‘Look at the hands,’ Rory said. He tapped a reproduction. ‘Nobody draws hands like Schiele. They're not decorative. They're structural. They hold the composition together.’
‘The fingers are too long.’
‘The fingers are exactly right. He distorts to tell the truth.’
‘Distortion for honesty. Your entire philosophy in three words.’
‘Art doesn't need philosophy. It just needs to feel right.’ He turned the page. A standing nude, male, angular, the body contorted into a position that was simultaneously uncomfortable and completely true. ‘Look at this one. He's not comfortable.’
‘He's not supposed to be comfortable. He's supposed to be seen.’
‘He is seen. Every line of him. Schiele didn't leave anything out. Not the ribs, not the hip bone, not the cock. He drew the whole body because the whole body was the point.’
‘Unlike your paintings.’
‘What's that supposed to mean?’
‘Your paintings don't show faces. Schiele showed everything. Face, body, expression, genitals. The full human. You show shoulders and turned heads and the suggestion of a neck. You hide the thing Schiele exposed.’
Rory was quiet for a moment. His thumb on the page, resting on the printed body. ‘I hide the face because the face is too much. If I paint the face, the viewer makes it about identity. About who. I want it to be about what. What the body carries. What the posture says.’
Rory's arm lay along the sofa behind Neil's shoulders. His hand came to rest on Neil's far shoulder, drawing him a fraction closer.
Neil didn't pull away. He let his own weight settle. A millimetre. Two.
The rain on the window. The wine half-drunk on the table. The book between them. Rory's thumb moving against Neil's shoulder, an absent stroke.
‘He died at twenty-eight,’ Neil said.
‘Twenty-eight. Thousands of works. The most honest art ever made. Less than a decade.’ Rory's thumb traced a slow circle on Neil's shoulder. ‘I was terrified of that at twenty-two. The time question. Too little of it. Now I think the work doesn't care about time. It cares about whether you showed up.’
‘Did you show up?’
‘Every day. Even the bolognese days. Even the days when the painting was shit and Kieran had nits and I hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. I showed up.’ He looked at Neil. ‘That's the only thing I know how to do.’
The front door opened.
Neither registered it. A sound from the hallway. Background noise.
‘The line work in the later paintings is more confident,’ Neil was saying, pointing to a 1917 piece. ‘Less frantic. He's not trying to shock anymore.’
A presence in the doorway.
Neil looked up.
Kieran stood in the living room doorway. School bag over one shoulder, earbuds around his neck, damp from the rain. He'd come back for something, his eyes were already scanning the room, and had stopped mid-scan.
He took in the scene. His brother. The arm around Mr Ashworth's shoulders. The heads close together. The wine. The book. The geometry of two people comfortable enough to forget that comfort was itself a confession.
Neil jerked away from Rory. Violently, too fast. The full-body flinch of a man caught unprepared. The book slid off their laps and hit the floor with a thud like a gavel. Three feet of space opened between them in the time it took to draw one breath.
Colour flooded his face. A full, scorching heat that started at his collar and climbed to his hairline. His arms crossed.
Rory looked at Kieran. Looked at Neil's retreating posture. Exhaled slowly.
Kieran leaned against the doorframe. One eyebrow up. The smirk arrived, practised since the age of twelve.
‘Well, well.’ Arid. He looked from Rory to Neil and back. ‘Finally caught the famous I'm not seeing anyone.’ Beat. ‘Should've guessed. Explains the moping. And the paintings. And the fact that you've been cooking actual meals instead of eating cereal over the sink.’
