Page 114 of Undefined Terms

Mum hugs him like she’s done it a hundred times. Takes the tin, looks inside. ‘Oh, you didn’t.’ Laurence picks up a tea towel without being asked, dries because his hands need a job, in the kitchen where Dad taught me to tie a tie when I was fourteen and had a funeral to go to. Ewan watches him do it with the face I know now. The wrong-temperature face, gone right.

The phone goes at half twelve. The landline. Nobody rings the landline.

Mum wipes her hands. ‘Sean.’

The kitchen changes, and not loud — the opposite. Ewan’s shoulders go up. Laurence stops drying.

‘They’re here,’ Mum says, into the phone. A pause. ‘All of them.’ A shorter pause. ‘Right.’ Then, flat, no edge on it, because the edge wore off somewhere back in the autumn: ‘Suit yourself. Happy Christmas, Sean.’

The receiver down.

Forty seconds. That’s the whole call. Forty seconds on Christmas Day from a man in a one-bed in Deptford.

It was never Laurence. And it was bigger than Ewan, in the end. It was the quiet, all the years of it. Dad going quiet and Mum filling every gap, talking enough for two so the silence never got a seat at the table.

Then me and Ewan left, and there was nothing left to fill it with, and she stopped, and the quiet was the marriage. He won’t drive the twenty minutes because the twenty minutes end at a table where nobody talks over his silence for him any more.

Ewan told me he managed a record once. The first family dinner at Laurence’s, the pair of them bent over a Pink Floyd sleeve, Dad’s arms uncrossing for the first time in years over a Harvest label and no barcode. He can do a record. One sleeve, one man, one evening, no audience.

He can’t do this. The table. The holly cloth. The all-of-it-at-once.

We eat. Mum, Ewan, Laurence, me. The chair at the head empty.

Mum talks enough for two, fills it, Maeve’s hip and the church roof and the terrine, which is what Laurence’s tin turns out to be, and nobody at this table except Laurence has met a terrine. She asks him about his work. Gets the maths wrong. He corrects her gentle and she laughs the real laugh.

My phone goes under the table, face up before the head catches up to the hope. Not Celyn. The thread sits where it’s sat for days, nothing new under it.

Across the table Ewan catches me at it. Doesn’t say anything, just tips his head at the pudding Mum’s carrying in, the blue flame going round it. She’s outdone herself. And she has. Laurence has gone at the terrine, properly gone, eyes wet over a tin of pâté, and nobody says a word about it because letting him off is the kindest thing in the room.

Not Celyn. Of course not Celyn.

The thread with the green nails and the cat sits up there, untouched since the door closed. It’s you, last thing in it, my own silence under it like a read receipt I can’t argue with.

I look at the chair at the head, empty, that Dad emptied an inch at a time. Then at the seat beside me. Empty too. Where Celyn would be. Except I didn’t lose that one slow. I did it in an evening, a drawer and a wardrobe and a wash cycle, and then I did it again with one word in their own bed. Two empty chairs at one table, and only one of them’s my father’s doing.

Ewan catches me looking. The eyes that miss nothing.

Doesn’t say it. Kicks my foot under the table, soft. The kick from a hundred dinners.

I kick back.

Mum brings the pudding in lit, Ewan does the lights, the brandy going blue in the dark. Laurence’s hand finds Ewan’s knee under the cloth, I see the cloth shift, and Ewan leans into it, into a man at a table his father wouldn’t drive twenty minutes to sit at. Nobody looks at the chair at the head. Looking at it would make it a thing, and Mum’s not letting it be a thing, not today, not on the first one. She’s holding this table up with the same arms she’s held every other thing up with, and the holding is the loudest part of the room.

I pull a cracker with my mother. The hat’s purple. I put it on.

Somewhere under the mountains Celyn’s in a paper crown next to a dad who says ‘he,’ loved out loud across a table too small for everyone on it.

Two tables. One word each, and neither of us said ours.

I stay down a few days at Mum’s, the box room, the bed a foot too short. The old pull of the place around me the whole time, the simple one, the one with no words in it: Lewisham, the 171 bus, the kebab shop open till three, Big Steve who sells Marlboros and doesn’t ask how your week’s been because he doesn’t and that’s the beauty of it.

Boxing Day. Robbie and Trav text: Nag’s Head, eight. The usual, except there’s no usual any more, just the one night I’m down and they know it.

Mum’s kitchen. The table with the plastic tablecloth, the one with the flowers. The radio on, violins. She’s got the oven going and the flat smells like, home. Roast, potatoes, gravy from the granules because she’s never made it from scratch and never will and that’s fine because the granules are right.

She looks at me, that look. Mum look. She doesn’t push. Turns back to the oven, opens it. Blast of heat. Potatoes.

‘Set the table,’ she says.