Rory had given the permission back. The inscription on the inside cover:Start again.
Rory was asleep. On his stomach, one arm hanging off the mattress, the sheet at his waist. The tree tattoo on his ribs rising and falling with each breath, the roots expanding, the branches contracting, the tree breathing. His hair across the pillow, dark against the white cotton. His face in profile, the jaw, the broken nose, the ring catching the first light through the curtain gap.
Neil looked at him. Really looked. How he used to look at things before the looking stopped. The eye measuring distance, proportion, angle. He selected what mattered. The shoulder's curve. Shadow beneath the scapula. The sheet pooled at the hip.
He put charcoal to paper.
The line was uncertain. Unsteady. The hand remembered the impulse but not the fluency. The first stroke was wrong, the angle of the shoulder too sharp, the proportion off.
Too dark.
He smudged it with his thumb. Tried again. The charcoal caught the paper's grain and the mark was better, not right, but closer. He drew another line. Another. Another. The shoulder taking shape through accumulation, mark by mark, the same way Rory built his paintings, layers, corrections, the truth emerging through the process of getting it wrong.
He drew for twenty minutes. The charcoal wore down to a stub. His fingers blackened, the charcoal dust deep in the lines of his hands, the same place the paint lived in Rory's. The drawing filled the page: a shoulder, a back, the line of the spine, the suggestion of a face in profile. Technically rough. The proportions approximate, the work of a fifteen-year-old trapped in a thirty-three-year-old's hand.
But the attention was there. The careful, devoted attention of someone looking at a body and finding it worth recording.
When Rory woke, he found Neil sitting on the edge of the bed with charcoal on his fingers and the sketchbook open on his knee.
He looked at the drawing, at Neil, at the drawing again. His face cracked. Somewhere between tears and laughter. A man seeing what he'd hoped for.
'You opened it,' he said. Rough.
'I opened it.'
'You drew me.'
'I drew your shoulder.'
'From behind.'
'Old habits.'
'Will you draw my face?'
The sketch. The shoulder. The turned head. Eighteen years ended on a Monday morning in a flat of oil paint and sex.
'Next time,' he said. 'I'm working up to it.'
'Take your time.'
'You know me, I always do.'
Rory pulled him back into bed. The sketchbook fell between them, charcoal smudging the sheet, the drawing face-up on the pillow. Morning coming in. City outside.
The drawing would get better. His hand would remember. And one morning, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, Neil would draw the face.
And not look away.
19
BUILDING HOME
Mrs Webb'soffice was on the second floor of the admin block. Neil had been in it twice before in four years. Once for an appraisal. Once to flag a safeguarding concern about a Year 8 girl whose homework started arriving in a different handwriting. Both times the room was a room, plain, purposeful, the chair too low. Today it was a threshold.
He was halfway up the stairs when the office door opened above him. Howard Prentice came through it. Red-faced. The stride of a man leaving a conversation he'd lost. He saw Neil on the landing. Stopped for half a second. Recognition, assessment, something harder underneath that didn't need a word. Then past him. Close enough to catch aftershave and anger. His shoes hit the stairs hard all the way down.
At the top, Mrs Webb stood in her doorway. Hand on the frame. Behind her, the office still held the shape of whatever had just happened in it.
