Page 141 of Undefined Terms

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Celyn gives me the novel on Wednesday.

The whole thing, printed. Two hundred and forty-three pages held together with a bulldog clip. The paper’s warm from the printer.

‘I want you to read it,’ Celyn says. Sat on the bed. My bed, our bed, the flat. The knees up, the chin on the knees. Hoodie, mine, the grey one, the one that’s too wide in the shoulders and too long in the arms and Celyn wears it like it was always theirs.

‘The whole thing?’

‘The whole thing. Start to finish. Don’t skip.’

I look at the stack. The whole novel. I’ve read pieces, the chapters Celyn left on the screen, the paragraphs read aloud at midnight with the laptop balanced on the pillow. The woman on the hill. The house that won’t hold still. The man in it who frightens her and won’t leave.

I’ve never read it whole.

‘I don’t read fast.’

‘I know.’ The mouth. The beat before a smile. The held breath. ‘That’s why I want you to.’

I start at seven, the bed. The pillow propped against the wall. Celyn’s in the kitchen, the kettle on, the mugs out, and then they move to the sofa and settle.

Page one.

The woman is standing on the hill above the village and the grass is moving in the wind that comes off the sea and she’s looking at a house. The house is old. Older than her. Older than the village. Old like a fact, the house has always been there how the hill has always been there and the woman is new.

Celyn’s writing is, I can’t, not beautiful, beautiful is wrong. It’s like watching someone lay brick. The sentences go where they need to go. No waste. The mortar between them invisible. You don’t see the craft. You see the wall.

I read.

Elin goes into the house, and the house is hungry. Some rooms have things in them, folded into the corners, that unfold when the door opens: too many joints, a wet sound, a face she half-knows pressed flat into the wallpaper and still working its mouth. Some rooms have nothing at all, only walls that lean in while she stands there, the gap behind her thinning to a line. She learns to keep one hand on the way out. She learns the house keeps what it catches, and that it is patient.

Page forty, my tea’s cold, I don’t get up.

Page sixty-eight. The man, the first time. On the threshold of the house, boots on the worn stone. Doesn’t go in. Doesn’t go out. Gone by the next page. But he was there before she was.

Page seventy, Celyn’s in the doorway, I don’t look up. Feel the look, the writer watching someone read the book. Celyn goes away.

Page one hundred. There’s a man in the house. Not in one room, in all of them, the same man behind every door she dares open, sitting among the things that should frighten him and don’t. He never blinks quite when he should. He’s always already facing the door she’s about to come through, as if he heard her choose it. She should be more afraid of him than of anything else in the house. Instead she keeps opening doors to find him.

A tightness in my throat.

Page one hundred and forty. She’s decided she’ll save him. She tells herself he’s a man, and a man can be led to a door, and she tells herself that’s why she keeps coming back, and it isn’t, and she knows it isn’t. She reaches for him. He lets her, halfway, the head tilting too far, the smile a beat late, and the whole time his eyes slide past her to the walls, to the slow breath of the house, like the house is the thing in the room he loves.

I put the pages down. My hands are close to shaking.

I pick them up. Keep reading.

The light changes while I read. The window goes black. The streetlamp comes on, a stripe of orange up the wall. Celyn turns the kitchen light off and doesn’t put another on. The flat goes quiet around the lamp and the page.

Page one hundred and eighty. She finds out what he is. When the light drops there are too many joints under his skin too, the same wrongness as the things in the rooms, and he doesn’t hide it, he lets her see, the way you show someone the truth because you’ve stopped being able to lie. The house didn’t make him and he didn’t make the house. They’re the same thing wearing two shapes, and the second shape is running out.

Page two hundred. I read slow, every word, because the whole book has been walking towards this room and I can feel it.

The corridor had grown again overnight, longer and wetter, breathing through the wallpaper, and the door at the end gave onto a room that yesterday had been a bedroom. It wasn’t a bedroom now. The bed had sunk halfway into a floor gone soft as a tongue, the walls had the give and the warmth of the inside of a mouth, and the man stood at the window with his back to her, still the way furniture is still.

‘I found a door,’ she said. ‘One that’s stayed a door three days. It’s holding. Come with me. Now, while it holds.’

‘You keep finding doors,’ he said, without turning.