'I can see that. Excellent stripes.'
'I chose them SPECIFICALLY.'
'Specifically for the whales or specifically for me?'
'Both.'
Freddie grabbed his hand and pulled him inside. Rory let himself be pulled, the same way Neil let himself be pulled on school mornings, the surrender to a small person's momentum. He caught Neil's eye as he passed. The look lasted half a second. _I'm terrified and I'm here._
At the door, Neil took the wine. Rory handed him the small package. 'For you. Open it later.' Then he was gone, towed down the hallway by a six-year-old in a striped jumper, towards the whale gallery.
Neil looked at the package. Soft. Rectangular. Later.
He followed them in and stood in his own living room and watched Rory see it. Not the party flat. The real one. Saturday. The flat as it actually was.
Rory's eyes moved. His painting on the wall, still there. The bookshelf, alphabetical, the Van Gogh letters between Hardy and Heaney. The fridge, drawings, Spider-Man, the tree with BRAVE in purple. The coffee pot beside the kettle.
He took it in without comment. The control. The precision. And then his eyes found the drawings on the fridge and the painting on the wall and the coffee pot beside the stove, and Neil saw him understand: the order was changing. The evidence was on every surface.
The whale gallery was a success.
Freddie had arranged seven drawings on the coffee table, each labelled in his careful handwriting, HUMBACK, BLUE, SPERM (Neil had let that one pass), ORCA, GREY, MINKY, BOWHED. The labels were underlined twice. A small card at the front read: FREDDIE'S WHALE MUSEUM. ENTRY: FREE. Rory examined each one the way he'd examine a canvas at gallery work. No condescension. No hurrying.
'The humpback's the best,' Rory said. 'The proportions are right. See how the body curves? You've got the mass in the front and the tail's lighter. That's accurate.'
'The book said they're heavy at the front.'
'Yeah. The book's right. Mass distribution is everything. In whales and in paintings.'
'Is that true?'
'Absolutely. A painting needs weight in the right place. Too heavy at the top and it falls forward. Too light at the bottom and it floats. Your humpback has perfect balance.'
'I want to paint a real one. Big. Like the mural.'
'How big?'
'Like a WALL.'
'We could do that. Your wall. That wall.' He pointed at the living room wall, the one with the painting. 'Humpback whale. Life-size.'
'Life-size is THIRTEEN METRES.'
'So we'd need a bigger wall.'
'Or a smaller whale.'
'There's no such thing as a small whale. That defeats the point of whales.'
Freddie laughed. The full-body laugh. And Rory laughed with him and the two laughs, one deep, one high, both unreserved, filled the living room. Rory didn't look at Neil.
Neil stood in the kitchen doorway holding a plate and felt his eyes burn. He pressed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and breathed.
The oven was on. Pizza, shop-bought, because Neil's cooking skills had a ceiling and the ceiling was low. From the living room, his son and his partner discussing the hydrodynamics of cetacean locomotion.
They ate pizza on the sofa. Freddie between them. The crusts slightly too dark because Neil had been distracted by Rory's assessment of the bowhead whale ('He's got the baleen wrong but the eye's exceptional') and forgotten to set the timer. A nature documentary on, blue planet, Freddie's choice, volume up because whales deserved volume.
Freddie provided commentary. Running, tireless.
