Page 116 of Undefined Terms

My phone goes on the table. I turn it face up. A year ago it’d have stayed in my pocket.

I open the thread. Happy Christmas. Send.

The cat, the neighbour’s ginger one that comes through Celyn’s window and sits on the laptop. Celyn’s hand in the frame, the nails green, bright. He asked about you. Then, a second later: The cat, not me. I don’t ask about you. I just think about you constantly which is different.

I read it twice. Put the phone back down.

‘Who’s that.’ Trav, the squint. The leak-finder. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’

A year ago I’d have said nobody. Said it was the cat and made it a wall. I look at the phone, then at him.

‘Seeing someone,’ I say. ‘Up north. Was.’

In a pub I’ve drunk in since I was eighteen, and the ceiling stays where it is. Trav waits for the rest. The name, the shape of it. I don’t give it, not here, not yet. But seeing someone is true and I put it down on purpose.

‘Right,’ Trav says.

Robbie, over the glass: ‘About time.’ He doesn’t push. The match comes back, someone fouls someone, the ref’s a prick. Trav lets it go because Robbie did.

Small. The smallest. But I said it out loud in the Nag’s Head, and nothing broke.

I drink. Match on the telly. Chair, carpet, broken quiz machine, a Stella that tastes correct.

It tastes correct and I miss the Northern Soul which is a bloody stupid name for a beer and I miss the bar where it’s poured and I miss the table in the corner where a person sits with a laptop and green nails and a ginger cat that comes through the window and a voice that makes the vowels soft and a mouth that does the lift-on-one-side thing that is, the thing. The thing I can’t.

The last train’s at eleven. I finish the Stella and I watch the clock.

I drink.

This is the thing I asked them for. A room where nobody turns round. Robbie who doesn’t dig, Trav who lets it go because Robbie did, a quiz machine that’s been broken since before any of it, a Stella that tastes correct. The simple. I stood in a flat and told a person I wanted the simple back, and here it is, poured and set and holding, and there’s nothing in it. Simple’s not the opposite of hard. Simple’s just the room with nobody in it I want to be seen by.

Simple. This is simple.

The morning I go back, Mum makes eggs and I eat the eggs. She irons a shirt I didn’t ask her to iron. I tell her I don’t need the shirt ironed because I’m going back on the train and the shirt’s going in the bag and the ironing’s wasted. She irons it anyway, that’s Mum.

The sofa, the telly. The photograph on the shelf. The four of us, Margate, five years ago. Me and Ewan in the front. Dad behind. Mum’s hand on my shoulder. Everyone’s squinting because the sun’s out and nobody thought to stand with their backs to it.

I look at the photograph. The four of us. The version where everything was, not simple. It wasn’t simple then either. Dad was already withdrawn. Mum was already watching him be withdrawn and not saying anything about it. But the photograph has four people in it and the kitchen has two plates and the table has four chairs and the maths doesn’t work and nobody’s fixed the maths.

Mum comes in with the tea. Two mugs, the mugs from the cupboard, the ones with the chips, the ones that should’ve been thrown out years ago. She sits.

‘Ewan says hello,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘He says you had your tea round theirs last month. The fish.’

‘Sea bass.’

‘Was it nice?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Laurence?’

‘He’s smart. He’s alright. He’s good.’

She drinks the tea, I drink the tea. The photograph on the shelf. The four people squinting.