Page 68 of Undefined Terms

HSE arrive at eleven. Two of them, hi-vis over suits, clipboards, the expressions of people who’ve seen this before and have already started writing the report in their heads.

The site’s shut, two days minimum. The scaffolding company’s sending an engineer. I’ve got forms to fill and calls to make and the gaffer from head office wants a briefing by three.

The hard part is the seventeen lads standing in the car park with nothing to do. They just watched a mate fall. Nobody’s talking about it, smoking, kicking gravel, checking phones, texting wives. The thing nobody’s saying is that could’ve been me.

I do the briefing, I fill the forms. I call Marek’s wife. His emergency contact, a woman called Ewa who speaks English better than I do and takes the news with a steadiness that makes me want to sit down.

By four the site’s empty. Just me and the fence and the scaffold with the gap and the rubble still holding the shape of a man in it.

I lock up, walk. Don’t go to the bar. Don’t go to the flat. Walk. Along the canal, the towpath, the old mills with their new flats and wine drinkers on the balconies. Walk until my legs remember they’re legs.

My phone buzzes. Celyn.

How was your day?

I stare at it. The question that on any other Monday would get alright or long or knackered. The canal. The light going. A runner passes, headphones, doesn’t look at me.

I type: Bad day on site. Someone got hurt.

Three dots, then:

Are you okay?

Am I okay. Don’t know what that means right now. The body or the head or the bit where I can’t move.

Yeah, think so.

Where are you?

Canal, near Castlefield.

Stay there.

I stay, don’t know why. Celyn said stay and my legs agree with Celyn and the canal doesn’t ask questions and the bench is cold and the phone goes dark and then, twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, the footsteps. The Converse on the towpath. The sound I know before I see anything.

Celyn sits, doesn’t touch me, doesn’t ask. Just sits on the bench in the dark. A coat I haven’t seen before, long, dark, buttoned up. The hair’s down. Can’t see the nails in this light.

We sit.

‘He fell from the second level,’ I say. After a while. Don’t know how long. ‘Marek. The scaffold board, the bracket slipped. I was in the office doing the—I should’ve been on the floor. Should’ve checked everything.’

Celyn doesn’t say anything, the canal. A narrowboat with the lights on, someone inside cooking. I can smell it. Onions.

‘His leg.’ Marek’s leg at the angle. The wet breathing. My hands when they shouldn’t have been. ‘It was bad.’

A hand, on my knee, cold fingers, just there. Like a sandbag on a wall when the weather turns.

‘You need to eat something,’ Celyn says. The accent on something. ‘Not toast.’

I laugh, shouldn’t laugh. Laugh anyway, the short kind, the one that comes out like a cough.

We sit, longer. The narrowboat passes, the lights go, the onion smell fades, the wake laps against the stone edge. The canal goes dark again. Just the streetlight from the bridge and the reflection of it in the water, broken, moving.

I look at the hand on my knee. The fingers. Can’t see the nail colour in this dark but I know it’s there. The fingers cold from the walk to find me. Twenty-five minutes. Celyn walked twenty-five minutes from—wherever Celyn was.

People don’t walk twenty-five minutes for you. Not in the cold, not in the dark, not without asking why.

‘The bracket was rated for the load,’ I say. To the canal. Not to Celyn. ‘I checked it. Last week. Thursday. Checked every bracket on that run. They were right.’