Chapter 11 #2
Don’t pick up. Can’t not pick up. Always pick up, that’s the rule: she’ll ring back, or Ewan’ll get a text and get involved, and I’m not having that today.
I clear my throat. Sit up. The crumbs go down the front of the t-shirt and onto the duvet. Don’t care.
‘Hiya, love.’
‘Morning, Mum.’
Kettle in the background.
‘You sound peaky. You been eating?’
‘Yeah, Mum. I’m eating toast.’
‘Toast ain’t eating, Ronan.’
‘It’s bread and butter and heat. That covers it.’
She does the noise, the half-laugh, half-sigh that means it’s going on the list.
‘How was the weekend, then? Ewan reckons you were out with the lads Friday.’
Ewan said.
Ewan didn’t say. Ewan was at home studying for an exam and didn’t text.
Mum’s fishing.
‘Yeah. Few pints with the lads.’
‘Which lads?’
‘Gaz, Dean. The crew. Same as always.’
The kettle clicks off. Spoon, mug, milk, the same six minutes she’s been doing since I was nine.
‘And last night?’
‘Quiet one, was in. Bit of football.’
The lie’s small. Three sentences, that’s it. Quiet one. The bar, the corner table, Celyn’s voice flat and sharp telling me my work doesn’t count, then the door, then the cold, then the bed in the jacket and the boots and the streetlight on the wall in strips.
Quiet, yeah. The phone face down on the duvet next to me with a message I haven’t answered to and the toast cold and Liverpool playing nowhere.
‘Who was on?’
Shit.
‘Liverpool. Liverpool, someone, wasn’t paying attention.’
‘You’re meant to support West Ham.’
‘Mum. I support West Ham. I watched a Liverpool game. The two things are not.’
She sips. The mug down on the plastic tablecloth, I can hear the click.
‘I told your dad you were settled. That right?’
‘That’s right. I’m settled.’
The settled word. The flat with two mugs and a key in someone else’s pocket and a message I haven’t answered. Settled.
‘Anyone in your life I ought to know about, love?’
The toast on the plate, half-eaten, the butter gone soft. Past the toast, through the open bedroom door, the kitchen counter. Celyn’s mug. The bird clip on the windowsill where Celyn left it.
‘Nah. Just work.’
‘Just work.’
‘Yeah.’
She doesn’t say anything for a beat. The Mum-pause, the one that’s a question without a question. I let it ride. The pause goes long enough that I hear the radio in her kitchen, faint, violins.
‘Alright, love.’
‘Tell Dad.’
‘I always tell Dad.’
‘Bye, Mum.’
The thumb on the red button. The room the same as before, the toast the same, the mug the same. Nothing’s moved.
Except the air in here’s got a shape and the shape’s the wrong shape.
I pick up the toast. Eat it. Cold.
I put the kettle on for another tea I won’t drink. Celyn’s mug, still on the counter. I don’t move it.
By the time I get back from work, the flat’s full of it.
The voice saying you work with your hands like that’s all I am, and the key I gave someone who said that, and the message on the phone I didn’t answer, and the morning.
The flat’s cold. I slept in the cold. Cold’s cold.
I make tea. The kettle that sounds too loud because nobody’s speaking over it. The toast, one side, flipped, the toaster still only does one side. I eat it with jam because there’s no butter. There was butter; Celyn brought it on Thursday, and it ran out because I ate toast for three meals.
I shower. Change. Clean shirt. The blue one, the one Mum bought for Christmas that I never wear because it’s too nice for anything. Don’t know why I’m wearing it.
The walk’s five minutes, the same five minutes. Same street, same turn, same door, same smell of hops and wood. Evening. A couple at the bar, someone reading near the window. The bartender, not the usual one, the girl with the buzz cut who always overpours.
The Christmas shirt, in the bar. I catch my reflection in the glass behind the taps, the blue, the collar, the thing Mum bought that’s too nice for anything and I’m wearing it to a bar like it means something. It doesn’t.
Celyn was right, the job isn’t shit. But how it was said. The weapon of it, the aim, the delivery.
Celyn’s at our table.
I stop, in the doorway. The cold still on my back and the bar heat on my face and Celyn’s at our table with a pint and no laptop and the face, the face is different.
The eyes are tired, circled dark, the kind of dark you get when you don’t sleep.
The hair’s down, falling across the forehead.
The nails, violet still, but barely. Chipped down to islands.
I walk to the table, pull out the chair, sit.
‘I was an arsehole,’ Celyn says. Eyes on the pint between the hands. The violet islands.
‘Me too.’
Silence. The couple at the bar laughing. The buzz-cut bartender wiping the counter.
‘My tutor said the novel’s not working.’
‘I know it’s not.’
Celyn nods, the hair moves. The circles under the eyes are worse than I thought, not just tired, something deeper. The face of someone who’s been sat with themselves for twenty-four hours.
I go to the bar, order two pints. The Northern Soul. Bloody stupid name, good beer. I bring them back, put one in front of Celyn. Take the old one that’s gone warm and flat and set it to the side.
Celyn drinks, I drink. The silence is the kind I know, not comfortable, not uncomfortable. Working, like mortar that’s still going off. You wait.
Someone puts music on. Acoustic, a bloke with a guitar who thinks he’s better than he is. Celyn’s foot touches mine under the table. The table’s small, but the foot stays.
I let mine stay.
‘You can say my job’s shit,’ I say. After the second pint. After the foot. After the guitar player gives up and the jukebox takes over and the buzz-cut girl brings us chips without asking. ‘But mean it. Don’t use it as ammo.’
Celyn looks at me, full-on. The eyes, the grey-green, the thing I still can’t, the eyes are wet. Something sitting behind them that won’t come out.
‘I don’t think your job’s shit.’
‘You said it.’
‘I know what I said. I was failing and I wanted you to fail too. For one second. That’s not right.’ A breath. ‘That’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to someone I care about.’
The sentence stops and I hear it.
I eat a chip, it’s cold, eat another one.
‘The reading was brilliant,’ I say. The word feels wrong in my mouth. It’s the right one though. ‘The whole room couldn’t breathe. Your tutor wasn’t in that room.’
Celyn blinks.
‘Ron.’
‘What.’
‘You just said something beautiful and you have no idea.’
‘I said it was brilliant. That’s all I can say.’
‘I know. That’s why it’s beautiful.’
I sit with it, eat more chips. The salt on my fingers. The jukebox, a tune I don’t know. The foot under the table. Celyn’s foot against mine, the heat through two shoes.
The bar fills, a quiet crowd. Smaller, the people who don’t have somewhere better to be and I’m one of them and have been for months. The couple by the window. The bloke who reads the paper in the corner and has been reading the same paper since I started coming here.
Celyn orders another pint. Doesn’t ask me, just goes to the bar and comes back with two. Puts mine down.
‘Third time you’ve apologised tonight.’
‘Noted.’ Tired. ‘Last one. Promise.’
We walk back. Celyn’s hand finds my wrist. The fingers, cold. Wrap around the bone and hold. Like testing if the bone’s still there.
I don’t pull away.
Door. Celyn uses the key, lock sticks, Celyn jiggles it. I could do it faster but I stand behind and watch the fingers work and the door opens and it smells like the heating, like old toast, like the building settling.
I make tea, two mugs, one sugar, milk.
Celyn sits on the bed cross-legged, the hoodie pulled over the knees. The face still tired, still circled, still the heaviest version of Celyn I’ve seen. But something’s different. Something’s coming off.
I bring the tea, sit on the bed, the mattress dips. Celyn’s knee touches my thigh.
We drink tea.
‘I read your message,’ I say.
‘I know. Double blue tick. I was watching the screen like an obsessed person.’ Celyn laughs. Small. Through the nose. ‘Like a person who says they hate phone culture and then stares at a phone for six hours.’
‘Didn’t know what to say.’
‘You don’t have to say anything.’
‘Right.’
The tea. The knee against my thigh.
‘The silence’s different now,’ I say. Don’t know why I say it. The words come out like the key came out of my hand yesterday, not decided. Done.
‘Yeah,’ Celyn says. ‘Scar tissue.’
I don’t know what that means. I know what it means. The silence with a mark on it from what happened. Like a wall you patch, you can see where the crack was, the plaster’s smooth but the line’s there if you know where to look.
Celyn puts the white mug on the floor. Leans sideways. The head on my shoulder. The hair against my neck. The stubble that I feel through the shirt, rough, warm.
The heating clicks off. Then on again. The sound of a flat that knows how to regulate itself. A thing Celyn said back when the staying-over started. Small things like that. A person noticing how a building breathes.
Celyn’s breathing deepens. The body goes heavier.
‘You’re warm,’ Celyn says, barely awake. A laugh, the sleepy one.
The flat’s dark now, the rain’s stopped. The blind-stripes from the streetlight move across the wall as cars pass. A rhythm I’ve started to recognise. This flat, this person. The heat that stays as long as I stay still.
Celyn sleeps, I don’t move. The ceiling crack is still there. The mark on the wall where something broke and got fixed and you can still see the line if you know where to look.
I do know where to look.
But knowing where to look doesn’t fix the crack.
Celyn’s novel is still broken. The tutor’s still in there somewhere, in the sentences, in the hesitation before every paragraph.
I can be there. I can be the tea and the silence and the flat regulating itself.
But I can’t write the book. And the book is what’s breaking them.
The laptop’s on the desk. Closed. Tomorrow I’ll make tea and I won’t ask and Celyn will open it or won’t.