Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ibuy the keyring one morning. The place on Oldham Street, five minutes, three quid, the bloke behind the counter doesn’t look up. Small brass tag, round edges, nothing written on it.
Back at the flat, I lift the mat and take the spare from underneath. It’s cold, damp at the teeth, a bit of grit stuck to one side. Stupid place for a key. Stupid thing to call it, too. Spare. Like Celyn’s only meant to be here if something goes wrong.
I wipe it on my jeans and work it onto the ring. The metal clicks once when it settles. Smaller sound than it should be.
Celyn’s at the table with the laptop. Scarf, purple, knitted, too long for indoors, hoodie underneath, jeans.
Nothing on the eyes, nothing on the mouth, the hair pushed back with a clip that’s got a tiny bird on it.
The fingers going at the keys in that pattern I know now: fast, stop, fast, stop, delete.
I put the key on the table next to the laptop. Don’t say anything. Start filling the kettle.
‘What’s this.’
‘Key.’
‘I have the key. It’s under the mat.’
‘Not anymore.’
The typing stops. Celyn looks at the table. Then at me.
‘Ronan.’
‘It needed a keyring.’
‘The spare key needed a keyring.’
‘Yeah.’
‘For its little outings.’
‘For you.’
The kettle runs loud. Too loud for the size of the kitchen. I turn it off before it’s full because I’m standing there holding the tap like an idiot. Celyn doesn’t touch it.
‘That’s the spare,’ Celyn says.
‘Was.’
‘Was.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And now?’
I lean back against the counter. Look at the chipped mug by the sink, the blue one beside it, two spoons drying on the draining board. Celyn’s scarf on my chair like it knows the place better than I do.
‘Now it’s yours.’
Celyn goes still in the way that means every part of them has heard it.
‘Officially?’
‘If you want to be a dick about it.’
Celyn laughs once. Small. Not enough air in it.
‘No,’ Celyn says. ‘I want to be a dick about it exactly the right amount.’
Then they pick it up. Not fast. Finger and thumb first, like it might be hot. The brass tag turns in the grey morning light. No name. No label. Just enough weight to make it a thing you own and not a bit of metal shoved under a damp mat for emergencies.
‘You didn’t put my name on it.’
‘Didn’t know if you’d want that.’
‘Could’ve put “person who does the milk”.’
‘Didn’t think of that.’
‘Obviously not. Tragic lack of imagination.’
Celyn closes their hand around it. That does something to the room. No mat. No damp corner by the door. No pretending it’s only for when Celyn forgets a charger or drops off a flask or comes round because the buses are shit and the rain’s worse.
‘You know I’ll use it,’ Celyn says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Not politely.’
‘Wouldn’t expect that.’
‘I’ll come in when you’re not here.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll leave stuff.’
‘You already leave stuff.’
‘More stuff.’
‘Fine.’
There. The smile. Quick and gone.
Celyn stands, scarf dragging off the chair and nearly taking the laptop charger with it.
Crosses the kitchen. Not dramatic. Not slow.
Just comes to me and puts both arms round my middle, face against my chest. I stand there with my hands up for half a second.
Then I put them down. Back of the hoodie. Scarf, wool. Warm person.
‘It’s only a key,’ I say.
Celyn’s hand tightens at my back.
‘No, it isn’t.’
It doesn’t hold. The keyring buys an hour, maybe less, and then something in Celyn goes tight again. The typing turns aggressive, delete, delete, delete, the tea going cold, the scarf still on indoors, wrapped around the neck.
I don’t ask, Celyn doesn’t say. This is how we work. The silence carries until someone puts it down and it’s usually Celyn because Celyn talks and I listen. I was built for silence.
But Celyn doesn’t put it down.
We go to the bar. Evening, the walk’s different. Celyn’s ahead of me by half a step, which never happens. Usually we’re close, usually there’s a hand that finds my elbow or my wrist or the back of my jacket. Tonight: nothing, half a step ahead, the scarf trailing.
The bar, our table, two pints. Celyn opens the laptop and types and the typing is angry, the keys hitting harder, the delete key taking punishment. I drink. The screen from my angle but I can’t read it, the font’s small, Celyn keeps the brightness low.
‘How’s it going,’ I say. After twenty minutes.
‘It’s not.’
I wait, the pint, the table, the sound of the bar. Someone’s laughing near the taps, a glass breaks, the bartender swears.
‘The tutor,’ Celyn says. ‘Thinks the second act drags. Thinks the house is too abstract. Wants more.’ The fingers make quote marks in the air.
‘“Grounded emotional stakes.” Whatever the fuck that means. Everything’s a stake.
The whole thing is a stake. The woman is living in a house that rearranges itself and she’s losing her mind and apparently that’s not enough. ’
The typing stops.
I haven’t got anything to give. The tutor’s wrong, I know that in my body, but I can’t explain why. Don’t have the vocabulary. Grounded emotional stakes. I don’t even know what that means.
‘Maybe if you try.’ I start.
‘If I what.’
The voice is different, flat, sharp. The accent thicker, thicker when Celyn’s angry, the vowels going round, the consonants hitting harder.
‘I don’t know. Show it to someone else? Rhiannon liked it. The whole room did.’
‘The whole room liked a reading, Ron. A performance. That’s not the same as the novel working on the page. You don’t get it.’ Celyn stops. Breathes. The hands curl on the keyboard. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to work with words. You work with your hands. It’s not the same thing.’
The bar noise fills the gap. The laughing, the bartender.
It lands in the ribs, left side. Like someone dropped a block from a height and it hit bone. The you don’t know. Like what I do is, less. Simpler. Like reading a level and knowing the exact second concrete’s ready to vibrate is just. Hands. Just muscle.
And there’s a thing in my mouth, ready. The true one. You’ve not finished a chapter since I met you. I know it’ll land. I know exactly where the bone is, same as Celyn just found mine. That’s what close gets you. The map.
I don’t say it.
I put the pint down. Careful. Like it’s full.
‘Going to get some air.’
‘Ron—’
‘It’s fine.’ It isn’t. But the other thing, the thing behind my teeth, that’s not fine either, and one of them has to leave the room. Rather it was me than the sentence.
I take the jacket off the back of the chair. I don’t look at the face. If I look at the face I’ll see Celyn working out what they said, and I’ll either forgive it too fast or I’ll open my mouth, and I can’t trust which.
The zip catches halfway. I yank it. The door, the cold. The cold doesn’t tell you your work doesn’t count. The cold doesn’t ask you to be kind when you’ve got a cruel true thing behind your teeth.
I’m on the bed. Jacket still on. Boots still on. Haven’t turned the light on. The streetlight comes through the blind in strips and the strips land on the floor and the wall and the crack and I’m looking at all of it and none of it.
The anger’s new. This is different. This one’s got something under it. Something soft.
And I left so I wouldn’t say it. That’s new too. I’ve gone quiet on people my whole life. Gone to the wall, let the stillness do the talking. Never once walked out to keep someone safe from my own mouth.
You don’t do that for people who can’t reach you.
I roll onto my side. Stare at the wall.
I didn’t know Celyn could hurt me. Annoy me, yeah, confuse me, daily. Make me feel like I’m standing on ground that won’t stop moving, that’s the whole thing. But hurt. Actual hurt. The kind where your chest does something and your throat closes and the words don’t.
The kind where you want to ring someone and say they said my work doesn’t matter and then hear someone say that’s bollocks, your work matters and then feel better. Except the person I’d want to ring is the person who said it.
I take my boots off. Leave the jacket on, the pillow. The flat’s cold because the heating’s on a timer and I didn’t change it and the key, the key, the one I gave Celyn this morning, is in Celyn’s pocket. On the brass ring.
The phone’s on the bedside table. Face down. I don’t look at it until the light changes. The strips from the streetlight going orange to grey, the early-morning grey, the one meaning the heating’s about to kick on.
I turn the phone over. Two seventeen a.m.
One message.
That was shit, I was shit, I’m sorry. You know more about work than anyone I know. I was frustrated and I aimed it at you and that’s not. I’m sorry.
I read it. Read it again. The stop in the middle. That’s not. Where Celyn ran out of sentence the same way I run out of sentence. The apology that doesn’t make excuses. Doesn’t say but the tutor or but the novel or but I was stressed. Just: I was shit. I’m sorry.
I put the phone down. Face down again.
I don’t respond because I don’t know what to say when someone does that, when someone just says I was wrong and there’s nothing between you and it.
Nobody does that, Mum doesn’t do that, Dad never did.
Ronan, I don’t do that. I go still and the stillness becomes the wall and the wall stays until everyone forgets what built it.
Celyn built the wall and then knocked it down in the same night.
I lie there, the heating kicks on, the radiator ticks. The phone face down on the table and the message inside it and the key in Celyn’s pocket somewhere across Manchester and the crack in the ceiling and the anger going flat.
The anger isn’t the thing.
The thing is: I didn’t know someone could hurt me. I didn’t know I’d let someone close enough.
I don’t text back. The pour starts in a few hours. The alarm’s already set, the body’s already shifting into site mode, the arms, the back, the knees arranging themselves for concrete instead of this.
The grey light, the crack.
The phone goes, vibration on the bedside table by the lamp, then the ringtone, then MUM on the screen. The Christmas photo, three years old, the paper crown.