Chapter Twenty-Four The Terrible Thing I Never Told You
Danny woke up unsure where he was. Instinctively he reached for Luis and, not finding him, sat up.
Over the years they rarely slept apart and always with their arms around each other as they had done on their first night together.
As Danny slept on the right side of the bed the hotel linen on the left was smooth and untouched.
It occurred to Danny that the desire to marry might be as simple as a fear of waking up alone.
He pulled back the covers which smelt of talcum powder, selected by his parents to be as inoffensive as possible.
Running a guest lodge was about navigating a neutral path, creating a centre ground where everyone felt welcome.
It was something he could never do – create a house where everyone would feel comfortable staying, a polarizing figure by default, excluding him from the family business before it had even been offered to him.
On his way to the bathroom he opened the doors to the balcony and looked out over the sand dunes.
Despite the unsettled November sky, he decided to swim in the sea.
It was a short walk to the beach, the sand streaked with lines of seaweed and driftwood after a storm.
As there was no one else around Danny stripped naked, walking out into the freezing shallows before diving under the water, swimming along the seabed holding his breath for as long as possible.
When he surfaced, he swam as fast as he could, suddenly tempted not to return.
The pull was so powerful it took a conscious effort to stop.
He trod water for a time, staring at the wide-open sea.
The childhood fantasy of a kinder society under the waves no longer held the same grip over his imagination and he swam back to shore.
The hotel breakfast was porridge made with creamy milk from a local dairy and sweetened with heather honey from the moors.
Afterwards Danny and his parents set out for a clifftop walk.
Following their conversation last night his parents seemed to have compartmentalized the years they spent apart as something they could never fully comprehend, rationalizing it as the collateral damage of their son being gay.
The family had experienced a rupture and a separation, one many parents of gay children grappled with to varying degrees.
Over time a balance was found between the child’s chosen family and their biological family and it had simply taken Danny longer to find that balance.
But for Danny it wasn’t enough for his parents to merely attend the wedding, their attendance needed to mean something more – that they understood each other better, that they had not only restarted their relationship but also remade it.
At the top of the cliffs the three of them arrived at the Storm Tower, an octagonal structure decorated with the points of a compass, designed as a refuge for the coastguard, itself now in need of rescue from a crumbling cliff edge.
Seeking shelter inside they looked out across the sea at the approaching rain.
Danny had set his mind on telling them about a formative event that had happened when he was young.
It explained, he believed, why he had needed to escape and why it had been so hard to come back.
His dad crossed his arms. His mum took a seat.
Danny began, ‘By the time I finished school, I didn’t know anyone who was gay aside from my drama teacher.
There was no internet, no chat rooms, no mobile phones.
I was eighteen years old and I had never been kissed.
So, I paid for a lonely-hearts ad in the local papers. ’
His dad shook his head in disbelief.
‘Dad, what other options were there? My friends had house parties to figure sex out. I had nothing. I collected the replies from a payphone in the visitors’ carpark so it wouldn’t appear on your bill.
Mostly there were creepy messages but one was promising, a polite older man staying in a house close to Boscastle. ’
His mum asked, ‘How much older?’
Danny noticed how quick his mother was to leap on the matter of age, as if she’d always believed that being gay was a form of corruption inflicted on Danny by an older man.
‘I was eighteen, claiming to be twenty-one. He was forty, claiming to be twenty-nine.’
Danny had been forced to lie since the age of consent for gay men wasn’t lowered to eighteen until 1994, prohibiting Danny from having sex through his university years.
‘We arranged a date on a Saturday afternoon. I studied the map, worked out how to get there. An hour and a half by bike. I picked out my best clothes, styled my hair, stole some aftershave. When I arrived, I left my bike outside and rang the bell. The man was good-looking. Neat and tidy. I had this idea that he was a teacher. He stood there, for a time, as if figuring me out. Which was odd because what was there to figure out? I was exactly who I claimed to be – an inexperienced young gay man. Looking back, he was probably calculating the odds.’
His dad sought clarification.
‘The odds of what?’
‘Whether I’d go to the police.’
Neither of his parents spoke.
Danny continued, ‘I should’ve walked away.
I knew something wasn’t right about him.
He was off. But I thought – maybe this is how men like me are when we grow up.
We’re all a bit off. I told myself that I was being a coward, that I wasn’t afraid of him, I was afraid of sex.
Which was true. The reason that I thought he was a teacher was because that’s what I was looking for – a teacher, someone who could teach me what it meant to be gay.
I hoped he’d sit me down, tell me the story of his life.
Which was laughable. He didn’t want to talk.
Inside I began to shiver even though it was the middle of summer, so I said no offence, change of mind, I’m going to leave, let’s do this some other time.
He said I was being silly, why was I being so silly?
I should have a drink. He took me by the wrist and walked me to the kitchen where he poured me a glass of red wine.
I took one sip and my legs became weak, not because the drink was drugged but because I knew that I’d missed my chance to leave. ’
At this point Danny’s dad stood up, walking to the doorway of the storm shelter as the rains arrived, sweeping over the cliffs.
‘If you’d told me, I would’ve killed him.’
Danny registered the violence in his reply.
‘The thing is, Dad, I wasn’t scared of what you’d do to him. I was scared of what you’d do to me.’
Danny had often imagined telling his parents this story, but he had never imagined the pain it would cause them. Shocked at the implication, his dad said, ‘We never laid a hand on you.’
Upset, his father stepped into the rains, pulling up his waterproof hood and setting off towards Bude.
Danny leaned against the stone walls, unsure if his mum was about to leave and only the heavy rains were holding them together.
But rather than leaving Danny alone in the storm shelter his mother joined his side.
‘We’re never going to get back the time we lost. No matter how many sad stories we tell each other.’
The pair of them listened to the rain for a time before she asked, ‘What happened with that man?’
Danny shook his head. He had lost a sense of what he was trying to achieve.
‘It doesn’t matter. I came here to invite you to a wedding. I don’t know why I’m talking about him.’
His mother suggested, ‘Because they’re connected.’
She was right. They were connected, as though the first encounter had been a curse, and the wedding was the spell to lift it. Danny returned to the end of story.
‘After he kicked me out, I walked my bike back home. I couldn’t cycle because of the pain.
I remember watching the sunset and hating it.
I hated everything I saw. Our house. The sea.
The cliffs. This town. At home, I took a shower.
Cleaned myself up, threw my underwear away, hid them at the bottom of the bin.
I swallowed twenty aspirin and went to bed. ’
Danny stretched his hand out into the rain, feeling the drops on his skin.
‘Twenty was enough to feel like I was doing something dangerous. But not enough to be dangerous. In the morning, I didn’t eat breakfast. I didn’t eat for days because I was scared that I was torn inside.
And I wasn’t, not like that, but in another way I was.
I wanted to say something. I was desperate to say something.
I needed you to tell me that my future was not going to be men like that or sex like that. ’
His mother contemplated this.
‘I could never have told you that. You were always going to have to find it out for yourself.’
Danny nodded.
‘That’s why I’m here. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That I found my answers. That I’m no longer torn inside. And I don’t want to be angry anymore.’
Arriving back at his parents’ house Danny found his dad waiting for him at the kitchen table with a photo album open. He gestured for Danny to take a seat.
‘We made a lot of mistakes. But it was never about shame. We were afraid for you.’
Danny couldn’t count the number of his gay friends who had heard similar sentiments from their parents.
It was never disgust, they would claim. It was concern for their children’s health or their careers, a fear that they would spend their lives alone.
Much of the world will hate you, they would warn, some people openly, most privately, if they bothered to think about you at all.
And how could any parent be happy about their child being hated when they only wanted the best for them.
But the conversation took a different turn when Danny’s father said, ‘We should have told you the truth about your grandfather. I was scared that what happened to him might happen to you.’
Danny had no idea what his father was referring to.
‘What are you talking about? He died in a traffic accident before I was born.’
His father’s voice became quiet.
‘No one believes your grandfather’s death was an accident. No one who knew him well. He died on a dangerous stretch of road, but he’d been cycling his whole life. He knew these roads better than anyone. And the driver maintained that my father swerved into the impact.’
His dad allowed that fact to sit before adding, ‘The insurance company investigated. There was no suicide note. Everyone in town claimed he was happy. He was popular. He was loved. They paid out, which is how your mother and I managed to start our business. But there were always doubts.’
Sensing the direction the story was heading in, Danny asked, ‘What kind of doubts?’
His dad nodded.
‘After his funeral I cleaned out his study. My father loved to travel, which was not common back then. He kept travel guides from different cities. I found them, hidden behind his other books. They were called Bob Damron’s Address Book. Have you heard of them?’
Danny shook his head.
‘They were the first guidebooks published for gay men. And my father owned a few including for San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.’
Danny asked, ‘He was gay?’
His dad shook his head, but then changed his mind and shrugged.
‘I don’t know what words to use. He was married to my mother. I’m his son. He was a pillar of the community. Daniel – I burned those books. All of them. I told your mother and no one else. They were evidence of a fraud.’
Danny wondered if his father was referring to the fraud of his grandfather’s death or the fraud of his life.
‘Why didn’t he burn them?’
It was a good point and one his dad had wrestled with.
‘I wish he had. Only recently I began to wonder if he wanted me to find them as a way of explaining why he left without saying goodbye. He was living two lives. He believed there was more value in his death than in a life like that.’
Looking directly at Danny he said, ‘You remind me of him. His gestures. His physicality. The way you would go for long runs, he would cycle for many miles. And I was scared when I saw him in you. I thought history might repeat itself and that you would grow up with that same sadness inside of you. I tried to set you on a different course. And I see now that was the exact course my father was on.’
His father offered Danny the photo album. Danny studied his grandfather’s face for traces of himself.
In town they bought flowers from the supermarket.
The only half-decent bunch remaining on a Sunday afternoon was a bouquet of mauve carnations.
The three of them walked to St Michael’s cemetery, not far from the centre in the grounds of a nineteenth-century church.
Passing the tombstones of the fishermen and sailors who perished off the coastline’s rocks they arrived at the grave of his grandfather.
Danny laid the flowers and said, ‘Hey, Granddad.’
As if they were meeting for the first time.