Page 54 of Bare
‘It’ll go cold.’
‘In a minute, Neil.’
Rory was looking at the table. The table, not the food. The grain of the wood and the scratch near the edge where Freddie had run a toy lorry over it at eighteen months and the placemat and the bowl on the placemat and Neil’s hand next to the bowl.
‘This is the table,’ Rory said, eventually, ‘where you sit on Sunday mornings.’
‘Yes.’
‘With the paper.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your coffee.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you did it alone for a long time.’
Neil set the spoon down.
‘Yes,’ Neil said.
‘Okay.’
Rory picked up his spoon. He ate the first mouthful slowly, eyes closed. Swallowed. Opened his eyes again and said, withoutany performance at all, ‘Christ, Neil,’ and that was how Neil knew the risotto had worked.
They ate. They talked about nothing. The bottle. The parmesan. A joke about Barry the parrot, a fragment of a thing Rory’s sister had said on Christmas Day about a cousin who had brought the wrong kind of stuffing. Neil listened more than he spoke. He watched Rory hold a spoon in a kitchen that had, until tonight, only known the sound of one set of cutlery on a plate.
When the bowls were empty Rory took both of them to the sink and rinsed them and stacked them on the draining board in the wrong order, plate on top of bowl, and Neil, because he was a person and not a machine, did not move them.
Rory dried his hands on the tea towel. He folded it and left it on the counter.
‘Can I see the rest,’ he said.
‘There isn’t much.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m asking.’
Neil walked him round it. It took ninety seconds. The sitting room with the sofa and the bookshelf. The bathroom with the single toothbrush. The bedroom, which Rory stepped into and stopped at the threshold of, and looked at, and stepped back out of.
And then the smaller door. The one on the left of the hall.
Rory stopped at it. On the door, at the height of a five-year-old reaching up, four wooden letters stuck on with a glue Neil had not trusted when he bought it and which had held for three years anyway. F. R. E. D.
Rory did not touch the handle. He touched the D. Just the D. With one fingertip, the pad.
‘He’ll be back on Sunday,’ Neil said.
‘I know.’
‘I’m not going to...’
‘I know, Neil. I’m not asking to go in.’
‘Okay.’
‘I just wanted to know where his room was.’
