The Milkman's On His Way Page 4

  ‘Couldn’t stand the teasing.’

  ‘So he left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Being teased about what?’ Mum wanted to know.

  Dad and I laughed. ‘About liking men as much as women. Haven’t you ever heard of such people? He had a wife. And a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh.’ She blushed. ‘Yes, I have heard of such people as it so happens. I didn’t know there were any in Bude.’

  Nor did I. More’s the pity. ‘They get in everywhere,’ Dad said.

  ‘Everywhere?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m surprised you know about things like that, Ewan,’ she said.

  ‘Honestly, Mum! I wasn’t born yesterday! I’ll be seventeen in June.’

  ‘Kids know far more these days than is good for them.’ She pulled her knitting out from under a cushion, and began to purl and plain with great vigour. A cardigan, pink, a sort of bed-jacket: it was hideous.

  I wanted to discover who this man was, but I couldn’t think of any way to pursue the conversation without Dad becoming suspicious. I sighed. ‘I’m going out,’ I said.

  ‘Where to?’ Mum asked.

  ‘I don’t know. See what Leslie’s up to.’

  ‘If you’re going far, the pair of you, wrap up well. It’s bitterly cold! I was frozen to death at work. There’ll be a hard frost tonight.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ I sighed again.

  Leslie was glued to the television, a crummy old Western. He hardly looked up as I came in, and when I spoke his answers were all monosyllables. His mother was out; the cat was occupying her armchair. I shooed it away and sat down, then picked up a magazine from a pile which was lying on the hearth. I turned at once to the help page. I always do; I don’t know why: maybe the bits of real life — I’m fourteen and still flat-chested, or my husband has left me for another woman after twenty-seven years of married bliss, or is there some way of removing unsightly hairs from my legs? — seem more interesting than those soppy, boring serials about little Nurse Frump who swoons when the rugged houseman looks at her, or who dreams all day about waltzing off into the sunset with Doctor Gorgeous.

  The shock of what I saw written there was so great that the magazine nearly fell out of my hands: a letter from a woman who was disgusted to find examples of homosexual pornography in her eighteen-year-old son’s bedroom. Was he sick? Was it her fault? What should she do about it? The answer surprised me even more. ‘Do not take such biased views towards homosexuality. Surely you want to see your child grow up happy!

  He needs support and understanding, particularly in the extremely difficult area of coming to terms with his sexual orientation. Make use of the various counselling groups. Parents’ Enquiry is a good starting-point; it exists specifically to advise and help young homosexuals and their families.’ And it gave a phone number.

  There were organisations to help homosexuals? I was amazed! Staggered would perhaps be a more appropriate word. I memorised the phone number. But. . . would I dare to ring these people? Who were they? What would they want out of me? Would I have to tell them everything about myself? I couldn’t do so; it was absolutely impossible!

  Ring them, a voice inside me said; ring them!

  ‘I’m off,’ I said to Leslie. He waved a hand, but didn’t shift his eyes from the television: a dozen baddies were pumping bullets into a lone goodie who was trying to hide behind a moth-eaten cactus. All the bullets missed.

  I ran to the nearest phone box, telling myself not to think, not to stop to consider the matter. If I paused for one second my courage would fail; I would never dial that number.

  ‘Hallo. Can I help you?’ A woman’s voice! It hadn’t occurred to me that women would be mixed up in such an organisation.

  ‘Yes. Look. . . er. . . ’ I didn’t know what to say. What to admit.

  ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘Bude. Bude in Cornwall.’

  ‘That’s a long way from here! I wish I knew someone local you could get in touch with, but unfortunately I don’t. Never mind; perhaps I can help.’

  Silence.

  ‘I won’t eat you!’ She laughed: a gentle, friendly sound.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I think. . . I’m gay.’

  There was a loud thumping on the door of the phone box. Leslie! I slammed the receiver down. ‘What are you doing in there?’ he shouted.

  ‘Ringing Louise,’ I said, as I came out.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She’s busy.’

  ‘I’m off to the Wimpy bar. Coming?’

  I walked along with him, feeling like a prisoner. Not one being led to his execution, but as if I was condemned to a life-sentence. Locked in a cell and left to rot.

  Half an hour later I found I couldn’t remember the phone number.

  Three: The Fairground Summer

  And when I had a chance to look for it again, the magazines had gone. Leslie’s mother had put them out for the dustman. So that was that.

  That was that: full stop. For months everything had grey edges. Other people, Leslie for example, went on living, developing, growing. I marked time. Or beat time, as in music, aware of hours, minutes, seconds even, that passed without anything happening. Locked in a cell and left to rot. No employment: I tried, but there was nothing. At night, watching the telly with Mum and Dad. Or drinking coffee at the Wimpy bar. Or going out with Louise: I wondered why she bothered to put up with me. Seeing Leslie occasionally. As I’d thought, he’d less time for me since he had broken the girl barrier. But things were more tolerable, curiously, during the winter when the rest of the world seemed dead as well, when frost and freezing wind shrivelled existence — plant, animal, human — back down inside itself, nipped the tendrils of growth; but in spring, in the first mild warm days when life stirred, I found depression at its most acute: other creatures revived, but not me. I was still withered. Dying inside myself, as a plant may do yet appear to be healthy, and only when it keels over does one notice putrescence has reached the outside leaves.

  Yes, I know it’s all very self-pitying. The old crude message on urinal walls says your future is in your hands. True. Very true. But I hadn’t the guts, the experience, the know-how, the confidence, the. . . anything. My ego had apparently been destroyed. Or, at least, severely damaged. I longed to talk to my parents. Who else? Up till now they had been the kind, patient listeners to all my troubles. Michael Tanner punched me on the nose; Roger Barnett stole my sweets; I dropped 10p and it rolled down a drain; I fell off my bike and grazed my knee and it hurts. . . All the traumas of childhood they had soothed and mended, and when they couldn’t do so they had consoled and calmed. This. . . impossible. I wrote letters in my head, telling them everything. I never actually put pen to paper. But why didn’t I get in touch with that counselling organisation? Leslie banging on the phone-box door was hardly a good reason for not trying again. I could have found the number by ringing directory enquiries. So why didn’t I? Cowardice. Not ready for it: it might be the start of a very long road leading God knows where, and I wasn’t old enough, not sure enough of myself, to risk travelling on it.

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  By the time you've read this you'll know I’m homosexual.

  What on earth would I say after that bombshell? That I hoped one day to meet a boy and fall in love with him, live with him perhaps? How easy it would be for Leslie to say to his mother, ‘I’ve met a really nice girl!’ I could see in my mind’s eye Mrs Radford welcoming her into the house. ‘So you’re Anne (or Julia or whatever her name was). I’ve heard so much about you!’ My mum and my boy-friend? Huh! What could I write in a letter concerning my own gay life? That Leslie and I had had sex a score of times? Which would sound less shocking, that I’d thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it because I fancied him — or that he’d just needed a helping hand but no girl would volunteer hers? They’d say ‘Get out of our house and never darken our doors again!’ Yet we were the same two boys as the sweet innocent kids they’d alwa
ys known and loved. The same, for God’s sake! No better or worse than we’d ever been. We hadn’t become villainous monsters, depraved moral outcasts.

  Why don’t parents listen to their children? They don’t. Perhaps it’s because they can’t guess at where we’ve reached. The next stage always surprises them. And alarms them, because every move means one more knot in the string of dependence is because I wouldn’t be able to take a lover of my own sex into my parents’ house: would the conversation turn to my life? Would my boy-friend’s name even be mentioned? No. So whoever I could approach if I was in trouble, it would not be my parents.

  Better, then, not to say anything. Better not to risk anything. Life would be easier that way. I thought.

  That’s why I didn’t contact Parents’ Enquiry, why I went round feeling dead inside. It seemed preferable.

  Summer had one obvious compensation: I was still unemployed so I had all the time I could want in the sea. In the macho all-male world of the surf-board I was as good as anybody else, and I appeared to be no different from anybody else. As real a male as the next guy. Another attraction was that Leslie was no I better than me; we were equals, and rivals. Once again, we spent hours together. We resumed our old routine of jogging before breakfast and weight-lifting at the gym. I looked at myself one night in the bathroom mirror and thought, you look pretty good, Ewan. Suntanned and fit. The muscles in my arms and chest had developed. A good curve to the biceps. Flat stomach. Even if I felt that inside I was of an inferior species, I could pass myself off as one of the real people. It was a bit like blacks painting their skins white and dying their curls blond, but that was not how I regarded it then.

  Soon after our seventeenth birthdays a travelling fair came to town. Leslie went dotty over Kay, who worked on one of the hooplas. A good-looking girl, I suppose, with green eyes and long red hair, rather like Linda: funny how some people, once a pattern is set, fall for the same types, again and again. Kay had an effect on Leslie different from that of any other girl he had been involved with. He was in love for the first time in his life. He stopped coming to the beach, even though the surf was excellent. ‘No girl is important enough to miss surfing,’ I told him, but he was deaf to anything I said. The early-morning runs stopped. I hardly saw him at all, and when I did he was cool or offhand.

  The Surf Club announced that it was holding a competition for juniors, with cash prizes. Leslie said he probably wouldn’t enter for it; he was thinking of leaving Bude to find work. I was astonished. And upset; half the fun of the competition would be lost if he wasn’t there. I could beat the other kids, I reckoned: Leslie was the only real challenge and I didn’t want to come first merely because he wasn’t available. I wanted to beat him for the prize. ‘It simplifies things if I don’t enter,’ he said. ‘Makes you the obvious favourite. You ought to be pleased.’

  ‘Well, I’m not pleased.’

  ‘Why? Are you jealous or something?’

  ‘If you think I fancy your girl-friend, you couldn’t be more wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t mean in that sense.’

  ‘What did you mean, then?’

  He wouldn’t say, but I guessed he knew I felt sore about being dislodged as the number one person in his life. Kay persuaded him to enter for the competition, but that, surprisingly, didn’t help my mood. When I nearly got drowned one morning after attempting a huge wave in an extremely rough sea, and had to be dragged out, frightened, choking, and unable to walk, I was even more upset. Some of the adult surfers told me off for being so reckless, and Leslie and Kay had to help me get dressed I felt so feeble. A few nights later we went to a disco and I was very rude to Leslie. I was a bit drunk. When the fair left town, I tried to apologise and pick up the pieces but things weren’t the same. I gathered from what he said that they’d made love, properly, the real thing: his first time. But he was depressed and unhappy, though it wasn’t just that Kay was no longer there; something had happened that had humiliated him badly. When I asked him what it was he told me to sod off. Perhaps he’d had some silly idea about working with the fairground people so that his beautiful romance could continue, and they had refused to let him.

  Our mothers went up to London; a women’s club outing which meant they were away for a couple of nights. After they’d gone I left Dad asleep in front of the telly and went next door with some cans of beer. Leslie was bored, having nothing in particular to do, but not even the sight of alcohol made him pleased to see me. ‘Don’t you ever knock?’ he said, as I came in.

  But he opened one of the cans and drank from it, then switched on the television, pretending to find it totally absorbing.

  I needed to talk, to move the situation between us back to what it had been before the fair came to town. But how? I wanted to say something about friendship, that what could exist between one boy and another had areas that no girl-friend could entirely replace. Without betraying myself, of course. It wasn’t easy to know where to start, and my first words were clumsy, almost gave the game away. ‘I can’t see much difference when you think it all out,’ I said, ‘between having a girl-friend and going around with another boy.’

  It was the first time since I’d arrived with the beer that he’d taken any real notice of me. ‘I can think of a few pretty obvious differences,’ he answered. ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you on the turn?’

  Well, at least I had his attention. ‘Don’t be daft. What I meant was I’d rather talk to boys. To you. . . I never seem to have much to say when I’m with a girl. I get tongue-tied; I don’t feel at ease. And they giggle so much, particularly when they’re in a group. I sometimes think perhaps I’m. . . frightened of them.’ Had I gone too far? Revealed too much? It wasn’t altogether true, either: I was usually quite happy in Louise’s company. ‘Do you know what I mean?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you prefer the company of girls.’

  ‘A girl,’ he said. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to be the only male in a great gaggle of women. But a girl, one special person of course it’s more interesting than going around with people of your own sex all the time!’

  ‘Well, I haven’t found it so. I prefer your company to that of anybody else I know.’

  ‘Don’t you get bored, always knocking about with me?’

  ‘Quite the opposite. I really enjoy being with you. . . doing things, surfing.’

  ‘I want. . .out! No more Bude! I want the big bad world outside!’ This wasn’t getting us anywhere. It was yet another stage of life he was after now, one which excluded me completely: friendship, at the moment, was of no importance. ‘I find girls fascinating,’ he said. ‘And I’m not thinking of the excitement of getting your hand inside a bra; I mean the way their minds work, their feelings. Everything about them.’ He’d like to be married, he said; have a couple of kids: why not? ‘It could be bloody marvellous!’

  ‘When your friends get married. . . no, I mean when they get deeply involved. . . you lose them.’ I looked straight at him. ‘Like you and Kay.’

  ‘You didn’t like me being with Kay because you felt left out; is that what you’re trying to tell me? You missed my company?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re bloody pathetic, Ewan.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re asking me to stop doing what I want to do. Who do you think you are? If she walked through that door at this minute I wouldn’t have any hesitation in telling you to fuck off! And if she was here all the time, living in Bude, you wouldn’t see me for dust! What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Well, shut up then and let me watch the television.’

  ‘I was only trying to be friendly! Bringing you booze and thinking you’d be fed up on your own with nothing to do.’

  ‘I’m grateful for the beer. But I’m not fed up with being on my own.’

  ‘I’ll go if you like.’ I was being pathetic; he was quite right. Somehow I’d lost control of this con
versation; every time I opened my mouth I was making it all much worse.

  ‘Do what you want,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t care less.’ I went to the door and hurried out, but he followed, shouting, ‘Come here! I didn’t mean it!’ I should have gone straight home, keeping one last shred of dignity; to do anything else was cheap. But I had already stopped. I turned and walked slowly back into his house.

  We watched the television. Or rather he did; I saw it but nothing registered. After about an hour he switched it off, came over to where I was sitting and touched me between the legs. ‘I’m . . . so randy anyone would do,’ he said, rather glumly.

  It was the last time it ever happened.

  ‘Are you queer, Ewan?’

  The moment I had been dreading for months. I licked my lips: my tongue suddenly felt dry. ‘I have. . . wondered,’ I said. ‘Occasionally.’ My voice sounded high and strangulated.

  ‘Seems to me you could be.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Me?’ He burst into laughter. ‘Me? You’ve got to be joking! Do you really think that’s possible? I should hope you know me better than that!’

  ‘Then. . . I guess you’re not.’

  ‘It was just the two of us having a wank.’

  ‘Yes.’ A vile word to describe what I thought was something beautiful.

  ‘Tell me. . . do you fancy me?’

  ‘Not in the slightest.’

  ‘Thank God for that!’ He smiled, apologetically. ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand that! I’d say, get out of my life. And I don’t want to do such a thing, not to my best friend.’

  ‘Am I?’

  He nodded.

  I went round there next morning, hoping he’d be up and ready for an early-morning run. There was no answer to my knock, but when I pushed at the door I found it unbolted. He was still in bed, fast asleep. My best friend. He’d said so! At that moment, I felt, despite everything, that I actually loved him. I was prepared to admit to myself I could make such a dangerous leap in the dark; but another part of me said don’t be a total idiot: that way lies complete ruin. So I swallowed the feeling. Which wasn’t a selfish emotion, not desire for sexual gratification. It was as if I could give him my entire being: stay with him in sickness and in health, defend him against any pain the world could ever stab him with. Make him happy. Whole.