Page 2 of Undefined Terms

‘Nobody does,’ Celyn says. ‘That’s how it gets in.’ The eyes hold mine and don’t drop, steady the way you hold a level and wait for the bubble to settle.

‘What do I look like?’

The question’s direct. Can’t tell if it’s flirty. Celyn’s chin is on one hand, watching me, and I don’t know where to put myself.

‘Dunno,’ I say.

True. Dunno what you look like. What you are. Dunno why I’m sat at this table with an empty glass and a pulse in my throat.

‘Most people have a guess by now,’ Celyn says, easy, not a challenge. ‘Boy or girl. They land on one and relax.’

‘And if they land wrong?’

‘I’m neither. I use they. So they always land wrong, and it’s the most boring thing about me. And you haven’t landed anywhere. That’s why you’re still in the chair.’

I haven’t got a guess. Haven’t got the word for it. The not-having sits where a word should be and doesn’t bother me the way I reckon it should.

Celyn smiles. Wider. The teeth are slightly crooked, the crow’s feet show, and for a second, just a second, I see the whole face. The face, nothing more, and the face is.

‘Walk me through your day,’ Celyn says.

‘What?’

‘On the site. What you do. From the start.’

Nobody asks me this. Dave tells me what to check, Gaz says cheers boss. Mum asks am I eating. And I open my mouth and start talking and don’t stop.

The footings, you check by feel. Run your palm along the concrete and you feel what the eye can’t see. Air pockets. Cracks. The rough patches where the set went wrong. The hand knows before the eye. Then the steel, twelve-mil rebar tied in grids. Every tie, every overlap. If the steel’s wrong the building fails and people die. The pour, forty tonnes off the back of the trucks and it goes where you tell it. You shake the air out. Smooth the top, wait.

Friday morning. The pour’s scheduled but the concrete truck breaks down on the motorway and Dave’s got his phone pinned to his ear, doing the voice he keeps for suppliers. Gaz is eating crisps with his mouth open and doesn’t care.

‘Cheers boss,’ he says when I tell him to help Dean move the formwork back. ‘Though we’d be pouring by now.’

‘We will. Truck’s late.’

Dean comes past with a board under each arm, doesn’t say anything. Dean is the opposite of Gaz. Gaz talks enough for both of them and it doesn’t annoy me because it’s just noise, just air moving. But Dean notices things; he reads what isn’t said.

The formwork’s set, the level’s good. We could go back and wait in the portacabin or we could stand here and let the wind do what it does and not think about anything except the concrete that’s coming. Except I’m thinking about the soft R, that mouth.

‘You met someone,’ Dean says. Doesn’t look at me. Just checking a tie on the grid, pulling it tight, the knot going through like he’s done it a thousand times. He has.

‘No.’

‘Right.’

‘Not like that.’

‘That’s the exact thing someone says when they’ve met someone like that.’

Gaz’s listening now. The crisps paused halfway to his mouth. ‘Is it a girl?’

‘Not your business, Gaz.’

‘That means yes.’ He eats the crisp. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Mate, you look like you’ve been hit with a spade. Your whole face is different. It matters.’