Boys & Girls

by Paul Burston

  My mum takes me over to my dad’s house and drives off before he and my step-mum come out. He and my step-mum come out and we get on our way to Christmas lunch with what, I guess, people refer to as extended family.

  On the way to what is possibly a second cousin’s house, dad talks and I listen. Dad talks about the state of the economy, family affairs in general, my cousin’s working hours, making the perfect steak, brand new property versus property with character, other topics that I forget. It’s unclear whether I’m required to provide input in this, so I don’t. I don’t say anything and instead I sit there nodding at the right points, maybe some wrong ones too, thinking: do I need another tattoo, must go to Iceland again soon, do I have Xanax with me – panic – wait, I do, steroids versus growth hormone, ‘Womanizer, woman-womanizer, you’re a womanizer’, Daniel’s lips, Daniel’s lips, Daniel’s eyes, Daniel’s lips.

  We get to what I still suspect is a second cousin’s house, I get ready for the worst and we go in.

  A large part of my family from my Dad’s side is quite disgustingly working class. There, I said it, they are working class. This cousin is a taxi driver (a taxi driver!). His wife is…oh I don’t know, I really don’t. And they have two sons, just a bit younger than me and neither of them has been to university.

  Every time I go back home to visit, I meet distant family members like these. So I see these people every 2–3 years on average and the interaction is always the same. Somehow, they take personal offense at my choice to live abroad, working on the assumption that I have rejected them and their lifestyles and that I have some superiority complex. The fact that this assumption is very nearly true doesn’t really help.

  Of course they are also racist, xenophobic and bigoted, not so much in a malicious, deliberately hateful way, but in the way that characterizes the uneducated working classes. These sentiments naturally hit red when I’m around: a traitor, a stuck up cunt that lives in England, an embarrassment of a country compared to the grandeur and superiority of Greece.

  For this Christmas lunch, I mostly get sweaty in a cardigan that I’m too scared to take off and listen to shocking conversations:

  My cousin asks me whether everyone in England is ugly and a fag and if all the women are sluts and crap in bed.

  My cousin’s wife shares the information that the whole of Northern Europe were climbing on trees and feeding on bananas around the same time when the glorious nation of Greeks had invented cutlery and cooked their meat. My cousin adds that they still don’t cook their meat in Northern Europe, in fact they eat raw elk and therefore they are very primitive.

  When the Muppets adaptation of A Christmas Carol comes on TV everyone gets enthusiastic and is amazed by this brand new production. I point out that this film is at least 15 years old but nobody believes me.

  When somebody (a cousin I don’t recognise?) questions the validity of A Christmas Carol featuring the Muppets because it shows Kermit and Miss Piggy as a family with children ‘even though Miss Piggy never had children’ I point out that it’s an adaptation of a Charles Dickens story, not a documentary. My cousin’s son picks on the name Charles (an unusual name to Greek ears), makes a connection with Prince Charles, who is English and therefore a fag. Everyone cracks up at this brilliant witticism.

  Around that point I drift off, start thinking about my new nose, imagine how amazing it would be to have the Australian personal trainer from my gym as a friend, make a resolution to try harder at the gym in the new year, cancel my resolution to try harder at the gym in the new year because it sounds too superficial, picture Daniel sitting at this Christmas table with me as my boyfriend, try to guess what my relatives would think if they knew I were gay but I have such a handsome boyfriend as Daniel (surely my gayness would be forgiven?), try to replay ‘Born To Run’ by Bruce Springsteen in real time in my head, plan the evening’s TV viewing.

  After some course or other I slip into the bathroom, lock the door and sit on the closed toilet lid. In my trouser pockets I find: two vials, one and two thirds Valium tabs (approx 8mg in total), two mobile phones (one pre-paid), a leather card wallet (no cash). In my cardigan pockets I find: a folded print-out of a map of central Athens, four Xanax tabs (10mg each). I crush all the pills, snort them using the rolled up map and lean back.

  DYING, AND OTHER SUPERPOWERS

  KRISTIAN JOHNS

  JOSHUA:

  I’ll remember my eighteenth birthday for three reasons. The first being that I turned eighteen.

  Well, duh.

  The second reason is because it was the day I got diagnosed with HIV. And the third? I made a mug explode.

  Yeah, that was a pretty hectic day.

  I suppose I should start by telling you about myself. This type of story always starts with that, doesn’t it? Ellie (my best mate) says it’s to help people ‘connect’ with the central character, i.e. me. She reads Harry Potter and all that kind of stuff, so I suppose she knows what she’s talking about.

  She’s making me write everything down so there’s a record of it. I think she wants to make me into some sort of tragic hero when I’m gone. Not that I give a shit. I’m going to be dead aren’t I? I don’t believe in the afterlife. Mind you, I’ve definitely been re-evaluating what I do and don’t believe in lately.

  I’m tall-ish — about 5’11’ or 180 centimetres if you’re using metric measurement. They make us use metric in school, but my mum’s always asking ‘what’s that in feet and inches?’ so I know both.

  Lookswise, I’m average, slender, verging on the skinny, although I’m told I’ll ‘fill out’ soon — usually by guys with beer bellies. Great. Looking forward to that. Dark hair, green eyes. Told good looking. I’ll stop before I start sounding like a lonely hearts ad.

  I spend my days at college doing an HND in Business Studies, my evenings playing on my Xbox and my nights having wet dreams about my mum’s boyfriend Stuart, who’s Daniel Craig’s double, and always walks around in tight briefs that purposely show off a pretty hefty cock.

  I know it’s hefty because I’ve sucked it. He had big balls, too, despite the fact he uses steroids. He called me into the bathroom to ‘chat’ once while he dried himself off after his shower. He got hard and I ended up sucking him off for a bit. He wanted to fuck me, but we heard my mum’s keys in the front door and I had to dive quickly out of bathroom so we wouldn’t get caught. I heard them going at it shortly afterward. Sounded like he was giving her a proper seeing to. I was next door, cock in hand, wishing he’d swing by and do the same to me.

  Despite everything that’s happened — I still definitely would — despite the fact he’s 43 and he’s boned my mum.

  Anyway, I’m getting distracted.

  The HIV thing.

  I only meant to go for a while without a condom, but I’m not going to lie — it felt fucking awesome. I mean, it was a compliment really, he just kept saying over and over how good I felt, and yeah — the thought of him coming inside me turned me on, so I let him. He came so hard I could actually feel him shooting inside me.

  Jesus, if I could just go back to that night and do it all over again, but safe this time, I would, but you don’t think about sitting in a badly decorated NHS consultation room getting told ‘the news’ by some doctor/nurse/counsellor/whatever when you’re straddling some fit 28 year old who’s going insane at the fact he’s got his bare dick inside you.

  But that’s exactly where I ended up, four months later on my eighteenth birthday. I knew I needed to get tested. You can hardly pick up a gay mag nowadays without getting saturated with ads begging you to have safe sex. And despite my shit judgement that night, I’m not stupid, I knew what I’d done and I knew what the risks were. I suppose getting tested on my eighteenth was symbolic. ‘Officially’ becoming a man meant I had to face up to it and stop pretending everything was OK.

  I suspected I’d got it. I’d had a nasty bout of flu a few weeks previously and I knew that’s one of the symptoms. But it was still a shock. This
cute Irish guy, Marco (apparently he had Italian blood), pricked my thumb with a needle and told me to come back in an hour. So I did.

  That’s when he told me I had HIV. And that’s when I made the mug explode.

  It happened like this: Marco called me in, smiled, but not too brightly, and invited me to sit down. You could tell he’d done the whole telling people thing a thousand times before. His delivery was perfect. It was matter-of-fact without being too cold and clinical.

  ‘Well, Josh, I’m sorry to say your test came back positive,’ he paused, letting me absorb it, ‘I’ll just give you a second…’

  I sat there, blunted. The room swayed. I couldn’t hear properly and I didn’t know which way was up, like I’d been thrown into a swimming pool. All I could think was: How am I going to tell my mum?

  Acid belched up from my stomach and into my mouth. My ears had gone pop, everything sounded muffled and slow, like the batteries of reality were running out. I felt this rumbling sensation. My head was tight and I couldn’t think — I was panicking. Marco leant forward, put his hand on my arm and said, ‘Josh, are you OK?’

  I knocked his arm away, and as I did, felt a tightening sensation around my hand, like it was inside one of those inflatable pulse monitors they measure your heart rate with. I shook it instinctively, and the air around it blurred — like a heat shimmer. Beyond it, I noticed Marco’s mug on the desk and as I did, the heat-shimmer gathered instant velocity and shot towards it.

  And it exploded, and I mean really exploded. Not cracked, not shattered, but genuinely whoops-I-stepped-on-a-land-mine detonated. Great shards of cheap, yellow ceramic hammered into the wall behind the desk, and caused all the papers and files on it to develop coffee coloured freckles. The wall was a river of brown blood.

  An open mouthed Marco gawked at me, then back at the coffee drizzling down the shrapnelled wall, then at the closed, intact window behind him, as if to check Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t risen from the dead and cracked off another shot for old time’s sake.

  I grabbed my rucksack and ran. I heard him shout my name behind me, but I was already running out of the main door. I ran for longer than I should have, I think I ran nearly all the way home. I can’t remember. My head felt like it was being drilled into from both temples. I crumpled onto my bed and slept for thirty-six hours solid.

  I won’t bore you with a long description of what happened when I broke the news of my diagnosis to my Mum, but yeah, it was pretty gruesome. There was a stunned silence, followed by a fair amount of crying, a few angry exchanges, a lot of talking and then finally, reassurances that she would support me in any way she could.

  I had pretty much the same with Ellie, although she was less diplomatic. She slapped me round the face and called me a stupid cunt, then broke down in tears and held onto me for dear life, as though she expected me to evaporate or drop dead on the spot.

  Sometimes I’m so glad I’m gay — girls are weird.

  Life went almost back to normal. I almost forgot about the incident in the clinic that day. I certainly didn’t tell anyone about it. I carried on with college. Mum ordered a shitload of books on AIDS off the internet and would make a point of turning up the volume if anything about it came on the news. I suppose it was her way of telling me it was alright.

  Stuart was totally freaked. I could tell. He started wearing clothes in the house for a start, and there were no more naked, post-shower chats and definitely none of the ‘other’ stuff. He was clearly relieved at his lucky escape, he’d come within an inch (or about nine) of fucking me that day.

  After that he just turned into a dick. He’d grab my mum whenever I walked in the room and get off with her in front of me, as if to prove to me how straight he was. Most of the time he regarded me with barely concealed disgust. I understand all that fake-straight-repressed-sexuality-self-hatred crap — really I do, but it still pissed me off.

  Things came to a head in more ways than one when I came home to find my mum and him having a full-on slanging match in the lounge.

  ‘I don’t care if you want to spend more time with me!’ My mum was saying hotly, ‘He’s eighteen years old! He’s just been told he has HIV! He needs me! I’m not throwing my son out on his ear!’

  Stuart was complaining back, ‘All I’m saying is that it’s time he started fending for himself, Lorraine, he put his hands on her shoulders in a pretty good impression of someone who gives a shit, ‘he needs to stop hanging around with that girl and get some proper mates — you know — people like him, people who —’

  ‘Who what, Stuart?’ I asked. They hadn’t noticed me standing in the doorway.

  He fumbled. ‘Josh, hey, mate, I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Clearly. So are you going to finish your sentence?’ I lounged casually against the doorframe, ‘people who what, Stuart? People who have HIV?’

  The reply came instantly, ‘I wasn’t talking about that.’

  I snorted ‘Ah, so you mean the other thing — people who like getting their dick sucked by other guys, perhaps? Is that what you were talking about? Well we should both find some mates like that, shouldn’t we? After all, that type of thing is right up your street, isn’t it Stuart?’

  I couldn’t stop. All the resentment, bitterness, regret, fear and anger at everything that had happened swelled up in me like bile, and I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Oh, no wait, of course it’s not, because we all know which category you belong in, don’t we, Stuart? Closet queer! That’s right, isn’t it? Or did I —’

  ‘— You shut your fucking mouth!’

  ‘— get it wrong? Is it that you like a bit of both? Is the idea of having a mother and her son what turns you on?’

  ‘What is he talking about, Stuart?’ my mother’s voice chimed in.

  ‘Keep out of this, Lorraine!’

  ‘I will not keep out of this! Don’t you tell me what to do! What is he talking about?’

  I was yelling now, there was a rumbling noise coming from somewhere, like a low-flying jet, building and getting ever nearer, till it began to drown us out.

  ‘Didn’t he tell you, mum? Didn’t he tell you about the day I sucked his dick while you were at work? Did he not tell you the only reason he didn’t fuck me till his legs buckled was that you came home early?! Isn’t that right Stuart?’

  ‘You shut the fuck —’

  ‘Stuart! What is he —’

  ‘— up, you fucking queer cunt!’

  ‘— talking about?’

  He whirled on her. ‘Just shut your fucking mouth for one fucking second, Lorraine! All you ever do is talk, talk, talk! The only time you shut up is when you’ve got a cock in your mouth!’

  ‘Don’t talk to my mother like that!’ I shouted above the rumbling-without-a-source, which was getting louder by the second.

  He span back round, his face centimetres from mine. ‘Or what, gay boy?’ he hissed loudly, ‘You want to start with me, do you?’

  A vein bulged in his forehead. He looked huge. I think he’d been on the steroids again. His voice grew louder.

  ‘You fucking lying prick! I ought to break your fucking neck for what you just said! You lying, AIDS infested—’ He raised his arm to hit me and I flinched.

  ‘YOU LAY ONE FINGER ON MY SON AND SO HELP ME GOD, I’LL—’

  ‘—queerbag piece of shit!’

  ‘—KILL YOU!’ My mum grabbed Stuart’s raised arm and he batted her away. She came in again and he swung his fist at her, connecting with her cheekbone. She fell back. Hard. Blood already oozing from the cut he’d given her. He went to hit her again.

  ‘GET THE FUCK OFF OF HER!’

  My voice boomed out like an explosion, stopping him dead in his tracks. The rumbling became an earthquake. Photo frames and knick knacks rattled a melody on the mantelpiece. A picture fell off the wall — nobody looked at it.

  I fixed him an icy glare and walked towards him purposefully. The air seemed to whirl around me, my clothes and hair whipping in t
he current. My eyes grew hot. I kept advancing.

  Stuart just stared at me with a shocked expression on his face. He looked around as if hoping to find someone behind him — the real object of my focus — but I carried on glaring, walking, arms outstretched, pulling the churning air from around me wrapping it like cyclones around my forearms. I was seething with some unseen energy — starting in my toes, a sensation like billions of tiny bubbles travelling upwards over the surface of my skin, up my back, spreading out towards my shoulders and down my arms, building towards a crescendo in my hands. Instinctively I threw them out in front of me, fingers splayed.

  The air around my forearms shimmered — the same as before — and I saw…something…shoot from my hands, like an invisible jet of water. I actually saw the air part around it as it rocketed and rippled towards him. It hit him square in the chest and suddenly he was nothing more than a rag doll, flying through the air. My head buzzed, crackling with electricity. Everything seemed to slow right down and I was just a helpless observer, watching Stuart as he floated in slow motion towards the big bay window at the end of the room.

  Someone — I don’t know if it was me — shouted ‘NO!’ and the world sped up again. The buzzing in my head became a chainsaw. Stuart shot like a bullet towards the window. I screamed, clutching my hands to my temples — all I could think of was stopping him from smashing through it.

  And just liked that, he stopped. And I mean right there, in mid air.

  I stood, speechless as he hung motionless for about ten seconds, his eyes bulging at me with a mixture of terror and disbelief. We carried on looking at each other. There was no sound anywhere. Then, I felt a sharp twanging sensation in between my eyes, as if some cord in my mind had snapped, and he dropped to the floor. Sound exploded back into the world. I could hear my mum screaming, a car alarm blasting. Stuart clambered unsteadily to his feet croaking ‘What the fuck?!’ There was a dark patch on the front of his jeans.

  I gaped at my hands, turning them over a couple of times, but my vision was blurring and I felt unsteady. I looked around the room, unfocused and disoriented, and in a weak voice said, ‘Mum?’