Bare

Chapter 2 #2

‘There's got to be a but.’ Neil wrote the word on the whiteboard in large letters. Capped the pen. Turned back. ‘Not bad, Jake. A story is what happens when your walk to school runs into a but. A change. A problem. Something that makes the walk matter.’

He was moving, walking between the rows, eye contact quick, one student at a time.

‘Every story you've ever read, every film you've watched, every anecdote your nan tells over Sunday lunch, there's a but in it somewhere.

Romeo loves Juliet, but their families are at war.

A hobbit finds a ring, but the ring wants to destroy the world.

Your mum's making dinner, but the oven breaks and now everyone's eating cereal.’

Laughter. The warm kind, not disruptive. The recognition of truth.

‘Your job this week: find the but. Write me a paragraph. Something that happened to you, and then the thing that made it a story.’

‘Can it be anything?’

‘Anything real. Something you actually experienced.’

‘What if nothing interesting has ever happened to me?’

‘Then you haven't been paying attention.’ Neil paused by Lily's desk. ‘Every life has a but. Most people just don't notice it.’

Pencils moved. Twenty-eight heads down. The scratch on paper, the specific, irreplaceable sound of children writing by hand, which was different from typing, more intimate, the thought travelling through the arm before it reached the page.

Maya Jills was already on paragraph two, her handwriting small and neat.

Jake drew a small dog in the margin, the drawing elaborate for a boy who claimed to hate art.

And in the corner, Toby Marsh, who'd barely spoken in two days, who sat with his shoulders hunched and his blazer sleeves pulled past his wrists, was writing with a concentration so fierce his tongue poked out. His pen didn’t stop.

Whatever he was writing, it was coming from somewhere deep.

Neil stood at the back and watched them work.

This room. These faces. The reason he'd chosen this.

Every September, the same miracle, you gave them a question and they gave you something you hadn't expected and the exchange was the closest thing to honest communication he experienced in his professional life.

The fire alarm. A drill. He ushered them into lines and out through the exit while Jake asked if they could finish during the drill and Neil said no and Jake said but sir, that's a story, isn't it, the drill is the but and Neil had to turn away so the boy didn't see him smile.

On the field, Toby Marsh stood apart from the group, exercise book clutched to his chest, fierce and private. He guarded whatever he'd written.

Neil would check the book later. Gently. A bird on the windowsill, too much attention and it flies.

In the staff room afterwardss, the teaching had done what it always did, put him back inside his competence. The version that didn't measure locks or count the days since he'd been touched.

That version lasted until he turned a corner and the air changed. Turpentine.

The reprographics room. Again. Friday. Last period free.

Neil had waited until the corridor was deserted. He let himself in, pressed the button for thirty copies of his Year 9 mock exam, and stood with his arms folded while the machine hummed.

The door opened behind him.

‘Oh. Hello.’

The room was six feet by eight. The copier took half the floor space and a shelf of paper reams lined one wall. With one person it was functional. With two it was a phone box. Rory stepped in and the air compressed, the ventilation not built for two men and the charge between them.

‘Just grabbing my prints.’ He reached past Neil to the output tray.

His arm crossed Neil's line of sight, his body turning into the space between Neil and the machine.

For a duration that lasted either for a second, or the rest of his natural life, the heat of Rory's chest radiated through the gap between them.

Close enough to feel but not touching. Close enough to see the collar of his T-shirt where it sat against the collarbone, the dark hair just below it, the rise and fall of breathing. A margin of air that was doing nothing to prevent the blood making a decisive, humiliating move south.

Neil pressed his folder against his front and did not move.

Rory collected his prints and stayed. Leaned against the wall, arms crossed, a posture that pushed his shirtsleeves tighter against his forearms and made the muscles underneath shift. He tilted his head.

‘So, Mr Ashworth.’ Light. Conversational. Eyes that tracked down Neil's face and paused, for just a beat, at his mouth. ‘Bet you're strict about grammar.’

‘I believe in structure.’

‘Structure.’ He held the word up like something found on the ground and examined. ‘What about mess? Where does mess fit?’

‘Mess doesn't fit. That's its defining characteristic.’

‘That's one way to look at it. Another way is that mess is where the interesting stuff happens. Every good painting starts as a mess.’

‘Paintings aren't sentences.’

‘No. Paintings are better. Sentences need commas. Paintings just need nerve.’

‘I'd argue that a well-placed comma requires considerable nerve.’

‘Would you?’

‘The comma in 'Let's eat, Grandma' is the difference between a meal and a crime.’

Rory laughed. Low, a sound that lived somewhere in Neil's chest before he could stop it. ‘Fair point. So you're a man who believes in the life-saving comma.’

‘Among other things.’

‘What other things?’

‘Structure. Clarity. The correct use of the semicolon.’

‘Nobody uses the semicolon correctly.’

‘I do.’

‘Yeah.’ Rory's eyes held his. The amusement was still there but interest had joined it, the quiet, focused kind, something steadier. ‘I bet you do.’

It wasn't about punctuation.

A beat. Two. The copier hummed between them. The fluorescent light buzzed. The room was too small and Rory was too close and the folder was doing its job and Neil needed to leave before his body made a decision his brain couldn't support.

‘I'm not an easy sell, Cavanaugh. I'm a colleague running off mock papers.’

‘With your folder pressed against you like a riot shield. Like it was doing a job.’

Neil's fingers dug in. ‘Professional habit.’

‘Right.’ Rory uncrossed his arms. Let them drop. The movement drew Neil's attention to those paint-stained fingers, ochre in the creases, blue under one thumbnail. ‘Don't let me keep you from your riot shield.’

He picked up his prints. Walked past. In the doorway, half-turned, one shoulder against the frame. He opened his mouth. Closed it. The half-smile instead, loaded, unresolved.

He left. Neil didn't move, with his folder pressed against his traitor crotch and the conviction that the last two weeks of avoidance had been an exercise in futility.

That Friday evening. Freddie at Gemma's for the weekend.

She met him at the door, tea towel over one shoulder.

Her new companion, Owen, somewhere inside, the telly, something roasting.

The house was warm and lit and the easy comfort of people who liked being home.

A shoe rack by the door with four sizes of shoes.

A coat hook with Freddie's raincoat beside Owen's jacket. The domestic architecture of a family.

His ex-wife had built a real home for herself; Neil was glad of it.

‘You look terrible,’ Gemma said.

‘Cheers.’

‘I mean it. You look like someone who's been sleeping badly and eating sandwiches at his desk and running too many miles and pretending everything's fine.’

‘I have been doing all of those things. But not because of…’

‘Neil.’

‘What.’

‘Love. Your left eye twitches when you lie. It's twitching.’

‘It's September. Everyone's left eye twitches in September.’

Freddie tore past them with his overnight bag, shouting about Owen's PlayStation. Gemma watched him go, already rationing her patience for the next forty-eight hours. Then she turned back to Neil.

‘What's going on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Neil.’

When he looked at her, she looked back. Unsurprised. The same steady eyes that had looked at him when she'd said the word and waited for the answer she already knew. The safest eyes in the world.

‘There's a new art teacher.’

‘And?’

‘And he buys very good coffee.’

A beat. ‘How good?’

‘Italian. Stovetop. Proper beans.’

‘Oh, Neil.’

‘It's not… it's coffee. I'm talking about coffee.’

‘You're talking about a man who makes you drink something besides Yorkshire Gold. In six years of marriage I never managed that.’

‘That's not what this is.’

She leaned against the doorframe. ‘Is he fit?’

‘He's an art teacher.’

‘Is. He. Fit.’

‘He's got a lip ring and paint on his hands and hair that should be illegal in a professional setting.’

‘Oh, one of those.’ She waved a hand. ‘Tortured artist type. Paints in a garret. Wears a beret.’

‘He doesn't wear a beret, more like… he had his hair tied up in a bun. He's not… it's not like that. He's good with the kids. Properly good. He's…’ Neil stopped. He'd corrected her too fast. Too much detail. Gemma's eyebrow climbed steadily upward.

‘So yes,’ she said. ‘Fit. And not what I assumed.’

‘I'm not discussing this.’

‘You are discussing this. You're discussing it badly, which is how you discuss everything that matters.’ She folded her arms. ‘Neil. It's been… what, six months since you stopped going to that place? The bar?’

‘Yes.’

‘And before that?’

‘You know before that.’

‘I know. Six years of marriage and in the last two you never once…’ She stopped.

Without unkindness. ‘I know before that.

I also know you've been alone for four years.

And the closest thing you've had to human contact is a stranger in a car park and a laptop.

And now there's a man with a sexy lip ring buying you coffee and you can't tell me about it without your eye twitching.

So I'm going to ask you something and I need you to answer it properly.’

‘Gemma, I never used the word sex…’

‘Do you want to see him?’

‘He's my colleague.’

‘That's not what I asked.’

The hallway was narrow. Owen's voice from the living room, talking to Freddie about which game to play. Chicken roasting. The domestic heat of someone else's complete life.

‘Yes,’ Neil said. Quietly. ‘I want to see him.’

‘Right. So see him.’

‘It's not that simple.’

‘It's exactly that simple. You want something that isn't anonymous. That's not complicated. That's basic human progress.’ She folded her arms. ‘And don't say Freddie. Freddie is five. Freddie wants dinosaurs and ice cream. Freddie does not need his father to be a monk.’

‘Gemma…’

‘I've been your best friend for twenty years, Neil. You have been and are my dearest person. I earned the right to tell you to stop it.’ Her hand on his arm. The steel-and-cotton voice. ‘Go and have a life. For God's sake.’

He stood on the step for a moment after she'd closed the door.

Drove home. The flat. The quiet. The evening stretching out in front of him like a corridor with no doors.

He stood in the living room. The white wall opposite the sofa, blank, the one where Gemma once suggested he hang a painting. Two years later. Still blank. A surface with nothing on it, in a flat with no one in it. He'd loved art once. He'd closed the sketchbook. No images on the walls.

Sat on the sofa. Stood up. Sat down. Picked up Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd. Read the same sentence four times. Gabriel Oak watching Bathsheba Everdene from a distance and burning.

He cleaned the kitchen. Wiped the counters.

Scrubbed the hob. Reorganised the spice rack, even though it was already alphabetical and the reorganisation changed nothing except the position of the cinnamon, which he'd bought by accident and never used.

The jar sat between cardamom and cumin like an interloper. He considered binning it. Left it.

At eleven he dropped onto the sofa in the clean, quiet flat and stared at the white wall. Then picked up his phone and typed Rory Cavanaugh artist into the browser before the sensible part of his brain could intervene.

Gallery pages. Review links. An image search, canvases dark, thickly textured.

He clicked through. One series caught him: large-scale pieces, oil and mixed media, human forms rendered in slashes of colour that shouldn't have been recognisable but were.

The bodies in the paintings weren't pretty.

They were real. Weight and tension and angle, muscle and bone pressing against the paint surface, trying to break through.

He stared at one canvas. A male figure, back turned, shoulders carrying invisible weight.

The palette was bruised, purples, deep blues, an undercurrent of red that ran through the composition like a vein.

It was good. Better than good. The surface of the painting wasn't the painting, and whoever made this knew it.

A short biography on the gallery page. Working-class background. Self-taught before art school. Based locally. No mention of a partner. He hated that he looked.

He found an interview in an arts supplement. I don't plan, Rory had said. I react. The canvas tells me what it needs. My job is to listen and not be a coward about it.

Neil read the sentence three times. The word coward sat in the room.

He closed the browser. Set the phone face-down on the arm of the sofa.

The flat held its breath.

Neil stared at the wall. Gemma's voice: You're allowed to want things.

The wall stared back. Patient. He offered nothing and demanded nothing and waiting for the man on the sofa to decide whether he was going to spend the rest of his life looking at white plaster or whether, at some point, he was going to hang a painting.

Bed. The mattress held his weight alone. No doorway, no paint-stained fingers or lip ring or turpentine, no word coward or the word chaos or how Rory's eyes had tracked down his face and paused at his mouth.

He thought about all of it. Every second. Until sleep came.

He woke at six with his hand on his cock and the echo of a voice saying after you and the sheets tangled around his legs and the certainty, cold and absolute, that the avoidance had failed.

And tomorrow, he'd have to see him again.