Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Aweek and the flat’s got a shape now. A man who goes to work and comes home and sits. Dave stopped asking if I’m alright on Wednesday. Practical men stop digging when the shovel hits rock.
The packet of stars is still on the bedside table. The same ones from the charity shop. Eighty pence. Sealed.
I was going to put them up. On the ceiling.
The weekend Celyn was at the restaurant for the double shift.
I had the plan, the step-ladder from the site, the packet, the ceiling.
Put them up while Celyn was out. A surprise.
Like a bloke who can’t say a thing so he sticks plastic stars on a ceiling and hopes the stars say it instead.
I never did it. And now the packet sits there and the ceiling is bare and the person who was supposed to look up and see them is somewhere in Manchester. Hasn’t texted, I haven’t texted.
The food’s been existing. Toast. The last of the beans.
A Tesco sandwich on Wednesday that I ate in the portacabin, Dean next to me saying nothing, and the nothing was the right shape.
Thursday I didn’t eat until lunch. Friday the fridge had a lemon, half a pint of milk on the turn, and a jar of Celyn’s chutney.
The one from the farmer’s market. The one I don’t like but eat because Celyn puts it on everything, and the taste of it is the taste of Celyn’s kitchen.
I threw the milk out. Kept the chutney.
My birthday was the fifth. Twenty-eight. I clocked it the way you clock a date on a delivery note, a thing that’s due, and went to work and poured a slab.
Ewan texted in the morning.
Happy birthday old man. Let me cook you something proper, I’ll come up, cake and the lot. Just say the word.
I looked at it a long time. The word was yes, and yes meant a table and candles and Ewan watching my face to check I was alright, and I wasn’t, and I hadn’t got it in me to be alright over a cake. Next time, I sent. Busy. He knew there was no busy. The thumbs-up came back and let me keep the lie.
The knock’s at half seven. Saturday. I’m on the sofa, not watching the telly. The telly’s on, noise, don’t know what. The sound fills the room and that’s the function of the telly tonight. Filling.
I open the door and Ewan’s there. Carrier bag, four cans, the tall ones, Moretti, the green ones, which means he went to an actual shop and not the Tesco Express because the Tesco Express doesn’t do the tall Moretti.
‘Alright,’ I say.
He walks past me, puts the cans on the counter, looks at the flat. He clocks all of it, every object, fast. Surgical. Eyes that miss nothing.
‘You look like shite,’ he says.
‘Cheers.’
He opens two cans, hands me one, sits on the sofa. I sit next to him. Telly on. Sound.
Ewan drinks. Doesn’t say anything for—I don’t know. Two minutes. Three. The length of time it takes to decide how to cut someone open.
‘You fucked it up,’ he says. Statement. Verdict.
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you do.’
It’s not a question either.
I drink. Can. Metal. Cold.
‘When mum came up to Manchester.’ The ceiling. The bare ceiling. ‘I cleared the flat of Celyn before she was off the train. I said I just wanted it simple. To walk into a room and not feel it turn.’
‘Simple,’ he says. Flat. Repeating it like a measurement that doesn’t add up. ‘You said that.’
‘Yeah.’
‘To their face,’ Ewan says. Not a question.
‘Yeah.’
Ewan drinks, puts the can down, picks it up, puts it down again. The hands, the Ewan hands, the quick ones, the ones that are always doing something because the brain behind them runs faster than the room.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right.’
And then nothing, for a minute, the telly.
‘I wanted it simple,’ I say. ‘A room where nobody turns round. Then I went to Lewisham for Christmas and got exactly that. The pub, Mum, Robbie, nobody asking. And it was nothing. Empty. An empty room I’d been calling simple. I worked that out three weeks too late.’
‘To what.’
‘To not do the maths. Every word, every pronoun, every look, the thing where someone sees us and I don’t know what they see. I just wanted one room where I didn’t have to.’
Ewan turns his head, looks at me, he’s lived it first.
‘You know what I lost,’ he says. Quiet. ‘For this.’
‘Ewan.’
‘I lost Dad and I gained everything else. Laurence. My work. The thing where I wake up and don’t lie about who I’m lying next to.
And there wasn’t a day I could have both.
’ His voice drops. Lower. The register that means the words are costing something.
‘Not a single day where I got to be Dad’s good boy and Laurence’s partner. Not one.’
The telly. My throat doing a thing I don’t want it to do.
Ewan picks up the can. Puts it down. The metal on the counter, the clink. He’s looking at his hands. The same hands as mine but smaller. Sharper. Hands that write and hold pens. Hands that don’t carry steel.
‘Some mornings I pick up the phone to ring him.’ Quiet.
The other one. ‘The hand does it. Muscle memory. Two years of not ringing him and the hand still goes there. I look at the screen and his name’s there and my thumb’s on the button and then the brain catches up and the brain says: he won’t answer. Because he won’t.’
The can on the counter.
‘And I put the phone down. And I make the tea. And Laurence is there and the flat’s there and the life is there and it’s a good life, Ron. It’s the best life I’ve ever had. And the hand still goes to the phone.’
I don’t answer. Carrick boys don’t lie to each other. We just sit.
Ewan picks up his can. Drinks, the vulnerability closes. The surgical face comes back.
‘And you.’ Ewan puts the can down. Hands.
Gesture that has nothing to hold. ‘You spent a year staring at someone through a window. A year, Ron. Before you moved up here. Bar. Table. Person with the laptop. You couldn’t say hello.
Couldn’t cross a room. Couldn’t do the simplest thing a person can do which is walk to a table and open your mouth. ’
He’s right.
‘I know,’ I say. Because denial’s gone. Because Ewan’s laid it out like a job drawing and I can’t unsee the lines.
‘A year,’ Ewan says again. ‘And then you moved. And you moved, Ron. You physically got on a train and came here and picked a flat and signed a contract because some deep part of you knew. Knew before the head knew. The body was like: this person. This place. Go.’
The can. The metal going warm.
‘And you did. You walked into that bar and you found them and they found you back. You don’t get to have that and throw it back because it was simpler before it existed.’
The brother voice. The one that doesn’t give room for the other person’s bullshit because it’s seen too much of its own.
‘I’m scared,’ I say. The words come out flat. Site voice.
‘Yeah.’ True. ‘Because Celyn’s real. Celyn doesn’t fit the boxes, and the Lewisham Ron never had to change shape for anyone. He sat and let the world come to him.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Totally not fair. Life’s not fair. Mum’s not fair. Dad’s definitely not fair. And Celyn’s not going to be fair either, because Celyn’s a person, not a script. Celyn’s going to scare you and make you use words you don’t have, and you’ll have to build them as you go.’
‘And the kicking comes anyway, Ron. I took mine outside Canal Street last winter, two lads, forty seconds, and I’d told no one but Laurence.
They didn’t check whether I was hiding or not, Ron.
Either way you end up on the floor. The only choice is whether there’s someone holding a tea towel to your face after, or whether you do that bit on your own too. ’
The two cans emptying.
‘Is this where you tell me what to do?’
Ewan leans back, the look, the actual smile.
‘No,’ he says. ‘This is where I tell you that you already know what you need to do. You’ve always known. The question is whether you’re brave enough to do it.’
‘That’s fair.’
I can’t. The words aren’t in the place where I can reach them.
‘The Manchester Ron is better,’ Ewan says. ‘You know that? The one up here. The one who laughs. The London one doesn’t laugh. Not like that, not with the whole face.’
‘I laugh.’
‘You don’t. You do the thing. The pub thing. The Robbie thing. The thing where the sound comes out but it’s not the laugh. I know because I have the same two laughs and I know which one’s real because I spent eighteen years doing the wrong one.’
Can, metal, cold going warm.
‘Do you want to be with Celyn.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s the only question.’ Ewan’s voice. The one that cuts the room down to the size of the sentence. ‘Yes or no. Do you want to be with Celyn. Do you want to.’
The bar I walked past Thursday night, the window, the corner table, the green nails on the handle, the wet hair, the spine straight.
It’s you.
‘Yes.’
No pause, the body answering.
Ewan looks at me, nods, one nod, small.
Three seconds. That’s all it took him. I’ve been turning this over for weeks and he cuts it in three seconds. Same as the maths.
‘Then stop being a coward,’ he says. ‘And go tell them that.’
He picks up the can. Drinks, telly, something, filling.
I sit next to my brother on the sofa and the word sits in me like a footing that’s finally set.
Yes.
Ewan stays for the four cans. Talks about Laurence. The paper, the marking, the Victoria sponge that came out lopsided. ‘He said it was rustic. It looked like a crime scene.’ Normal things. The coat he puts around you after the surgery.
He leaves at ten, the door. The carrier bag, empty now, folded, tucked in his jacket pocket because Ewan folds things, even plastic bags, even after two cans.
‘Ron.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Yeah.’
The door closes, the stairs.
The flat. The packet of stars on the bedside table. The ceiling. The bare, white, stupid ceiling.
Tomorrow.
I walk from the flat to Oldham Street, the route I know.
Left at the corner, past the barber’s, past the kebab place that smells the same at any hour, past the Tesco Express.
Seven minutes. I’ve done it in five when the rain was bad and once in three when Celyn texted the pasta’s dying, Ron and I ran.