by Swan, Tarn
When we took our leave that afternoon she hugged Twinkles and then placed a kiss in the centre of his forehead. She told him he was a beautiful boy and a fine friend for Freddy. Glancing at me and smiling she said she was glad he'd found someone who looked after him properly. She hoped Freddy would eventually find someone too, someone kind who knew his worth. I think she had a premonition about what was coming. I think a lot of people do sense when death is close. She suffered another massive stroke in the early hours of Monday morning and died two days later without regaining consciousness. Her husband and son were by her side holding her hands.
Lulu is grief stricken, but it's healthy, if something as intensely painful as bereavement can ever be called healthy. He had no issues with his mother. She didn't always understand him, but she never withdrew her love from him. He was always her darling Freddy. I like to think, sentimentally perhaps, that her last thoughts were of him singing the song he sang for her in Bluebell Woods, while dancing across the stage at some long ago holiday camp and seeing her little boy smile and bow to the applause of the audience.
I'm more worried about my boy at this point in time. Twink's grief isn't healthy. It’s eating him alive. Emily's death has brought to the fore issues that have nothing to do with her. He won't eat. He's barely spoken since yesterday morning and he won't let me comfort him.
9th August 2006: Imperfection
Twinks is still low in mood alternating between silent tearfulness and garrulous irritation. Naturally enough those of us who love him best, especially me, have to bear the brunt of both the tears and the irritation. I can't do right for doing wrong at the moment. If I smile and act as normal I'm being insensitive to the situation. If I'm quiet and give him space I'm being miserable, selfish and unsupportive. I signed online the night before last and he flung a giddy fit along with the computer mouse saying I paid more attention to the computer than I did to him and he was going to name it as co-respondent in divorce proceedings. I immediately paid him due attention, though he didn't like it very much. He is not cruelly abusing my poor little mouse and getting away with it, no matter what the circumstances. Then again if I try to get him to talk about his feelings I'm pressurising him.
I suggested he make an appointment with the counsellor at the surgery again. She had said to return if there was something else he wished to discuss. While he'd talked much about his father during the sessions, his relationship with his mother and the rest of his family had only been briefly touched upon. There's a lot of heavy baggage there. Family dynamics for good or ill, and bits in between, have an effect on all of us. Twink’s childhood was so emotionally barren I sometimes marvel he's as loving as he is, and he is, even when he's being a difficult, self-centred pain in the proverbial. He’s essentially an affectionate and loving man. He just has problems with self-marketing at times.
Anyway, my mention of seeing the counsellor gave him a perfect excuse to let rip and hit the roof, metaphorically speaking anyway. Having suffered the consequences of hitting my mouse off the floor he wouldn't have risked hitting anything else that evening. He accused me of always fussing and making mountains out of frigging molehills. I got on his tits with my nagging.
I lost patience I'm afraid and told him that if he didn't seek counselling I would have to seek it for myself because he was driving me bloody mad with his histrionics! He proved the point by bursting into tears and demanding to know how I could swear at him in his present state of grief. As his Top I was supposed to look after him and never lose my temper, a statement that made me roll my eyes skyward. He’d obviously been reading domestic discipline stories on the Internet again, the ones where all the Tops were perfect paragons of virtue. Still, I felt a bit of a bastard, but I'm only human. I get irritable and worn down with things. He's been really hard work since Emily died. I'd known her for quite some years, obviously not as closely or as well as him, but all the same I’m sad at her passing. I'm grieving too, which he isn't taking into account.
I told him he was selfish and childish for saying I had less right than him to feel frazzled by life's difficulties. Things hurt me just as much as they hurt him. If he wanted perfection then he'd married the wrong man. He snarled, “never a truer fucking word” and huffed off upstairs for a bath.
I gave him some time to soak and then at the risk of being rebuffed went up to the bathroom to ask if he needed any help in the back washing department. He did. He also let me dry him afterwards. I like doing that. It’s an intimate thing to do for someone you love. It can be simply a comforting gesture or something sensual and arousing, whatever the mood dictates. In this case one of comfort.
When he was dry I wrapped the towel around him and we kissed and cuddled. We completed the making up process in bed with a glass of wine while watching one of his favourite feel-good films, 'While You Were Sleeping.' He loves it, especially all the Christmassy family scenes. He always tells me I bear a slight resemblance to Bill Pullman because I have a 'wholesome homely' kind of look, if that isn't a compliment with a razor edge I don't know what is. To make matters worse he openly lusts after the other actor, Peter Gallagher, the one who plays the man who sleeps, the one whose life Sandra Bullock saves. He said he'd readily jump on a railway line to save him. I snorted and said he was more likely to stand on the platform and scream hysterically for someone homely and wholesome to save the object of his desire and then he’d take all the credit. He'd do one of his 'Tarn I'm having a crisis and you must attend' jobs. He snootily claimed that when jealousy got an unattractive hold of me I could out-bitch a busload of old queens.
I actually think I'm better looking than Bill Pullman and my bum looks sexier in jeans, so there.
Twinks took Gabby to the cinema this evening. She wanted to go and see 'Over The Hedge' and as Katie isn't very well at the moment and Frank is away on a job he stepped in. They both enjoyed it. He's still over at her place now helping her redecorate her dolls house using some of the little match pots of paint that we've accumulated over time. It's keeping him from dwelling on sad things. I'm gloating a bit over the match pots to be honest, because I always said they'd come in useful. Needless to say he's forbidden me to re-start my collection of empty margarine tubs.
18th August 2006: Dramatic Art
Another weekend approaches. Thank God! I need the break. It's been hell at work. There's been a change of management at the top in the hallowed rafters where the Civil Servant Masters reside. As a consequence the rest of us have been running around like headless chickens filing reports as to how we run our departments. It's all a waste of time. The moment 'Sir' officially gets his name and his new rank on all appropriate local government stationary plus a name plaque on the door of his posh new office he'll relax and dump our reports in the shredder, question our claims for overtime and we'll all go on as before.
On the home front I can only hope this weekend is more relaxed than last. It's been like residing at RADA living in our house lately with one dramatic production after another, which on reflection isn't that out of the ordinary I suppose. As I've said before drama is a thread that runs constant through our everyday life. With a personality like Twinkles just getting out of bed on a morning affords a potential for drama. He can make an all singing all dancing stage production out of an intake of breath.
Take the Thursday morning before last for example. I was in the kitchen making breakfast, grilling bacon and black pudding. I was also lamenting the loss of the heat wave, which had waved our British shores goodbye and left rain and cold winds in its stead, when a crisis struck Twinkles. It had obviously struck hard because his screams were terrible. My bowels just about turned to water at the sound of them.
Abandoning my breakfast I raced upstairs and into the bedroom where he flung himself into my arms babbling incoherently about his life slipping away. My heart thumped with alarm. I questioned. Did he have a pain, where, how bad was it? No, no pain, but he'd discovered something sinister. What had he discovered, a lump, what?
&n
bsp; No, it was a grey hair. He had a grey hair, on his head, right at the front where everyone could see it. I could have happily tanned his hide there and then. It was bad enough him being obsessed with grey hairs on my person without him becoming obsessed with them on his own.
Closer inspection revealed what to my mind was simply a sun bleached hair, it was more blonde than grey. I said so. Blonde? Sun bleached? Was I colour-blind? From the look on his face I knew a tirade was imminent and nothing short of a bullet would stop him delivering it. I folded my arms, girded my loins and let him get on with the emotional equivalent of detox.
It was definitely grey! How dare I question his colour perception? He’d plucked enough grey hairs out of my privates and scalp to recognise the colour grey. I'd spread grey hairs to him, like a disease, if only he'd washed his hands after handling me. It had probably been transmitted by the pube that stuck in his throat when he choked that time. It had infected him with a grey gene. He bet if he allowed his pubic bush to grow back it would probably look like a grizzled old badger tacked to his dick. He was getting old! Where would it all end!
It was my fault. All my overbearing, demanding ways had turned him prematurely grey. He’d start to sag in all directions next. His balls would droop low enough to qualify as kneecap covers and he'd be overrun with wrinkles before you could say pension plan. They were over! The days of his youth and beauty were over. GONE! His skin collagen was in its dying phase, melting like a marshmallow on a mug of hot chocolate. Why did people have to age? He didn't want to get old, and so on, followed by copious tears.
Slipping my arms around him I offered words of comfort telling him he was and always would be beautiful to me. I also reminded him that he was still in his twenties and one reputedly grey hair did not an OAP make. Giving me a saccharine smile he said he wasn't concerned with what I thought. It was what others thought that mattered. If news got out that Stardust Twinkles had a grey hair every transvestite and drag queen in the North East would be rolling up to view it and to proclaim him a falling star.
His words had a ring of truth. Drag queens in particular are hypersensitive about age and there's nothing they like better than guessing the age of their sisters in frocks, often adding a year or more from sheer malice. Add a hint of greyness or a potential wrinkle to the mix and it can get very nasty. There’d be craftily weighted handbags at dawn, as Twinks offered out anyone who dared mention the words hair and grey in the same sentence.
I offered to pluck out the offending shaft, as he had done mine, not that he'd offered me the courtesy of asking first mind you. He just ruthlessly uprooted them. He was strenuous in his refusal of this plan. In other words he screeched no I couldn't frigging pluck it out. It would only grow back and bring other little grey bastards with it. Did I want him to end up like Mr Marsh from the Newsagents who went around looking like his hair was splattered with pigeon shit?
I'd had enough by then and threatened to take his mind off all things grey by giving it another colour to focus on. In other words I jabbed an irate finger at him and said if he didn't calm down I would smack his bum several shades of purple for throwing a paddy a toddler would be proud to own. In the end I placated the drama queen by tinting the offending hair with a bit of brown mascara, the waterproof type, seeing as it was raining out. It blended in perfectly, problem solved.
By the time we set off for work he was fine again. He’d had his outburst, his system was cleansed, but I was ready for a couple of indigestion pills and a lie down in a darkened room.
Before getting out of the car he straightened my tie, tweaked my hair, kissed me tenderly on the lips and said I really ought to try and calm down a bit, as I did tend to blow things out of all proportion. He was sure it was just a sun-bleached hair. He’d got one or two last summer if I remembered. It always darkened down again in the winter.
Sourly slouching over the steering wheel I watched him trip happily across the road under cover of his pink pussycat umbrella. Once safe on the pavement he turned and gave me a beaming grin and what I can only describe as a very gay little wave. Shaking my head and smiling I thrust the car into gear and drove on to work. It had been a drama over nothing, as most of his dramas usually are, like the time he found a lump in one of his ‘breasts.’ You wouldn't believe the hysterical scene that ensued.
The lump turned out to be a cotton wool ball, which had somehow found its way into his bra when he was inserting his silicone falsies. In this instance the drama did have a positive side because it made him speculate how a biological woman must feel on discovering a lump in her breast, one that couldn't be so easily removed and resolved. Consequently breast cancer charities benefit regularly from fundraising efforts by the PP crowd.
Speaking of the PP, last Friday night was spoilt when a bunch of charmless, drunken morons who had come to view all the ‘freaks’ started making trouble. They gave Rick and the other bar staff a hard time when they were refused more alcohol. They then began hassling Cherie Pie during her set, shouting abuse. It got really ugly when one of them threw a bottle at the stage. It hit her chest. Fortunately with her breasts being of the rubber type it bounced off without causing harm, but it would have been a different story if it had hit her or someone else in the face or head.
The troublemakers were duly evicted. It was rumoured that the bouncers along with some help from Bear Daddy and a couple of his mates, not to mention a well placed high heel from Miss Pie herself, left them with some souvenirs of their visit to the 'Pink Parrot Perv Palace.'
The incident tainted the evening. Clubs like the PP obviously do attract the curious, for a variety of reasons, but most itinerant visitors at least behave with civility and respect towards the people whose home turf it is, but occasionally you get those who come to exercise their ignorant prejudice and cause grief.
As we headed for the taxi stand on our way home Twinkle’s evening hit an additional sour note. The slender heel of one his shoes snapped clean off, almost pitching him over. His shoe size falls within the range offered by most high street retailers of women's footwear and he's able to buy shoes without resorting to the more expensive specialist retailers who have less choice. Still, the fact is most ladies shoes are not designed to take the weight of a man. Men tend to disperse their weight in a different way to women so broken heels are a regular occurrence.
It being a regular occurrence doesn't stop him making a right royal fuss when it happens. I sharply told him to stop whining and be grateful it was the heel that had broken and not his ankle. I told him to give me the other shoe so I could break the heel to match, thus allowing him to walk without bobbing up and down as if he had one leg shorter than the other.
He gave it to me all right, but not in a way I cared for. He kicked it off in a temper. It flew over my head and landed with a resounding thud on the bonnet of a parked car, setting off its alarm. It screeched a shattering protest into the night air. I hastily retrieved the glittery shoe, made sure it had done no structural damage and prayed that whoever owned the car was too far away to hear the sound of its distress and come racing to see who was abusing it.
Grabbing Twinks by the hand I hastened him in the direction of the taxis ignoring his bleating about the expensive tights on his shoeless feet being shredded. I had no sympathy. Any damage to his tights was entirely due to his own reckless behaviour.
The moment we got home and indoors I whipped up his short frock, whisked down his knickers and tights and spanked a message of disapproval regarding his action onto his bottom. It certainly wasn't one of our more harmonious evenings out.
Saturday was fine with only one minor drama occurring when a big moth made its debut in the bedroom while he was getting ready to go out. He didn't actually see it, but I did. I'd just come out of the shower and was rummaging in the drawer for fresh underwear when I caught a fluttering from the corner of my eye. My heart sank. It was a huge tiger moth and even I felt repulsed enough to break out in a rash of goose pimples at sight of its furry wings a
nd thick body. He was engrossed in applying his foundation and hadn't spotted it. I knew the moment he did all hell would break loose. We'd have mass panic with him seeing portents of doom all around. He has a notion that moths work in cahoots with the grim reaper. He'd insist I call everyone in our address book to make sure they were okay and hadn't died or were in the process of dying. I wouldn't get any sleep because he'd be shaking me awake every five minutes to check that the horrible moth hadn't harvested my soul.
The beast was hovering around the lamp on his side of the bed, which was on because it was grey and rainy outside. Nonchalantly strolling over to the bed I tried to catch the moth in my cupped hands, but the hairy fiend evaded me and to my horror fluttered in the direction of the light above the dressing table mirror. It obviously had a desire to be in the spotlight. I lunged for it batting it with the tips of my fingers to make it change course, losing my balance in the process. As I plunged to the floor with an almighty crash it thankfully bobbed out of the bedroom onto the landing. I hastily used my foot to close the door before it bobbed back in. Twinks gave a shriek, clapped a hand to his chest and demanded to know what the hell I was doing, as I'd scared the crap out of him. I claimed to have tripped over my own feet and left it at that.
I tracked down the moth on the landing and successfully caught and released it back into the wild via the bathroom window. No doubt it would later meet up with its mates and tell of being pursued by a silent, wild-eyed, naked human lunatic. The things you do for love, and a bit of peace and quiet.