Page 23 of Undefined Terms

‘He fell asleep at the end. I had to watch the last hour alone with a bear.’

I drink. He drinks.

Then he puts the glass down. Looks at me with the Ewan eyes. The ones that make you want to leave the room.

‘You look like you did at Christmas. When you told me about the bar.’

My stomach drops.

‘I didn’t tell you.’

‘You told me about a person you couldn’t stop looking at. And now you live five minutes from where they sit every night. And you look like you’ve been hit by a bus. So.’

The pub’s loud around us. The rugby, someone laughing.

I drink.

‘Did you talk to them?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Name?’

‘Celyn.’

Ewan nods, slow. Like the name was the answer. He doesn’t push. Doesn’t ask what Celyn looks like or what Celyn does or whether Celyn’s a. Doesn’t ask anything. Just nods and picks up his pint and says: ‘Laurence put too much garlic in the pasta last night. I thought I was going to die. He said it was authentic. I said cardiac arrest isn’t authentic.’

I laugh. A breath through the nose.

He talks about the flat, about the bathroom tiles needing regrouting, about a student who asked if maths was invented or discovered and how Laurence went on for twenty minutes and Ewan timed it. Normal things. The normal Ewan gives me when I need it.

We finish, he pays, course he does.

‘Ron.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Whatever it is. You’ve got time.’

He puts his jacket on. Squeezes my shoulder, goes.

The squeeze. My brother’s hand on my shoulder. The pressure. The door closes and the pub noise fills the space he left.

I finish the second pint alone. The rugby’s in the second half. Someone’s arguing about a try. The sticky floor, the booth.

Whatever it is, you’ve got time.

I leave the pub. The walk home is six minutes, different route from the bar, different streets, different lights. The canal’s nearby, I can smell it, wet stone and standing water. The cranes are lit up on the skyline above the bar signs.

I think about the documentary. Three hours of bears. Laurence asleep on the sofa and Ewan watching alone and the image is. Specific. Domestic. Something I didn’t have for my brother a year ago when Ewan was a student in a room and Laurence was a name I wanted to hit. Now Ewan’s a man who watches bears and times lectures and regrouts tiles and has a person who rests against him.

I think about someone. Someone specific.

Link, the Victorian warehouses article. I open it, read the first paragraph: the cotton industry, the brick, the iron. Sentences are precise, factual. I read them and think: this was a building over-engineered by men who didn’t know how to build anything that wasn’t.

I close the article.

I want to kiss you.