The Milkman's On His Way Page 3

  My father filled his pipe and lit it. This was something he often did when he was at a loss for words; it gave him time to think. ‘I do know how to boil an egg properly,’ he said, as he blew out dense clouds of smoke. ‘And if you think I should do women’s work, why aren’t you rushing to learn how to do my jobs? Can you mend a puncture? Put a plug on a piece of flex? Fit a new washer on a tap? Dig the vegetable garden so we have a good crop of peas and beans? You wouldn’t know where to begin!’

  I could mend punctures and fix tap washers; I could also cook quite reasonably. A mixture. Was that yet another sign? Of course not! It was simply that roles, as far as who does what is concerned, had indeed changed.

  ‘I think this is a stupid conversation,’ Mum said. She got up and went into the kitchen.

  Dad and I laughed. ‘Game, set, and match,’ he said. ‘Still. . . she’s probably right about being tired. I am myself. They say the average milkman shifts about five thousand pints a week. I’ve never bothered to count, but last week it felt like ten thousand! I was leaving bottles on doorsteps in my sleep, all night long. Not good, that.’ He picked up the Sun and handed it to me. ‘Have an eyeful of page three. Something extra special today.’ I looked at her, and passed it back to him. ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Not bad! What’s the matter with you? Sometimes I think you’re a bit of a prude.’

  ‘Not at all!’

  ‘Found yourself a job yet?’

  ‘They need someone at the Linga Longa Cafe; I’ll go down in the morning and see what they want. But if they don’t pay more than the dole it’s not worth taking. It’s only seasonal, of course, till the end of October.’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t be able to spend so much time in the sea.’

  ‘Surfing’s all very well, but it doesn’t bring in any money.’

  ‘I’m told you’re becoming quite an expert. I’m glad.’ He smiled, pleased to find something in his son to be proud of. If you knew the truth, I said to myself, you’d probably want to kick me out of the house.

  Was there a cure for it? I went to the library and searched for something that might help. I didn’t take the books out; no explanation I could think of would sound convincing if my mother saw in my bedroom a treatise on homosexuality. Even reading in the reference section of the library was a furtive and surreptitious act; suppose the girl at the desk saw the titles? My mother knew her. And gossip travels very fast in Bude.

  There wasn’t much on the subject. The local powers that be evidently didn’t seem to think it a matter of burning interest to the inhabitants of North Cornwall. But the few snippets of information I did gather, from psychology books and sex primers, all told me the same thing: there was no cure. About the cause of it they tended to disagree, which surprised me: didn’t people really know? And why didn’t they know? It had been around, I discovered, for as long as mankind had existed. Had people been so irresponsible that they could never be bothered to find out? Most of the authors were emphatic that seduction by someone of your own sex was not the cause; they argued that it was the result of having an overbearing mother and a weak or absent father in the case of homosexual boys, the opposite with girls: for some inexplicable reason, the children of such marriages found it difficult or impossible to model themselves on the parent of their own sex. But one author argued very strongly that if this theory was correct, then all children of these marriages would be homosexual, and the evidence tended to suggest that this wasn’t so. There were sometimes identical twins where one was gay and the other was not, and vast numbers of homosexuals from marriages that didn’t consist of hen-pecked husbands and wives who wore the trousers. Gay: it was the first time I had heard this word. My parents’ marriage, certainly, was normal; whatever ‘normal’ implied — I was beginning to have doubts about its meaning: it no longer seemed to convey anything very coherent. This particular writer said man would discover the causes of homosexuality when he discovered the causes of heterosexuality, and went on to say that asking such questions was fundamentally absurd. More relevant, he thought, would be to find out why society had always disliked and persecuted gay people: an attitude or emotion he called ‘homophobia.’ I was, to some extent, relieved. I didn’t want to think my parents had made me like this. It didn’t seem fair. Or was I just looking for a reason, an excuse even, not to blame my parents because I loved them? Perhaps. But I don’t think so. I was like this, quite regardless of anything they’d ever done. And would have been had they brought me up in an absolutely different way.

  Why did people persecute homosexuals? Society, I read, always needed scapegoats. Jews. Blacks. Hitler had incarcerated homosexuals and forced them to wear a pink triangle on their clothes, just as the Jews had been ordered to wear the star of David. Half a million gays had died at Auschwitz, Belsen, and other concentration camps. Loving your own sex, in the opinion of most of the human race, was unnatural, disgusting, and sterile. Probably its unproductiveness was, more than anything else, the reason why it was persecuted. A gay relationship didn’t produce children, didn’t propagate the species. It appeared, to those with a puritanical cast of mind, to be sex simply for pleasure, an evasion of responsibilities, a threat to the basic unit out of which the entire fabric of society was structured: the family.

  One in ten people was, wholly or in part, homosexual. Five million in the United Kingdom! Where were they all? Hidden, presumably, as I was, under a heterosexual facade. As far as I was aware I was the only one in Bude. According to the statistics, there should be hundreds!

  But, as I returned the books to the library shelves, I felt sadness rather than relief. The feelings expressed in what I had read, with the exception of the author who had stated that the cause of homosexuality was an irrelevant question, were either pitying, patronising or more or less condemnatory. I didn’t want pity, patronage, or condemnation. I wanted to be told. . . what? That there was nothing wrong with me, I think. Be gay and happy. I didn’t realise that I was the only person who could tell myself that that was so. The only authority.

  The Linga Longa Cafe decided to employ me. Waiting at the tables, washing up, sweeping the floor, anything that needed doing except sitting on my backside at the cash-desk. The manageress did that. The hours were helpful from my point of view, eleven a.m. till three p.m., then in the evenings from half past six till half past ten; which meant there was time during the day for surfing. The cafe became so busy in the second half of August that the manageress had to take on another person. Leslie got the job.

  The work was boring, hard, and not very lucrative, though the pay was certainly better than being on the dole. And they gave us our lunch and an evening meal. As we didn’t finish till half past ten, there weren’t a great many places open in which we could waste our hard-earned money. I bought some new clothes — jeans, a decent shirt, shoes. Mum took a couple of quid for my keep, which was ridiculously small, but she said I wasn’t earning a fortune, and, besides, she was spending less on the housekeeping as I ate at the cafe. Leslie saved his up for weeks and eventually, in October, he bought a wet suit: prices had dropped as the surfing season neared its end.

  We were together now, he and I, almost from the time we got out of bed in the mornings till we slept at night, for we continued to go for our run and surf in the afternoons; and on Saturdays, when the pubs stayed open till eleven, we’d drink two or three pints of beer before going home. (Saturday was pay day.) I liked the arrangement: I preferred to be with Leslie than with anybody else I knew. But he wasn’t always happy. Not that he seemed to get fed up with my company: it was more a question of lacking the time to pursue the opposite sex. In his third week at the cafe, however, he struck up a friendship with one of the waitresses, Sandra, a dreary, plain girl who, I guessed, might give him everything he asked for. After work now I went home on my own while he took Sandra for a stroll on the cliffs.

  ‘She’s a slut,’ I told him.

  ‘So much the better,’ was
his answer. ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘I don’t. I just think she looks like one.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘You mean you haven’t found out yet?’

  ‘No.’

  Which I knew anyway. By tacit agreement our early morning run no longer ended with my bedroom as the winning-post; but we had had sex again. More than once; several times in fact, and it always started in the same way, with Leslie the initiator. Neither of us ever said a word to each other about it; his first remark, when it was over, was usually ‘I’d better go home and change’ or I would say ‘I must get myself something to eat.’ I acted as casually as he did, as if to reinforce his opinion that it was of the utmost irrelevance; but I was always worried that my face or my body would give me away by reflecting the intense pleasure I felt every time.

  I began to wonder about him. Why did he want to do it? What really was going on in his head? Surely some of the girls he had been out with, one or two of them at least, wouldn’t object to doing for him as much as I did, tossing him off. It would hardly make them pregnant. Or were they scared that if they went that far, he’d want more, the whole thing? That they’d want the whole thing? It was possible. Or, when he was alone with a girl, did his normally confident, cheerful, extrovert self vanish; did he become shy, tongue-tied, so nervous that he didn’t dare go beyond kissing her goodnight? It was improbable, to judge from the Leslie I had always known, but it could be the explanation. Or was he actually like me, one of those millions of hidden, buried gays? Or bisexual? If that were so, he might fancy me as I did him. Wouldn’t I have some inkling, some sign, however small? Not necessarily. He hadn’t a clue about me. We’d had sex now at least a dozen times, and he still hadn’t the faintest idea. As far as I knew. It was, I decided eventually, an insoluble mystery, and it would remain so unless I came out into the open, and that, unless I was being excruciatingly tortured, I would never do.

  One Saturday evening we went into a crowded pub. (Sandra had gone home early, suffering from a migraine.) Near us was a large party of drinkers, all talking very loudly, as if they wanted the entire bar to hear what they were saying. Everyone addressed everyone else as ‘darling’, even the men when they spoke to each other; there was a lot of wild embracing, kissing, gushing, and showing off. It was like watching a play. Then I remembered that the actors from the theatre in Exeter were performing all week in Bude: it must be them.

  The focus of attention was a tall, slim young man with dark hair, quite good-looking I thought, who, we gathered from the conversation, was the company’s assistant director. His voice was the loudest, almost a shriek, and his words virtually an uninterrupted monologue. He had just bought a car, he screamed; wasn’t that bold, darling?

  ‘What is it, Crispin?’ someone asked.

  ‘Blue, darling.’

  Amid the general laughter that followed came the question ‘But what make is it, Crispin?’

  ‘Make, darling? I don’t know. I just went in and said I wanted a blue one. Do you think that was wrong? It goes fearfully well. I’ve already driven up three one-way streets in the wrong direction, but, honestly darling, I don’t think road signs mean anything serious. Nobody stopped me.’

  I nudged Leslie, who was staring open-mouthed in astonishment. ‘Poofs!’ he said. ‘The first I’ve ever seen in my life!’

  ‘Poofs?’

  ‘Queers! Homos!’

  ‘Are they?’ They seemed to me more like actors who, pathetically, had forgotten that the play had finished. It was all so false that you couldn’t label it as anything definite like ‘homo’.

  ‘Of course they are!’ Leslie said. ‘Bent as nine-bob bits! Anyone can see that.’ He took a long swig of beer. The tone of his voice — scorn and contempt — made me shiver. So that would be what he’d think of his best friend if he knew: I’d been so right, I congratulated myself, on hiding it all away from him.

  The assistant director was now giving a soliloquy on the subject of his landlord in Exeter. ‘. . . so he said there’s some fresh fruit or you could open a tin. I said, darling, I couldn’t cope with anything so butch as a tin. I mean, what do these people expect? It’s the same with the light in my bedroom; he thinks I can fathom the mysteries of a two-way switch. I asked the electrician from the theatre to come down and explain it all to me, but he wouldn’t. Isn’t that amazing? So I have to go to bed in the dark. Alone, darling, alone!’ Lots of dramatic gestures. ‘The theatre is my only mistress, darling!’ Slight pause, while he sipped vodka and tonic. ‘He said to me one evening he was going to commit suicide. I said, darling, you can’t possibly do anything so inconsiderate! I’d have to find new lodgings, which would be a frightful bore! I said, you really can’t expect me to cope with a dead body. I mean, what on earth would I do with it?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Leslie. ‘Or I’ll have hysterics!’ On the way home he ran onto the golf links and yelled at the sky, arms ! outstretched, ‘It’s blue, darling! The theatre is my only mistress, darling!’ Then he exploded with laughter, jumped up and down, stood on his head, and executed three perfect cartwheels.

  When he had sobered a little, I said ‘Do you really think they were queer?’

  ‘Of course they were!’ And he added, in a less contemptuous tone than he’d used in the pub, ‘It’s their own business, I suppose. They’re not doing any harm.’

  Next morning was the only occasion I made any comment on what he and I had done. ‘Don’t you think,’ I asked, ‘this. . . you and me just now. . . was queer? More than those actors?’

  ‘Of course not!’ There was no hesitation in his answer. ‘With us it’s simply because our girl-friends won’t let us. Does it bother you? If that’s the case, we won’t do it again.’

  ‘It isn’t that.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘I just thought we haven’t any real evidence about that assistant director. For all we know he might be happily married.’

  ‘You do talk a load of balls, Ewan! You can tell them a mile off! Wasn’t it obvious? Go on, ask him if he’s got a wife and three kids! You’ll find there’s only one thing he’ll be interested in. Your bum.’

  ‘Time for breakfast,’ I said. It wasn’t a load of balls: in this matter, Leslie was full of confusion and half-baked prejudices, utterly lacking in real knowledge. Where ignorance is bliss. . . there was plenty of truth in that saying.

  The following day he was so excited he could hardly contain himself. It had finally happened. With Sandra, on the cliffs. No, not all the way; what he and I did. ‘But so incomparably better!’ he said. His eyes shone. I’d never seen him looking so happy. ‘It was. . . ecstatic! I’ve got to the next stage at last! I’m growing up!!’

  ‘Bully for you.’

  ‘Can you imagine what it was like, Ewan? Fantastic!’

  ‘Oh, yes. I can imagine.’

  ‘Your turn will come. It isn’t a race.’

  No, it certainly wasn’t a race. And even if it was, I was not one of the competitors. I could see that the moment had arrived when we would begin to grow apart; as he became more involved with the pleasures of heterosexual life, he wouldn’t want to take me along with him. Not where one boy and one girl were of the only importance. It wouldn’t be Sandra, of course; she was merely a convenience, poor kid. If and when he fell in love I’d lose him altogether. I could look forward to envy and jealousy, watching him approach his rightful inheritance, while I. . . I would stay still. Mark time. There wasn’t any inheritance I could see that I could approach.

  It stopped, the two of us having sex. It was very hard to bear.

  At the end of October the cafe jobs finished. We were, both of us, back on the dole. Being almost penniless is much worse when you’ve had some money in your pocket than it is when you’re a kid earning nothing, dependent on Dad for a hand-out. That autumn and winter was a difficult, frustrating, miserable time.

  I became a telly addict. I’d had a phase of that once before, when I was about nine. I
watched it now all evening, sometimes long after my parents had gone to bed: late shows, late late shows, late late late shows, until the screen went blank and a high-pitched whistle assaulted my ears. Police serials, soap operas, sit coms. And loads of American crap. Chopper Squad, which amused me because it was so unbelievably bad: but at least the surf boys were dishy enough to keep my imagination alive. There was nothing else to do. Nothing.

  Some of the programmes annoyed me. Anything about teenagers invariably reflected Leslie’s way of life, not mine: it was as if being young and homosexual was a problem nobody had ever heard of. Or if they had, it embarrassed them so much they refused to admit that it existed. The adverts were the same. Happy, happy families. None of them seemed to suggest that on planet Earth any other kind of arrangement was possible. Except one about tonic water, of all things; the guy orders his drink in Russian and tells the barmaid he’s bilingual. ‘Well. . . none of us is perfect,’ she says. Then he scowls at her. It made me feel cross. But Mum found it incomprehensible.

  ‘Why does she say that? And why does he look at her so oddly?’

  ‘She thinks he means bisexual,’ I informed her.

  ‘Bisexual!’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was as if she had never heard the word before. She stared at me, then said ‘I don’t know where you get such expressions from.’

  ‘It’s a quite ordinary word. I don’t suppose they’d have it on Call My Bluff’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘That you like men and women equally,’ Dad said. ‘We had one at the dairy, but he didn’t last five minutes!’

  Before what, I wondered. I couldn’t think of any reason why a bisexual couldn’t shift pints of milk. Or a homosexual, for that matter. Or a transvestite. Or a semi-intelligent ape if you trained him carefully. ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.