Page 111 of Undefined Terms

Still warm.

Like Mum.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sunday, a week after Mum. The flat, and rain, committed rain.

I fix the bathroom tap. It’s been dripping since October, the washer’s gone, the rubber split, and the drip’s been keeping time with the flat like a metronome nobody asked for. I’ve got the parts from the hardware shop on Tib Street, the one run by the bloke with the moustache who calls everyone ‘chief.’ Washer, O-ring, PTFE tape. Two quid forty.

I turn off the stopcock and take the handle apart. The brass is tarnished, green, the oxidation, the same thing that happens to copper on a site when you leave it in the wet. I clean it with a rag. Fit the washer, wrap the thread, tighten, turn the stopcock back.

Run the tap, no drip.

I stand in the bathroom and listen to the silence where the drip was. Four months of that sound, gone. The flat adjusts. The fridge hums louder without the counterpoint.

I make tea, sit on the sofa, the telly’s off, don’t turn it on. The rain on the window and the fridge and the radiator ticking and the silence from the bathroom tap. Four sounds. None of them need anything from me.

I wash the mug. Put the tools back in the bag.

The flat settles around the fix, the way buildings do. They absorb the change, recalibrate, carry on. Everything I touch ends up working.

Seven days since Mum. Seven evenings, me doing all the talking.

You about. A thumbs-up, nothing else. Bar tonight? Read, no answer. You alright? Read, the little grey word and nothing under it. Day three the thumbs-up stops. By day seven I’m texting into a thread that’s only got my side in it, blue bubble under blue bubble, a man talking to himself with a delivery receipt. I ring once. Voicemail in two rings, which is a thumb coming down on purpose.

I know why. I put Celyn in a drawer. My mum sat in that chair and before she was off the train I’d moved the mug, the toothbrush, the second pillow, wiped the flat of a person the way I clear a site at the end of a job. I never said it. You don’t have to be told you’ve been hidden. You feel the drawer shut from the inside.

So I text into the quiet and the quiet keeps it. The showcase is Thursday. I’ll go and stand at the back whether they answer or not. That’s what being in the room means. Even when the room’s gone quiet on you.

Same room as the reading, same plastic chairs, same strip lights. The showcase. Bigger crowd. The whole MA cohort, forty-odd, plus two external assessors in the front row with notebooks and the expressions of people whose job is deciding if other people’s work is real. Pritchard’s at the side: navy blazer, grey hair, clipboard. The hand that was on Celyn’s elbow back in February.

I’m in the back row, same row, same position. The jacket Ewan said makes me look like a bouncer. My hands on my knees.

We’ve not spoken since Mum, three texts and a thumbs-up between us. I came anyway, because not coming would say a thing I don’t mean.

Celyn walks to the lectern.

The skirt, the dark knee-length one, heels that click, full makeup, the stubble a day’s shadow under it. And the whole room looking.

Two external assessors. Forty students. Pritchard with the clipboard.

Celyn opens the folder, the hands steady. I can see from here: the nails are green, bright, the colour of something decided.

The door chapter. The one Pritchard said not to read.

Celyn reads.

The voice, the Welsh, the low register. The words fill the room the way concrete fills formwork: every space, every corner. The woman lies in bed and listens to the door opening by itself at three in the morning and she doesn’t move because whatever’s on the other side is hers.

The room holds its breath. I know this feeling. The reading at the bookshop, the same silence, the same arms going cold. But bigger. Forty people and two assessors and the strip lights humming and Celyn’s voice underneath all of it.

It’s brilliant. The room knows it. I know it. The woman in the front row has stopped writing.

Celyn finishes. Looks up. The silence holds for two seconds, three. Then the applause, real, the kind that comes from the stomach.

Pritchard stands.

‘Thank you, Beynon.’ Surnames, with Pritchard. Always. The one thing the man gets right, the surname stepping clean over the he or she he never bothered to learn. The voice carries. Pleasant, measured, the voice of a man who’s about to be reasonable. ‘I’d asked you to prepare a different section. We discussed this.’