Fiddleback

by Mark Morris

  ‘But what will you do there?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ll teach. It’s a nice school.’

  ‘No, but what will you do?’

  He smiled. ‘I’ll walk in the meadows. I’ll breathe clean, fresh air.’

  ‘You’ll hate it. You’ll be lonely.’

  ‘Don’t you mean that you will?’

  I don’t think he really said that. I think that that was simply the thought I was ashamed to admit was in my own mind.

  It was twelve Christmas Eves ago when Alex said, ‘I think I might have something wrong with me.’ We were in the Malt Shovel, a pub about a mile from our parents’ house, where I had illegally bought my first alcoholic drink at the age of sixteen. The place was heaving, the air hazy with smoke, the liquid in our glasses shivering as the music from the annual Christmas Disco thumped through from the function room next door.

  We’d got in at seven, grabbed ourselves a table and started drinking. I was on pints of lager and Alex was on Pernod and Coke. This worked out well because when Alex went for a round, the rugger buggers propping up the bar assumed the lager was for him, so he didn’t get any hassle.

  We had been drinking steadily for three hours and were pretty pissed when Alex made his announcement. I looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What do you mean?’

  He looked down into his drink as if the voice had come out of it. There was a clamped, miserable look on his face.

  I punched his arm, a squirm of anxiety in my belly. ‘Alex, what do you mean? Are you ill?’

  He lifted his head, but refused to catch my eye. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘nothing like that.’

  ‘What, then?’ When he didn’t answer immediately, I punched his arm again, harder. ‘Come on, Alex, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘I …’ His voice faltered. He pursed his lips, then looked at me. ‘You won’t laugh, will you? Or think badly of me?’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, I think … well, it’s just that …’ He leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘I don’t fancy girls. I mean, I like them and everything, but I never fancy them. I’ve tried to, but I can’t.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. Suddenly I felt sober and mature. I’m not sure how else I felt. Not shocked or upset. Not even surprised. Matter of factly I asked, ‘So what are you telling me? That you’re gay?’

  He blushed, looked miserable. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  ‘Do you fancy other men?’

  He winced, then nodded dumbly, toying with his glass.

  Realizing that the onus was on me to keep the discussion going, even though he was the one who had instigated it, I reached out and stroked his hand. ‘Well, that’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t they reckon ten per cent of the population is gay? No big deal.’

  Again he didn’t say anything, just continued to stare miserably down into his glass, face crimson with embarrassment.

  ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ I asked.

  He looked as though he’d been stung. His shoulders jerked, his head snapped up. ‘No!’ he said, glaring at me as if the very idea was preposterous.

  ‘OK, I was only asking.’

  His head drooped again, gaze sliding from mine. Making a vague circular motion with his hand he mumbled, ‘I’ve never … done anything. I’ve never acted on how I feel.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He grimaced. ‘Too scared, I suppose. Besides, how can you tell if … well, if another bloke’s the same as you?’

  ‘Depends where you go. In London there are pubs and clubs you can go to.’

  He laughed humourlessly. ‘There’s nowhere like that here.’

  I leaned back and looked at my brother. I remembered him falling out of Gran’s apple tree when he was six and breaking his ankle; remembered how his screams of pain had been so full-blooded and intense that they had caused the hairs to rise on the nape of my neck. I remembered him and his friends making home-made parachutes for their Action Men and throwing them out of the bedroom window on to the patio. I remembered once at school how he had squared up to a boy called Pete Kershaw, who was two years older and a foot taller than him, because Kershaw had reduced me to tears with a relentless campaign of sneaking up behind me and lifting my skirt.

  What am I trying to say here? Only that Alex had never been a loner or an outsider, had never been different from his friends. Growing up, he had given no hints as to his sexuality; he had even had girlfriends, though admittedly none of them had lasted very long. And yet somehow I had always known. Or at least, when he told me about himself that Christmas Eve, I felt as though a series of vague and mysterious components was sliding and clicking neatly into place. ‘So what will you do about it?’ I asked.

  He gave me a pained, defeated look. ‘What can I do?’

  An answer jumped to my mind immediately, but I paused for a moment, allowing myself at least a few seconds of reflection. Then I decided to give it voice, to allow the notion to sink or soar of its own volition.

  ‘You could come back to London with me,’ I said.

  Alex stared at me for a moment, searching my face as if for signs of duplicity. Finally he shook his head. ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He flashed a smile that managed to look self-deprecating. ‘You don’t want me around.’

  I gawped at him, indignation rising in me. ‘Al, I love having you around. I always have. I thought you knew that.’

  ‘Yeah, but … things are different now.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘You’ve got your own life in London. Your own friends. You don’t want me cramping your style.’

  I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him. How could my beloved brother think this of me? Reaching across the table and grabbing his hand, I said, ‘Alex, listen to me. Believe me. There’s nothing I would like more than for you to come to London with me. I would be proud to introduce you to my friends. And you could really open up there. Be yourself. Not like in this shithole where everyone’s so … so fucking insular.’

  Alex squeezed my hand. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he urged.

  I looked around. A couple of heads were turning in my direction and I realized that I wasn’t quite as sober as I’d thought. ‘Sorry,’ I hissed, and leaned towards him. ‘But what do you reckon? Please say yes.’

  ‘I can’t just up and leave. I’ve got to finish my A-levels. If I don’t finish my A-levels I’ll never get to university.’

  I sighed. I couldn’t argue with that. I couldn’t justify persuading him to abandon his studies, not even for some much-needed personal freedom. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but you’ll be finished in six months. What about applying for London then? You could come and stay with me, at least until you get yourself sorted out. We could have a fantastic summer.’

  A slow grin spread across Alex’s face. He’s got a real heart-melter of a grin, my brother. It makes him look about eight years old.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’

  ‘Six more months to endure at home before then, though. Will you be OK?’

  He shrugged. ‘Course I will. Mum and Dad aren’t so bad.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I mostly keep out of their way and they keep out of mine. It’s OK.’

  I grimaced. ‘I don’t think I could stand it, not any more. They’re … I don’t know … like vampires. They suck the spirit out of you. I’d be wanting to tear the place apart within a week.’

  This time Alex shrugged with his face, pushing his bottom lip out. ‘I suppose I’ve never known any different.’

  I took a long swallow from my pint. Then I said, ‘Will you tell Mum and Dad that you’re gay?’

  Alex raised his eyebrows in horror at the prospect. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea,’ I said, deadpan, then I grinned wickedly. ‘Mind you, it wouldn’t half prod them out of their lethargy.’

  Ale
x looked alarmed. ‘You’re not going to tell them, are you?’

  ‘Course not,’ I said. ‘Do you honestly think I would?’ I paused, then asked, ‘Do you think you’ll ever tell them?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so, one day. Maybe I’ll write them a letter. From London.’

  ‘Coward,’ I said, then giggled. ‘I know. Maybe you could put an announcement in the local paper. It’d certainly give Dad and his friends something to talk about at the golf club.’

  Alex laughed. It was good to hear, though made me realize that I hadn’t heard him laugh for a while. ‘Can you imagine it! He’d die of shame.’ Then suddenly the humour drained from his face. ‘Shit, he’s going to hate me, isn’t he?’

  ‘Course he isn’t. You’re his son. He loves you.’

  ‘Yeah, but he thinks I’m normal. When he finds out his son’s a pouf, he’ll go fucking Beirut. He’ll think I’ve done it just to spite him.’

  He’s not that bad, I almost said, then didn’t. Because the thing was, he was that bad. I mean, he was my dad, and he’d always done the best he could for us, and – despite the fact that he and I hadn’t really seen eye to eye since puberty (mine, not his) – I loved him for that. But there was no getting away from the fact that he was a bigoted bastard – albeit in a repressed, passive, Middle England sort of way. I couldn’t watch current affairs programmes with him any more because the merest glimpse of dreadlocks or facial piercings or politicians who wore red ties instead of blue ones would elicit grunts of disapproval from him, darkly muttered comments, dismissive shakes of the head. A report on the AIDS epidemic, intercut with footage of guys dancing together in a gay nightclub, had once prompted him to blurt contemptuously, ‘They’ve brought it on themselves, these people.’ Last time I’d been home we’d had a blazing row about single mothers and I’d ended up calling him a walking Daily Mail article before stomping out of the room.

  In Dad’s defence I’d say that he’d had a pretty sheltered upbringing, and that much of his bigotry was due more to a lack of understanding than anything else. However, I think you get the idea that perhaps he wasn’t – and isn’t – the most tolerant person in the world.

  None of which helped Alex, of course. There was no getting away from the fact that his announcement would be anything less than a bitter blow to our decent, upstanding, right-thinking, fiercely heterosexual father.

  ‘Do you think he’ll punch me?’ Alex asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No. He’ll probably just shout a bit.’

  ‘What about Mum?’

  ‘She’ll cry at first,’ I said, ‘but she’ll be all right once she gets used to the idea.’

  Alex looked worried. ‘I’m really not looking forward to telling them.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to yet,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

  In fact, Alex didn’t tell our parents for another five years, but that’s another story. Six months after our Christmas Eve conversation, he did indeed move to London, and there – as I had predicted – he flourished. Well, maybe not at first. He had a lot of adapting to do, and for the first three or four months he was on an emotional rollercoaster. He would climb to heights of dizzying discovery only to plummet to depths of doubt and despair. But just as he had always been there for me, so I was there for him. I talked and listened, and as best I could I comforted and reassured.

  And gradually he got through it. He said I’d helped a lot, but I think he’d have got through it anyway. Over the summer he stayed with me and my friend, Keri, in our shared flat, and then in September he started his zoology course at London Uni and moved into student accommodation. He started having relationships – proper relationships – the first of which was with a sweet Welsh guy called Dave, who had bleached hair and a tattoo of a rose on his bum. Alex loved his course, and stayed on after it to do some post-grad research or other, which culminated in him writing a book about fiddleback spiders (called, appropriately enough, Fiddleback,) which, Alex assures me, is regarded as the modern definitive work on the subject.

  When all that was over he was offered a job on the lecturing staff, which he took, and he wrote a couple more books – one about scorpions and one about the breeding habits of some kind of carnivorous fish whose name I can’t remember. Whenever anyone asked him what he did for a living, Alex would say, ‘I’m a naturalist,’ and as they started to grin, he’d add, ‘And no, that doesn’t mean I walk around with no clothes on.’ Sometimes, if he was talking to some guy he fancied, he would raise those perfect eyebrows of his meaningfully and murmur, ‘Although that can be arranged.’

  God, I loved my brother.

  Except that now he’d gone and I didn’t know where.

  He’d got the job in Greenwell a couple of months ago. I couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed a backwards move to be going from London University to some obscure comprehensive in a northern backwater. But Alex was adamant. He said he’d always wanted to teach kids and for a while he’d been wanting to get out of London, move back up north (our family home was in Newark, near Nottingham), live in the country. Meeting guys would be harder up there, I told him, but Alex shrugged off my protestations. He was older now and wiser. He knew where to go, what to do. He knew how to recognize the signs. At least, that’s what he told me.

  ‘But won’t you miss me?’ I said.

  ‘Course I will. But you’ll be able to come and visit me. And I’ll visit you. We’ll have the best of both worlds.’

  For the first six weeks we talked a lot on the phone. Every day, in fact. And then one evening last week I called him and he wasn’t there. I left a message, but he didn’t ring back. I called again the next day, left another message, but again he didn’t respond. I felt hurt and disappointed and worried, though I told myself I had no reason to be. He’d probably gone away with the school for a few days. Or maybe he’d met someone and was stopping over, too caught up in the euphoria of a new relationship to give me a call. I admit I felt a bit resentful, but I wanted Alex to be happy. I left it another two days and then I rang him again. Answerphone. Message. No reply.

  I rang Directory Enquiries to try to get the number of his school, but there was nothing listed under Greenwell Comprehensive, so I could only assume that the school went by some other name. It infuriated me that I had no way of contacting Alex at work. I was sure I’d written his work details down at some point, though God knows where. Probably on some scrappy piece of paper which I’d accidentally thrown away.

  I sat and brooded for a bit longer, and then last night, waiting restlessly at home, willing the phone to ring, I finally thought: bugger it. I was a freelance production designer, and currently between jobs, so it didn’t matter about taking time off work – not that that would have stopped me anyway. I packed a bag with enough stuff to last me for a few days, set the alarm for five and went to bed.

  And now here I was, nine thirty in the morning, five miles from my destination, stonewalled fields to either side of me. It was a bright, clear morning, sunshine enlivening the land, even though much of the foliage was shrivelling and browning, mournful of summer’s end. The air smelled verdant, the breeze that slipped in through the open window sinewy, vigorous with life. If I hadn’t been anxious about Alex I would have felt good. Cleansed. But my stomach was tight with trepidation even though I told myself time and again that there was no reason for it. What, after all, did I expect to find when I got to Greenwell?

  I was doing fifty, the road a winding grey thread in front of me, when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a scarecrow in the field to my left. It was a couple of hundred yards away, and my eye was drawn to it because it was the only splotch of darkness amidst the glow of green. As I half-turned my head I became peripherally aware of something darting out in front of the car, and I was slamming on my brakes, my leg rigid, even as my head snapped back. Instantly there was a thump of impact, the sound – real or imagined – of bones splintering, and the car juddered slightly. A cold wash of nausea went thro
ugh me as I screeched to a halt maybe twenty yards further up the road. What had I hit? A dog? A sheep? A child? Whatever it was had sounded pretty big.

  I sat in the car for a moment, trying to bring my breathing under control. My head was spinning, and it took me a few seconds to work out how to turn the engine off. I uncoiled myself and got out of the car, feeling weak and wobbly, not quite there. I turned to face back up the road, dreading to see what I had hit.

  There was something there, but it wasn’t as large as I’d feared. A bundle of brownish fur with a thick streak of red trailing from it like the tail of a comet. The redness was vivid in the sunshine. I took a deep breath, then started walking towards it. It wasn’t until I was a couple of paces away that I realized what it was.

  A hare. The biggest one I’d ever seen. Wiry and rangy, built for speed, like a cross between a rabbit and a greyhound. Only this one had run its last, had had the unbelievable misfortune to encounter possibly the only moving vehicle in several square miles. Its sleek, bony head and its front and back legs were intact, not a mark on them. But its abdomen, which must have borne the brunt of the impact, had been ripped open, and an eruption of bodily contents now lay across the pitted tarmac in a glistening smear.

  I put a hand to my mouth. I knew there was nothing I could have done, but I still felt terrible for inflicting such a violent death on such a beautiful creature.

  And then abruptly the creature’s back legs kicked, its glazed eyes opened wide and it began to make an awful, high-pitched squealing sound.

  I stepped back in horror. For one ludicrous moment I thought the hare’s outrage at its sudden and meaningless death had given it the power to return to life. Then I realized that the animal must simply have been stunned and that it had now regained consciousness. Its back legs continued to thrash and jerk as if they knew nothing other than to run even as it squealed out its agony. I had to do something. I couldn’t stand by and watch the poor thing suffer. The animal was clearly beyond help, but at least I could put it out of its misery.

  I looked around, feeling sick and faint, my thoughts slow and syrupy. I needed a weapon. No, mustn’t think of it like that. This was to be an act of mercy, not violence. For a few seconds I stood, looking around helplessly while the creature squealed in pain. My slow thoughts speeded up, began to race, and a desperate mantra ran through my mind: There’s nothing here, there’s nothing here.