Page 95 of Undefined Terms

‘I dunno.’

‘Guess.’

I don’t want to guess. I want to not know, want to stay in the flat with the rain and the telly and the hand that just let go so Celyn could ask me a question I don’t have an answer to.

‘I’d say, he’s the one losing out.’ The words come wrong. They’re not the ones I was looking for. ‘I’m here. With you. Getting the tea cold. Watching shite darts. Having a life that’s, it’s not special. It’s just mine. And he’s the one who doesn’t get to be in it.’

Celyn shifts. Pulls the knees up again. Back to the small version.

‘But that doesn’t work either,’ I say. ‘Because the thing is, he’s lost Ewan for a year. He’s not going to un-lose him just because I explain the profit margins to him like it’s a business transaction.’ I drag a hand over my face. The stubble catches. ‘And I don’t know if he can be changed. I don’t know if the fire door opens again or if he just. Gets smaller. Quieter. Tells himself a story about sons who made a choice to disappoint him.’

The telly, the seventeen millimetres.

‘So you don’t say anything,’ Celyn says.

‘No. I don’t say anything. I come home. To here. To you. To the flat that smells like burning hair gel from the barber downstairs and has a stain on the ceiling and is four metres from the toilet because the landlord’s a tight bastard.’ I turn to look at Celyn. The knees. The t-shirt. How the face looks when it’s just waiting. ‘I come home. And that’s the choice. Every time. And the fire door stays closed and my father stays behind it and I get to have something. So the loss isn’t, it’s not nothing. It’s just. Negotiated.’

Celyn puts the hand back on the knee. Doesn’t squeeze, just sits there, warm.

‘The Welsh helps,’ Celyn says. ‘When Mam’s difficult. When the pronouns go wrong. I can go back to Welsh and I’m. I’m someone else for a bit. Something that doesn’t need translating.’

‘I don’t get that,’ I say. ‘I just get this. One language. The one that comes out wrong no matter what.’

‘You get me,’ Celyn says. ‘Which is also a language. Just, not the one you were born with.’

The rain, the hand.

‘Not sure I’m fluent yet,’ I say.

‘You’re getting there,’ Celyn says. ‘You’re getting there.’

And maybe that’s enough. The whole thing would be a father who opens a door. Would be Ewan at a Christmas table. Would be a word I don’t have to un-hear. But this. This is something. Celyn’s hand on the knee. The rain hitting the glass. The flat that’s too small and too warm and the only place I know how to stay.

I squeeze the knee. Celyn squeezes back.

The squeeze back is the whole conversation.

The rain hits the glass in sheets. The darts on the wall. The Welsh still in the air between us, the shape of words I’ll never make right.

My hand on the knee. The squeeze back.

Don’t know.

Don’t move.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The spring went, then the summer, the site climbing floor by floor, the heat curing the concrete too fast so we poured at six to beat it.

July does what July does to a slab, which is try to set it before you’ve finished it. We pour at first light, done by half nine, and by ten the crew’s down to vests and Kenny’s got the hose on the third floor like a man watering a garden he hates. Saturday crew, the volunteer shift: me, Dean, Gaz, Kenny, two agency lads whose names I’ll have learned by the time they’re gone.

The flatmate tour happens, finally. Steph’s architect, the one from the text I never answered. It had sat there for months, the little x on the end of it, until Gaz brought it up at lunch like a snag I’d been ignoring. Her mate still wants the site, you know. You never answered. So I answered, because unanswered questions don’t go away, they just get heavier, and this one weighed nothing once I put it down.

Sally turns up at ten with her own hard hat, which tells you most of what you need to know, and asks about the underpinning before she’s through the gate. Where the Victorian brick starts. What we did about the water table. She photographs a wall tie like it’s a face. Steph trails her with two coffees and sunglasses, out of her depth and happy about it.

Celyn texts at half ten. You left your charger. Also I want to see the crane.

At eleven there’s a person at the gate in a vest and green nails, holding my charger up like evidence. The summer version: stubble, sunglasses pushed up, the notebook in the back pocket because the notebook goes where Celyn goes.