I remained rigid, terrified to move. Because surely for this fiction-in-progress to remain guilt-free, we both had to continue to pretend to be asleep.
Glen, behind me, didn’t move. He even relaxed his arm a little for a while, but just as I concluded that he really was asleep, his hand moved down, then slipped under my T-shirt.
As it gently stroked its way up my chest, my body tingled all over. Every cell felt invigorated and alive with sensitivity to his touch, so incredibly, unreasonably sensual, so irredeemably ecstatically perfect, that there was no debate possible as to whether this really was what I wanted. Sex with Hannah, even at its best, even at its most frenetic, had never come close to this sensation of simply being held, simply being caressed by these heavy rough hands.
“Do you want me to fuck you?”
I ceased, momentarily, to breathe. “I’m sorry?” I said, stupidly, pointlessly. Because we both knew that I had heard exactly what Glen had just said.
“Do you want me to fuck you?” Glen asked again.
“Would you want to do that?” I asked, genuinely astonished.
I felt Glen shrug behind me. “Sure,” he said, shuffling down until his dick was against my arse. “Why not?”
“I . . . I never did that,” I admitted.
“Hum,” Glen said, now reaching down and pulling down my boxer shorts. As he did this he lightly touched my dick, and it twitched and lurched towards the hand of its own accord.
“Have you done it before?”
“What?”
“Fucked.”
“Sure.”
“A guy, I mean,” I said.
I sensed Glen shrugging again. “A hole’s a hole,” he said, and even if I remained as aroused as before, something bright, something hopeful that I hadn’t even been aware of, faded, and I became aware of it now only by its absence.
“So?” Glen asked.
“No,” I said. “No thanks. Sorry.” I felt absurd for thanking Glen for the offer, for apologising, but I simply didn’t know how I was supposed to respond.
Glen took my hand and pulled it behind me, and just for a moment, for no apparent reason except perhaps some childhood terror, some memory of James, I imagined that Glen was going to twist my arm – literally. In fact, what Glen did was pull my hand down and place it next to his own dick. I stroked it a little, then grasped it.
“D’you want to suck it?” Glen asked, and though the idea hadn’t yet crossed my mind, though I hadn’t yet projected any further than these adolescent fumblings, the second it became an option, it was exactly what I wanted to do.
After less than a minute, Glen pushed me away – had I been doing it wrong? – and started to bring himself off, vigorously. He groaningly, gaspingly came over his own chest, and then, astonishingly, rolled away.
I lay there on one elbow, peering, in the gloom, at Glen’s back. “Glen?” I said eventually.
“Go to sleep, dude.”
“But I haven’t . . .”
“Go to fucking sleep.”
I rolled onto my back and lay quite still until Glen began to snore, and then finished off myself in the hope that this, once done, would enable me to sleep.
But despite the whisky, and despite the late hour, sleep remained an impossibility, and so I lay there and frowned and fretted and wondered what had just happened, and tried to comprehend how I had been so efficiently reduced to the role of insecure adolescent.
In the morning, though the weather had improved, Glen wanted to go. As I had been ready to leave pretty much since we got there, I didn’t argue, but Glen’s sudden brusque nature concerned me, and I struggled to understand why he would want to miss out on fishing on the first sunny day that we had had.
At the farmhouse, Betty revealed that she was nobody’s fool, and asked Glen to estimate the weight of the two fish we had eaten. “We only ate one,” Glen told her, and Betty grinned at his admission, at her victory, and added a tenner onto the bill.
The first half of the drive took place in complete silence, but just past Watford Gap, I asked, “Are you annoyed about something, Glen?”
“Uh?” Glen said, without glancing over.
“Did I do something wrong last night? Because, you know, this is all pretty new to me.”
Glen wrinkled his brow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
I sighed and watched a few miles go past before I said, “You don’t seem very happy this morning. Is it to do with what happened last night?”
I watched as Glen took a deep breath, held it for such a long time that I feared that he might collapse at the wheel, and then, still staring straight ahead, said, “Nothing happened last night, Cliff. Nothing. So just shut the fuck up.”
Unable to think of any reasonable way to proceed, I turned my body and watched the trees spinning past the side window. Eventually the blur tired my eyes, and so I closed them, and then at some point I fell asleep. When I woke up, Glen had opened the passenger door and was holding my bag. “This is your stop, cowboy,” he said loudly, and I blinked and struggled to focus.
* * *
The first time I was called queer was at secondary school. It must have been about my third day and a guy called Stephen Hawking (not the Stephen Hawking, I hasten to add) told me to stamp on a worm. I said “no” and when he started to walk towards me, I picked it up and threw it into the bushes.
“Fucking queer,” Stephen declared, and then, one hour later, when I got to the classroom, he told Nigel Ramsey, the class bully, “That’s the one.”
“Right,” Ramsey replied, with meaning.
I had no idea what the word queer meant, but I could tell that it wasn’t a good thing; I knew they weren’t complimenting me on my empathy for worms.
From that point on, the die was cast. The class naturally separated out into different layers of sediment: the bullies at the top, the smellies and the queers at the bottom, and everyone else floating precariously in between. It seemed that there was no way to change category, or at least, no way to rise in the pecking order. The only direction, if you momentarily dropped your guard, was down. In fact, it later transpired, there was a way to beat the system, but I didn’t know that yet.
I was constantly harassed, incessantly picked on. Some days someone would steal my homework and run across the playing field pulling out pages. This was called “paperchase”. Other days, Hawking and Ramsley would grab my feet, pull me to the floor, and then, taking one leg each, run across the field, dragging me along my back, ripping my uniform, before finally running one each side of a tree. This was called “tree treatment”.
My parents’ reaction to all of this was to bully me further when I got home. My mother, generally drunk, or at the very least on her way to being drunk, would slap my face for ripping my clothes. My father, under instruction from my mother, would take his belt off to punish me for the homework failure, something for which I would invariably be punished at school too. And James, dear James, twisted the knife by coming up with the nickname Clifty Queer, and by telling a few choice people at my school that this was what he called me at home. It spread like wildfire, of course.
The first year of secondary school was purgatory, no less. I spent most of my time in a state of terror: fear of my parents, my brother, my teachers and my schoolmates. The rest of the time I was either distraught or working to replace lost homework, or plotting how to end my own life. I really did want to die, and faced with such a life, who wouldn’t see that as the preferable option?
At some point, I came to understand what the word queer really meant, and felt confused as to why it was being applied to me. My dream, in those days, was to marry a quiet undemanding girl and live in the country as far away from other human beings as possible. We would have kids, and I would love them, and hug them. I would help them with their homework and I would never ever hit them.
At the end of my third year, our parents took us out for a meal – an almost unprecedented event – so rare, in f
act, that I can still remember exactly what I ate: gammon steak with a slice of pineapple on top, served with chips and peas.
The meal was their attempt at smoothing the way for the big announcement: we were moving from Huddersfield to Reading. Reading was very posh, my father told us. It was our big chance to better ourselves. Mum, sipping at her third glass of wine, wobbled her head and agreed.
James was furious. He had a girlfriend two streets away, and a mate who grew marijuana three doors down. He had false ID and a local pub that obliged him by not looking too closely at it. James, almost fourteen, did not want to move.
As for me? Well, I was ecstatic. It seemed to me that no matter what life would be like in “posh” Reading, it couldn’t be worse than the life that I was living. I might, I decided, not have to kill myself after all.
The new house was smaller but nicer, and for the first year at least, Mum and Dad seemed happier. Dad wielded his belt less, and Mum stopped drinking. For a while.
James was thoroughly miserable – the move had knocked all of the stuffing out of him, and he suddenly found himself King of Nothing-At-All. But even that worked for me. James’ misery had somehow neutralised him, for the time being at least.
But the best thing of all was the change of schools. Highdown was perhaps one of Reading’s rougher schools, and it certainly contained its fair share of bullies. But compared to Huddersfield, it felt like a paradigm shift. The boys here, for the most part, seemed to be acting, playing some kind of hardman theatre. Try as they might, they just weren’t that scary.
About a month into the new school year, one of Highdown’s overlords, the thick-set Gary Piper, came up to me in the playground and demanded that I hand over the chocolate biscuit in my lunch box. I had enjoyed four weeks of smooth, trouble-free, paradisiacal existence and the idea that this might be ending, that this might all be happening again, was too much to bear.
I looked at Piper’s curled lip, then down at my lunch box. The disputed item was a Jacob’s Club (with raisins) – my favourite.
“Give it to me now or get a beating,” Piper said. Even his vocabulary seemed false. A beating? Nobody in Huddersfield said “a beating”.
I glanced around, and noticed three or four boys watching the action, and realised that my fate was being sealed here, my reputation decided. As I reached into the box and grasped the Club, my skin prickled with swelling anger.
Gary Piper took the biscuit and leered at me. “Fucking queer,” he said, and as he turned to walk away, he slapped me, gently, across the side of the head.
The final slap was his big mistake. My eyesight misted red, and my hand shot out, whacking him across the ear so hard that the lunch box, which I was still holding, split on impact. Piper fell, clutching his bleeding ear, to the ground.
I jumped on top of him and driven by years of bottled up rage, gripped his head and started to pound it against the tarmac. He offered little resistance. Perhaps he was just too surprised to react.
A teacher dragged me off him, and it’s just as well . . . I fear I might have killed him if we hadn’t been separated. I was in some kind of a trance.
Piper was sent to hospital, and my parents were summoned to the school. As Mum was “ill in bed” – an alias for “too drunk to stand” – Dad came instead. He nodded gravely as the headmaster explained the seriousness of the situation and assured him that I would be punished, and that it would never happen again.
Once we were in his yellow work van, though, he said, “Well there’s a turn up for the books. Glad to see you finally found your balls. Now buckle up and let’s get you home. I’ve got another job at four. And try to get that uniform cleaned up before your mother gets up. You know what she’s like.”
It was the first and last time that my father ever showed any sense of pride in my behaviour, and I realised in that moment what a stupid man he really was.
Gary Piper, not the sharpest knife in the drawer either, was off school for two full weeks. When he did return, proudly bearing stitches across the back of his skull, he walked straight up and proposed that we be mates. For security reasons, I thought it best to accept.
From that point on, with Piper’s backup, I felt relatively safe at school. Though I didn’t join in the bullying or extortion, I did stand idly by, I did watch. And I somehow gained a reputation for being the strong silent one, the quiet, dangerous brain behind the terrorist.
Back home, my position was more tenuous. My mother lapsed from one alcohol-fuelled crisis to another and my father tried to manage her while hiding the natural disdain he felt for his bookish son.
James, though calmer than before, still knew that he held a trump card, and didn’t hesitate to use it, threatening to tell my new schoolmates of my nickname. Now that I had repeatedly smashed the school bully’s skull against the tarmac, I didn’t know how much sway James might have in what was, for him too, a new school, but I wasn’t prepared to risk it. I continued to give in to any and all of James’ demands.
Around the same time, I became conscious that I looked at my classmates differently to other boys. I noticed the muscles the school athletes flexed as they ran and jumped. I glanced, more than once, at the bulge in Mister Simpson’s shiny suit trousers. Where my peers laughed and joked around in the showers, I remained frozen in my efforts not to look. But even then, even from the beginning, what I desired was so confused with what I wanted to be that I couldn’t even begin to think about where the one ended and the other began.
Silently lurking behind my “dangerous” facade, I watched the world around me and tried to decode who I was. I listened to the lyrics of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” and nothing had ever seemed so attractive to me as leaving in the morning to escape these people who would never understand. But then I would look at Boy George or Liberace and see that they were so totally, terrifyingly other, that if queer was what they were, how could that category possibly include me?
Occasionally, very occasionally, I would see a woman whose beauty I would find astounding. I would look at Joanne Whalley, or Debbie Harry, or Farrah Fawcett Majors and think, “Yes, I could marry her.” But then AIDS outed Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury – to me, stunning images of masculinity – and suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
But with the exception of a couple of eighties pop stars there were still no positive role models to be found. Every news mention of homosexuality was about someone being arrested, or someone catching a disease; an MP losing his job or someone abusing boys.
Perhaps if things had been different – if the world had been different – then I would have found the neutral space to consider the question objectively and then I might have made different choices. But by the time my intellect had developed enough to even consider the question, all the terms that could describe the concept – queer, gay, poof – had all been used as insults and only as insults, and were preloaded with so much fear and shame that no sane person could choose such an identity. And whatever I was, I wasn’t insane.
And so, when I found myself on a crowded bus, squashed against a very Rock Hudson-style man in a suit, or opposite a moustached Mercury lookalike, I would force myself to think about the simultaneous equations I needed to hand in tomorrow, or the words to the school hymn, or anything that would enable me to avoid one of my frequent adolescent erections.
The first girl ever to ask me out was called Susan, and she didn’t look a bit like Farrah. I felt no desire for her whatsoever, it has to be said, but she was a girl, and she wanted to date me, so we dated.
Susan and I spent many happy hours wandering around Reading together, and many more sitting on the sofa holding hands, and for a while at least, this stopped James from calling me a poof.
And then one day, Susan got to our house before me and found James alone in the house. He managed to wheedle out of her that we weren’t doing much kissing, and then offered to fill in for me in my absence. By the time I got home, his bedroom door was locked, and by the time they stepped out of his
room – even though he was still underage – they had become an item.
FIVE
Hannah
Once we had had our “honest communication” talk, things between James and me started to get better again, even if changing old habits wasn’t easy and I frequently found myself slipping into my old ways.
I would say, “I’m not feeling that well” and James would raise an eyebrow at me. “OK, I just don’t fancy it,” I would admit, and he would give me a wink for having decoded my own riddle.
Sometimes, he would say, “Hey, d’you fancy a quickie before we go?” and out of habit I would say, “Now? Are you mad?” but then catch myself, and turn back to kiss him instead.
We still fought over the light switch – me switching it off, and James playfully flicking it back on – but he started to understand my complexes and did whatever he could to reassure me. He told me over and over that I was beautiful, that he loved my eyes, my lips, my hair, the little hollow on the inside of my arms that didn’t seem to have a name . . . And if I didn’t suddenly fall in love with my own body, didn’t magically begin to consider myself beautiful, I did at least begin to suspend disbelief. I did at least start to believe that James truly was attracted to me.
So the initial teething problems of our relationship – which I had feared signalled a precocious beginning of the end – seemed to be behind us now. We were getting on well, communicating honestly, and having more and better sex than I had ever had in my life. Honesty, it seemed, really was the best policy.
Yet there remained the challenge of future destinations, a subject that I suspected still had the power to blow everything apart.
James was phoning Australia almost every night now, frequently talking until first light as he struggled to manage his farm from a distance.
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