Chapter 32 #2
Then me. The fact of the bareness, the heat I could feel was mine going into Celyn, no membrane, the body decided for me, surge after surge, and I came inside Celyn with the word home going off somewhere behind my eyes that I couldn’t explain and wasn’t going to.
My hand at the base of Celyn’s spine. The other on the nape.
Some of it leaking out around me when Celyn shifted later, hot on my thigh.
Celyn looked at me with the eyeliner ruined and said:
‘There. Now it’s real.’
Afterwards the manuscript was everywhere. Page twelve stuck to my arm. Celyn peeled it off, looked at it, laughed the wet half-laugh.
The book comes out in March. There’s a cover. Celyn showed me, dark, the outline of a house. The title in white: The Threshold. My hand on the cover. Celyn’s name at the bottom. I ran my thumb over it.
Ewan and Laurence are coming Saturday. Celyn’s been cooking since Thursday, the recipe from Catrin, the one with the lamb and the rosemary, same as Mum’s except it isn’t and you don’t say that to either of them, and the thing with the potatoes that involves a step I don’t understand.
The flat’s going to smell like Beddgelert.
Ewan’s going to eat three plates and I’m going to sit at the table and watch and it’s going to be a Saturday. The best kind.
Dad rang, last month, forty seconds. He said: ‘How’s the site.’ I said: ‘Good.’ He said: ‘Right.’ I said: ‘Celyn’s good too.’ Silence. Three seconds, four. The telly in the background. Football, always football. He said: ‘Right, then.’ The phone went.
A proof of life. Forty seconds is more than the last time. The last time was less. The numbers are going up.
The door, still not open. Still not shut. The daylight through the gap.
Enough.
Sound, keys, typing. From the end of the corridor.
Celyn’s in the writing room. Door open, always open.
I can see from the sofa if I lean, the shape at the desk, the hunch of the shoulders, the fingers moving.
Dave asleep on the warm corner of the desk, one ear turning when I shift.
New novel. The one Celyn won’t let me read yet because ‘it’s not ready, Ron, and if you read it now you’ll see the scaffolding. ’
Scaffolding, the word, in Celyn’s mouth.
The typing stops.
‘You’re staring.’
Celyn, the doorway, leaning on the frame. The t-shirt, mine, the old one, the grey one, the letters cracked. It reaches mid-thigh, nothing else, stubble, one day, the hair a mess. Feet bare on the floorboards. The nails, chipped, whatever colour, doesn’t matter.
The morning version. The version that’s just mine.
Celyn crosses to the sofa. The notebook in one hand, the leather one, the definitions. The fourth since I’ve known them. Turns it round and sets it in my lap, open, and that’s new, because the notebook’s never been mine to read.
One line. Not crossed out. The green ink steady, no second-guessing, no scribble over the top of it.
A word I can’t pronounce and a short definition under it in English, and it’s not us and it’s not home and it’s nothing to do with me.
It’s a word that’s only Celyn’s, finally caught and pinned and named, and I don’t ask what made it land tonight, because I know the answer isn’t me.
It’s them. It was always going to be them.
‘Found it,’ Celyn says. Cocky, quiet. ‘Took the whole notebook.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ Takes it back, closes it. ‘You still don’t get to read the rest.’
‘Wouldn’t dare.’
Two years ago I had space. The flat empty, the leak ticking away the days, no one to ask where I’d been. Clean, hollow. How I thought I wanted it.
Dave’s annexed the sofa, the warm end, the way cats decide a thing is theirs and dare you to move them. There’s hair, Celyn’s, Dave’s ginger, mine when it falls out, on every surface.
But the writing room has the stars. And the stars are crooked because Celyn stood on the desk chair with my hands on the legs and didn’t ask for help putting them on straight.
Just reached up and stuck them and said ‘there’ and jumped down and I caught them.
Celyn knows we’re out by Christmas and put them up anyway, every last one, because home was never the walls. The stars go where we go.
The fourth reason was Celyn saying ‘yes’ when I asked if I could read the novel and then saying ‘no, not yet’ and making me wait and know that waiting for the right time was the whole structure holding.
I’m home. That’s a word I use now. The place where Celyn writes words that’ll sell and Mum knows how to take her tea. The place where I put my hands down and they don’t need to be fixing anything.
The hand knows before the eye. That’s what I said to Celyn once, on the site, about concrete. I didn’t know I was talking about myself. About standing at a bar counter and the hand already knowing what the eye wouldn’t see for months.
I think about the bar. The first night. The corner table and the laptop and the mug and the hands on the keys and me with a pint I didn’t need, watching a person I didn’t know for reasons I couldn’t name.
Two bags on a train and three reasons in my head and a gap where the fourth should be. Two years, the gap filled, overflowed.
The fourth was this.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘At what?’
‘Home,’ I say.
‘Cariad.’ Celyn says it small. Smiles, half-open. The door that opens a crack.
I stand up. The floorboards cold under bare feet. I cross the corridor, the length of it, the hand that used to measure steel reaching for the frame. I step through.
All the way.