Bittersweet Seasons
Anthology of gay romance stories
Fabian Black
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 Fabian Black
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Completing the Puzzle
Jinx knew a lot of things. He knew his local football team would never make it to the top of the league, but he supported them regardless. He knew he wasn’t good looking in a drop-dead gorgeous kind of way. By the same token nor was he ugly. He was an ordinary boy-next-door type with a sweet smile and neat ears, or so his grandma had told him.
He knew he preferred thin peel breakfast marmalade to thick peel, something his mother just couldn’t seem to get her head around, so that when he visited home he’d have to stoically chew on what felt like strands of bootlace because he knew she’d bought the marmalade especially for him.
He knew his father was a man called Harry Coulter, but he’d never actually met him. In fact his mother had only met him once, at a friend’s wedding. It was a relationship caught like the bride’s bouquet at the height of a happy moment, but which expired before the bridal blooms had even wilted.
He also knew the nickname Jinx would be with him until the day he parted company with life and his legal name, David Jenkins, appeared on the brass plaque on his coffin lid, thus confusing his friends and leading them to exclaim, who the hell is that? Are we at the wrong funeral?
Childhood nicknames are hard to shake off and sometimes Jinx doubted he had another name in any concrete sense. His bio father’s surname had been Coulter, but Jinx had never shared it. His mother’s surname was Trent before she married Eddie Jenkins, the man who subsequently adopted David at the age of six. He became David Jenkins and finally Jinx to differentiate him from the three other Davids he shared a classroom with, one of whom he had a secret crush on throughout his school life.
Being in possession of a nickname early on in life had its advantages. It meant that when it came to creating an email account he had a ready made ‘emaily’ sort of name and didn’t have to invent one. He was Jinx101. Occasionally he harboured a regret that he hadn’t chosen something more fantastical, like the email addies chosen by blokes whose genitalia had taken over their lives and become an entity separate from the person that transported it around. Names like Wellhung, Everhard or 9andahalfinches. Yeah, Jinx knew a lot of things. He knew that a bloke whose email address was 9andahalfinches was probably seven at the very most.
Jinx knew other stuff. He knew that in order to get ahead you needed to get an education. So he studied hard and won a place at university. His chosen university had an active gay social scene and he was determined to take full advantage of it. For a while he lost control of everything but his groin region. His first year at uni looked in danger of becoming his last as he disregarded the golden rule about fitting in a few lectures and essays between partying and screwing. Consequently tutors made complaints when papers failed to be submitted
This was the point in his life when he met Jim Chambers. Jim was a student counsellor. Like Jinx he was gay, and he could remember what it was like to go through those euphoric days of self-discovery and existing from the waist down only. He counselled Jinx wisely. He helped him organise his social and work schedules, so that one didn’t cancel out the other. Consequently Jinx wasn’t booted ignominiously out of university with only an STD to show for his endeavours.
Jim was a few years older than Jinx but they got on well together and once the official counselling sessions were over they became good friends.
During Jinx’s all-important final year his adoptive father died suddenly of a heart attack. It came out of the blue one Saturday afternoon, while he was in the midst of cheering on his local football team. The St John Ambulance volunteers did their best to revive him, but to no avail. He was gone.
Jinx was surprised by the grief that engulfed him for the quiet man who had married his mother and given his name to a child who wasn’t his own, a man who had staunchly been there during the lego years, the seaside days and the acne moments. He hadn’t realised how much he wanted that man to be proud of him and how much he had been looking forward to him being present when he received his degree.
It’s funny how you never really know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Jinx regretted all the words of gratitude and affection left unspoken for the man whose surname, he now understood, he carried with pride and love. That was when Jinx, who as a student already drank too much, began to drink way too much in order to dull the pain of unsaid words.
Jim helped him through it. He was a shoulder to cry on, someone who listened and comforted. He was the man who physically hauled Jinx out of The Star And Garter the night before an important exam. He walked him miles in the fresh air and made him drink enough water for it to fall under the category of torture. He then stayed with him all night to ensure he woke up sober and got to his exam.
He was also the man who solemnly promised Jinx that if he got drunk again before his finals were over he would tan his foolhardy backside. In fact if he ever resorted to the bottle instead of friendship in the event of any future problems, he would do the same. Jinx had blushed at the threat, but not really believed it. Still, he made sure he didn’t get drunk again until his exams were over.
Jinx got his degree with honours and landed a good job in the same city as the university he got it from. Life was sweet. He and Jim remained firm friends. They met up at least twice a week for a meal or to go to the cinema or just to chat over a pint in the pub. When something bothered Jinx he called Jim to talk it out and knew he could rely on getting honest advice. They sometimes messaged online during work hours and all in all they were part of the warp and woof of each other’s lives.
The days shaped themselves into weeks then months and seasons that flowed one into another and the years fell from the calendar.
There was something Jinx didn’t know. He didn’t know he was in love with Jim. He thought they were just great friends, but they weren’t. They were lovers in all senses but sex. Did he but know it, Jinx had begun the process of falling in love in his second year at university. It happened on a fine day in mid-October when he and Jim were sitting by the river, watching kingfishers dive, admiring their azure livery. He had shivered as a cool autumn breeze wrapped itself about him. Draping an arm around his shoulders Jim had pulled him close against his side and shared body heat with him, as they talked and laughed.
On the other hand Jim knew he was in love with Jinx. He first suspected it one autumn day, as the leaves turned ruby-gold on the trees and kingfishers dived in and out of a fast flowing river sparking aqua diamonds from their wings, while Jinx nestled snug and warm against his side.
The suspicion was confirmed not long afterwards, on a winter day, as they walked on the Cleveland Hills. Jinx had clutched at his hand and exclaimed in spontaneous wonder, as the sun went down on the frost kissed fields of the sheep wash, turning white to sparkling pink before their eyes. In a moment of spontaneity of his own he told Jinx he loved him. Jinx had hugged him and said he loved him too. Jim knew he had chosen to interpret the declaration as one of close but uncomplicated friendship, and a shadow crossed his heart. He didn’t press, fearful of losing a valued friendship, as well as a prospective lover.
Jim met Victor, a tall broadly built Canadian who came to the university to do some history research for a year. Jim liked him. They got on well, more than well. They started dating. Vic asked him to take a sabbatical from work and go back to Canada with him to see how they got along as a couple. Jim said yes, because he was lonely. Sometimes friends and family are not enough. Jinx was seeing someone, a stockbroker called Nigel, a smug individual with certain knowledge of his own worth. They were talking about setting up together. Jim wanted to set up with someone. The days of his life were slipping like sand through an hourglass and he didn’t want to spend the remainder alone.
Jim’s announcement that he was emigrating to Canada in the early spring hit Jinx like a thunderbolt. He was shocked by the grief that engulfed him. He suddenly understood with shattering clarity that Jim was more than a friend. He was a lover in every sense but sex. He’d had sex with many men, but been intimate with none, not in the way he was intimate with Jim. Why had he not seen what was under his nose? He wanted to beg him not to go. He wanted to tell him how much he meant to him, how much he loved him, and how he was now ready to take their relationship a step further. He didn’t, because he believed Jim loved Vic and that he had missed his moment, and a shadow crossed his heart.
On the day he left for Canada, Jim told Jinx to phone him, email him or message him every day. Taking his face between his hands he told him that if he ever needed him, all he had to do was ask and he would be there. Then he waited, waited for Jinx to give the right response, waited for everything to fall into place and make this their moment. Nothing fell into place. Jinx didn’t make the right response and Jim got on the plane and went to Canada with Vic, but left his heart with a fair-haired, blue-eyed man in the airport bar.
Jinx missed Jim even more than he thought he would. He came to realise how important he had been in his life. How he had made him laugh and how he had accepted and forgiven his many flaws, such as his propensity to talk too much and too loudly when excited, his critical impatience and blindness to things that were often under his nose. He missed the fresh citrus scent of his aftershave and the way his soft brown eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. He missed the cinema trips and meals out and the little courtesies that Jim had shown him, such as helping him on with his coat or straightening his tie.
Jim had helped Jinx keep his life together and with him gone it began to slowly fall apart. He and the stockbroker did not set up house together. Nigel did not like Jinx calling him to talk things over, because he was not an advice giver or a comforter or a fucking nursemaid, as he tenderly put it. He believed people should be responsible only for themselves and he viewed domestic commitment simply as a means of maximising material assets and procuring sexual services. He was one of the hard hearted and self-serving and Jinx wondered what the hell he had ever seen in him.
Autumn came. Jinx sat by the river, watching a pair of kingfishers dive until it got too cold and he turned his footsteps homewards, stopping off en route at the pub. He was drinking too much. He had started to drink a little too much the day Jim left for Canada. A little too much soon turned into way too much, but he didn’t tell Jim, nor did he tell him when he lost his job due to alcohol related absences. He didn’t tell him anything, because he didn’t want to worry him. He convinced him he was keeping a handle on life and everything was fine.
Pretence took its toll and he began to reduce contact with Jim, finally making the decision to stop talking to him altogether, because it hurt too much and he was too afraid he’d say something about his handle-less life and cause his dearest friend to be ashamed of him. He changed his phone numbers and email addresses and tried to forget the kingfisher moments he’d shared with a man who had been not only a friend, but also, he now knew, the love of his life. Sometimes you just had to accept you’d messed up and missed out on your chance for happiness.
Jim had not liked Jinx’s gradual cessation of contact, but accepted it as being a natural aspect of the distance between them. He and Victor had set up home together, but they were not a domestic unit as such. They shared an apartment and had a friendship with occasional sex. When Jinx fell off the radar altogether Jim made urgent enquiries and what he discovered distressed him. He told Vic of his concerns.
Vic took Jim’s face between his big kind hands and told him to go back to the place that in essence he had never left and make plain the strength of his feelings for Jinx. He described them as two men who for too long had been trying to live as independent entities, when in truth they were interlocking parts of the same puzzle. The puzzle was incomplete. It was time, he had said, smiling, to accept that the emerging picture was not of a student and counsellor, or friends, it was a picture of two men in love. He told Jim to take charge and press home the final piece, because that was his role. It had been his role since the first piece was laid down by a young man having a hard time adapting to life away from home and who subsequently walked into a counsellor’s office and asked for help, willingly taking what was offered.
Jim wrote snail mail to Jinx saying he was on his way back and he’d be home for Christmas. He also told him emphatically that he was in love with him and wanted to live the rest of his life with him.
The letter arrived at its destination on the same day Jim’s plane touched down on the airport runway, but it didn’t get read. It lay unopened on the hall table, because Jinx didn’t realise it was a love letter. He thought it was just Christmas greetings from a far distant friend and he couldn’t bear to open it and read a general message from someone he wanted so much, but believed he would never see again. Instead, he got ready and went out on a date with a man whose attraction lay in a slight physical resemblance to Jim.
Jinx knew he’d sunk to the bottom of the barrel when he woke up late on Christmas Eve with a terrible hangover and his bed companion from the night before turned out to be a chicken, and not in the sense of a young gay man, but an item of poultry. While devoid of feathers, it was still in possession of its head and neck. He stared in horror, wracking his foggy thoughts as to how he’d ended up in bed with a naked bird, and worse, wondering whether he might have given a whole new meaning to the term stuffing the chicken.
It slowly came back to him, the gay club, and the date who had reminded him of Jim, but who turned out to be nothing like him. He remembered leaving the club alone, ending up in a pub and buying fur and feather raffle tickets, winning the chicken and arriving home too drunk to do anything but collapse into bed, still fully dressed and still clutching the bag that contained his featherless friend and from whence it had obviously escaped during the night.
Taking the bird into the kitchen he sat at the table with it and pondered on the mess he had made of his life. Tears fell. He was lonely. His thoughts turned to suicide and he got out the whisky bottle and all the pills he possessed, six painkillers and half a bottle of vitamins. Hardly a fatal amount, so he took a couple of painkillers to offset his hangover and a vitamin in lieu of food, and then concentrated on reaching the bottom of the whisky bottle, while telling the attentive chicken all about Jim.
Jim had always had a spare key to Jinx’s house, a back up sort of thing. He had kept it when he went to Canada and he used it on his return, opening the door and stepping into the dark hall when his peal on the doorbell went unanswered.
The kitchen tableau with the empty whisky bottle and scattered pills told an alarming story, though Jim was uncertain as to what part the chicken had played. Roughly rousing Jinx from his stupor he convinced him he was neither dream nor hallucination, and then demanded to know what the hell he’d taken.
Jinx gave a slurred assurance he hadn’t overdosed, well, not if you discounted the alcohol. Jim scolded him and then ruthlessly set about sobering him up fulfilling a promise he’d made years earlier in the process.
Hauling Jinx to his feet he seated himself in his place and pulled him over his knee, soundly spanking his jean clad backside while berating him for turning to the bottle instead of friendship in a time of crisis. He warned that if he ever did it again the jeans would come down and his hand would make contact with his bare backside. When he’d done spanking he made a shell-shocked, but more sober man drink enough water to qualify as a form of torture and then took him out and walked him miles in the frost laden air.
Once home, before going back into the house, he turned to Jinx and asked, “why, why didn’t you call, David, why didn’t you tell me you were struggling? I would have come to you without hesitation. I could have helped.”
Jinx’s fine blue eyes misted, “I didn’t want to impose on you. I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me, and anyway I thought you loved Victor.” Tears fell. “I thought I’d fucked up and missed out.”
“You daft man.” Taking hold of Jinx’s cold hands Jim gave them a cross little shake and then raised them to his lips, kissing each in turn, “real friends are never disappointed in each other, or if they are, they get over it. I told you a long time ago I’d always be here for you. I meant it.” Releasing his hands he opened the door and ushered Jinx inside helping him out of his coat. Taking his hand he led him into the sitting room and sat down on the couch pulling him onto his lap, cuddling him as he cried.
Once the tears abated Jim told Jinx he was in love with him, did he understand? Jinx nodded, smiled and then cried afresh. A gentle kiss of comfort gave way to heated kisses of passion and they ended up in bed where they became lovers in every sense of the word. It was as if someone had fitted the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle and the full picture at last emerged.
It snowed on Christmas day, as it inevitably does in stories set around the festive season. Jim and Jinx stood by the window watching snowflakes falling outside while they waited for their celebratory repast, chicken, to finish cooking. The bells rang joyfully out for Christmas Day. Turning into each other’s arms they hugged and kissed, knowing they would be happy together for all the days of their lives.
Connections
Stuart met Michael. Something clicked and they made a connection. A pattern emerged: the pictures, dinner out, walks in the countryside, dinner in, sex. The relationship deepened, or did it merely become a habit? Time moved on and they set up home together.
Once a year Michael journeyed to Scotland to visit the mother he otherwise communicated with via the Hallmark Greetings Card Company on high days and holidays, such as birthdays and Christmas. Stuart had no family of his own; his parents had long since passed the eternal boundary. He missed the bond that linked you to some other subliminal part of yourself.
Some while after he and Mike move in together; when a Scottish journey was imminent, he said, “I’ll come with you this time, Mike. I can easily get the time off work. I’d love to meet your mother.”
Michael shook his head, “I’d rather go alone. Maybe next time.”
“You always say that. I’m beginning to think you’re ashamed of me; of us.”
“She wouldn’t understand about us and I really don’t want to talk about it, Stu.” A kiss shelved the subject.
On a warm June evening, after a brief phone conversation, Michael pressed the receiver back into its cradle. His eyes strayed to a stain on the polished tabletop, a white heat ring, the result of a carelessly placed coffee mug. He studied it. It wasn’t a stain as such, but rather condensation, which had been trapped in the wood fibres. It would be difficult to rectify. The secret was to try and unlock the moisture, allow it to escape rather than try to mask it with dyes and polish.
In the sitting room, Stuart continued to read, curled up in his favourite chair by the French window. The clock on the mantelpiece did its duty ticking a message of time passing, second by second, keeping friendly rhythm with the words on the page as they filtered through his mind. After a while the ticking began to intrude and to move out of step, interrupting the pattern so the words lost their fluency. Stuart was conscious only that twenty minutes had passed since the return click of the phone receiver and Michael had not yet come back into the room.
Setting aside the verbal delights of ‘Carol Shields,’ Stuart left ‘Larry’s Party’ and walked out into the narrow hall. Michael was standing by the phone table, bathed in a pool of glass filtered sunlight, his right hand still resting lightly on the receiver, as if he had just that moment put it down. Unease rippled through Stuart prompting him to ask, “who was on the phone?”
“Colin.”
“Your uncle?”
“Aha.” The green eyes registered slight emotion for a second, “he actually deigned to speak to me.”
“What did he want?”
“To tell me my mother is dead,” said in a ‘isn’t the weather fine for the time of year’ sort of voice.
Stuart experienced a flashback of pain to the moment when someone had told him the same thing. He started forward. “God, Michael, I’m so sorry, how?”
Michael neatly sidestepped both the question and the intended embrace by heading upstairs. “I’m going to have a bath.” He didn’t glance back.
Stuart hastened after him, only to have the bathroom door shut in his face and locked. He sat on the top stair. He could hear the tick of the clock downstairs in the living room. A minute...ten minutes…fifteen. Stuart listened for the sound of the bathroom door opening, but heard only the ticking of the clock. “Michael,” he knocked on the door, “are you all right?” Silence. He knocked again, more insistently. “Michael?” The sound of water draining away caused a surge of relief.
Emerging from the bathroom Michael dumped the clothes he’d been wearing in the laundry hamper on the landing. Then without so much as a word he walked into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. Stuart lay down beside him, stroking the damp hair back from his brow. “Don’t shut me out, Mikey. Tell me what happened.”
“She hanged herself.”
The stark statement was followed by a harsh unexpected kiss cutting off words of shock and sympathy. Sex was unadorned. Afterwards Michael turned over, curling on his side to sleep.
“I love you,” Stuart caressed and then kissed his shoulder. There was no response. He lay for a moment gazing up at the ceiling and then got up, going to the bathroom to shower.
The note arrived the day after Michael heard the news. ‘Free at last’ she wrote in her flowing handwriting, its elaborate peaks and troughs so reminiscent of the woman herself. ‘By the time you read this I’ll be free at last. Remember only that I love you.’ Carefully folding the note into a neat square Michael slipped it into his wallet.
Stuart finally got to accompany Michael to Scotland. “What was she like,” he pulled his gaze away from the flow of verdant countryside beyond the car window, “your mother? You never showed me any photos of her. Do you look like her?”
“I’d rather not talk about her just now.”
The room in the chapel of ease was cool and dim. She looked peaceful in her coffin, calm and at rest, something she had never been in life. Michael gazed down at her. He felt no correlation and turned away.
The sun shone as the coffin was lowered into the fresh grave. It should be raining, thought Stuart. The sky should be leaden, with water pouring and dripping through the branches of the trees. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because it had rained on the day of his own mother’s funeral and it had felt appropriate. The sun had no right to shine, it was disrespectful somehow, but shine it did from a clear blue sky. The birds sang and the distant murmur of traffic filtering through the cemetery walls served as a reminder that life marched on regardless.
The Minister intoned the final rites. Picking up a handful of soil he sprinkled it on top of the coffin, inviting the other mourners to do the same. All but Michael followed the Minister’s example and then began drifting away from the grave. Michael stayed where he was looking down at the pine box, which contained the empty shell of the woman who had borne him.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Stuart took his arm, “it’s time to go.” He guided him to the car waiting to take them back to his uncle’s house for the customary funeral tea.
Michael ate nothing. Holding a china cup and saucer in his hand he let the subdued funereal conversations accompanied by the chink of cutlery sweep over him. He felt numb, lost in a strange limbo. It stretched back to a telephone call and his uncle’s voice telling him his mother had taken her own life. There had been a swell of angry indignation in the voice, as if she had done it just to shame and inconvenience him. His mother had always said nothing she did would ever please her family, unless it was dying, and only then if it adhered to prescribed rules.
Gazing out of the window towards the hills he felt the emptiness of his birthplace press around him. His father still resided here, but there was no connection between them. His father had chosen to sever it when Michael made known he was gay. All that had been here was gone to the grave with his mother. He should have felt released, but instead felt confined, as if he too were under a mound of soil.
Stuart made strained but polite conversation with people he didn’t know, all the while casting anxious glances towards Michael who stood motionless by the window. As soon as was decently possible he made excuses and ushered him away to the hotel they had booked into for the night.
Un-knotting his black tie, Stuart dragged it off with a sigh of relief and then unfastened his top shirt button. He went to the mini bar. “Would you like a drink, love, whisky?”
Michael nodded. Sipping at the amber fluid, he sat cross-legged on the floor staring at the cardboard boxes the psychiatric staff had given to him. His mother’s few possessions. The sum total of a person’s life packed into two cardboard boxes. She herself now neatly boxed and cleared away, labelled and closeted, much as she had been for years past. He closed his eyes remembering a childhood event, a picnic at midnight in the rare heat of high summer, walking barefoot on the grass outside. He also remembered the disapproval that followed and the tainting of a special moment when with shining eyes he told about the midnight excursions. The exchanged looks above his head, the pursed lips and the first inkling his mother was not quite like other mothers. She’d gone away for a while after that, he missed her and he wished he hadn’t told.
Stuart studied Michael’s face, admiring eyelashes that would grace a girl; lush dark crescents on high, pale cheekbones. He had barely spoken, barely eaten, since the phone call over a week ago. “Don’t fight your grief, Mike. It’s okay to cry.”
“Is it?” The lashes flicked up from their lowered position. “Maybe I don’t have the right to cry.”
“We all have the right to cry when we need to.”
“Maybe I don’t need to, and anyway I don’t want to talk about it.”
So Stuart didn’t press him to talk and Michael didn’t cry. They resumed the pattern of their lives.
June passed the baton to July who raced into August and then September. The days shortened, the nights lengthened and the ticking of the clock marked a growing distance between lovers. Stuart read words on a printed page while Michael flicked through the picture book of memory: a boy standing at school gates waiting for a woman who didn’t come because she’d lost track of time. A young man visiting a grey hospital ward where a dull-eyed woman stared at him without recognition, a temporary effect of electrical impulses passing through her brain in an effort to make her into someone acceptable. She had not wanted the treatment; it had been imposed. It didn’t work anyway. She stayed the same. He despised her and went away to university cutting all connection for three long years.
October merged into November leaving a trail of damp leaves and aching silences. Even the clock no longer spoke. It hunched miserably on the mantelpiece waiting for someone to do what was necessary to reconnect its voice. Even without the aid of the clock, time did what it had to do and moved forward. It could do no more. How it was used was beyond its power. Two men went through the motions of daily life, picking up bottled milk from the doorstep, exchanging small talk with neighbours and workmates while ignoring each other. Stuart moved into the spare room to sleep in the single bed. It felt less lonely than the bed he had shared with Michael where the gap between their turned backs had become an unbridgeable chasm. He tried to discuss it with Michael, but as ever he didn’t want to talk about it. The green eyes were blank shutters securely fastened from within. Stuart ached for a man who had been his friend and lover and was now just someone he shared a roof with.
November died quietly, unlamented.
December came, bringing the dark days. On a cold frosty morning Michael silently packed his possessions into bags and boxes. He had announced his intention to leave the day before. He’d rented a place, it was for the best, he said, and no, he didn’t want to talk about it. Stuart didn’t press him and neither did he go to bed that night. He sat in the armchair downstairs keeping vigil with the aphonic clock. Morning came. He hesitated outside the bedroom where Michael was gathering together the last of his things. He wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words. Going back downstairs he stood in the room he had occupied all night feeling its emptiness press around him. Without the tick of the clock the room was soulless. He stared at its reproachful face and suddenly knew what he had to do. Rummaging in a drawer he found the key made the connection and gave the clock back its voice. It smiled ten past ten gratitude and filled the room with words; words that told of a space of time…seven years shared with Michael. He ran back upstairs.
“Have you found someone else?” He finally asked the question that had been tugging at his mind for weeks. There was truth in the unembellished reply.
“No.”
“I love you. I don’t want you to leave. I want us to work this out, together.”
Michael didn’t respond. Instead he placed a large pink seashell on top of the box he had just packed and lifted it up.
Stuart ran an agitated hand through thick dark hair. It couldn’t end like this...seven years packed silently into bags and boxes. “Michael, please, if there’s to be any chance for us you have to trust me. Tell me what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. Surely you owe me that much?”
“I’m sorry, it’s too late and I...”
“Don’t want to talk about it, I know!” Anger suddenly surged through Stuart. “Well tough, because I do want to fucking talk about it and I will fucking talk about it. I’ve invested seven years of my life in this relationship and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you just walk away without at least TRYING to salvage it. You’ve called all the shots throughout our time together, shutting me up and shutting me out whenever it suited you. No more though.” Grabbing the box from Michael’s arms he dumped it roughly on the bed, dislodging the seashell in the process. It bounced off the mattress spinning for a second in the air before hitting the wooden floor and shattering.
With a shrill cry of dismay Michael dropped to his knees among the fragments of shell. The damn burst at last and tears streamed down his face, sobs tearing from his throat as he gathered up the pale pink shards, cradling them in his hands. Stuart knelt beside him, apologising, reaching out his arms, half expecting to be rebuffed, and experiencing a rush of relief as the offer of comfort was grasped. “I’m sorry, Mikey, I’m so sorry,” he cradled him in his arms, kissing the rough, wheat brown hair.
The sobs eased and faded. Lying in the protective circle of Stuart’s arms Michael at last gave voice to the pain he held inside. He told of the mother he had loved and hated at one and the same time, who was never quite like other mothers, which when you’re very young is wonderful.
He told of time passing and how the child in him died and the emerging adult became tainted with the world’s prejudice. He told how he learned to be embarrassed and ashamed of a mother who had woken him at midnight to go for walks and picnics in the garden, who took him to the seaside instead of to school, and who just didn’t seem able to connect with the corporal world for any length of time.
He spoke of the guilt he felt at being unwilling to accept what she was, who she was, and of his guilt for the times she was forcibly shut away, not just in hospital wards but also in a corner of his mind, and how he learned to disconnect so he couldn’t be hurt.
The kiss was soft, sensual and healing.
“I love you,” the peaceful postcoital silence was broken as Michael, for the first time, returned to Stuart a gift of three words, confirming at long last that their relationship was more than mere habit.
Time did its duty ushering seasons in and seasons out, turning the year full circle to June again.
After placing flowers on his mother’s grave, Michael lifted his face to the sky, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun to watch a skylark wheel and turn in the air.
Setting aside the conditioned shame, the embarrassment and the confusion, he remembered with joy and love a woman who gave him midnight memories of moonlight picnics, who ran barefoot across sandy beaches, who scrambled recklessly over sea-washed rocks to find a pink seashell so he could hear the sound of the ocean whenever he wanted, and who made him promise never to be ashamed of who he was.
She had told him to own himself with pride and demand recognition and respect, things she herself had finally given up on. She had chosen to disconnect from a world that had constantly pressured her to conform to its norms, and which had hurt and shunned her when she couldn’t. He glanced down at the quiet grave. She was free at last.
“You all right, Mikey?”
“Yes,” Michael slowly nodded, "I'm fine." He smiled at Stuart and held out his hand, “let’s go home.”
A Spring Legend