Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The chair’s wrong. Too small, the plastic kind, stackable, the kind that makes your knees higher than your hips so you can’t sit without feeling like the furniture’s rejecting you.
The room’s wrong too: low ceiling, strip lights, rows of these plastic chairs facing a lectern with a microphone that nobody needs because the room’s the size of my bedroom.
Posters on the walls: book covers, events, a thing about a visiting author I’ve never heard of.
There’s wine on a table by the door, white and warm, in plastic cups. I’ve got one. It’s shite.
Thirty-odd people, students, mostly. The kind who look like they chose their clothes on purpose: layered, scarves, canvas bags with logos I don’t recognise. A few older ones, tutors, maybe. Glasses, cardigans, the posture of people who sit for a living.
I’m in my jeans. The good ones, not the site ones, but still jeans. The jacket Ewan said made me look like a bouncer. Boots clean, at least. My hands are clean, and that took ten minutes and a nailbrush and three goes at the line under the thumbnail that never fully shifts.
I’m sat in the back row because the back row is the only row I’ve ever sat in for anything. School, college, the one term before I left. The safety brief on the first day of every site. Back row, exit visible.
A girl next to me is reading a programme. I haven’t got a programme; didn’t know there were programmes. She glances at me, glances at the boots, goes back to the programme.
I drink the wine. It’s warm and thin and tastes like something that happened to a grape by accident.
Celyn comes out.
The dress, black, stops above the knee. Tights, dark, the ones with the sheen. Shoes, low heel, clicking on the floor. The hair’s down, washed, curled at the ends. Earrings, the silver ones, the long ones that move when the head turns. And the face.
The face.
Full makeup. The eyeliner, thick, the wings sharp at the corners. The lashes dark, longer than I’ve seen. The lips are dark red, the colour of, postbox. That’s the only word, postbox red. The cheekbones shimmer. The nails. Bright orange, like a hi-vis, like the vests on site.
And no stubble, smooth. Clean jaw. The skin on the chin pale and bare and the neck long without the shadow and the Adam’s apple clear and moving when Celyn swallows before speaking.
My hands on my knees. The plastic cup bending where I’m gripping it.
Two days ago I had my mouth on three days of stubble and the red lace and the body under me was all weight and angles and sound. And now. Celyn’s walking to the lectern and the dress moves when the hips move and the calves in the tights and the shoes clicking and I.
I want this the same.
The same. The exact same heat in my stomach, the exact same. I told Celyn that two nights ago with my hand on the spine and Celyn said good and now I’m watching the proof of it walk to a lectern in heels.
I don’t have a box for this. Stopped looking for one.
Celyn looks across the room before opening the page. The eyes go front row, middle, back, scanning, not lingering. They find me, half a second. The face does nothing. But the breath out is visible from where I’m sitting, the shoulders dropping by a millimetre. Then the page.
Celyn reads.
The voice is different. This is the public one, bigger. The mic’s not on but the voice doesn’t need it.
The scene: the kitchen. Elin goes downstairs and there are more cupboards than there were last night, a whole new run of them along the wall where the window used to be, and when she opens one it is full of jars with no labels and the things in the jars turn, slowly, to face the light.
The mug she put down last night is where she left it.
The kitchen is longer than it was. She counts three doors out of it now, and last week there was one.
Celyn reads the part where Elin reaches for the mug.
The hand goes the wrong way first, muscle memory of yesterday’s kitchen, and corrects.
The mug is warm. It should be stone cold.
It’s warm the way a mug is warm when someone has just had their hands round it, and there is no one else in the house, and there has never been anyone else in the house.
The room holds. Thirty-odd people holding their breath at the same time. One woman in the front row has her hand over her mouth. The bloke next to me, the one with the scarf and the canvas bag, hasn’t blinked.
My skin’s gone cold. The small hairs on my arms up. Celyn wrote that about fear. And the room knows it and my arms know it.
Celyn pauses. Looks up from the page. Doesn’t look at anyone in particular, or looks at everyone, and the eyes land somewhere near the back row and stay for half a second and the grey-green goes bright. This is mine.
Then back to the page. Elin opens the fridge. It’s a new fridge. She doesn’t remember buying a fridge. Inside, every shelf is full, and the labels are in her own handwriting, dated weeks she hasn’t lived yet.
The audience laughs, nervous.
I don’t laugh. The cold on my arms is still there. Like someone opened a door in the room that wasn’t.
Celyn reads for ten more minutes. The corridor scene.
Elin walks down the hallway and it’s longer than yesterday, or shorter, or the same length but the door at the end keeps changing colour.
Green yesterday. Blue today. The paint is wet.
The paint is always wet, and when she touches it her fingers come away red, and warm, and it isn’t paint.
The voice drops for the last paragraph, every word placed like bricks in a course.
The room applauds. I clap.
People everywhere. The room breaks into clusters: plastic cups, voices, the noise of people who want the person at the centre.
Celyn’s at the centre. The tutor, grey hair, navy blazer, the pontificating type, has one hand on Celyn’s elbow. Possessive, territorial, the teacher who takes credit. He’s talking and Celyn’s nodding. The half-smile, professional, not the one I know. The closed version.
I stand against the back wall. The plastic cup, the shite wine, my boots on the carpet.
I watch the tutor’s hand on Celyn’s elbow. Don’t like it, don’t know why. It’s an elbow, it’s a hand, it’s nothing. But the fingers are there and they’re staying there and Celyn’s not moving them.
A woman, short, dark hair, loud, breaks through the cluster and throws her arms around Celyn. Celyn laughs. A real one, the full-body kind, the one from the pillow two days ago. The tutor’s hand drops.
‘Rhi,’ Celyn says.
‘That was fucking terrifying and I loved it and I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight and you owe me therapy.’ All in one breath. Welsh. Same accent as Celyn, thicker.
Rhiannon. Celyn’s mentioned the name, from the course, the workshops, the midnight texts about word counts and deadlines. She says my second act sags, does my second act sag? The best friend.
Rhiannon pulls back, looks at Celyn properly. ‘The eyeliner is insane, where?’
‘Boots. Like, a quid.’
‘Get me one.’
‘Already did. It’s in your bag.’
Rhiannon makes a sound that could shatter the plastic cups. Hugs Celyn again.
I watch, the cup, the back wall, my boots. The room is Celyn’s world and I’m stood in it like I’m stood on a site that’s not mine. I can see the structure, I can read the weight, but I don’t have the drawings.
A bloke. Tall, sandy hair, one of those faces that knows it’s a good face. He’s talking to Celyn now, leaning in. Celyn laughs the polite one, the one I can tell from the real ones.
The thing in my stomach. Not jealous, not quite. This is a room full of people who know the words for what Celyn does and I don’t, and the sandy-haired bloke has them and I’ve got nice, my arms went cold.
I grip the cup, the plastic cracks. The wine slops over my knuckle. I don’t wipe it.
It’s not that I think Celyn’s interested. It’s that the bloke can stand next to Celyn and talk about the writing and the craft and the second act and whatever else and I can stand next to Celyn and say. What. Nice. That was nice, my arms went cold. Proper literary analysis there, Ron. Well done.
Celyn’s head turns, scans the room, finds me at the back wall. Walks over, the heels on the carpet, doesn’t excuse the exit, just walks. Sandy-hair’s still mid-sentence when Celyn leaves.
Takes my wrist, the wrist. The fingers wrap around it, the ring, and the grip. This one.
Turns to Rhiannon. ‘Rhi, this is Ronan.’
Like that’s enough.
Rhiannon looks me up and down. Doesn’t hide it. ‘Bloody hell, Cel. You didn’t say.’
‘What.’
‘Nothing. He builds things. Got it.’ The grin. She sticks her hand out. I shake it. Small hand, strong grip. ‘You’re the site manager? The big development?’
‘Victoria North. Block C.’
‘My cousin’s put a deposit on one of those flats. If the heating doesn’t work I’m blaming you personally.’
‘Fair enough.’
She turns back to Celyn. ‘I like him. Quiet, useful, probably knows where the stopcock is. You need that.’
Celyn’s hand on my wrist. Still there. The heat of the grip and the bouncer jacket and the bloke with the sandy hair watching from across the room.
‘Ready?’ Celyn says to me.
‘Yes.’
The half-smile, the real one.
We walk. The air’s cold, the February kind that gets into the bones. Celyn’s got my jacket, threw it over the dress because the cardigan’s too thin, and the shoes click on the pavement, and the jacket hangs past the hands, the hem of the dress sticking out at the bottom.
My jacket, on Celyn. I’m walking through Manchester in a t-shirt in February and I’m not cold.
‘You’re going to get ill,’ Celyn says.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’ve got goosebumps.’
‘That’s from the reading.’
Celyn stops walking, looks at me. The streetlight on the postbox lips, my jacket held shut against the wind.
‘That might be the best thing anyone’s ever said to me about my writing,’ Celyn says.
Shrug, keep walking. Celyn catches up, the heels clicking again.
‘When did you start writing it?’ I say. After a minute. Two. A gap that’d be awkward with someone else.