Page 142 of Undefined Terms

‘And you keep not using them.’ She made herself step inside. The floor printed up warm around her shoe and let it go slowly. ‘I came back for you. Five times. I climb out of this house and I make myself come back. For you. Do you understand what that costs.’

‘I do. That’s the part I’m sorry for.’

‘Then come. One foot, then the other, I’ll go first, I’ll hold the door.’ She heard herself begging and didn’t stop. ‘Whatever it’s doing to you, it stops the second you’re outside. It has to.’

‘It isn’t doing anything to me.’ Gently, the way you’d correct a child. ‘You’ve had it backwards since the first room. You think the house has me.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No.’ And he turned around.

She had told herself a story to get herself up the hill each night: that he was a man the house had taken, that under the wrongness there was someone who wanted out. She had loved that someone. She had built every return on him.

In the grey light there was too much of the man. The joints fell at the wrong distances, an extra knuckle in every finger, a second hinge in the neck, and the skin stretched over them had gone the exact colour of the walls, plaster turning to meat and meat to plaster, no telling where he ended and the room began. His hand on the sill had grown into the sill. When his mouth opened to smile it opened too far and kept opening, small new teeth coming in even and endless along a gum with no end to it, and the smile was gentle, and it was the worst thing she had ever looked at.

‘I’m not caught,’ he said, and the voice came out of him and out of the walls at once. ‘I knocked. I asked it to let me in, and it did, and I have never once wanted out. Out there they kept asking me what I was. In here there’s no line left to stand on. There’s no edge to find.’

‘You’re a monster.’ It was all she had left.

‘Yes.’ Delighted. Grateful, almost. ‘So is the house. You spent a whole season trying to work out which of us it was. It was both. It was always both.’ The wall flexed and drew his shoulder smoothly into itself, and he let it, the way you lean back into a chair. ‘Don’t be frightened. Or be. It’s the same to me now.’

And she ran.

She ran the way the body runs when the mind has seen too much, down the wet corridor with the walls leaning in at her shoulders, and behind her the thing that had worn a face she loved was laughing, soft and fond and delighted, in the voice that had said her name, and she did not look back, because some things you do not get to understand. You only, if you are quick, get to leave.

Page two hundred and forty-two. Elin’s out, down the hill, and there’s one page left, and I look at it and I don’t turn it over. Not yet. My hands aren’t steady.

It’s the most frightened a book’s ever made me, and I’m not even at the last page. And under the fear there’s the worse thing. I knew him. The man in the wall, choosing it, telling the woman who loved him there was never anything to save. You can’t tell, reading it, which one’s the monster, the house or the man, or whether there’s any line between them at all. I know him the way you know your own face in a dark window.

I put the stack down. The bed. The pillow against the wall. My eyes are wet, close to crying.

The flat holds, the fridge humming, traffic. The creak of the sofa in the other room.

‘Celyn.’

Creak. Footsteps. Bare feet on the floor. Celyn in the doorway, my hoodie, chipped nails. Face watching me. Reading my face before I speak.

‘The one on the threshold,’ I say. ‘That’s me.’

Celyn doesn’t move. Doorway. Light from the kitchen behind. Hoodie, bare feet.

‘Yeah,’ Celyn says.

‘You wrote me into your book.’

Silence. Brief. A word being chosen.

‘I wrote everyone I’ve ever loved into my book.’ The voice. Low. The Welsh. The vowels. ‘That’s what writers do.’

Loved.

The word. Present perfect. The tense I wouldn’t know the name of except Ewan told me once and I didn’t listen and it stuck anyway.

Loved. Not ‘love.’ Loved, the one that includes everything. Every skirt and every stubble and every midnight paragraph and every morning where the pillow smells of vanilla and cologne and the body next to mine is warm.

‘Come here,’ I say.

Celyn comes across the room, bare feet, floor, bed, sits on the edge. I can feel the weight of the mattress shifting, warmth, smell. The cologne’s gone this late, just Celyn, just skin and the laundry soap from my hoodie and underneath that what I can’t name that I’ve been smelling for fourteen months.