Chapter 19 #3
Kieran's face did the thing Rory had not seen it do since Kieran was nine years old and had been told the cat was not coming back. A small recalibration, the kind that moved the bones of a face without moving it.
'No landlord.'
'No. I bought it. Last week. Signed the papers on Thursday. It's small and not modern, but it's yours and Carol's. Uni starts in three weeks, you're not going in from my sofa, you're going in from your own front door.'
Kieran did not speak for a full five seconds. He stared at the keys in his palm. Closed his fingers around them. Opened them again, checking they had not evaporated.
From the doorway Neil stood very still. A teenager's face trying not to do arithmetic in public and failing. September and Manchester and Carol and the rent he'd been quietly dreading. All of it weighed in five seconds on a scale that had only ever added.
'Rory. You...'
'Don't start.'
'I'm going to start.'
'I know you are. I'm telling you don't.'
'You bought me a flat.'
'I bought you an escape route. You and Carol.
You're going to university, you're going in from a door that opens into a room that is yours, and I'm done discussing it, because my entire job description since you were eight has been making sure your head got to the next thing in one piece. This is the next thing. Take the keys.'
Kieran put the keys down on the hall carpet, very carefully, as though they were hot.
Then he stood up, and for a moment Rory thought he was going to walk out of the flat.
Instead Kieran put his arms round his brother's neck, a graceless full-body hold from a boy who'd never learnt to hold anyone smaller than himself, and pressed his forehead into Rory's shoulder.
'You're an arse.'
The voice soft.
'Yeah.'
'Proper arse.'
'I know.'
'Big one.'
'I'm aware. Let go, you're crushing my collar.'
Kieran did not let go. He tightened once, the way a child tightens a grip before allowing himself to separate, and then stepped back and wiped his nose with his hand like a nine-year-old who had been told the cat was not coming back but had now been told there was a new cat.
'Carol knows,' Rory said. 'I rang her Saturday.'
'You told Carol before me.'
'Carol is sensible. You are a sentimental man with a weakness for gestures. I needed her onside first.'
'I am not sentimental.'
'Kieran. You just called me an arse with tears in your eyes. That is the textbook definition of sentimental.'
'Shut up.'
From the kitchen doorway, Neil, who had been pretending not to listen and failing, caught Rory's eye.
Rory, still holding a box of sellotape, still with a younger brother two feet in front of him, gave Neil the small nod that meant this is who I am, this is what I do with money, and Neil felt the last unaligned thing in his chest move half a centimetre and settle.
They'd hired a van. Rory drove, badly, the gears grinding on every turn, the wing mirrors adjusted and readjusted because Rory navigated by instinct and Neil navigated by mirror.
Kieran helped load. He lifted boxes with the sullen efficiency of a teenager bribed with pizza and fulfilling the minimum contractual obligation.
'What's in this one?' Kieran said. Staggering under a box marked BOOKS, HEAVY.
'Books.'
'It weighs more than a person.'
'It contains the collected works of Thomas Hardy. Hardy was a prolific man.'
'Hardy should have written less.'
'Don't let your brother hear you say that.'
'Rory doesn't read Hardy. Rory reads art books and pretends they count as literature.'
'They do count as literature.'
'They're pictures with captions.'
'Go and load the van, Kieran.'
When they were done, Rory locked the old flat for the last time.
Kieran stood in the emptied hallway looking at the space his life had occupied for ten years.
The sofa dent was still visible in the carpet.
He hadn't taken the mug, the chipped one with the permanent coffee ring.
It sat on the counter. The final holdout.
On the fridge, a Post-it in his handwriting:
DON'T EAT MY LEFTOVERS. Oh wait.
Rory peeled it off. Folded it once. Put it in his jacket pocket.
Freddie helped too. His contribution was organisational: he stood in each room of the new flat and designated its function.
'This is the whale room' (his bedroom). 'This is the pizza room' (the kitchen).
'This is the painting room' (the studio).
'This is the games room' (the living room).
'This is the room where Dad and Rory sleep' (the master bedroom).
He said the last one without pause, without emphasis, as though it were as ordinary as the pizza room, because to Freddie it was.
He had also decided where the Spider-Man painting went.
Proper art, Freddie's words, and proper art deserved a wall.
He'd pointed to the centre of his bedroom wall, the spot where the afternoon light would hit it best, and that was that.
Rory found a nail and a hammer before the sofa was even in the door.
Gemma arrived at noon with sandwiches.
Owen carried the sofa. Patrick arrived with Tess and carried the bookshelf. Patrick spoke four words all day: 'Where?' 'Here?' 'Tea?' and 'Done.' This constituted, by Patrick's standards, a soliloquy.
By three o'clock the flat was full of boxes and empty of order and the kitchen was functional enough for the moka pot. Rory made coffee. The sound of it, the hiss, the gurgle, filled the new kitchen for the first time. The first of a thousand times.
The vase broke at five.
A cheap vase. A blue ceramic thing Diane had given Neil two Christmases ago, chosen with care, presented with specific formality. Neil kept it on the windowsill of his old flat. It held nothing. Served no function. But it was from his mother and the keeping was its own quiet loyalty.
Neil was carrying a box of kitchen things. The box caught the vase on the counter edge. The vase fell. Hit the new kitchen floor, tile, not carpet, and broke into five clean pieces.
Quiet. Rory looked at the pieces. Looked at Neil.
'Shit. That's... that is your mum's.'
'Neil.' Rory crouched. Picked up the five pieces.
Clean breaks, edges sharp, the ceramic blue and white.
He held them in his palms and looked at them, and Neil thought about his mother and the vase and the shop that had closed and the woman who'd chosen it with care and given it with formality and never once said what the giving meant.
Rory set the pieces on the counter. Arranged them. The base. The sides. Two curved fragments. Aligned the edges.
'It's fixable,' Rory said.
He left the pieces on the counter. They'd fix it tomorrow, or the day after, or the weekend. The vase wasn't urgent. The vase was patient. It had been patient for two years on a windowsill and could be patient for a few more days in five pieces on a kitchen counter.
That night. The first night in the new flat.
The boxes were stacked. The bed was assembled.
Neil had done it, because Neil assembled things with the instruction manual open and the screws sorted by size, while Rory sat on the floor and offered unsolicited opinions about allen keys.
The sheets were clean. The curtains were hung, badly, one side higher than the other, a problem that would be solved tomorrow or would become a feature.
Freddie was at Gemma's. The flat was theirs alone for the first night. Neil's idea. To hear the sounds. The pipes, the boiler, the traffic pattern, the specific creak of a floorboard under a foot.
They lay in bed. The new bed, in the new room, in the new flat. Paint and the faint chemical sweetness of new carpet.
'It doesn't smell right yet,' Rory said.
'It smells of carpet.'
'It needs to smell of us. Of linseed and coffee and whatever your shampoo is.'
'It's just shampoo.'
'It's not just shampoo. It smells like... cedar and something else. I've never asked.'
'It's Tesco's own brand.'
'Tesco's own brand smells like cedar?'
'Tesco's own brand smells like Tesco's own brand. You've romanticised my shampoo.'
'I've romanticised everything about you.
Your shampoo. Your folder system. Your insistence on double-knotting Freddie's laces.
The pen pressed into paper when you concentrate.
The way you stand at a whiteboard and the whole room listens, because your voice changes when you're teaching.
It drops half a register and gets warmer and the kids hear it and they stop messing about. '
'You've been watching me teach?'
'Through the window. Walking to the courtyard. I stop. Every time.'
'Every time?'
'Every time.'
Neil lay in the dark. The new dark. Different from his flat's dark.
The streetlight came from the other direction here, the shadows fell differently, the ceiling was higher.
He'd learn it. He'd learned every ceiling he'd ever slept under.
Rory's flat, counting the cracks after sex.
The studio, staring at the watermark while catching his breath.
New ceiling. New shadows. Same man beside him. The arm across his chest. The weight.
'Rory.'
'Mm.'
'We live here.'
'We live here.'
'Together.'
'Together.'
'With a broken vase and a crooked curtain and a studio the size of a wardrobe.'
'A wardrobe with excellent light.'
'And coffee on the worktop.'
'Where it belongs.'
'And a child's room with east-facing light.'
'And Spider-Man on the wall.'
Neil turned his head. Found Rory's mouth in the dark. The kiss was slow, tasting of toothpaste and the last coffee and the man himself. The ring clicked against his lip. Familiar. Necessary. The sound of home.
'Go to sleep,' Neil said.
'I'm knackered. But I can't sleep. You keep kissing me.'
'One more.'
'One more.'
One more became three.
Then nothing. The breathing evened. The arm stayed.
The bathroom was eucalyptus. Rory's soap, presumably his for years before Neil was any part of the picture. In Rory's flat it had belonged there. Here it sat on the shelf of their bathroom and it was the wrong smell. Not right yet.
He'd get used to it. Or say something, start a negotiation that'd take three weeks.
The pipes ticked. The street settled.
He hadn't decided about the curtain. It could wait.