by Swan, Tarn
Over dinner I nagged Lulu about making an appointment with the gay counselling service I’d found for him. He’s been having awful nightmares. I also stoically harped on about reporting the attack to the police. He refused and came out with the theory that he’d probably got what he deserved. He got the rough edge of my tongue for that remark. I asked him if he thought a woman who made a silly decision to walk alone through a park late at night deserved to be attacked and raped? He said no. I told him to apply that attitude to his own situation. I begged him to consider reporting the incident, if not for his own sake then for the sake of others. The man is a danger. It would be different if he advertised his perversions openly and men were still stupid enough to gravitate towards him, but he didn’t. He lured victims under false pretences and he was going to end up killing someone.
I think Lu almost decided that being cosseted to death by his parents was preferable to being nagged to death by me. He promised to make an appointment with the counselling service, but on the matter of the police he remained stubborn. He didn’t believe he’d be treated with compassion. He has no confidence in them, pointing out that they hadn’t exactly come up trumps with regard to our hate mailer. They just see such the attack as endemic to the homosexual lifestyle and as such, tough luck. He escaped my well-intentioned nagging by going off to the hospital to visit Barry who is starting to pick up at long last. The medication seems to be kicking in. He’s getting out of bed most days now and getting dressed. I think he’s been surprised and pleased to receive regular visits by some of the PP crowd. He’s also rather proud of the fact that his room has become the venue for a card school. The last time I saw him he was surrounded by his psychiatrist, a male nurse, Big Mary, Kevin, Brian, Gloria and a couple of porters who were all playing poker around the bed.
Maryann rang and we talked about mum. I’d ignored mum’s request not to tell her about the cancer. I didn’t think it was right to keep her in the dark about something so important, and dad agreed with me. We both got upset and then we pulled ourselves together and reassured each other about how fine everything was going to be, how lucky mum was to have caught it at this stage and how vital it was to have regular screening. Maryann complained because I didn’t have to attend for such intimate and embarrassing tests. I reminded her that I have a prostate gland. She said it wasn’t the same as I didn’t bleed from it every month and nor did I have to carry a child and give birth out my arse, and anyway the chances were that I wouldn’t have to have my botty clinically fingered until I was much older. Honestly, the things she comes out with. She makes me blush. Then she complained she was getting paranoid because after my skin cancer scare she checked herself everyday for suspect marks and now she was terrified she’d get cervical cancer.
After she rang off I went upstairs and told Twinkles to put on a robe or a tee and boxers and get himself downstairs to wash up, seeing as he hadn’t done a thing all day. He said seeing as he hadn’t eaten any dinner he didn’t see why he should wash up, and anyway there was a perfectly good dishwasher in the kitchen so why didn’t I toddle off and stick my pots in it. I wasn’t running the dishwasher for a few pots and told him he could get his sulky arse downstairs and do them, though I was willing to give him a hand, which I did, duly applying it to his bottom before stuffing him into a robe and escorting him to the kitchen.
While he savagely washed up he took the opportunity to have another whining session. How the hell was he supposed to buy Christmas presents without money and what about new clothes for parties and the PP’s Christmas Queen Pageant? I pointed out that he had more than enough clothes, several wardrobes full of them. He didn’t need any more. As for Christmas presents, there was no real issue as we always bought them jointly anyway. We could head off to the MetroCentre on Sunday coming and start Christmas shopping if he liked. He didn’t like. I could stuff the MetroCentre right up my crevice. To accompany this charming sentiment he hurled a pan into the washing up bowl and then plunged his hands in to wash it. Pandemonium followed. He let out a scream of shock. The pan had broken a glass that was lurking under the water and a shard sliced through rubber glove and flesh. Pulling his hand out of the water he dragged off the glove and began shrieking hysterically as blood pattered and pooled onto the kitchen floor. He fainted. I quickly grabbed a tea towel and wrapped it around his hand. Gathering him into my arms I carried him into the sitting room and laid him on the couch stroking his face until he came round. He has a phobia about blood and needles, so I was praying the cut wouldn’t need stitches.
Thankfully, when examined it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared from the amount of blood. It’s on the side of his right hand curling in slightly towards the palm. I cleaned it and applied a couple of steristrips to hold it together so it would heal neatly and then bandaged it. My baby was as white as a sheet and close to tears, but out of bad came good. To my joy and relief all animosity towards me vanished. Yes, he was as mad as hell with me, but at the end of the day he loves me and he wanted comfort from the one he loved.
The thaw didn’t last long. Lulu phoned to say that he’d met up with Kev at the hospital and they were going out for a drink. We were invited. I declined because I had some paperwork to do. I told Twinks that he could go if he wanted to, but on the proviso he stuck to a pre-arranged budget. It wasn’t enough. I refused to negotiate the amount, so he refused to go out. Fine, if he wanted to cut his nose off to spite his face he could get on with it. He called me the biggest bastard in Christendom and threw his hardback edition of ‘Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret’ at me. Fortunately it missed. His aim isn’t brilliant at the best of times and it was even worse due to him throwing with his left hand instead of his right. The book hit the floor with enough force to fracture the spine and a sheaf of pages fluttered loose. He burst into tears sobbing that he wouldn’t be able to replace it because he had no money thanks to me. I was a very bad man. I reminded him that ultimately it was his own fault he had no money, and then my hand had a serious discussion about temper tantrums with his bare bottom.
Lulu and Kevin’s night out turned into a pity party pub-crawl, as they commiserated with each other about their luck with men. Lulu was absolutely hammered. He staggered out of the taxi took a wrong turn at the garden gate and collapsed onto the Brownlow’s front lawn where he decided it was as good a place as any to have a nice nap. Fortunately the taxi driver had a humanitarian streak and realised that the address given him by his drunken fare didn’t tally with the lawn he was lying on. He rang the doorbell to alert me, fearful lest the drunk died of exposure. I thanked him sincerely and retrieved my houseguest before the Brownlow’s discovered him. I had few words of sympathy as he puked into the receptive bowl of armitage shanks.
It was yet another miserable start to the day in our house this morning. Twinkles’ hand was sore and Lu had a stinker of a hangover. They both slumped silently over the breakfast table looking like death in a temper. I outraged Lulu by telling him he wasn’t fit to drive after the skinful he’d had, as it would still be in his system. I confiscated his bike keys. He asked me if realised what a bossy bitch I was? I said yes and told him that if he didn’t watch his lip I’d make him walk to work instead of giving him a lift.
Twinkles voluntarily kissed me goodbye when I dropped him off at work, which cheered me up and made me bold enough to ask if he’d like to lunch with mum and I. He accepted. I’ve taken today off. I’m going to try and get refunds on some of the goods that my naughty boy stockpiled in his wardrobe, then I’m picking mum up and we’ll meet Twinkles. I thought mum needed a treat after everything she’s gone through lately. She sees the Consultant on Monday morning and she’ll find out the results of the tests then.
3rd December 2005:
Fish Cringers And Phlegm
We received our first Christmas card this morning, from my aunt Mary in Scotland. I haven’t written out any Christmas cards yet, let alone posted them. It accompanied my Christmas present, the latest edition of the ‘Oor Wullie’ A
nnual. No doubt Maryann got her card complete with a copy of ‘The Broons.’ Aunt Mary, bless her, has been sending us the same Christmas Annuals every year since we were little kids. Some part of her obviously still believes that we’re about seven years old. I’ve never been that big a fan of Wullie or the Broons to be honest, but Twinks loves them; he thinks they’re braw, as the Scots would say. He’s taken ‘Oor Wullie’ to work to read during his breaks today and he knows Maryanne will forward on her Broons Annual for him to read in due course. He was never allowed comics or annuals when he was a child because his stonehearted grandfather considered them vulgar. Twinkle’s dad would sometimes slip him a ‘Beano’ or ‘Dandy’ on the quiet, but he would have preferred ‘The Bunty’ a girls Annual, because it came with dolls you could cut out and put costumes on. I now buy him a ‘Bunty’ Annual every Christmas.
We all enjoyed yesterday’s lunch. Mum and Twinks had a mock bitch about all the other patrons in the Riverside Restaurant, happily condemning their fashion sense. He informed her he’d done some in-depth research on the net and given the details she’d provided and the evidence of the medical tests so far, she had absolutely nothing to worry about. She had already entered the menopause so the removal of her womb wasn’t going to send her body into areas it didn’t already know about. Hysterectomy was actually more likely to enhance her sex life than hinder it if she adopted the right psychological attitude, and there was always anal sex to consider…at which point I rendered myself stone deaf and concentrated on enjoying my food.
My quest to get refunds met with mixed success. The six hundred pound dress is still hanging in the wardrobe. The shop refused to take it back claiming the refund period had passed and it was more or less tough. I got a refund for the expensive curtains and cushion covers and some of the costume jewellery. Twinkles came up with a ‘Fab Idea’ with regard to the dress. It could be my Christmas present to him. It would save me the hassle of thinking of something. He could wear it to take part in the Christmas Queen Pageant. I said a firm no. Apart from the fact that I would never spend that much on a single Christmas present, I would sooner donate it to a charity shop than allow him to benefit from his deceitfulness. It’s going on ebay along with a few other things when I get the time to do it.
I’ve paid off all of Twinkles store card debts. The interest charged on those things is phenomenal, absolutely crippling and I didn’t see any sense in letting it mount higher. It’s a difficult debt wheel to escape from and it’s no wonder people end up in a mess with them. I will not be handing them back to him. They’re permanently banned as a mode of credit. I haven’t told him that yet. I’m saving that battle for another day.
He finally got his biannual commission cheque yesterday and got shirty in the car on the way home because I refused to even consider letting him keep half of it. He whinged and moaned and begged me to reconsider and then pleaded for punishment to be deferred until after Christmas, as this was the worst possible time of year to be punished in such a horrible way. It was the cruellest discipline I’d ever, ever inflicted on him, even worse than after the necklace incident (now there’s a tale). I wouldn’t budge. His commission is going towards clearing his debt. He lost his temper and threatened to tear up the cheque and flush it down the toilet. I threatened to blister his backside if he bent so much as a corner of it before it got paid into the bank.
He worked himself into such a state of vitriolic hysteria that driving became nigh on impossible. I detoured and parked the car on an industrial estate that I knew would be deserted at that time of day. We ended up in the back seat, but not in a good way. He was so tightly wound that it didn’t take much to break the spring. My hand had barely warmed the seat of his trousers before he was crying as if the skin was being flayed from his bottom. I righted him and he clung to me sobbing about how he wouldn’t be able to get me a Christmas present or even a card. I told him I had everything I needed and besides, it wasn’t as if I were denying him access to his money altogether. I’d just taken away his control of it. All he had to do was tell me what he wanted and if I approved he would get the money. He said it was humiliating having to ask for money, especially his own money. I know this is very, very hard for him and I’m sorry, but I think it’s too important an issue to just let it go.
I cuddled him as we sat in the back of the car and he at last managed to give his feelings a verbal format. He was ashamed and angry about what he’d done, so much so that he didn’t even want to acknowledge it. He’d made me a scapegoat for his anger instead. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. He hated Teddy for encouraging him to be stupid, but most of all he hated himself for being weak. He rolled up his sleeve to show me a scratch and a yellowing bruise on his forearm, explaining that he’d felt such self-disgust that he’d scratched and bitten his arm, adding he would have bitten twice, but it hurt too much the first time. How on earth did people self-harm on a regular basis? The poor things needed help. I was horrified and sternly told him if he ever resorted to such a mechanism again I would treat it in the same vein as him scratching and biting me. He confessed that he still wanted to keep all the things he’d bought and he wanted control of his finances back and surely that made him a bad person? If he were truly repentant he would accept punishment without rancour and fuss. He was worried I might think he was beyond redemption and leave him.
I assured him he could rancour and fuss until the cows came home, it wouldn’t do him any good, quite the opposite because I would discipline him if it got out of hand, but I would never leave him. I’m not in the business of redemption. I didn’t see him as something that had to be salvaged and fixed. I loved him when he was nasty just as much as I loved him when he was nice. It didn’t mean I’d put up with the nastiness. I’d deal with it, as he expected me to deal with it, but I certainly didn’t see our relationship as being about fundamentally changing him as a person.
Whoever said that we learn by our mistakes was talking twaddle to my mind. We learn to walk, talk, feed and dress ourselves. We learn to read and write and count to varying degrees, according to our level of intelligence. We learn to cross the road, we learn to cook, etc. We learn to recognise what might be a dangerous situation, but on the whole we do not learn by our mistakes, because nine times out of ten the mistakes we make arise from some aspect of our nature that cannot be changed. It’s who and what we are. As a result of consequences we might learn not to repeat our mistakes in exactly the same way over and over again, but from time to time we will trip and make mistakes of a similar kind depending on what drives our personality.
Twinkles is impulsive. He will be impulsive until the day he dies. He has a consuming need for attention and approval. He will have those needs until the end of his life. They are part of the fabric of his being and they affect his judgement in many different ways. If I were to walk away from him because he ‘failed’ to permanently change those aspects of his personality then I would consider myself to be a poor quality human being. What I’m trying to say I suppose is that if you love someone you love all of them, even the unattractive bits, and you don’t abandon ship the moment you sail into stormy waters.
To our dismay when we arrived home Lulu had made dinner, which sounds ungrateful, but Lu is a terrible cook. There’s a myth that says all gay men are fabulous cooks. It’s utter rubbish. Lulu can’t cook to save his life, and he feels compelled to do peculiar things with food. Our repast last night consisted of fish fingers, Cadbury’s Smash and tinned peas, not so bad you might think, could be worse. Wrong! He’d sprinkled the fish fingers with a mixture of cinnamon and five spice in order to try and glamorise them and he’d added green food colouring to the instant mash to make it look more interesting and tone with the peas. Twinkles told him the mash looked like phlegm and he was a frigging idiot. In exchange Lulu told him he looked like he had chronic conjunctivitis and what had he been crying about now? To which Twinks retorted ‘the thought of eating anything cooked by you.’ Even Lulu admitted that the fish finge
rs were inedible. We ended up having ham and salad sandwiches, which I made, deeming it to be the safer option.
Twinkles wasn’t much in the mood for dressing up and going out last night, and believe me that’s a rare happening. He was tired after the scene in the car, which I think was a case of the boil finally bursting. We could have done with a quiet night in to recover. However, the PP was having a fund raising night in respect of the recent World AIDS Day and we’d both volunteered to be part of the can shaking team. We felt we owed it to the memory of Steven to do our bit and of course we didn’t want to let Brian down. It was a good evening in its way, but tinged, as such occasions are, with sadness and regrets as you inevitably recall the people who are no longer with us. I miss Stevie. I miss his smile, his jokes, and his kindnesses. I miss his presence in our life. We didn’t see him every single day, but he was there. It’s odd how you can go for a while without physically seeing a person, but you know they’re around, so it doesn’t bother you. Death robs you of that. You can pretend that they’re in the next room or on holiday, but it doesn’t really work because you know the room is permanently empty and the holiday will never be returned from. It hurts.
I see I’ve rambled at length again. It’s no wonder I haven’t got any Christmas cards written out. I spend too much time writing in this journal. I’d better run, got to pick up Oor Twinks from work.
4th December 2005:
Christmas Stropping
After collecting Twinkles from work yesterday I told him we would not be going out, as we still had a few things to settle between us. I wanted them settling as soon as possible, was that clear? He rolled his eyes, but nodded. We arrived home to find the front lawn scattered with household rubbish, cans, convenience food boxes, and scraps of leftover food. It was disgusting. Twinkles nearly popped a blood vessel and I hastily hustled him indoors before he could start hurling the rubbish in our new neighbours direction. I told him to get changed and make a start on dinner while I tidied up. He interpreted that as a request to grab the phone and call directory enquiries to demand the number of the evil bastard Brownlow’s. I cut him off and sent him on his way. Lulu, who had been visiting his parents, arrived back as I was beginning to clean up and gave me a hand. Twinks had obviously got him onside, because once we had it all re-bagged he offered to nip round the back and chuck it over the Brownlow’s garden wall. I declined his offer and settled for sticking it where it belonged, in the bin. I had no intention of engaging in a petty gay/straight trash-slinging vendetta.