Page 39 of Undefined Terms

Ewan looks at me, the other one. The one from when we were kids and I fell off the wall in the garden and he came and sat next to me and just sat there until I got up on my own.

‘You’re Ron,’ he says. ‘That hasn’t changed.’

‘It feels like everything.’

‘You were Ron when you couldn’t look at them. You’re Ron now you’ve kissed them. You were Ron when you sat at that bar for a year pretending the beer was the reason. You’re still Ron.’

He drinks, I drink, the radiator ticks.

‘It’s not like I’ve been anything.’ I stop. ‘I’ve been with women. You know that. Plenty. It was fine. It was empty.’

‘It was fine.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And this isn’t fine.’

‘This is different.’ I look at the table. The ring from the pint glass. The wet circle. ‘This is a lot more than fine and I don’t know what to do with that.’

Ewan nods, doesn’t smile, the face softens.

‘You don’t have to do anything with it,’ he says. ‘You just have to not run.’

‘I don’t run.’

‘You moved to Manchester.’

‘For the job.’

‘For the job. And for me. And for a person in a bar you’d been watching for months before you even took the contract.’

I open my mouth, close it. The pint’s getting warm, the football’s still going. The bloke at the bar’s won the argument and is celebrating with a packet of dry roasted.

‘Ewan.’

‘I’m not pushing. I’m just saying what I see.’ He leans back. The grey jumper. Laurence’s jumper. ‘You know I’ve been there. You watched me go through it.’

‘That was different.’

‘It was the same. I looked at a man and I felt the thing you feel when you look at a person and you can’t stop looking and every time you see them it gets worse instead of better. That’s not a category, Ron. That’s just. A person.’

‘Laurence says hello, by the way.’

‘Tell him hello back.’

‘He made a lasagne. Wants you to come for dinner.’

‘Since when does Laurence make lasagne?’

‘Since he decided it’s his thing. It’s terrible. He puts too much béchamel. I eat it and tell him it’s perfect.’

I laugh, Ewan laughs. The laughing breaks something, not something bad. Something tight. Like the lacing on new boots when you finally pull them loose.

‘How is he?’ I say. And I mean it. Not the version that meant is he treating you right. Just: how is he. The man who makes bad lasagne.

‘Good,’ Ewan says. ‘Busy. There’s a paper. There’s always a paper. He marks at the kitchen table and I sit on the other side and we don’t talk for three hours and it’s the best part of the week.’

He says it simple, like it’s nothing.