Page 69 of Undefined Terms

‘Then it wasn’t your fault.’

‘His leg was broken.’

‘Ron. Was it your fault.’

I look at the water. The broken light, the cold.

‘No.’

‘Then it wasn’t your fault.’

The sound of a body hitting ground. The wet breathing. The angle of a leg. But Celyn’s voice underneath, the Welsh, it gets in there too.

My hands start. On my knees, in the cold. The hands that didn’t shake once today, not on the rubble, not on the phone to Marek’s wife, not on the forms, pick now to go, a fine tremor I can’t stop. All day I was the steady one in a room full of people who weren’t.

Celyn takes them. Both, between both of theirs, cold over cold, and holds them still. Doesn’t say anything about it. Doesn’t make it a thing. Just stops the shaking with the grip, the way you’d steady a length of rebar before you tie it off.

The steady one tonight isn’t me. And I let it not be me.

‘I’ll make you something,’ Celyn says. ‘At yours. Come on.’

I go. Because Celyn said come on and the bench is cold and the canal doesn’t have food.

Key, Celyn’s key, the brass ring. Celyn moves through my kitchen like it’s Celyn’s kitchen, knows which drawer has the fork, which cupboard has the pan, the hob that runs hot on the left burner and cold on the right. Eggs, cheese, the pan I never use properly. I eat at the counter. Fork, plate, crack in the ceiling.

My phone buzzes, the gaffer from head office. HSE update: two days minimum, possible three. The scaffold company’s engineer tomorrow at nine. Paperwork by end of week.

The phone goes face down on the counter. The eggs are good. The cheese is the wrong kind, Celyn buys the one with the rind, the one that costs three quid for a tiny block, but it works.

Celyn sits on the bed and reads on the laptop and doesn’t ask me to talk about it.

The laptop sounds, the safe place.

Except the site was the safe place too. And now there’s a gap in the scaffolding, a bracket that slipped, a man in hospital. And I’m eating eggs and cheese in a flat that smells like someone else’s cooking, and the only thing mattering in the whole day is the hand that was on my knee.

Which makes Celyn the—I don’t know what that makes Celyn. Something I don’t have a⁠—

One safe place left.

I wash the plate, the fork, the pan.

Celyn looks up. ‘Come to bed, Ron.’

I go.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The gate’s locked, the padlock mine, and there’s a scaffold with a bent standard visible from the road.

Four days. The site’s shut for four days, and I’ve never had four days off that weren’t Christmas or a funeral. The first one I spend at the flat: forms, calls, the scaffold engineer who arrives at nine and spends two hours looking at brackets and writing on a clipboard and saying nothing useful. The second one I clean, which takes twenty minutes because the flat’s small and I don’t own much.

Then there’s two days left. The walls are close and the crack in the ceiling’s bigger. Or looks bigger.

On the second afternoon my phone buzzes. Steph. Hey! How’s the project going? My flatmate would love to see the site sometime x

I read it, put the phone down, pick it up, read it again. There’s nothing wrong with the message. Polite, friendly, the kind of text you answer with yeah sure, will sort something and forget about.

I don’t answer it. Don’t know why. The message sits on the screen and I look at it and the thing that should happen, the typing, the reply, the normal, doesn’t. Like a joint that won’t fit. The right shape, the right size, just. Won’t.