by David Rees
1976 — a more liberal time for gay men and women than the mid-eighties. That doesn’t mean an easy ride, however, for the central characters of The Colour Of His Hair, Mark, aged eighteen, and Donald, aged seventeen, who fall in love and begin a relationship. When their so-called friends at school find out what is going on, the persecution begins. Donald nearly breaks down under the strain, despite help from an unexpected quarter — his English teacher, who is also gay. But the relationship survives into early adulthood, and ten years on it undergoes some surprising twists and turns in less liberal, AIDS-conscious 1986. The Colour Of His Hair is a return by David Rees to a novel about gay teenagers with whom, according to most critics, he deals more sympathetically and with more insight and understanding than any living novelist.
After Edmund White, David Rees is probably the best-known living gay writer.
— The Pink Triangle
Anyone who has read his best-selling novel, The Milkman’s On His Way, will be aware of his skill in presenting the traumas of adolescent awakening into gay life… He writes with great beauty and power.
— Campaign
Cover design : Rupert Kirby
Price
U,K. U.S.A
£4.50 $8.50
ISBN 1 870188 10 1
THE COLOUR OF HIS HAIR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
‘Stories never really end,’ Mary Norton said in The Borrowers Aloft. ‘They can go on and on and on — and on: it is just that at some point or another the teller ceases to tell them.’ The Colour of His Hair is not the last book I shall write, but it is the last novel. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
THE COLOUR OF HIS HAIR
David Rees
THIRD HOUSE (PUBLISHERS)
First published in 1989 by Third House (Publishers)
69, Regent Street, Exeter, EX2 9EG, England
Copyright © David Rees 1989
ISBN 1 870188 10 1
Typeset by Rapid Communications Ltd, London WC1X 9NW
Printed by Billing & Sons, Ltd, Worcester
Distributed in the United Kingdom and in Western Europe by
Turnaround Distribution Co-op Ltd, 27, Horsell Road, London, N51XL
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and
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Distributed in Australia by Wild & Woolley Pty Ltd,
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Distributed in New Zealand by Benton Ross (Publishers) Ltd,
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Cover photograph: Ian David Baker
All rights reserved
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it
— Shakespeare, Hamlet
For Jim Palmer
Table of Contents
PART ONE 1976
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
PART TWO 1986
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
PART ONE
1976
ONE
‘Hey, this is a bit unusual, isn’t it?’
My brother Donald grinned. ‘I just thought I needed the exercise,’ he said. There was a hint of embarrassment in his face.
I was about to take our dog, Sally, for a walk: Donald had invited himself to come along too. He hadn’t done this for years, not since he was eleven or twelve. Once upon a time he had liked to think Sally was his dog, but when he became a teenager he lost interest. He had other concerns: football, and his gang of friends. It wasn’t only the dog he lost interest in; he didn’t have much time now for me. Though I could be wrong about that: it could be my fault, busy with ‘O’ levels, then ‘A’ levels and my boyfriend, Brian; I could be the one responsible for the distance. Donald was seventeen, a year younger than me; tall, lanky, attractive: dark hair, and green eyes that could look at you very disconcertingly if he suspected you weren’t telling the truth. In the mornings now, before he went to school, he shaved. He was growing up.
It was a wintry February day, with the kind of chill that seems to get to your bones. Fog shrouded the tops of the trees in the park; damp dripped from twigs. Wallflowers and forget-me-nots the Council had planted were still withered from recent frosts, but one brave specimen, some sort of daisy, was in full bloom: a bunch of white petals. We chased the dog to keep warm, threw sticks for her. Donald had brought a football with him, and we belted it back and forth to each other; just like old times when we were both young kids. The dog barked her head off; we shouted, screamed, laughed, ran everywhere, as if we really were young kids. What created this happy mood I don’t know, but I liked it.
It didn’t last long, however. Donald, having retrieved the football from a dump of forsythia bushes where I’d kicked it, put it under his arm and said, ‘Helen, I have to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
‘I’m in love.’
‘Oh?’ I stared at him. I had never thought of Donald being in love before, but, well, it would obviously happen sooner or later; as I said, he was growing up. ‘Who is she?’
I asked.
‘It isn’t a she.’ I must have looked rather blank, for he added, loudly and slowly, as if I was an idiot, ‘He is a boy. Mark Sewell.’
Mark Sewell was in my ‘A’ level English group. He was eighteen ― born the week before me ― blond, blue-eyed, and very handsome. He could have been a brilliant games player if he had ever bothered, and he was the last person on earth you would imagine to be a pouf, even though ― now I came to think of it ― he never seemed to have girlfriends. Then my brother, the school’s first eleven centre forward, was also the last person on earth you would imagine…
It began to dawn on me what Donald was saying. I was shocked. Stunned. Then I said to myself: I just don’t believe it. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ I asked.
‘No, Helen. It isn’t.’ He sat down on a nearby bench, hands in pockets, legs crossed; a defiant but somehow scared look on his face. ‘I’ve never been more serious in my life,’ he said. We gazed at each other in silence for some moments. Our breath steamed. The dog, annoyed that her stick-chasing fun had stopped, came leaping over to us, her eyes quizzical; she growled, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort and lay on the path, sighing heavily.
‘I’m sorry for you,’ I said.
‘I’m not sorry for myself,’ he answered. ‘So why should you be?’
‘You had better explain it all.’ I sat down beside him. ‘In words of one syllable. It isn’t a subject in which I’m well versed.’
‘I’m … oh, I don’t know that I can explain anything! Look … I love him. Just as you do Brian, or at least as I imagine you do Brian…’
‘What does Mark think about it?’
‘He loves me too. That’s why I said I’m not sorry for myself … and that you shouldn’t be.’
I whistled in surprise. It accounted for the lack of girlfriends, but I was still… shaken rigid. Plenty of girls I knew would be disappointed if they heard this! Not that they would. Donald was sure to make me swear I’d keep this information to myself. ‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘I mean … why? And how? How do you know? And why you? And … what do you do together?’
‘Helen! Really! Have I ever asked what you do with Brian?’
I hadn’t meant that. I’d meant what interests did they share; did they listen to symphonies on Radi
o Three or go to cricket matches. I thought: I don’t know either of these people ― my own brother, and a boy I’ve been in the same class with for seven years. Every certainty I’d felt about anything was suddenly reduced to no more than an assumption. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked.
‘Because … because nobody else knows. You have to talk to someone about the most significant thing that has ever happened to you! I’ve thought, sometimes, it’s O.K. for Helen! When Joanna or Pat says, “Did you and Bri have a good time last night?” you can tell them! You can compare notes about your boyfriends, and so on.
I could hardly say to Gary or Jake or Andy or any of the other kids in the football team that when Mark was kissing me last night he said, “I love you.” You can well imagine what they’d think! Helen … are you shocked?’
My brain was racing. For a few minutes I looked at my breath rise in the raw February air, then I said, ‘Am I shocked? Yes. Not by the fact. I mean, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a boy or a girl… so long as the people concerned are happy. But shocked ― in the sense of being amazed ― that it’s you, Why you?’
‘Perhaps you’re asking yourself will I be like this all my life,’ Donald said. ‘Grow up never to get married, not to have children.’
I was silent again, thinking. ‘I’m sorry you have to lead such a hidden existence,’ I said.
‘Yes. I am too. I can’t bring him home and say, “Mum … Dad… I want you to meet my boyfriend.” And that’s a shame, Helen. Depressing. Disheartening.’
‘Mum would freak out!’
‘Yes.’
‘As for Dad…’
‘He’d probably want to have me psychoanalysed. Or locked up.’
‘I don’t think locked up,’ I said. ‘But … to put it mildly … he wouldn’t be pleased. Probably go back on the bottle.’ Dad, when we were younger, had been an alcoholic. It was always touch and go as to whether he’d start drinking again. ‘Isn’t it illegal, if you … do anything? Aren’t you under age, both of you?’
‘I could be prosecuted. Fined. Even put into care. As for you and Brian, you’re heterosexual and over sixteen, so it’s O.K. Doesn’t seem right, does it! Well, I don’t reckon it’s right.’
‘How long have you been … like this?’
‘Years! Ever since I first knew about sex. When I was … twelve.’ I must have looked even more astonished, for he said, ‘I’m not unique! There are others; Mark knows a few. Ted Viner, maybe.’
I laughed. That’s just a story!’
‘How can you be certain of that?’
‘I can’t.’ Ted Viner taught us English. He was thirty-eight years old and single, and because he had never got married the kids at school often joked that he must be queer. He was a good teacher. He drove his pupils hard; it was impossible to get away with scrimped, badly done work in his lessons, and his enthusiasm for his subject was infectious: it was Ted who had made me feel I’d like to study English literature at a university. I hadn’t ever stopped to consider, seriously, why he was unmarried, but I did now. Perhaps the stories were true.
‘Most of the kids think Ted is O.K.,’ Donald said. ‘He’s a nice enough geezer, doesn’t shout and yell all the time. I like English, just as you do … Mark says Ted knows about him and me, that he’s guessed.’
At this point the dog decided she had had enough of lying down on a path, and that we had had enough of sitting on a bench. She began to bark so much we could scarcely hear ourselves speak. Donald stood up and threw a stick for her. ‘Don’t repeat this conversation to anyone,’ he said. ‘Not even to Brian. On second thoughts, especially not to Brian.’
‘Why especially not?’
‘He might get very funny with Mark.’
‘I shouldn’t think so for a minute! But of course I’ll keep your secret.’
I must have looked reluctant, however, for Donald said, ‘Well… if you have to tell him, then you have to… but I’d prefer you didn’t.’
We went home. I was surprised by how ordinary everything seemed, how exactly the same as when we had walked in this direction an hour previously; after Donald’s earth-shattering confessions it should all, I felt, look different. The fog in the trees that made branches wraith-like and faint, the frost-bitten flowers, the damp; then, outside the park, the familiar bits of our West Croydon scenery ― the shop with the peculiar name, Tammy’s Tropicals (source of many a joke, that), the gap in a terrace where two men for over a year had been trying to build a house, the wall on which somebody had mis-spelled in spray paint: VOTE CONSERERIVE. And my brother, I said to myself, my little brother Donny, whom I remember at the age of five howling because he’d cut his leg, who looked quite sweet as a seven-year-old in shorts, who even now lived, I’d imagined, only for Wednesdays and Saturdays when he could kick footballs, was having an affair with someone of his own sex! Mark! Did they plan a future together, as Brian and I sometimes did? Talk of kitchens and curtains and wedding rings as I did with my friend Joanna? It was weird, fantastic, grotesque!
I longed to tell Brian. He might be able to give it shape and sense. But I couldn’t tell Brian; I’d promised Donald not to.
‘Helen, what is the matter?’ Ted Viner asked.
‘Nothing, sir.’ I blushed, and stared hard at my copy of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
‘You haven’t been paying attention the whole morning!’
It was true; I hadn’t. I’d been watching Mark across the gangway from me when he was following the Chaucer in his text-book or looking out of the window, or twiddling with a strand of his long fair hair or doodling on a bit of paper; and I listened intently when Ted asked him to translate. Donald hadn’t said so, but he’d implied it: they’d had sex. This guy was mucking about with my kid brother! That was one way of putting it, and it sounded just as improbable as saying ‘Mark and Donald are lovers.’ What was he like, this Mark, this boy I’d known since he was a pale-skinned, pale-haired eleven-year-old, now eighteen and nearly a man? What did he think, feel, believe in? What sort of parents did he have? Did Donald find his interests and hobbies absorbing?
Alison Reilly hadn’t done her homework properly, and Ted was making her feel as withered as the flowers I’d seen yesterday in the park. Poor Alison! Wayne Stephens’s fault: he took up too much of her time. As Ted’s attention was so involved with Alison, Mark thought it an opportune moment to write me a surreptitious letter. It landed on my desk as poor Alison came to the brink of tears. Block capitals: WILL YOU STOP STARING AT ME? ITS GETTING ON MY NERVES. Underneath this message was a skull and crossbones.
I screwed it up and hurled it at the wastepaper basket, breathed heavily, and began to concentrate on Chaucer’s story of the hen and the cockerel.
I admired Donald. His behaviour, for a boy of seventeen who was attracted to his own sex, was, I guess, unusual; he had not freaked out, or refused to admit to it because Gary and Jake and Andy might discover what he was, or pretended to himself that it could be a phase he’d shrug off like an illness in a few weeks’ time.
‘Mark was a great help,’ he said, when I asked him about this. ‘I think … if I hadn’t met him, I’d be in a bit of a mess right now.’
‘Does he like girls? I mean as friends.’ I was wondering about the note he had written to me.
‘Sure he does. Why not?’
I was learning too. From my young brother, of all people! If I’d thought at all about homosexuality, I’d said to myself girls like that gave me the creeps because they might fancy me and I couldn’t cope with it; and as for the boys, well, it was a pity: it was so many fewer boys for the girls to get interested in. I hadn’t ever considered the problems of being gay, the difficulty of telling oneself it was just as good and valid as it was to be attracted to the opposite sex. ‘Does Mark know other gay people?’ I asked.
‘I thought I said that. Yes. Some. He took me to a pub … I didn’t like it. I don’t think I’m ready, I suppose. I mean, I feel a bit bothered going into a pub any
way because I’m only seventeen; what if the landlord insists on knowing how old I am and chucks me out? It hasn’t ever happened, but that, and a crowd of men who … looking at me … I mean, I said to myself, what do they want from me?’
‘Did they want anything?’
‘I don’t know. I just felt uneasy, so I clung to Mark.’ He laughed. ‘That was the good bit! A place with other people where we could hold hands and it didn’t matter. It was nice!’
Mum called up from the kitchen: ‘Dinner’s on the table!’ It was Sunday lunch-time, and we were in Donald’s bedroom, the attic of the house. I was always rather jealous of Donald having the attic; it had two windows, sloping ceilings, and better views than I had from my ordinary old bedroom. His ownership of the attic had turned it into a typical teenage boy’s room ― pictures of rock stars and sportsmen on the walls, a mobile made of racing bikes, and discarded games kit littering the floor ― Mum was always complaining about this. I had to move a tennis racket, a pair of sneakers and two muddy shirts before I could sit down that morning. But there were also signs of interests more typically Donald than just an average teenage boy, though nothing anyone would consider particularly odd these days: CND posters, a cartoon of ex-President Nixon that he was using as a dart-board, a placard that announced: I AM A BORN-AGAIN ATHEIST. But there was something odd, I realised. No pin-ups ― no scantily dressed girls. And placed among the football photos so discreetly that Mum wouldn’t even see it when she was doing the dusting was someone I recognized. Mark.
Roast lamb and mint sauce, roast potatoes, sprouts and carrots. Dad carving the joint. A scene so normal, so unchanging throughout the eighteen years of my life that I blinked, astonished. Donald had so upset my belief in the normal that I didn’t think Dad, cutting a slice of lamb and saying to me, ‘Enough, Helen? Plenty more here if you want it,’ was quite real.