50 Reasons to Say Goodbye (2 page)

The last one, Rachel, used to help me mend my
motorbike. My friend Andy always said that Rachel was a dyke; many years later he turned out to be right. We used to share a bed, Rachel and I, cuddle up when it was cold, but we never had sex. Some say we snogged at a party once, but I truthfully don't remember – too drunk. Andy, who was studying psychology, used to say that it was a classic case of justified memory-repression syndrome.

I suppose it's not a lot for twenty-three, perhaps it should worry me. But my social life since I moved to Cambridge is so full on, and Jenny fulfils most of my emotional needs.

She's here tonight; we've been watching television together. She's snuggled up to me on the sofa to watch a French film,
Betty Blue
– typical French, basically an arty excuse for a shag-fest. I'm worried that Jenny will move her elbow, discover my hard-on. Being a man is like walking around with a shag/don't shag sign in your trousers.

“He's so cute,” she says.

“Yes, well neither of them are exactly ugly,” I reply.

“The French,” says Jenny. “Makes you sick.”

I shrug. “Not the French, just films. They don't have ugly people in films.”

“Or even normal people,” says Jenny. “She's sexy too. We try, the English, to look like that. But it's just pointless.”

I laugh. “You're exaggerating. Beatrice Dalle isn't
that
pretty. She's sexy, dirty, but she's pretty vulgar too. You're prettier.”

Jenny laughs. She fidgets, changes her position.

“Oh my God! Mark!” she exclaims. “Hard-on!”

A wave of red sweeps across my face. Lucky the
lights are low.

“Sorry,” I say. “The film. Too much shagging.”

Jenny
looks
into my eyes.

I feel slightly sick. Embarrassment probably.

“It's OK,” she says.

I fidget. I wish she'd move out of my face.

She kisses me. I am surprised – like
really
surprised. I don't react at all.

She says, “Make an effort.” She tries again.

I try to make an effort but my stomach is churning. Jenny stands. I think, “Thank God!” But she leads me to the bedroom next door.

“It's time,” she says. “Enough pussying around.”

I feel frozen, remote. A sort of
does not compute
feeling. I didn't know that we
had
been pussying around. I thought we were watching T.V.

She pushes me onto the bed, undoes my jeans, and climbs on top of me. She doesn't seem phased by the fact that I'm not really participating. She pulls off her top – she isn't wearing a bra. She grabs my head, pushes me down, down between the mother-warmth of her breasts, down over her stomach, down, down to the forest.

I'm doing my best but it's making me heave. I've never much liked all of that, down there; never could get off on those pictures of women with their ankles behind their ears.

She touches me, realises. “You have a puncture sir,” she says. “That car's going nowhere.”

I am offended.

“Don't worry,” she says. “It'll come back.”

It germs as just an idea of anger, of outrage at myself. The decision to let it happen is quite conscious, calculated, a way out. “This always fucking
happens,” I spit – a lie, for who could say? Too few opportunities to know.

I get up, pull on my chinos, and wriggle into a pullover.

“Mark, where are you going?”

I pull on my shoes. “Oh, fuck off!” I shout as I run out into the street. I wish I'd brought a raincoat.

I jog to the end of the road. I feel bad, but relieved. I'm shaking.

I crouch in the entrance to an alleyway and watch the rain spin past the orange streetlights. I have cigarettes in the pocket of my jeans. I blow the smoke behind me into the darkness until, eventually, I see her leave the house and go home.

The next day she comes to see me. “We need to talk,” she says.

She says many things. She says that I am a selfish bastard, that she was worried all night. She's right, but there are things that are instinctive, things that you can't help but do – things that you can't explain, not even to yourself.

“Have you ever thought that you might be, well, gay?” she asks.

I say bad things. I say, “So anyone who doesn't like the smell of your vagina is gay, right?”

She shouts, she cries, she leaves.

I'm upset, but I'm glad.

Later on the phone, she says, “I think we should stop seeing each other.”

I say, “I wasn't aware that we
were
seeing each other.”

Later still, much later, we'll be friends again. I'll apologise to her, thank her even, for making me realise. But it will take a while.

I start seeing Catherine six months after I split up with Jenny. Every night is insomnia night. Friends say things like, “Just use the extra time to read or something.” My eyes are too tired to focus on the page, but still sleep eludes me until four a.m.

I lie awake, watch the headlights sweep the ceiling. I can't work out why, a feeling of unease, a tightness in the stomach.

Catherine's OK, I suppose. I expected her to be much more involved. She never seems to say much, other than, “Umm,” and “I see,” and “How do you feel about that?” It annoys me – if I knew how I felt then I wouldn't be seeing her.

“Why does that question annoy you so much?” Catherine asks.

It takes five visits for me to get to the point, because I don't know what the point is. I suppose that's what therapy is all about.

“Why do you think your girlfriend's suggestion that you might be a homosexual upsets you so much?” she asks.

I had said, “gay.” Jenny had said, “gay.” Catherine is paraphrasing.

A week later and we're having the same conversation, only this time I shrug. I say, “Maybe she's right.”

Catherine laughs. It's the first time she has reacted to anything I have said.

“What?” I ask. I missed the joke.

“Walk into any gay bar and you'd know!” she says.

“Know what?”

She laughs again. “That you're not a homosexual.”

On the way home I walk past The Burleigh Arms. John has told me it's gay. He knows from his days visiting every pub in Cambridge with the Sixty-Two Pub Club. It was the last one they tried, number sixty-two.

I peer through the windows; it looks like any other pub.

Wednesday evening, I go for a stroll, walk past it again.

Two men go in, laughing.

Thursday night, I open the door and walk in. It is the scariest thing I have ever done.

I stand for half a minute looking round the place, try to suppress the trembling in my hands. I lean against a wall – it feels awkward, uncomfortable, as though it's not my body.

“Maybe that's what Catherine meant,”
I think.

A man in the corner smiles at me – a round warm face, a good smile.

I leave. Outside I gasp. I had stopped breathing – stress does that to me.

“Look,” says Catherine at my next visit. “You are
not
a homosexual.”

I wonder why she says, “A homosexual,” instead of just, “homosexual,” or even, “gay.” It sounds like a grammatical error, but I was never very good with grammar.

“Now tell me about this …” She glances at her notes. “Jenny, your
“friend.”
“ She lifts her fingers to form the speech marks.

On the way home I go back to the pub. I order a drink;
I am trembling again. The man with the smile is there.

“Hello,” he says.

His name is Nick. He has brown eyes and gappy teeth. He smiles a lot. We drink our pints, I tell him the story.

He says, “It's hard coming out.”

“Is that what I'm doing?”
I wonder.

I like talking to Nick better than Catherine. He seems to have more common sense. He hates shrinks.

Saturday, we meet in the park. We walk; we talk. He tells me about his family. His boyfriend is a fireman.

“He's very sexy in his uniform,” he confides.

Monday night, and I'm back with Catherine, supposedly my fix after the weekend. Gone is the cool detachment of our previous meetings.

“Why did you go there?” she wants to know.

“You said that if I went to a bar, I would know,” I reply.

“I doubt that I said that,” she says.

I frown. I shrug. “You did.”

She smiles. “Well if that's what you think you heard,” she says. “Anyway,” she sighs. “Do tell me about your “gay” night out.” She makes the speech marks again.

I want to ask her what the “ “ is all about but I don't dare. I say, “It's OK really. It's just a pub.”

“Did you talk to anyone?”

I nod. “Yeah, a man called Nick – nice, he has a boyfriend, a fireman.”

Catherine closes her eyes, breathes deeply. She looks as if she's doing yoga. I fidget in my seat. I watch her.

“Look, Mark. You have to stop this before you do yourself harm,” she finally says.

I feel strange, caught between tears and anger. I
don't know why.

“Can I leave?” I gather my jacket towards me.

She looks at her watch. “In ten
minutes
,” she says. “In the meantime, tell me about … whatever his name is.”

I'm surprised. It is the first time she has ever forgotten a name.

“Nick?” I ask.

She nods.

I sigh. “I told you. He's nice.”

“Are you,
attracted
to him?”

I frown. “In what way?”

“Well I'm not talking about his
intellect
now am I?!”

“What?” I feel angry but I'm still not quite sure why. “Do I
fancy
him?”

Catherine seems to swell, to sweat; her eyes burn. “Listen, Mark,” she says. “I'm going to stop this conversation right now; it's not … good.”

I stare at her.

“The only question you need to ask yourself is this, Mark: do you ever want to be in a long term, loving relationship?”

I smile incredulously. “Well, of course.”

“Then, my dear Mark, you are
not
a homosexual.” She smiles again.

I wrinkle my nose and open my mouth. “Sorry?” I say.

“Homosexuals don't
have
loving relationships,” she says.

My mouth drops.

She shakes her head. “They have sex, Mark. Sex in bars, sex in back streets, sex in toilets. Now if that's what you want …”

In my mind I tell her to fuck off. In my mind I say,
“If you are a heterosexual then I'd rather be gay.”
But for some reason I'm scared of her.

I say, “Oh dear, times up. See you next week then.”

I am unimaginably angry. I lean against a wall outside until I can breathe properly.

I never return. I go to the Burleigh instead.

Sometimes I wonder if she did it on purpose, if she said it to push me. But my guess is that she just doesn't like gays.

From that moment on, my virginity is a weight I drag along behind me. It is something I need to get rid of. I tell Nick this, he understands. “Once I had decided, I slept with the first guy that came along. He wasn't even cute,” he says.

I need to sleep with a man. I need to know, need to be sure.

It only takes a week of hanging around in the Burleigh for the opportunity to appear. His name is Andrew. He's beautiful – dark skin, high cheekbones, a sort of male Naomi Campbell. Only he's not a model, he's a postman. I like that idea.

At night he seemingly lives in the Burleigh. I tell Nick that I think he's beautiful.

Nick says, “Yeah. I spoke to him once. He's very lovely, very intelligent – a very beautiful tart. But you could do worse, for a first time.”

The next evening I see him there with some friends. He smiles at me. I am behaving like an adolescent schoolgirl. “He smiled at me!” I tell Nick.

He sighs. “Go and say
hi
then.”

I shrug. “Nah, he probably doesn't fancy me anyway,” I say.

Friday, he's there again. This time he offers me a drink and then invites me back to his house for coffee. We both know what coffee means and we both want it; I am terrified.

Nick slips a condom into my hand as he pushes me towards the door. “Good luck,” he says raising an
eyebrow. “Don't worry.”

Trembling, I walk back with him. His voice is smooth and calm.

I am scared. Scared of looking stupid, scared of not knowing what to do, scared of AIDS, scared of negotiating safe sex.

He sits me on the sofa and makes coffee. On the wall he has a safe sex poster. It shows a man holding a condom. It says, “Live to fuck, again and again.”

“That's one thing I don't need to worry about then,”
I think.

He serves coffee on the little wooden table. My hand is trembling, the teaspoon rattles against the cup.

Andrew looks at me. “Are you OK?” he asks.

I smile at him. “Yeah, I erh …”

I am about to say that I have never done this before, but it suddenly strikes me as presumptuous. This could just be coffee after all.

He nods in an understanding way. He says, “I know.”

I wonder what he knows and how. I wrinkle my brow at him.

He says, “I know what will help.”

I cough. “Yes?” I say.

He says, “Put down your coffee cup.”

I place it on the table; it clatters against the saucer as it makes contact. Andrew places one hand behind my head, kisses me on the lips. He pauses, looks into my eyes. I launch into him, years of unacknowledged desire welling up in me, driving me forwards. I kiss him madly, maniacally, a man deranged.

He says, “Hey, HEY! Calm down!” He laughs.

We lie on the sofa and hug and kiss. He slows me down. It is softer, more romantic than I imagined. It is more wonderful, more magical than I thought possible.