by Patrick Gale
Eustace dreaded ringing him at a bad moment.
‘You mean with bullets flying? I hate to tell you, but I probably wouldn’t answer.’
‘That’s even worse. Now if I ring and you don’t answer, I’ll be thinking IED.’
So they agreed Eustace could text whenever he liked but that Theo would initiate all calls, as his life was more complicated.
Because they had deleted what Theo called the App of Doom, and become roundedly human to one another by talking rather than texting, they resisted doing the usual sordid, appy things, like beating off in unison although – thanks to a waterproof cover on Theo’s tablet and a cunning suction pad Eustace found for his – they did take a couple of showers together. For the most part they talked, as any new lovers must. They told their stories. Eustace learnt that Theo was teetotal because his parents were drunks and confided in turn that his relationship with Gwyn had verged on the abusive and that his one with his mother wasn’t straightforward either. They laid tentative then increasingly definite plans for Theo’s next home leave, which was in four months.
Naomi demanded details, of course, encouraging him at every turn and brushing aside any doubts he expressed with characteristic pronouncements.
‘Prudery at our age is as unconvincing as home dye jobs,’ was one. ‘You’re scared he might rearrange your tidy life,’ was another. Her final pronouncement, after she had been briefly introduced to Theo at the start of a Skype call before coming over all girlish and making a hasty exit was that this latest twist in his life story was almost unbearably sweet. ‘If I’m honest, I only got you on the app to get you some healthy rumpy-pumpy to help you forget Gwyn. Only you could dive into a lake of pure sex and come up like some Labrador with something so bloody wholesome.’
The results of his blood tests led to Eustace being called in for another consultation and an X-ray. He had come clean to Theo weeks back about his HIV status, popping his daily dose of medication on camera and showing the labels on the pill pots in close-up. Theo just grinned, nodded, apparently quite unbothered, although the connection sometimes wavered, which could make expressions hard to read if they weren’t backed up by words, and held up a bottle of his own.
‘Prep,’ he said with another grin. ‘I used to be in the Scouts.’
At which Eustace had nodded, smiled back uncomprehendingly then raced to Google to find out just what Prep was. He didn’t like to tell him about this latest hospital visit though. As Theo had already joked, their age difference was completely immaterial, as they were never going to meet ‘in the real world’. Eustace wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not and hoped his face hadn’t fallen too obviously at it.
And he certainly didn’t tell him that the X-ray results came through, and he had a papillary thyroid carcinoma and would need an operation at the first opportunity. He wanted to tell him but found he couldn’t. He told himself it was because a man in a war zone had no need of bad news from home; he was almost convincing.
They had one of their weekly Skype dates the night after, however: pizza at either end and Vertigo , because Eustace had horrified Theo by admitting he had never seen it. Joyce had learned to recognize Theo’s voice and responded when he called her name, even though they were fairly sure she couldn’t see things on screens as she barked or whined in response to noises on a show’s soundtrack but sat calmly through any silent imagery of cats or rabbits, both certain to send her into a frenzy in the flesh.
To Eustace’s dismay the Skype call had barely begun with his lover greeting Joyce and her frantically sniffing the screen and whining to get at the nice man who knew her name when Theo started weeping, lent courage by the fact that there was nobody in the other bunks.
‘What?’ Eustace asked. ‘For God’s sake, what? Theo?’
Theo mastered himself then cracked again.
‘Take your time,’ Eustace told him gently. ‘I’m here. I can wait.’
Theo had not long before adopted a local dog, a mixed breed who looked as though she or a parent had once herded animals. Perhaps rashly, he had christened her Audrey and taken to feeding her leftovers from the mess. She had taken to sleeping beneath his window and joining him enthusiastically when he went jogging. But that day he had found her shot dead in a ditch. He was desperately upset. There had been no enemy action for days, or nothing near the camp, and he had a horrible feeling she had been killed by one of his fellow soldiers who could occasionally become trigger happy, shooting birds or rats when nervous or bored.
‘I’ve been out here too fucking long,’ he whimpered, after blowing his nose, his face blotchy with tears.
‘When’s your next leave due? I mean proper leave, back here?’
‘Five weeks now,’ Theo said.
‘Hey! So we can go to Battersea Dogs’ Home together. Maybe find a friend for Joyce to tear around with.’ What am I saying? he thought, but he said it anyway. ‘She’s an egomaniac; it would do her good not to be an only child at last.’
And Theo mumbled, ‘Really?’
‘Sure. Why ever not?’
‘I love you.’
Theo meant it. He wiped his nose again and turned the full wattage of his big eyes on to the screen, where he had somehow achieved the perfect, most flattering lighting.
A few days before, regaining ground after letting herself be flustered by their Skype introduction, slightly peeved, perhaps, despite her denials, that the app she had recommended for mere curative diversion had so rapidly thrown up what was looking like another relationship, Naomi had snatched his mobile to examine several photographs of Theo with a connoisseur’s frown before reluctantly declaring him Pornstar Bambi .
‘I love you,’ Theo said again. He didn’t smile.
‘Fuck. I think I love you back,’ Eustace told him, unmanned.
So there it was. He was in love again, this time with a man he’d not even kissed yet, after not so much as a whiff of pheromones and after the most chaste courtship of his life to date, far purer than anything he’d experienced in his teens.
And he had cancer.
He told Naomi of course, about the cancer, because he needed her to come and stay while he went to hospital to have the thyroidectomy. One of the by-products of his period in his early twenties employed as a quant in a merchant bank was private health insurance he had never got around to cancelling. He could have the operation swiftly and in a private hospital he could see from his guest bathroom at the back of the house. They wouldn’t be sure until they opened him up but the cancer might not have metastasized yet. They would have to remove some lymph nodes as well to check.
Eustace told Naomi to her face and she gave him a warm hug but was bracingly calm afterwards. And then, because she knew him so well he could never keep anything hidden from her for long, he told her about the love.
Theirs wasn’t one of those friendships in which the single straight woman looked to the gay man for a relationship surrogate. She had always been clear that what she liked about being around him was precisely that they weren’t lovers, that they were ‘grown-ups’ who could be as refreshingly honest with one another as siblings and as supportive as true friends. Over the years since they had rediscovered each other, she had pursued a discreet love life, giving him so few details that he had always assumed she preferred her men married and only sporadically available. Men had let her down, however, as Eustace’s friendship had not, and he knew she would miss him if he disappeared into another exclusive or possessive relationship.
‘He’s on active deployment,’ he felt he needed to point out. ‘You’ll hardly notice the change . . .’
She chose not to rise to this but parried his comment with a joke. The scarring would be minimal, she said, and with the calibre of surgeon he’d be getting up the road, they could give him a facelift in time for Theo’s leave.
‘You can be surprised when you open the door and carry on looking surprised throughout the honeymoon. You’ve got to tell him, though,’ she added.
&nbs
p; ‘He’s in a war zone. Someone just shot his dog,’ he said, petting Joyce for reassurance. But the dog chose to pull back and look at him with a whippetty directness that somehow only echoed Naomi’s. ‘It’s the last thing he needs.’
‘But you might be really ill. Would you want to start a relationship with someone who was dying before you met them?’
‘Jesus, Naomi!’
‘Sorry, but would you?’
‘Well let’s see. Let’s let the oncologist read my entrails for signs before we start seeing vultures wheeling over W8.’
The operation was remarkably simple. His thyroid was removed, leaving a small horizontal scar in the front of his neck that soon began to heal once the skin clips were removed and which he rubbed religiously with calendula cream to make it disappear more quickly.
Still he said nothing to Theo. Although, as Naomi loved pointing out, in a literal sense they had been seeing each other for some time, although he had seen Theo cry, although he now knew him well enough to recognize the way he invariably glanced to his left when saying something painful or unconsciously rubbed an earlobe when something turned him on, Eustace still felt Theo was too much a stranger to be so confided in. Until the scar had blended in with the other all too numerous lines on his neck, he avoided sitting too close to a light source on their date nights and only sent selfies after judicious cropping.
The date for Theo’s leave was now only a fortnight away. Theo had a father still living, but they were not close because of the drinking, in which he persisted. There was an aunt he loved, however, who was on the Isle of Wight. So, assuming their first meeting in the flesh would not be a disaster, they’d laid a plan to go there for a few days, staying on a houseboat in Bembridge harbour because the aunt was beyond hosting visitors. Then they would travel on to Dorset to walk some of the coast path. Joyce would come too. To Eustace’s slight relief, there had been no follow-through on the rash but impractical suggestion that they adopt a rescue dog together. Theo’s leave was for two whole weeks.
Then the oncologist announced that the thyroid had indeed been cancerous and that Eustace would be needing radioactive iodine treatment to make sure that any thyroid cells left behind by surgery would be destroyed. ‘You’ll take a single capsule of I-131. That’s the radiation bit,’ she explained. ‘It will make you entirely radioactive for a day or two, depending on the size of dose and your metabolism, which is why we’ll have to perform the treatment in our dedicated suite – what I like to call the Lead-Lined Room. Once your readings are below a safe level we’ll let you out but it’s simplest to bring only clothes and possessions like paperbacks you don’t mind leaving in the bin at the end.’
Still he didn’t tell Theo. The treatment date fell after their last date night and his next duty visit to his difficult mother and two days before the date of Theo’s arrival.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ he told Naomi. ‘Honestly. You have a life. I can easily put Joyce in kennels for once.’ Joyce looked at him as though outraged but then, a little like a Sealyham terrier’s, her facial markings meant that outrage or disgust seemed her permanent expression.
Naomi stroked her. She was always far softer on the whippet than she was on him. He liked to tease her she’d have made a natural mother had she not been born aromantic.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen where I live. Coming here will be a holiday.’
She was just the same with him when she arrived for her day of lessons and he set off to visit his mother, but there were small marks of tenderness when he returned. She booked a table at their favourite restaurant for supper (he paid, but it was the thought that counted). And she had bought him a very soft bamboo T-shirt, boxers and socks, ‘to pad around your cell in. It’s always hot as hell in those places; you won’t need layers’.
She insisted on walking him the short distance to the hospital and checked him in, mischievously playing the role of his significant other in front of the nurses. And then, as a surprise, just as she was leaving him, she pressed a tiny MP3 player and earphones into his hands, betraying a small tremor of emotion in the gesture.
‘It’s only a cheap one they were giving away on a flight once,’ she said. ‘You can throw it in the bin when you go without a backward glance.’
He smiled, making her push her hair off her face in the impatient way she had when feelings were required of her.
‘Is it all cello music?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she snorted. ‘What other kind is there? What was it Jean used to tell us all the time?’
He pictured Jean, their formidable shared teacher, her leonine face, her daunting, oracular air.
‘When everything has been said,’ he began and they finished in unison, ‘the cello sums up!’ And they both laughed.
‘I put all your favourites on there,’ she added. ‘And maybe a few surprises.’
‘Is it all you?’
‘Not entirely,’ she said. ‘But other people’s recordings can be so bloody irritating. Is that self-centred of me?’
He kissed her as response, which raised a smile from the nurse who was waiting to usher her from the lead-lined room.
‘You’re allowed to visit him tomorrow,’ the nurse said. ‘Just not for very long and you’ll have to keep your distance by sitting right over there.’ She pointed to an unappealing chair in the corner.
Naomi glanced back at the chair. ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to glow in the dark.’
Bring nothing with you that you don’t mind leaving behind. Like that daunting instruction he was sure nobody in a plane ever obeyed that, after an emergency landing, you should take absolutely nothing with you, it was an injunction that might have been designed to arouse Dante-esque thoughts of transience.
The corner room was featureless but Eustace had lived long enough under the influence of an art-dealer lover, then that of his collection, to prefer a blank wall to bad art. There was a plane tree outside. A yard of dirty sky. Pigeons. A police helicopter. He could even see across the lower block of flats between to the roof and upper floor of his house, whose chimney pots were distinctively modelled like chess pieces.
He poured himself a glass of water. The introductory booklet said that the more he drank, the swifter his radioactivity would be safely flushed away underneath unsuspecting Kensington and Chelsea.
He changed into the bamboo T-shirt, socks and boxers, left his other clothes, shoes and wallet in a bag by the door as instructed, climbed into bed, because he thought he might as well, plugged in the little ear buds and picked up the MP3 player. It was so small, with a cord so it hung around the listener’s neck like a pendant, that it took him a while to work out how to set it playing. Then his head filled with a watery piano introduction so instantly evocative of boyhood it made him smile in recognition: Saint-Saëns’ The Swan .
CHAPTER TWO
Eustace lived in Hell, or at least its antechamber. Or perhaps Purgatory was a fairer comparison, since he was not unusually abused, and he was clothed and fed, and with both parents still living. On the rare occasions when people asked where he lived, they tended to exclaim,
‘Oh Weston-super-Mare! How lovely! Lucky boy! It must be like being on holiday every day.’
And he knew they were thinking seaside, sunshine, donkey rides on the beach. But Weston had estuary mud, not proper sand, and was no sunnier than anywhere else in England.
His surviving granny said the rain came across the Bristol Channel directly from Wales, which made it more penetrating and with a tendency to leave coal streaks on drying laundry. And if you lived in a place where people came on holiday, it made things like going to school harder and when you tried to do holidayish things on your doorstep, like going to the beach, you felt people stare. And if the sun did come out, it was crowded down by the water, and he had taken on his mother’s horror of crowds. Only she didn’t call them crowds but trippers. Weston, his mother said, attracted something called the Rougher Element
, and a few ugly incidents where the sons of visitors had thrown sand in his eyes or kicked over his carefully constructed sandcastles apparently confirmed this. And donkey hair made him wheeze. So, although their house in Royal Crescent was close to the water, Eustace rarely went there for pleasure, preferring to ride his bicycle aimlessly around the streets or to find a shady corner of a public park.
Even without the Rougher Element, people in unwise shorts, people exposing too much sweating flesh, people who ate and drank in the streets when it wasn’t even a mealtime, Weston was full of people who were a source of unease. Many of them were very old, as a lot of them chose to come there to die, apparently, but there were also others adjusting to life outside mental hospitals and more of whom his parents darkly muttered ‘rehabilitation’ . These were often painfully thin but otherwise could only be distinguished from the ex-psychiatric patients by the bad teeth and skin they often had or by their way of looking for things in litter bins or abruptly asking if he could spare any money. All three groups had a tendency to talk to people who weren’t there and to be alarmingly unpredictable. However compelling they were to watch from a safe distance, they were best avoided. Unfortunately, while the really old residents liked to bask in the sun like lizards, the people adjusting and the people in rehab seemed as drawn as Eustace was to the few shady corners of the town’s parks and gardens.
There was little respite at home since that was also a home with a big H. He had overheard visitors describe Royal Crescent as distinguished and knew from Granny that it was a reminder of how refined a resort the little town had been before the arrival of the railway and the Rougher Element. Their house should have been lovely. It had spacious rooms, high ceilings, a pretty conservatory and a calm, ferny garden. Several of the bedrooms, including his, had glimpses of the water. However his father had turned it into one of the town’s many old people’s homes so there was always a pervasive smell of cabbage water or worse and, except in the deepest reaches of the night, rarely a half-hour went by without the ringing of a bell or the sounds of the demented elderly. Depending on the resident, these ranged from cackling merriment to naked anguish. Eustace was used to both smells and sounds, of course, since he had grown up there and they were his normality, but they made him reluctant ever to bring boys from school home with him. Also there was something about being a child in such a place, that encouraged the old to be forever reaching out with hands or voices, so that to enter any of the public rooms was to feel prodded and challenged in ways he did not welcome.