Page 54 of Undefined Terms

‘The one where you’re thinking something and you’re not going to say it.’

‘I’m not thinking anything.’

‘Right.’

The cold air and the streetlights and the postbox-lips half-wiped and somewhere ahead the flat and the key under the mat. The reading still in my arms, not my ears, my arms, the cold going through them when Elin reached for the mug. And Celyn wrote that. I build things. Between those two facts there’s a gap. I’m in it.

He builds things.

It is enough. Don’t know why it matters that it’s enough.

But it does.

The silence is the wrong kind. Celyn’s at the restaurant until close, double shift, someone called in sick. The flat’s mine; hasn’t felt mine for weeks but tonight it’s mine.

I eat. Beans on toast. No garden-fruit smell tonight, no tea in the white one. I make one cup in the blue one, and leave the white one where it is, because using it when Celyn’s not here feels wrong. Like putting on someone’s jacket in an empty room.

No milk, because Celyn does the milk.

And the bread.

And the small things neither of us assigned.

I sit on the bed with the mug. The bed that’s too big. Wasn’t too big when I moved in, the estate agent said double and I thought luxury because the one in Rotherhithe was a single and my feet hung off the end. Now the double’s too big. The left side has a shape in it that’s not mine. The mattress remembers a weight it hasn’t got tonight. I sit on my side. The right side. The rain.

The telly’s on. Football. Highlights I should care about. Don’t. My eyes on the screen and not watching any of it. Plate on my lap, the fork going back and forth, and outside it’s raining, the window doing that tick-tick-tick from the drops. The flat small and full of things that belong to someone who isn’t here.

The beans, the plate, I wash it. The sponge, the hot water, the plate on the rack. My boots by the door, the hi-vis on the hook, the hard hat on the shelf.

Shower, the water too hot. Eyes shut. The day comes off. The dust, the concrete, the noise. And under the day there’s the other thing. The one that’s been there since the reading, since the bar, since the first night. The hum. Low. Constant. Like a generator you stop hearing until someone switches it off.

Nobody switched it off.

I get out. Towel, boxers, teeth, the bed. Sheets changed yesterday, Celyn’s idea, because apparently you’re supposed to change them more than once a month. The pillow smells like detergent. Detergent.

I lie on my back. Ceiling. The crack that runs from the light fitting to the corner. I’ve been tracking that crack since I moved in. Hasn’t got worse, hasn’t got better. Structural nothing, cosmetic, plaster shrinkage, doesn’t mean anything.

The phone on the bedside table. I pick it up. Type: How’s the shift. Delete it. Type: I think about you when you’re not here and I don’t know what that means. The cursor blinks. Fifteen words, too many, too real, the backspace key, letter by letter, the screen goes blank.

Ewan said his words at the kitchen table and Dad pushed back the chair and the chair legs scraped the tiles and the scraping sound is still in the kitchen. The backspace key doesn’t work on sentences you say out loud.

The generator hum, still there.

I think about the reading. The voice that made the room cold. The arms that went cold. My arms, the goosebumps.

Then: Celyn in the morning. No makeup, stubble. Hair on the pillow. Mouth slightly open, breathing.

This is the line, right here. The boxers and the ceiling and the hand on my stomach. The previous times, the WhatsApp photo, the mattress at two in the morning, those happened TO me. Like tripping.

This is not an accident.

My hand is on my stomach and moving down and I know what I’m doing and I’m choosing to do it. This is. This is me. On purpose, with my eyes open, in my flat. With the name in my mouth before I’ve started.

The hand goes into the boxers. Wraps around, tight. Familiar, years of this. But the pictures are new. All of them. Every version.

Dress. Stubble. That laugh, the real one, the pillow one. Voice reading the horror novel in front of thirty-odd people with the accent thickening on certain words. Voice in the dark saying there like a compass point. Hands, the ring, on my chest, flat, feeling. Hip bones under my thumbs. The weight, the sound through lace.

I don’t separate them, don’t try, the skirt, the hoodie. Stubble, eyeliner, bare face. Lace, boxers, the—all of it. At the same time. Because there aren’t options. There’s Celyn.