Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The lasagna is a war crime. Just the shade of brown that says ten minutes too long, and the smell of cheese with opinions.
Laurence stands in front of the oven with a tea towel over his shoulder and the expression of someone whose academic career survived a misconduct investigation but whose dinner has not survived the combination of nerves and a faulty timer.
‘It’s fine,’ I say.
‘The edges are everything.’
‘Crispy. People pay extra for crispy.’
We both know: the lasagna is a lie. We both look at it anyway.
‘Your father threatened to report me to the police even before seeing this,’ he says, and the sentence arrives without warning, as Laurence’s worst thoughts always arrive—mid-task, disguised as observation.
‘And my mum asked me to meet you.’ I lean against the counter. ‘People change.’
‘Your father hasn’t changed. He’s coming to lunch. There’s a difference.’
He’s not wrong. But the lasagna’s already in the serving dish and the table’s set—four places, five if Ron stays, which Ron will because Ron always stays—and Laurence has changed his shirt three times.
Blue, white. Blue again. Then a grey I’ve never seen before, pulled from the back of the wardrobe like a man retrieving a weapon.
‘That shirt’s new.’
‘It’s not new. I bought it for a conference in 2019 and never wore it.’
‘You bought a shirt years ago and saved it for the occasion of meeting my parents over burnt lasagna.’
‘The lasagna isn’t burnt. It’s perfect.’
‘Crispy.’
Laughter surfaces and dies; the muscles try, but the nerves intercept. He straightens a fork that’s already straight. The tremor’s there. Faint, the Haldrey tells.
I cross the kitchen and take him. The one straightening the fork. He closes his fingers around mine, and the pressure is tight. Tighter than he’d admit.
‘Laurence.’
‘Mm.’
‘They’re going to see what I see.’ I don’t elaborate. Don’t need to.
The buzzer goes. He drops my hand like an instinct. The professional reflex, the don’t-touch-me-when-people-might-see, the muscle memory of a year of hiding. Then he catches himself. Looks at his empty hand.
‘Old habit,’ he says.
‘I know.’
Mum comes in first. She surveys the flat the way she surveys any room. Eyes doing the circuit: bookshelves, records, the clean kitchen, the framed print above the sofa. She registers it, a grown man’s home. A life, maintained, with ironed tea towels and perfect shelves.
‘Lovely,’ she says—the single word carries three stones of subtext.
Dad follows. Sean Carrick is in the doorway of Laurence Haldrey’s flat, arms crossed, before his feet have stopped moving. He doesn’t know how to enter a room without announcing he’d rather leave.
Ron is behind them, hands in pockets. The face is doing its thing. He catches my eye and gives me the look, the one that says I’m here, I’ll be useful, don’t make me do the talking.
‘Please, come in.’ Laurence. The voice is pitched at a formal-warm tone. He extends himself to my mother first. She greets him.
Dad shakes too. Briefer. The grip of a man completing a contractual obligation. His eyes already—no, on the records. I see them land.
We sit, the lasagna, the serving. The choreography of passing plates in a kitchen too small for five people and too full of the silence that happens when everyone present understands, and nobody’s decided who breaks it.
Mum asks Laurence about the flat. How long has he been here? Whether the tram’s reliable. Safe questions. The kind you can answer without detonating. Laurence answers with the meticulous politeness of someone undergoing a pleasant interrogation, every response slightly too detailed.
Ron eats and compliments the lasagna. ‘The edges are class,’ he says, and I nearly choke on my water.
Dad doesn’t speak. His fork moves. He eats and says nothing. He’s sat at the end of the table with the posture of a man counting the minutes until he can stand without it being rude. Six inches to the left. Always six inches—
‘Is that a first pressing?’
His voice, out of nowhere. Directed not at the table, not at me, not at the six-inch void. At the shelf behind Laurence’s head.
Laurence turns. ‘Sorry?’
‘The Floyd.’ Dad nods at the records. His arms have uncrossed. The first time I’ve seen Sean Carrick’s arms uncrossed in a social setting. ‘Dark Side of the Moon. That sleeve.’
Laurence looks at the record. Looks at my father. Something recalibrates behind his glasses.
‘It is. I found it in a charity shop in Lancaster. Five pounds.’
‘Five pounds.’ Dad’s voice. The flatness cracking, a first pressing. Five pounds. He’s outraged on behalf of the universe. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘The inner sleeve’s a bit—’
‘Doesn’t matter. The vinyl’s the thing. The posters, they include the posters?’
‘Both of them.’
Dad stands, a movement towards instead of away. He crosses to the shelf.
His hands—calloused, builder’s hands, the hands that have avoided touching anything in this flat until now—reach for the sleeve with a gentleness I’ve only ever seen when he held my mother’s hand.
He turns it over and reads the back. Runs his thumb along the edge.
Laurence stands too. They’re side by side. Two men looking at the same object.
‘I’ve got Wish You Were Here,’ Dad says. ‘Original pressing. My father’s.’
‘That’s the better album.’
Dad looks at him. Direct. His eyes are where his attention is. The six-inch displacement is gone.
‘You think so?’
‘The sequencing.’ Laurence nods towards the sleeve. ‘“Welcome to the Machine” into “Have a Cigar”. That transition’s architecture.’
Dad turns the record over again, considering that. Like Laurence has answered correctly in a language he respects.
A pause. Dad puts the record back. He leaves his palm on the shelf for a moment.
‘You should hear it on a proper system,’ Dad says. ‘Mine’s nothing fancy, but the speakers are.’
He stops, catches himself. Realises he’s just invited his son’s thirty-two-year-old former lecturer to come round and listen to records. The realisation crosses his face like weather.
He sits back down, his arms crossed again. But the crossing is different, looser, less fortified—a wall with a window in it.
Mum’s hand finds mine under the table. The squeeze is fierce. Briefly, her eyes are wet.
‘It shows that he cares about you,’ she says. Just for me. Her mouth barely moving, the ventriloquism of mothers in rooms full of difficult men.
I squeeze back.
The rest of the lunch happens. Conversation, halting, then less halting.
Mum asks about Laurence’s family. He tells her about Lancashire, about his mother, about the house with the garden that backs onto the canal.
Dad contributes nothing further but eats a second portion of the lasagna, and the second portion is the closest he’ll come to a compliment.
At the door. Coats. The shuffling choreography of departure. Mum hugs me, hugs Laurence, brief, startled. He hugs her back. His arms are not quite sure where to go.
She looks at him. Holds his look like she held mine when I was seven and lied about the broken window.
‘Look after him.’
Laurence nods. Doesn’t speak. Knows better.
Dad shakes hands with him again. The duration is the same. But the pressure is different. I can tell from the angle of Dad’s wrist, from the geometry of his grip. Still not warm, but present.
Ron stays.
Of course, he stays. The beer’s open before the door’s closed, and he’s on the sofa with his boots off and the expression of someone past the hard part and into the bit he wanted.
‘Good lasagna,’ he says.
‘It was burnt.’
‘Crispy. There’s a distinction.’
Laurence collects plates, and Ron watches him go. Waits until the kitchen tap runs.
‘Is the Northern Quarter far from here?’
I look at him. He rubs his thumb on his palm—the circuit.
‘That bar,’ he says. Casual. So casual it’s translucent. ‘The one with the good beer. Is it still?’
‘Twenty minutes on the tram.’
He does the thing with his face. The red creeping up his neck, his expression tightening, the helplessness of a twenty-six-year-old man who can boss a crew but can’t.
‘Go,’ I say. ‘Right now.’
‘I can’t just.’
‘You can. You’re Ronan.’
He looks at me. The look from the train, younger brother as advisor, the universe in the wrong configuration. Then he stands, boots on. Jacket.
‘Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Ron. I kept a huge secret from everyone I love for an entire year. Discretion’s not the issue.’
He almost grins, almost. Then he’s gone. The door is closing. His footsteps on the stairs are quick, the pace of someone walking towards the next thing.
Laurence comes back, drying his palms. Looks at the empty sofa where Ron was.
‘Where did he go?’
‘He’s figuring something out,’ I say.
He raises an eyebrow, the Haldrey eyebrow. God, I love that eyebrow.
‘Cryptic.’
‘Not my secret to tell.’
Something softens in his face at that. Approval, maybe. Or recognition.
He sets the tea towel down. Steps towards me. Just there.
I lean into him—my forehead against his collarbone.
The dishes done, the table cleared, peace settling into the space between us.
Five people exist in this kitchen now: my mother’s hand under the table, my father’s hand on a record sleeve, my brother’s boots heading towards a tram, and this man standing in a kitchen that smells of burnt cheese and home.
His chin rests on top of my head. The weight of it. Holding. Just holding.