by David Rees
The morning before my last exam, Mark and I saw Ted in conversation with Tom. ‘I’d like a word with you two in private,’ Ted said to us.
‘The trouble with Helen,’ Tom said, ‘is she won’t make a decision. Should it be this one, or should it be Brian?’ (He had, curiously, decided that there was no truth in the stories about Mark and Donald: they couldn’t be gay because they weren’t effeminate.) ‘She needs marriage guidance counselling.’
I laughed: it was said without rancour.
‘Interesting news,’ Ted said, when Tom had gone. ‘We’ve caught the graffiti specialist. In the act, it would seem.’
‘Who?’ we both asked, simultaneously.
‘Ian Ross. Fourth year. What do you know about him?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Ross. Ross,’ Mark said. ‘Did he have a brother in our year who left school… oh … ages ago?’
‘Yes. Colin Ross. When he was fourteen, Colin was in trouble with the police for soliciting men in public toilets. Bad background: mother committed suicide; father’s a long-distance lorry-driver who’s frequently away from home ― sometimes he left the two kids to fend for themselves for days on end. When the police picked Colin up the social services looked into the matter, and the result was both boys were put into care.’
‘But… what’s that got to do with painting obscenities on the school wall?’ Mark asked. ‘Why does the younger brother have it in for Donald and me? I don’t know him! Don’t even know what he looks like! And I’m sure Donald doesn’t either.’
‘Some obscure revenge because the police caught Colin?’ Ted suggested. ‘I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatrist. The soliciting, it was said at the time, was because the boys needed the money. The father would go off, apparently, without giving them enough to buy food. Though Colin might have said that, of course, to get sympathy.’
‘How did you catch Ian?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t. It was Miss Evans. She came into school three quarters of an hour earlier than usual; some work she had to correct before first period ― she’d forgotten to take the books home with her yesterday evening. She went to her room, and there he was, drawing on the board. Nothing obscene this time, though the usual heart with the drops of blood and the arrow. And your name, Mark, and Donald’s. The message was: “I would like to wish all my readers a happy summer holiday.” ‘
‘What did she do?’
‘She spotted at once that the writing was identical with that of whoever had painted the words on the wall. Ian, when he saw her, immediately tried to rub out the evidence, but she grabbed hold of him, twisted the rubber out of his hand and threw it across the room, then quite literally frog-marched him out into the corridor. She locked the door behind her ―she wanted the Headmaster to see the blackboard, she said, as proof it was done by the same person ― and propelled Ian up to the office, his left arm still in a half-nelson.’
‘Miss Evans did all that?’ I said, amazed.
‘Very difficult to imagine,’ Mark said.
Ted grinned. ‘She really is not the little mouse you all seem to think she is! In fact she’s a very tough old bird. An ex-Cambridge hockey blue, and she once thumped a burglar unconscious with a poker. Her favourite Biblical quotation is “And Jesus said, I come not to bring peace but a sword.’” He laughed. ‘You always stereotype your teachers! You imagine that in private life we’re the same as we are in the classroom. You’d be astonished at the extent to which we’re not!’
‘What will happen to Ian?’
‘He isn’t going to be punished in the usual way, of course ― an hour’s detention and told not to do it again would hardly be appropriate! The social services and the education office have been informed, and … we wait and see. Oh … I expect they’ll put him in a special school and have him psychoanalysed. Much good that will do!’
‘Does Donald know?’ Mark asked.
‘Yes. I was teaching him first thing this afternoon.’
‘How did he react?’
‘He went pale and said just three words; “I’ll kill him!” Mark … he obviously won’t, but… please make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.’ He paused, scratched his neck, and blew his nose. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘ think that’s it. Term ends on Friday … have a good time this summer and keep in touch. Make sure Donald in particular enjoys himself …he needs to.’
‘I will,’ Mark said. ‘Don’t worry.’
One of the good times that summer was returning to the beach we had visited that Saturday months ago; on this occasion Brian came with us. The weather was hot, almost a record for August, the experts said. The sea was crowded with swimmers, and we soon joined them. It was difficult to keep out of it for long, though I declined Mark’s invitation to go with him, Donald, and Brian for a fifth swim; I wasn’t a mermaid, I said. I sat on a rock and enjoyed myself just watching, though the waves weren’t as rough, white and glittering as on that previous afternoon. When he emerged from the water, Mark decided to sunbathe. Donald did not potter about collecting stones. He wasn’t so restless now: he lay down beside Mark and relaxed. The discovery of who had written on the blackboards and painted on the wall had lifted some of his depression; calmed him. He hadn’t killed Ian Ross, of course, nor attempted to; he did, however, after Ted had told him, hurry off to find Ian: ‘I just wanted to see what he looked like,’ he said to me. ‘I wanted to fix his face in my memory. It’s a rather ordinary face, not particularly evil. Scared rabbity eyes, and a weak mouth. Do you know … I actually felt sorry for him!’
Brian didn’t feel sorry for him. ‘Little bastard deserves all he gets.’ was his comment. He stayed on the sand with Mark and Donald for a while, then strolled over to my rock, put his arm round me, and stared at the sea. He said: ‘You can feel a bit left out when you’re with those two.’
‘I’m here.’
‘You looked so engrossed I didn’t think you wanted company.’
‘Ah! Poor Brian!’ I teased, and made a little bit more room for him on the rock. ‘It’s a funny old world, isn’t it!’
‘Yes. Odder than I’d thought. But why do you say that now?’
‘I don’t know. I was wondering how long everything lasts. Whether you and I will be together longer than Mark and Donald.’
He looked disconcerted. ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of that,’ he said.
‘The sea makes me think odd things. It’s all flux, never still for a moment.’
‘We’ll last if we want to last.’
‘Yes … and I’m sure they will.’
These events happened two years ago. Jason Smith and I went out to dinner with Ted recently, and in the course of the conversation I told them I had ambitions to be a writer. ‘You’ve got a subject,’ Ted said, ‘and the characters. Also the plot, and something important that needs saying.’ Since then he’s been phoning me, badgering me to get on with it, just as if I was still in the sixth form. I guess teachers never stop teaching.
Mark got excellent ‘A’ level grades, and went to the University of Sussex to read for a degree in English. Donald was determined to follow him there, and he did so, a year later. He’s studying History. They share a fat in Brighton, and are about as happily married as any two people I know. Donald has taken up football again, and Mark complains about dirty games kit on their bedroom floor almost as much as Mum did. Things turned out differently for me. I, too, got a university place, at Bristol, but when I go to Sussex for a weekend, it isn’t Brian I share the sofa-bed with at Donald’s; it’s Philip, a man I met at a party a few weeks after I left school. My relationship with Brian just fell to pieces. When I last had news of him, he was working for an electronics firm in the north of England and living with a woman called Hazel, some fifteen years older than he is.
I often urged Donald to tell Mum and Dad. ‘I will one day,’ he said. ‘I’m not ready. And they aren’t, either.’
‘I don’t like the pretence,’ I said. ‘The secrecy
. The lies.’
‘I may be nineteen, but I’m not even legal yet. The law says I’m still supposed to be a virgin.’
‘Oh … this daft under twenty-one business,’
‘Yes.’ He grinned. ‘Not that it ever stopped us,’ right from the start. And the same is true for thousands of others, I guess. We live in an absurd world.’
Dad discovered the truth one day by working it out for himself. ‘It’s odd,’ he said to me. ‘Donald’s best friend turned out to be a boy in a different year at school. If it was a girl, I’d understand that. Very few women in Donald’s life.’
‘Oh, he’ll meet a nice girl,’ Mum answered. ‘Settle down and marry her. He’s just waiting till he’s finished his studies.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Dad went on. ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they were … Donald … Mark…’
Mum, who was sewing a button on a shirt, paused, needle in mid-air. ‘Go on,’ she said.
He turned to me. ‘What do you know about it, Helen?’
‘Me? You’d better ask them. It’s not my business.’
‘So I’m right. I’ve been wondering … for a long time.’ Silence. It lasted a full minute. Mum and Dad just stared at each other. Then Mum returned to her sewing. ‘I’ve always known,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t want to think about it. I guess Donald imagined I wouldn’t see that picture on his bedroom wall. But I did see it.’
‘What picture?’ Dad asked.
‘Mark.’
Dad stared out of the window. ‘Weather’s clearing up. I’m going down to the pub.’
‘To the pub!’ Mum was alarmed. ‘You haven’t been in a pub for years!’
‘Well, I’m going now. Don’t worry … I’m not starting all that again … drinking. I just need a little pick-me-up.’
‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour.’
‘I’ll be back.’
‘He’s buying me a car,’ Mum said, when he’d gone. ‘A Fiat… so I don’t need to get a bus to work. It’s red. You did know I’d got myself a part-time job, Helen?’
‘I’m amazed!’ I said. ‘It’s incredible! Why aren’t you freaking out?’
‘I am … you see … used to the idea. Though we didn’t call it gay back then. Your Aunt Margaret… that’s why she never got married.’
Extraordinary people, my parents.
PART TWO
1986
ONE
The Syrian desert, a rhinoceros hide; and the pilot had just announced that Amman was half an hour away. Why was he going there, Mark asked himself, not for the first time. There was only one place that occupied his thoughts: Camden Town. Where Donald was in bed with another man, maybe even now, this minute, this second, coming. Nausea of sexual jealousy: a seizing in the muscles like paralysis, so akin to the urge to vomit it always surprised him he did not actually throw up; then the overwhelming desire to hit, to hurt, to smash.
He started to write a letter. ‘My love ― I’m flying? It’s a marvellous sensation! I can’t imagine now why I was ever frightened of the thought. How I wish you were with me, sharing it all; I miss you so much there are no words to convey the depths of missing you. Perhaps, when I’ve ―’
Why was he writing such rubbish? Donald would throw it into the wastepaper basket. Or laugh, and read it aloud to his lover.
Hands round Donald’s neck, strangling. I’d never get away with it, he thought; that’s the problem.
He tore the letter into several pieces.
Months previously, Rick had said, ‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘No. Oh, I suppose so.’ Then, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what there is to tell.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know what I mean.’
Rick, sensing that Donald disliked even the pressures in this direction, was silent. But puzzled: that Donald had ceased to love Mark and now loved him was obvious. Not, of course, the easiest of matters to break to one’s lover, even a lover of a month’s duration, and those two had been together for ten years; but it seemed to be more than the simple facts of the case that bothered Donald, something other than being the cause of pain and suffering. ‘I must go now,’ Rick said. He got out of bed and dressed.
Alone, Donald sat staring gloomily out of the window at the canal. Clouds, trees and water were the same oppressive grey. And the silence of the flat, disturbed only by the occasional traffic noise, was even more oppressive and sad than the grey outside. I hate it here, he thought; I hate it! A cage, a prison! But … where do I go? And why?
It was true that he was not in love with Mark; for months had felt only boredom, had not in any way been turned on by his lover in bed. It had happened before, these patches of tedium, but where there had once been the will to see them through and come out the other side in a greater degree of closeness, there was now an overriding desire for release, a longing to experience the pleasures and vicissitudes of Donald alone. They had been together too long, mutually dependent, almost symbiotic. What was this Donald, the mature adult male; had it ever had a chance to find out who it was without Mark shaping, moulding, influencing it?
Rick was of no importance, a catalyst merely, a trigger. A university student, charming but inexperienced, who lived in the next street. Donald had met him in the Cage aux Folles. He provided not only the sexual attraction and excitement that Mark seemed without, but also the novelty of a relationship with somebody younger, one in which Donald, for the first time in his life, was teacher, initiator. A youthful body, blue eyes and a wide smiling mouth: Mark, nearly twenty-nine, was putting on weight and losing his blond hair. But he couldn’t envisage exchanging Mark for Rick, swopping his shared existence with the one for similar routines, domestic, sexual, or whatever, with the other: Rick was a key that turned a lock in a door that would open an enchanted garden, a world the nature of which was as yet quite unknown. Opening that door and looking would not suffice: the garden had to be entered. What was this world? Himself. Exploring it would be the discovery of his real nature, finding out who this Donald was.
It was selfish of course; and how to tell Mark wasn’t exactly easy to work out. He was fairly certain that Mark knew he was sleeping with Rick, but tensions between them lay more in matters domestic, the result, Mark probably considered, of Donald’s increasing depression about being unemployed. Donald was the home-maker; it was he who usually did the cooking, had the final say on colour schemes and furniture, carried out the decorating projects, but recently Mark had come home from work to find meals uncooked, or the spare room had only two of its walls painted and no attempt had been made to finish the task; covers were unpicked from cushions and not replaced. And had grumbled. Sometimes irritatingly; just because he had a job he seemed to think that Donald, who had not worked for two years now, had no right to flop into an armchair in the evenings and complain of a difficult and trying day. Mark, who worked for a firm of industrial designers, would go on about his problems: the boss was an idiot; the secretaries were two-faced, and what was the point of his creating elaborate advertising lay-out when it wasn’t used? Then … what was there to eat for dinner? Not another cauliflower cheese! At this point Donald usually felt it was impossible to start a discussion about the difficulties he had had with trying to get through another long day of blank, empty nothingness.
It was time to do something drastic.
Rain: Helen watched it streak down the windows like tears. It was the wettest summer she could remember.
When Mark or Donald, or occasionally both of them together, arrived at the house these days Brian disappeared into the garden or his garage, leaving her to cope. She was the sister, the old friend, the fag hag; they wanted to talk to her, not him. Embarrassed, unable to help and not really wanting to know much about it, he was pleased to escape. But now, in their absence, he was asking questions.
‘My brother’s mind,’ she said, ‘when it comes to examining his feelings, just goes flit-flit-flit from one surface impression to a
nother. He’s petrified of not being able to understand what he’s up to, so he avoids any attempt to think about it at all.’
‘You’re hard on him.’ Brian was lying full-length on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. ‘His treatment of Mark isn’t totally callous.’
‘I didn’t say it was. Doesn’t the word “callous” somehow imply that you’re conscious of what you’re doing?’
‘Yes.’
‘He certainly doesn’t take into account anybody else’s feelings. I mean he never says to himself I want to do such-and-such, but I won’t because it would hurt Mark.’
‘Seems rather immature.’
It is. The last time I saw Donald he said, “I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it.“But Mark will survive, I guess. He’s a giver, not a taker.’
‘Sexually the other way round, I thought.’
‘Honestly, Brian! Whatever’s that got to do with it?’
He thought for a moment, then said, ‘Maybe quite a lot. Perhaps the sex and the emotion never clicked properly.’
‘Oh, it did! It certainly did! You should hear them both on that subject!’