‘Bare. That’s all. I won’t put your name anywhere.’
Neil looked at the painting. The painting looked back.
His own face, seen by someone who loved it. The fear in the eyes was real, Rory hadn’t softened it, hadn’t painted courage without cost. He’d painted a man in the act of arriving. Still frightened. But getting there.
‘Put it in the show,’ Neil said.
‘You’re sure.’
‘I’m sure.’
He meant it. In the studio, wine in hand, Rory behind him.
The opening was a Friday in late April. Seven o’clock. The gallery occupied a converted warehouse south of the river; high ceilings, concrete floors, the industrial architecture that made art look serious and artists look small. Track lighting that turned every surface into a stage.
The same man who dressed in ten minutes on a school morning had spent sixty minutes standing in front of a mirror, changing shirts, changing back, discovering that his good trousers had a paint mark on the left thigh, Rory’s paint, orange, from the studio floor, and deciding to keep it.
Neil wore the dark jumper. The aftershave Gemma had given him. He’d shaved clean. His hair was pushed back. The face in the mirror looked decided.
The drive was short. He parked a street away. Sat in the car for two minutes, grip white on the steering wheel. Different from the first drive to Rory’s flat, the shaking, the circling the block. This was the stillness before a thing he wanted. The pause before something worth marking.
Out of the car. April evening, mild, the first since October, blossom on the pavement, the city scented with river and exhaust and the green vegetable snap of spring.
The gallery entrance was a loading dock converted into a doorway; industrial roller shutter raised, the interior visible from the street. Light spilling out. People inside, moving, holding glasses. The hum of conversation that happens when a hundred people gather around something and pretend they’re not looking at each other.
He walked in.
The space was already filling. Art people in studied carelessness. Tess and Patrick by the bar, Tess in a dress that said I left the pub for this and the champagne had better be worth it, Patrick in a clean shirt that said this is the maximum I will concede to the occasion. Kieran in a blazer that didn’t quite fit, his girlfriend Carol beside him, both overwhelmed by a room that contained no screens and no food.
The canvases were arranged in sequence around the perimeter. Twenty-four pieces. Large-format, five by four, six by five, the biggest Neil had seen from Rory.
The palette had shifted since the earlier work. Still the bruised blues. The near-blacks he was known for. But warmer. Ochres and ambers bleeding through the dark surfaces. The scrape-back technique revealing layers beneath layers, each surface an archaeology. Neil walked the sequence.
His feet moved without instruction. A set of canvases. There was a pattern he hadn’t seen before. The warmth bleeding through the scrape-back layers was what Rory had taught Year 7 to paint into the mural roots, the colour that lived underneath, revealed by attention.
Here, it was plain.
The first canvas: a figure turned completely away. All shoulder. All back. Posture closed, defended. Paint surface dense and dark, almost black, the gold tones barely visible. The old Rory. The Rory of the Whitmore review: dark, urgent.
Further along: three-quarter profile. Half a face. One eye visible, dark, wary. The palette shifted. Ambers and raw siennas mixing with the blues, the scrape-back revealing golds underneath. The surface thinner, the paint less armoured.
As the figure turned, the layers came away.
At the end, the final canvas. It occupied the far wall alone. Lit from above. Track lights pulling it into a pool of white. The rest of the gallery fell away.
He’d seen it in the studio. Said yes. Prepared himself.
He was not prepared.
In the studio, the painting had been private. Two men and a canvas and the familiar studio air. Here it was public. Lit. Institutional. The face, his face, hung six feet tall on a white wall while fifty strangers moved around the room holding wine and opinions.
The expression Rory had captured, terrified and brave, the eyes open, was not a painting anymore. It was a confession pinned to a wall under lights.
A woman in a red scarf stood in front of it. She studied the canvas, then turned and scanned the room. Her eyes found Neil. Back to the painting. To Neil. The comparison was clinical, unhurried. She tilted her head. Tilted her head. Her face softened into something worse than curiosity. Moved on.
A man with a notebook, the arts supplement, the same one that had reviewed Rory’s earlier work, looked up from the canvas. His gaze found Neil, held for a beat, then returned to the painting. He wrote something. Unhurried. His colleague leaned over and read the note. Glanced at the painting, then at Neil, then back.
Neil stood still. The gallery was performing its function: people were looking at art. This was the contract. He’d signed it. In the studio, with wine, with Rory behind him, the signature had felt brave. Here, under track lighting, with strangers cataloguing the distance between the painting’s face and his own, the signature was exposure. His breath went shallow. His fingers found his shirt cuffs and held.
