Page 58 of Undefined Terms

‘Maybe if you try.’ I start.

‘If I what.’

The voice is different, flat, sharp. The accent thicker, thicker when Celyn’s angry, the vowels going round, the consonants hitting harder.

‘I don’t know. Show it to someone else? Rhiannon liked it. The whole room did.’

‘The whole room liked a reading, Ron. A performance. That’s not the same as the novel working on the page. You don’t get it.’ Celyn stops. Breathes. The hands curl on the keyboard. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to work with words. You work with your hands. It’s not the same thing.’

The bar noise fills the gap. The laughing, the bartender.

It lands in the ribs, left side. Like someone dropped a block from a height and it hit bone. The you don’t know. Like what I do is, less. Simpler. Like reading a level and knowing the exact second concrete’s ready to vibrate is just. Hands. Just muscle.

And there’s a thing in my mouth, ready. The true one. You’ve not finished a chapter since I met you. I know it’ll land. I know exactly where the bone is, same as Celyn just found mine. That’s what close gets you. The map.

I don’t say it.

I put the pint down. Careful. Like it’s full.

‘Going to get some air.’

‘Ron—’

‘It’s fine.’ It isn’t. But the other thing, the thing behind my teeth, that’s not fine either, and one of them has to leave the room. Rather it was me than the sentence.

I take the jacket off the back of the chair. I don’t look at the face. If I look at the face I’ll see Celyn working out what they said, and I’ll either forgive it too fast or I’ll open my mouth, and I can’t trust which.

The zip catches halfway. I yank it. The door, the cold. The cold doesn’t tell you your work doesn’t count. The cold doesn’t ask you to be kind when you’ve got a cruel true thing behind your teeth.

I’m on the bed. Jacket still on. Boots still on. Haven’t turned the light on. The streetlight comes through the blind in strips and the strips land on the floor and the wall and the crack and I’m looking at all of it and none of it.

The anger’s new. This is different. This one’s got something under it. Something soft.

And I left so I wouldn’t say it. That’s new too. I’ve gone quiet on people my whole life. Gone to the wall, let the stillness do the talking. Never once walked out to keep someone safe from my own mouth.

You don’t do that for people who can’t reach you.

I roll onto my side. Stare at the wall.

I didn’t know Celyn could hurt me. Annoy me, yeah, confuse me, daily. Make me feel like I’m standing on ground that won’t stop moving, that’s the whole thing. But hurt. Actual hurt. The kind where your chest does something and your throat closes and the words don’t.

The kind where you want to ring someone and say they said my work doesn’t matter and then hear someone say that’s bollocks, your work matters and then feel better. Except the person I’d want to ring is the person who said it.

I take my boots off. Leave the jacket on, the pillow. The flat’s cold because the heating’s on a timer and I didn’t change it and the key, the key, the one I gave Celyn this morning, is in Celyn’s pocket. On the brass ring.

The phone’s on the bedside table. Face down. I don’t look at it until the light changes. The strips from the streetlight going orange to grey, the early-morning grey, the one meaning the heating’s about to kick on.

I turn the phone over. Two seventeen a.m.

One message.

That was shit, I was shit, I’m sorry. You know more about work than anyone I know. I was frustrated and I aimed it at you and that’s not. I’m sorry.

I read it. Read it again. The stop in the middle. That’s not. Where Celyn ran out of sentence the same way I run out of sentence. The apology that doesn’t make excuses. Doesn’t say but the tutor or but the novel or but I was stressed. Just: I was shit. I’m sorry.

I put the phone down. Face down again.

I don’t respond because I don’t know what to say when someone does that, when someone just says I was wrong and there’s nothing between you and it. Nobody does that, Mum doesn’t do that, Dad never did. Ronan, I don’t do that. I go still and the stillness becomes the wall and the wall stays until everyone forgets what built it.