Chapter Two

Aiden

Roland Park, Coalport City, is Posh, with a capital P. Aiden hates it. His dad lives in a preening Georgian townhouse with the housekeeper. It feels like the whole street is looking down on him, as he sits curbside in his '06 Peugeot 206, a car almost as old as he is.

The door on the black car creaks and he imagines a hundred old ladies rushing to twitch their curtains at The Poor who deigned to enter the neighbourhood in such a shitty car.

He spent eight years here, but it was never home. It came with his dad's new found fame and wealth, when he was ten.

Aiden bends down to look in the car wing-mirror. His inch-long black hair is flecked with ash and he brushes a hand over the fuzz to dislodge it. He looks tired, which his dad will notice. He stands and straightens his white shirt and his trousers. He was trying to make an effort to look nice, but it looks like he's going to an interview, or a funeral.

The front door has a big, shining-silver clawed knocker. The raps are thudding and ominous. He's building it up in his head into this cartoonishly bad thing, and he tries to shake that off. This is just dinner at 'home.' Even if it's been... seven? eight months? Long enough he can't quite remember.

The housekeeper, Mrs Leclerc, opens the door and his dad is standing behind her in the hallway. She's tall and thin and eternally silver-haired. His dad is tall and thin and severe, with black hair like his, but slightly longer and side-parted. He's wearing a polo and a navy fleece; CEO chic, despite describing himself as an artist.

"We were just about to send for search and rescue," his father says drily, by way of 'hello'.

"There was a fire." He passes Mrs Leclerc as she lets him in and she doesn't even try and disguise the fact that she can smell his new acrid fragrance. "Some nut lit a bonfire behind the cafe."

"You couldn't have called?" His father leads the way into the dining room and sit down, not waiting for Aiden.

Aiden trails after him and sits, too, childishly hoping the smell of the smoke realy gets in the off-white upholstery. It's not his style in here at all, but then, it's not his home, not any more. It looks like someone said, "keep the Georgian, but modernise it," so they sanded off a lot of the ornamentation and sapped all the colour. White, black and grey.

"It slipped my mind between the fire and the driving to get here."

"Oh well, you're here now," his father says. Mrs Leclerc bustles off to find the first course, and Aiden resists the urge to offer to help. "Still at the same digs?" The words express interest, but the tone of 'digs' suggests it could also be be pronounced 'shit hole'.

Aiden sighs quietly and fiddles with a napkin. There's not even food on the table yet; it's going to be a long, tiresome evening.

Then he remembers why he's here at all.

"Just try, Aide, for me?" his mam had said, in one of her more lucid moments.

"Yeah, same digs, Dad," he says. "How's work?"

It's cheating a little; his dad can talk and talk and talk about work. He ramps up and keeps going with relatively little prompting from Aiden. There's a whole new series of portraits to be done of ridiculously famous people, CEOs, high corporate lawyer types. The kinds of people who need an oil painting of themselves in the lobby. There's gallery openings and other, more hush-hush commissions that his father has to let him know are middle-eastern royals, but he can't say any more than that! And his sister has opened a new office for the brokerage in New York, with several new high profile clients - both artists and buyers. They're halfway through the main, pork in some kind of red-berry sauce that he begrudgingly admits is delicious, before his dad peters out.

They manage to limp through the rest of the main by talking about his mother. Her care is good and the new treatment regime seems to be working, but he knows all that; he saw her last week.

He doesn't say a cross word as they tuck into dessert - Eton mess - and his dad is loving on Reform.

And then there's a pause, a lull, and his dad says, "So. Have you got something serious lined up, or are you still playing around?"

Aiden gives himself credit. He scowls, but he doesn't immediately tell him to fuck off, which shows remarkable restraint.

"Hmm?" he says, swallowing the meringue and strawberries in his mouth with an angelic smile. "Oh, I'm still playing around."

It's his dad's turn to scowl.

"So what's this then?" he asks, gesturing between them. "It's been eight months. I thought you had some news. Or contrition."

"I literally just thought that we could spend some time together without getting the knives out." He puts down his spoon, thinks about it, and decides to be honest. "And Mam asked me to."

His dad doesn't want to do any of the touchy feely stuff. Never does. He just sighs and the silence stretches on.

"You could do anything you want to," he says eventually, unable to let it go.

"Including what makes me happy?" Aiden asks sarcastically.

"If it puts food on the table, sure!"

"You're an artist. If you hadn't lucked out with the Merrit & Tayle commissions, you'd be in the same boat-"

"I didn't luck out with anything," his father snarls. "It was hard damned work! Real work, making connections and getting business in. Work you could be doing, just like your sister, but you're too busy in your own head, dreaming and wasting your time, as always!"

Whoops. He'd always had an uncanny ability to find his father's buttons and stamp right on them. There was 'putting your foot in it' and then there was the no-look two foot stomp that Aiden seemed to manage, like jumping in a puddle.

He sighs, stands up.

"This was a damn fool idea," he says.

"Yes, I think it was." His dad gets up, too. "Maybe you should just call me when you come to your senses. I'll talk to your mother about not pushing it any more."

It's a cold dismissal. It doesn't hurt. He knows it will later, but right now he just wants to tell him to jump up his own ass.

He doesn't. Another demonstration of restraint.

"Yeah. Maybe that's best. Night."

It's still hot out, the summer's heat relentless, but he takes a moment down on the pavement. It's not like the Peugeot has AC anyway.

"'There was a fire?'" he asks himself in a mocking tone of voice. "'Are you okay?' Yeah, Dad, I'm fine, don't worry about it." He lets out a long, weary sigh and a short, exasperated laugh. Then he crosses the road and climbs into the Peugeot with a creak, to drive home.

It starts on the second try.