Nina Simone
I WISH I KNEW HOW IT WOULD FEEL TO BE FREE
I wasn’t really gay at all until my mother died.
Of course, by then I was so used to being “straight” that it almost felt like the opportunity to “come out” had passed me by entirely, relegated to the same category as red lipstick, short shorts, and dancing until the clock turned into a new day.
I was straight-facing – and after that, I was married.
David and I should have arranged the elopement for when Mum had still been alive to see it.
Although the prospect of calling in sick to work for a week, swanning off to Vegas and coming home married would have likely made me as unsightly a daughter as one who was openly gay, so perhaps there was no winning.
I don’t remember how old I was when my mother embargoed me being attracted to women. But I can remember the conversation, clear as day, when she came home and found me doe-eyed in the face of one of her women’s magazines.
‘Are you looking at their make-up?’ she asked.
‘No, just the women.’
Mum was putting the shopping away, and there was a very deliberate pause when I said that. She was frozen midway between bag and cupboard with a tin of baked beans.
‘I saw Johnny Williams on my way home from the shop.’
‘Did you?’
‘Mhm,’ she answered, having resumed her ritual of unloading the heavies first. ‘He asked about you. I told him you’d be out later, at the community centre.’
‘I wasn’t going to go.’ I turned the page and stared into the face of the next blonde.
Her curls were much easier than my own unruly ones, and I couldn’t decide for a moment whether I wanted to be her, or whether I wanted to be with her, even though I can’t have been old enough really to understand the idea of “being with” anyone.
‘He wasn’t in school today,’ I added; a slight tarnish on his name.
‘Well, whatever he was off with, he’s better now. You should go and see him.’
‘I might.’
‘You will.’ My head snapped up and she smiled. ‘Beans on toast?’
‘Can we have scrambled eggs?’
Mum narrowed her eyes. ‘Will you go to see Johnny?’
‘If I can have scrambled eggs.’
Bartering: that was one of the first lessons Mum taught me.
‘Deal. Put the magazine away.’
‘I’m only looking at the pic–’
‘That’s why you need to put it away.’
That was the first of many small, quiet conversations where much more was being said than what was actually being said – that was another thing Mum taught me.
Years later, when I was about to leave school for the dizzying heights of university, Mum had The Talk with me over dinner – beans on toast with scrambled eggs – one evening.
That was another night when so much more was said; that was the night when I realised she really did know.
‘You mustn’t go causing yourself any trouble.’ She cut the crusts from her toast with a surgeon’s precision. ‘Girls go getting themselves in all sorts of trouble when they leave home for the first time, but I don’t want to hear of it.’
I snorted. ‘There’s literally no chance of me coming home pregnant, Mum.’
Again, she paused, just as she had when putting the beans away all those years ago. Mum finished the mouthful she was on, then set her knife and fork down with purpose.
‘I don’t want to hear of any other trouble, Patricia. Do you understand me?’
And of course, I did.
There was a palpable relief in her the first holiday I came home and started to mention David.
She took him to be a fancy of mine, and of course, I didn’t correct her.
He and I were already best friends by that first Christmas, which meant I was mentioning him time and again, with increasing regularity as the months dragged into spring and summer, too.
An interesting thing happens when a man and a woman spend enough time together; sooner or later, people just assume.
Mum did that, even though I would always rebuff her suggestions with an honest to God, ‘We’re only friends!
’ I’m sure she went to her grave believing otherwise – or maybe hoping.
Either way, I came to think of David as something like a beard.
And while my mother showered him with compliments and gifts and home-cooked meals – all things his own mother had neglected to offer him – he never minded her assumptions, and he never corrected them.
Though he did always grab me by the shoulders, kiss my temple, and tell me he didn’t care who I slept with, which was often exactly what I needed to hear after we’d visited my mum for an afternoon roast – roasting?
A made-for-television part of me always hoped that when Mum was on her deathbed, she might issue a retraction for all of those conversations that we didn’t have.
But that’s the problem with made-for-television; it lacks real-life application.
The retractions never came, and it hardly seemed worth mentioning when I was squeezing her hand through another round of chemotherapy, or holding her hair out of the way when she was vomiting afterwards.
‘At least I haven’t lost my hair,’ she’d joke every time.
‘Shame about all the other nonsense, eh?’
Somewhere between life and nonsense, I had so many conversations with her that I didn’t really have. But still I held my tongue, and I wiped her brow and acted like the good, heterosexual daughter…
* * *
I didn’t know how long Fred and I had been walking when we decided to rest our weary bones.
But we found a conveniently positioned park bench to hold us for a while.
I pulled my coat tighter around me, unsure of whether it was a chill in the air or simply the memories that were doing it.
Fred sat his rump next to me and huddled close to my legs.
I reached down to scratch at the brown blemish on the crown of his head – ‘You’re a wise old boy, aren’t you?
’ – and then went back to catching my breath, watching the world.
My phone hummed in my pocket, but only once, and I took it to be another notification.
I wasn’t altogether sure what David had downloaded onto my phone; I hadn’t looked in great detail.
But given the frequency at which it made a racket now, I had to assume it was a virus disguised as a dating app.
I hadn’t even known my phone made this noise before this nonsense endeavour started.
My bitter internal monologue was broken up by screams: girlish, full of delight.
It caught Fred’s attention, too, and we both cast a glance in the direction of it, only to be greeted by two women.
One was unconventionally tall, her lanky legs clothed in light blue jeans with small tears in them.
She was wearing a thick woollen jumper with the sleeves rolled up, and had auburn hair that looked much like my own probably had done, at her age.
She was strolling towards us with a woman much shorter than her, wearing thick black tights and neat boots, a dress that was too short for the chill I was feeling.
And I couldn’t help but smile at how beautifully young they were.
David had a tinge of sourness to him whenever we saw people this age – or rather, whenever he saw men this age – as though they were staunch and uncomfortable reminders of something important that he’d misplaced.
But I found something quietly joyous in it.
Their youth was contagious, and I thought they might have been the umph that Fred and I needed to get our arses up and away from our rest point.
But then something happened that I was entirely unprepared for: the women kissed.
There was nothing shameful about it, nothing self-conscious.
One simply grabbed the hand of the other, pulled her to a gentle stop and kissed her.
It looked like such a fantastic kiss that I half-expected the woman in the dress to let her foot pop, as though she were a 1950s starlet at the climax of a film.
Though of course, no such thing happened.
Still, there they stood, in broad daylight, in the middle of a well-populated park, and they kissed, kept kissing, until the taller of the two cracked a wide smile and broke the moment.
She broke the spell for me, too, then, because I instantly realised that I’d been staring at these poor women the entire time they were sharing this intimacy – as had Fred!
‘If they will cavort in public though, eh, old boy?’ I reached down for another scratch.
By the time I was upright again the women had started to walk on. They were no longer kissing, but they were holding hands. And with an elastic band snap I remembered all the women – Lucille, Anne, Caroline, Suzie… – who I’d refused to hold hands with over the years.
I was suddenly desperate to go home to my husband.