Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The email comes on a Wednesday. I’m at the site, the last pour, the final section, the concrete going down smooth and grey and permanent.
The pump’s running, the mixer’s turning, Gaz is on the vibrator, the hose in the formwork, the bubbles rising as the air pushes out.
Dean on the far side with the screed board, me with the trowel, the finish.
Last pour of Victoria North. Eighteen months of this site.
Footings I checked in January, the first week, the first cold, the boots that were new and are now cracked at the toe.
The steel that went up in winter with the ice on the beams and the gloves that stuck to the metal.
Walls. Floors. Roofing. Everything I touched is becoming a building where people will live and sleep and make tea.
The phone buzzes in the pocket. I don’t look until lunch.
From: Henderson & Roe Construction. Subject: Project Manager, Rotherhithe Riverside.
I read it on the bench, the sandwich in one hand, the phone in the other. The words, they’re real words. Not a feeler, not a ‘keep in touch.’ An offer. Project manager, Rotherhithe. Permanent position, starting September. The salary. I read the salary twice.
Good money, proper money. Career money. Money that means you stay.
Rotherhithe, twenty minutes from Lewisham, the same river, the same south, the same streets I grew up knowing by feel. The pubs and the chippies and the sound of the train that’s different from Manchester trains, faster, angrier, louder.
I close the email, open it, close it.
Gaz sits down, the sandwich, the thermos.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Gaz says.
‘Just an email.’
‘Must be some email. You’ve gone white.’
I haven’t gone white, I’ve gone somewhere. Between Rotherhithe and this portacabin.
‘You alright, boss?’
‘Yeah. Fine.’
I eat the sandwich, I don’t taste it.
Gaz is still looking at me like I’ve grown another head. ‘You sure you’re alright.’
‘Yeah. Just a lot on.’
‘Like what. The pour’s almost done. We’re two weeks out from handover.’
‘Not the site.’
Gaz grins, ‘Oh, them.’
I don’t answer, that’s answering. Gaz knows it, Dean knows it, probably the whole site knows it.
You can’t walk around with someone in your head and expect nobody to notice.
The hands shake slightly. The eyes go somewhere else for twenty minutes at a time.
You smile when nobody’s said anything funny.
Dean passes with a board, nods at me like he’s saying it’s alright, mate.
Dean doesn’t do opinions. Dean just does: get the work done, leave the person alone about their life.
He’s got kids, I think, a wife, doesn’t talk about them.
Shows a photo once a year of a Christmas dinner and that’s it.
That’s how you manage it, you don’t talk about it.
Except Celyn isn’t manageable. The brain keeps going: where would Celyn’s desk fit. Which way does the light come in that flat. Would Celyn like it or would Celyn hate London and everything that’s there and everything that’s here that Celyn knows.
‘You’re going back,’ Gaz says. He already knows.
‘Maybe.’
‘You are. You’ve got that face.’
‘I don’t have a face.’
‘You’ve got the face you get when you make a decision. Like when Dave asked if you wanted to stay through the east section and you just said yeah. Like it was already decided before he asked.’
It was. This was, the moment I opened that email I knew. The moment I thought about the writing room, the moment I calculated the light coming through the window, it was already done. The brain catching up to the body how the body’s been ahead of the brain since Celyn asked for a walk home.
I finish the sandwich, don’t taste it.
The site, the last pour, Victoria North’s almost done. Six weeks and the build’s done and Manchester is over. The thing I came for, the two-year thing, the ‘good money, good project, close to Ewan.’ Three reasons. I counted them on the train.
There was a fourth, couldn’t think what.
I know what.
I ring Ewan from the car park, the engine’s off. The site behind me, the cranes still against the sky, the light going orange over Ancoats.
He picks up on the second ring. Background noise. Laurence’s kitchen, a pan, Radio 4.
‘Rotherhithe,’ I say. No preamble. Ewan doesn’t need preamble.
Silence. Two seconds. Three.
‘Project manager?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good money?’
‘Good money.’
Another silence, I hear him breathe, I hear the pan. I hear Laurence, can’t catch the words and Ewan’s hand go over the mic for a second.
‘And Celyn?’ Quiet. How he asks things that matter.
‘I’m looking at flats tonight. Two bedrooms.’
‘Two bedrooms.’
‘One’s for writing.’
The sound Ewan makes isn’t a word. It’s the sound of someone who’s been waiting for something and the something arrived. A breath, almost a laugh. Relief and pride and something else, all at once.
‘You’re bringing Celyn home.’
‘Peckham. Not Lewisham.’
‘Close enough.’ A beat. ‘Ron.’
‘What.’
‘You did it. The whole thing. You did it.’
I don’t know what the whole thing is, the job. The person, the two years. The sitting still long enough for something to find me. All of it, maybe.
‘Tell Laurence I said hi,’ I say, because I can’t say anything else.
‘He already knows. He’s smiling.’
I hang up. Sit in the car park. The site, the cranes. The sky doing the thing Manchester skies do when the day’s almost done, wide, and soft, and not quite finished.
Evening, Celyn’s flat. I’m on the sofa with the tablet, the email’s open, been open a week. The offer, the start date, the number I’ve read forty times. I close it. Open it. Close it.
Then Rightmove, because Rightmove’s the part I can’t explain to myself yet.
Not flats. Houses. For sale. London, the cheap end, Peckham, Camberwell, where nobody looks twice at anything.
The wrecks, the ones the estate agent photographs apologetically.
Damp in the corners, a kitchen from 1985, a garden gone to bramble.
Every one of them a year of Sundays. Every one of them a job.
A house off Rye Lane, end of a terrace, cheap because it’s falling down. Two up, two down, and the small room at the back faces north. North light’s even. I know that from Celyn’s flat, from months of watching a person work.
A writing room should face north.
I’m looking for a room a person who writes horror novels could sit in. Stars on the ceiling, a fountain pen with green ink, the Shirley Jackson poster off the charity-shop wall. Measuring a stranger’s spare bedroom with my eye, for a desk that isn’t mine to place.
I’m looking at a house for two people.
I know. This time I know. The thing I can’t do is say it, not the way it’s meant to be said.
Tonight: jeans, Converse the old ones white and soft, the hoodie oversize grey, mine or Celyn’s, can’t tell any more, hair down, no makeup, stubble light, a day. And the nails: red, cherry red.
The first version. The one from the first night at the bar. The nails were red and the stubble was there and the face was the same face and I didn’t know then. I know now.
‘What are you looking at?’
I lock the tablet. Set it face down on my knee. The face-down does the same job a slammed drawer does. Tells the whole room there’s something in it.
‘Nothing.’
Celyn comes round the sofa. Stands over me. Waits the way you wait out a bad liar, which I am.
One drawer left. This one.
I turn it back over. House listings. London. For sale, not to let.
The colour goes out of the face.
‘London,’ Celyn says.
‘Yeah.’
Three seconds. Five. The Welsh comes up under the next one, heavy.
‘Are you leaving me?’
The words won’t come. They never come when it matters. So I do the thing my hands know. Thumb the email open and hold the tablet out, screen to them, because I can’t say it but I can show it.
Celyn takes it. Reads. I watch the eyes go along the lines.
Henderson & Roe. The Rotherhithe job. An offer now, with my name on it and a number under it I’ve read forty times. Applied back in the winter, told nobody. Up from where I stand. Twenty minutes from Mum. A career’s worth of up in one email, and all I had to do was leave.
‘That’s a step up,’ Celyn says. Careful. Reading more than the words.
‘Big one. Wouldn’t get the like of it here for years.’
Celyn keeps looking at the screen. Not at me. The hand not quite steady on the edge of it.
‘So you’re going.’
‘Only if you come.’ Flat, too fast, right for once. ‘I’ve not signed it. I’ll not. Not unless you’re coming with me. You don’t want London, I tell them no and find something here, Manchester, smaller, doesn’t matter. I’m not taking a job in the wrong city when you’re the right one.’
The tablet goes down in Celyn’s lap. Both hands flat on it.
‘You’d turn that down. For me.’
‘Yeah.’
Like it’s simple. It is simple. The simplest thing I’ve ever known.
Celyn doesn’t answer. Looks away, the window, the bar across the road. And I think: here it is. The kind no. The one that won’t say the word.
‘I built a self here,’ Celyn says instead. Low. ‘Out of nothing. Nobody handed it me.’
‘I know.’
‘And in London I’m what.’
‘Don’t know. That part’s yours, not mine.’ Then the rest, plain. ‘I’ve savings, eight years of them. I’d put the deposit down, the whole of it, that’s mine to give. We’d buy somewhere. Both names. And you don’t work a day you don’t want to, the book’s done, I’m on enough for two—’
‘I’ll work.’ Quick. ‘I don’t know at what yet, and don’t you dare line something up for me. But I’ll work. I’m not crossing the country to be kept in a back room.’
‘Alright.’
A breath.
‘Is it near your mum?’
Not the question I’m braced for. Lands somewhere soft.
‘Twenty minutes. Bus near enough from the door.’ Then the real thing, the one under it. ‘Sunday roast’s twenty minutes off. She’d have you every week. She’s already asked.’
And that’s what wets the eyes. Not the job. Not the deposit. The roast. The mum twenty minutes away who’s already asked.
‘Show me the houses,’ Celyn says.