15. Fallout
FALLOUT
The call came on a Tuesday.
Neil had expected it sooner. Had braced for it every evening, the phone vibrating, the name on the screen. But Diane Ashworth operated on her own schedule.
He was bracing for a different call, too. Quieter but constant. The one from Webb’s office about Howard Prentice. Four weeks since Sue had tipped him off. Silence since. Either Webb absorbed it and it was dead in a drawer, or she was holding it.
He was marking Year 9 essays at the kitchen table. Freddie at Gemma’s. The flat quiet. The sketchbook Rory had given him sat on the kitchen counter, untouched but present. He hadn’t opened it. He wasn’t ready. But he hadn’t put it in a drawer either.
The phone rang at twenty to eight. The landline. Nobody rang the landline except Gemma about Freddie and occasional cold calls about accidents that hadn’t happened. The landline was deliberate. A conversation she did not want on a device Neil could read notifications on afterwards.
He picked up on the fourth ring. Made her wait the standard amount.
‘Neil.’
‘Mum.’
‘I hope I’m not interrupting.’ She wasn’t asking.
‘You’re not.’
A calibrated pause.
‘I wanted to ring. About Saturday.’
Saturday was the birthday. Fourteen days ago.
‘Right.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the situation.’
There it was. _Situation_.
‘The situation,’ Neil said.
‘I have been thinking about what’s best for Freddie.’
‘Right.’
‘I am not ringing to criticise. I want you to hear me say that, before I say anything else. I am not criticising.’
‘All right.’
‘I am concerned about the pace at which your choices are affecting the environment he is growing up in. That is all. That is the whole of it. The pace.’
Neil felt his back teeth find each other. The old click. He pressed the receiver harder against his ear and said nothing, because saying nothing was the first lesson his mother had ever taught him and the lesson she would now have to listen to.
Seconds.
‘I’m sure you have your own views on the pace,’ she said. ‘I only wanted you to know I’d had mine.’
‘All right.’
‘Your father sends his love.’ That was the line she had not rehearsed. Then, quieter: ‘I’ve done a casserole. I’m putting a portion in Tupperware. If you pass on Sunday I’ll give it to you at the door. Bring Freddie if he’s with you.’
‘Mum. Thanks.’
‘It’s a casserole, Neil. It’s not a ceremony.’
Click. She had hung up on him because Diane Ashworth had never in her life said goodbye on a telephone.
The flat did not resume. The kitchen had the shape of a room in which a phone call had happened and no one said the thing the phone call was about.
Later that evening, when Freddie was asleep and the flat was the particular kind of quiet that had nobody else in it, Neil returned to the essays.
He wasn’t marking. He’d finished hours ago, before Diane rang. The green pen was still on the table. The stack of Year 9 Romeo and Juliets sat at his elbow, ticked and commented and dated.
He pulled one from the middle of the pile. Turned it over. The back was blank, the school letterhead faint in the top corner. St Bede’s High: English Department. A lined page asking to be used for something other than what it was for.
He pressed the nib to the paper and wrote _Dear Dad_ at the top.
Then sat looking at it.
_Dear Dad._ Two words that had never belonged to him, not as an address for a letter, not as the start of a sentence that went anywhere.
He’d never written to his father in his life.
There’d been no reason; they lived twelve miles apart and saw each other at Christmas and on birthdays and that was the shape of it, and the shape had been drawn by somebody else.
He crossed out _Dear Dad_ with two hard green lines. Wrote _Dear Neil_ underneath. Then, smaller: _aged fifteen_.
That one he could write.
_I don’t know if you’ll read this. I don’t know if I’m writing it to the boy who gave up the drawing or to the man who’s trying to get it back. I think I’m writing it to the part of you that was told to stop looking._
_You were right to look. You were right about the shoulders. You were right about the word disgraceful and the drawer and the silence. You were right, and you were fifteen, and the room was bigger than you. That’s all. The room was bigger. It isn’t now._
The pen was shaking. He wasn’t sure whose hand it belonged to.
He didn’t sign it. He didn’t re-read it. He folded the Year 9 essay in half, green-pen side in, and walked it across the kitchen to the recycling bin under the sink. Hesitated with the lid open. Then put it back in his pocket instead.
On the Friday, Neil walked past Mrs Webb’s office heading to Year 9 second period.
Her door was open. She was on the phone.
She was saying, in the voice she used for conversations that were not going to be reported anywhere: ‘...and I appreciate your concern, Mr Prentice, but I would ask you, with respect, to be very precise about what you are raising as a safeguarding concern and what you are raising as a personal view. Because the two are different things and this office is only authorised to deal with one of them.’
A pause. The voice on the other end of the line, inaudible but pitched to a tone Neil recognised from his own years of parents’ evenings: the tone of a sentence already regretted.
‘Good. Then I’ll make a note, Mr Prentice, that your concern has been withdrawn.
I’d suggest, again with respect, that if you want to raise a further matter you put it in writing to the governing body and I will ensure it is responded to through the appropriate channel. Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon.’
She put the phone down and looked up and saw Neil in the doorway.
He had not intended to be in the doorway.
The look lasted under a second. She did not beckon. She did not nod. Back to her computer screen she went, composure intact.
Neil walked on.
Later, in the staff room at quarter to three, Sue Dhillon sat down opposite him with a cup of tea and did not look at him and said, to her own tea: ‘Howard Prentice rang the office this morning. Sophie Prentice’s dad.
He was asking questions. Janet in the office said the word _inappropriate_ was used three times.
I don’t know what about. I know Webb was in that office for three quarters of an hour and when she came out she was drinking her coffee a degree colder than usual.
’ Sue stirred her tea. ‘I don’t think it was about nothing. ’
‘No.’
‘No.’ Sue looked at him for the first time. ‘You let her handle it, love.’
The phone vibrated. Mum.
He let it ring three times. On the fourth, he picked up.
‘Neil.’ Her voice. The neutral register.
‘Mum.’
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
‘You’re not.’
‘Good. I wanted to... I’ve been meaning to ring. Since the party.’ A pause. ‘I wanted to talk about your situation.’
_Your situation._ The person whose face you touched in your hallway. A word that reduced five months to a noun that sounded like a medical condition.
‘My situation,’ Neil said.
‘Your... the arrangement. With the teacher.’
‘His name is Rory.’
‘With Rory. Yes.’ She said the name. ‘I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see what I saw at the party, Neil. I’m your mother. I notice things.’
‘I know you notice things.’
‘And what I noticed... the gesture, the... it suggested a degree of familiarity that goes beyond...’
‘I wiped paint off his face. Yes.’
Silence. He’d said it directly. Direct statement disrupted the choreography.
‘I wiped paint off his face,’ Neil repeated. ‘Because he had paint on his face. Because he always has paint on his face. I’ve been wiping it off for months. Because he’s my partner. And taking care of him is what I do.’
‘I’d rather we didn’t discuss this on the phone,’ Diane said. ‘I’d like you to come. Sunday. Your father will be here.’
‘Does Dad know?’
A pause. ‘I’ve told him. Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He’s... processing. In his way.’
‘Mum. What did you say? When you told him.’
Neither spoke.
‘I said what needed to be said.’
‘What needed to be said according to whom?’
‘I told him that you were... involved. With the art teacher. And that it would need to be managed.’
_Managed_. Neil heard it the way he’d heard _disgraceful_ twenty years ago, not as a grenade but as a door, closing softly, on oiled hinges, with perfect manners.
‘Managed,’ he repeated.
‘I mean... there’s Freddie to think about. And the school. And your father’s... you know how your father is, Neil. If it were just us, if it were private, I wouldn’t... but people talk. The neighbours. The school parents. I’m trying to... I just think there’s a way to do this that doesn’t...’
‘Doesn’t what?’
‘That doesn’t make it harder than it needs to be.’
The sentence hung in the kitchen. Neil looked at Freddie’s drawings on the fridge. The dragon. The whale. The tree with brAVE in purple.
‘You changed the channel before Dad said _disgraceful_. Two men holding hands on tv. You reached for the remote first. I was fifteen. I remember the food, shepherd’s pie. I remember the footage. And I remember that your hand moved before his mouth did.’
Silence.
‘You’ve been managing me for twenty years, Mum. Managing me and managing Dad and managing the silence and calling it protection. And the protection cost me...’ His voice steadied. ‘The protection cost me my twenties. My marriage. And then car parks.’
‘Car parks?’ Faint. Lost.
‘Never mind. I’m coming on Sunday. And Rory’s name is Rory, not _that man_. I care about him. Partner. And it doesn’t need managing.’
‘Partner.’ She said it like tasting something unfamiliar. Testing the pH.
‘Partner. Not colleague. Not friend. Not situation. Partner.’
‘Neil, I understand that you’ve been...’
‘Gay, Mum. The word is gay. I’ve been gay. And I still am.’
He hadn’t planned to say it. The word had come up from the same place as the thumb on Rory’s jaw.