The Colour of His Hair

by David Rees

  ‘Freedom! What do we do with it? Ability to choose signifies being adult, doesn’t it? People normally choose to share their freedom with somebody else.’

  ‘Not everyone. Ted Viner didn’t, for ages.’

  ‘That was simply his defence mechanism after Alan died! I’ve heard him on that subject a dozen times! Anyway … he and Jason are now an old married couple. They’ve been together nearly as long as Donald and I have.’

  ‘Perhaps Donald doesn’t feel he’s an adult yet.’

  ‘At almost twenty-eight!’ Mark exclaimed. That’s nonsense.’

  ‘You’ve been lovers since he was seventeen. I don’t deny you’ve given each other room to grow and develop enormously. But how many adult choices have you made on your own, Mark?’

  ‘Not many, I suppose.’

  ‘Donald feels he’s made none. He thinks that if he is to develop any more as a person he’s got to make choices unhindered by you. All right, you may say that’s absurd but it’s no use justtelling him that!’

  ‘You think he won’t stay long, then?’

  ‘Hasn’t that crossed your mind as being … probable?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. It has; I’ve got to admit it. A few days ago he went on about our bedroom being so gloomy. Well, he decorated it himself the year before last; he chose the colours: it’s not my fault. I didn’t have any say in the matter. I asked, is Rick’s bedroom very different? So light, he said. So light! The light of one’s life? Anyway, I’ve just repainted it, this week. Threw out that awful old carpet, did the walls cream, stained the floorboards… Maybe I was trying to see into his mind, how he would do it if he were doing it now. And he said it was far more beautiful than anything he could imagine … but it was the peculiar way he said it. Looking at the walls like a visitor. As if he wasn’t going to see them again,’

  ‘He doesn’t want to be accountable, doesn’t want to have to fit in round your needs and concerns. Sex with you … it’s not the same. It’s the staying the night, every night, waking up beside you each morning … it’s a trap. He thinks. He can’t see that within the context of a relationship it’s possible to have almost all the necessary freedoms. It’s that “almost” that bugs him. He can’t compromise, can’t give. Don’t you think on the whole he’s the one who’s done the taking?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And it didn’t matter. My love was in the giving.’

  That warm, protecting, caring love … that’s what he finds so … repellent.’

  Her words hurt, enormously. ‘Why the hell can’t he talk to me about his problems?’ he said. ‘What’s so wrong with me? Why?’

  ‘Perhaps he fears you’d talk him down. Or out of it. Persuade him he’s wrong.’

  ‘He is wrong!’

  ‘Mark … there have been other men … since he’s returned…’

  ‘In our bed? When I’ve been at work?’

  ‘I didn’t ask for the details. But there’ll be more. You’re going to have to face a time that might be worse than Rick. He might come home to you at night; he might not. If I were you … I’d tell him to fuck off out of it.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I love him,’ Mark said. ‘I don’t respect him; I don’t believe him. I don’t mean he deliberately tells lies … well, he does sometimes … I mean he lies to himself. Constantly! But for me there’s no one else. There can’t ever be anybody else. I love him! I have no options.’

  ‘He doesn’t love you. He can’t possibly love you, whatever he may say, and treat you as he does. And you do have options.’

  The truth of it all was so evident, he said to himself. So utterly obvious! And he had driven to Helen’s, eager to tell her the good news that Donald was back, that everything might now be the same as it had always been. He’d come alone because Donald was meeting his father in the Jack Straw’s Castle. Or was that another lie? He glanced at his watch ― ten to eight. He was supposed to be picking Donald up at half past. ‘I must go.’ he said, abruptly.

  Donald was not in the Jack Straw’s Castle.

  ….

  ‘Mark. My parents’ home is my home. In a sense that’s always been true. If I have any roots that’s where they are.’ They were eating dinner at a little restaurant in Highgate; the clientele was young, all of them younger than they were. That’s why he chose it, Mark thought; this perpetual need for youth. It’s sickening. Donald had moved three days previously into the spare room at his parents’.

  ‘Did you only want dolls’ houses?’ Mark asked. ‘Playing with cookery books and colour charts? Adolescent games?’

  ‘I’m certainly not domesticated any more. The whole syndrome ― I hate it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mark sighed. What were they doing here, he asked himself; what on earth was the point? Such meetings could only stop him from taking any positive action in the direction of mending the broken pieces of his life. Donald had moved his possessions out except for his furniture, and, though they had argued over such things as who should have the electric mixer and the gardening tools, they had on the whole managed with a stiff politeness, sometimes even moments of warmth. ‘Oh, you might as well take the mixer and whatever you want from the garden,’ Mark said. ‘I shan’t bother to use the bloody things!’ Donald, grateful, kissed him. And when it was time to leave he was unable to let go of Mark’s hands. ‘We’ll meet in a day or two and have a meal together,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ So Mark stayed indoors, waiting for the phone to ring instead of going to the pub or to Ted’s or Helen’s, even refused an invitation to a party.

  ‘I suppose you’re a lot better off at your parents’ house,’ he said. ‘Money has been a problem these past two years, hasn’t it? It’s caused too many tensions between us. Me earning and you unemployed.’

  ‘I don’t intend to stop there long. I must find my own room.’

  ‘So you can invite all your men back.’ Donald said nothing. ‘You don’t mean Chris and Jane allow it?’ Donald looked away, and gestured impatiently. ‘Good God, they do.’ He swallowed his wine in one gulp.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you because we never did. Just another hurt. I’m sorry!’

  ‘Yes. It does hurt. And your mother giving you an almost totally free hand with her car so you can get to the pubs and clubs and whore around. How can she do it?’

  ‘What do you mean, how can she do it?’

  ‘Does she ever think of me?’ Mark asked. ‘What damage it causes me?’

  ‘She is worried about… what I’m doing to you.’

  ‘Oh, yes! With the top of her head. I know her! Her one concern is Chris’s drinking. Anything to maintain the balance, to keep the home on an even keel. I count for nothing. I never did.’ There had been a crisis in his relationship with Donald when they were both still at Sussex. Donald had gone through a stage of being impossibly clinging, jealous and almost manically possessive; he would rush home hours before he said he would arrive, expecting to find Mark in bed with another boy, and there was never anybody else, not even a hint of a passing trick, let alone a lover. He made fearful scenes when Mark spent five minutes just talking to a friend or an acquaintance who, he imagined, was a threat; and babbled away to his father about Mark preferring other people’s company to his own: Chris, very drunk, plied him with alcohol, and said to Mark, ‘Give the boy security! Give him the security I’ve never been able to give him!’ As if it was a serum to be injected into the bloodstream, not something Donald could only find inside his own self. ‘He’s left home. He’s not my responsibility now! Oh, my son! My only son! I wish … we were able to help you!’ He wept into his gin; then grabbed Mark’s arm and twisted it till it hurt. ‘If anything happens to him, if he goes off the rails, I’ll seek you out… and cut your right hand off!’ Mark broke free, and, trying not to lose his temper, appealed to Jane, ‘Leave my missus alone!’ Chris shouted. It’s nothing to do with her! Pestering her wh
en she has enough worries! Oh, my son, my son! My son is a faggot and my daughter married an imbecile! Where have we all gone wrong?’

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Donald said.

  Mark awoke to his surroundings. Poppy’s, a restaurant in Highgate High Street. ‘Let’s have some more booze,’ he said.

  ‘Are you paying for it?’

  ‘I thought we were going halves on this meal.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Donald looked glum. ‘I can’t. I’ve no cash.’

  ‘Write a cheque.’

  ‘My overdraft’s too big. I’ll pay next time; I promise? We’ll go to that new bistro in Gospel Oak… the one you said you wanted to try.’

  ‘Where Arnold works. Been there recently?’

  ‘Mmm … yesterday.’

  ‘Someone took you out to dinner?’ Mark asked. ‘Slept with him as payment? Back home in the bedroom next to Chris and Jane?’ Donald lowered his eyes. ‘Well, I wouldn’t screw you tonight for love or money; that’s for sure! I won’t be one of your tricks! I’m Mark! Remember me?’

  ‘Don’t shout. People are staring at us.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘WHO WAS IT?’

  ‘Ssssh! If you must know … Arnold himself.’

  ‘Arnold! Arnold!!’ Mark roared with laughter. How could you? He’s so ugly! That slack mouth and eyes. Hideous! Non-stop superficial chatterer. Did you stick elastoplast over his mouth? The only way you’d get any sleep. And, so I’m told, pretty second-rate in bed.’

  ‘It was all right.’

  ‘What are you trying to prove?’

  ‘Prove?’

  ‘If it has balls between its legs it has to fuck you! What a way to find out who you are! Some voyage of self-discovery, Donald!’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ He looked at Mark. Vulnerable, but defiant.

  Mark’s anger collapsed. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

  Donald’s move to his parents’ house had a curiously unexpected effect on Chris and Jane; it was not his father who seemed to feel the stress but his mother. There was time to do things with Donald that Chris had not done for years; a trip to an antiques market on Saturday morning, an evening with old family friends, a tour of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which neither of them had visited since Donald was a child. ‘Dad’s as pleased as a dog with a juicy bone,’ Donald told Helen. ‘It’s as if he’d got his little boy back again.’ Jane, however, did not easily adjust to having another person in the house; it was too disturbing of the daily routines on which she had come to rely as a solace for her husband’s return to drinking. She was fussy and house-proud to a fault; ‘living with her is like living in a museum,’ Chris complained frequently. Everything had its proper place, even to the point of storing saucepans on precisely the same spot on a shelf; colours had to match exactly: she had recently bought a new washing-up bowl because the previous one wasn’t the shade of brown really suitable for her kitchen. She knew her behaviour in these matters was excessive and she could often allow herself to be teased about it; one evening last year, when Mark and Donald had come to dinner, Chris said, ‘Mum thinks you’ve both been sitting on that sofa too long, so she wants you to put the dust-sheet over it!’ At the time she had found this amusing, but in periods of tension she was unable to appreciate the humour, indeed became more intolerant in the house, dusting, washing, polishing, hoovering several times a week.

  Donald’s way of being domestic was not unlike his mother’s, something Mark found as tiresome as Chris did. Gone were the old days of sports kit strewn everywhere. A great deal of his behaviour was in fact modelled on Jane, with whom he had had a particularly close relationship in early adolescence as a result of his father’s drunkenness, which had tended to frighten or disgust both of them. When drunk, Chris could be either dangerous or unpleasantly maudlin; crockery would get smashed, food thrown round the place ― Helen, as a child, had had ice-cream stuffed into her ears, Donald hot stew poured over his head ― or else absurd olive branches were produced: on one occasion Chris, on the way home hours later than expected, had stopped and bought a Japanese tea service, thirty-two pieces in all, which he presented to Jane in the hope of avoiding her anger: ‘As if,’ she said to Helen, ‘I knew thirty-two Japanese well enough to invite to tea!”

  But Donald was now suddenly in revolt against any domesticity, especially his mother’s kind of fastidiousness; it smacked too much of the sort of permanence he found totally unpalatable. Soon they were at loggerheads. ‘Your room is a tip!’ she complained.

  ‘It’s my room. Or so you said.’

  ‘You do nothing in the house! I cook for you, wash your clothes, do your ironing, and you don’t even dry up a knife or a fork! You can’t even open the attic curtains when you get out of bed in the morning! I wonder how on earth Mark put up with you.’

  ‘I shan’t be here much longer.’

  ‘I never know if you’ll be in or out, here to eat a meal or not, if you’re staying away all night or

  ‘I get the car back for whenever you want it. I’ve not failed once in that.’

  ‘Only because you know you’ll not be borrowing it again if you do fail.’ She stared at him. ‘You’re twenty-seven and behaving like a teenager! Like some irresponsible nineteen-year-old.’

  ‘You’ve hit it on the head! That’s exactly what I’m doing: behaving like some irresponsible nineteen-year-old! Why? Because I was never nineteen and doing the things appropriate to that age; I was already into a nice cosy routine with Mark, just like you and Dad. I’m making up for lost time. Christ! To think how much time I have lost!’ He put on his jacket.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out. And I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

  They were half-way through the meal ― trout (Jason had caught it himself) and a bottle of hock ― when the phone rang. ‘For you,’ Ted said to Mark. ‘It’s Donald.’

  Who was upset, tearful, and incoherent. ‘I’m so alone. Talk to me, please!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He wouldn’t say. ‘Can I come over there?’

  ‘No. Where are you?’

  ‘At East Croydon Station.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

  Jason began to sing, sotto voce, It’s a bad time to leave me, Lucille. Ted glared at him. Mark apologised to his hosts, and, abandoning his dinner, rushed out of the house. He was conscious, as he told them where he was going, of an expression of amazement on Ted’s face, contempt on Jason’s. He has only to lift his little finger, they seemed to be saying, and you come running. What else can I do, he thought as he drove off; what else can I do? I have no choice.

  Whatever had upset Donald seemed to have vanished when Mark arrived. He was no longer tearful; a bit depressed maybe, but nothing else. And the explanation, when it came, made Mark very angry. ‘I should have stayed and finished my dinner!’ he stormed. ‘And told you to fuck off! I was enjoying myself!’ The problem was some German Donald was sleeping with; this Helmut wanted him to go back to West Berlin for a holiday.

  ‘I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no. I kept hedging. I’d think about it; I’d tell him later. I couldn’t stop thinking, what would Mark say? What would he feel about it? So much so that eventually I just didn’t know what to do. Helmut… he’s returned to his hotel in Kensington. When we said goodbye … the look in his eyes. So hurt.’

  ‘Do you ever think about the look in my eyes?’

  Donald blew his nose. ‘Snap, and you come running.’ he said. He flicked his fingers.

  ‘And it reminds you that you’ve got me cheap. You disgust me!’

  ‘Sometimes I disgust myself.’

  ‘I’m going back to Ted’s. There’s a lemon soufflé, which is always delicious when Jason makes it. As you know ― I might get the last spoonful.’ He pulled out his car keys, and stood up. He felt very aware of being ma
de to look as if he was without the minimum of self-respect he would have hoped to retain, to have been pushed beyond the limit where others would dig in their heels. He was less of a person, he thought, in the opinions of three people: Ted, Jason, and Donald. Lessened, too, in his own eyes. As for Donald’s dilemma about going to Berlin: the truth, Mark said to himself, isn’t concern for me. He simply doesn’t fancy Helmut all that much. He’s flattered by the attention, and tempted by the prospect of a free holiday.

  ‘I think of you as I think of a teddy bear,’ Donald said. ‘Sometimes I want to cuddle you, sometimes I want you in bed with me, sometimes I want to kick you… but mostly I want to put you in a corner and forget about you. And I want you to stay in that corner till I need you again.’

  ‘I’m a human being,’ Mark said.

  THREE

  Mark phoned his mother and told her that Donald had left him. She made little comment, feeling too stunned to say anything helpful. A few days later she asked him to come home for the weekend. ‘I’ve told your father.’ she said.

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘Sympathetically, of course.’

  When he reached Croydon depression engulfed him so strongly he had to make an enormous effort not to turn the car round and drive back to Camden Town. It was a damp, silent afternoon, the roof-tops hidden in a sea of woolly fog, dull and grey as himself, like those blank years in adolescence before he met Donald, when living in this dreary suburb seemed to strangle him, squash his life to extinction.

  Even at the house his parents had lived in since before he was born there was no escape from Donald. Mark had been child and teenager here, had grown up and left; these rooms, his old bedroom, belonging to immaturity, the only bit of his life that had nothing to do with adult relationships, should be the one place his lover could be forgotten. But, like everywhere he found himself, there were memories: in this bed he and Donald had spent their first whole night together.

  ‘You look drawn and tired.’ his mother said. She was shocked by his appearance.

  ‘I didn’t remember to shave. That’s all.’ He glanced in the mirror: yes, a bit more pallid than usual, perhaps.