I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  “I mean,” Peter said, suddenly quiet, “I’m gay.”

  Well, that threw me. I should have been speechless with the amount of brain activity I was exercising, but somehow I was still talking. I didn’t have a clue what I was saying though. It was something along the lines of, “But, you can’t be, how did you, why didn’t I…” I was stammering, my brain turning somersaults.

  “Nobody knows. Well, Charlie knew of course.”

  Naturally he had told Charlie, Charlie was his best friend. Charlie was the one he shared things with. Not me. Not stupid Hamish Day.

  “But Peter, you… I don’t…”

  “Look, not all gay guys are girly and wear tight pants and listen to Enrique Iglesias.”

  “I didn’t say that, I just… I never would have expected…”

  “Yeah, well, now you know.”

  “But—”

  “Look, you don’t have to say anything, all right? I’m sorry I told you, I just wanted to make you shut up about perfect Annie fucking Bower. She’s not all that wonderful, you know.”

  “I never said she was perfect,” I said, defensively.

  “Yeah, whatever man,” he said. “Look, just forget it. Despite what you may think, we don’t have to talk about everything.”

  I stopped for a minute to try and think, but I couldn’t. My brain had turned to shit. “What did Charlie say when you told him?” I asked, finally breaking the silence. I wanted to know what Charlie would have done in this situation because a part of me wanted so badly to be like him. To be popular and athletic and attractive but, mostly, to be Peter Bridges’ confidant.

  “I didn’t tell Charlie. Charlie told me,” he said.

  And again, that threw me. “What?”

  “Charlie was my boyfriend, Hamish.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, to protest again, but no sound came out. I felt bad afterwards but I almost laughed. It just sounded so funny coming from Peter. I guess it was just something I had never, not even in a thousand years, expected him to say.

  “But how did I not know this?” I asked.

  “No one knew. It was a secret.”

  Nothing made sense to me anymore. I could only keep asking questions in the hope that I might understand it all better.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked, although, looking back, that was a pretty stupid question.

  “Are you serious? At our school? Man, they would have killed us.”

  “Not even Charlie’s parents knew?” I asked. I didn’t need to ask why Peter hadn’t told his mum, I knew why he wouldn’t tell her.

  “Well, you know, Charlie’s parents are very old-school religious. He couldn’t tell them. They probably would have kicked him out of the house or had a priest come and pray over him or drown him in holy water or some shit. So we kept it a secret from everyone. Well, everyone except Annie, obviously.”

  “Wait, what? Annie knew about you two?” I said, so confused that my head was starting to hurt.

  “Of course she did, she was Charlie’s best friend. He told her everything.”

  “No she wasn’t, she was Charlie’s girlfriend. What the hell was she doing dating him if he was… you know…” Why couldn’t I bring myself to say the word that day?

  “She was all part of the cover. They never did anything, he would just take her to parties and hold her hand at school so no one would get suspicious and he’d invite her over to his house for dinner to keep his parents off his case.”

  “Shit,” I said. “But why would she do that?”

  “Because she was in love with him, duh.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that he didn’t feel bad about it. It killed him to see her wasting her time with him when she could have had any guy in the school she wanted – straight guys too.”

  “Shit,” was all I had left to say.

  Silence filled us.

  Everything I thought I knew about Peter was wrong. Everything I thought I knew about Annie was wrong. I mean, she was my girlfriend for god’s sake, why hadn’t she said something? “Oh hey Hamish, by the way, my ex-boyfriend wasn’t really my boyfriend. I was only dating him to keep his sexuality a secret from his overbearing parents.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I told you,” Peter said. “I didn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable, you were just pissing me off with all your fucking talk about Annie’s dresses and books and I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I really wanted to talk to Annie. She had a lot of explaining to do.

  “Come on, I’ll drive you home,” he said, getting up and shaking the sand from his shorts and the water from his hair.

  I followed him to the car in what I can only describe as a daze. I started to wonder about things like that patchwork quilt in the boot and the way Peter had cried at the tree that night. Piecing it all together, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed sooner.

  I thought the car ride would be awkward. I was worried. I didn’t know how to handle the situation at all. I’d never met someone gay before. I didn’t really know anything about it. It had never even occurred to me. You must understand, I lived in a small town; we didn’t really branch out much there. It was the same as it had always been.

  But it wasn’t awkward at all. Even though silence came easily to us, now it was all out in the open, Peter must have felt that he could talk about it all he wanted.

  “We were always close friends as kids,” he said, once we were out of the parking lot and on the road. It was probably the strangest conversation I had ever had. “Our mums were friends and we used to hang out on the weekends in primary school. Well, I say ‘friends’, but actually his mum was trying to help mine with her drinking. We used to build forts in his living room and we did nippers on Saturdays. He was the first person I ever kissed. We were like eight or something, sitting in my garden, back at my old house before my mum lost her job. We just wanted to see what it was like. Neither of us thought it was that great at the time. By the time we got to high school, Charlie knew. He was always more comfortable with himself than I was. But he couldn’t tell anyone because of his parents. He didn’t even tell me for years.”

  I wondered if he expected me to say anything but honestly, I was still dumbstruck.

  “Anyway, it was a long time before we actually got together for real, after he helped me get off all the shit I was taking and get me back to school once in a while. I moved into his house for a few months. His parents didn’t mind because I think they wanted him to save me. Like a mission from god or whatever. They would say grace before every meal and I would throw most of it up again. They made me go to church with them on Sundays.”

  I snorted, because the idea of Peter in a church was frickin’ hilarious. He also found it highly amusing.

  “Charlie had to fucking spoonfeed me for a while, and wash me and dress me and everything. I don’t remember most of it. But I do remember waking up beside him in bed one night. They didn’t have a spare room or anything, but we’d slept in the same bed before, it wasn’t like it was strange. But I must have finally been through the worst of it because it was the first time I hadn’t felt like shit in months. And he was there, and he was awake, watching me to make sure I didn’t fucking die in my sleep and… well, anyway, you know the rest.”

  I’m not going to lie, I really didn’t know the rest. I was trying to remember if we covered anything like this in health class, but I was pretty sure we learnt about wet dreams, periods and how to put on a condom and that was it. I couldn’t even really remember that much.

  We had reached the payphone.

  I got out of the car. I didn’t know if I should say something different now. It shouldn’t have been different, but it was.

  “See ya,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I shut the door and walked away from him. I took my towel with me.

  17.

  I called Annie as soon as I got home. Her mum answered the phone. I couldn’
t remember what I said to her, but she put Annie on the phone.

  “Annie, it’s me, Hamish.”

  “Hi, Hamish.”

  “Are you free right now?”

  “Not right this second, but in an hour or so, maybe…”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you at your house, yeah?”

  “How about we meet in town, say at the ice cream shop at seven?”

  “Sure,” I said, and I hung up. Some things could not be discussed over the phone.

  I changed my clothes twice and then wandered into the garden to find my parents and tell them I had another date. My mum was at the well; she could work that thing a lot better than I could.

  “Hey Mum,” I said, taking the bucket for her.

  “Hey sweetheart.”

  “So, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I have another date with Annie Bower.”

  “When are you going to invite her over for dinner?”

  “I will, I promise, but listen, the date is tonight. Do you mind if I go? I’ll miss dinner.”

  She thought about it for less than a second. “Sure honey, you have fun.”

  Sometimes she made me feel so guilty just by being nice.

  I walked to town. I got to the ice cream shop half an hour before Annie so I sat there trying to think but I couldn’t make much sense of anything.

  When she did show up, the sight of her in her denim shorts and a white T-shirt almost made me forget why I wanted to see her.

  “Walk?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  We didn’t get very far before we sat together on the curb under a streetlight.

  I decided to cut right to the chase. “I know,” I said.

  “You know what?”

  “I know about Peter and Charlie.”

  “Oh,” was all she had to say; one word, not even a proper word, just a frickin’ syllable.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, probably a little too forcefully.

  “It wasn’t my place,” she said, calmly. “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”

  “But Peter—”

  “I knew Peter would tell you when he wanted to.”

  “But Annie, why did you date him if you knew?”

  “I loved Charlie.” “But you could have been his friend,” I said. “You didn’t need to be his girlfriend.”

  “They needed me. They needed me to keep it a secret. I was part of the plan,” she said, and I could tell that she really believed it.

  “How could you do that for them?” I said.

  “That’s what I do.”

  “What?”

  “Every guy I have ever liked has turned out to be gay, that’s just the way I am. So, it’s kind of like my own personal charity. I help them keep it a secret until they’re ready to tell everyone. I hold their hand, I go to parties with them, I kiss them in front of their friends, I meet their parents, I just don’t sleep with them. I did the same thing for Peter when I told everyone we’d had sex.”

  “For Peter?”

  “Yeah, so what? He’s a good guy, you know that better than anyone.”

  “Yeah but… did you know? About him, I mean?”

  “Not at the time, but he wasn’t exactly my boyfriend or anything.”

  “When did you find out about Peter and Charlie?”

  “I think Charlie always knew, he told me years ago. We were at someone’s birthday party and we were playing spin the bottle or truth or dare or something. Anyway, Charlie and I had to get into a cupboard together for seven minutes in heaven. But, instead of making out he decided to tell me. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when we went in there.”

  I don’t suppose I really need to tell you that I had never been to a party where people played games like spin the bottle or seven minutes in heaven. We generally played pin the tail on the donkey or pass the parcel.

  “He told me about getting together with Peter as soon as it happened,” Annie went on. “I can’t say I was totally surprised. I mean, I used to like him so the odds weren’t in his favour. Anyway, it wasn’t until things got serious with Peter that we decided to pretend to date.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “About two years.”

  “Two years?” I said. “Jesus. Poor Peter.”

  “Yeah.”

  We were silent as I tried to understand how someone could do what Annie had done. She got up and started to walk. I guessed she was giving me space with my thoughts or some such shit. But I just followed her.

  “Want to go back to your house?” she asked.

  “Why not yours?” I said. “Mine’s an hour’s walk away.”

  “I don’t want to go home tonight,” she said, and she tried to brush it off as a joke.

  “Why not?”

  “We have family over,” she said.

  “So what? Surely they can’t be that bad?”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Why? Why don’t you ever want to see them? What’s wrong with them?”

  “It’s not them, really, it’s just him.”

  “Him? Do you have an annoying cousin or something?” I said.

  “Can we just go to your house? I don’t mind walking, it’s not that hot tonight. Besides, I’ve never seen where you live.”

  She was filling the silence with words just like Peter did with his music.

  “Him who? Who don’t you want to be in your house with?”

  “He’s my uncle,” she said, still walking, never looking at me.

  “And why do you never want to be home when he’s there?”

  “Because he’s a creeper, that’s all. He’s just a sleazy old man.”

  “Wait a minute, he hasn’t, he doesn’t, you know…”

  “Look, it’s fine, I’m older now. I can go out by myself, I can just leave when I know he’s coming over.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “I used to go to Charlie’s,” she said, sadly. “Sometimes to one of the girls’ houses.”

  And then I realised what she’d said. “Wait a minute, what do you mean you’re older now? Do you mean, when you were…” I’d never found sentences so hard to finish in my life.

  She nodded. Just once. And there was the yes to so many of my questions. We kept walking in silence. Some conversations work better in dark rooms where faces are hidden by the quiet.

  As we walked, one of us would try to change the subject, to start a new conversation. I would try to make a joke, she would point out a house that she liked. But we couldn’t seem to fill the gap between us with words. I didn’t try to hold her hand; I knew now she didn’t want to be touched.

  When we reached my house, it was almost ten. I didn’t know where that time had gone. I knew my parents would both be in bed. I hoped they weren’t worried about me. But parents were always worried. That’s something they don’t tell you. From the second your baby is born until one of you dies, you will be worried. Unless you can actually see them and you know for sure they’re all right, it never stops.

  We tried to sneak in the front door and it creaked and groaned louder than it ever had during the day. I filled two glasses with water and put them on the coasters on our coffee table. My dad was a stickler about getting rings on the wood. We sat on the sofa together. Annie curled her legs up underneath herself. Neither of us touched the water.

  “So,” she said.

  I waited. But that seemed to be the extent of what she would offer to the conversation. “So, your uncle?” I offered.

  The room was dark. I hadn’t turned the lights on so my parents wouldn’t wake up. But as my eyes adjusted I could see the outline of her features.

  “Yeah, my uncle.”

  This interrogation was different than with Peter. I knew that Annie wanted to tell me; I knew that she wanted to talk about it with someone. She, like Peter, had lost her main confidant. But Annie was willing to let me into her life. She wanted me to know about her. Peter never wanted to tell me anything. I had to p
rise the truth out of him like Martin used to try and get a laugh out of me.

  “Look, he’s never actually, you know…”

  I nodded as if I understood.

  “But he has… Well, he just, you know…”

  I could tell she was embarrassed and she didn’t often talk about this. I wondered if I should really push her to tell me. What business was it of mine? But then I realised, as Annie’s boyfriend, it was definitely my business, and I was sure she had told Charlie.

  “Annie,” I said. “You’re going to have to say the words.”

  “Okay.” She sighed and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for her to tell me those things that night. “He’s never raped me.”

  I was so relieved, I couldn’t tell you how happy I was. I mean, I was well and truly worried out of my mind. Annie Bower. Sweet little Annie Bower who was probably less than five-foot tall and had hair the colour of lamb’s wool. If she had been through something like that, I don’t know how I would have coped. Let alone how she would have coped. How does anyone cope?

  “Then what has he done?” I asked.

  “He just…” She looked away from me. “He touches me, all the time.”

  And, just like that, I wanted to cry.

  I was hoping beyond all hope that she would tell me he was just making sleazy comments or jokes or maybe he had kissed her once when he was drunk. I ran out of words.

  “I can’t remember the first time it happened,” she continued. “I remember always being scared of him. I remember not wanting him to come over. I remember piling things behind my bedroom door when he stayed the night. But I couldn’t lift my furniture or anything so I used to stack up my teddy bears and my shoes. It was so stupid.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “I was confused, I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what he was doing was wrong.”

  “But what about your parents?”

  “He’s my mum’s big brother and my dad’s best friend. He was the best man at their wedding. He helped them buy their house; I think they still owe him money. He introduced them. He drove my mum to the hospital when she was in labour with me. I wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for him.”