DON'T EAT MY LEFTOVERS. Oh wait.
Rory peeled it off. Folded it once. Put it in his jacket pocket.
Freddie helped too. His contribution was organisational: he stood in each room of the new flat and designated its function. 'This is the whale room' (his bedroom). 'This is the pizza room' (the kitchen). 'This is the painting room' (the studio). 'This is the games room' (the living room). 'This is the room where Dad and Rory sleep' (the master bedroom). He said the last one without pause, without emphasis, as though it were as ordinary as the pizza room, because to Freddie it was.
He had also decided where the Spider-Man painting went. Proper art, Freddie's words, and proper art deserved a wall. He'd pointed to the centre of his bedroom wall, the spot where the afternoon light would hit it best, and that was that. Rory found a nail and a hammer before the sofa was even in the door.
Gemma arrived at noon with sandwiches.
Owen carried the sofa. Patrick arrived with Tess and carried the bookshelf. Patrick spoke four words all day: 'Where?' 'Here?''Tea?' and 'Done.' This constituted, by Patrick's standards, a soliloquy.
By three o'clock the flat was full of boxes and empty of order and the kitchen was functional enough for the moka pot. Rory made coffee. The sound of it, the hiss, the gurgle, filled the new kitchen for the first time. The first of a thousand times.
The vase broke at five.
A cheap vase. A blue ceramic thing Diane had given Neil two Christmases ago, chosen with care, presented with specific formality. Neil kept it on the windowsill of his old flat. It held nothing. Served no function. But it was from his mother and the keeping was its own quiet loyalty.
Neil was carrying a box of kitchen things. The box caught the vase on the counter edge. The vase fell. Hit the new kitchen floor, tile, not carpet, and broke into five clean pieces.
Quiet. Rory looked at the pieces. Looked at Neil.
'Shit. That's... that is your mum's.'
'Neil.' Rory crouched. Picked up the five pieces. Clean breaks, edges sharp, the ceramic blue and white. He held them in his palms and looked at them, and Neil thought about his mother and the vase and the shop that had closed and the woman who'd chosen it with care and given it with formality and never once said what the giving meant.
Rory set the pieces on the counter. Arranged them. The base. The sides. Two curved fragments. Aligned the edges.
'It's fixable,' Rory said.
He left the pieces on the counter. They'd fix it tomorrow, or the day after, or the weekend. The vase wasn't urgent. The vase was patient. It had been patient for two years on a windowsilland could be patient for a few more days in five pieces on a kitchen counter.
That night. The first night in the new flat.
The boxes were stacked. The bed was assembled. Neil had done it, because Neil assembled things with the instruction manual open and the screws sorted by size, while Rory sat on the floor and offered unsolicited opinions about allen keys. The sheets were clean. The curtains were hung, badly, one side higher than the other, a problem that would be solved tomorrow or would become a feature.
Freddie was at Gemma's. The flat was theirs alone for the first night. Neil's idea. To hear the sounds. The pipes, the boiler, the traffic pattern, the specific creak of a floorboard under a foot.
They lay in bed. The new bed, in the new room, in the new flat. Paint and the faint chemical sweetness of new carpet.
'It doesn't smell right yet,' Rory said.
'It smells of carpet.'
'It needs to smell of us. Of linseed and coffee and whatever your shampoo is.'
'It's just shampoo.'
'It's not just shampoo. It smells like... cedar and something else. I've never asked.'
'It's Tesco's own brand.'
'Tesco's own brand smells like cedar?'
'Tesco's own brand smells like Tesco's own brand. You've romanticised my shampoo.'
'I've romanticised everything about you. Your shampoo. Your folder system. Your insistence on double-knotting Freddie's laces. The pen pressed into paper when youconcentrate. The way you stand at a whiteboard and the whole room listens, because your voice changes when you're teaching. It drops half a register and gets warmer and the kids hear it and they stop messing about.'
'You've been watching me teach?'
