Page 149 of Undefined Terms

That’s more than my dad said first time

I look at the message. The comparison. Celyn’s father who says ‘he’ every time and nods and doesn’t change. My father who says ‘both of you’ and walks out and might come back. Both still fathers.

he didn’t hang up on me

That’s something

is it enough

The dots. Longer. Celyn typing and deleting. Typing again.

It’s a start, starts are enough.

Phone on the cushion, the sofa. The flat with the stain and the telly off and the silence that isn’t Celyn’s silence and isn’t Dad’s silence. My silence. The one I’m learning to sit in without filling it.

The stars on the ceiling. The charity-shop ones I put up last week. Crooked, wrong constellations, the moon in the wrong corner. Celyn said ‘that’s not where Orion goes’ and I said ‘who’s Orion’ and Celyn did the face.

I look at them, the glow. The plastic stars in a flat in Manchester on a ceiling that used to be bare.

The door’s not shut, cracked, daylight through the gap.

It has to be enough.

The phone call was yesterday. Twenty-seven hours. I’ve been counting without meaning to. How I count steps, how I count rebar ties.

Twenty-seven hours since Dad’s voice. The voice I know from football Saturdays and Christmas mornings and the landing at night when Mum sent him to check if we were asleep. Both of you, that’s what he said.

I walk. The route to the pub, not the bar. The bar is for Celyn. The pub is for Ewan. The evening’s cold, April, but Manchester cold isn’t calendar cold, it’s in the air whenever the air decides, and tonight it decided. My jacket’s too thin, don’t care.

Past the canal. The water’s black and flat and the streetlights make orange lines on it like someone drew them with a ruler. A couple on the towpath. Walking, close, one of them laughing. I watch them for three seconds and then don’t.

The Lass O’Gowrie, the door, the noise. Inside is warm and smells like beer and the carpets and the darts machine beeping and it’s a Tuesday and there’s nobody here who matters except the person at the corner table.

Ewan’s already there when I get in, the corner table, the one by the window, two pints. He bought the first round. That’s how I know he knows.

‘Mum called you,’ I say. Sit down. The pint’s Estrella. Not the Northern Soul.

‘Mum calls everyone. She’s a telephone exchange.’ Ewan picks up his pint. Drinks. Puts it down. The hands, the Ewan hands, always moving. Tonight they’re still. Almost. The thumb runs along the edge of the glass. Back and forth.

‘Dad called me,’ I say. ‘He said “both of you.” Like something we caught. A disease.’

Ewan doesn’t flinch, the face, flat, the eyes on me. The same look from the night with the Moretti, the surgical look, except tonight he’s not cutting. He’s just, there.

‘He said he needs time,’ I say.

‘He said the same thing to me.’ Ewan drinks. ‘Two years ago. Still timing.’

The word. Timing. Like Dad’s sat in the flat above the bookmakers with a stopwatch and at some point it’ll go off.

‘Did he ever try.’ I don’t know how to finish the sentence. ‘Did he ring you? After. When he was. Timing.’

‘Once.’ Ewan’s voice. Level. ‘About eight months in. He rang at half seven. Laurence was cooking. The football was on loud at his end. That was the whole call. United at home, going down, and he wanted someone watching it with him. I was the name his thumb landed on. “You seeing this.” Not a question. He just needed to say it out loud to one of us.’

‘What’d you say?’

‘I said I’d put it on. He said right. That was it. Forty seconds. Laurence asked who it was and I said wrong number and Laurence looked at me and I looked at Laurence and we both knew and neither of us said anything and we ate the pasta and went to bed.’

Pub. Noise. Darts machine, someone at the bar, music low. Table. Pints.