by Patrick Gale
‘Maybe it’s just the beer,’ Jamie suggested, trying not to add stage-fright to humiliation by peering at the cause of their frustration. ‘It can happen to anyone.’
But it had never happened to him and it had never happened to Sam, however much he drank. It happened to Sam again, the next evening. Again he tried to ignore it, setting about pleasuring Jamie with his hand, in a kind of fury. The third time, Jamie stopped him, forcing him simply to lie close and cross in his arms. There was nothing to discuss. However near they lay, his condition had placed them in categories as radically discrete as separate cages. The abrupt refusal of his lover’s body to penetrate his own, or even put itself in a position where it might be called upon to do so, made Jamie feel branded INFECTIOUS in a way no number of medical insurance rejections could have done.
‘I want us to fuck so badly,’ Sam groaned, at last beginning to break free of Jamie’s restraining hug to run his fingers across his chest and down between his legs. He leaned over, encircled the base of Jamie’s dick in finger and thumb then ran his tongue slowly up its shaft. Jamie shuddered, smiling despite himself.
‘Go on,’ Sam whispered. ‘Fuck me. Just this once. Fuck me. I don’t care.’
‘No,’ said Jamie, laughing but adamant.
‘Why not? Just once.’ Sam reached out with his mouth once more and, with a supreme effort, Jamie rolled aside, evading this most persuasive kiss.
‘You know why not.’
Sam flopped back onto the pillows, tugging the duvet up around him with a wounded grunt.
‘Fucking stupid test,’ he said. ‘Poxy thing. I don’t know why you made me take it if this was going to happen.’
‘You wanted to, remember? It was your idea. They’re not even a hundred percent accurate.’
‘I know.’
‘So? Stop fretting. Maybe you’re positive too and it just didn’t show up yet.’
The bitterness in Jamie’s tone silenced them both
The following Saturday morning, Sam confessed that, talking in terms of a mythical girlfriend, he had opened out to a man at work who had experienced similar problems with his wife because he had been terrified of making her pregnant again. They had resorted, apparently, to toys.
‘Toys?’ Jamie asked, picturing pink rabbits and water pistols.
‘Oh, you know. Toys!’ Sam tried to sound as though he used them all the time. ‘At least then we could do something. Let’s go shopping.’
And so, at that time of the weekend when other couples were browsing for new sofabeds or sensible shoes for the children, they had headed into Soho and braved the fluorescent-lit cellar of a marital aid shop. They picked, chuckling, over negligées edged in mock ostrich feather and packets of condoms flavoured with peppermint or tandoori chicken, then went on to garish displays whose very frankness silenced their chatter: vibrators, dildos, butt-plugs, harnesses, douche kits, uniforms, stimulant lubricants, whips and handcuffs. Jamie was amused and, beneath his amusement, guiltily excited.
‘What d’you want, then?’ he murmured, as Sam fingered a huge set of rubber genitalia that purported to be modelled on those of a famous porn star, down to their very veins, ‘realistic’ curly tufts of brown nylon hair and shifting, gelatinous balls. Sam raised the thing to his nose and sniffed its shaft judiciously, like a chef tasting a sauce.
‘I dunno,’ he said and set it back on the shelf. ‘I can’t be doing with all that bondage crap and as for the rest of it, well, it’s all so big.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ Jamie said. ‘Would it make you feel a tad inadequate, or just left out of the party?’ Sam shoved him in the ribs.
‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘And it’s all so …’ He pulled a face. ‘So pink.’
Just then Jamie saw a woman nestling a thick, dildo-shaped package into her basket amongst more innocuous weekly food shopping, and was inspired.
‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a better idea.’
Back out on Berwick Street, Jamie led Sam along the market, past displays of cut-price underwear, naughty nighties, Christmas wrapping and cordless kettles, to a fruit and veg stall whose electric lights made its heaps of produce glow in the drizzle on their lush bed of emerald nylon turf.
‘Yes,’ he said, as the stallholder turned to serve him. ‘I think this’ll do nicely,’ and he picked out a thick, gnarled carrot, some ten inches long. ‘And these.’ He selected two similarly generous courgettes and a wispy-tipped parsnip. ‘Oh, and a pound of those nice fat grapes to eat afterwards. The black ones.’
The stallholder weighed up the grapes, rubbing her mittened hands for warmth as she eyed the scales.
She thinks we’re just mild-mannered vegetarians, Jamie thought.
‘What’s this, then?’ Sam reached down and held up a big green plantain.
‘People chop them up and fry ’em,’ she said. ‘I think.’
‘We’ll take that too, then,’ Sam said, having understood without even catching Jamie’s eye.
‘And my vegetable love did grow,’ Jamie murmured, a hand thrust in his pocket, as they walked back to the tube, surprised to find himself as excited as he used to feel in the minutes before a first assignation.
They fell to experimenting on one another as soon as they got home. Jamie gave top marks to the carrot, Sam, once he had got over a certain bashfulness, voted for the plantain. They spent a happy afternoon window-shopping on the King’s Road like any other Saturday couple, but disgraced themselves in a superior supermarket by loudly scorning the display of outrageously expensive vegetables, intentionally picked during dwarfish immaturity.
That evening, as Sam was pleasuring Jamie with an unexpectedly erotic stick of frilly leaved celery still chilled from the fridge, his impotence left him as suddenly as it had arrived. Catching Jamie’s look of greedy surprise as Sam stopped what he was doing to fumble on the bedside table for the tandoori chicken condoms, he mumbled that he didn’t see why the celery should have all the fun. When he came, for the first time after days of frustrated non-participation, he slipped into a faint like sudden death. In the full minute before Sam’s eyelids flickered open again, Jamie felt hot panic boil up within him.
48
Alison had always hated Christmas. Even more than her birthday, it was a celebration which never lived up to its promise and invariably left her wanting to cry tears of childish disappointment. It contained individual elements which pleased her. She liked its scents of spice, orange peel, warm red wine and pine needles. She liked giant, bank holiday crosswords, log fires, old films on television, snow, before it melted, and even the occasional present. Over the years, however, these elements had become so associated with family arguments, over-eating and the inevitable sense of personal failure that came with the death of each year, that the pleasure they brought came hand in glove with bitter melancholy. In the days of Miriam’s commune, Christmas had always seen The Roundel invaded by strangers, noisy friends of friends. These interlopers had even less respect for a child’s property and private space than the Beards did, so Alison and Jamie would find their beds taken over by queer-smelling adults, their toys broken or borrowed and even their clothing purloined by hostile visiting children. Aware from talk at school of how family Christmases were meant to be, they were forced, if they wanted rituals, to perform them for themselves. They gave each other Christmas stockings. They taught each other Christmas carols. Once they even built a crib in an uncultivated corner of the garden. When an invasion grew too hard to bear, they would escape to their grandfather’s studio where, despite his scorning to celebrate the feast himself, he played them appropriate pieces of Bach and Berlioz on his record player and fed them festive gingerbread and biscuits, bought especially for them from a German delicatessen in Belsize Park.
When the commune disintegrated, its flimsy structure corroded by age, boredom and acrimony, and Miriam had married Francis, she began to take Christmas very seriously indeed, as though in compensation for years of pot luck. She shopped th
oughtfully for presents, which she wrapped following hints from magazines – Financial Times pages offset with pink and silver silk ribbon was a recent coup. Resuscitating the craft skills that had helped stock the commune’s market stall with knick-knacks, she wove her own holly wreath, twined ivy up the bannisters, painted her own cards for her nearest friends and was fiercely purist in her decoration of a large tree. She threw a punch and pies party for all Francis’s friends and clients. She revived Christmas rituals even her children had never dreamed of, such as burning a fantastically adorned yule log out on the drive and insisting on a Germanic exchange of presents on Christmas Eve so that Christmas Day dawned for Alison as a ready-made anti-climax.
Every November, Alison and Jamie indulged in mutinous rumblings about how nice it would be to stay in London for once, and celebrate with friends of one’s choice rather than relatives thrust upon one by Fate. Every year, however, having shown eagerly willing, the friends of their choice slipped guiltily back to their various family reunions, leaving brother and sister with no option but to do the same.
‘It’s only three days,’ one of them would admit, resolve now undermined by fear at the prospect of Christmas alone in London. ‘Four at the most. And she does make a special effort, I suppose. And if Grandpa can stick it, then we certainly can.’
This year, however, their grandfather was to join Heini Liebermann and some friends for a reindeer-free holiday in Marrakech. The frost between him and Jamie had, by unspoken common consent, been kept from Miriam. This was easily done since the two of them saw each other so rarely in any case. Edward claimed that Heini had been inviting him for years, but the implication was that he was leaving the way free for Jamie to enjoy Christmas without his disapproving presence. Assuming that, now there was Sam, Jamie would find a way of staying in London with him, Alison had begun to plot either to spend the holiday fielding festive angst on the helpline or helping dole out pudding and turkey at one of the temporary shelters set up for the army of homeless. Either way, she had figured, guilt would silence Miriam’s protest, and imagined her response. ‘You’re so good, Angel. I really ought to do something like that too but you know how Frank is. Christmas means too much to him. He’s so sentimental. We will miss you, though.’
Perhaps she would have to compromise, weakened by emotional blackmail into running up brownie points by going to the punch and pies party.
Then Jamie scuppered her plans. Meeting her for a drink after one of his late shifts at the record store, in a pub already rendered crustily yule-ish with tinsel and spray-on snow, he announced that he was going home for Christmas because he thought it was time Miriam met Sam.
‘Reading between the lines,’ he said, ‘I think it’s years since he had a proper family Christmas. His dad was usually at sea.’
‘Isn’t he the lucky one!’ she exclaimed. ‘Since when did you think it was such a great institution?’ Then she realised it was since he began to wonder how many Christmases he had left. She could have bitten off her tongue. ‘Have you told her yet?’ she hurried on. ‘She’ll probably be impossible. And what about Francis? Oh God.’
‘We always assume they’ll react badly,’ he said in the soft voice of a group facilitator. ‘The least I can do is let them meet him once, give them the benefit of the doubt.’
She protested but he started to cough, a wet, wheezing cough.
‘Are you taking something for that?’ she asked, wincing as he fumbled for a handkerchief.
‘It’s okay,’ he spluttered, eyes watering, as the spasm subsided. ‘Caught it off someone in the shop. Every other customer is sneezing and snuffling. The smoke in here doesn’t help. It gets to me more than it used to. Let’s clear out of here. Oh. Sorry. You haven’t finished your drink.’
‘Yes I have. Come on.’
As they walked down Shaftesbury Avenue to the tube, she found she was covering for him, stopping repeatedly to gaze with confected interest in shop windows, shielding them both from the fact that he was having trouble keeping up. ‘So you’ll come?’ he asked as they rode down the escalator.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘But maybe you shouldn’t make too much of an issue of it. The three of us can turn up together as if Sam’s just a mutual friend, then you can take it from there.’
‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’
As things turned out, having advocated political cowardice, it was Alison who made their relationship an issue. Sam drove the three of them down in Jamie’s car after she finished work on Christmas Eve. Miriam actually came out with the line, ‘Hello Sam. I’ve heard so much about you,’ then showed them to their rooms. Seeing she was putting her in a double bed and Sam and Jamie in a room with two singles, and being still slightly fuddled from festive-red wine drunk in Cynthia’s office, Alison piped up that it was all one to her and the Boys would be far happier if she swapped with them. Miriam misunderstood, but only for a moment. Then, having said that was fine, perfectly fine, she covered her confusion by bustling off to put the finishing touches to dinner, leaving the three of them on the landing. Jamie gaped like a ten-year-old.
‘Did I just do what I think I did?’ Alison asked, stunned at herself. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Mind?’ he gasped, ‘I’ve been wondering how to do that since I was fifteen and you just came out and did it in seconds.’
‘Maybe she knew already,’ Sam suggested.
‘I’m sure she knew,’ Alison laughed. ‘She just wasn’t thinking when she planned the sleeping arrangements.’
‘Well she looked pretty surprised to me,’ Jamie said and his words seemed borne out by what happened next. Francis came out to greet them as they returned to the hall and he shepherded them away from the kitchen doorway for a fireside drink in the sitting room. When Miriam joined them, some twenty minutes later, her crackling laughter and tense smile could not disguise a fresh redness around her eyes.
It was so rare to see her mother tearful – the last time, she recalled, had been at the shooting of John Lennon – that Alison was filled with tenderness towards her, coloured a little by the excellent whisky sours Francis had mixed them all. She was glad that the Boys were being monopolised by man-talk about journey times and roadworks because it was easier to draw Miriam onto the sofa beside her.
‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.
‘Happy Christmas, Angel. I’m so glad you all made it down.’
‘Me too. Sandy had almost persuaded me to work for Crisis instead.’
‘Those poor people,’ Miriam sighed, sparing a thought for the homeless, then started, by association, appraising Sam, who had stood to warm his back at the fire. He was hardly recognisable as the man Alison had brought in from the street all those months before. Leaning against the richly decorated mantelshelf, wearing black jeans and a new, royal blue cord shirt over a gleaming white tee-shirt, he looked more like a model in a Christmas fashion spread than a builder who had done time. She watched him smile as his glass was refilled.
We have corrupted him, she thought, then saw the idea was as naive as it would be patronising to say they had ‘saved’ him.
‘He seems very nice,’ Miriam said.
‘He is,’ Alison confirmed then looked away, confused by an inappropriate spasm of desire. ‘You’ll see.’
‘He doesn’t seem very … well … you know.’
Alison grinned at her coyness.
‘Neither does Jamie,’ Alison said.
‘No,’ her mother sadly admitted. ‘Neither he does.’
‘It’s okay, Mum. They’re mad about each other.’
‘Good. I’m glad,’ Miriam said breathily, before making a palpable gear change back up into a more convivial mood. ‘What are they finding to talk about?’
‘It was roads. Now it’s work. You know what Francis is like on the dignity of labour. He’s probably saying he doesn’t understand why so many people carry on being unemployed when someone as underqualified as Jamie could drop one job and pick up another so easily.’
/> ‘Being his usual sensitive self.’
Alison pricked up her ears.
‘Do I detect a note of disenchantment?’
‘No. Not really,’ Miriam said, but then she turned back from studying the men and her eyes betrayed her. ‘But you know how he can be.’
‘The thing is, Sam,’ Francis was saying, ‘I can call you that, can’t I? We don’t stand on ceremony here.’
‘Sure,’ Sam nodded his assent.
‘The thing is, my dad was a working man too, a plasterer, and so was my granddad. So I know what real work is. Now these two,’ he indicated Jamie and Alison, ‘they don’t know the meaning of labour. I mean, have you ever come across two such pointless occupations as selling classical records –’
‘CDs,’ Jamie broke in.
‘CDs. Whatever. And publishing highbrow novels which a fraction of the population read. Pointless. They could stop tomorrow and the world would still turn. But building, now that’s a worthwhile trade for a man.’
‘So what do you do, Francis?’ Sam asked, adding the Christian name with a barely audible irony.
‘Well now I’m an accountant, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘But I used to work for my dad, in the holidays, even when I was a nipper. I replastered the guest bathrooms here myself actually.’
A kitchen timer went off in Miriam’s pocket, breaking up the conversation to call them all to the dining room for a rich spread of duck soup, roast gammon and profiteroles. Crossing the hall, Alison snatched a moment with Sam and Jamie.
‘She fancies him,’ she told Jamie. ‘I can tell.’ Jamie cast his eyes to heaven. He was slightly drunk.
‘I’ll protect you,’ he told Sam.
‘And you’re getting on well with Francis,’ she added. ‘No-one usually knows what to say to him.’
‘He’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘Quite funny really. Well … I thought I ought to make an effort, you know?’ He paused as Francis bustled past them with a bottle of claret he had left by the fire to take off its chill.