Chapter 7 #3
My mother sips her coffee delicately. ‘Well, we miss you, darling,’ she says. ‘If you’re not going to move back home now uni’s done, we’ll bring home to you. We can’t miss out on your life forever.’
‘But – what about Robbie?’ I ask, putting on a fake air of selflessness. ‘He’s still in Gero. And you love being nonni to Bianca.’
‘We’re not moving here fully, silly!’ my mother says cheerily. ‘Our flat would be a pied-à-terre. Any time we come to Perth, we can stay there. And meantime, you’ll live there, to take care of the place for us.’
Every fibre of my being wants to breathe a dramatic flamethrower into their faces – like a Charizard absolutely losing his shit. No way. I can never live with my parents again, not even part-time. It would kill me. This is a nightmare scenario.
But any fire in my belly is quickly extinguished. Fighting my parents will only make them more determined to vanquish me. If I stay as still as possible, play dead, they might change their minds.
‘Well, I thought you’d be more excited!’ my mother scowls.
I plaster on my smile. ‘Wow. Yes, no, this is exciting. Sorry, it’s been a big day.’
‘Living part-time in Perth will be such fun!’ my mother insists. ‘I could walk to the Coventry Village markets. And there’s this quaint little trattoria where the pasta is measured by the metre, have you heard of …’
I nod and smile for forty more minutes of pleasant monologue from my mother, but I am no longer in my body. My soul is floating above my head in a cloud of doom, totally dissociated, looking at the city lights a hundred metres below and thinking about the jump.
I head to the toilets before we leave C Restaurant. There’s a text from Jack. It’s a photo of his dick, cock ring around his nuts, veins throbbing and the head of his penis engorged with blood, a deep, shiny, pre-cum-coated purple.
Want this inside you? he asks.
More than anything, I reply.
When I get home, Sabrina is on the couch in a knitted Baby Yoda jumper.
She’s picking at a charcuterie board and watching an episode of Severance.
In that show, the characters have severed their identities, their personalities bifurcated surgically so their public work selves and private life selves are totally divided.
The red-headed woman on screen is so desperate to escape this dystopian arrangement she’s tried to hang herself in an elevator.
Sabrina doesn’t pause the episode when I walk in. It’s not until I lock the front door that she says coolly, over the top of the Severance episode, ‘How was dessert?’
I have the sense of walking into a battlefield without armour, and no clue where the archer’s arrow is going to sling from.
‘Fine,’ I manage. I shuffle into the kitchen and place my awards and parchment scroll on the bench. I have a sudden compulsion to throw them all in the bin.
Sabrina finally pauses her show. ‘I hope your parents didn’t hit you with any more homophobic stuff. That was messed up. I’m so sorry.’
Theoretically, this is nice, but it’s a bit rich when she’s the reason things got tense.
‘Nah, we’re cool,’ I reassure her. ‘Just how my family is.’
I go to walk to my room, but Sabrina adds, ‘That’s really not okay. It’s one thing when you were closeted, but they know who you are and they don’t seem to accept it …’
I pause. ‘It is what it is. They’re Italian. Catholic. Small-town. Different generation.’
Sabrina scoffs. ‘No. Age is no excuse for prejudice.’
She’s in debating society mode. Third speaker for the negative team, Sabrina Sefton, reporting for duty, Miss Collard. She was always in that role: no new information, just pure rebuttal. Sabrina is great at confrontation.
I was always in the more placid first speaker role: conflict gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I shrug. ‘Well, whatever. I only see them a few times a year. No biggie.’
Between my post-graduation abyss, and my parents’ news, I’m not in the mood for an argument. I head to my room, hurl my mortarboard and robe to the ground, and shove my certificates into a container full of other junk I’ll never look at again.
As I get changed into my grey T-shirt and boxers, I notice a blank rectangular space on the wall, four oily Blu Tack dots exposing beige-painted wall beneath.
My Tom of Finland poster is gone.
My breath catches in my throat. She didn’t. Did she?
I march back into the living area and stomp my foot on the pedal to open the kitchen bin.
In the recycling, among Prosecco bottles and cardboard Shining Dragon containers, is my poster.
‘Sabrina …’ I splutter.
Sabrina pauses her show again. She gets up off the couch, leans against the wall beside me and folds her arms over the knitted Baby Yoda on her chest. ‘I tried to talk to you about it,’ she says, blue eyes locking with mine with righteous concern.
‘Zeke, those big men – all hypermasculine and erotic – it’s porn.
You know how I feel about porn. And what I went through with Shane. I don’t want this in my house.’
I breathe in and my lungs catch, waterlogged.
At once, I am sixteen again, my mother humiliating me at the dinner table after she found the porn in my internet history.
My heart is drumming, my legs are ready to flee, my brain is scrambling.
I want to tell Sabrina she’s crossed a boundary.
But my brain is a sixteen-year-old boy’s, and I’m terrified.
I’m not safe here.
I carefully extract my crumpled poster from the bin. ‘Sabrina, I know you don’t like a boyfriend watching porn – but it’s not the same as Shane … I’m just a roommate … and I’m gay … it’s a totally diff—’
‘Oh, you’re gay again now, are you?’ Sabrina shoots from the hip. ‘I thought you said you were bi tonight?’
I wince. ‘I knew that pissed you off.’
‘It didn’t piss me off. I just didn’t realise you’re a liar.’
A fleeting, out-of-body thought crosses my adrenalised synapses: Me and Sabrina are having a fight. This has never happened before. What do I do?
‘I was young and still working stuff out. I told my parents what they wanted to hear.’
‘Oh, so they’re the ones you lied to?’ Sabrina snaps. ‘Or was it me? It can’t be both. You’re either bi or you’re not. Are you going to pin up porn with girls in it next? I honestly don’t know what to expect anymore.’
She’s as merciless as the night she broke up with Shane.
‘No. I’m not bi. Why is this a big deal to you?’
‘Oh, don’t act like you didn’t rip my heart out that day!’ Sabrina cries. ‘I accepted it. You weren’t into women so that made it bearable. It wasn’t your fault you weren’t into me. Except, if you’re bi, all that was horseshit, wasn’t it?’
‘Okay, you’re triggered,’ I mutter.
‘Don’t tell me about being triggered!’ Sabrina arcs up. ‘I studied psychology, not you. This is about trust. I can’t have a relationship with someone I can’t trust.’
The word hangs like an anvil suspended from the ceiling fan. ‘Wait, relationship?’
Sabrina shrugs. ‘Friendship. Relationship. You know what I mean.’
I hear my mother’s words from the revolving restaurant float back to me. She’s clearly still fond of you. You already live together. How much of a change would it really be?
‘Oh my God,’ I blurt out. ‘We’ve been acting like we’re a couple.’
Sabrina’s face is a mix of disgust and – unmistakably – guilt. Realising she can see it too makes me uncomfortable to my bones. Except for the lack of a sex life, we’ve gotten so comfortable we function like a straight couple. My Tom of Finland poster was one of the only visible signs we aren’t.
‘Don’t be silly.’ Sabrina staggers to a sentence. ‘This is about what I allow in my house. I don’t want to live with porn on the walls and that horrible app beeping.’
I swallow. ‘You mean Grindr?’
Sabrina winces like I just said ‘anus’ in the middle of church.
‘Yes,’ she mutters, shuddering. ‘I hear that little boop sound all the time. That’s all you ever do!
Empty hookups with gross dirty guys who aren’t good enough for you.
Zekey, you should be dating. A doctor or a scientist – someone as smart as you.
You could find a much nicer person to have a meaningful relationship with. ’
My brain cogs whirr overtime trying to process this betrayal. The spectacular gaslighting of shaming me for liking the men I like while claiming to care about me. I have a million arguments forming in my neurons, all savage but all inarticulable in my amygdala hijack.
‘Person?’ I say. ‘A much nicer person, huh? Not “guy”?’
Sabrina goes silent.
‘Is it porn you have a problem with, Sabrina?’ I ask. ‘Or is it that I’m gay? Cos it’s feeling like you’re okay with my sexuality as long as I don’t actually have sex with men.’
Sabrina scratches her wrist. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know I accept your sexuality.’
‘But you’d prefer it if I was one of those trad-husbands from TikTok …’ I say slowly, the penny dropping. ‘Nice white collared shirt. Baking gingerbread. Helping you decorate the house with flowers. Not putting porn on the walls of my bedroom.’
Sabrina purses her lips and I understand I’ve now hit the bullseye.
My ears start ringing. Adrenaline fills my bloodstream but, like always, I’m too much of a coward to go into fight mode. I do what I did when I was sixteen: I flee.
I turn on my heel and march into my room, leaving Sabrina by the bin, confused.
‘What are you doing?’ Sabrina calls. ‘You’re acting weird, Zeke.’
I lurch around my bedroom, head spinning, vision blurry. What am I going to do? My hands are shaking as I grab my Squirtle backpack. I grab some necessities, a change of clothes and my poster. I need to get out of here.
I emerge into the living area. ‘Look, I respect your rules, Sabrina,’ I manage, my tongue so dry it nearly sticks to the roof of my mouth. ‘Please don’t think I’m being rude. But maybe me living here isn’t the best idea anymore.’