Page 33 of Undefined Terms

Celyn’s already there, the hoodie, tired. The shift does that. Takes the energy, leaves just the bones and the eyes. No makeup today. I prefer it.

‘You’re early,’ Celyn says.

‘No I’m not.’

I’m not early, I’m exactly on time, for my own chair, at my own table, this table, ours. It’s become ours how Celyn’s voice saying my name in Welsh became the thing I play back when I can’t sleep.

Celyn reads me like the concrete. The palm flat, the fingers spread, the thing underneath the surface telling you what’s real. ‘You’re thinking.’

‘I’m always thinking.’

‘Different thinking.’

I look at the foam on the pint, the level’s gone down. I’ve been drinking without noticing. That’s what happens when the brain goes somewhere else, the body just keeps going, automatic, how you pour concrete without thinking about the pour.

‘I like that you’re here early,’ Celyn says. Closes the laptop.

And that’s the thing about Celyn’s world. Words for things. Post-its and paragraphs and metaphors. I don’t have words. I just have: your hand in mine. Your face. The Welsh pulling the vowels. The yes.

‘You look like you didn’t sleep.’

‘Slept fine.’

Didn’t. Came in a dream about you and stood in my kitchen at five in the morning drinking tea and thinking about Welsh vowels. Fine.

Celyn reads. The laptop screen glowing, the novel. Elin’s in the house and the house is showing her rooms that weren’t there an hour ago. She touches the wallpaper and it peels back wet, like a scab lifting, and underneath there’s a door, and behind the door another room, and in the room a bed, and in the bed something that has arranged itself to look like sleep and is waiting for her to come close enough that it won’t have to pretend any more.

‘Two people,’ Celyn reads. Voice low. The Welsh pulling. ‘“Two people sleeping. Or the shapes of two people. One lies perfectly still, because the thing beside her is not quite breathing in time with anything alive, and moving would break something she doesn’t have a word for.”’

Celyn stops. Looks at me over the screen.

‘That bit,’ I say. My voice comes out rough. Clear my throat. ‘That bit where she doesn’t move.’

‘What about it.’

‘How did you write that?’

The tired eyes with nothing around them. No liner, no shadow, just the grey-green on me.

‘I watched someone,’ Celyn says.

The bar’s got noise in it. Music, glasses, someone laughing near the door. All of it far away.

I know who.

‘I watched someone.’

Celyn doesn’t move.

‘You.’

Celyn closes the laptop. Puts it in the bag. Finishes the tea, stands.

‘Let’s go?’

‘Yeah.’

We walk.