Chapter 6
THE STUDIO
A week of controlled demolition.
Nothing had collapsed.
That was the problem.
At school, they reverted. The nods returned, courtyard, corridor, the four-second exchanges that had been currency for weeks and now carried the freight of a Friday night neither mentioned.
Neil taught. Marked. Took notes in meetings. The performance held. Underneath, his body replayed the sofa, the kiss, the hands, the sounds Rory'd made, in a loop that rendered everything else irrelevant.
On Monday he stood at the whiteboard explaining active versus passive voice, and the word active triggered a flash, Rory's hand wrapping around both of them, the grip, the specific slick pressure of two cocks in one fist, and he lost his place.
First time in years. He stared at his own handwriting.
The ball was kicked . He couldn't remember what came next.
The class waited. Twenty-seven faces and one gap where Jake Hargreaves had been sent to the head for an incident involving a protractor and a dare.
‘Sir?’ Lily Adders. Front row.
‘Fine. Yes. Passive voice.’ He tapped the board. ‘What's wrong with this sentence?’
‘It doesn't say who kicked the ball,’ said Toby Marsh. Quiet, from the corner. His second voluntary contribution in three weeks.
‘Go on, Toby.’
‘It hides the person. The ball was kicked. By who? You have to wait. Like whoever kicked it doesn't matter as much as the ball.’
‘That's exactly right. Passive voice hides the agent.’ He wrote WHO DID IT? on the board. ‘Every sentence you write, ask that question. Who did it? Who's responsible? Don't hide them.’
He did.
On Tuesday, Freddie brought home a painting from art. A tree, six colours, roots thick at the base, a word painted into the trunk in unsteady purple letters: brAVE.
‘Mr Cavanaugh said we could paint a word in the roots because the big mural's going to have words too. So I picked brave because it's the best word.’
‘It's a good word.’
‘Rory says brave doesn't mean not being scared. It means doing it anyway.’ The frank, searching look of a child repeating something he sensed mattered. ‘What are you brave about, Dad?’
He didn't answer properly.
He never did.
‘Parking in Tesco's on a Saturday.’
‘That's not brave. That's just driving.’
‘You've never tried to park in Tesco's on a Saturday.’
Freddie considered this. ‘Mr Cavanaugh said he was brave about looking after his brother when Kieran was little. He said being brave about people is harder than being brave about things.’
‘He said that in art class?’
‘Lily was upset. Not my Lily, the Year 10 Lily. And Mr Cavanaugh was talking to her. And I was listening. I'm a good listener.’
‘You're an exceptional eavesdropper.’
‘I was painting AND listening.’
Neil put the painting on the fridge. brAVE in purple, between the school photo and the hospital photo. And the word in his son's unsteady hand was closer to accusation than decoration.
The fridge was his gallery. Freddie's monsters, Freddie's trees, the dragon with the button eye that had been painted three separate times because Freddie believed the dragon's story was ‘not finished yet, Dad, he hasn't found his treasure.’ Now brAVE in purple.
The fridge door was running out of space. One was going to fall.
Dinner was fish fingers, salad and mashed potatoes, Freddie's favourite, Neil's default, the meal he could assemble in fifteen minutes, requiring no thought. He stood at the counter watching the oven timer while Freddie set the table with the anarchic precision of a five-year-old.
‘Dad.’
‘Mm.’
‘Is Mr Cavanaugh lonely?’
The question arrived.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because he talks about Kieran a lot. Like, a LOT. And Miss Greaves says people who talk about someone a lot are either in love or lonely. And I don't think Mr Cavanaugh is in love with his brother because that would be weird.’
‘Miss Greaves says a lot of things.’
‘Miss Greaves is very wise.’
‘Miss Greaves is twenty-four.’
‘Wisdom has no age, Dad. That's what she said.’
‘Did she.’
‘She said it to Oliver when Oliver said she was too young to know about dinosaurs.’ Freddie arranged his fork with care. ‘But is he lonely? Mr Cavanaugh?’
‘I don't know, mate. I don't know him very well.’
‘You could know him better. You could invite him for fish fingers.’
‘I don't think Mr Cavanaugh wants fish fingers.’
‘Everyone wants fish fingers, Dad. Fish fingers are universal.’
‘Now, where did you pick up universal?’
‘Mum.’
Neil served the fish fingers. Freddie ate three. Negotiated for a fourth. Lost. Accepted defeat with the resigned grace of a diplomat who knew the next round of talks would go differently.
Bath time, The Gruffalo, the breathing that settled within thirty seconds, and Neil alone in the kitchen with the word lonely sitting on the counter beside the ketchup.
Was Rory lonely? The flat suggested not, the canvases, the music, the mess of a life being lived. But the clean glasses on the coffee table.
The glasses set out before Neil arrived. The hope embedded in their placement. Rory lived alone with his work and his brother. He'd taken the wine glasses out because someone was coming.
Neil washed the dishes. Dried them. Put them away. Stood in the kitchen and thought about loneliness and fish fingers and the tree with brAVE in purple on the fridge and his five-year-old had seen something in his art teacher that Neil had missed.
Or hadn't missed. Had seen and shelved. Different shelf.
Monday morning.
Rory was already there. Two cups, the second appearing on the counter at the exact time Neil arrived, at the exact temperature Neil preferred. ‘Morning, Ashworth.’ The surname. The public mask.
‘Cavanaugh.’
Neil drank. Excellent. He'd stopped pretending it was adequate.
‘Mural update,’ Rory said. ‘Year 7 roots are taking shape. I've given Toby Marsh his own section. The kid's got something.’
‘I know. His essay last week was the best in the class. Four paragraphs about his grandfather's allotment. Emotional. No grammar mistakes. No spelling errors. First time since September.’
‘The mural did that?’
‘The mural gave him something to concentrate on that wasn't sitting at a desk being told he was concentrating wrong. You gave him a wall and a spray can. I gave him a question and a pencil. Different tools.’
‘Same principle.’
‘Stop telling them their energy is a problem. Give it somewhere to go.’
When Rory looked at him, the staff room was empty. Rain on the windows.
‘You're a good teacher, Neil.’
First name. In school hours.
Sue Dhillon entered the staff room and stood by the biscuit tin with studied nonchalance. She was absolutely listening.
‘Friday. For the mural,’ Neil said. Low.
‘Friday.’
He didn't ask what that meant.
He knew.
He left. Sue watched him go. Bit a hobnob. Said nothing.
Friday. Eight o'clock.
Same route. Same traffic lights. Radio off. Hands steady. The tremor was gone.
Same buzzer. Same stairs. Rory opened the door. Barefoot. Freshly showered. Hair tied up.
‘No speech this time?’ Ghost of a smile.
‘No.’
‘Good.’
He took Neil's hand.
‘Come. I want to show you something.’
Past the living room. Past the kitchen. To the door at the end of the hallway.
Neil stepped inside and the door closed behind him and the world outside, the stairwell, the cooking smells, the other lives, disappeared.
Linseed and turpentine hit first, warm-nutty over mineral-sharp, the chemical signature of a room where work happened. Galleries didn't carry this air. He hadn't breathed air like this since he was fifteen, sitting in his art classroom, drawing a boy's shoulders from memory.
His throat caught.
The home studio was smaller than he'd expected. Ten feet by twelve. A converted bedroom, two adjustable lamps throwing hard white light that flattened everything and hid nothing. Forensic light.
Canvases stacked three deep against the walls.
Paint tubes on every surface, squeezed, curled, bled dry.
Brushes in jars, in mugs, standing upright in a tin that had once held custard creams. A worktable scarred with knife marks and layered with dried paint, each layer a day's work preserved in the wood.
Sketches pinned everywhere: charcoal studies, ink drawings, loose sheets torn from pads with the spiral fringe still hanging.
And in the centre, on an easel, a large canvas. Five feet by four. Dark. The bruised blues and near-blacks of Rory's exhibited work, but underneath, ochre tones bleeding through the surface, ochre and umber, as though the painting were generating light from the inside.
The figure on the canvas was turning away. A shoulder. The beginning of a neck. The posture of a man holding himself in place.
Neil stopped breathing.
He crossed the room before deciding to. Stopped a foot from the canvas.
The figure was nearly life-sized. The paint surface was thick with the scrape-back technique he'd named in the art room, built up in layers, then scraped with the palette knife.
Beneath the dark blues, amber tones showed through.
The work was unfinished, the lower right corner raw canvas. But the shoulder, the neck, the invisible face, those were complete. Rendered with a precision that came from weeks of watching, across staff rooms and corridors and courtyards.
The angle of the shoulder was his own. The set of the neck, tense, resistant. Perpetually bracing. Rory had painted him from behind because that was how Neil presented himself. Back turned. Face hidden. The surface showing nothing while the underneath generated intensity.
Fingertips on the paint. Ridges and valleys, the places where the knife had scraped. Every mark a moment of attention. The accumulation was a portrait that didn't need a face because the body told the story.
The painting wasn't flattering. It wasn't romantic. It was accurate, and the accuracy was so sharp his skin registered it.