Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

On the Tuesday after the Saturday when they’d had sort-of-sex and Stuart had sent her an email about Bacon, and a couple of texts about nothing, he came up to her in a corridor in school and, blushing very red, asked her did she want to go for a coffee after school, just the two of them. She didn’t know why he was blushing. Well, she did, and she thought it was funny, but it made her blush as well. The two of them just standing there going red. She rushed out a Yeah, OK, see you after, as casually as she could and walked off. It was completely stupid. They’d had about six million conversations in the school corridors before.

One time in the café two men came in and sort of stood there looking at her dad. He stared back at them.

— What.

It was the same voice he used on the phone.

— Sorry to interrupt, sir.

The one talking was a really good-looking black man with dark framed glasses and hair shaved close to his head. He was wearing a dark grey suit, with a black v-neck jumper under the jacket and his tie done up. He looked really interesting. The other one was a white guy with a funny face. Like he was peeking through a keyhole. Or maybe it was normal. He had a stupid smile and was carrying a big envelope and he was looking at her. He was wearing a neat suit too, but he looked more like he was going for a job interview. They didn’t look like police.

— What.

— Need you to have a look at a couple of things, the black one said. Somewhat urgent.

He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at Cath and nodded.

— I’m very sorry to bother you.

She smiled and felt herself blush.

Her dad went outside with them. She watched through the window. The three of them hunched over the envelope, and stuff was pulled out of it, and her dad peered at it. She thought maybe it was photographs. She couldn’t see. Her dad made a call on his phone. The black guy made one on his. The white guy came back in and bought himself a bottle of water.

— Sorry about this, he said.

— That’s OK.

— He’ll be back in a minute.

He seemed nice. But he looked sad. She thought that he just had one of those sad faces. And red eyes. She wanted to ask him things. About her dad. What’s he like to work with? Is he tough? Does he beat people up? Is he racist? Does he swear all the time? Is he good at being a detective? Is he clever? Is he sexist? Does he have a girlfriend? Do you do cases where fathers kill their kids? What does he think about them? But she couldn’t form any sort of question at all before he had gone back outside. The two men walked to a car and drove away and her father came back in and patted her shoulder and apologized.

— That’s the first time I’ve ever met anyone you work with.

— No it’s not. Is it?

— Yeah. You’re very rude to them.

He laughed.

— I am not.

— You didn’t say anything to them. Just what . You should have asked them to sit down.

— They should have called me.

— They seemed really nice. You should have introduced me.

He smiled at her as he sipped his coffee.

— They are not nice. Really. And anyway, one of them is married and the other is gay and they’re both old enough to be your father. And if your mother and I agree on anything then we agree that you should never, ever, ever, get involved with a policeman.

They went up towards Muswell Hill to a place Stuart knew where there’d be no one from the school. He bought her a strawberry tea and got himself a cappuccino. He talked about music and kept on wiping his lips. He was into all these bands that she had never heard of. She thought he was trying to match her art talk. Trying to balance it. That was OK. He said he’d send her a playlist and they talked for a while about the best ways of sharing files, and about the computers they had and about stuff on Facebook, and she was sure they’d had all these conversation a dozen times before. It was like he’d forgotten that he’d known her for about two years. On and off.

They walked down the hill and he held her hand for a while. When they got to a bus stop that was good for her, he kissed her again, and it was great. He leaned against her and she could feel his body warm against her and she liked it and she thought about his scar. When the bus came he smiled at her like he was shy again, and she liked that too, and he said ‘See ya, gorgeous’ in a stupid voice and they both laughed, and they were laughing at themselves, at how stupid they were being and that it was all right to be stupid, it was fun. On the bus she dozed and held her phone in her hand and leaned her head against the window.

She didn’t know what to do about Rothko. She didn’t understand Rothko. Everything about Rothko made her want to like him. All the things people who liked him said and wrote made her want to like him. They talked about warmth and love and comfort and feelings like religious feelings. She wondered about herself, about what was wrong with her that she couldn’t feel those things. Or not feel them when she looked at Rothko. She had been, twice, to the Rothko room in the Tate. And her dad had taken her to the big exhibition of lots of his stuff. But she didn’t get it. Soft focus blocks of dusty colour. One of them had made her think of sunsets on summer holidays in Cornwall, so she liked that one, a bit. But Rothko. He did not move her.

Whenever her father took her to one of the Tates, or to the National Gallery or something, she could sense his boredom make his back straighten and his eyes water. She would forget he was there sometimes and then turn to find him looking at his phone, or looking at a woman, or yawning. She’d laugh at him and they’d go for a coffee and he’d get her something in the shop. Some postcards usually, or a book. She didn’t like him spending much. She didn’t know why. He wasn’t hard up.

Her mother was jealous of these trips. She didn’t want to be, and she battled with herself to cover it up, but you could feel it, in the kitchen. It was like she was plugged in to something.

She started going to museums and galleries with Stuart. They went to the Whitechapel Gallery together — the first time she’d been. They had to stand on the tube and he held her hand. She liked when they had to let go for some reason and then she’d wait to see how long it took him to reach out for her again. Sometimes it wasn’t quick enough and she grabbed his hand, and she liked that she felt able to do that, and liked that it made him smile. She liked the fact that they were turning into a really annoying couple who held hands all the time and that their other friends, if they knew, would dedicate their lives to taking the piss.

They went to the National Gallery and spent a couple of hours wandering around. Stuart wasn’t scared of stuff that other boys were scared of. He stood in front of a picture of a naked man and said out loud to her that it was beautiful. He looked at another picture and wanted her to tell him whether it was supposed to suggest a vagina. She blushed and he didn’t. When she used a word he didn’t understand, he told her he didn’t understand it and asked her what it meant. She had to admit once that she didn’t really know what crescendo meant. He laughed at her and put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a little kiss on her cheek.

She told her mother that she and Stuart were sort-of-seeing-each-other now. Her mother took a couple of minutes to work out which of her friends she meant. Then she told her that he was welcome to come over to the house whenever Cath wanted. That made her laugh. She liked it. She wondered if he’d be allowed to stay the night. Maybe. In the spare room. She wondered if he’d even want to. She wanted him to. Sometime. For some reason. She wanted to see him first thing in the morning. She imagined bringing him a cup of tea in bed. She imagined him lying asleep in the spare bed in the spare room. She imagined it for ages.