Chapter 8
CHRISTMAS
Next time, Kieran opened the door.
Not Rory.
Kieran.
In joggers and a hoodie, earbuds in, phone in one hand, someone interrupted mid-game and being magnanimous about it. He looked at Neil for approximately half a second.
‘He's in the studio. Shoes off if you're going past the kitchen. I've just mopped.’
He stood aside. Neil entered. Took off his shoes, not because Kieran had told him to but because the instruction was so disarmingly domestic that he obeyed before his brain could object. Kieran returned to the sofa, put his feet up, resumed his phone.
Neil walked down the hallway in his socks, past a teenager who knew everything and cared about none of it, and the normalcy cracked a hinge in his chest that drama would have left intact.
Rory was in the studio. Paint on his jaw. Music low. He looked up and the smile that arrived was the real one. Unhurried. Easy. Glad to see him.
‘Alright?’
‘Your brother mopped.’
‘I know. He's either maturing or he's broken something and he's softening the blow.’
‘I'd check under the sofa cushions.’
Neil laughed and kissed him. Easier now. He set the wine on the worktable beside a jar of brushes and a coffee mug with a dried ring inside it. The studio was its own ecology, surfaces layered with the debris of making, everything covered in paint or charcoal or the ghost of both.
‘Show me what you're working on,’ Neil said.
Rory turned the canvas on the easel. A new piece, not the Neil painting, which was still propped against the far wall, the shoulder still turning, the face still absent.
This was warmer. Looser. Two figures, barely suggested, just the impression of bodies in proximity.
The palette was gold and ochre, the scrape-back revealing hints of blue beneath. Unfinished but charged.
‘It's different from the others,’ Neil said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Warmer.’
‘Yeah.’ Rory dragged a rag over his knuckles. ‘The palette's been shifting. I can't mix darks the way I used to. My hand keeps reaching for warmer tones.’ He looked at Neil. ‘The paintings are changing because something's changed in me and the paintings don't lie.’
‘When have they ever lied?’
‘They haven't. That's the whole point.’
The evening settled around them. Wine on the sofa.
Music. Rory's feet in Neil's lap. Physical contact that wasn't sexual, the intimacy of naked feet on another man's thighs while the wine emptied and the rain came on.
Neil's hand rested on Rory's ankle. Absently.
His thumb against the bone. A gesture he hadn't planned.
Kieran became background. Part of the furniture. When Neil arrived on the second Friday after the discovery, Kieran was in the kitchen making toast. ‘Alright, Mr Ashworth.’ The same tone he'd use for the postman.
At school, Rory started testing edges. He was smarter than reckless. But the invisible fence developed gaps. A coffee appeared on Neil's desk during his free period. The takeaway cup. Flat white, no sugar. A yellow Post-it stuck to the side: Thought you could use this. R
Neil peeled the Post-it off. Folded it. Put it in his wallet, behind the card.
Colleagues noticed the shift, if not the specifics.
Martin Clarke said, ‘You seem better this term, Neil. More relaxed.’ Sue Dhillon gave him a look that suggested she'd noticed more than the relaxation and was keeping her own counsel.
Mrs Webb, passing in the corridor, said, ‘Good work on the mural writing component. The cross-curricular element has been noted.’
Neil thanked her.
Last Friday before Christmas. Term had ended that afternoon. The staff room was full of mince pies and cheap prosecco and the relief of people who'd survived another autumn. Rory found Neil's eye across the room, a single loaded glance over the rim of a plastic cup, and Neil felt it in his groin.
Kieran had left an hour ago, overnight bag, a ‘Happy Christmas, losers’ thrown at the door. The flat had been quiet for twenty minutes before it stopped being quiet, and now it was quiet again.
They were on the sofa. The cushions were a lost cause, shoved sideways, a blanket pulled over Neil's lap and no further.
Rory was propped against the armrest, Neil against his side with no particular intention of moving.
Rory's arm was around him, hand resting on his shoulder.
His thumb moved in the absent way it did when he wasn't thinking about it, slow, unconscious, the same rhythm he used when he was working something out.
The room carried them still.
They talked about Christmas. Neil's schedule, the day with Freddie, lunch at his parents', a prospect he described with the enthusiasm of a dental extraction. Then Freddie to Gemma's for the week between Christmas and New Year.
‘What are they like?’ Rory asked. ‘Your parents. You've mentioned them. Fragments, bits. Never the full picture.’
He turned the glass. The question was simple. The answer wasn't.
‘My father wears a blazer to breakfast. My mother has opinions about everything. Their house smells of air freshener and the television is always on because it means nobody has to talk.’
‘That bad?’
‘Fine. Empty. The house is immaculate. You could perform surgery on the kitchen floor. The garden looks like it's been combed. Everything's in its place. The cushions, the ornaments, the coasters. It's a show home that's been lived in for thirty years without anyone leaving a mark.’
Neil drank. ‘They love Freddie. He’s the only. He's the only person in the family who generates warmth. They orbit him. When he's not there, the house goes cold.’
‘And you?’
‘I'm tolerated. I've always been tolerated. I'm the son who didn't do engineering. Who married a woman and then stopped being married to her without adequate explanation. Who moved to a flat they've visited twice and rearranged the furniture both times.’
‘They rearrange your furniture?’
‘And my spice rack.’
‘Your spice rack?’
‘My mother moved the cinnamon.’
‘The same cinnamon you don't like?’
‘She moved it to the wrong place. Between the chilli flakes and the coriander. It should be between the cardamom and the cumin.’
‘I love that you have a position on cinnamon placement.’
‘Everyone should feel strongly about where the cinnamon goes.’
‘Nobody has a position on cinnamon placement. You are the only person on earth with a position on cinnamon placement.’
‘Then the world is disorganised and I'm the last line of defence.’
Rory laughed, the low one, the one Neil felt in his spine. ‘And your dad? You've barely mentioned him.’
‘There's barely anything to mention. He's a presence. A mass. He occupies his armchair and the armchair occupies the room and the room is his territory and nobody enters without permission. He built a career in insurance on the principle that saying less gave away less. He applies the same principle to parenting.’
‘Does he talk to Freddie?’
‘He reads to Freddie. That's different. Reading is following a script. Talking is improvisation. My father doesn't improvise.’
‘Neither do you.’
‘I'm aware.’
Rory was quiet for a beat. His hand on the wine bottle, not drinking. ‘Do they know? About you?’
‘No.’
‘Would they...’
‘No.’
A wall that was load-bearing. Rory left it.
‘My Mum knew about me before I did,’ Rory said.
He was offering, not redirecting. His own version.
‘In the worst way. She knew and she was terrified.
She came from a generation and a background where it where you just didn't. She never said a word about it.
Ever. But I could feel the not-saying. She'd flinch when the topic came up on telly. Leave the room when I brought a male friend home. The flinch was worse than any word would have been.’
‘My parents don't flinch. They change the tv channel.’
‘Same thing. Different abuse.’
‘Christmas Day,’ Rory said. ‘What time do you escape?’
‘Five, if I'm lucky. Six, if my father starts talking about the garden.’
‘Ring me. After. Whenever.’
‘It'll be late.’
‘I don't care.’ He met Neil's eyes. ‘I want to hear your voice on Christmas Day. That's not a negotiation.’
‘Okay,’ Neil said.
‘Okay.’
Rory shifted. Pushed off the sofa. Padded barefoot across the room to the worktable and came back with something wrapped in a paint-spotted cloth. A canvas, wider than his arm span. He propped it against the wall.
‘I was going to put this under a tree. I don't have a tree. I've had it behind the wardrobe for a week.’
Neil unwrapped it. A canvas, unframed, the back raw and the front worked in oil.
Two figures from behind. Shoulders, the line of two spines, the space between them charged and specific.
No faces, no hands. The palette warm, gold and ochre with a thread of burnt sienna where one body nearly touched the other.
He recognised it from the easel. Finished now.
The brushwork was Rory’s exhibited quality, the technique that sold for thousands at the Whitmore.
He looked at it for longer than the beat called for.
‘Rory.’
‘You don't have to hang it. I just wanted you to have it. It was the one on the easel. I finished it in November and I couldn't sell it. It's yours. It was always yours.’
‘Rory.’
‘You've said my name twice.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you going to say anything else.’
‘In a minute. I'm looking at it.’
He looked at it. The taller figure had his shoulders.
The set of the neck, the specific tension Rory had been painting since October.
The second figure stood closer than a colleague would.
Anyone looking at this painting would see two men, gold-toned, close.
Anyone who knew would see exactly what it was.
The back of the canvas had a pencilled date.
October 14th. Six weeks before the discovery.
Three weeks after the reprographics room.
Neil leaned the canvas against the wall because if he kept looking at it he was going to embarrass himself.
‘Thank you.’
‘You're welcome.’