Page 104 of Undefined Terms

Recognition. Same as the first day at the bar.

Celyn sits, the laptop out. The bag on the floor. The skirt settles around the boots and it shouldn’t work, none of it should work, the stubble and the lipstick and the boots and the skirt, and it works. It all bloody works.

‘You’re staring.’

‘Nah.’

‘You are. I can feel it from here.’

‘Looking out the window.’

‘The window’s behind you.’

Right. The window’s behind me. My body’s been turned towards the door for. Dunno how long. Since before Celyn came in. Like the body knew. Sorted itself towards the entrance and waited.

‘The blue’s good,’ I say. Nod at the nails.

Celyn looks at the hand. The fingers spread. The blue against the dark fabric of the skirt. ‘Electric blue. It was on sale.’

‘Suits you.’

Lipstick. The door opens a crack and shuts.

‘Cheers, Ron.’

The hand comes across the table. The blue nail catches the light. Thumb along my jaw, once. Light, quick. The stubble on my chin against the thumb, the stubble on Celyn’s chin under my eye. Mirror.

‘You alright?’ Quiet.

‘No.’

Celyn laughs, the short one that’s all breath. The hand goes back to the laptop. ‘Good.’

I drink the pint. Watch the window I’m not watching. The stubble catches the bar light and the lipstick catches it differently, and the heavy boot just sits there under all that fabric.

Celyn reads me an article from the phone. A writer who built a house out of her own novels. ‘She pulped them. Made papier-mâché. The walls are literally her own words.’ The Welsh thicker when Celyn’s excited, the vowels stretching. The lipstick shifts when the mouth moves, the shadow following the cheekbone, and I’m watching the mouth make words and the shadow is wearing two days of beard and the pint’s still half-full and I haven’t touched it.

Same bloody thing as the first night in this bar when I didn’t know what I was looking at.

The next night, the skirt’s gone. Hoodie, grey, massive. Jeans, trainers. A cap, navy, pulled low, the hair tucked under. No makeup, nothing. The stubble heavier, three days now, maybe four. The nails still blue but chipped.

A stranger would read Celyn as a bloke. A bloke in a bar with a laptop. Nobody would look twice.

I look twice, I look three times. I look from the door to the bar and from the bar to the table and from the table to the seat across from Celyn and the heat under my ribs is burning.

The same, the same.

‘Alright?’

‘Yeah.’ Celyn pulls the cap lower. ‘Rough night. Couldn’t sleep. The chapter’s being a bastard.’

‘Which one?’

‘The one where the house knows it’s been found. He’s stood at the door and the house knows.’

Don’t understand what that means. Like the house, just sit with it.

‘Tea?’