by S. E. Lynes
* * *
Back in Leeds, he called Jack and Margaret from the payphone in the Union. Jack never came to the phone, never had. Once she’d told him how Jack Junior and Louise were getting on, and about any changes in the road or down at the seafront, Margaret seemed to struggle for anything else to say. For his part, he told her nothing of Phyllis and his other family. He had not told her at the time, and now it was too late – the words were too difficult to find. Besides, to tell her after so much time had passed he feared would destroy her.
Christopher worked five shifts a week in the Fenton, a dingy place populated by alcoholics whose complexions ranged from red to purple, by lost young men who often left with men considerably older than them, and by lonely middle-aged women who sat all night on high stools at the bar, only to go home alone. Between times, he went to the Brotherton Library, trying to steal a march on the following year’s reading list. He went out with Adam when Adam wasn’t meeting a woman – once to Bradford for a curry, which they ate with their hands, once to a reggae night in Chapeltown and once to Le Phonographique, the club in the Merrion Centre. This last was a Saturday night, a night when locals emerged into the city and students, now that it was the summer holidays, were, as Adam put it, rarer than nuns in a clap clinic. At Le Phonographique they played disco music, songs and bands whose names he knew, of course, within a few bars of them beginning.
That night Adam had revisited his flared jeans and a new black shirt Christopher hadn’t seen before, along with a silver pendant necklace. The two of them stood at the side of the dance floor, drinking cheap lager and watching the predominantly female crowd.
‘ “I Feel Love”,’ Adam shouted into his ear, bobbing about, managing to somehow smoke, talk and smile at women all at once.
‘That’s nice,’ Christopher replied and was thrilled to see Adam laugh.
‘Donna Summer,’ he shouted. ‘It’s bloody magic, this one.’
Christopher felt the beat, which seemed to his ears frenetic, like panic rising. He thought of Angie, her skin. He thought of Phyllis and the way she held out her arms to him, the relief he felt whenever he was by her side.
‘Ah, love this one,’ said Adam. ‘Go on then, who is it?’
‘Parliament,’ said Christopher.
‘In one. Hold that.’ He passed Christopher his drink and headed for the dance floor.
Christopher watched his friend slink through the dancers, the rhythm informing his every move. The women responded to him as if he emanated a kind of glow, like the kids on the Ready Brek commercials, and before long, he was shouting into the ear of a woman with blonde hair flicked out in rolling waves. The next song was Blondie. Christopher sang along, under his breath, picturing Debbie Harry’s mouth, wondering what it would be like to have sex with her. He was normal in this, at least, he supposed.
Adam returned, a sheen of sweat on his brow. He took his pint and drank half.
‘Love this stuff,’ he said. It was unclear whether he meant the beer or the music. ‘What’s this one?’
‘ “Boogie Oogie Oogie”,’ said Christopher.
‘Now that’s what I call a title, man. Is that the band?’
‘That’s the song. A Taste of Honey, the band.’
‘Page the bloody Oracle.’ Adam took his cigarettes from his back pocket, offered one to Christopher, lit first his own then Christopher’s, inhaled deeply, tipped back his head and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling.
‘So tell me, oh lanky one,’ he said, ‘how come you didn’t go back home for the summer?’
‘You got us a job.’
‘I know. But that’s not the reason. And how come you’re away so much at weekends? Tell me to piss off if you like, but when you come back, you’re always so… I don’t know, happy, as if you’ve been shagging for the entire weekend. Now apart from that one time, I haven’t seen or heard about a girlfriend, and I think I have a clue as to why that might be.’
Christopher felt twin trickles of sweat run from his armpits down his sides. The club was hot, the air opaque. How could he explain, without having to explain everything? He would have to tell Adam he was adopted, that his adoptive parents had only told him because he’d found the note in the case, that now he’d found a family that he… he what? He preferred. That was it. That was the shameful truth of the matter. He had abandoned his old family like an unfashionable pair of jeans. Worse still, he had not told his new family that he hadn’t told his old family. No – too complicated. Better to say he had a woman on the go, a married woman. It was easier.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Adam clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Do you want to know why I’ve not gone home?’
Relief coursed through Christopher. He nodded.
‘My old man,’ said Adam. ‘My dad.’
For the first time Christopher could remember – ever, in fact – Adam looked serious. Serious or sad or cross – something that sent his brows towards each other, that turned his smile upside down.
‘Your father?’
‘If I tell you this, it stops here, OK?’
Christopher nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘He’s handy with his hands, if you catch my drift.’ Adam took a drag on his cigarette, drained his pint glass. ‘Violent. With my ma, but with me an’ all, like. Since I was thirteen. I feel like a shit staying here, leaving her there, but it’s her choice, she’s made it and I have to make mine.’
In the stinging smoke, Christopher looked hard at his friend. Adam had glanced away, to the dance floor, and was lighting a cigarette from the last one. He threw the old one to the floor and squashed it with his shoe. Odd, Christopher thought, that in the thick smog of the club, this was perhaps the first time he had seen his friend clearly.
‘Is he your real dad?’ The question was out before he could stop it.
Adam cocked his head. ‘Eh? Yes. Course he’s my real dad. Believe me, I’d love nothing better than for them to tell me they found me on the street, but unfortunately, no, I am their biological progeny.’ The last words he laced with irony, bitterness – something like that. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
They headed out onto Albion Street. Adam turned his talk to the women in the club, asking Christopher if he had seen her with the dark hair, what about that one with the silver dress, did Christopher think she was a man or a woman? Thankfully, they had left the subject of him, Christopher, behind. They turned into Boar Lane. Above them a white poster covered the wall, shouted down its message in bold black letters:
DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?
HELP US STOP THE RIPPER FROM KILLING AGAIN
CALL LEEDS (0532) 46111
A man with dead eyes stared out from a crude photofit image. Adam nodded up at the sign. ‘There’s been no more since May, has there?’
‘The sixteenth,’ said Christopher. Vera Millward. Outside Manchester Royal Infirmary. He had cut out the newspaper article and stuck it in his scrapbook with the others.
‘I know.’ Adam shuddered. ‘Sick bastard. They should cut his bloody balls off, man.’
Adam pushed open the door to the Griffin pub. Christopher followed him in and headed for the bar.
‘It’s my round,’ he said. ‘Same again?’
‘Why aye. Good man. I’ll get us a table.’
Unusually, Adam chose a table in the corner, away from the others. There were no women at all in the pub, Christopher noticed as he brought the drinks over, sat down and slid Adam’s beer over to him. Taking hold of his pint, Adam made a come-here gesture with his other hand, wanting to share another confidence, no doubt.
Christopher leaned in.
‘No, you prat,’ Adam said. ‘Fags. Your turn.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘So that’s me,’ said Adam, once they’d lit up. ‘Elvis, the great pretender. I know I look like I walk on water, but that’s what comes from treading on eggshells your whole life.’ He sucked at his cigarette, blew smoke rings, met Christopher’s gaze. ‘So, buggerlugs
, where do you go to, my lovely? At weekends?’
‘I…’ Christopher began, the blaze of attention making his cheeks burn. ‘It’s a long story.’
Adam put both elbows on the tabletop, rested his chin on the steeple of his hands.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘And don’t take this the wrong way. This isn’t what I think necessarily, I’m just saying it’s OK by me, that’s all. I’m not prejudiced in any way against anyone. Black, white, yellow, straight, queer, it’s all the same to me.’ He paused, met Christopher’s gaze. ‘I’m not prejudiced, is what I’m saying.’
Christopher shook his head. ‘Me neither, I don’t think.’
‘I mean, did you see that chap in the club? The one with the pink towelling headband on his bonce doing the big moves, the spins and all that malarkey?’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Adam broke his gaze, thank goodness, and rolled his cigarette tip in the ashtray so that it made a grey cone. ‘All I’m saying is, good on him. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Adam shook his head, laid his hand on Christopher’s shoulder and leaned into his ear.
‘If you’re gay, it’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’m not, but if you are, what I’m saying is, that’s cool, man.’
He leant back and smiled, and Christopher held his gaze for a second. Adam didn’t laugh. He wasn’t joking. An hour earlier, he had been one kind of person; now he was almost entirely another. How sudden the shift had been. From Adam the chancer, the dancer, the romancer, to Adam who had been beaten as a child, who when he left for university had left violence behind along with his mother, who continued to endure it. Adam who asked for confidences, who promised not to judge. With the exception of Phyllis, he was possibly the kindest person Christopher had ever known. He was still looking right at Christopher, so serious, so unlike himself, but, it was possible, utterly himself, the self he normally kept under wraps. That was what he was offering: himself – the real one.
Christopher felt a smile creep across his lips. The smile widened.
‘What?’ said Adam. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? It’s OK, man, it’s OK. And I won’t tell either.’
From nowhere, Christopher exploded into laughter. Tears leaked from his eyes, his stomach hurt, he tried to speak but could not. Adam laughed too, but doubtfully.
‘Mate,’ he said. ‘People are staring. Get a grip, will you?’
‘I-I’m not,’ Christopher stuttered, when he was able. ‘I’m not gay.’
‘What? What then?’
‘It’s my mother,’ he said. ‘My real mother. That’s where I go at weekends.’
Chapter Nineteen
Ben heads out of St Matthew’s Convent grinning like a fool. Mother Superior Lawrence was a doll and he’s pretty sure he caught a twinkle in those old grey eyes of hers. It is 5.30 p.m., 9.30 a.m. in California, although, he thinks, he should drop that thought and get used to what time it is here – here where he actually is.
One thing he already loves about England is how civilised everyone is. The mother superior really couldn’t have been sweeter, serving him tea and biscuits in a cute little annexe full of antique furniture and pictures of JC, and talking to him for longer than he had any right to ask her to. She even let him use the phone so he could call ahead to the hotel. The wind is in his sails – turns out his mother left her address with the sisters years ago. She wants to find him; why else would she leave it? But the request for contact has to come from him. She lives near, so near, barely half an hour’s drive, according to the nun. This country is so small! Tomorrow he should be well on his way to finding her. His hotel is in the same town, a place called Runcorn.
He crosses from the red-brick gothic monolith that is the convent and gets into his hire car.
Steadfastly he repeats the process of studying his map book and noting down the roads he needs. Looks like there’s a river or a canal of some sort there; it might be pretty, he might even get to wander along there with her while she tells him her story and he tells her his. When he is satisfied he can find the way, he starts the car. He is getting hungry. He hopes the hotel does room service.
Chapter Twenty
With the Ripper at large, it was no wonder they were all paranoid – Christopher, Adam, those girls. The whole country was in the grip of it. I remember the feeling of dread. Dread. If I could bring myself to speak, that would be the word with which I might start. Maybe the question is not how are you feeling but what are you feeling? That I could answer. I need nouns, not adjectives: guilt, shame, regret. If you can’t talk, then write. At first I couldn’t, the meds were too strong, but bit by bit I’ve crawled my way towards it, and now that I’ve started, I find I can’t stop. I look forward to it – or do I? Is it simply a habit I can’t break, like a biscuit with a cup of coffee?
When I think about Christopher volunteering to be Adam’s alibi, I realise that was a turning point for him. Something was sealed between them in that crucial moment. Without it, would they ever have had their evening of confidences and become so very close? Needless to say, this kind of friendship was new to Christopher. He’d already told me that he’d not had a best friend at school nor a lover of any real kind – it’s only now that I find myself thinking about that and wondering why I didn’t think about it more at the time. And as with anything good that happened to him now, he wondered whether Phyllis lay at the root, whether having found someone like her had opened him wide enough to allow room for someone like Adam.
‘I wonder if friendship or love or whatever is not a finite thing but something that under the right conditions grows and multiplies; you know, like cells in a Petri dish,’ he once said to me.
I know he looked forward to Adam getting home from his evening shifts, when they would make tea and toast and smoke and talk, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. In these moments, as with Phyllis, he felt a warmth that was physical, he told me, as if his insides had been lined with fur.
Adam’s father drank – too much, it transpired during one of their many long conversations. He was a miner; the work was hard and dirty, the conditions poor.
‘He’s got emphysema now,’ said Adam, one leg over the armchair in their student kitchen-cum-living-room. ‘Won’t see fifty. Most of his life spent underground, and for what? Couldn’t even take joy in raising his kids. Hates the fact I got to uni, hates it. Couldn’t stand the sight of me then – now, well…’
‘My father’s a bit that way,’ Christopher confessed. ‘I think he’d prefer it if I knew how to unblock a drain or wire a plug.’ He stared into his tea. The merest grey tinge of the meniscus broke when he put his mouth to it. ‘Words were what did for my family,’ he added, voicing a thought he had not known was there. ‘The lack of them anyway. If they’d spoken to me sooner, I wouldn’t have grown up feeling like a guest in my own house. Like an imposter.’
Adam was at that point the only person who knew about the situation regarding both of Christopher’s families
‘I can see how you’ve ended up where you are,’ he said after a moment. ‘But sooner or later it might be best to tell Jack and Margaret. These things have a way of coming back to bite you on the arse.’
‘I will,’ Christopher replied. ‘One day, when I find the right moment, I’ll tell them everything.’
In this way, late into the night, they unfolded their worlds like maps, the better to study their roads, rivers and contours. Like this, they hoped, they would be able to find their way through to something clearer – a destination of sorts.
* * *
It was in the August of that summer that Christopher went with Phyllis, David and the boys to Pembrokeshire. They had rented a bungalow in Tenby, in the grounds of a farm. Inside, the rooms smelled faintly of damp – a homely smell once the gas fire was lit, an alarming process involving a taper, the leaning back with one’s arm outstretched and the waiting for a loud woof as the gas blew orange.
‘Bloody hell,’ were David’s words the first evening, after he had succeeded in lighting the fire. ‘Nearly took my bloody eyebrows off, that thing.’
Outside, chickens scratched at the courtyard and, in the communal garden, a rather forlorn badminton net sagged between two trees. Phyllis pronounced the place perfect, and while David went off exploring with the boys, Christopher helped her to unpack. She had brought foodstuffs in a cardboard box and in the quaint pine kitchen brought out a brick-like object wrapped in foil.
‘Do you like fruit cake, Chris?’ She smiled at him and wiggled her eyebrows in mischief.
‘I love fruit cake.’
‘What say you and I have a piece with a cuppa, while the others aren’t looking?’
He smiled back, the lightness, almost fizziness he felt around her returning as it always did.
‘Sounds like a good idea.’ He made to sit down but stopped himself. ‘Ah, I almost forgot.’ From his jacket pocket he pulled the gift he had brought for her. ‘I made this tape for you. It’s from Adam’s record collection actually. It’s a selection of disco hits. I know you like disco.’
Phyllis cooed with delight and dashed to fetch the portable tape player she had brought. After a moment of static, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ pulsed in the cramped space. Immediately Phyllis threw up her arms so that her bright green T-shirt rose up, exposing her white belly, her belly button. She danced like that around the kitchen.
‘I love it!’ she cried. ‘What else is on here?’
‘Everything,’ he shouted over the music. To watch her dance around, grinning like a fool was to be filled with joy. She was a miracle.
‘Chris, love, you’re an angel.’ She bent, took his face in her hands and kissed him on the cheek. He closed his eyes, but she had already let go, and when he opened them she was twirling around the kitchen again, lifting the kettle from the hob now and parading around with it like one of Pan’s People. She filled the kettle with water, her bottom wiggling in her tight blue jeans. She held the kettle to the skies, spun and placed it back on the hob. With a flourish she lit the gas with a match, blew it out with a wink.