“What’s it about?” I asked.
“Well ... the practice of Zen Buddhism. That’s it, really.”
“Yeah, but what is Zen? What does it mean?”
He wrinkled his brow. “That’s too hard. It’s a kind of religion, you could say, Zen Buddhism, but it’s really a way of being. You stay in the present moment with the breath when you meditate. Each moment has value, meaning. That sort of thing.”
“Hmm,” I said thoughtfully. We both laughed.
“What do you get out of it?” I asked.
“Just that,” he said, shrugging. “You don’t have to worry about your past, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you... You can forget all that, ’cos it’s not important. You find peace within yourself. It’s called having Beginner’s Mind.”
“Oh,” I said. The enormity of that idea bewildered me and we were quiet for a long time.
“It helps,” Paul said with a smile. “Not that I’m an expert or anything.”
Maybe you are, I thought, staring up at the still glass baubles of the chandelier. I realized that I thought they were beautiful, though I could not have said why. My mind seemed to slow down when I looked at them. I was able to rest.
* * *
One morning Paul said, as we paused, looking into the window of the bookshop where he worked, “I applied for a tourist visa yesterday.”
“To where?” I asked blankly.
“San Francisco. I mean, America, but I want to go to San Francisco.”
“Have you been reading about it?” I knew this was an idiotic thing to say, but I was still in a state of shock.
“Quite a lot, yeah. And I’ve got a few hundred quid saved up.”
“Jesus. I had no idea.”
“What, that I’d go to America? Or that I’d saved up?”
He looked at me, smiling, as if to say, well, there we are.
“No, it just seems like most English people hate America.”
“Most working-class blokes like meself, you mean?”
I blushed and said nothing.
“I don’t hate it. I don’t like it either. But I have to leave. I’ve gone as far as I’ll get here. I’m treading water.”
“I’m not even doing that. Not even close.”
“Gotta go,” Paul said, as the manager put his head around the door enquiringly. Tom was very butch, wore a mustache, and frowned slightly when he saw me. He’d noticed me before.
“Why don’t you apply too?” Paul said as he went in.
* * *
“You weren’t joking about that visa, were you?” I asked him timidly later on that day.
“No, why would I?”
“I dunno ... anyway, I did apply at the American embassy.”
Paul laughed. “Don’t worry. I have a good feeling about this.”
“You really wouldn’t mind if I came along?”
“I’d love the company.”
I felt happy suddenly. But it worried me that Stevie didn’t know, and that his response might be to forbid me to go.
“You haven’t told Stevie?”
“No.” He shrugged. “If it comes through, I will. Of course.”
“What about the other thing?”
He remained silent for a few minutes. He seemed rather grim, and I felt as if I had gone too far.
“I’m sorry, Paul, it’s none of my business,” I said hurriedly.
“I told him, yeah,” Paul said. “He didn’t take it well. Worse than I thought. It was hard to get him alone, first of all. He said I was the first person he knew who’d been diagnosed positive. I told him he was bloody lucky. Then he said he wouldn’t tell Ron, so he hasn’t really had anybody to talk to about it, I suppose. He doesn’t talk to me much, if you’ve noticed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Or me, if you’ve noticed.”
“We’d better just get the fuck out of here. That’s my plan anyway.”
I looked at him in surprise. He hadn’t seemed bitter before. Now seemed the time to ask him about Stevie, but I couldn’t get the words out. I was afraid that something had happened. Something complicated that I wouldn’t want to hear about.
Paul leaned back on his sofa. He looked tired today. I wondered if I was annoying him.
“Should I go?” I said, starting to get up.
“No, don’t.” He waved me back. “Put on a record.”
I crawled over to his stack of albums and started going through them.
“Ah, look at this! Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood singing ‘Some Velvet Morning.’”
“Yeah, play that,” he said wearily. “Good choice.”
We listened in silence.
“Tom’s been hassling me,” he said, out of nowhere. “Wouldn’t you know it? I must be the type, somehow.”
“His type?” I asked uncertainly.
“Nah ... just the type that gets picked on. At school I got beaten up all the time. Now it’s sexual. Tom knows I’m in his power. He could sack me any time. He probably will.”
“Because you’re not going to...”
“No way,” Paul said with vehemence. “He’s a shit.”
“But if you liked him... ” I said, after a time.
He shook his head. “It’s not a good idea, is it, sleeping with someone you work with? I’m very good at separating business and pleasure.”
I said nothing.
“A bit too good,” he added gloomily.
“Is it easy for you to be celibate?” I asked. This question had been troubling me for a while. I couldn’t understand why Paul was single. He never went out in the evenings.
He looked slightly embarrassed. “Yeah, it is. Can you understand that?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “You seem like me in a way, not looking for anyone.”
“I’m not.”
“That’s strange, for a man,” I mused.
“Especially a gay man,” Paul said. “Yeah, it’s strange but true.”
The record ended and I got up to put on another.
Chapter 17
I was in two mental worlds now, dreaming of San Francisco, living in London. The cities were both unreal. London had not left a big imprint on me, but it had given me Paul and I was grateful. I tried not to rely on him too much, but I did feel that somehow we had been meant to meet. Stevie should have been the one to thank for that, but it seemed that he was trying to avoid us, and that when he saw us together he glimpsed only a casual connection, one that would easily be broken.
But was he trying to avoid us? I watched him closely, and it occurred to me that there was something odd in the way he treated Paul and I now: he would often come into the kitchen while I was washing up and Paul was drying and ask to help. But there was nothing for him to do. Sometimes he sat at the table with a glass of wine and a cigarette, not saying much, until Ron would come in and fetch him away.
Ron was another issue. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that Stevie and he had lost that one-to-one intensity that they’d once had. I hazily remembered Stevie telling me a couple of years before that what he wanted most of all was to live with Ron in another city. Now they were together, and yet they seemed less of a couple than they ever had been. It confused me. I found myself almost feeling sorry for Stevie, wondering what he would do.
I didn’t talk to Paul much about this. He didn’t seem to think about them as much as I did, or perhaps he did in a different way. They were people he was going to leave, and leave permanently, and he was satisfied with his decision. There was more unfinished business between Stevie and me, but I couldn’t see it being worked out now. Despite the sense of order on the surface of our lives, I felt that beneath it all we were in a state of flux, and I knew that Stevie didn’t like it. I would soon be outside his control; he didn’t know it yet, but perhaps he had glimmerings of it. Maybe this was why he lingered near us in the evenings. It was almost as if he were hoping for a word from us, some gesture that never transpired. I didn’t snipe at Ron anymore, and even that see
med to unsettle him. Now it was he who occasionally made comments about Ron; they were polite and disassociating and unlike anything he would have said in the past.
Sometimes he and Ron would socialize with his friends from the bank and once or twice they all came back to the flat. Paul and I shunned them after we received the impression that we weren’t particularly welcome. It was the summer of 1987: Thatcher was at the peak of her power, or if it was on the wane in the North of England, nobody cared yet in the South. Stevie’s colleagues were solid types who cared mostly about cars, clothes and money. The fact that they were gay did not redeem them in my eyes. They simply ignored Paul. He cheerfully returned the favor. We would sit playing music and drinking together in the sitting-room while half listening to the stilted, self-conscious conversation going on down the corridor in the kitchen. We were convinced that we were having a much better time.
But Stevie seemed almost apologetic after they had gone, to Paul that is, not to me. He implied that he was entertaining them to please Ron, not himself, and he always looked relieved when they went away. Ron on the other hand appeared sour and bored, as if the civilized people had decamped, and he had been accidently left behind with a bunch of savages.
* * *
My questions about Paul’s life were gradually answered as we talked more. Music seemed to help, for as a song moved him he became more confessional. He told me about shooting up, about the rush he had felt the first time and then the slow downward pull, so seductive, so sweet. “That was what I wanted, above all,” he said, “not to care, and smack gave me that.” I understood completely and did not press him further. A few puffs on a joint was enough for me, but Paul laughed when I asked him if the effect was similar to heroin. “No,” he said, “not really. But I still need something, don’t I? I’m not sure if I could manage without smoking. I don’t want to try.”
I asked him where he got the dope and he became rather vague. Finally one day he mentioned the name of a Jamaican boy he knew from the old days. This led to an explanation that when he first left home he had lived in a squat with some friends, and this included the Jamaican dealer whom he still kept in touch with.
“Charlie was Jamaican too,” Paul said. “My first lover, I suppose you’d say.” The words seemed difficult for him. “I’m not explaining it very well. He was a mate of my brother Billy’s, older than me, a good few years older. He was the first bloke to ever pay any attention to me. He was in my brother’s gang. They were dealing, doing robberies. I knew him for about two years. He’d come over when Billy wasn’t there, we’d have a smoke... Billy caught on eventually, never said anything though. But he was killed, Charlie, by the police. Billy set him up. That’s what I think anyway. Charlie told me he’d warned him off me. But he couldn’t stop seeing me, he said he’d take the risk. He didn’t believe that Billy was serious, he thought Billy liked him. I left home the same day. I never wanted to see Billy’s face again. He’d done it because he couldn’t bear seeing me with a black guy.”
So when Paul left home and left school it had been to go to the squat Charlie had been living in, and he had slept in Charlie’s bed and the others had all accepted him and taken him into their lives, which included shooting smack together. He had done it that first day, when it seemed as if his life had fallen apart, and he’d wanted to do something to cement that moment almost, because he needed to stop struggling, it was too painful. So he gave up the idea of college which had been in his mind even though no one he knew had gone there and nobody had ever encouraged him. He decided that he wouldn’t try to stop the flow of his life going in the direction that they’d all assumed it would go anyway. So he did what he had to do to get by, like the others, and nobody thought badly of him at all. He wanted to be just like them and he was for a while. Sex became an exchange, nothing much. He turned his thoughts inward to memories of Charlie and how happy they had been together those evenings when they’d lain in front of the telly with his mother passed out in the other room and touched lazily, laughing a lot. He’d loved touching Charlie’s silky skin and Charlie had got a thrill out of his paleness, he was sure. He’d always avoided physical contact as a kid, been deathly shy, and here he was ... he hadn’t believed how easy it had been to slip into messing around with Charlie. But later it seemed that nobody would ever care about him that much and he didn’t want to be disappointed again; he preferred the certainty of the needle and what it offered. He hadn’t expected to become addicted, he told me, but it happened faster than he could believe possible, and once he understood this he didn’t worry, he just made sure he always had a supply. The future, which had always seemed uncertain and vaguely sinister, ceased to trouble him.
“I still don’t really believe in the future,” Paul said to me. “Funny. Now I don’t have to, long-term. Short-term, yeah, I’m trying to come to grips with that.”
“I never have either,” I said. “That’s been one of my problems. The future. God, I’ve always hated those words. Now at least it doesn’t seem too bad. It’s because of you.”
“Me, eh?” Paul said with a smile. “Let’s not give up on it, then. The future can’t be worse than a lot of the past, can it?”
“No,” I said, thinking of Jeanette, Fintan’s, our little house in Dundrum and my father’s temper, our gray and stagnant life in Dublin. “The past has to be the worst. Maybe we’ve got that out of our way, you know?”
It seemed possible suddenly.
* * *
The evening that Paul told me he had got his visa we were having dinner together in the kitchen. Ron was out somewhere and Stevie had gone to the pub to meet a friend. It felt nice to have the place to ourselves. I could finally relax. It made me wonder what living with Paul in San Francisco would be like. We hadn’t spoken about it, there was just an understanding that we would, if I was able to go with him. After hearing his story I felt that it was very important that someone should help him finally, that after years of neglect and abuse someone would make a difference. And Stevie had, obviously, but he hadn’t wanted to go the whole way. But I could, I thought. Everything had worked out well between us so far.
“I’ll wait until you hear about yours and then we’ll set a date,” Paul said, munching away at the particularly delicious risotto he had made.
“And if I don’t get it?”
“Well, try again. Sometimes that works.”
I groaned. “You’re going to go and I’m never going to see you again.”
I didn’t usually make melodramatic statements. I blushed immediately. Paul stared at me.
“You’re funny—I’ve done everything possible to include you in on this.”
“Maybe it’s better that I don’t come,” I said gloomily, almost to myself. “I don’t have any skills or work experience. I’ll just make it harder for you to survive over there.”
Paul shook his head. “Two is better than one, right? I won’t be as isolated or as scared.”
“I hope not, but maybe I’ll depress you even more.”
“You don’t depress me,” Paul said, smiling. His voice was warm. “How do you think it would have been for me if you hadn’t been here this last month? It’s been no picnic anyway. Stevie’s changed a lot.”
“I know,” I said uneasily. “But we’re not to blame for that, are we?”
We were silent for a while. I heard the door open down the hall. I checked my watch. It wasn’t late; I had expected Stevie to be much later. I began to feel apprehensive even though there was no immediate reason to.
“I want to tell him tonight,” Paul said in a whisper. Stevie bolted into the kitchen, his eyes shining and his face flushed.
I shook my head no at Paul but he avoided my eyes. Stevie sat down at the table and poured himself a glass of wine. His hands trembled slightly, his eyes were bloodshot. I noticed for the first time that the tips of his fingers were stained brown from years of smoking. What else had I not seen about him? He had begun to seem like a stranger to me.
; “God, I just can’t get away from people who want to jump my bones,” he said, gulping the wine down without seeming to taste it. “Fidelity’s becoming a lost art, don’t you think?”
Neither Paul nor I spoke. I began to feel a growing sense of alarm. My throat tightened. I got up to clear my plate.
“Christ, I feel psychotic tonight,” Stevie said suddenly. “I wonder where Ron is? Any ideas?”
He sounded so savage that again neither of us dared to speak.
“Strange that the people you want don’t want you, and the people that you don’t pursue you. Maybe it’s something about the English. I never had this problem in Dublin. No one ever came on to me, really. That’s the Irish all over. You go for a drink with a friend and you get pissed. But here it’s like you go out for a drink and then you’re supposed to go off somewhere and screw.”
He poured himself another glass. Paul was looking at him intently, as if waiting for the right psychological moment. I plucked up my courage.
“Paul, could you show me that book you were talking about today?”
It sounded unconvincing. He looked at me as if rousing himself from a trance.
“Why don’t you leave Paul alone for once?” Stevie asked. His eyes were hostile, and I shivered. “Paul might actually want to speak to me on occasion. Or vice versa. I might sometimes want a minute alone with Paul. Get it?”
“Well, that’s surprising,” I blurted out, “considering the fact that you’ve been ignoring him for weeks. And me. Well, that’s OK, I’m used to that. But Paul must feel a bit hurt.”
Stevie grimaced. “There you go again, assuming you know what other people feel. You’re just proving your own complete ignorance of the situation, but that’s all right.”
Paul cleared his throat. “Stevie, there’s something I should tell you.”
Stevie was attentive suddenly, his fingers drumming the side of his glass.
“I got a visa today so I’m making plans to go to America—it seems the right thing to do.”
The Leaving Page 25