Page 85 of Undefined Terms

Neither of us says anything for a while. Football on the telly, an arguing couple. Carpet sticky under my boots. The word still on the table. Can’t unhear it. Ewan knows, the clever bastard.

He looks at the table. At the wet ring his glass left on the mat. And his voice changes, thinner.

‘We had a row, a couple of months in. Worst one we’ve had. I walked out of the flat.’

I look at him.

‘Didn’t say anything. Just. Left. Walked round Chorlton for two hours in December. No coat. My phone was in the flat. He thought I’d gone for good.’

‘Why.’

‘He’d started talking like it was permanent. A holiday booked for the year after, the word “we” starting to mean years instead of weeks. Forever stuff. And I picked the fight because forever meant there was finally something I could lose, and some part of me would rather blow it up myself than stand there waiting for it to be taken off me. I knew how to chase a thing and how to fuck it and how to be clever about it. I didn’t know how to just stay. Stand in it. And not run.’ He picks up the pint. Puts it down. Picks it up.

I’ve never heard Ewan say this. Never heard his voice do this, the thinness, the edges showing. Walked out of a flat in December with no coat because the thing had got too big to stand still inside.

‘What happened?’

‘I went back. He was sat on the sofa with my coat over his knees and the kettle already on. He said “I’m not going anywhere, Ewan. You can keep trying to wreck it to save yourself the wait, or you can let me stay.” Then he got up and made toast, because that’s what he does when he can’t find the words, and burnt it, the way he always burns it.’

The coat, the kettle. The man who burnt toast instead of asking where I’d been.

‘Burnt toast,’ I say.

‘Worst toast I’ve ever had.’ The half-smile. The one I know, the Ewan one, the one using one side of the mouth. ‘Best morning of my life.’

‘So you were scared.’ My voice comes out flat, not a question. ‘And you went back.’

‘Scared shitless. And went back. Yeah.’

‘How d’you know when to go back.’

‘You don’t. You just go.’

I look at my brother. The grey jumper, Laurence’s. The hands that don’t shake anymore. The kid who climbed into my bed when Mum and Dad were rowing. I’d lie there and feel him breathing and the breathing was scared and I’d put my arm over him and say nothing because I was twelve and I didn’t have words either.

And now he’s sat in a pub in Manchester telling me about burnt toast and I’m sat here with a lipstick mark under my polo and we’re both the same. We’re both something Dad wouldn’t recognise. Something better. Something the house in Lewisham wasn’t built for.

‘Ewan.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thanks.’

He drinks. Doesn’t say for what. Doesn’t need to.

‘Another?’ Ewan says. Like he didn’t just drop a grenade on the table and walk away.

‘Yeah.’

The pub, the draught. The word that won’t fit back in the glass.

I walk home, past the bar, the lights are off. Celyn’s shift doesn’t end for another hour.

The bed that’s made because Celyn made it this morning. I don’t make beds, never have, and the duvet is flat and the pillows are straight because it’s Celyn’s handwriting on my flat.

The bed, the edge. My boots still on, the lipstick mark under the polo. I pull the collar down and look. A faded smear, almost nothing, almost gone.

The word. It’s in the flat now. Ewan said it in the pub and I carried it home and now it’s here. In the mug, in the made bed, in the charger. Love, four letters. The ones Ewan walked out of a flat in December to avoid. The ones Laurence said over burnt toast.