Chapter 9 #2
Neil did not turn round. The fridge. The card beside Freddie's whale. He'd looked at it himself, every morning since the twenty-third, and forgotten to move it.
The pirate ship. The red crayon one. Freddie’s, from the week before term ended, stuck up with a magnet shaped like a teapot. And next to it, a more recent one, in biro on a Pret receipt: a parrot with a square body and an enormous beak and the word BARRY underneath in Freddie’s capitals.
‘Is that Barry,’ Rory said, not turning.
‘That’s Barry.’
‘He’s got a beak on him.’
‘He’s a very serious parrot.’
Rory got the parmesan out and closed the fridge and came back to the stool. He put the parmesan on the counter. He sat back down and picked up his wine for the first time and took one swallow and put it back down again.
‘I hung your painting,’ Neil said. He didn’t know why he said it.
Rory’s hand stopped on the parmesan.
‘Your painting. It’s over the table. In the other room.’
Rory looked at him. Something deeper than the half-smile.
‘I told you you didn’t have to hang it.’
‘I know.’
‘Neil.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘You hung it.’
‘I hung it.’
‘For me.’
‘For the table.’
‘For me.’
‘All right. For you.’
Rory put his chin on his fist and watched Neil stir.
The rice took another twenty minutes. He did not rush it.
He added stock and the stock went in and the rice drank it and gave something back and he tested a grain against his teeth at the seventeen-minute mark and again at the nineteen and at twenty-one he took the pan off the heat and dropped in the cold butter and the parmesan and stirred it hard and fast until the whole thing went glossy and loose and slumped when he tipped the pan.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is mantecatura.’
‘Show-off.’
‘You said I could be.’
He plated it. Two bowls. Black pepper, a last grating of parmesan, nothing else, because anything else would have been noise. He carried both bowls to the kitchen table and put them down on the placemats he put out an hour ago and straightened twice.
Rory came and sat down on the far side of the table. Looked up. Went quiet. Above his head, the painting. The gold, the warmth, the two figures who were not touching and were also very clearly together. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at Neil and said nothing and didn’t need to.
Neil sat. He picked up his spoon. Rory did not pick up his.
‘Eat,’ Neil said.
‘In a minute.’
‘It’ll go cold.’
‘In a minute, Neil.’
Rory was looking at the table. The table, not the food. The grain of the wood and the scratch near the edge where Freddie had run a toy lorry over it at eighteen months and the placemat and the bowl on the placemat and Neil’s hand next to the bowl.
‘This is the table,’ Rory said, eventually, ‘where you sit on Sunday mornings.’
‘Yes.’
‘With the paper.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your coffee.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you did it alone for a long time.’
Neil set the spoon down.
‘Yes,’ Neil said.
‘Okay.’
Rory picked up his spoon. He ate the first mouthful slowly, eyes closed. Swallowed. Opened his eyes again and said, without any performance at all, ‘Christ, Neil,’ and that was how Neil knew the risotto had worked.
They ate. They talked about nothing. The bottle.
The parmesan. A joke about Barry the parrot, a fragment of a thing Rory’s sister had said on Christmas Day about a cousin who had brought the wrong kind of stuffing.
Neil listened more than he spoke. He watched Rory hold a spoon in a kitchen that had, until tonight, only known the sound of one set of cutlery on a plate.
When the bowls were empty Rory took both of them to the sink and rinsed them and stacked them on the draining board in the wrong order, plate on top of bowl, and Neil, because he was a person and not a machine, did not move them.
Rory dried his hands on the tea towel. He folded it and left it on the counter.
‘Can I see the rest,’ he said.
‘There isn’t much.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m asking.’
Neil walked him round it. It took ninety seconds. The sitting room with the sofa and the bookshelf. The bathroom with the single toothbrush. The bedroom, which Rory stepped into and stopped at the threshold of, and looked at, and stepped back out of.
And then the smaller door. The one on the left of the hall.
Rory stopped at it. On the door, at the height of a five-year-old reaching up, four wooden letters stuck on with a glue Neil had not trusted when he bought it and which had held for three years anyway. F. R. E. D.
Rory did not touch the handle. He touched the D. Just the D. With one fingertip, the pad.
‘He’ll be back on Sunday,’ Neil said.
‘I know.’
‘I’m not going to...’
‘I know, Neil. I’m not asking to go in.’
‘Okay.’
‘I just wanted to know where his room was.’
Back to the kitchen. Rory finished his wine standing at the counter.
He did not sit back down. It was after ten and the evening did what it came to do and there was a version of the night that would have had them both in the bedroom with the door shut and the other version, the version they were in, which was Rory putting his glass down and looking at Neil across the kitchen.
‘I’m going to go,’ Rory said.
‘Okay.’
‘Not because I want to.’
‘I know.’
‘Because this wasn’t the night for that. This was the night for the risotto.’
‘The risotto and the painting.’
‘The risotto and the painting and Barry the parrot.’
‘And the D.’
‘And the D.’
He got his boots on in the hall. He put his helmet under his arm.
At the door he stopped and leaned in and kissed Neil once, properly, the way he had been kissing him since October, and then stepped back and said, ‘Thank you for the dinner,’ and Neil said, ‘Any time,’ and Rory said, ‘Don’t say things you don’t mean,’ and Neil said, ‘I meant it,’ and Rory nodded once and left.
Neil closed the door. He stood in the hall for a minute with palm flat against the wood. Back in the kitchen, he looked at the two bowls on the draining board, plate on top of bowl in the wrong order, and he left them there and got his phone out.
‘home?’
Three minutes.
‘home. thank you.’
‘thank you for coming.’
‘neil.’
‘yes.’
‘you moved a picture.’
He put the phone down on the counter, face up, so he would see it if it went again. It did not go again. It did not need to.
He washed the two bowls in the wrong order and put them away in the right one.