Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ewan picks the pub. Not the bar, the pub. The Wheatsheaf on Deansgate, proper pub, sticky carpet, the telly on a football match nobody’s watching. Two pints of Doom Bar and a table by the window where the radiator makes a ticking noise.
Haven’t seen him in ten days. Facetime doesn’t count: it’s the top half of a face and bad lighting and Laurence in the background fussing with a casserole.
He looks good, thinner, the cheekbones sharper, same eyes. The Carrick eyes, dark. He’s wearing a jumper I don’t recognise, grey, expensive, Laurence’s.
‘You look different,’ he says.
‘I look the same.’
‘No. You look present.’ He tilts his head, studies me like he studies a problem. ‘Present. You look present. You’ve been on the phone the past month and I could hear you not being where you were. Now you’re here.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It means something.’
I drink, he drinks. The pub does its thing, the noise, the match. A bloke at the bar arguing with another bloke about offsides.
‘How’s the site?’ Ewan says.
‘Good. Block C’s on schedule. Dave’s happy, which means Dave’s not shouting, which is the same thing.’
‘And the flat?’
‘Fine.’
‘And the thing you’re not telling me about?’
I look at the pint. The foam’s settling, I’m stalling.
‘I kissed Celyn.’
Ewan doesn’t make the face. He drinks, puts the glass down. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Was it what you thought it’d be?’
I look at him. The Carrick eyes looking back. Waiting, just. There, like a plumb line.
‘You’ve been thinking about it for a year, Ron.’
A year. The word goes through me like cold water. A year. Said out loud, in this pub, with the sticky carpet and the ticking radiator and the football nobody’s watching. A year of the corner table. A year of the hands, the nails, the voice.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It was.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’
I don’t know how to say it. I turn the pint on the mat, a quarter-turn, back.
‘I don’t know what I am.’
Ewan looks at me, the other one. The one from when we were kids and I fell off the wall in the garden and he came and sat next to me and just sat there until I got up on my own.
‘You’re Ron,’ he says. ‘That hasn’t changed.’
‘It feels like everything.’
‘You were Ron when you couldn’t look at them. You’re Ron now you’ve kissed them. You were Ron when you sat at that bar for a year pretending the beer was the reason. You’re still Ron.’
He drinks, I drink, the radiator ticks.
‘It’s not like I’ve been anything.’ I stop. ‘I’ve been with women. You know that. Plenty. It was fine. It was empty.’
‘It was fine.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And this isn’t fine.’
‘This is different.’ I look at the table. The ring from the pint glass. The wet circle. ‘This is a lot more than fine and I don’t know what to do with that.’
Ewan nods, doesn’t smile, the face softens.
‘You don’t have to do anything with it,’ he says. ‘You just have to not run.’
‘I don’t run.’
‘You moved to Manchester.’
‘For the job.’
‘For the job. And for me. And for a person in a bar you’d been watching for months before you even took the contract.’
I open my mouth, close it. The pint’s getting warm, the football’s still going. The bloke at the bar’s won the argument and is celebrating with a packet of dry roasted.
‘Ewan.’
‘I’m not pushing. I’m just saying what I see.’ He leans back. The grey jumper. Laurence’s jumper. ‘You know I’ve been there. You watched me go through it.’
‘That was different.’
‘It was the same. I looked at a man and I felt the thing you feel when you look at a person and you can’t stop looking and every time you see them it gets worse instead of better. That’s not a category, Ron. That’s just. A person.’
‘Laurence says hello, by the way.’
‘Tell him hello back.’
‘He made a lasagne. Wants you to come for dinner.’
‘Since when does Laurence make lasagne?’
‘Since he decided it’s his thing. It’s terrible. He puts too much béchamel. I eat it and tell him it’s perfect.’
I laugh, Ewan laughs. The laughing breaks something, not something bad. Something tight. Like the lacing on new boots when you finally pull them loose.
‘How is he?’ I say. And I mean it. Not the version that meant is he treating you right. Just: how is he. The man who makes bad lasagne.
‘Good,’ Ewan says. ‘Busy. There’s a paper. There’s always a paper. He marks at the kitchen table and I sit on the other side and we don’t talk for three hours and it’s the best part of the week.’
He says it simple, like it’s nothing.
I think about Celyn, bar, typing. Me with the pint, not talking. Hours of it.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean.’
Ewan looks at me, the eyes, he knows. He knew before I said anything, before the kiss, before the year. He sat across the table at Mum’s last Christmas and watched me not say the name and he knew and he waited because that’s what Ewan does.
The pub, the second pint empty, I should leave.
Should walk and think and maybe text Celyn something that doesn’t sound like an apology or a promise or whatever the hell this has become.
But Ewan’s sat there with the leather jacket and the eyes seeing everything and he’s not moving, so neither do I.
‘You know what I didn’t say,’ Ewan says, ‘when you told me about the bar the first time?’
‘What.’
‘I didn’t say it was okay. I didn’t say it was normal. I didn’t say a single thing that would make it easier. That was on purpose. The easy things don’t help.’
The pint’s gone. The glass is empty except for the ring. The radiator ticks. Ewan’s hands are on the table and they’re the same hands as mine but they’re not. They’re steadier, they know something mine don’t.
‘I didn’t decide to be gay,’ Ewan says, quiet.
‘I just woke up and I knew I was. Took me longer to know what to do with it, but the thing itself was already there. And you didn’t decide this either.
You woke up and Celyn was there, and the story you had for yourself didn’t fit any more.
You can’t fix that by not going to the bar or not texting them back.
The thing’s already happened. You’re just catching up. ’
‘But what if they don’t.’
‘No what-ifs. That’s the trap.’ Ewan looks at the screen, not watching it.
‘You stay in the what-if long enough and you miss the actual thing happening. Me and Laurence hid for the best part of a year. And it didn’t even start as anything you’d hide a year for.
It started as sex. That’s all I thought it was, for a long time.
Feelings turned up later. Inconvenient timing, because by then hiding was a habit, and what it would cost him if it got out hadn’t changed. ’
The match on the screen. The pub noise.
‘Then it got out,’ he says. ‘You know how.’
I know how.
‘I’m not saying it for sympathy. It’s done.’ His voice stays level. ‘I’m saying the worst day, the day every what-if I’d saved up arrived at once, we survived it. It was the hiding that nearly did us. That’s the maths on what-ifs, Ron. They cost more than the thing they’re about.’
‘Why’d you never say anything?’ The glass, the ring on the table. I turn it with one finger. ‘About me, I mean. You knew. Christmas. Before that, probably.’
‘Long before that.’
‘So why not.’
Ewan looks at the table, then at me. ‘Because waking up and being it, that’s the free part.
The rest costs. There are idiots out there, Ron, proper ones.
Blokes with one thought a week who’ll still have a verdict on you.
I got called a faggot at school before I knew what the word meant. Had to look it up.’
His voice doesn’t go up. It goes precise, which is worse.
‘If I’d sat you down a year ago and told you what I could see, what would you have done?’
The honest answer. ‘Told you to piss off.’
‘Told me to piss off. And then spent a year proving me wrong instead of working it out. You had to get there on your own or it wouldn’t hold.
’ He turns his glass once, puts it back on the same ring.
‘And the idiots, when they come, you stand in front of them yourself. Nobody can sit that exam for you. I could’ve swung at every one of them and it wouldn’t have moved you an inch. ’
He stands. The leather jacket comes on. He’s a man who knows who he is and he’s my brother and he walked the thing I’m walking and didn’t have anyone to tell him it was alright. So he’s telling me.
‘Come to dinner,’ he says. ‘Bring Celyn. And Ron.’ He leans down. ‘Nobody’s keeping score. You just bring the person you want to be around and you show up and that’s the whole thing. That’s enough.’
The door closes. The pub’s warm around me. The match is over and nobody cares. I’m sat here with a glass ring on the table and a brother who went first, and the knowledge that sometimes the after-thing is just the thing. Just different.
I pay, leave a tip.
I walk home, the NQ, the cold getting into the lining of the jacket and staying.
The wall, our wall. I stop, put my hand on the brick. Cold, wet, just a wall.
Except my body knows what happened against this wall, and the body doesn’t forget. The hand feels the brick and the brick feels like Celyn’s back. A bloke passes on the other side of the street, hood up, doesn’t look. Nobody looks.
I take my hand off the brick. The cold stays on my palm. The shape stays.
I walk.
The flat, the door, the key. Right way round this time. Inside. The bed’s still unmade from last night. The sheets still smell like both of us. Concrete dust and garden-fruit. Both here.
I sit on the edge. The edge where Celyn stood.
You’re Ron, that hasn’t changed.
Like it’s simple, like this is enough.
I pick up the phone. I type.
Ewan says come to dinner
Three dots, gone, three dots again, then:
Tell your brother I’ll bring dessert.
I close my eyes. The taste is gone. But the shape is still in my hands. And the sound, the Welsh word, the one I don’t know, is still in my ears.
My door’s open.
I come up the stairs, boots on the concrete, and the door’s open, a crack. Light from inside making a stripe on the floor.