by David Rees
My father and I did swop milk roundsmen’s stories. Which was pleasant, though he said he was disappointed I hadn’t found a more worthwhile job. He seemed to have forgotten that when he was my age there was no unemployment, that nowadays people are grateful for almost any kind of work. And one entertaining diversion occurred: the lights fused. James immediately leaped into action. ‘Now a man with a first class honours degree in physics should be capable of doing something about that,’ he said to me, and asked my father to show him where the fuse box was. Not only were the lights on in next to no time, but he was able to point out what had caused the fault. He went round the house looking at plugs and sockets. ‘The entire system is very old,’ he said. ‘And dangerous. It needs re-wiring.’ He suggested that if Dad bought the necessary cable he would come down one weekend and do the job for nothing. An offer which Dad accepted.
‘You’re a bastard,’ I said, when we were on our own.
He grinned. ‘Yes. Isn’t it fun?’
They could see, I suppose, that we were sane and happy, not the monsters of popular myth, though I doubt if they’ll ever accept us for what we are. But I’m glad we’re trying. They are my parents, for God’s sake! How can you discard parents — whatever they think of you — and feel one-hundred-per-cent happy about it?
Leslie had given up attempting to teach James the rudimentary skills of surfing. I was amused that something I thought was as easy as breathing my lover found impossible. I lay on the sand, beside Victoria. Leslie and James started to wrestle with each other.
‘They’re so physical, those two!’ she said. ‘It wears me out, just being near them.’
‘It’s a good thing they get on so well. It could have been awkward, sharing the house.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t suppose it would have mattered. We’re hardly ever there.’
‘Everything OK with you and Leslie?’
‘Of course. Couldn’t be better.’ She looked at me. ‘You often ask me that question. As if you were expecting it not to be.’
‘Will you marry him one of these days?’
‘Yes.’
‘Christ!’ I was extremely surprised.
She laughed. ‘When I’ve got my degree. I’ve one more year at Cambridge. Though I can’t see us having babies, not for a long time. I want to work: I’d like to go into publishing. You’ll be the best man, of course.’
‘Isn’t that. . . rather up to Leslie?’
‘We’ve discussed it; it’s what he wants. He’s very fond of you. He’s spent all his life measuring himself against you. He still does. I don’t think he’s as adult as you are. You’ve outstripped him in so many ways.’
‘It was quite the opposite, four or five years back. Apart from his parents dying, he’s never had to suffer.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘You should have known us at sixteen!’
‘I’ve heard.’
‘Have you?’
She nodded. ‘Everything.’
‘Everything?’
She was silent for a moment, then said ‘Do you still fancy him?’
‘Yes. Not that it bothers me. I am. . .rather occupied elsewhere! Does it bother you?’
‘Not in the slightest. I asked him once, when we’d had a row, if he’d prefer to go upstairs and sleep with you two intead of me.’
‘I wouldn’t have kicked him out! Nor would James.’
‘Men. . . do you ever stop being tom-cats?’
‘What did Leslie say?’
‘Well. . . I wasn’t exactly being serious! He thought I was, and got very worried that I imagined he would like to.’
‘And would he?’
‘No. Not in a million years. So he said.’ She laughed. Tough luck, Ewan!’
‘I always wondered if he was bisexual.’
‘It’s possible. Even probable. You and James. . .you both certainly seem to have something. Will it last?’
‘Oh, yes. For a long time. All the foreseeable future. Do you doubt it?’
‘No.’
That evening I overheard a conversation between Mum and Dad. ‘One day he’ll settle down and marry a nice girl,’ she said. ‘You see if I’m not right!’ Dad’s answer was inaudible. And maybe unprintable.
The foreseeable future. I had long since grown out of thinking that it was worthwhile making plans. Nothing can last for ever. James and I might get bored, break up, fall in love with other people. Nobody is your own private property; people are only lent to you. But the longer you’re together the harder it must be to part; you stay because of shared possessions, shared routines, or you can’t face the emptiness of being yourself, alone. All the wrong reasons. Learning to be happy alone: that’s probably the most difficult thing of all about growing up. Not the problem of ‘I’ll survive’ but of finding the strength to be sufficiently fulfilled without the prop of a lover, a wife, or a husband.
There’s a wonderfully huge amount of life left to me: fifty years, if I’m lucky. All the adult decades. I’m twenty; I haven’t even started!
But the milkman’s on his way.
other novels by David Rees published by GMP:
THE HUNGER
Ireland in the late 1840s, where a beleaguered population falls victim to massive famine following the spread of an uncontrollable potato blight. Against this harsh background of turmoil, starvation and disease, an English landowner and an Irish peasant struggle to keep not only themselves and those around them alive, but also the love they feel for one another in a society and era which violently condemn it.
ISBN 0 85449 008 6 £4.95
THE ESTUARY
Luke, an extremely attractive but selfish young man, surprises himself when he gets involved with an older man after breaking up with his girlfriend.
‘Highly readable and once begun is difficult to put down. It examines sympathetically and realistically the complexities of homo, hetero and bisexual relationships and the irrationalities, uncertainties, doubts and suspicions which surround love and sex. Highly recommended’ - Time Out.
ISBN 0 907040 20 9 £3.95
other recent fiction from GMP:
Jeremy Beadle
DEATH SCENE
The discovery of Guy Latimer’s mutilated body in an alleyway near one of London’s leading gay nightclubs opens this intriguing and compulsive novel. It soon becomes apparent that the killing was premeditated and that the assailant must have been known to the victim. Suspicion falls on Guy’s circle of gay friends, all of whom seem to be hiding crucial information, but who soon find themselves obliged to join forces to try and solve the killing, fearful of a set-up by the police.
A highly innovative and cleverly plotted mystery that in classic whodunnit style grips the reader until the very last pages, with a dramatic final twist. The first of a new genre - a contemporary gay murder story set in present-day Britain, with sharp observations on both the nature of the gay community in post-AIDS London and on the reactions and attitudes of the wider community around it.
‘Beadle’s writing is adept and assured, the characters are well-drawn and plausible... I recommend it as a rattling good yarn’ - New Musical Express.
ISBN 0 85449 088 4 £4.95
Timothy Ireland
THE NOVICE
New fiction from this award-winning author.
Donovan Crowther is 23 years old and still a virgin. Romantic and uncertain, he is drawn to London in his search for love. And from the moment he arrives in the capital, it’s clear that whatever happens, his life will never be the same again.
Donovan’s experiences will be all too familiar to the many who have taken the same path, yet Ireland achieves a level of intimacy with the reader that is disarmingly immediate.
‘Ireland ... has a way of capturing the immediacy of emotional experience, with all the attendant confusions and contradictions, without ever resorting to hackneyed sentimentality or galling set formulas. A talent to be reckoned with’ - Time Out.
ISBN 0 854
49 089 2 £3.95
Also from Timothy Ireland
WHO LIES INSIDE
... It was as if out of the corner of my eye I could see a stranger standing in the shadows and I was scared to look too closely in case I saw who it was. Worst of all the stranger seemed to have wriggled under my skin, or had grown inside me all my eighteen years; only now for some reason that stranger was not content to stay in the shadows but wanted to step out into the light and be seen ...
The much acclaimed novel about growing up gay, winner of The Other Award for fiction in 1984.
‘This is an exciting, innovative book which deserves the widest possible readership - it will open your eyes to some issues about gay men and must be made available to young people themselves’ - ILEA Contact
A T Fitzroy
DESPISED AND REJECTED
This major piece of gay literary history was first published at the height of the First World War. Focusing on the brutal persecution of conscientious objectors, and with its two main characters a lesbian and a gay man, it was almost immediately banned. This is its first reissue in Britain for seventy years.
In a new introduction written for this edition Jonathan Cutbill examines the background to the novel and the trial of its original publisher.
‘A sophisticated and well-crafted novel’ - Sunday Times.
‘A thoughtful and well-considered book...brave and pioneering. Compelling fiction about a world that may seem light years away - but from which many attitudes still prevail’ - Gay Times.
‘Fitzroy presents the socialist-pacifist cause with intelligence and passion and manages to avoid sentimentality. She entertainingly lampoons the social pretensions, patriotic double-think, snobbery, smugness and bloodlust’ - Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement
James Purdy
IN A SHALLOW GRAVE
When they sent Garnet Montrose to Vietnam they told him he’d go out a boy and come back a man. But he comes back a freak, so hideously scarred that no one can stand to look at his face. The explosion which destroyed his company has skinned him alive.
living as a recluse on a storm-battered Virginia farm, he dreams of the days when he was eighteen and king of the local dance hall, kept alive by his obsession with the untouchable Georgina Ranee, his childhood sweetheart still living down the road. It seems this half-life will never end - until the arrival of the mysterious Daventiy, offering him total love or total destruction... '
‘...a lyrical mystery, unsolved because unsolvable, but crammed with a sense of spiritual beauty at work in the physical world. James Purdy is more than just a good writer. He has created his own genre of rhapsodic horror stories’ - The Pink Paper.
‘Mr Purdy writes like an angel, with accuracy, wit and freshness, but a fallen angel, versed in the sinful ways of men’ -The Times.
‘A marvellous tour de force. A novel that engages as it entertains, draws the reader in as it draws something out of him’ -Publishers Weekly.
Rohase Piercy
MY DEAREST HOLMES
Although Dr Watson is known for recording nearly sixty of his adventures with the celebrated Sherlock Holmes, he also wrote other reminiscences of their long friendship which were never intended for publication during their lifetimes. Rescued from oblivion by Rohase Piercy, here are two previously unknown stories about the great detective and his companion, throwing a fresh light upon their famous partnership and helping to explain much which has puzzled their devotees.
‘Thoroughly amusing...Wonderful stuff -Stanley Reynolds, The Guardian
‘Any Holmes aficianado would enjoy it for its own sake’ - Gay Times
‘These pieces work on a number of levels - the detective story (written in a style amazingly close to the originals), and the social document. Most importantly, a literate and humane portrait of one man’s love for another’ - Gay Life.
‘Just because two chaps share digs doesn’t mean they’re queer’- Captain Bill Mitchell, secretary of the Sherlock Holmes society, as reported in the Daily Mail.
Table of Contents
DAVID REES
One: The Meningitis Summer
Two: The Linga Longa Cafe
Three: The Fairground Summer
Four: First Love
Five: The Diary
Six: The Swimming-Pool Summer
Seven: Coming Out
Eight: James