Chapter 7
It became suddenly clear that this was what we had been working toward all this time, inch by inch. We had escaped Greenwich
and saved each other, but there was more to it than that—there had been this unspoken longing, there had been a goal all along.
After all, Simon seemed to know exactly what he was doing when we made love again in the morning, both of us spread out wide
and open for the other, a complete newness transforming everything. We had spent every day of the past six months together,
only now for the first time we were spending time inside each other, fingers interlocked, sweat on backs and chests, our grip
on the day inverted, and everything I thought I knew needing to reestablish itself through unclouded eyes.
The world of Simon opened up to me and the thrill felt nostalgic—our desperate clawing for each other a feeling I didn’t think I would ever find out here, yet here it was.
We inspected each other’s naked bodies in the brilliant light of day.
We fucked on the banks of the flooded stream.
There was a meatiness to all of it, a brutal humanness that had us both in strangleholds and the thought crossed my mind that maybe this actually wasn’t gay at all, just an excise of pent-up maleness.
We had spent an entire winter together, hardly seen another soul.
More importantly, Simon’s sweetness and chivalry seemed in diametric opposition to the concept of gayness and the bitterness it creates in a person—there was no shirking, there was no squeamishness. We held hands in public.
We went to Scarborough together a few weeks after this new dimension revealed itself and we walked the streets arm in arm,
hand in hand. Vague fear crossed my mind, but fear was always crossing my mind; I followed Simon’s lead. We traded bundles
of flax for two sheep, we bought rosemary, lard, a sharpening stone, and rope, and the whole time our glow was showing, a
pheromone flagging our coupledom, yet nobody batted an eye. We even attended a mass at the church there and while I felt the
natural homophobia of decorum, Simon still slipped his hand inside mine. He held his arm around the small of my back when
we were greeted by a cheery vicar before the start of the service.
“Look at you two,” the vicar said. He was simple and round, draped in plain robes with minimal adornment like a snowman without
a face. He touched us both on the arm. “Strapping young men. Lovely to have you here today.”
“We were just passing by,” I said, wary—wary right from the start and regretting coming inside the church. (It had been my
idea to pop inside because, well, because I was gay and appreciated aesthetics, but there was no such thing as pop inside in this world and a church was not an empty tourist attraction.
Simon had taken my suggestion nearly as important as our first kiss, nearly as commonplace as boiling water before drinking it.
Yes, of course we needed to take the eucharist, we needed to be blessed, good idea.
The flippancy of popping in and taking a picture of a stained glass window with a phone would not exist for hundreds of years.)
Simon took command of the pleasantries with the vicar while I waited for the penny to drop at any moment. The cold water would
be thrown over me and all this would come into context. This was Boy Scouts, this was a heightened bromance, this was a Masonic
Movember arm wrestle, this wasn’t—
“We’re lovers,” Simon told him.
Maybe he had said “brothers.” Maybe something completely different. Maybe the English I thought I had gotten my head wrapped
around was all wrong, but whatever he said was enough for the vicar to touch me on the arm again and say with praise, “A budding
romance.” He winked. “A regular David and Jonathan we have in our midst. What a blessing.”
There’s a clear misalignment here, I thought. “Budding” as in buddy. “Romance” as in romanticism, as in the glory of the individual’s
emotional truth, not something shared. We were pals—surely that was the interpretation. The church service itself wasn’t even
church—not that I had much of a preexisting context, but this was more like a census taking. We worshipped, I guess, but only
in the sense that we declared ourselves present, we recited prayers, we were blessed and given a sacrament but it felt purposeful like indication, not ritual, like something
was being absorbed, physically, into my body, not in a New Agey, superstitious way, not even in a pseudoscientific, born-again
way, but like a shampooing of my hair, a stethoscope on my chest, a section of my brain unfolding then recreasing.
It was half in Latin anyway, nobody understood a thing.
But it was novelty, it was mystery, and these things felt accumulated and weighty, pressing down.
Any tangible checklist about Jesus and what he did or didn’t want us doing was irrelevant in a world where I had spent the past weeks digging holes and making love.
It was all just chemicals living this way.
Endorphins and hunger, hot and cold, the fever of expenditure and its rewards.
Emotions—if you encountered them at all, even at church—didn’t nip and gnaw at you like they did in the modern world.
They came and went like smoke. I watched the saints in the stained glass windows and it was more entertaining than a film, no longer as terrifying as they had seemed in Lincoln.
They moved with the sun. Simon and I discussed them like superheroes.
That’s Saint Bartholomew, that’s Saint Francis, that’s the Virgin Mary.
“They look like astronauts,” I said. It was true. They each had a perfect circle drawn around their head, painted gold. The
halos looked like helmets you would wear in space.
“What’s an astronaut?” asked Simon.
“Someone who goes up into the sky,” I said. “Beyond the sky, far out into space where there’s no air, so they need special
helmets to breathe.”
“That’s what you need.”
I paused, raised an eyebrow. Simon added, “For your cough,” but somehow my mind had already raced ahead of him, thinking yes,
that’s what I need because my breath catches on itself when I’m around you. The spark, the quickness, the smoothness with
which he could just touch, press, and kiss. Who he was in private was exactly who he was in public. I didn’t know how to be
like that and I was in fearful awe.
What worried me most was that Simon’s eagerly honest sense of self reminded me of Callum, a man from the worst (or best) of my days at the financial firm in Canary Wharf.
Callum had come along like all the other sales boys selling themselves for favors.
Crisp shirts, tight trousers, thick hair cropped close.
Callum’s “performance” with me was the most successful of all the men, so much so that I can’t look back on what it turned into without feeling a flash of severe shame, a disconnection from my own self thanks to what I had contorted into being for him.
That feverish anticipation, performance, praying—I recognized too many of those ghosts in how I felt about Simon.
Our lovemaking was love making, sure, but so many other things can be that too.
With Callum it started with small things. Pure fantasy on my part. Then real fantasy—fantasy football, which the office ran
every year, and Callum, out of all the boys, was the one who finally got me to join in. He got me to treat it seriously, helped
me set up a login, cutting through my self-deprecation and irony. He got me to wager serious money.
“You’re a stats guy, that’s all it is. I need you to help me figure out my team at least.”
I need you. I need you. I played it over and over in my head at night.
I wasn’t a “stats guy,” but I made myself into one for him. My number-crunching hell-job wasn’t maths-whizzy in the slightest,
but I loved the impression it gave him of me and the power dynamic. I was meek and lowly, he was high and hot.
What I hated—what I absolutely hated more than anything—was how much my boyfriend saw exactly what was happening, counting each one of my tiny self-manipulations, and never did anything about it, never called me out; seeing me watch a match on TV—something I had never done before outside of maybe the World Cup or the Euros—and how my phone would blow up with each goal, my group chat with the lads, my private chat with just Callum.
Gwon that’s my stats man! That’s it baby!
Get in! He called me man. He called me baby.
And I didn’t care what he called me as long as I could be just the one word that mattered
most: my.
Was that all I wanted? To be owned?
I knew it had gone too far with Callum when I started to feel an old familiar childhood craving to hear him say that I was
his best friend. Like an itch, I wanted it said out loud, each way, me to him and him to me. We had hiked the Pennines together,
we had shared a tent, I had been to his wedding, become friends with his wife, helped him avoid financial ruin at work—he
hugged me for the first time that day, then hugged me often, all platonically and I understood that, but we both knew it traipsed
on the edge of something else, and that in some moments, all it would take was a certain route, a special formula, where things
could be persuaded into something more, some discreet new dimension because the deepness was already there, the emotional
fuel was there. I wanted to throw psychology at him: men have sex with each other because they’re gay, they’re not gay because
they have sex with each other—so nothing to worry about, buddy. Easy-peasy. Ease him in. But I never did because that’d be
perversion to a tee—yes, much better to crave in silence, boil myself to bits while he danced with me and toed the line, daring
me to call him out because calling him out would only prove a thousand points. I couldn’t call him out because I couldn’t
bear to let it stop.