Nightingale on the Ward

Prologue

Sharon

I Want To Break Free by Queen

I stop in the open doorway to watch. And smile.

He has no clue I’m watching him – his shaking hips and terrible out-of-tune singing are testament to that – but I’m not even sure he would stop if he did know I was standing here in my work clothes, my heavy bag slipping from my shoulder and my feet pulsing with pain in the heels I feel compelled to wear as the personal assistant to the Managing Director of Royal Crescent Bank.

Danny is my best friend. Danny is the brother, the sibling I never had. Danny is as close to family as a non-blood relative can be, especially when your own family has all but rejected you.

After a quick gyration of his hips, Danny turns the hoover to suddenly face me.

And shrieks. Loudly.

He switches the hoover off and then holds a hand to his chest. “Jesus fucking Christ and all the angels in heaven, Sharon! You scared the living daylights out of me!”

“Couldn’t have been any scarier than those dance moves.

” I walk into the room, turn down the volume of our radio cassette player and dump my bag on the kitchen counter.

The relief is immediate. I don’t always bring work home with me at the weekend but I want to get ahead.

I want to start Monday feeling like I may actually have a fighting chance of leaving the office before six o’clock one day next week.

“What would you know about dance moves?” He tuts back at me as he rolls the hoover to one side, gathering the cable behind him as he does.

His slim but muscular physique flexes with the movement and his perma-tanned skin shines under the lighting.

Not for the first time I wonder enviously what it would be like to have his body fat percentage and a fraction of his muscle tone.

“You’ve never stepped foot inside any of the clubs I’ve been trying to drag you to. ”

“And be surrounded by men like you, sweaty and naked? No, thank you. Speaking of, put a T-shirt on. You’ll freeze, and I’m not turning the heating on until October,” I say as I start to put some of the items I grabbed at the corner shop in the fridge.

“I don’t have any clean right now.” He shrugs like this is the most obvious problem to have. “Can I borrow one of yours?”

“Fine,” I sigh because that’s what I’m supposed to do, just as I’m supposed to suppress the smile that wants to bloom because I like it; I like Danny borrowing my clothes. “You know where they are.”

He skips out of the room and down the corridor of our single-storey flat.

It’s not a huge space with this room, two bedrooms and one small bathroom, but it works perfectly well for the two of us.

Its location in Shepherd’s Bush is handy too with the Central Line whisking me across the underbelly of London’s equator and into the City each morning in little more than thirty minutes.

It's also handy enough for Danny, who is currently working in the BBC canteen in their White City headquarters which is walking distance from our flat, even though he’d very much like to be a couple floors below in one of the TV studios.

“How did the audition go?” I ask when he waltzes back into the room… wearing my favourite Bananarama T-shirt. I scowl at him as he expects me to. And he flutters his eyelashes at me like I knew he would.

“It was terrible,” he tells me, before collapsing on the second-hand sofa we both carried up the front steps not six months ago when we moved in.

“I panicked and forgot my lines. Looked at the camera at least three times. And also flirted with the woman on Reception who I later found out was the director’s daughter. ”

“Ah.”

“I do know how to pick em.” His voice lifts with his light Welsh accent.

“Normally that only applies to the men you choose. Normally your taste in women is far superior to the XY-chromosome creatures you set your sights on.”

“Well, she was very pretty. Dainty features. Dark hair. This midnight-blue dress that clung to all the important parts.” He blinks at me. “Actually, she was very much your type.”

“I don’t have a type,” I tut at him as I fill the kettle. It’s fast approaching eight o’clock and I know Danny will be asking for a glass of wine any minute now but I can’t seem to think about consuming anything else until I’ve had a cup of tea after work.

“Yes you do!” I can practically feel his finger wagging at me behind my back. “Petite. Uber-feminine. A little stern-looking.”

“I like petite women because I’m petite,” I say, which is true in the height department. A little less true when it comes to my proportions, but I’m working on that, I say to myself as I think about the cupboard of SlimFast shakes above my head.

“Well, you’re hardly uber-feminine,” Danny says, and that makes me turn around. “I mean, you’re not! And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I love butchies.”

“I’m not a butchie,” I say, mimicking him. “I am somewhere between a femme and a butch.”

Danny snorts. “Just a lot closer to the butch end of that spectrum.”

“Possibly,” I concede.

“I don’t know why you fight it. Butch dykes get all the women.”

As quick as a match catching fire, heat rushes to my cheeks. Luckily the kettle clicks off so I can turn back around and hide it from Danny. “Well, good for them.”

A second later and Danny’s voice is much louder. “Come out with me tonight,” he says, standing next to me as he retrieves a mug for himself. “We’ll go to a lesbian bar before we hit up Heaven.”

“I am not going there.”

“Fine, go home after the lesbian bar. Just please come out and play!” His hand has found mine and he rocks our arms back and forth.

I look up into his warm brown eyes that are big and pleading.

His thick moustache twitches with anticipation.

The messy, brown curls of his hair probably haven’t seen a brush in days and yet they look perfect.

I may be confident in my homosexuality but even I can see why Danny has no trouble with men or women.

“Maybe,” I say. And that’s exactly what I mean because maybe it is a good idea for me to try and actually meet women rather than fantasise about them all day long.

Maybe it’s time I found out if they’re as terrifying as I’ve made them out to be.

And maybe I should do something about the fact I’m a twenty-six-year-old virgin who’s never been kissed?

Actually, there’s no maybe about that. That is a dire state of affairs and I should definitely try and do something about it, even if all I want to do right now is crawl into bed and re-read my entire back catalogue of Lady Phantom comics before I go buy the new one tomorrow.

“Come on, one drink?” Danny clasps his hands together in prayer. “Although I warn you, Sharon Goldblatt, a lot can happen in one drink!”

“Oy,” I groan and roll my eyes. “This is exactly what I want to avoid. You leaving me in a corner while you go grind up against some man with an even bigger moustache than yours.”

Right on cue, he wriggles the thick brush that covers his top lip. “Nobody has a better moustache than me. In the whole of London.”

“I said bigger, not better.”

“That’s the same thing, according to most gay men.

” He brings a fist to his mouth as he starts to cough.

It’s a deep, gravelly smokers’ cough and I often use it as an excuse to encourage him to give up but I don’t have it in me tonight.

He’s too happy. He’s smiling too much. He’s too busy shaking his hips to his hero, Freddie Mercury, and daydreaming about the night he's going to have. He claps his hands once the coughing has stopped. “Right, it’s a deal. One drink in Betty Butch and I will make all your dreams come true!”

“Dreams don’t come true in dyke bars on Old Compton Street.” I point my teaspoon at him. “But seriously, Danny. If I do come, and it’s a big if, please don’t abandon me for a man or a woman or something in between!”

“I make no promises,” he cocks an eyebrow. “But I will try my best.”

“I mean it, Danny,” I say, aware I sound more than a little pathetic. “I’m not like you. I find people… difficult. I find crowded spaces… too much. And I find women… terrifying.”

“Oh, they are,” he nods. “Men are so much easier to talk to and sleep with.”

“And yet, I don’t find men attractive. At all. So that is zero help.”

“I wasn’t trying to be helpful. I was simply indulging in some brief appreciation for my bisexuality.” He grins manically at me and clasps his hands together under his chin. “God, it’s so fun.”

Not for the first time, I marvel at his comfort with his sexuality.

His seemingly innate sense of freedom, his undiluted appreciation for who he is, his pride and his hope and his joy.

I wish it was contagious. Maybe that’s why I first felt pulled to Danny when he served me extra mashed potato with a wink in the staff canteen when he was temping there.

Maybe I wanted to be more like him and I hoped proximity would make it happen, like osmosis.

It didn’t exactly happen like that, but I did make a new friend.

After little more than a week, he was getting stern warnings from his boss for ‘sitting on the job’ when he’d sit next to me and we’d play ‘Guess the Gay’ with the surrounding suited-and-booted, mostly male employees who always shunned me.

I’ve never asked Danny why he started talking to me, if it was because he saw me sitting alone to eat my lunch day after day, but I’m forever grateful for it. I’m forever grateful for him.

Three years later, it’s fair to say his bravery and optimism hasn’t exactly rubbed off on me. But maybe it’s different for him because he’s bi. Maybe it’s easier when you still find the opposite sex attractive. Maybe then you don’t feel quite so ‘other’.

Not that I want him to change. I want him to stay like this always. I wonder if he has enough boundless optimism for the both of us. I often think maybe his bright energy and unapologetic self-love could even make a dent in the shame I feel too often.