Chapter 4 #2
Tib Street, the nail on the wall. The only picture I own is still in the bag from Ikea, not hung: a black frame, a photo of a beach that isn’t anywhere I’ve been. Just a thing to put on a wall so the wall isn’t completely nothing.
Up the stairs, the step that creaks on the third one, the key in the lock.
The flat smells like nothing because I’ve barely been here except to sleep.
The ceiling’s white and the crack’s grey and Celyn’s somewhere in Manchester with the words I want to kiss you still hanging in the air like they didn’t change everything.
The bed’s made because I don’t sleep in it properly anymore. Just lay on top and stare and try not to. Try very hard not to think about.
I want to kiss you.
The matter-of-fact way. Like saying the brick’s listed or the tie rods hold the walls.
Sit on the edge, the mattress dips. In two hours I’m going to get up and go to work and the site’s going to be normal and the lads are going to be there and Dave’s going to be loud and Dean is going to nod and Gaz is going to talk about the Stockport girl and nothing’s going to have changed except everything.
The image won’t leave. Celyn in the dark with the torch between us. The columns rising. The voice like the structure. The eyes on me. Looking, while I talked about concrete like it was something that mattered.
You talk about concrete like I talk about sentences.
And I’m sat on a bed in a flat that costs eighty quid a night and nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before.
Friday, clean sheets, nothing else. I don’t go to the bar: a ten-hour pour on Block B, the excuse good enough to believe.
Monday, site at seven, the rebar’s late, Dave on the phone doing the voice he does when someone’s about to lose a contract.
After the shift I walk past the bar, lights on, the corner table through the window, Celyn bent over the keys.
Keep walking.
The flat, the ceiling, the nail. I lie on top of the made bed and the dark fills with the warehouse, the torchlight on the columns, the mouth that said I want to kiss you like it was a weather report.
The words sit in my chest like a stone I’ve swallowed, and the warm is worse than heavy. Wait it out. Concrete helps.
The phone lights up on the pillow. I don’t reach for it.
Tuesday, same, the rebar’s in. Gaz is talking about his girlfriend’s sister’s wedding in Stockport and I’m checking the spread on the formwork and the day is shapes and measurements and things that make sense.
‘Get back on the ties.’
‘Right you are.’
The phone buzzes at lunch. Celyn, a link: Victorian warehouses in Ancoats, an article from the Guardian. No message with it, just the link.
I click on it. Victorian warehouses, red brick, buildings that stood for a hundred years before someone decided they wanted lofts. The text is solid: footnotes, bibliography, writing that matters. Writing Celyn does, the restaurant and the pieces, two things patched together to make a living.
My phone says half twelve, lunch done, the crew scattered. Thomas is probably asleep behind the portacabin, Jay’s on TikTok or Twitter or whatever keeps his fingers moving. Dave’s in the office with the coffee and the crossword. Dean is tying the next grid.
I read the article again, the engineering, the load-bearing walls, the redundancy built in.
The author, some bloke with a PhD from somewhere, goes on about how these buildings were made for certainty, made to last beyond whoever was paying the men who poured the foundations.
Like they were building for people they’d never meet.
That’s what we do. Pour concrete, wait for it to set, leave. Someone else builds on top.
Except Celyn reads about buildings like they’re people. Like the bricks have a story and the iron’s got a memory. And I pour concrete and go home and don’t think about any of that because the thinking gets in the way of the work.
When did I start thinking about the thinking?
The photo of the cat comes through at 12:15.
I’m holding the sandwich I made this morning.
The cat’s expression is perfect. The disgust, the judgment, the how did I get here look.
Celyn’s captioned it from a paragraph about the cat assessing something and finding it lacking, and the joke works because I know Celyn.
I know the sense of humour. I know how a line gets shaped in that head.
I put the phone down. The sandwich’s gone dry in the cling film, I eat it anyway.
By Thursday the thread’s three deep and I’ve answered none of it.
The link, the cat, a photo of a skip outside the restaurant captioned like a still life.
I open it on the scaffold at break, look, put it away.
The silence feels like I’m failing something.
Except I know exactly what the test is. It’s answering.
And I am interested. Woke up this morning with the name in my mouth. With women there were rules: touch here, say this, the ending always the same shape. This doesn’t have a shape. And I don’t know if answering means I’m saying something I’m not ready to say.
Dean sets down a board, the noise brings me back. The site. The thing that makes sense.
‘You alright?’ he says.
‘Fine.’
‘The stare again.’
‘There’s nothing like that.’
‘Right.’ He starts the next tie, the knot going through. ‘Just seems like whatever that is.’ He gestures at the phone. ‘It’s messing with your head.’
‘It’s not.’
‘So you’re just normally shit at deciding things.’
I pick up the screed. He’s right and I hate when Dean is right because he doesn’t rub it in. He just states it like a fact about concrete, something you either accept or argue with and there’s nothing else.