Chapter 3
THE WORD AT THE KITCHEN TABLE
The word came years before it mattered.
The flat was still new then. Freddie was three. The smaller bedroom had his name on the door in wooden letters Gemma had picked out during the good year, the third year, the year before the year when nothing got said.
An ordinary evening in March. He remembered the month because the heating had been on and the window above the sink fogged by the kettle.
He'd made beans on toast because he'd had Freddie that day and Freddie had wanted beans on toast, and he'd made a second plate for himself not thinking about whether he wanted beans on toast.
Freddie had been asleep for an hour. The washing up was done.
Neil was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea he had not drunk and a school exercise book open in front of him that he was not marking.
The desk lamp was on. The flat had the stillness of a small child asleep and a parent who has run out of tasks.
He'd been thinking about nothing. That was the thing he wanted later to be able to say and could not.
He had not been looking at a photograph.
He had not been thinking about anybody in particular.
He had been sitting at his kitchen table not thinking about anything, and the word had arrived like post through the letterbox: on its own schedule, to the address it had always had.
Gay.
That was all. One syllable in his own head in his own flat, and the whole of his adult life rearranged itself. The twelve years with Gemma rearranged themselves.
Not with evidence. Neil had never allowed himself any.
No man in his past he could name. No almost-was, no near-miss, no one drunk night at twenty in a hall of residence that he had spent a decade re-filing under an unusual Tuesday.
The rearrangement was quieter than that. Harder.
Watching a boy called Adam in the sixth-form common room in 2002 shifted. How he had always chosen the seat with its back to the wall at pub tables shifted.
The vocabulary of the last twelve years followed. Every sentence he had built to avoid the subject stood revealed for what it was.
He did not cry. He did not stand up. He sat at the kitchen table and drank the tea that had gone cold and finished marking two more essays on Of Mice and Men and at quarter past ten, bed. He did not tell anybody. There was nobody in the flat to tell.
The next morning he made Freddie's porridge and dropped him at nursery at 8:15 and went to work and did the full timetable and came home and made fish fingers and read The Gruffalo and did bath and did bed and went back to the kitchen table and sat down.
The word was still there. It had grown. It was no longer new and it was not going to leave.
He did nothing about it. Doing nothing was what he knew how to do and he was very good at it.
The thing he could never tell anybody, and would never tell anybody, was this: the word at the kitchen table had not been freedom. It had been an invoice from a company he had been pretending did not have his address.