Tin Man(40)

A Rhodes Scholar once. Brooks Brothers shirt and pressed khakis, a man with the premature weight of middle age and a thick-cut cock. His room was like every other room I’d visited. Smelt musty of sleep and spunk and books. We’d hardly got through the door when he handed me a schooner of sherry, hoping, I imagine, to bring a touch of finesse to what we were about to do. On would go the classical music – it came in trends – Shostakovich one day, Beethoven the next, but always the volume up loud. After sherry, he’d encourage me to shower, and when I returned to his room, I was always relieved to see him face down on the bed, knowing the beast between his legs was coming nowhere near me. And we fucked to the rhythm of strings and timpani under a photograph of a young blonde girlfriend, none the wiser.

He only liked to be fucked, and it was painful for him no matter how tender I’d be, but he never wanted me to stop. I came to realise the pain was necessary for him. It stopped the loving. It stopped the act being unfaithful.

By the end of that summer, I had a serious addiction to fortified wine and a loathing for classical music. London was Donna Summer and vodka. There could be no going back.

I have such fondness for men like him, though. They were my mentors. They showed me how to compartmentalise my life, how to keep things separate, how to pass. And even though they’ve been, at times, the punchline to my stories or pathetic gossip shared across a pillow, I’m so grateful to them. It was still a world of shyness and fear, and those shared moments were everything: my loneliness masquerading as sexual desire. But it was my humanness that led me to seek, that’s all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere.

I walk on. The winds are subsiding. I sit on a bench and watch the rowers train. A child gives me some bread to feed the ducks with and I do so with delight. The child’s mother asks if I’m OK. My cough is rasping. I tell her I’m getting better actually, and thank her for the cough sweet. I retie my scarf and walk on.

In those days of my twenties and early thirties, I remember how friendships came and went. I was too critical – a disagreement over a film or politics gave me permission to retreat. Nobody matched Ellis and Annie, and so I convinced myself I needed nobody but them. I was a sailboat at heed to the breeze, circling buoys before heading out to the uncomplicated silence of a calm bay.

Up ahead is the pub where they held their wedding reception. Taxis brought us down here from Holy Trinity, and we walked the towpath in slow procession. The bag I was carrying held towels and swimsuits and when we got to Long Bridges, I said, Fancy a dip? Annie said, You’re kidding, right? No, I said, and I unzipped the bag, and she squealed and the bride ran across the grass to swap a white dress for a tangerine costume. Trust you, said Ellis. Trust you to think of everything.

And the three of us swam. Mr and Mrs Judd and me.

And with hair still wet and dress slightly askew, we drank champagne in the pub garden and ate fish and chips, and the bride and groom cut a simple cake that Mabel had baked the day before. Everything was real, not perfect. And yet that’s what had made it so perfect. I said that in the speech. No jokes just memories, a bit soppy really, about how we met a week before Christmas. Advent Annie. How love is crucial to freedom.

In the soft light of evening, as the small gathering became even smaller, Ellis came and found me along this stretch of river. I can still see him, so handsome in his suit, a sort of lopsided handsomeness with his scuffed brogues and red rose buttonhole. And we stood side by side, as light flared off the water, as rowers passed. We shared a cigarette, and in between us was a parched landscape strewn with the bones of abandoned plans only we once knew about. We heard our names shouted along the path. We turned and Annie was running barefoot towards us. Doesn’t she look beautiful, I said. I love her. He grinned. Me too. And she loves you. What a mélange we are, I said. It was a relief for us finally to laugh. Annie took the cigarette from my mouth and finished the remaining stub and said, Come to New York with us, Mikey. You’ve always wanted to go. Come on! There’s still time. Join us tomorrow. Or the next day. But come.

I wanted to scream, Yes, to still be part of you, yes for nothing to change, yes. But I said, I can’t. You know I can’t. It’s your honeymoon. Now go. Get it started.

We waved them off from the pub. Good luck, good luck, have a great time! And more confetti was thrown. Mabel’s hand pressed firm to my back, holding me up. It’s got cold, she said. Let’s go home and get you warm. The gesture almost broke me. We settled silently in the back of a taxi, no talk of the beautiful day or who wore what or who said what. I could see her looking at me. She slipped her hand into mine. Waiting for me to crack. That’s how I knew she knew. Had always known. As if she, too, had seen another version of our future orbiting around us. Before its fall to earth on that real and perfect day.

It was Mabel who told me to take the job in London. Come see me at weekends, she said, and I did, without fail. Friday evening, she’d be waiting outside the shop, holding a list of all the things she wanted to talk to me about. And from the restaurant opposite, she’d have bought a bottle of Chianti Ruffino, which would be waiting on the kitchen table, opened. Breathing, she liked to say, as if it was a small animal. And sometimes Ell and Annie would be around that table, just like old times, laughter and tears, but with a twist of difference. The pronoun ‘We’ instead of their names, and a newly acknowledged ache that sat in the core of my gut.