by Patrick Gale
‘Well …’ Alison hesitated, glancing uncertainly at Sam, who was starting to scowl dangerously. Jamie remembered that Sam had broken someone’s arm with impunity. ‘We’re here with friends. Gay friends.’
‘I must ask you to join the group of supporters at the back of the march,’ the steward told them.
‘But that’s daft!’ Alison insisted. ‘We came to be with them, not to be segregated.’
‘What is this, a camp?’ asked someone in the queue that was pressing up behind her and there was a guffaw at the unintentional pun.
‘Oh just tell him you’re a dyke,’ someone else muttered.
‘It’s quite simple,’ the steward continued. ‘Are you Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Other?’
Sam pushed to one side and began to unhook a section of crowd barrier.
‘Hey! You can’t do that!’ the steward protested.
Lifting the barrier clear as though it were so much balsa wood, Sam threw him a look of innocent puzzlement. With a cheer and a few mutters of Nazi and Silly Cow, the people behind him – men, women and children – swept through the new space. Sam and Alison slipped through with them. Belgian Agnes clapped. Seething now, although Sandy was protesting that the steward was probably some kind of political performance artist, Alison pointedly led them all to march under the first banner she could find that least described any of them – Kent Sapphic Gardening Collective. A serene woman in African batik handed them each a flower.
As they were sucked into the tide of people, Sam tried to push his sprig of sweet-william into a buttonhole on his shirt but dropped it. Jamie picked it up before anybody could squash it.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Oh. Ta.’
They stood still for a few seconds, but none of the horticultural sapphists complained or bumped into them – instead they walked neatly around, bearing Alison and the others away with them. Jamie reached up. Sam was a full head taller than him, he realised; six foot four at least. Fiddling to pull the stem through a buttonhole high on his chest, Jamie felt the rustle of hair beneath the hot shirt fabric. He glanced past Sam’s shoulder and saw Alison watching them to see why they had dropped behind. Still walking, she smiled, waved and turned back to take a turn pushing Guy’s wheelchair.
‘What’s wrong with him, do you reckon?’ Sam asked as they continued, surrounded now by the London Transport SM Group, several of whom were chained to friends.
‘The usual,’ Jamie said.
‘Thought so. Is he a friend of yours?’
‘I’ve never met him before today,’ Jamie lied.
Their section of the march was passing under Hungerford Bridge now.
‘Give us an O!’ somebody called.
‘Oh!’ people shouted.
‘Give us another O!’
‘Oh!’
‘Give us another O!’
‘Oh!’
‘And what does it spell?’
The was a flutter of anticipatory laughter before about a hundred people yelled, ‘OOOOOH!!’ making the most of the booming acoustic overhead. Some scaffolders waved from their workplace on the bridge far out over the water and received another, ever so slightly ironic ‘oooh’ in return. Sam glanced at Jamie and snorted. Jamie quickly followed suit, as though in agreement.
‘Oh I know. They’re not with us. We’re not like that.’
Jamie noted how Sam’s cheek dimpled, and let his eyes flick down to where the man’s big, worn hands were swinging at his sides. He wondered how Alison had contained herself in the same house as him at night. Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps she was already deeply in love and had forborne as yet from telling Jamie out of the usual misplaced concern that bachelors are saddened rather than encouraged to hear of the connubial joys of others. Or maybe. Just maybe, Sam had wanted to come on the march for reasons of his own …
‘Alison tells me you’re a builder,’ Jamie said and promptly wished he had thought of some less crass opening gambit. Sam snorted again, and this time Jamie had the impression it was at him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a naval fitter by trade. But that’s about as much use as knowing how to shoe horses, maybe even less. How about you?’
‘Oh I’m er …’
‘City gent, is it?’
‘Not really.’ Jamie hesitated. His immediate impulse, well practised, was to lie. He usually said his name was Greg or Tony and that he worked for a landscape gardener or the Forestry Commission – something outdoorsy – but Sam had met him in context, knew his bloody sister. ‘Actually I’m in a Lloyd’s insurance syndicate. It’s reinsurance mostly.’
‘And is it interesting?’ Sam clearly had his doubts.
‘Well. It was.’ Jamie felt himself going off his career choice rapidly.
‘Do you have to wear a suit and tie?’
‘Every day.’
‘I’d hate that.’ Sam laughed to himself. Jamie had the queer sensation of being the shy one who was being expertly encouraged to reveal himself instead of, as usual, being the drawer-out. He was about to change tack when Sam bounded aside, in answer to a hoarse shout, to exchange quick pleasantries with three ragged-looking women and their scrawny dog. A Harrods tour bus crawled by chock full of stunned overseas visitors. Marchers played up shamelessly for the cameras inside. A drag queen with a reporter’s notebook came by. She was surprisingly chic and restrained in an excellent, heavily up-scaled copy of a Chanel suit, and wore a beauty queen sash that read Fashion Police. She looked Jamie over and clicked her pen against the tip of her tongue.
‘Somebody didn’t make an effort today,’ she sighed. ‘Il faut souffrir, honey.’
Laughing, Alison beckoned Jamie to come forward to join her. He was on his way, pushing back among the lady gardeners when Sam reappeared at his side and offered a swig from a can of luke-warm lager someone had given him. It seemed like a challenge, so Jamie accepted it.
‘So how are things in Bow?’ he asked. ‘You must have settled in well if she persuaded you to come to this.’
Sam wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He frowned.
‘Yeah, well I’m not … you know …’
Jamie knew.
‘No. No, of course not. I knew that,’ he said abruptly. Sam’s earring was on the right, of course, which nervous hetero men always thought less riskily ambiguous. Any self-respecting queer would have paid for an artfully artless haircut rather than sport one that was so unmistakably home-made. Hoping he had not made a fool of himself, or betrayed more than a brotherly interest, Jamie walked faster, drawing Sam with him. They caught up with Alison and the rest just as they were passing a nostalgic Margaret Thatcher impersonator in a royal blue tailored outfit and imperious wig. ‘She’ had clambered on top of a stack of beer crates to harangue the marchers down a spangled megaphone as they came off the Lambeth end of Westminster Bridge.
‘There is no alternative,’ she enunciated in an eerie approximation of the familiar hectoring tones. ‘We will never surrender to sexual terrorism. In the words of Saint Francis …’
Jamie watched Alison also accept a swig of Sam’s lager, tried to picture the two of them sweatily naked, candlelit, and found it all too easy to see how well they would fit together. He cast the image from his mind, gave them his mental blessing and began to chat to the others, scanning the men in the crowd around him from the shelter of Nick and Sean’s coupledom, using their quasi-parental air as a foil for his own availability. This nonchalance was a defence mechanism learnt early amid the brutally shifting loyalties of the playground, then honed in clubs and bars since his late teens: appear to brush him off before anyone notices that he brushed you off first. His gaze could find no purchase elsewhere, however, and kept sliding back to Sam.
The march began to move through increasingly residential streets towards Kennington. There were fewer and fewer spectators, just scowling men in traffic jams and little groups at bus shelters who tried to look invisible.
‘Why are we doing this?’ Ni
ck asked suddenly. ‘Someone remind me. I mean, why really? Is sex so important?’
‘It’s not about sex,’ said Sean.
‘Isn’t it?’ Jamie asked, only half-concentrating because the rest of his mind was wondering whether a big-thighed man walking on his own with a rucksack over one shoulder was interesting, foreign or merely friendless.
‘It’s about freedom,’ Sean went on decisively. ‘The inalienable right to be. About saying we’re here, we’re uncategorisable and we’re not going away just to suit somebody’s economic policy.’
‘I think a lot of us just come because it’s an excuse for a fun day out,’ Nick suggested and threw a mischievous glance at Jamie. Jamie grinned back because Nick was so sweet and untroubled. He didn’t fancy him – Nick was too puppyishly winning for his taste – but Jamie could see how he could be good to come home to, to wake up to. If one wanted that sort of thing. Sean hardly seemed to notice Nick was there, which was perhaps what had held them together so long; devoted compliance on one side and a kind of tender oversight on the other. When Jamie tried to picture himself as settled with someone – which he did no more seriously than when he fantasised about having a baby to push around the park or handing in his notice to take up singing professionally – it was inevitably with Nick and Sean’s marriage as a model.
The park was full of people by the time their section of the march arrived, and after queuing for twenty minutes to shuffle past the volunteers with begging buckets at the gates, Jamie felt overcome by sudden fatigue and was quite content to sit on the grass with the picnic things while the others headed off to explore the disco tent, bar and countless food and trinket stalls. Alison flopped down beside him and lay on her side, watching Sam saunter off between Nick and Sean. It was one of those moments when Jamie enjoyed the sense of her being his negative image, her hair dark where his was blond, her skin pale where his was olive, her limbs soft where his were gym-hardened.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ he told her, though in truth he was beginning to find the crowd enervating and the event – now that the march had finished – unfocused.
‘So what do you think?’
‘Well the sheer number of people who’ve turned up is amazing but I –’
‘No,’ she laughed at him. ‘I mean about Sam.’
‘Oh.’ He screwed up his eyes against the sun, wishing he had brought his dark glasses. ‘He’s great. He’s lovely.’
‘You think so? But he’s so tall!’
‘So? Think what you could do with those legs.’ He broke off to regard her quizzically. ‘Have you had him yet?’
‘Jamie! I don’t regard every man I meet in a sexual light.’
‘Pinocchio!’
‘Well I don’t. I’m not like you.’
‘Since when?’
She slapped his thigh with the back of her hand then pushed her sunglasses further up her nose to hide her expression, but her nose was shiny with the heat and they slowly started slipping down again.
‘All right,’ she said, after stopping to watch two old women stroll by arm in arm. ‘So I did want him. But I don’t think he’s interested. Or he respects my space as a woman or something. Anyway, if something was going to happen it would have done by now, so there’s no point my fretting about it. He’s a nice bloke and it’s nice to have him around and there’s an end to it.’
‘You can’t just push sex away because it’s beyond your control.’
‘I can,’ she said. ‘I always have. Like chocolate or long, expensive holidays. If I put it out of my mind, it’s gone. Life’s too short to mope around pining for what you can’t have.’
‘But you pine all the same.’
‘Not if I don’t want to.’
‘But that’s so controlled!’ he protested. ‘I know you. You’re not that cold.’
‘I can be. Just like you putting people out on the pavement without letting them stay the night.’
‘That’s not cold,’ he protested, ‘it’s just honest. Letting them stay the night then putting them out, that’s cold.’ He caught sight of Sam in the distance, shambling awkwardly through the mass of sprawling bodies on the grass. ‘Well if you’re not going to try any harder to get him,’ he suggested quietly, ‘maybe I will.’
He said it partly to see how she truly felt, partly because her admission that Sam had yet to make a move on her had excited him afresh.
‘Fine,’ she said with a shrug, not meeting his eye. ‘I mean, it would be a dreadful waste of man if you didn’t.’ She was hurt and trying to hide it by playing the good sport. He knew her too well to be fooled.
‘You don’t want me to,’ he said, then glanced back at Sam and added, ‘do you really think I’d be so mean?’
‘Honestly, he’s all yours,’ she insisted. ‘If you can get him, that is.’
So she was still interested. Jamie slapped her knee playfully and looked away. He would back off, he decided, and let Sam decide the contest for them, à la Ivanhoe.
One by one, Sam and the others returned bearing, variously, veggie-burgers, shirts, love beads and pamphlets. Nick was shyly clasping a book called Cook Together, Stay Together. Guy had bought a black baseball cap which proclaimed, OUR DEATHS YOUR SHAME. He told a brief, unexpectedly funny anecdote about having just run into – literally – an old PE mistress of his, then lapsed into exhausted silence, letting his cap talk for him.
Jamie let Alison hang some love beads around his neck and kiss his cheek, and wondered why she felt the need to make peace when they had not argued. He jumped up to buy some cheap black sunglasses from a passing vendor. Examining Guy safely from behind them, he realised he must once have been handsome. It was less that one could see traces of the handsomeness in his ravaged face than that he unconsciously retained the gestures and posture of a beauty, even in his decline. The group spread themselves on the grass around his wheelchair and the crowd, in turn, seemed to spread itself on the grass around the group.
After a few angry speeches, a raucous, all-woman rock band began to play on the stage – archly melancholic songs of heartache and betrayal. Beer cans flashed in the sun and little puffs of cannabis joined the scents of cigarettes and sunblock on the breezeless London air. Everywhere people were beginning to stretch out on the grass, exposing pale bellies and sunburned shoulders. As if this reminder of the interminable navel-gazings of his boyhood were not enough, Jamie found himself obliged to watch as Sam slowly unbuttoned his shirt to the waist then casually raised his head off the grass and onto Alison’s lap so as to sunbathe and watch the stage at the same time. She, heedlessly lucky, stroked Sam’s hair without even looking down at him.
Accepting defeat, Jamie excused himself, muttering about needing to take a leak. The queues for the temporary gents were long, however, and their chatter began to set his nerves on edge. He followed the example of some mustachioed Germans and peed in the crowded privacy of some municipal laurel bushes. Rather than pick his way back over the countless bodies to Alison and the others, he wandered for a while around the impromptu market that had been set up in the other half of the park. He drifted aimlessly past stall after stall of things he had no desire to buy and groups he had no desire to join and found his mood sliding uncontrollably from grey to blue. The more linked hands and puckered lips he saw, the more hugs he witnessed and wittily brazen declarations he found himself reading on passing chests, the more out of kilter he felt with the proceedings seething around him. Earlier, on the tube train and crossing Covent Garden, he had felt a certain subversive elation, but now that had evaporated, and in its place he felt no pride, no solidarity, only a dim anger and encrusting sense of isolation.
He had been walking back onto the main lawn where the others were lying, but impulsively he turned aside to a path and began to stride towards an exit and the first taxi that would take him home to the private security of his Battersea flat. Alison would understand. She’d be pleased that he had at least joined her on the
march, been there for the important part. He would tell her he had begun to find the crowd overpowering. This was, after all, a part of the truth. He need not upset her pointlessly by voicing his political heresy. Or his sibling envy.
Reaching a park exit, where local children jostled with marchers in competition for service at two ice cream vans, he fancied he heard her calling his name, but pressed on.
Sam caught up with him at a zebra crossing. He had obviously been running and, in his eagerness to catch up with Jamie, had not planned what he was going to say once he did.
‘Hi,’ he panted. ‘Are you going, then?’
‘Er. Yes,’ Jamie said. ‘Looks like it.’
Sam furrowed his brow as though this were momentarily incomprehensible.
‘But you didn’t say goodbye.’
‘No. Sorry. I’ll ring Alison later, tell her.’
‘I thought we were going to, you know, talk some more.’
‘Oh.’
Once again, he had Jamie feeling uncharacteristically at a loss. Jamie was aroused by the suggestion that he was interested, yet shy in the humiliating face of a possible misunderstanding. From urban instinct, he had waved at a vacant taxi, which was now pulling over from the middle of the road, causing cars in the nearside lane to swerve, tooting, around it.
‘I couldn’t face much more of that crowd,’ he explained.
‘Where d’you live, then?’
‘On the river,’ Jamie told him. He glanced at the taxi, which had now reached the kerb ahead of them. The driver shouted something impatiently. ‘I can wait for another one,’ Jamie started to say.
‘No I –’
Sam faltered. Jamie looked back into his face and was surprised by an expression he recognised from other faces, other times. He stared for a moment, startled, feeling his spirits quicken, then murmured, as he had said many times before, with a flicker of a smile he knew was infallible because he had watched it on himself in countless bar and lavatory mirrors, ‘So let’s go.’
38
The conductor, Peter Grenfell, slowly beat the last few bars. It was hard to see how such a quantity of strings playing simultaneously could produce so magically quiet and glassy a sound. He pointed to the harpist, drawing from her one last, funereal statement. The sound grew thinner, thinner, then faded into nothing. Grenfell left his plump, white hands in the air to a count of eight, holding the players’ attention and the audience’s rapt silence – he was a consummate showman – then let his arms fall to his sides. Applause surged up behind his back.