Boys & Girls

by Paul Burston

  ‘Everything’s hard,’ Dad said. ‘Life is hard. We gave you the best start we could…’

  I watched them digesting the fact that education wasn’t going to save me. I was surprised too. It was my only contingency plan.

  ‘Wendy,’ Dad said, ‘it might be…say you went to a couple of parties, met some boys…’

  ‘No,’ I said, and ‘No,’ Mum said at the same time. She shook her head. ‘She’s always been like this.’

  When she went up the stairs, Dad and I sat together.

  ‘Wendy,’ he said, ‘you can hold your head up while you drink your fucking tea.’

  Mum took me to the pantomime of Peter Pan when I was six. When her daughter’s gone, Wendy – all grown up, a sensible mother now – walks into the empty room. I remember the stage bathed in indigo, the woman stopping when she sees the white curtain belling back from the window.

  As a kid, I’d thought that was a mean thing to do to an old friend – but perhaps she’d known for years that this was how it would be. Maybe, before she went and shut the window, she looked up into the sky, to see if she could catch a glimpse of vanishing light. But that little girl’s room would still be empty.

  EXPENDABLE CHARACTERS

  HELEN SANDLER

  The sword suited her. So did the doublet. In fact, Rachel looked even more dashing in costume than she did in uniform, which was saying something. Alex was revelling in their time alone in the school hall, rehearsing their double-act away from the interfering teacher who was directing the show. Much of their wordplay might be meaningless to a modern audience, but Alex liked to think that the sheer wit and charisma emanating from herself and Rachel would impel the crowd to cackle at their codpiece puns.

  They both had strong voices and their lines were bouncing off the walls. Rachel made a knightly flourish with her expressive right hand as she performed her next line; Alex held her teasing gaze and stepped closer to fire back her favourite riposte, imagining all the while that they were centre stage at the Royal Exchange.

  At the end of the scene, her new friend grinned broadly at her. ‘We are the best expendable characters,’ she declared, ‘ever to appear on the Shakespearean stage… in a secondary school context.’

  Alex glowed and preened. She might be going to her friend Laura’s house after school and out with Paul at the weekend, but it would be Rachel’s words that found their way into her diary when she next wrote it up.

  ***

  ‘Do you think your Alex Didsbury has started something with that Rachel girl from the Lower Fifth?’ Miss Salmon asked Miss Finch, refilling her wine glass.

  ‘Oh you and your baby dykes,’ said Miss Finch in mock irritation. ‘You’re more interested in their adolescent fumblings than in ours.’

  ‘So you think there are adolescent fumblings going on?’

  ‘Frankly, Irene, I don’t think they’d know the word “sapphic” if you chalked it on the blackboard during double Greek.’

  ‘Well, I saw them in the hall at lunchtime, rehearsing in full male drag, just the two of them.’

  ‘That’s because I told them to do exactly that,’ said Miss Finch, pouring salt from a designated eggcup onto the middle of her plate. She liked salt as much as Miss Salmon liked spice. ‘They have some rather tedious scenes together and I don’t see why the other girls should have to sit in the wings while they show off their elocution every other day. They can manage perfectly well without me.’

  ‘They’re not the only ones,’ muttered Miss Salmon.

  ‘This basket looks dirty!’ said Laura, the least sophisticated and most sex-obsessed of the friends. They were in the queue at the Co-op in their own clothes, having changed out of their uniforms together in the cloakroom.

  Alex wasn’t entirely sure what Laura meant and didn’t particularly want to know, but Katy chipped in with, ‘Yeah, we’re all going to go back to yours, drink the wine and then take turns with the cucumber!’

  If they carried on with such immature jokes, thought Alex, the cashier might notice they were underage. Then again, the content was not dissimilar to her stage dialogue with Rachel. Every time she thought of Rachel she had a funny feeling in her stomach… probably nerves about the performance. She tried to join in with the others as they all walked round to Laura’s, where they would have the house to themselves for the evening. She would find it easier when she’d had a drink and started to relax.

  As it happened she relaxed a bit too much. She was feeling quite hazy as she lay back on Laura’s bed and watched the tassled lampshade sway from side to side. Laura and Katy were arguing about something to do with Culture Club. Something about the lyrics to the latest single.

  ‘Alex!’ Laura shouted at the top of her voice, trying to get her attention.

  ‘What?’ Alex rolled on her side and stuck her head over the edge of the bed for a good look at Laura, whose face was looming in and out of focus.

  ‘Ohhh!’ With a shriek, Laura veered away.

  ‘Oh my god, were you going to kiss her?’ squealed Katy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Laura, ‘it was like you were going to kiss me!’ She laughed drunkenly. ‘You’re weird.’ She got up and stared at Alex. ‘Weeiiird. I only wanted to know the words to “Church of the Poison Mind”.’

  By Monday it was all forgotten and Alex had another rehearsal to look forward to. She and Rachel had agreed to run their lines over and over at lunchtime, until they were confident that they could deliver them at speed without tripping up. There was only a week to go till the first night and Alex had a tendency to get nervy around that time. She was already having dreams in which she didn’t know her lines or was pushed onstage in the wrong play.

  Rachel seemed to have no such fears. She had appeared in a professional production the previous term and was expecting to go to drama school eventually. Her confidence brought out Alex’s expansive side, made her bigger onstage and funnier off it.

  ‘I don’t think that was right,’ Alex said now. ‘The line before last – I think I lost a word. Let me just look at my script.’ As she walked back to the desk where she had left her things, Rachel intercepted her, waving her own script with that exaggerated flourish she used onstage.

  ‘Sirrah, allow me!’

  ‘Away, thou clotpole!’ Alex parried her away but Rachel hit back. They pushed and wrestled, the classroom furniture shunting away from them, till their arms locked over their heads. Time stood still. They were panting into each other’s faces.

  ‘What is going on here?’ The piercing voice of Miss Finch broke them apart.

  ‘Nothing, Miss Finch, we’re just practising our swordplay,’ said Rachel, composed in an instant.

  ‘That’s not what it looked like,’ said the teacher, her face a picture of outrage.

  ‘We’ll put everything back where it was,’ Rachel added with an angelic smile.

  ‘Yes, you certainly will. And you will not “rehearse” on your own any more,’ said Miss Finch.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Alex.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘You know why not. If you cannot maintain propriety then you cannot be trusted to be alone together.’

  ‘Are you getting at something?’

  There was a silence.

  Rachel was not to be left unanswered. ‘Miss Finch? Are you accusing us of something?’

  ‘Go outside now, girls,’ said the teacher, her face shutting down.

  As she and Rachel passed Miss Finch in the doorway, Alex saw three girls from her year standing in the corridor, all ears.

  ‘What exactly went on today?’ Miss Salmon asked when Miss Finch came in the door at 6.30.

  ‘I stayed late for rehearsal, as usual on a Monday.’

  ‘I mean,’ she said pointedly, ‘what happened at lunchtime?’

  ‘What?’ Miss Finch put down her briefcase and poured herself a gin and tonic.

  ‘It’s all round the school that you laid into those girls. People
seem to think you said something… odd.’

  ‘They were fighting in the classroom.’

  ‘Fighting?’

  ‘Playing at fighting, I should say.’

  ‘Oh, was it steamy?’

  ‘Irene! You’re as bad as they are.’

  ‘So, what did you say to them?’

  ‘I told them they couldn’t be left alone together.’

  ‘Well, you can see how that could be misinterpreted.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, dear. I’ll do the English sentence deconstruction. You can stick to the Greek.’

  ‘I do believe you’re frightened of the idea that something might be going on between them,’ said Miss Salmon triumphantly.

  ‘And you’re not? You’d like the whole school to be on some lesbian rampage, would you?’

  ‘It doesn’t reflect on you, you know.’

  ‘Either there’s nothing going on or there’s scandal in the school and everyone is under suspicion. There is no middle way.’

  ‘You sound like a paranoid nutcase.’

  ‘Thank you for your cutting analysis. When you force your own way out of the closet, you may lecture me.’

  Alex and Rachel were celebrities by the time the bell rang for the end of school – for having stood up to Miss Finch or for having been up to something ‘weird’, depending who was telling the story. It all made the official rehearsal with the teacher somewhat awkward and Alex was relieved to get out to the pub afterwards with Paul. Snogging him in the bus shelter killed time until the 48 arrived and it gave her a thrill in the cold air but there was no way she would have taken up his invitation to go back to his house at that hour. She waved to him from the top of the nightbus and glided through the city in a cider daze, then jumped off a stop early for a portion of chips and gravy.

  The food was wrapped in a newspaper story about a homosexual politician who had got into trouble. As she shovelled the slimy chips to her mouth at the kitchen table, Alex read the piece three times, wondering if many people were homosexual.

  She wiped her hands on the paper, threw it in the bin, turned off the kitchen light and stumbled up to bed, avoiding the squeaky stair so as not to wake her parents. She would be in trouble in the morning for coming home late but she might be able to knock half an hour off her actual arrival time under questioning.

  Lying in the dark under her brown flowered duvet, Alex tried to comprehend the bizarre happenings of the last few days. Girls’ faces, accusations, laughter… But none of it making any sense. She thought of how she and Rachel had ranted their way through their scenes at lunchtime, how they had launched themselves at each other… There was something… something she wanted to happen.

  But didn’t life always get strange and intense, just before a performance? Probably everything would seem better when they got the first night out of the way.

  AMBER

  THE ALBERT KENNEDY TRUST

  I was born in Chorley. I’m a late ’80s girl. I’m forever young. My earliest memory is from when I was about three or four years old. Me and my Grandma used to catch the bus to town every Saturday morning. My Grandma had trouble walking upstairs but she always walked up to the top deck with me. We sat on the top of the double decker bus and she gave me fudge. It makes my heart melt every time I remember that. I know she cared for me.

  My childhood was very different from what I see as a childhood. I can’t really remember much about the early years. I do remember secondary school. I went to the local school. I attended every day like a good girl should. But as the years went on, when I grew older, I felt ill. Not like having a cold ill. A different kind of ill. It turned out to be a mental illness. I am ninety-seven percent better now, by the way! But growing up I didn’t know this, so as I got older things at school became difficult and I didn’t know why.

  I didn’t really like school. I found life back then really difficult. I don’t really visit that place anymore as I’m over it. One subject I really enjoyed was Child Development. It was about learning how the baby or child developed physically and at what stages. Although most of it was paper-based studying in school I really enjoyed it.

  I have heard a little bit about anti-gay bullying in places like America and Canada, but not in the UK. I have not experienced anything like that, thank goodness. I have never witnessed anything with regards to someone being gay in school. I was bullied at school, but nobody ever knew about me being gay. I didn’t know myself. When I was at school I never saw anything about support groups for LGBT people. And if they had and people saw them looking at them they would more than likely get beaten up for looking at the poster. I do think society is more accepting of lesbian women than gay men.

  I suppose I always knew about my sexuality but I was never really sure. It’s difficult being young with everything going on in life. My mother knows. The older generation, they will never know. I know what the older generations of my family are like towards LGBT people.

  I have been with The Albert Kennedy Trust since I was eighteen years old. I am an Albert Kennedy girl! I started off meeting a mentor once a week for two years. We did so much good work. He was a good friend, someone to talk to who wouldn’t judge me. We were very similar. We got on so well. As I say about him – ‘he’s like me in a man’. He is a legend! Now I do talks for AKT, and I see a student social worker once a week. I thank AKT for being there.

  It’s pretty good going over personal things like this. It is stressful sometimes, but I am coping. I am happy. I want to continue studying and hopefully get a job helping people. I’ve always found learning and taking things in and storing them to be difficult. It still is, to this day. But I’m still learning. It’s an ongoing process. I am getting there. And when I do I will be so clever the world won’t know what’s hit it!

  INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS

  HELEN SANDLER

  Helen Sandler has written two novels, The Touch Typist and Big Deal, and edited Lambda-winning anthologies. Her poems and stories have appeared in Brand, Chroma and Smoke. She is an MC at London’s Bar Wotever and runs Tollington Press, publishing new writing by women.

  tollingtonpress.co.uk

  JAY BERNARD

  Jay Bernard is a writer and cartoonist who divides her time between Oxford and London. She is currently co-editor of Dissocia Zine and a student of English Literature. She has been featured in two anthologies, Voice Recognition and City State. Her first collection of poetry Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl was PBS pamphlet choice for summer 2008. Jay is also a recipient of the Foyle’s Young Poet of the Year Award and was champion at the London Respect Slam. Her first exhibition is scheduled to take place in St Andrews, in March 2011.

  brrnrrd.wordpress.com

  KAREN MCLEOD

  Karen McLeod is the author of the award winning In Search of the Missing Eyelash published by Vintage. She is a cabaret performer and recently retired air stewardess. She has worked as a cleaner, a life model and a balloon seller. She lives in south London with her record player.

  karenmcleod.info

  SOPHIA BLACKWELL

  Sophia Blackwell is a performance poet who has appeared at Glastonbury, The Big Chill, WOMAD and Wychwood Festivals and venues such as The Roundhouse and Soho Revue Bar. Her debut collection, Into Temptation, is available from Tollington Press and her journalism has been published in Trespass, Pen Pusher, and Rising.

  STELLA DUFFY

  Stella Duffy has written twelve novels, forty short stories, and eight plays. Her latest novel, Theodora, is published by Virago in summer 2010. In addition to her writing work, Stella is an actor and theatre director. She lives in south London with her wife, the writer Shelley Silas.

  stelladuffy.wordpress.com

  VG LEE

  VG Lee has written three novels including Diary of a Provincial Lesbian, and a short story collection As You Step Outside published by Tollington Press. She is also a stand-up comedian and a finalist in the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year 2010 competition.

  SINCE 1989 AKT HA
S SUPPORTED LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANS (LGBT) YOUNG PEOPLE (UP TO 25 YEARS OLD) WHO ARE HOMELESS OR LIVING IN A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT. MANY OF OUR YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE BEEN REJECTED BY THEIR PARENTS OR BULLIED AT SCHOOL JUST FOR BEING BRAVE ENOUGH TO COME OUT AS GAY.

  WE PROVIDE: Safe and supportive homes with LGBT Carers through our Supported Lodgings Scheme. We also have a range of organizations we refer to in cases where we cannot supply accommodation.

  More informal support by helping young people build positive independent futures through mentoring and befriending.

  Advocacy, information and support by phone, face to face or email: to help young people achieve their own tenancy, employment or return to education.

  Opportunities for young people to develop life skills to help them secure employment, their own tenancy or a place in higher education through our accredited training programme.

  In some circumstances we may be able to provide limited support to young people facing homelessness through our Emergency Support Pack; and for those young people we have worked with for some time we can, in certain circumstances, provide access to our Rainbow Starter Pack to help with the costs of moving into independent living.

  We also offer training and audit to mainstream housing and homelessness organizations to ensure they treat LGBT people with respect and fairness, as part of our ‘Making a Difference’ quality mark scheme.

  We have recently developed a new project with funding from the Forced Marriages Unit in response to an increasing number of young people from faith backgrounds contacting AKT who are being threatened with honour killings by their families who cannot accept their sexual orientation.