Page 155 of Undefined Terms

A dog barks, far off. Somebody’s dog, not theirs.

I could say Catrin will learn. I could say it gets better. I could say the things people say when they’re not the one being misnamed.

Don’t.

Celyn breathes out. A cloud in the cold.

The hand finds mine. The ring warm now, my thumb’s worn it that way. We stand.

Bed is Celyn’s old room, top of the stairs, under the slope of the roof. Single.

We don’t fit. We make it work anyway, Celyn’s back against my chest, my arm dead under the pillow inside ten minutes and me not moving it, because moving means saying out loud that the bed’s a single and we’re not seventeen.

The room’s wrong and it takes me a minute to place why. It’s the colour. Pale blue, wall to wall, blue ceiling, white skirting, white wardrobe, the blue they paint a room when they’ve been told it’s a boy. The decision got made before the kid turned up and never once got looked at again. And then, against all that blue, books. Two deep on every shelf, the spines I’m learning, the names Celyn says like a service. A window seat, the cushion worn flat to the board, the only thing in the room that ever really got used.

‘Blue for a boy,’ Celyn says into the dark, picking the thought up before I’ve put it down. ‘Mam did the whole room before I was even here. I asked for a library, later. You don’t get the walls changed, not in that house, but I got shelves, and I filled them, and you can still see the blue behind Shirley Jackson if you know where to look.’

On the back of the door, many swimming certificates gone yellow. I can read them from the bed. Gethin Beynon. Fifty metres. The name in a teacher’s careful capitals.

‘I could swim,’ Celyn says, tracking where I’m looking. ‘I could win things. I could do every single thing they asked except be the kid on that bit of paper.’

‘I never met that kid,’ I say instead. The fifty metres. The capitals. ‘Not being hard about it. I just never did. I drove up a mountain in a car that can’t do mountains, for the person in this bed. Not the one on the door.’

The house ticks. A sheep somewhere objects to nothing.

‘They’re getting there,’ I say. ‘Your mam took your face in both hands tonight and put no name on it at all. Owain doesn’t trip. Your dad works for it so hard you can watch it cost him, and he pays up every time. The little ones don’t know there’s a thing to get wrong.’ I find the hem of the t-shirt, the warm skin under it. ‘They had the wrong kid the best part of twenty years and they’d have walked through fire for that kid the whole time. Now they’ve got the real one and they’re learning the controls. They’ll get there. And the day they don’t, I’m still here.’

Celyn’s quiet a long moment. The breathing slows. The shoulders come down off the ears, the way they wouldn’t in a single photo on that landing wall.

‘You’re very calm,’ Celyn says at last, ‘for a man crammed into a single bed.’

‘I’m exactly where I want to be.’ True, and the truest thing I’ve got. I haven’t got a bigger word for it, and I wouldn’t trust a bigger word if it turned up. ‘Go to sleep.’

Celyn goes first, the way Celyn always does, all at once, like a switch thrown. I lie there with my arm dead and the roof close over the both of us and I look at the certificate till the dark takes the letters off it. Not this one’s problem any more, the kid on the door. Mine now. Every version of them, that one included, because that one’s what got them up the mountain to me.

The old house settles in the cold. I sleep.

Morning. Seven, out of habit. The house asleep. I go out to the van because the van’s there and checking it is something to do with my hands.

Frost on the windscreen. The mountain pink at the top, the lane quiet. There’s a wall along the lane, dry stone, the proper kind, no mortar, every stone holding its neighbours by weight and judgement. Somebody’s rebuilt a stretch of it recently. The new bit’s tighter than the old bit. Show-off.

The door goes. Rhys, two mugs, a coat over the pyjamas. He hands me one and stands next to me at the wall and looks at it with me. We do that for a bit. Two men looking at a wall. It’s the most comfortable I’ve been in two days.

‘My father’s,’ he says. Nods at the old stretch. ‘And his, before him. The new bit’s mine. The frost had it last winter.’

‘It’s good.’ It is. ‘Tighter than the old.’

‘Don’t tell them that.’ He drinks his tea. ‘The dead take criticism worse than the living.’

The frost coming off the windscreen, slow. The mountain getting on with it.

‘Gethin used to sit—’ He stops. The mug stops with him. He sets the sentence down the way you set a stone down when it’s the wrong stone, and picks up another one. ‘Celyn. Celyn used to sit on that wall and read till the light went.’

I leave it. He didn’t do it for me to say anything. He did it the way you do a repair, because the wall’s yours and the gap’s yours and the weather’s coming regardless.

‘They still read like that,’ I say. ‘Light goes. Doesn’t notice. I put the lamp on.’

The they goes past him. Doesn’t snag.