Chapter 19 #2
The next night, the skirt’s gone. Hoodie, grey, massive. Jeans, trainers. A cap, navy, pulled low, the hair tucked under. No makeup, nothing. The stubble heavier, three days now, maybe four. The nails still blue but chipped.
A stranger would read Celyn as a bloke. A bloke in a bar with a laptop. Nobody would look twice.
I look twice, I look three times. I look from the door to the bar and from the bar to the table and from the table to the seat across from Celyn and the heat under my ribs is burning.
The same, the same.
‘Alright?’
‘Yeah.’ Celyn pulls the cap lower. ‘Rough night. Couldn’t sleep. The chapter’s being a bastard.’
‘Which one?’
‘The one where the house knows it’s been found. He’s stood at the door and the house knows.’
Don’t understand what that means. Like the house, just sit with it.
‘Tea?’
‘Please.’
I get the tea, bring it back, put it down. Celyn over the mug, the hoodie, the cap.
Same.
Exactly the bloody same.
I sit there and drink my pint and watch a person in a grey hoodie type on a laptop and the thing in my gut, the one that was there last night, hasn’t shifted one millimetre.
Celyn reaches across the table without looking up from the screen. The hoodie sleeve past the wrist. Fixes my collar. The polo’s got a fold at the back from where I pulled it on too fast after the shower. The fingers on the back of my neck. Two seconds, the cap, the stubble rough.
‘You had a thing,’ Celyn says. Still typing.
A thing. A fold in my collar and a person in a hoodie and four days’ growth leaned across a table and fixed it with chipped nails and the touch lasted two seconds and the two seconds are on my skin and the skin is warm and it hasn’t changed, not from the lipstick, not from the boots, not from any version, and I know.
Right.
Wednesday.
The dress is short, black. Stops above the knee, thin straps, collarbones and the shoulders and the. I don’t know what the muscle there is called. The one between the neck and the shoulder. The one I put my mouth on two nights ago.
Tights. Sheer. The legs are long and smooth and the shoes have a low heel. Low enough to shape the calf.
Makeup. Full. The eyeliner thicker than Monday. The lipstick the same dark shade. Blush. Something on the eyelids. Colour, a shimmer. The face smooth. Shaved clean.
The ring, the earring, a small hoop, gold.
Celyn orders at the bar. I watch from the table. The heels change the walk, the hips, the spine. Celyn leans on the counter and the bartender leans in and Celyn laughs and the laugh is the laugh from every version, the breath through the nose, the head dipping forward, the hair falling.
The bartender, the regular one, the bloke with the piercing, nods. Celyn turns back towards our table. Catches me looking. Doesn’t do the half-smile this time. Does the full one. The one that uses both sides of the mouth and reaches the eyes. The rare one.
The dress moves when Celyn walks back, the heels on the floor, click, click, click. The same person who sat here yesterday in a hoodie and a cap with four days of beard and typed on a laptop and fixed my collar.
The same, the same, the same.
I’m sat at this bar with my pint going warm and the window behind me and I’m looking at a person I’ve seen in a long skirt with combat boots, in a hoodie with four days of stubble, in a short dress with heels, and the feeling hasn’t changed once.
If it was just the skirts I could tell myself. Right. The legs, the fabric, how a skirt moves. Could file that. Could put it in a box.
If it was just the stubble I could tell myself. I dunno. Could file that too.
But it’s all of it. Every version. The boots and the heels, the lipstick and the bare face, the rough mouth and the clean skin.
All of it is Celyn and Celyn is, I don’t have the word. I’ve been looking for the word for, months. Girlfriend is wrong, boyfriend is wrong. The thing your mate says when he asks who you’re seeing. That’s wrong too.
Celyn looks up from the laptop. The full makeup, the shimmer.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
The opposite of nothing. The biggest something I’ve ever sat with and I can’t.
It comes in quiet, it comes in quiet. Like noticing it’s raining, you don’t hear the first drop, you look up and it’s already been raining for a while and your jacket’s already wet.
I’m in love with Celyn. Every version. Celyn.
I’m in love with Celyn and the word for what that makes me doesn’t exist in the language I’ve got. And I sit with that, the gap, and it’s okay.
Fine.
It’s fine. Don’t need the word. Need the person.
‘You’re staring again,’ Celyn says. The shimmer on the eyelids.
‘Am I.’
‘The staring thing. The quiet thing.’ A pause. The laptop closes. The click of it, decisive. ‘You’ve been doing it all week.’
‘I haven’t done this before.’
‘Monday you looked at me for ten minutes without talking. Wednesday you went to make tea and stood at the counter for five minutes with the kettle cold.’ The voice is level. Factual. ‘And now you’re sat there with a warm pint looking at me like you’re trying to memorise something.’
Celyn’s right. All of it’s right. Just not why.
‘People memorise things they’re about to lose,’ Celyn says. Quiet. The accent thicker. The Welsh pushing through because the control’s slipping. ‘I’ve had it before. The looking. The long silences. The staring at me like I’m already past tense.’
The shimmer on the eyelids. The dress. The full makeup on a Wednesday night and I think. Did you do this for me? Did you put the dress on because you thought I was pulling away and the dress was a way to hold on?
‘I’m not leaving.’
‘Because if this is the part where you tell me London was easier,’ Celyn says, and the voice cracks. Small. A fracture in a load-bearing wall, the kind you don’t see until the plaster falls. ‘If this is you working out how to say it was simpler before me.’
‘Celyn.’
‘Then just say it. Don’t stare at me for a week. Don’t let me sit here and type and pretend I can’t feel you leaving from across the table. I’ve had that. I won’t do it again. I can’t do this.’
The hand comes up. Pushes the hair back. The gesture. But wrong. Too fast, too rough. Celyn’s fingers catch in the earring. The small hoop, winces, doesn’t stop.
‘I’m not leaving.’
‘Then what.’
The word. The word I’ve been sitting with for twenty minutes that doesn’t have a name and doesn’t need one.
‘I was thinking about Block C,’ I say. And Celyn’s face closes, pulls back, the armour going up, and I watch it happen in real time and I think: this is what you do.
This is what you’ve always done. You read people and you’re brilliant at it and right now you’re wrong.
You’re wrong and you don’t know you’re wrong and the wrongness is breaking your face.
‘I was thinking about Block C,’ I say again. ‘And then I was thinking about you. And then I stopped thinking about Block C.’
The eyes open, everything underneath showing. Young.
‘I’m not leaving,’ I say. ‘I’m the opposite of leaving. I’m so far from leaving I can’t see leaving from here.’
Celyn doesn’t move. The laptop, table, dress. Everything held in the same moment. The earring still crooked from where the fingers caught it.
‘You can’t know that,’ Celyn says. Low. The voice underneath all the voices that I’ve never heard before.
‘I know concrete,’ I say. ‘I know when something’s set.’
Silence, the bar, the rain starting. Celyn’s hand on the table, the blue nails chipped to nothing on the thumb, and I put my hand over it. Cover it. The knuckles under my palm.
Celyn looks at our hands. Looks at me.
‘Nobody stays,’ Celyn says. Almost nothing. A sentence falling out of a place that doesn’t usually open.
‘I’m staying.’
The hand turns under mine. Fingers lace through. The grip is tight. Tighter than it needs to be, the grip of someone holding on to something they’ve been braced to drop.
Outside the window it starts raining. Proper rain. Manchester rain, sideways, won’t stop until it’s done.
I don’t look for the umbrella. Haven’t got one, don’t need one.
The rain, Celyn at the table, the dress. The mouth doing its thing.
Right.
The hand in mine. Gripping like they’ll lose it. I hold back.