by David Rees
‘How do you know that?’
‘Robin told me.’
‘Oh.’
When it stopped, he said ‘Can I come back with you tonight?’ I was amazed. ‘Why?’ was the only answer I could think of. He laughed. ‘I left some things in the flat.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Under the bed. Have you ever looked under the bed?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
Eight: James
‘I can’t believe it!’ I cried. ‘So much waste of feeling! Of time! Of. . . ’ I looked round at the things of my room. To a stranger, to James even, it would seem occupied by someone in transit, living out of a suitcase. ‘Of all this.’ I was remembering it as it was, comfortable with Robin’s possessions. ‘Of Robin himself.’ ‘There’s no blame to be attached. To any of us; him, me, you. You can’t bend feelings, make them fit expected slots. You know that, better than any of us.’
He and Robin had split up. For ever: finally, irrevocably. Right from the beginning, the reconciliation had not worked. Robin had given up his job and emigrated. To Australia: as if he needed to put the greatest possible distance, half the world, between himself and James. It was sad that he had not tried to get in touch with me, but, to put it mildly, I could understand his reasons. I was the unwitting cause of it all.
‘Do you know why I worked on my car outside this house?’
‘I believed what you said. That you couldn’t, for some reason, do it elsewhere. And that you wanted to be near Robin.’
‘That’s the truth, Then I started to fancy you. In a vague sort of way. Perhaps I was curious: wondering what Robin had found. You misinterpreted all the signals.’
‘When did I become more than a potential bit on the side?’
‘I don’t know.’ He yawned, and rubbed his hands over his eyes. It was late: three a.m. I was exhausted. Physically and emotionally. The misery and suffering that had been revealed, the possible excitement and happiness of the future—I looked at both blankly, almost objectively: I was too tired to react, to take it all in. ‘As soon as Robin left here,’ James said. ‘Then, certainly. Your face, your body. . . voice, gestures. . . everything haunted me. All the time. Everywhere. At the university. Having a bath, cooking a meal. Most of all. . . in bed.’ He stroked my arm. ‘These last few weeks have been agony. Inflicting pain on somebody else. Twice.’ For a moment he looked haggard. Then touched my face and kissed me. The effect was electric: rousing something at my absolute interior that had never before been stirred. ‘Maybe the day I helped him move out of this room. It was. . . shutting a door. On a sunlit garden.’
‘I remember.’
‘Remember what?’
‘How you looked at me. The sourness of your mood.’ I was silent for a while, yawning myself. ‘You don’t think,’ I asked, ‘that Robin. . . will do anything stupid?’
‘Try to kill himself?’
‘Yes.’
‘He isn’t the type. You don’t book a passage from London to Sydney in order to do that.’
‘But if he finds nothing when he gets there?’
‘Sydney, I’m told, is a good place for gays.’
‘I’ve never fancied it.’
‘Ewan. . . ’He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s late. Do I have to go home now?’
‘No. But I only want to sleep.’
‘So do I.’
‘Have you looked under the bed yet?’
‘What?’
‘As I thought. A way in.’
He peered underneath it, pulled something out, and held it up for me to see. A small roll of white carpet, a remnant, of no use at all. ‘That has been there since. . . oh, long before you met Robin. You’ve never noticed it?’
I laughed. ‘No.’
‘Now I’ve discovered what limits there are to your housecleaning abilities.’ He put it down on a chair. I started to undress. ‘It may come in handy some time. You never know.’
‘What, a thing that size?’
‘Why not?’ He unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them. I trembled. ‘You and I, one day, could have a bedroom carpeted wall to wall in white. Do you like that idea?’
I nodded.
There is no such thing as perfection and it is often our own fault that there is not. The next few weeks might have been that, but I could not escape a sensation of illicit and stolen pleasures, of guilt. I worried about Robin a great deal. I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t responsible for what had happened; that in no way was it my doing. Simply the fact that I existed and had come into their lives at a certain time had been the cause. Or was it? If not me, would it have been another person? Possibly. I wanted to feel responsible, in Robin’s debt: to do something that would ease his pain, this person I respected so much. I suppose in order to ease my own. James and Robin had tried to repair a thing that was smashed, but there were too many pieces missing. I wished I had his address. But what could I have written? Or he in reply to me?
‘Stop bleeding,’ James said. He was teaching me to drive at the time; I had just stalled his car at some green traffic lights.
‘I will. But it has to take its natural course, I think.’
It did. But it’s buried somewhere inside me, and if I dig it up and look at it, I do so still with a sense of shame. We never heard, either of us, from Robin; not even a postcard.
Some people leave an indelible mark on you, an imprint of themselves like Christ’s face on the handkerchief. An Irish boy I spent one night with and never saw again, a boy who’d picked me up at a disco, pale-skinned and red-haired with vivid green eyes, spoke to me of Ireland, of soft rain and wet green grass, of big clumsy potatoes just lifted from the soil, the red dust still on them. It was not in his words. His only remark about Ireland was that he’d never been so glad in his life as the day he’d stood on the Holyhead boat, watching Dun Laoghaire recede. Our conversation was mostly banal. Though I was interested that he was a practising Catholic who attended Mass every Sunday, went to Confession and took Holy Communion: and never once admitted to the priest on the other side of the grille that he had sex, promiscuously, with men. ‘That’s my own private affair,’ he said. ‘Between me and God.’ I thought no more about it as we made love. It was rain, grass, and clumsy potatoes his body spoke of; I could almost smell the earth, the red dust. I felt sad afterwards. I wanted to see him again; he’d given me something of himself, something important. He, evidently, did not think so. In the morning he was impatient for me to be gone.
Leslie was the same; I had experienced the essence of him: merman, water baby, beach-boy, surfer. The smell of the sea. On every inch of his skin it was written. Victoria knew that.
But not Robin. Robin had left no such impression, nothing of himself. It’s very difficult, therefore, to describe him. I can’t even see him in my mind’s eye. Not once had I glimpsed that essence, and maybe that’s why I could never love him as I did James. And perhaps why he, of all people, attracted the attention of the queer-bashers. They saw something they could they thought easily destroy.
Skin and silence and touch communicate more than words. James’s mark, his imprint, changed me. Branded me. Before I met him, if I’d been at the point of death, I’d have said nothing in my past life would make me want to live it a second time, but now I would say it had all been worthwhile, if only for the best half dozen times with him in bed. Though there is far more to it than sex. There are no words I can find to explain adequately what he means to me.
Such a filthy people, some say of the blacks, those who cannot find anything in anyone who does not reflect their own self-satisfied image. His absolute difference from me is perpetual fascination. I shall never unlock the whole secret of it. I like studying the palms of his hands, paler than the rest of him, as if the patterns of lines were ancient runes that might one day yield up their meaning. It amuses him. ‘What do you see?’ he asks.
‘Rum and banana boats? Feathered bodies in a tribal dance?’ Something of that, I guess, though I never say so.
‘It’s like bat’s skin,’ I tell him. How ignorant are those people who talk of the sterility of homosexual life; of the impossibility of real satisfaction, mental, emotional, spiritual, physical! A story of when he was fourteen, a comment about badly cooked carrots, his breath in my ear, discussing music or stained-glass windows or the people next door, watching him laugh across a room full of people, the sound of a syllable left hanging in the air: they are all bits of the mosaic that is him. Straight people are scared that it isn’t sterile, that something other than a baby can be a wholly satisfying end-product of love.
If our relationship is like some sort of narrative that has a beginning, a middle, and not yet an end, discovering each other’s past is as if the book stops for a moment, and one observes a photograph, a lantern slide, that has nothing to do with us as a pair, but which has helped in some small way to our being together. So he learned of my meningitis summer, of Leslie, Louise, my parents. And I of a primary school in Stroud not unlike my own, of grey Cotswold cottages that more than any other houses grow out of landscape. Of student life in London. His family. Mother, father, two sisters (one married, one still at school). They all know he is gay. Have accepted it without difficulty, have even made his boy-friends welcome at home. He had told them when he was seventeen. Though he’d been aware, long before, of what he was. From the age of twelve he was certain, and prior to that he’d had some idea. ‘We were eating cold beef and pickles at the time,’ he said. ‘A Monday. For twenty-four hours my father was a bit stunned. But my mother said so long as I was happy, then she was. Though she feared I would not be. The world, she pointed out, was not disposed to like or even tolerate homosexuals.’
‘I find it incredible!’
‘I was in love. Quite hopelessly, with a boy called William. I needed to talk, and my parents listened.’
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing! Is it to do with being black?’
He roared with laughter. ‘Of course not! I’ve met a few others, all whites as it happens, who are equally lucky with their families. Not very many. Mostly the opposite. And one friend whose father refuses to believe that homosexuality even exists! “It’s all in the mind,” he says. “A myth. A deep American plot.’”
‘A deep American plot?’
‘Yes. A variant of reds under the bed. An invention of the CIA to sap a nation’s morale.’
‘Never, in a million years, will my parents be happy about me! Never!’
‘I’ve been with mine to gay clubs. Dad gets bored, but Mum is fascinated. Not that she understands. She looked round the club in Cheltenham and said “This room is full of gorgeous men!” I agreed; yes, it was. “Don’t they realise almost any girl would go weak at the knees?” Perhaps they do, I told her, but so what? They aren’t interested. “I shall never work it out,” she murmured. She has this theory, you see, that you take up with your own sex after some disappointment with girls. There’s nothing I can do to shift that idea from her mind.’
‘The thought of my parents raving it up in a gay club is mind-boggling! Ludicrous!’
‘We often joke about it. Once, when I was telling my father some involved story, he said, “James, your life sounds like an everyday story of sodomy.” Not every day, I answered. Robin was with us, one Christmas, swopping recipes with my mother. A cosy domestic conversation. “I stuffed a marrow last week,” he said. A slip of the tongue, he told me afterwards; he had meant to say he had cooked a stuffed marrow. “Really, Robin?” she said, laughing. “Whatever did James do that night?”’
‘What a difference it must make! There’d be no guilt, no low self-esteem. Just. . . be happy!’
‘This Christmas, we’ll visit them in Stroud. Would you like that?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’d love it!’
‘And. . . next Easter, or in the summer, we’ll stay with your parents. It’s time we sorted them out.’
‘We’ll. . . stay with them? No. Oh no! It would be quite impossible! A recipe for disaster!’
‘We’ll see about that.’
He isn’t easy to live with. We don’t fit domestically, as Robin and I did. We have rows. He’s unpunctual. Domineering. Sometimes he goes off on his own. I don’t know where and I don’t ask, because it doesn’t really matter. His thesis has to be written this year, and he sits up half the night, working. Which makes me feel lonely. We lived in the attic at first, but I was never entirely at ease with him there: too many memories of Robin. He warned me that it would be difficult to move out. Rented accommodation in London, he said, whether it was furnished or unfurnished, was almost impossible to find and the prices sky-high. And even if we did discover somewhere suitable, we might not get it: some people objected to two men sharing. ‘Landlords think that if they let a room to gays,’ he said, ‘every queen in London will be trolling in and out with her poodles. And I’m black as well! It isn’t worth trying.’ But I did try: and found he was right on every single count. A gay negro: a double cripple in society’s eyes. Let him have a room in their house? Send him back to Trinidad — if they’ll take him! Though that was not what people actually said, I could feel it under their words.
Often he can be infuriating. One evening the lights fused. ‘You’re the physicist,’ I said, expecting him to repair the damage at once. ‘Let James be, and there was light.’
‘Dark. Ebony all over.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m a theoretical physicist, not a practical one.’ He lit a candle and went on reading. I had to stagger about in a dusty cupboard under the stairs and learn to do it myself. I was angry. Of course he must know how to mend a fuse! Twenty minutes later I had solved the problem; light was restored. ‘So you’ve had a physics lesson,’ he said, calmly blowing out his candle. ‘You can’t expect to go through life totally ignorant of these things.’
‘Are you?’
‘Of course not!’
I threw a cushion at him.
On Christmas Eve, when we were at Stroud, Mrs Radford died. A heart attack. Leslie was there, at home, when it happened. All he could think of was to find Victoria. He hitched a lift across Devon on Christmas night, and arrived in a state of collapse at her parents’ house — numb, cold, and so upset he was scarcely aware of what he was doing. He poured out a jumbled, hysterical tale, the thread of which was ‘For Christ’s sake, help me!’ And they did.
He turned up, unexpectedly, at the attic, one evening at the end of January. He was selling his mother’s house, he said. And with the money he was buying a place in London. In Kilburn. There was a vast difference in the prices, but he was hoping to take out a mortgage to cover that. Would I, he wanted to know — he had never met James before, and was eyeing this long, loose-limbed black man rather warily — move in as a lodger to help pay the mortgage?
Some months later, we — James and I — did so. We have the whole upstairs; it’s a self-contained flat, with a grandstand view of other mean little dwellings. But our home. Easy to cope with: it’s so empty there’s almost nothing to sweep and clean, apart from the floors. James borrowed a hundred pounds from his parents; that, and the little money we had, bought us, second-hand at sales, some basic essentials: bed, an electric cooker, table, chairs, a paraffin stove. A few odds and ends since, when we’ve been able to afford them. But we’re a long way off carpeting our bedroom wall to wall in white.
I’ve rented a colour TV. I was able to do that because I changed my job, and I’m earning a little more than when I worked for the dance company. A new job was essential: the church hall in Richmond was miles away from where we are living now; the cost of travelling would have been astronomical. And I’d hardly have seen James. When it was Robin, that didn’t matter, but it was different now. I found work — as a milkman!
On my first day I kept thinking how I’d love to compare notes with Dad. Not that he would be proud; he always looked to something better for me than following in his footsteps. But I enjoy what I’m doing. It’s easy; it’s out of doors, and there’s no one supervising
me all the time. Unlike Dad, I have to get up at five a.m. But I’m finished by early afternoon, which means that unless James has gone in to the university or disappeared on one of his solitary walkabouts, he and I have a large part of the day together. I’m often so tired in the evenings that I fall asleep in front of the television. When that happens, he undresses me, picks me up as if I were a baby, and carries me to bed. Which always seems to turn him on, for the next thing I know is he’s screwing me like mad. ‘I’m too exhausted to resist,’ I mutter. ‘Rape!’
‘Shut your eyes and think of Trinidad.’
I open them, look at him, and kiss him.
James is a bully, and he takes an enormous pleasure in organising my existence. He nagged, on and off for weeks, about visiting my parents. ‘Don’t mention me,’ he said. ‘Just let them know you’re coming. And when we arrive,say you’ve brought a friend with you. They won’t eat us, for God’s sake!’ Eventually I agreed. What had I to lose? Nothing, or next to nothing; my parents and I had drifted apart, almost totally. ‘I’m not going to switch on a lot of synthetic charm,’ he said. ‘But I can show them I’m not a primitive savage who’s just dropped out of a tree.’
‘You are a primitive savage,’ I answered. ‘And, besides, they’ve never even heard of you. Let alone your being the colour of soot.’
‘Well, it’s about time they did.’
‘I’m warning you. . . on your own head be it!’
I took a day’s holiday, a Friday. James was more or less his own master now his thesis was finished. Leslie and Victoria were in Newquay: I wrote to tell them what was happening, and they replied that they’d come up to stay with Little Michael, who had recently married his Juicy Lucy, and give us moral support.
It was not exactly an easy weekend. My parents have no particular prejudices about colour, though that is accidental rather than considered: I don’t expect they’ve ever thought about it. The subject has not been part of their lives; it isn’t an everyday occurrence to see a black person in Bude. They guessed immediately what the relationship was between James and me, and the colour of his skin may well, in the circumstances, have added an extra dimension of horror. I don’t know: it wasn’t discussed. Nor was the dreadful problem of homosexuality even hinted at. We spent the time, the four of us, simply being polite to one another: careful and non-committal. James and I tried our best to give no offence; didn’t touch or kiss, and certainly didn’t sleep together. I was in my old bedroom, he downstairs on the sofa. It was all a great strain, and it was good to escape and spend a few hours with Leslie and Victoria, to relax and be our normal selves.