time.
Now they’ve got the real one and they’re learning the controls.
They’ll get there. And the day they don’t, I’m still here. ’
Celyn’s quiet a long moment. The breathing slows. The shoulders come down off the ears, the way they wouldn’t in a single photo on that landing wall.
‘You’re very calm,’ Celyn says at last, ‘for a man crammed into a single bed.’
‘I’m exactly where I want to be.’ True, and the truest thing I’ve got. I haven’t got a bigger word for it, and I wouldn’t trust a bigger word if it turned up. ‘Go to sleep.’
Celyn goes first, the way Celyn always does, all at once, like a switch thrown.
I lie there with my arm dead and the roof close over the both of us and I look at the certificate till the dark takes the letters off it.
Not this one’s problem any more, the kid on the door.
Mine now. Every version of them, that one included, because that one’s what got them up the mountain to me.
The old house settles in the cold. I sleep.
Morning. Seven, out of habit. The house asleep. I go out to the van because the van’s there and checking it is something to do with my hands.
Frost on the windscreen. The mountain pink at the top, the lane quiet. There’s a wall along the lane, dry stone, the proper kind, no mortar, every stone holding its neighbours by weight and judgement. Somebody’s rebuilt a stretch of it recently. The new bit’s tighter than the old bit. Show-off.
The door goes. Rhys, two mugs, a coat over the pyjamas. He hands me one and stands next to me at the wall and looks at it with me. We do that for a bit. Two men looking at a wall. It’s the most comfortable I’ve been in two days.
‘My father’s,’ he says. Nods at the old stretch. ‘And his, before him. The new bit’s mine. The frost had it last winter.’
‘It’s good.’ It is. ‘Tighter than the old.’
‘Don’t tell them that.’ He drinks his tea. ‘The dead take criticism worse than the living.’
The frost coming off the windscreen, slow. The mountain getting on with it.
‘Gethin used to sit—’ He stops. The mug stops with him. He sets the sentence down the way you set a stone down when it’s the wrong stone, and picks up another one. ‘Celyn. Celyn used to sit on that wall and read till the light went.’
I leave it. He didn’t do it for me to say anything. He did it the way you do a repair, because the wall’s yours and the gap’s yours and the weather’s coming regardless.
‘They still read like that,’ I say. ‘Light goes. Doesn’t notice. I put the lamp on.’
The they goes past him. Doesn’t snag.
‘Catrin’s slower,’ he says, to the wall. ‘She’ll get there. Don’t judge the house by the winter.’ Then, the mug at his mouth: ‘You stay, lad. That’s the whole job.’
‘I know the job.’
‘Aye.’ He puts his hand flat on the top stones, once, the way you’d touch a beast that knows you. ‘I can see that.’
He goes in. I finish the tea at the wall and check the straps in the back of the van that don’t need checking. Working hands. You keep them moving so the rest of you can catch up.
The house wakes the way houses with kids wake, all at once. The back door bangs. Owain’s two come out in wellies over pyjamas, the boy dragging a basket, the girl dragging Celyn out by two fingers, and Owain behind them with a carrier bag held up out of reach.
‘Nobody in the garden till they’re hid,’ he says. ‘That’s the rule. Always been the rule.’
‘You hid them by the dog last year,’ the boy says.
‘The dog’s entitled same as anyone.’
Easter Sunday, frost still in the shadow of the wall. The girl’s got both arms round Celyn’s leg like Celyn might be hidden too and she means to be the one who finds them. I get handed a basket. Didn’t ask for one. The boy decided.