Tin Man(26)

You’re up, I say. I’m happy to see you.

Is this G? asks Chris.

You’re not seeing him at his best, I’m afraid.

What were you saying to him? asks Chris.

Names of paint. He was an artist.

You’re sweet, he says.

And you’re looking good, I say.

I have a T-cell, he says.

Shut up, I say, or everyone’ll want one.

He laughs. They think I’m doing better.

I can see you are.

I was angry with you.

I know.

But I miss talking with you.

I’m a dilemma, I say.

My friends have sent me a cake, he says. I feel like eating today.

Is this an invitation?

An olive branch, he says.

The cake is good. Chocolate, not too sweet, and that awful word, moist. We eat half of it – me, most of it – and I feel bloated, and lie back in the chair and put my feet up on his bed. I’m embarrassed by my socks. Green terry towelling, the ones I wear when I clean the bathroom floor, fuck knows how they ended up in my good drawer.

Here, I say, hoping to distract him from looking at my socks. I hand him the photograph I was looking at three nights before.

This is me, I say. I’m nineteen. 1969.

He puts on his glasses and holds the photograph close. You look so young, he says.

Ta, I say.

Who’s that? he asks.

Ellis, I say.

Were you together?

I think so, I say. We were then.

Where was it taken?

In France, in the South.

You look cool.

We do, don’t we?

Was he your first love?

Yes. Only one, probably.

Is he dead?

Oh God no. (Oh God no, not everyone dies, I want to say to him.)

Where’s he now?

In Oxford. He has a wife. Annie.

Do you still see him?

No, I say.

He looks at me. Why?

Because . . . (And I realise I don’t know how to answer this.) Because we lost contact. I lost contact.

You could get back in contact.

Yes. I could.

Don’t you want him to know about this? Are you ashamed?

No! Not that, I say. No. It’s complicated.

But it isn’t, though, is it? Life isn’t any more, you told me that. All this makes life simple.

It’s complicated, I say again. And there is an edge to my voice that stops him pursuing it.

He picks at my sock instead.

I know, I say. Awful.

Come on. Let’s carry on with your letter, I say.

I don’t want to write it today, he says. I want to know about this, and he waves the photograph in front of my face.

Oh blimey, I say, and I take my feet off the bed and I sigh and I stretch out my back.

And he says, You look like you’re about to lift something heavy.

Ha! That is telling, I say.

From the moment I saw him, I wanted to kiss him. That’s my well-practised and preferred introduction to a conversation about Ellis. I used to wonder if my desire for him came out of displacement. My need to join with someone, my readiness to love. The consequence of grieving, even for a father who was, by then, as distant to me as the southern sky.

I have an image of Ellis and me in Oxford, standing at the window in my bedroom. It is night. The summer air is clammy, our chests are bare and we’re wearing only our pyjama bottoms. Our age? Fifteen, maybe. The window is open and we look out across the overgrown churchyard, and darkness has its own smell back then, and the smell is fecund and shitty, grassy and exciting, and we’re listening out for the sounds of sex that rise from the crosses because that’s where the drunks go for a moment of tenderness.

I’m nervous. And I can’t look at him. And I reach down into his pants and hold him. I’m terrified he’ll push me away but he doesn’t. He moves me into the shadows and lets me wank him off. Afterwards he’s shy and thanks me and asks me if I’m all right. Never better, I say, and we laugh.

That was the start of our private world. A place where we didn’t discuss who we were or what we were, just experimented with the other’s body, and for years that was enough.

Sometimes, I wondered if his attraction to me was because I was the only one around, a release, of sorts. But when we were eighteen, he suggested a double-date. We took the girls to a film, snogged them, and got them on to a bus home. Afterwards, he and I came back to my room and got naked as if it was the most normal ending to an evening, like a strong coffee or an After Eight mint. Did I know I was gay? Yes, by then. But such compartmentalising was irrelevant. We had each other and neither wanted more.

We got to France in August 1969 by sheer chance. A journalist I worked with at the Oxford Times went down to a villa there every year, and two months before he was due to go he had to cancel. He’d hardly finished telling me the story, when I said, I’ll go! I’ll take the room, and he was so amused by my enthusiasm, he made phone calls to France that very day to confirm the booking, and told me everything I needed to know about getting the train.

I raced to the Car Plant and met Ellis after shift. What’s happened? he said. We’re going to France, I said. What? he said. France, I said. France, France, and I started to poke him and he was all reserved, all – Stop it, not here, people are looking.

But the summer couldn’t come fast enough. The weeks of waiting brought about a change between us, what I can only describe as a softening. The knowledge that what lay ahead was an opportunity for us to be different.