Undefined Terms (The Carrick Brothers #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The hands. That’s what my eyes do first. Fingers moving in the bar light, the ring on the middle one, the nails. Red. Postbox red.

The mouth keeps going above them. Something about a bloke at the restaurant who sent back his steak because he didn’t know it was cow. I’m not tracking the words. I’m tracking the colour on them and the way the ring catches the light.

Celyn. I’d had the name a year and nothing else with it. Weekend visits up to Ewan’s, the corner table across the way, me at the counter never once crossing the floor. Three nights this week I’ve done the same. Just that, and the thing in my stomach I keep blaming on the beer.

First time I clocked Celyn I’d come up to see Ewan. The two of us ended up in here, and it was already the way it stayed: the corner table, the laptop, a tea that smelled like a garden. I didn’t go over. Didn’t say a word, wasn’t going to. Looked once, looked at my pint, looked again.

Ewan caught it. He catches everything, my brother. Always has.

‘Good-looking, that one,’ he said. Easy. Like passing the salt. ‘You’ve clocked them.’

‘I’ve clocked them sat there.’

‘Course.’ He let it lie, drank. Never drops anything, Ewan, just sets it down where you’ll trip on it later.

Said nothing back. Looked at the table I wasn’t looking at, and a year went by like that.

‘and he actually says, “I didn’t realise steak was cow.” At a steakhouse. Called the Grill and Heifer. I’m holding his chips thinking, has this man just been eating things his whole life without asking what they were?’

Celyn stops, looks at me. The eyes are grey or green, can’t tell. The mouth does a thing. Half a smile.

‘You haven’t heard a word.’

A statement, not a question.

‘I heard steak.’

‘You heard a word. Not the same thing.’

I drink, the glass is empty. Don’t remember finishing it, which means I’ve been sat here for a while. I check the phone, forty minutes. Forty minutes gone and I couldn’t tell you the steak bloke’s name.

Could tell you what Celyn’s wearing though. Jeans, a shirt with the buttons undone, the sleeves rolled past the elbows. No makeup tonight. Tuesday there was something dark around the eyes, precise, made them look bigger. And a day’s stubble on the jaw. He. They, Celyn.

The stubble and the open shirt and the chain sitting in the dip above the collarbone. My brain tries to sort it. File it, no file. The shirt says collarbone and a freckle near the chain and I shouldn’t be able to see the freckle from here but I can. Can’t stop.

I’ve been in Manchester a week. The Airbnb sits above a barber’s in the Northern Quarter: bed, kitchenette, a job that starts at seven. Victoria North, Block C, twelve storeys of residential going up out of an 1887 warehouse shell. Two years of it.

Good money, good project, close to Ewan. That’s the list, three things.

The first three nights I sat at the bar with a pint and minded my own. Low music, brick walls, moody and dim. My sort of place has football on the telly and crisps behind the bar and nobody asks what hops you prefer.

But Celyn was here, every night. Corner table, laptop open, one earphone in, tea that smells like a garden. Typing, reading, the pencil between the teeth. And I sat at the counter and didn’t look and looked and didn’t look and looked.

Tonight the bar was full. No stools free. I was stood with my jacket on like a spare part and Celyn looked up from the laptop and said: ‘That stool looks uncomfortable. There’s a chair here.’

So I sat down. Because of a sentence about a chair. Because my legs got there first.

‘I’m working on this novel,’ Celyn says. Between sips. ‘Had the idea a while back. Horror.’

‘Horror.’

‘You said that like I just told you I collect teeth.’

‘Nah. Just, you don’t look like horror.’

The second it’s out I know it’s bollocks. What does horror even look like.

‘Nobody does,’ Celyn says. ‘That’s how it gets in.’ The eyes hold mine and don’t drop, steady the way you hold a level and wait for the bubble to settle.

‘What do I look like?’

The question’s direct. Can’t tell if it’s flirty. Celyn’s chin is on one hand, watching me, and I don’t know where to put myself.

‘Dunno,’ I say.

True. Dunno what you look like. What you are. Dunno why I’m sat at this table with an empty glass and a pulse in my throat.

‘Most people have a guess by now,’ Celyn says, easy, not a challenge. ‘Boy or girl. They land on one and relax.’

‘And if they land wrong?’

‘I’m neither. I use they. So they always land wrong, and it’s the most boring thing about me. And you haven’t landed anywhere. That’s why you’re still in the chair.’

I haven’t got a guess. Haven’t got the word for it. The not-having sits where a word should be and doesn’t bother me the way I reckon it should.

Celyn smiles. Wider. The teeth are slightly crooked, the crow’s feet show, and for a second, just a second, I see the whole face. The face, nothing more, and the face is.

‘Walk me through your day,’ Celyn says.

‘What?’

‘On the site. What you do. From the start.’

Nobody asks me this. Dave tells me what to check, Gaz says cheers boss. Mum asks am I eating. And I open my mouth and start talking and don’t stop.

The footings, you check by feel. Run your palm along the concrete and you feel what the eye can’t see.

Air pockets. Cracks. The rough patches where the set went wrong.

The hand knows before the eye. Then the steel, twelve-mil rebar tied in grids.

Every tie, every overlap. If the steel’s wrong the building fails and people die.

The pour, forty tonnes off the back of the trucks and it goes where you tell it.

You shake the air out. Smooth the top, wait.

Friday morning. The pour’s scheduled but the concrete truck breaks down on the motorway and Dave’s got his phone pinned to his ear, doing the voice he keeps for suppliers. Gaz is eating crisps with his mouth open and doesn’t care.

‘Cheers boss,’ he says when I tell him to help Dean move the formwork back. ‘Though we’d be pouring by now.’

‘We will. Truck’s late.’

Dean comes past with a board under each arm, doesn’t say anything. Dean is the opposite of Gaz. Gaz talks enough for both of them and it doesn’t annoy me because it’s just noise, just air moving. But Dean notices things; he reads what isn’t said.

The formwork’s set, the level’s good. We could go back and wait in the portacabin or we could stand here and let the wind do what it does and not think about anything except the concrete that’s coming. Except I’m thinking about the soft R, that mouth.

‘You met someone,’ Dean says. Doesn’t look at me. Just checking a tie on the grid, pulling it tight, the knot going through like he’s done it a thousand times. He has.

‘No.’

‘Right.’

‘Not like that.’

‘That’s the exact thing someone says when they’ve met someone like that.’

Gaz’s listening now. The crisps paused halfway to his mouth. ‘Is it a girl?’

‘Not your business, Gaz.’

‘That means yes.’ He eats the crisp. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Mate, you look like you’ve been hit with a spade. Your whole face is different. It matters.’

The truck comes through the gate, the mixer turning, the grey water in the drum. Dave stops shouting down the phone, Dean picks up the screed, Gaz grabs the trowel.

‘Later,’ I say.

And they let it go because that’s what this crew does.

They know when to talk and when to shut up and they know that whatever’s up with me won’t get fixed on a building site.

But Gaz says it anyway, while Dave’s shouting about the schedule: ‘For what it’s worth, you look less shit now than you did Tuesday.

Whatever this is, whoever they are, it’s working. ’

I don’t answer. But my hand finds the side of the truck and the metal is cold and the work begins.

I talk, don’t know how long. Celyn’s watching me and the laptop screen’s gone dark and the tea’s cold and the pencil’s behind one ear and nobody looks at me like this. Like what I’m saying about concrete and rebar has a shape.

There’s a glass of water in front of me.

I didn’t ask for it, didn’t see it come.

Celyn must’ve caught the barman’s eye somewhere in the middle of the footings, while I talked myself hoarse and noticed nothing, because my throat had gone dry and Celyn clocked it before I did.

Nobody gets you the water before you know you need it.

‘The hand knows before the eye,’ Celyn says. Low. ‘That’s a line.’

‘It’s not a line. It’s just how it works.’

‘That’s why it’s a line.’

Don’t understand that. How Celyn says it, the Welsh pulling the vowels soft, the mouth, and I’m looking at the mouth and the hand comes across the table and lands on my wrist.

A landing. Mid-sentence, making a point about a character in the novel who reads walls for the pulse in them. Cold fingers.

One second.

Celyn lifts it, picks up the tea, keeps talking.

One second and my wrist’s pulse is all I can hear. Chest doing it too. Lower. I shift, sit straighter, get both hands around the empty glass. Cold. The cold helps.

Celyn sees. I know because the eyes drop, quick, half a second, to where I shifted. And come back up, and Celyn says nothing, drinks the tea. But the eyes hold. Like a door that opened a crack and isn’t closing.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘I should.’

‘Early start?’

‘Seven.’

‘Course.’ The laptop closes. The earphone cable winds up tight. The bag, olive canvas, paint stain on the strap. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

Said light, like it’s the weather, but it matters.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Alright.’

Celyn stands, bag over one shoulder, the shirt hanging loose. Heading home the long way. Oldham Street’s two minutes from here, I’ve already checked the map.

I look up and catch it. Half a second, before the night version of the face slots back: Celyn looking at me the way I’ve spent all night trying not to look at them.

Open. Caught at it. The thing that lives under the dry voice.

Then it’s gone, folded back behind the half-smile, and I’d not swear I saw it except my chest is sure.

‘Night, Ronan.’