Page 138 of Undefined Terms

Celyn walks through the gap.

The skirt, dark, mid-thigh, moves when the wind catches it. Dr Martens, the leather scuffed at the toe. The notebook in one hand, the phone in the other.

The stubble, light, a day. The jaw darker than the chin. No makeup. The lips bare, the hair pushed back behind one ear with the silver earring and the other ear covered.

The nails. Violet. The edges clean. The colour against the denim jacket.

And then Celyn passes me and the smell comes off them. Different. Woody and sharp, a cologne, the kind you’d find at Boots in a dark bottle, and it doesn’t go with the skirt and it goes with everything.

‘All right?’ I say. Because I’m at work. Because there’s rebar behind me and Gaz twenty metres to my left and this is the site. My site.

‘All right.’ Celyn looks around. The eyes going up. The structure, the steel, the temporary roof. Taking it in. Like there’s a page being written behind the eyes. ‘It’s massive, Ron.’

‘Yeah.’

‘No, I mean. I’ve seen buildings. I haven’t seen the inside of one while it’s becoming a building.’

The Welsh pulling the vowels long on ‘becoming.’ The low voice today. No lightness, no lift. The voice that matches the cologne and not the skirt.

Gaz, coming across the site. Hard hat, hi-vis, the walk that says I’m-not-in-a-hurry-but-I’m-coming.

‘Alright?’ Gaz puts his hand out. ‘Back for more, then.’

Celyn takes it, ‘Cheers for letting me poke around again.’

‘No bother.’ Flat. Normal. No weight. Gaz.

Dean, by the mixer, looks up, the nod, the Dean nod. Chin up, half an inch, back down. Goes back to the mixer.

Jay on the scaffolding, the head turns. Not at me, at Celyn, the skirt and the stubble and the violet nails, the combination that doesn’t file for Jay the same way it didn’t file for me.

Jay looks, then looks away, goes back to the ties.

Thomas’s not here today. The timing is, I don’t know what the timing is.

Dave comes out of the portacabin, hard hat under his arm, the clipboard, the Dave walk. Purpose without performance.

‘You’re the writer,’ Dave says. Fact, same as concrete grade or pour schedule. Puts his hand out. Celyn takes it.

‘Celyn Beynon. Thanks for this. I know it’s not exactly standard, having someone wandering around.’

‘Long as you wear the hat and don’t touch the steel, you can wander where you like.’ Dave reaches back into the portacabin. Comes out with a spare hard hat. Yellow. ‘This’ll fit.’

Celyn puts the hard hat on, the yellow plastic over the hair. The skirt, the Dr Martens planted on the concrete like they were made for it.

‘So the original structure,’ Celyn says. ‘Victorian?’

‘1887,’ Dave says. ‘Cotton warehouse. The Victorians over-engineered everything, the walls are a metre thick in places. Means we can strip back to the shell and the shell holds.’

‘They built for a hundred years and got a hundred and forty.’

‘More than that. Steel frame’s modern but the brickwork underneath, you could drive a truck through the ground floor and the first floor wouldn’t know.’ Dave points at the south wall. ‘See the arches? Load-bearing. Every one. They didn’t know how to build anything that wasn’t.’

Celyn’s writing, the notebook open. The pen, not biro, the fountain pen, the one with the green ink that stains the side of the hand, the pen against the page.

Celyn writes in my building.

The two lives are in the same room.