The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  As Sam later tried to explain to Alison, an abiding problem of adult life was the embarrassment of choice. Able to do this, that or the other, one could rarely make a decision without the suspicion that one of the rejected choices might have proved happier.

  ‘Then something narrows the choices,’ he said. ‘Or takes them away altogether, and suddenly it’s all so simple. As simple as when you were a kid.’

  With hindsight he liked to feel that his decision had been arrived at with an almost heroic sureness of purpose. In fact the process was longer and messier. There were days of arguing when they were together, worrying when they were apart and one purgatorial evening when Jamie locked him out and refused to answer the telephone. He spent the night wandering smugly curtained Chelsea streets and failing to sleep on benches and doorsteps, unable to understand Jamie’s total rejection of him. After this dark night of the soul, Sam caught Jamie unawares in the thin morning light, returning from the newsagents with milk and orange juice. They confronted one another on the pavement, haggard with care and sleeplessness.

  ‘She told you, didn’t she?’ Sam said, catching him by the shoulder. ‘She fucking told you what I did and that’s why you don’t want me around any more.’

  ‘Alison? She’s told me nothing.’

  Jamie watched, bewildered, as Sam summoned up the words.

  ‘I did time, all right? Two years.’

  Jamie’s mind reeled.

  ‘Prison?’ he asked, trying to take the information in.

  ‘Yes. I did time,’ Sam repeated. ‘Not long.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘GBH. There was no excuse. No reason. I was drunk.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jamie shifted his weight from one foot to another, confused by this unexpected intelligence and, even more, by how unimportant it had become. ‘That doesn’t matter, Sam,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s not why I can’t have you –’

  But Sam cut in, pushing him hard on the chest with the flat of a hand in his frustration.

  ‘Why does this have to be so fucking hard to say,’ he groaned, turning aside and glowering at a woman passing with a baby-buggy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need you,’ Sam insisted, looking back at him. ‘Ask me to walk away now and you might as well expect me to chop off my own feet. I – I just don’t have a choice.’

  Loath as ever not to have the last word, Jamie drew breath to speak, then, as if frightened he might be swept off on another crying jag, shut his mouth again and fumblingly pulled Sam to him and held on hard.

  44

  The helpline was currently squeezed into a grim ‘suite’ of three tiny rooms in an office block left redundant and virtually unlettable by the onward sweep of new technology. The small organisation was constantly in danger of being moved on. It lurched from one ad-hoc lease and funding crisis to another, despite the desperate public need which the hours of meticulously logged calls would have made baldly apparent to any junior health minister or minor royal who cared to enquire. Though still officially existing to help with any enquiries of a sexual nature, from girls worried they were pregnant to cheating husbands in need of a discreet clap clinic, its work was increasingly AIDS-based. An already derisory government grant had just been halved following the production of highly suspect figures which, it was claimed, proved that any danger of an epidemic among respectable, white heterosexuals had been forestalled. The fact that most homosexuals, drug users, sex workers and African immigrants paid taxes too was, as usual, conveniently ignored. The helpline badly needed space so that London callers could hang up the telephone and come to be counselled face to face, but any such expansion would involve health and safety regulations and their consequent, impossible cost. In one room there were telephones, just five of them, ranged on a big trestle table along with a jumble of medical reference books, drug guides and directories of useful addresses and telephone numbers. The numbers most often passed on to callers were chalked on a blackboard under headings: Doctors, Hospitals, Law, Housing, Drugs. Volunteers had scribbled some inevitable graffiti up there too, the most enduring of which was a plaintive, ‘Whatever happened to herpes?’ The second room, wittily labelled RECOVERY in flowery writing with rabbits and bluebirds drawn around it, housed two old council-issue sofas, a coffee machine, an assortment of mugs and a bowl of goldfish Sandy had donated because she said pets were soothing and an office cat impractical.

  Sandy was the volunteer coordinator, the fundraiser, the general secretary. Sandy was the helpline.

  ‘I started it when both my flatmates died,’ she used to joke. ‘So I’d be sure of someone to talk to in the evenings.’

  She and Alison were drinking coffee on the sofas, preparing to take over the telephones once the previous shift finished. Sandy was an ex-solicitor, an obsessive tennis fan who preferred talk to reading, and television to either. At first it had seemed that the two of them had nothing in common but free evenings and a need to help. Then a chance comment from a third party revealed that Sandy’s real name was Harmony Rainbow and that she too was the disenchanted daughter of a commune – they needed no further common ground. Like Alison, Sandy had effected a reactionary escape into a professional career but she had found the constraints impossible and had rebelled in another direction, shaving her head, piercing her nose and becoming a full-time worker in the twilight world of charitably funded switchboards and support networks that was increasingly mopping up the messes the National Health Service and Social Services were forced to leave behind. She was lesbian with a cheerful frankness that left one no room for awkwardness or disapproval and she delighted in completing Alison’s sexual education where Jamie’s lunchtime confessionals had left off. She never tired of hearing Alison’s more or less polite refusals to sleep with her and continued to make regular, cajoling proposals despite, or perhaps because of, an enviable erotic life.

  ‘You’ll never know until you’ve tried,’ she’d say.

  ‘I know, I know, and women do it better, but –’

  ‘It could be just what your inexplicably unappreciated body has been waiting for.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So why not?’

  ‘Sandy. I’m straight,’ Alison would laugh at last. ‘Totally. As a die. Sometimes people know, you know.’

  Alison was flattered at the continuing attention, however, which had become such a cement in their odd, largely nocturnal friendship, and would miss it if it suddenly stopped. She enjoyed asking for details of Sandy’s latest conquests with all the critical asperity of a discarded mistress. She also caught herself wondering if one could be so sure. Time and again she thought of Sam who, despite his commitment to her brother, seemed somehow to defy labelling. She had seen the way he gave men and women equal, cool appraisal. Once or twice, now that he was safely answered for, she had been sure she had caught him appraising her.

  This evening Sandy was trying again.

  ‘Oh go on. You know you’d enjoy it once you relaxed.’

  ‘Are you that patient? Sandy, it isn’t something you can just persuade people into, you know. I can’t will my skin to change colour or my fingers to grow.’

  ‘Yes but …’ Sandy paused, glancing through the window in the door to where the others were still taking calls. ‘Don’t you ever wonder why you have all the free time to do things like this?’

  ‘Because I make it.’

  ‘Ah but –’

  ‘Sandy please don’t tell me that my having free evenings and no boyfriend means I’m a repressed lesbian; it’s almost offensive.’

  ‘But you should have a sex life.’

  ‘Why? You sound like my grandfather now.’

  ‘And he should know! You’re an attractive woman.’

  ‘So you’re always saying, and that’s very nice and can’t I just enjoy being attractive without having someone paw my tender parts?’

  ‘Now you are sounding repressed.’

  ‘Oh please!’ Alison scoffed, glancing at her watch and getting up f
rom her tattered sofa to begin work.

  ‘You seem to be doing all your loving vicariously,’ Sandy pursued, calling over her shoulder as she gave the coffee mugs a quick rinse in their cubby hole of a washroom. ‘You should listen to yourself. I asked you how you were a moment ago and instead of telling me about you, you went on about how nice it was that Sam had finally taken the plunge and moved in with Jamie, but how worried you were that Jamie had thrown in his job and you were sure he hadn’t given you the real reason. Face it, Ali, you’re becoming a fag hag.’

  ‘I hate that expression. Anyway, he’s my brother,’ Alison said with a shrug. ‘So’s Sam, in a way. I care about them.’

  ‘Yes, but it was you I asked after, not the plot of a soap opera. When does your life get to begin?’

  Alison held open the door to the office.

  ‘Enough, all right?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Sandy grinned. ‘Am I coming on too strong, Angel?’

  ‘Just a little. And don’t call me that.’

  She gave Sandy a playful smack on the stomach with the back of her hand and Sandy pretended to be winded. They pulled up chairs at the table alongside the other four volunteers, who cast grateful glances their way as they talked to their callers.

  ‘Want me to stay on?’ one man asked. ‘There are just the two of you and things are pretty busy because of that documentary earlier.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ said Sandy. She was strict about allowing no-one to work more than three hours in a row, however hectic things were. ‘Just unplug that phone would you, like a love? I can’t think straight when they’re all jangling in my ears –’

  She broke off to answer the telephone beside her. The others left, chattering with relief, heading for an unwinding drink at the rough Irish pub across the way. Alison carefully unplugged the third telephone, so that all the calls were now being channelled furiously into just two. She took a deep breath, pulled over a pencil, pad and log book then picked up the receiver.

  For the rest of the evening she received the usual dose of hard, sex-related reality in the shape of patient conversations with an HIV-positive mother of three on income support, and a teenager thrown out of home by a father who seemed to think his sexuality would somehow infect the household plumbing. She took calls about needle-sharing facilities, from the profoundly worried well, from people who needed immediate hospitalisation, and one from an incredibly abusive Christian who sounded as though, in Sandy’s books, she was having far too many quiet nights in. As always, by the time she turned the answering machine back on and bodily prised the receiver from Sandy’s compulsive grip, sex had come again to seem an arena of bloody war and her single state, an unjustly lucky neutral zone.

  45

  Inspired by a morning of unheralded autumn sunshine, prompted, too, by the memory that Alison had begged for contributions to a big jumble sale in aid of the helpline, Jamie and Sam purged the flat. To mark the end of Jamie’s life as an office animal, ‘and to celebrate the beginning of the rest of it’ as he put it, they went through cupboards and drawers. Jamie began by hurling all his striped cotton office shirts into a heap in the middle of the floor and after them, with only a moment’s hesitation, his pinstriped suit. Sam tossed several books on reinsurance and economics after it, a tax guide, a bouquet of silk ties, which he pronounced ‘poncey’ and, ignoring Jamie’s protests, the matt black calculator. Then the purge expanded into a total clear-out, filling bags and boxes with records, books, CDs, jerseys, mugs, a joke tea pot, a sickly African violet, three bottles of untouched cologne, assorted pornography, a hair dryer, a rolodex whose cards Jamie had never finished filling with addresses, a travel iron, an electronic phrasebook and an asparagus steamer. One by one they had snatched objects from shelves and out of corners, held them up to one another and, with Jamie laughing at their daring, condemned them before consigning them to oblivion. Jamie wondered if Sam felt he was expunging traces of predecessors. He stopped for a moment or two, watching Sam throw open a cupboard door revealing, with a kind of relish, another hoard of redundant items. It struck him that he had never had a boyfriend before, that his first would probably prove his last, and that some might find this sad.

  ‘What?’ Sam asked, catching him staring.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You don’t use telephone directories. Nobody does. Why do you keep them?’

  ‘Security?’ Jamie suggested, heaving up the first bag of things for the jumble sale to carry out to the car. Half-way downstairs a ripple of self-pity acute as a dizzy spell threatened to make him break down and cry, and he had to lean against the staircase wall to wait for it to pass.

  He returned from the car to find Sam had cleared the mantelshelf of its clutter of postcards, announcements and invitations and put Sally’s idol there instead. Jamie stopped in the doorway, looking at how the squat goddess now seemed to preside over the newly purified room. Sam paused in the act of tossing the cards one by one into the kitchen bin, briefly following Jamie’s gaze.

  ‘She looks better there,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jamie agreed. ‘It’s more like her place now.’

  ‘Jesus! Do you know him?’ Sam exclaimed. Jamie looked over and found him holding out the gilt-edged invitation to Nick Godfreys’s engagement ball.

  ‘Of course,’ he muttered darkly. ‘He was the one that sacked me, wasn’t he? Bin it.’

  ‘No.’ Sam fingered the piece of card. ‘When you told me I never realised he was the Godfreys they’re always writing about in the papers.’

  ‘Bin it, Sam. All that’s over and done with now.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Sam was incredulous.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Sam laughed.

  ‘I want to go.’

  ‘You’re not invited, berk. Anyway, he expected me to take a woman; the bastard actually said so. In front of everybody. I wouldn’t be seen dead there. Even with both Liz Taylor and Myra Toye on my arms. Bin it.’ He tried to take the card but Sam held it out of reach, smiling mischievously.

  ‘Look,’ he said, swinging away from Jamie’s clutching hands. ‘It says James Pepper and Friend. I’m your Friend. Let’s go.’

  ‘Now you’re kidding.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  Once again Jamie lunged after the offensive card but Sam slipped it down inside his tee-shirt and grinned. Jamie had noticed he was always more playful at weekends, less remorselessly macho when freed from the dead weight of exhaustion and his workmates’ potential ridicule. Out on the streets he became more guarded again, as though on the watch for people who might recognise him. He thrust a hand up inside Sam’s shirt for the card but was tugged down onto the sofa instead. Sam gave him a brusque, toothpasty kiss.

  ‘I do love you,’ Jamie said, the statement still sufficiently unfamiliar on his lips to give him a piquant sense of risk.

  ‘But I love you more,’ Sam said simply, then held up the card to examine it again. ‘I’ve never been to a posh git do before. I don’t know any famous people. It’d be a laugh.’

  ‘It’d be hell in a basket.’

  ‘No it wouldn’t.’ Sam ruffled the hair at the nape of Jamie’s neck with the stiff card, tickling him. ‘Go on,’ he murmured. ‘You can hire me a suit. After all. Think of all those lovely people you didn’t say a proper goodbye to.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘Are you ashamed of me?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘But I haven’t met any of your friends.’

  ‘I don’t have any friends.’

  ‘What about all those names and addresses we just threw out?’

  ‘Exactly. We threw them out. If they were proper friends, I’d have kept them. I mean, I do know people. I could pick up the phone and get us asked out to dinner with a load of people but, well, I don’t see the point when I can be with you.’

  ‘You mean like instead?’

  ‘Yes. No. Listen. Would you really like to go?’

  Sam considered the invit
ation, sensing a serious proposition.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said at last, smiling to himself. ‘Yeah.’

  So they took Jamie’s dinner suit to the dry cleaners and hired a second, longer-legged one for Sam. Unexpectedly he didn’t look like a bouncer in it, but like some gaunt, dissident poet instead.

  Sam drove them out towards Westmarket. Jamie had only recently discovered that Sam, though earless, had a driving licence and enjoyed indulging him at the wheel. Sam drove much as he made love; with an almost indignant concentration on the matter in hand. He manoeuvred with fast assurance and delighted in the car’s speedy acceleration which allowed him to pull away from traffic lights before anyone else. When Jamie called him a ‘Boy Racer’ he merely grinned, taking the mockery as acknowledgement of something of which he was proud. He changed gear by making rapid swipes at the gear stick with the flat of his hand and soon became quite rapt in the business of driving. Conversations died on his lips as he concentrated on a piece of risky overtaking or enjoyed a sweep of steady acceleration up a hill. Jamie lay back in the passenger seat, sucking peppermints, discreetly watching the aggressive flicking of Sam’s eyes across the road before them, and nursing a comforting hard-on. Occasionally Sam would swear at another driver under his breath and Jamie would smile to himself.

  Nick Godfrey’s house perched like a creamy wedding cake in a few acres of tidy parkland. There were big gates with octagonal lodges, a lake, old cedar trees, clean and fluffy sheep and a watchful family of horses. Some crucial element seemed to be missing, however, so the scene felt oddly two-dimensional, even temporary, like an elaborate film set. After showing their invitation to the security guards at a gatehouse, who handed it back with a yellow card to be placed inside the windscreen, Sam drove them through the park and Jamie found himself picturing the gigantic props and weights that held such extravagant scenery in position.

  ‘Those sheep are probably rented for the evening,’ he laughed.