Bare

Chapter 1

THE ARTIST ARRIVES

The boy's hand was damp and small and gripped like a vice.

Neil let himself be pulled along the pavement, past the hedgerow and the broken railing where sixth-formers smoked after the bell, and through the school gates into the chaos of a first morning.

Cars double-parked. Parents in clusters.

A woman shouting Phoebe, your packed lunch at a retreating blazer.

The September air, new shoes, anxiety, and deodorant that wouldn't survive first break.

Freddie vibrated beside him. Five years old and most of it energy, rucksack nearly as big as his torso, shoes polished to a shine that would last forty minutes. One shoelace already undone. A look on his face like someone about to storm a castle.

‘Dad.’ Freddie tugged hard enough to rock Neil's shoulder. ‘D'you reckon there's dinosaurs at school?’

Neil started to deliver a lecture on extinction timelines, caught himself, and said, ‘Maybe in the library.’

Freddie considered this with the seriousness it deserved. ‘Brilliant.’

‘Although,’ Neil said, ‘if there are, they'll be in the non-fiction section. Between D and E.’

‘What's non-fiction?’

‘True things.’

‘Dinosaurs are true things?’

‘Were. Past tense.’

‘What's past tense?’

‘Something that happened already.’

‘Like breakfast?’

‘Exactly like breakfast.’

‘So breakfast is non-fiction.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Brilliant,’ Freddie said again, and pulled harder. The rucksack bounced on his back. His laces trailed on the tarmac. Neil made a mental note, double knot tomorrow, and let himself be towed.

They stopped at the main entrance to let a woman with a double buggy through. Freddie studied the babies inside with the detached interest of a veterinarian examining specimens. ‘They're very small,’ he said.

‘You were that small once.’

‘Was I that bald?’

‘Balder.’

‘That's impossible.’

‘And yet.’

Freddie processed this affront to his dignity in silence.

They reached the Year 1 entrance. Miss Greaves stood at the door with a clipboard and the calm that infant teachers either possessed naturally or faked with heroic commitment.

She smiled at Freddie. Freddie grinned back.

The performance of bravery was so convincing that Neil nearly believed it.

‘Right then.’ Neil crouched to Freddie's level, straightened the collar of his polo shirt, checked the rucksack straps.

Adjusted them by three millimetres. Adjusted them back.

Noticed a smear of something on the left strap, toothpaste, possibly, and decided this was not a battle worth fighting on the first morning.

‘You'll be grand.’

‘I know, Dad.’ The exasperation of the very young. ‘Can I go?’

‘Yeah.’ His throat closed. ‘Go on.’

Freddie turned and walked through the door without looking back.

Then stopped, spun on his heel, and waved with his entire arm, fingers spread wide, elbow going like a windscreen wiper.

Two other mothers near the door smiled. One of them caught Neil's eye with the look of shared recognition, the look of adults watching bravery happen in real time.

Neil waved back, more contained, and held the smile until the door closed.

His hand hung empty at his side. The ghost of that small grip. He straightened, rolled his shoulders, buttoned his jacket. The jacket was his armour the way the rucksack was Freddie's, the thing you put on before walking into a building full of people.

Work mode: on.

The assembly hall. Stacking chairs in approximate rows, most occupied by colleagues in various states of post-holiday adjustment. Some tanned. Some haggard. All clutching mugs like talismans.

Neil took his seat, end of the third row, close enough to the door to suggest engagement, far enough from the front to avoid eye contact with Mrs Webb during safeguarding.

He set his folder on his knee. Colour-coded tabs visible.

Printed agenda. Pen aligned with the spiral binding.

Black ink, medium nib, the same brand for six years because it didn't smudge, didn't bleed, and didn't surprise him.

Martin Clarke from Geography gave a two-finger salute across the aisle. His tan suggested Spain or a sunbed. Neil returned it with a nod.

Sue Dhillon dropped into the seat beside him. Coffee in one hand, biscuit in the other. She settled, twelve years in this chair, opinions about all of it.

‘Good holiday?’

‘Fine, thanks. You?’

‘Lake District. Rained the entire time. The kids built a fort out of cagoules and spent three days inside it watching iPads. Very outdoorsy. Very character-building.’ She bit the biscuit. ‘New art teacher's late.’

‘The agenda says he's joining from an exhibition installation.’

‘The agenda says late start. I say late. There's a difference between fashionable delay and absent from a staff meeting. One's acceptable and one gets the Webb look.’

‘The Webb look has ended careers.’

‘The Webb look has ended marriages. My husband got it once at a parents' evening. He still flinches when he hears the word safeguarding.’

Neil's mouth twitched. Sue was the only colleague who consistently made him do that. She ran a statistics class like stand-up, same timing, same deadpan, same instinct for when the audience was flagging.

Mrs Webb took the podium in her grey suit, reading glasses on a chain.

Welcome-backs and housekeeping. Timetable changes, Years 10 and 11 now sharing the science labs on Tuesdays, which would cause problems nobody would mention until November.

Car park protocol: staff spaces numbered, anyone parking in the head's space would be spoken to.

The ongoing war with the Year 9s over chewing gum.

A brief digression about July's incident involving Hubba Bubba and a fire extinguisher bracket that had required industrial solvent and the premises team.

‘That incident cost us two hundred pounds,’ Mrs Webb said. ‘I have asked Mr Harrison to present a gum-disposal strategy to SLT by half-term. I expect compliance.’

The room murmured. The word compliance from Mrs Webb carried the weight of a sentencing remark.

Then safeguarding. Then data protection. Then the behaviour policy everyone would nod at and nobody would implement consistently. Neil took notes because writing kept his hands busy and his focus sharp. Thirty-three years old and he still needed mechanisms to stay in the room.

‘Right,’ Mrs Webb said, adjusting her glasses.

‘One final item before we all pretend the coffee is drinkable. We welcome a new colleague to the art department. Some of you may know his name from the local arts scene. He joins us from an exhibition installation at the Whitmore Gallery. Please welcome Rory Cavanaugh.’

The double doors at the back of the hall swung open with more force than necessary, and Neil's orderly concept of new art colleague collapsed.

The man who walked in was tall. Broad across the shoulders, genetics or heavy lifting or both.

Shirt worn open over a dark tee, sleeves shoved to the elbows, the fabric straining at the biceps, the shirt bought before the arms had finished deciding what size they were.

Worn jeans that sat low on his hips. Paint-spattered boots, scuffed to the sole, worn rather than displayed.

Dark curls past his shoulders, half pulled into a knot at the back of his head that was losing the battle with gravity.

A face that was all angles, strong jaw, nose that had been broken at least once, and a silver ring at his lower lip catching the fluorescent light.

He walked in like he was arriving at his own kitchen. Unhurried. Half a smile on his lips that wasn't apologising for anything.

Neil's pen pressed into the notepad hard enough to leave an indent.

A charge down his spine. Quick, involuntary.

It settled low in his stomach and sat there like a fist. He'd spent years cataloguing it, managing it, filing it under the same locked heading as the laptop and the bar and the man in Tesco's he'd followed out and never seen again, the body's response to a male body.

Except those had been dark, anonymous. This was fluorescent-lit and three rows away and walking towards the front of the room with paint on his hands and a lip ring that caught the light every time he turned his head.

Nothing he couldn't manage.

He repeated it like a grammar rule. Subject, verb, object. His body ignored him.

Sue leaned over. ‘Bit dishy, isn't he?’

‘I hadn't noticed.’

‘You've gone white.’

‘It's September. Everyone's white.’

‘Martin isn't white. Martin's been to Spain.’

‘Sue.’

‘Fine. But for the record: dishy.’

Martin Clarke, on Sue's other side, shrugged with the comfortable disinterest of a married heterosexual man who didn't understand the question and wasn't going to pretend otherwise.

Rory reached Mrs Webb's side and turned to face the room. Green eyes made a slow pass across the assembled staff. Confident. Genuinely interested in what was in front of him. His eyes found Neil. Stayed. One beat. Two. Curiosity. A second look.

Neil broke first. Dropped his eyes to his notepad, where the indent of his pen sat like an accusation. His pulse knocked against the side of his throat. He swallowed.

Mrs Webb assigned Rory the courtyard mural.

The blank exterior wall, two years abandoned, three proposals dead of committee.

He stepped forward. No notes. No PowerPoint.

Spoke about it with total, unselfconscious absorption, the wall as a living surface, a tree with roots below and canopy above, built over time with student input at every stage.

Years layering on it. New classes adding branches and texture.

His hands moved as he talked, shaping branches in the air. Paint sat in the creases of his knuckles, ochre and blue, ground in like a second skin. Neil tracked those hands and forgot to take notes. Forgot to pretend to take notes.