‘It was different in those days. Now I would,’ Jonathan assured her.
‘And did the judo help?’
‘Oh . . . oh . . .em . . . it sure did,’ he said hastily, forgetting when he had concocted his story that he was trained in martial arts and his mother would have expected him to defend himself. ‘I was able to flip him over my shoulder when I had a chance to manoeuvre and then I gave him a good kick before I took to my heels.’
‘And you didn’t know who he was?’
‘Not a clue. Whoever he was he had a couple of bruises when I was finished with him. I never saw him again.’
‘Thanks be to God I sent you to those classes.’ Nancy began to relax a little as she sipped her tea and nibbled on a biscuit.
‘They were such a help and I got great confidence from knowing I could use what I was taught if I got into a tight corner,’ Jonathan said reassuringly.
‘Well thanks be to the Holy Mother the priests and brothers didn’t abuse you, although I have to say we’ve always had very nice priests in this parish. That I know of,’ she added doubtfully.
‘We have, they’re sound. Father McManus is exceptional,’ Jonathan agreed, knowing how kind the parish priest was to the elderly of the parish.
‘You should have told me though. And I’m sorry I didn’t realize the difficulties you were going through about being gay. I didn’t really know what being gay was, when you were young. Things like that weren’t spoken about in our day. And being gay meant being happy and carefree,’ she added wryly. ‘I just thought you were a gentle child who liked playing with girls and doing girlish things. I thought that was because you had no male influence in your life, because of your daddy dying when you were just a toddler. And then when I did realize what it was all about I wondered was it because of anything I did or didn’t do.’ She gazed at him, distraught. ‘I feel I failed you.’
‘No, Mam. You didn’t, ever. You did great. Even if Dad were alive, I’d still be gay. It’s who I am.’ He knelt beside her chair and took her hand in his. ‘Don’t ever think like that. We all have to walk our own path in life and this is mine.’
‘And do you hate it? Is it a burden to you? Are you unhappy?’ she asked earnestly.
‘I did hate it at first. I hated myself, and it was a burden when I was young and had to hide it, especially here in Rosslara,’ he admitted. ‘And when I started working first, I had a boss who was homophobic and he gave me a very hard time—’
‘I hope you reported him,’ Nancy bristled.
‘Oh I sorted him, don’t you worry!’ Jonathan said grimly. ‘But I’ve made great friends in Dublin. Hilary and Kenny and Russell, you know them. And I go to a great counsellor called Hannah Harrison. You’d love her, Mam. She’s amazing. She’s made me look at everything so differently. If my boss hadn’t bullied me, for example, I might have got stuck in a rut in the Civil Service, but because of him I was determined that no one would treat me like that again and it motivated me to do the interviews and climb up the grade scale. So Hannah says that on a soul level he was a great teacher for me in many ways. His homophobia made me stand up for myself and gave me the kick in the ass I needed to move upwards.’
‘Oh! Well that’s an unusual way to look at it, I suppose,’ Nancy said dubiously.
‘Yeah, she makes you think about stuff differently.’ Jonathan stood up and went and sprawled on the sofa. ‘She believes in reincarnation. And she says we come to teach each other lessons in life to advance ourselves spiritually.’
‘And do you believe in reincarnation?’ Nancy asked, thinking that she would have chosen for her husband to live, and not to have spent most of her adult life as a widow, if she’d truly had a choice.
‘I think it makes sense, really. I’ve read a good few metaphysical books, and yes, it explains a lot.’
‘Even why you’re gay?’ Nancy ventured.
‘Especially why I’m gay,’ Jonathan laughed. ‘I’ve been straight in other lives. It’s all about the challenge and how you deal with it and you know, Mam, right now I’m doing fine. I truly am, so you’ve no need to worry about me. As Alice Walker, one of my favourite authors, said, We have to own the fears we have of each other, and then in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than what we were brought up to. That makes such sense to me. It can refer to anything in life, religion, politics and cultural differences. Fear of each other causes so much turmoil and violence in the world.’
‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Nancy. ‘She put it very well. It’s all about fear, isn’t it, that homophobic stuff? I mean who could be afraid of you?’
‘I can be pretty fierce,’ Jonathan teased. ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be able to sit and talk like this. I’m so lucky to have you, Mam.’
‘And I’m so lucky to have you, son. Just promise me you’ll never keep anything from me again,’ Nancy said sternly.
‘I promise,’ he assured her, utterly relieved that she had believed his story. It was a relief to be able to put her mind at rest too about how he felt about his life path. The evening wasn’t a disaster after all, even if he had held back on the most horrendous events of his childhood, he decided. He had not betrayed himself. He had chosen not to inflict emotional carnage on his beloved mother.
‘And you know something, Mam, I don’t define myself by being gay. That’s only part of who I am. I am a man, like any other, with a successful career, my own home, great family and friends, who happens to be gay. I never feel I have to introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Jonathan and I’m gay.” I hate the fact that people feel they have to “come out”, or others feel that gay people have to be “outed”. It’s no one’s business really. I mean you would never dream of introducing yourself as “Nancy who’s heterosexual”, would you? All that stuff pisses me off big time.’
‘And rightly so, why wouldn’t it?’ Nancy agreed. ‘The next time I go with the parish group to an event where we meet new people I must introduce myself as “Nancy the heterosexual”. That would make a few jaws drop,’ she laughed, tickled at the notion.
‘All these labels we hide behind. Straight, gay, upper class, lower class, highbrow, lowbrow, black, white, they’re all designed to make us forget that we are all equal, all one from the one Source, even the ones who abuse us. That last one takes some getting your head round, I can tell you.’ Jonathan made a face.
‘But why does it happen? Why does all this evil exist in the world?’ Nancy sighed.
‘Hannah says it’s because we’ve all forgotten who we are and why we were created. She calls it “the vale of forgetting”: we come back to earth and forget what we’ve come back to do. Life’s hard knocks are one way of getting us to remember.’
‘I like the sound of this Hannah. She has an interesting take on life.’ Nancy stretched her feet towards the fire.
‘You can say that again. She puts it up to you to stop feeling sorry for yourself, and really makes you look at it all from another perspective.’
‘I didn’t have time to be sorry for myself, but you know, before your daddy died, I wouldn’t say boo to a goose and I depended on him a lot when we married. Too much really. And when I was widowed I had to stand on my own two feet and just get on with it, so his death made me a much stronger person. Was that his gift to me, I wonder? Was that the life path I decided upon, do you think?’ She stared into the flames with a faraway look in her eyes.
‘You see, when you start looking at things differently everything changes,’ Jonathan exclaimed. ‘It’s not easy and you have to try hard but when it works, it works.’
‘She sounds like a lovely lady who talks a lot of sense. In fact I might pay her a visit myself sometime,’ Nancy declared, throwing a briquette onto the fire and sending a shower of sparks up the chimney.
Jonathan stared at his mother, astonished. Nancy had surprised him with her openness and acceptance of the esoteric teachings Hannah shared with him. He hadn’t been so accepting the first few times she had vo
lunteered them. He had argued truculently with her many times, affronted that she could suggest that Gus Higgins was a ‘teacher’ on a spiritual level. But she had always given him time to absorb what she said and told him only to accept what resonated with him. When the pupil is ready the teacher will come. Even when you were nearly eighty, it seemed.
‘You’d love her and she’d love you.’ He smiled at his mother and she smiled back at him and Jonathan felt the tension drift out of his body and his eyelids began to droop as he lay against the plump Gigli-print cushions he had accessorized the sofa with.
He had lied every which way to his mother about his abuse but his intention had been good. He had saved her from a grief that would have ruined her old age. That was more important than anything. But he had shared his feelings with her and that made the huge bond they had even stronger. Articulating how he felt about being gay, as he just had, had been very empowering. He was a human being who deserved to be treated with dignity and equality, just the way his mother treated him, and if people didn’t like it they could lump it. And he wasn’t a victim, he was victorious. Yes, victorious Jonathan Harpur who had put the past behind him and was ready to embrace his future, a future that hopefully he would spend with Leon at his side. Jonathan slept peacefully on the sofa, and Nancy, content that she had broached the subject she had been dreading and had not had her worst fears realized, closed her eyes and joined him for forty winks before the Late Late started.
Nancy lay in the warm hollow of her bed watching a sliver of moonlight through a chink in the curtains. She felt strangely at peace after her heart-to-heart conversation with Jonathan. He was a very strong person, this son of hers, she thought proudly. And a very good person. Why could people not see beyond the labels they hung on each other? Why could they not see the human being with the kind and loving heart? ‘Queers’ they called men like her son. How hurtful and derogatory. But they were the queer ones with their closed, judgemental minds and hard hearts. Jesus would never call anyone queer, she reflected, knowing that much of the hardship her son and others like him endured was in the name of so-called ‘religion’. ‘Sure you wouldn’t say those awful names, Jesus?’ she said aloud to the picture of the smiling Sacred Heart that rested on her bedside locker. Her eyes lit up and an idea popped into her mind. Exactly, she thought delightedly. ‘Thank you, dear Lord, for putting the idea into my head.’
She lay drowsily against her pillows watching the moonlight disappear as the wind began to rise and the spitter-spatter of rain against the window lulled her to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘Good morning, light of my life.’ Niall nuzzled in to her and Hilary felt him harden against her.
‘I was asleep,’ she griped, annoyed at being woken up.
‘I’ll wake you up,’ he murmured, cupping her breast in his hand. Hilary’s heart sank. She just wanted to go back to sleep. Niall had been drinking the previous night at his gig and she could smell the stale scent of beer off him and she just wasn’t in the mood for sex. All she craved was deep, uninterrupted sleep.
‘Can we do it tonight? I’m bushed. I just want to go back to sleep,’ she mumbled, turning over on her front and burying her head under the pillow.
‘We have a house full of teenagers tonight,’ he reminded her, disappointed.
‘Aw crap, I forgot about that. Tomorrow then,’ Hilary slurred drowsily. She was asleep in seconds leaving her husband frustrated and disgruntled.
The sound of the smoke alarm jerked her rudely from her slumber. For crying out loud, she thought in exasperation, how many times have I told him to keep the kitchen door closed when he’s grilling? She glanced at the clock and saw that it was nearly eleven and groaned. She hadn’t meant to sleep in so late: Sophie’s friends were coming and the house had to be cleaned. Hilary yawned. She supposed it might be too much to expect that the girls had made a start on their chores.
She threw back the duvet and grabbed her dressing gown and slid her feet into woolly slippers. It was raining. She could hear it hurling against the window and when she pulled up the blinds she saw the wind bending the bare branches of the rowan trees that lined her street so that they looked like old crones with long streaming hair. Rivulets of water flowed down the windowpane, the sky was dour, threatening sleet or worse, and she was glad she didn’t have anywhere to go today. Once the house was clean she was going to come back to bed and read the latest Anita Shreve. She had treated herself to it ages ago but had never had the time to get into it.
She climbed the circular staircase that led to the recent attic conversion where the girls now slept in their own rooms, with a shared shower room and toilet. The square landing area that separated their bedrooms was a cosy lounging space, designed by Jonathan, with a small two-seater sofa, bean bags, a bookcase, coffee table and TV. Did her daughters have any idea of how privileged they were? Hilary wondered, remembering the bedroom with the one old-fashioned wardrobe and chest of drawers she had shared with her sister.
They had been so thrilled when Sally had bought a dainty dressing-table unit with three oval gilt-edged mirrors that could angle. That had been the height of sophistication and they had painted their room in a creamy lemon and got new gold-coloured curtains that matched the colour of the gilt on the mirror and had been delighted with their new-look room. They wouldn’t have been able to fit a bean bag, let alone a sofa or bookcase, into their little kingdom.
She saw the remains of Millie’s Chinese meal on the table, grains of rice like confetti against the dark green carpet. The cleaning up hadn’t begun yet, she thought grimly, marching into the bathroom to pull up the blind before entering Sophie’s room. Her daughter was curled under the duvet; blonde hair streaming over the pillows, her favourite battered old teddy bear poking out from under the quilt cover.
‘Sophie, get up.’ She shook her daughter none too gently.
‘Whaaa . . . uuuuhhh?’ Sophie blinked open a bleary eye and raised a tousled head from the pillow.
‘Get up and start tidying up. Look at this bedroom. It’s a disgrace. And so is that bathroom. There’s make-up marks all over the sink—’
‘Breakfast in five. Sophie, do you want a fried egg?’ Niall appeared at the bedroom door, a tea towel slung over his shoulder.
‘Yeah, Dad. Mam, will you chill—’
‘Those girls are not coming up here unless you clean up, do you hear me? Pick those clothes up off the floor and put them in your linen basket and put a wash on and make sure there are no knickers and tights pickling under the bed.’ Hilary was in no mood to be told to ‘chill’.
‘Maaam!’ hissed Sophie and suddenly Hilary was brought back to a similar scene in her own teenage years and remembered Sally using the exact same phrase. Oh God! I’ve turned into my mother, she thought, horrified. I’m a middle-aged mother of teenagers, saying middle-aged things. Her existential shock was interrupted by the arrival of her eldest daughter.
‘What’s going on?’ Millie demanded. ‘I was trying to have a lie-in. It is Saturday after all.’
‘I told you we were doing a house clean today. You get that bathroom sorted – it’s a disgrace!’ Hilary retorted.
Niall threw his eyes up to heaven, exuding irritation with the three women in his life. ‘Millie, do you want a fried egg?’
‘Yep.’ She stretched.
‘Hilary?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Right, be at the table in five minutes,’ Niall said crossly, annoyed that there was an atmosphere to ruin his Saturday morning. Hilary followed him down the stairs. ‘Let’s all lighten up a bit,’ her husband suggested as she poured herself a cup of coffee while he began to fry the eggs.
‘That’s easy for you to say, Niall,’ she grouched. ‘I’d a very long day yesterday and when I came home from doing the shopping the pair of them were sprawled on the sofa watching TV and the breakfast dishes weren’t even washed. I can’t do everything by myself. I work too. I need support.’
‘I su
pport you,’ he said indignantly, flipping an egg and causing greasy spatters to land on the countertop and floor.
Not enough, she wanted to say but she bit back the retort. ‘Did you phone Sue?’ She wiped the countertop.
‘I left a message but she didn’t get back.’
‘She’s going to have to pull her weight, Niall.’ Hilary couldn’t hide her annoyance.
‘I hear you, I hear you,’ her husband snapped, cracking another egg onto the pan for Sophie, who liked her egg sunny side up.
‘Well sort Gran’s clinic visit between you because I have a client consult in Drogheda that morning and I won’t be available.’
‘I told you, I’ll be in Canada.’ Niall glared at her.
‘Not my problem,’ Hilary retorted. ‘And she has an appointment with her geriatrician, her heart specialist and the optician in the next few weeks. I’ve marked the dates on the kitchen calendar. You can give them to Sue.’
‘You know something, Hilary,’ Niall said coolly as he plated up the breakfast, ‘I’ve told you before there’s no need for you to work as hard as you do, and I wish you’d ease back because you’re becoming a real grouchy pain in the ass.’
‘So you want me to be a stay-at-home housewife?’ she demanded, stung by his criticism.
‘Frankly, yes.’ He stared at her.
‘You know, Niall, it was the money that I earned that built that attic conversion, and it’s the money that I earn that means we can have that extra holiday abroad and a decent car each. Don’t forget that. And I’m contributing to the account for the college fees. All I’m asking for is some cooperation and for everyone to muck in, and for your sister to take some responsibility for her own mother, like I do for my parents. Not unreasonable, I would have thought. And as for giving up work or cutting back, you cut back and job share or something and you can be a stay-at-home husband.’ She took her plate and marched over to the dining table fuming. She wasn’t being unreasonable . . . was she? She frowned, buttering a slice of toast.
‘Mam, can I have the money for my shoes? I’m going to go into town with Jilly this afternoon.’ Millie strolled into the kitchen in her PJs and fluffy slippers and put her arms around her dad who was absorbing his wife’s backlash.
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