Page 76 of Bare
'No.'
'But it explains it.'
He drank it. Lukewarm now. Still good. Rory's recipe, Neil's pot.
'And your dad?'
'My dad will sit in his armchair and let my mother handle it. That's the division of labour. She manages the emotions. He manages the garden. The hedge gets trimmed. The feelings get ignored.'
'He trimmed your hedge today.'
'He trimmed my hedge because trimming hedges is what he does instead of talking. Every snip is a sentence he can't say.' Neil paused. 'He'll die with a perfect garden and a son he never knew. And the terrible thing is, I think he knows that.
I think he trims the hedges because the alternative is sitting down and looking at me and having the conversation and the conversation would require him to feel and Malcolm Ashworth does not feel things. He maintains things. He maintains hedges and cars and standards and the absolute fucking fiction that his son is fine.'
Rory's hand found his. Laced their fingers.
'I wiped the paint off your face,' Neil said.
Rory looked at him. 'What?'
'In the hallway. You had paint on your jaw. Orange. I reached up and wiped it off. I didn't even know I was doing it.'
'I didn't notice.'
'I know you didn't. Neither did I. My hand just... went.' He stared at the coffee. 'My mother was down the hall. She saw.'
Rory was quiet. Processing.
'That's what she saw,' Neil said. 'Me. My hand. On your face. In my own hallway. The gesture of someone who'd been wiping paint off your jaw for months. Whose hand didn't know the difference between your flat and mine.'
'Neil...'
'My body did it.
Without permission. Do you understand? The body I've been controlling for thirty-three years. The body I trained to not reach, not look, not touch. That body reached up and touched your face in front of my mother because it's forgotten how to pretend.'
'Is that a bad thing?'
'It's terrifying.'
'Is it bad?'
Neil looked at him. Green eyes in the lamplight. The jaw he'd touched, clean now, the paint gone.
'No,' he said. 'It's not bad. It's the most honest thing my body's ever done.'
'Then don't apologise for it.'
'I'm not apologising. I'm telling you what happened. My hand reached for your jaw in my own hallway with my mother watching and I didn't flinch and I didn't stop and I didn't even know. And that's the thing, Rory. That's the whole thing. I spent four years building a system to prevent exactly that. And my hand passed through it like it wasn't there.'
'Because it isn't. Not anymore.'
'No. Not anymore.'
They were quiet. Rory's grip tightened on his fingers.
'The most honest thing your body's ever done,' Rory repeated. Quiet. 'That's what you said.'
