Page 99 of Undefined Terms

‘Why triangles?’

‘Push the top of a rectangle and it deforms. Parallelogram. Can’t do that with a triangle. The shape’s fixed. Every force gets distributed through three members, not two.’

Celyn’s eyes are doing it, the thing where something I said just became material.

‘You’re going to put that in the novel,’ I say.

‘The house has a frame,’ Celyn says. The mouth doing the half-thing. ‘Everything has a frame. The thing you can’t see that holds the thing you can.’

I drink my tea.

I don’t say: today I nearly put a structural fault in a building because I was thinking about your mouth. I don’t say: you’re in every room now, even the rooms where I need you not to be.

The mug goes up, comes down. Warm still.

‘You’re off tonight,’ Celyn says.

‘I’m always like this.’

‘Different than your different.’

I don’t know what to do with that. Glasses come off, get put on the table. Laptop closes halfway. Attention shifts, full, on me.

‘Ron.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Work nothing or real nothing?’

Celyn. The face.

‘What?’

‘You do that thing,’ Celyn says. ‘When something’s wrong at work. Your hands go flat on the table. Like you’re measuring something that isn’t there.’

I look at my hands. Flat on the table.

Bollocks.

‘Long day,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’

‘It’s not the work.’ Not a question. The dry sanded off the voice. ‘You’ve had the look a while now. The one a man wears when he’s keeping a door behind him, one hand on it the whole time. Like you’re half gone already and haven’t decided which way.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Didn’t say the street.’ The grey-green holds me a beat. Two. Then Celyn lets it go, the way you set down a thing you’re not finished with. ‘Drink your tea, Ron.’

The laptop opens again. The typing resumes.

The bar, the table, the sound of Celyn typing over the rim.

We stay until the bar closes. Celyn writes, I sit. The typing comes and goes, fast, then nothing, then fast. The rhythm of the novel, the rhythm I’ve learnt to sit inside without needing to understand. Sometimes Celyn reads me a sentence, ‘does this sound like a door?’ and I say yes or no and don’t know what I’m agreeing to but the face tells me I got it right.

At ten Celyn closes the laptop. The stretch. Arms above the head, the cardigan riding up, the stomach, the skin. I don’t look, I look.

‘Walk me home?’

‘It’s three minutes.’