Page 12 of Bare
‘Yes.’
‘And before that?’
‘You know before that.’
‘I know. Six years of marriage and in the last two you never once…’ She stopped. Without unkindness. ‘I know before that. I also know you've been alone for four years. And the closest thing you've had to human contact is a stranger in a car park and a laptop. And now there's a man with a sexy lip ring buying you coffee and you can't tell me about it without your eye twitching.So I'm going to ask you something and I need you to answer it properly.’
‘Gemma, I never used the word sex…’
‘Do you want to see him?’
‘He's my colleague.’
‘That's not what I asked.’
The hallway was narrow. Owen's voice from the living room, talking to Freddie about which game to play. Chicken roasting. The domestic heat of someone else's complete life.
‘Yes,’ Neil said. Quietly. ‘I want to see him.’
‘Right. So see him.’
‘It's not that simple.’
‘It's exactly that simple. You want something that isn't anonymous. That's not complicated. That's basic human progress.’ She folded her arms. ‘And don't say Freddie. Freddie is five. Freddie wants dinosaurs and ice cream. Freddie does not need his father to be a monk.’
‘Gemma…’
‘I've been your best friend for twenty years, Neil. You have been and are my dearest person. I earned the right to tell you to stop it.’ Her hand on his arm. The steel-and-cotton voice. ‘Go and have a life. For God's sake.’
He stood on the step for a moment after she'd closed the door.
Drove home. The flat. The quiet. The evening stretching out in front of him like a corridor with no doors.
He stood in the living room. The white wall opposite the sofa, blank, the one where Gemma once suggested he hang a painting. Two years later. Still blank. A surface with nothing onit, in a flat with no one in it. He'd loved art once. He'd closed the sketchbook. No images on the walls.
Sat on the sofa. Stood up. Sat down. Picked up Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd. Read the same sentence four times. Gabriel Oak watching Bathsheba Everdene from a distance and burning.
He cleaned the kitchen. Wiped the counters. Scrubbed the hob. Reorganised the spice rack, even though it was already alphabetical and the reorganisation changed nothing except the position of the cinnamon, which he'd bought by accident and never used. The jar sat between cardamom and cumin like an interloper. He considered binning it. Left it.
At eleven he dropped onto the sofa in the clean, quiet flat and stared at the white wall. Then picked up his phone and typed Rory Cavanaugh artist into the browser before the sensible part of his brain could intervene.
Gallery pages. Review links. An image search, canvases dark, thickly textured. He clicked through. One series caught him: large-scale pieces, oil and mixed media, human forms rendered in slashes of colour that shouldn't have been recognisable but were. The bodies in the paintings weren't pretty. They were real. Weight and tension and angle, muscle and bone pressing against the paint surface, trying to break through.
He stared at one canvas. A male figure, back turned, shoulders carrying invisible weight. The palette was bruised, purples, deep blues, an undercurrent of red that ran through the composition like a vein. It was good. Better than good. The surface of the painting wasn't the painting, and whoever made this knew it.
A short biography on the gallery page. Working-class background. Self-taught before art school. Based locally. No mention of a partner. He hated that he looked.
He found an interview in an arts supplement. I don't plan, Rory had said. I react. The canvas tells me what it needs. My job is to listen and not be a coward about it.
Neil read the sentence three times. The word coward sat in the room.
He closed the browser. Set the phone face-down on the arm of the sofa.
The flat held its breath.
Neil stared at the wall. Gemma's voice: You're allowed to want things.
The wall stared back. Patient. He offered nothing and demanded nothing and waiting for the man on the sofa to decide whether he was going to spend the rest of his life looking at white plaster or whether, at some point, he was going to hang a painting.
