Tom Houghton

by Todd Alexander

  Mal came every day to the hospital. The first few days while I was drugged and dazed, and every single day since I’d returned to consciousness. He never passed judgement over what I had done, never asked about the silver suit or the smouldering bonfire. Every day without fail he just told me how glad he was that I was all right, how much he would have missed me had I succeeded, and that no matter how low I felt, he promised me life was going to get better. I was young and stupid, but I could tell he too was nursing a bruised ego, an aching heart. Mum’s spiral affected him too. He never let on how much he liked her but I could tell by the way his face lit up that she meant everything to him and one day he planned on marrying her and creating a life for the three of us.

  ‘It may not feel like it now,’ he said to me one evening after his delivery shift when the nurse agreed to let him in outside visiting hours, ‘but everything you feel inside your head and your heart, bro, is completely natural. Believe me, you are going to grow up and look back on this time and wonder why the hell it all felt so fucked. I promise you that, Tom, you will get better and stronger every single day.’

  And in some respects, I suppose, he was right. He saved the real bombshell for my last day in hospital, again building up to it by telling me that my doctors didn’t think I was well enough to hear the news but he knew me better than that, knew I was man enough to take it on the chin. Mum had lost her son, my brother, after one of her spirals. She’d checked herself into the sanctuary but not told anyone, simply upped and disappeared one day, leaving three-month-old Liam at home with his dad. They thought she’d been murdered or something. That was her first one, the first anyone knew of, a spiral so all-encompassing Liam’s dad went to court and got custody of him and then took him away to live in Perth. The news that I had a brother did not shock me as much as it ought to have, because all I could think of now were the times when my grandmother looked after me as a kid, when for weeks at a stretch we would go ‘on holidays’ and when I returned to tell Mum all about them, she was never as enthusiastic or interested as I wanted her to be. How foolish and ignorant I’d been, to never have realised what was wrong with my mother. And now look what I had gone and done – so consumed with not being me that I had failed to save Mum from not wanting to be her.

  Mal explained that conversations had already taken place over who should look after me, so I went to live at his house and he paid for his auntie to fly over from New Zealand. She looked after me when he was working late, or early. Between the two of them, they never left me alone. He lived too far away from my old school and said that when the New Year began, he would look at taking me to a different school, get a brand-new start.

  He brought most of my possessions into his house for me, the piles of magazines I’d not had the energy to burn, but they lay untouched in my room. He brought videos on an almost daily basis but as I sat there watching them with him and his auntie, my mind wandered and I could not engage, though I pretended well enough to get away with it, I presumed. On the weekends he took me places to do things I had never before imagined doing. We kayaked and abseiled and did some boxing lessons and all those sorts of things fathers and sons would normally do in my fairytale view of that relationship, at least.

  Mum’s doctors refused to let me see her. Mal tried to explain that this was a bad spiral, that it was going to take longer for her to pull herself out of. I know he went to see her often, could tell in the shifty way he made up an excuse as to why he was late home from work. But he never spoke to me about those visits, just updated me on her progress, or lack thereof, from time to time.

  I suffered a series of nightmares during a week when Mal had back-to-back shift work. His auntie Kiara would come rushing into my room and rub my back as I turned away from her, offering to deliver me warm milk, but I could say nothing. She was a stranger and, sweet though she was, I knew she hated Australia and did not want to be here tending to someone else’s child, some crazy who’d dumped the kid with her nephew. The final nightmare happened after Mal had come home from work. I lay in bed wet with perspiration and finally found the courage to walk down the hall to his bedroom. He always slept with the door open and I crept under his sheet as soundlessly as I could. I edged up next to him and felt he was naked. Every ounce of my will silently egged me to turn to face him and place my body on top of his. I could be for him what Mum could never. I imagined our two bodies pressed together, how firm he would feel beneath me, the wiriness of his hairy chest and legs. I longed to press my lips against his. I would never disappoint him in the way Mum had, I’d never go off and leave him, no matter how bad things in my mind might seem. If he promised to be with me, to stay with me forever, then I would be with Mal until his dying day. I enveloped myself in the sound of his soft snores and the strong scent of his flesh and as I cast my mind back to our weekend away, drifting in the boat together, watching him shower naked, sharing my first ever beer, I eventually fell to sleep.

  I knew as soon as I woke that a dark cloud hung over the house. Mal and Kiara were whispering in staccato tones. It sounded like she was lecturing him, telling him to do something he was reluctant to do. I was still in his bed, could have stayed there all day, but this would have been what Mum would choose to do. I put my hand over my stiff penis and walked into the bathroom to force out a wee. The flush was enough to make the hushed kitchen conversation stop.

  ‘Morning . . .’ I said as I entered the room.

  Kiara looked at Mal and gestured with her eyebrows for him to say something.

  ‘You know I love you like my own son, right, Tom? I need you to know I think of you as my son, eh? You know what that means?’

  I nodded my head, but I wasn’t completely following.

  ‘Mate, they’re gonna be looking for any reason to take you away from me. And what does that mean? You don’t even wanna know, trust me. Foster homes, more arseholes than you could ever imagine. You can’t sleep in my bed, all right? That can never happen again. I had no clothes on, eh, mate? You imagine what someone would say they come in here and see you in there with me? I’d be in prison and where would this leave you and me both, eh?’

  I couldn’t respond to him, hated being berated for something that had felt so beautiful and liberating.

  ‘So I need you to promise you won’t come into my room again, eh?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said half-heartedly.

  ‘Nah, I mean it, eh, bro? You need to say you promise. If you’re scared or have a nightmare or something, you call out for me and I’ll be there, but no coming into my room. Or Kiara’s, eh? You stay in your own bed. You promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  I knew what he was saying made some sense, but we weren’t in the outside world, were we? It was just us and we shared something nobody else could understand. Most of his words were lost on me, except for the way he’d said I love you and I clung to that for dear life. I was, despite the lecture, buoyant.

  ‘Good. Now let’s pretend like this never happened,’ he said, causing Kiara to tut.

  • • •

  More visits to the mind doctors occurred. Mal insisted on coming in with me, though he never interrupted. When we left what turned out to be my last consultation, we drove away in hysterics at how stupidly they were treating me. That was a good moment, an ounce of gold after months of panning through mud.

  ‘They don’t know a fucking thing, I reckon,’ Mal said, after taking the piss out of one doctor’s accent. ‘Now, Thomas, I wonder would you care to inform me of . . .’

  ‘I can just tell they’re trying to trick me into something,’ I said to him after I had finished chuckling. ‘I’m not gonna fall for that.’

  • • •

  I thought about Katharine Hepburn a lot during those weeks. I wondered why she never bothered responding to my letter. As more of her telemovies and interviews showed on our screens that summer I tried in vain to dig beneath the iconic exterior, to find a semblance of the girl who’d discovered her brother’s body then ch
anged her birthday to be his. Without her blessing, what hope was there for me to be Thomas Houghton?

  Mal’s company made cuts after the Christmas break. His was one of the first jobs to go. The new school year was getting closer but I was still not enrolled in the local high school, as Mal and I could not agree whether I was ready to return; I thought yes, he was not so sure. It was Kiara who suggested we all return to New Zealand. It would be temporary, just until Mum got better and got out. I still wasn’t allowed to see her or call her, but I had been writing her letters that remained unsent. I figured these would be good for her to read when she was well enough.

  In New Zealand more of the family would be around to help Mal out, and he could return to his job helping one of his brothers with removals. I could tell Mal was not keen on the idea and had it not been for me, maybe he would have chosen another path but as it was Mal’s father reluctantly agreed to pay for all of our fares.

  Just before we left, I returned to the locked-up house in Seven Hills. Mal waited outside while I went in to gather up any last possessions. It was stale and cloying inside and for the first time I could see the house objectively. It hadn’t been updated since Pa had it built; Mum’s nicotine sheen lay over every surface. I didn’t want anything from my bedroom except the Hepburn biography. I’m not sure why I still wanted to hold on to it, but it seemed to beckon. I went into Pa’s room and took one of his large handkerchiefs to remember him by. My whole life, he’d always had one on hand when needed – always freshly laundered and ironed, never used. It was nothing really, but I felt it his due. In the backyard I noticed something, a hungry cat maybe, had dug up angry bird and her feathers were strewn about. In the garage the fire and coils of rope had been cleared and I wondered when Mal had thought to do this.

  As we drove to the airport in a rented car, we passed my school and, next to it, the high school where Fitz, Harlen and Spencer were all destined to fail. They would barely remember me after I was gone but, for the first time in my life, that felt okay.

   Thirty

  I got up early on my last day in London, while the sun was still shy. It had been Hanna’s idea for me to write letters to, as she termed them, ‘the affected’. I’d called her yet again and told her of my demise, my meltdown. She’d suggested that written apologies had a gravity to them, a millennia of tradition that made them feel more robust and heartfelt.

  ‘And when will my apology arrive?’ she asked.

  ‘Apologise to you? For what?’

  ‘For ever questioning that everything I say is the best advice you will ever receive.’

  It felt rather archaic to be writing letters, but given my behaviour, anything else felt wholly insubstantial.

  The first one I wrote was to Victor. I admitted being an alcoholic, something that felt freeing rather than imprisoning. I swore to him that I would never drink again, that without his friendship I was a lesser man and even if he never offered me work again, I would grieve the loss of his presence in my life as friend and confidant. I told him I loved him and he was the one man in my life who’d proved to be a constant.

  I wrote one letter each to the three producers of the Edinburgh run of Who’s Afraid. I confessed that I was an alcoholic. I went on to explain that the drunken ramblings of a bitter, lonely and soul-searching Australian mess bore little resemblance to fact. My suggestion that Victor’s insistence on hiring me was evidence of his personal integrity and generosity was not, I hoped, lost on each of them.

  Mickey the festival head came next. Apologising to him was one of the hardest – how to word around the delicacy of the situation? I decided on self-deprecation, suggesting that if ever his wife wanted to see the world’s least attractive and most self-deluded specimen I would, at her order, agree to do any demeaning work she could dream up and pass on my pay to the charity of her choice.

  The film producer I’d had lunch with received a note, really, nothing more. While I acknowledged that her princely offer was the highest compliment I had ever received, I was not in a position to accept it. I could only plead to the reasoning gods of comeuppance that this most difficult decision would not prove to be my only chance of working with her, and a sealing of my fate as pantomime fodder.

  I woke Lexi to say goodbye and gave her the prepaid credit card I’d purchased. It was my entire life savings aside from enough money to see me home via a stopover in Tokyo, not that she was to know.

  ‘I want you to promise me you will only use this money for further travel,’ I pleaded and I believed her when she said she would. ‘I hope when I grow up I turn out to be someone like you.’

  ‘Before you go, Dad, I need to know . . . Something I’ve always wanted to ask you but couldn’t, not before our chat last night. Why did you go out with Mum?’

  ‘You know it’s complicated . . .’

  ‘No, it’s not. I think you owe it to me. And she wasn’t the only woman either, was she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you always knew you were gay.’

  I sat on the side of the bed; she shuffled slightly to give me more room. ‘I always knew I was attracted to men, yes. Without doubt. For as long as I can remember there has been a magnetism of the male form that I cannot ignore. But you know how I told you about being bashed by those straight guys in New Zealand, my stupid advances on poor Mal, a failed tryst with one of his nephews . . . ? Well, every one of those led me to pain and rejection. I didn’t want to be gay, I think that was it, if I’m being honest with myself. Maybe I still don’t want to be. And at university, with everyone more or less on an even field, I had a chance at a new start. Sure, it was easier to be gay as a student but maybe I still couldn’t face what I had become . . .’

  ‘And Mum?’

  ‘She was lovely when I met her. We didn’t fall in love, not by a long shot. But we became good friends and we were both into drama and the theatre and we’d just go and see movies for the hell of it, skip class and see the very next session that was on, regardless of what was showing. Then we tried an E together for the first time and it was like all the weight of my past had melted away and there were no restraints, only unlimited possibilities.’

  Lexi yawned and I asked if I was boring her, though I knew I was not. She elbowed me in the ribs gently, encouraging me to continue.

  ‘Well, not that first night but a few nights later, Lou threw a party and there was this boy there – Anthony. My heart went a-pitter-pat and all that. He was just the most delicious thing I had ever seen but of course he was straight. I really think, obsessions aside, he was the first boy I had genuine feelings for. He left the party and I was so upset, but then the drug taking started and somehow your mother and I ended up in an embrace, and then things started happening. Needless to say it was my first time – with anyone, because you can’t count Mal’s nephew, we didn’t even touch each other, just watched each other play – oh god, too much information?’

  ‘Jeez, Dad, seriously? You’d think I’d be used to you by now.’

  ‘I guess, sorry . . .’ I took a deep breath. Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about this time in my life since the events themselves, hadn’t wondered why, or wished otherwise. ‘So that first time was abysmal. I was drunk and stoned and couldn’t . . . well, you know, and so I was mortified. I liked Lou, but more than that, I think I still craved a life like the men I fantasised about. I thought a woman, someone softer than me, might make me feel fulfilled, masculinise me. So I kept trying with Lou until we got it right . . . and she was a very patient partner, she taught me so much and then, well . . . you came along.’

  ‘And that was the end of that.’

  ‘Well, no actually, it wasn’t. I was over the moon at the prospect of having a child and I’m brave enough to admit that maybe part of that was about being a patriarch, you know, a power trip of a kind. And when you came along I couldn’t believe you were mine – didn’t for a little while – but then the reality of baby life set in and I was terrible at it. Lou and I fought, a lot,
and I was out till all hours drinking with uni mates, then I would come home and Lou would be angry and tired, but then I was too useless to be much help. And so that bitter cycle continued for months. I was so dejected, so disappointed in myself, but you need to know something, Lexi, it was always me that was fucked up, not Lou. I met a boy – who am I kidding? lots of boys – and I came to the realisation that this was the worst possible environment for you to be brought up in and I thought, I honestly, hand-on-my-heart swear to you right now, believed that you would be better off without some gay desperado in your life. I wanted to be there for you, wanted to be a father, to face my responsibilities like so many of the men I wanted to emulate, but in reality I just couldn’t. I was weak and I was insecure and I would never have been the role model you needed.’

  ‘I disagree . . .’

  ‘Well, I thank you, sweetheart, very much. But back then? I could barely stand myself, so doubted a little girl would have been all that fond of me. And when I left, Lou took you away, and I didn’t fight her because I agreed that away from me was better for you. But you know the rest, honey, Lou fell in with the wrong crowd, and now here we are, Fucked-Up Family, proud medal bearers.’

  Lexi ignored my attempt at humour. ‘What about the other women you slept with? If you were so drawn to men, why fuck around with their feelings?’

  ‘It wasn’t all so one-sided, not every time. Sex has always been fucked up in my life. Invariably the men I fancy are straight. Women tend to fancy me. When I realised I could perform for both, well, I took it when I could. I would always tell a woman I was bi, just to set the record bent. Sure, some of them fell in love with me. But like some of the straight boys who played with me that I fell heavily for, if you go into things knowing the facts then you’re a fool to let your mind trick you into thinking otherwise. I love women. More than men, as friends. Men make lousy friends. I need women in my life but not sexually, and I never do that any more. But no regrets, Lexi, not now. I hope you don’t regret the decisions of your mother or me either.’