Thirteen Stops

by Sandra Harris

  Dammit, thought Jamie, wishing he’d had the cop-on to put in his own earphones a bit quicker. That normally forestalled any attempts at interaction or conversation on the part of the other passengers. In fact, it was almost unheard of for passengers to interact with one other at all, beyond the usual courtesies involved when strangers had to sit together for any length of time. The excuse me’s and the mind if I sit here’s and the sorry, this is my stop here, I’ll just get past you’s.

  “Is it your girlfriend they’re for?” The man in the next seat folded his arms comfortably and nodded towards the flowers.

  Jamie thought for a moment. He still hated being asked that question. He and Callum had decided from the start that they’d both be husbands if they got married. They wouldn’t have one husband and one wife – they’d each be husbands. If they had to choose, though, Jamie would almost certainly end up being the husband by virtue of his being the only one of them who was currently earning a wage. He and Callum had joked before about their being a typical fifties’ couple, with a breadwinning hubby, Jamie, and a stay-at-home wife in the form of Callum. But Callum wasn’t terribly domesticated and, even though he was now unemployed and had all the time in the world on his hands, he left the housework mostly undone and the meals uncooked. Usually, Jamie did everything when he got in from work. He did it without complaining because he loved Callum and he loved that today’s society had decreed that they could be together without any fear of retribution from anyone, at least legally. What wouldn’t he have given, though, for a hot home-cooked meal to be put in front of him when he got home (even some kind of boil-in-the-bag dish would have been an improvement on what was currently on offer, which was nothing) and a tidy house? Instead, all he got was a grumpy Callum, stiff and cranky from sitting on his arse watching TV box sets all day. It was a wonder his eyes weren’t square from goggling at so much telly.

  To the man beside him, Jamie said reluctantly, “No, they’re for my partner actually.” He hated that word too, even more than some of the words for gays. Partner. It was so wishy-washy, so non-committal somehow. It was a nothing kind of word. It could mean a male or female or even a business partner. He sometimes wished someone would invent a new word with a bit more ‘oomph’ to it but, in the meantime, he supposed ‘partner’ would have to do.

  “So she’s the romantic type, is she? Likes being given flowers?”

  “Yes, I guess – h –” He hesitated and then stalled on the ‘he’.

  The man got it. “A man, is he, then, this partner person?” he said with interest.

  He turned in his seat to look more fully at Jamie, who blushed to the roots of his close-cropped gingery-blond hair. Thank God the people around them were on their phones and earphones and weren’t listening avidly to Jamie’s being quizzed so publicly.

  “Yes.” He knew he sounded embarrassed and hated the way his voice came out in an apologetic-sounding squeak. He cleared his throat and said again in his manliest voice, more forcefully than he intended, “Yes.”

  Jesus, he thought, why was there never a middle ground to these bloody situations? If he lived to be a hundred, he’d probably still be all awkward and defensive when asked about matters pertaining to his sexual orientation.

  “Ah shure, isn’t it grand nowadays that we do have all the gays out in the open, and getting married now and everything? What d’ya think of the whole gay marriage thing?”

  “Well, obviously I voted for it myself,” Jamie replied stiffly. He was being cautious because he didn’t yet know if the man was going to turn nasty in a minute, as people sometimes did.

  “I would’ve voted for it myself like a shot,” said the man, crossing his long, heavily booted legs, “but I wasn’t registered to vote at the time.”

  A fat lot of good that is to anyone, then, Jamie thought, wisely keeping his own counsel on the matter. Out loud he said, mainly out of politeness and not interest: “And have you registered to vote since then or what?”

  The man shrugged as if it were a thing that was, sadly, out of his control. “D’you know something? I’ve never thought about it since.” He said it almost wonderingly, as if it were such a bizarre, unorthodox thought that it wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years. “So, you’re gay then?” he asked Jamie, who blushed again and nodded uncomfortably.

  The man looked at him almost admiringly, as if he were a particularly well-groomed dog he’d passed on the street, or a lovely vintage car or something. “And how long have you known? About being gay?”

  Jamie sighed. Thereby hangs a tale, he thought.

  He’d known since he was about twelve or thirteen, around the time that he and his classmates were hitting puberty and starting to take an interest in girls and everything that went with that. Breasts, sex, masturbation, willies, where babies came from and all the rest of it. His classmates in his all-male school, even if they didn’t know for sure that he was gay, certainly acted as if they knew. Faggot, they’d call him with mean sniggers when he passed them in the hallways or in the classroom on the way to his seat. Poofter, gayboy, queer, nancy boy. Their vocabulary was maybe more limited than that of the teenagers of today, but they still managed to get their point across succinctly. Bent as a nine-bob note, that was another favourite. God only knew where they’d picked that one up. It sounded like something Dirty Den from EastEnders might say. In class, feet would be stuck out for Jamie to trip over as he passed by. Sly kicks would be directed at him in football or gym class. He’d be dunked and held under in swimming class until he really thought he might drown, and all behind the lifeguard’s back, of course. His homework would be stolen out of his bag and his ruined copybook might turn up later, stuffed down a toilet in the boys’ jacks. The one time they’d shoved his actual head down the lavatory and flushed it repeatedly, they’d laughed and crowed over their triumph for weeks, calling him ‘Shit-Head’ and ‘Shit-Face’ on top of all the other names they had for him and commenting on the ‘stink’ whenever he entered or left a room. They’d been little shits to him, literally. Jamie’s surname – Sweetman – hadn’t helped either. It just gave them more fodder for their stupid jokes.

  But time had passed and Nature had been kind to Jamie by way of compensation, causing him to bulk up naturally during his adolescence and, as soon as he was old enough, he’d started working out and even taking boxing lessons at a local club and strengthening himself even more. He quickly lost his skinny, almost delicate, frame and became more solid. By the time he’d left school, his former bullies were thinking twice before taking him on. When he left school and immediately found work in the men’s clothing shop where he was still employed, he’d straightaway started taking self-defence classes for men, as well as still going to the gym most days after work. He’d had a feeling those classes would come in handy, and they had. Well aware that he wasn’t completely immune from gay-bashing or anti-gay violence just because of his size, he at least felt reasonably confident now that he could protect himself and Callum from an unexpected (or wholly expected) attack. Gay-bashing was still a popular sport amongst drunken males on a night out. It hadn’t gone away just because the majority of the country had voted to bring in gay marriage. Just like racism against black people hadn’t died down when black people had been given the vote, or even when Barack Obama had become the President of the United States of America and, by definition, the most powerful ruler on the planet.

  Naturally, Jamie gave the stranger on the Luas only a very brief, diluted version of his story. When he’d finished recounting the details of how and when he’d first realised he was gay, the man said: “Fair play to ya anyway, for sticking with it.” As if being gay was a college course you were trying to complete, or a series of driving lessons or a jigsaw puzzle or something, Jamie thought. “And what did your ma and da think about all this being gay stuff and everything?”

  “Not a lot,” Jamie answered wryly.

  Their finding out had happened by accident, worse luck, and after Jamie h
ad lain awake in his bedroom at home night after night for years as well, agonising over how to tell them. He’d always known it wouldn’t go down well. His father, Jim Sweetman (a misnomer if ever there was one – Jim Sweetman was anything but!), was a real man’s man, a former factory worker now on Disability leave, an individual with a drink problem and a short fuse. This combination made him difficult to approach for anything material, like a few quid for schoolbooks or a new pair of trainers, never mind a heart-to-heart chat about something as incendiary as his son’s sexuality. Jim had never really loved Jamie, or at least this was how Jamie genuinely felt on the matter. He cared more, or seemed to anyway, about Jamie’s two older brothers and his older sister. Jamie was the runt of the litter and had been small and almost frail-looking in his childhood. Also, Jamie liked listening to music and spending hours alone in his room with his CDs, often penning song lyrics of his own or poems, the kind of tortured poetry churned out by angsty teens before they grow up and have no time to write poems any longer because there are bills to pay and work to go to and children to mind. Writing poetry alone in his room instead of playing football with the other lads on their road didn’t endear Jamie at all to his disgusted father. He didn’t hear the words ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ only at school, and he didn’t get thumped only at school either.

  Jamie’s mother, Nora Sweetman, was a quiet little sparrow of a woman who was terrified of her violent husband. She didn’t stand up for Jamie any more than she stood up for herself against the brutish, blustering man she’d married. She’d kept well out of things the day her husband found the little stash of gay porn in their youngest son’s bedroom while he was looking for cash with which to buy booze. He’d beaten the shit out of his then nineteen-year-old son when Jamie had come home from work, and then he’d thrown him out of the house in the rain. A badly shaken Jamie, blindsided by the attack, had managed to get a friend from work called Matt, a decent friend as he’d turned out to be, to agree to let him bed down on his couch for a while. Jamie had never again gone home, and his parents had never bothered to contact him again, not even his mother. Anything for a quiet life, that was Jamie’s mum, even if it meant she never saw her youngest son again.

  He stayed in touch, through text or social media, with his two brothers, Niall and Gerry, and his sister, Marie, who all had growing families of their own now, although his brothers in particular didn’t want to know anything or hear a peep out of him about his being gay. It was almost like a condition of their staying in touch. You can text us and all that, but none of your faggotty-ass stuff or that’s the end of it. Jamie knew the score and played the game by their rules. He had to, if he wanted to keep in touch with them, his own brothers. Marie at least was a bit more liberal and didn’t go into a mad panic and start flapping if Jamie accidentally let his gayness slip out for a moment, although you couldn’t exactly say that she embraced or encouraged it either. It was through Marie that Jamie learned that their father was dying of alcohol-related complaints, and that their mother was nervier and more timid and self-effacing than ever. Marie’s considered opinion was that their mother would have a nervous breakdown and become estranged from the real world altogether if the old man didn’t hurry up and die soon, releasing her from her torment. Jamie hated his father for what he’d done to him but, in a way, he hated his mother even more. Fathers were meant to be aggressive and violent and impossible to approach about matters like sexuality, weren’t they (that was what Jamie had been brought up to believe, anyway), but mothers were meant to protect you, to shield you from the blows. Jamie’s mother had simply abandoned him to his fate, like the heartless coward she was. Jamie told himself he couldn’t have cared less about what happened to either of them, but they cropped up in his thoughts the odd time just the same. It grieved him badly that they didn’t know about Callum, that they hadn’t met Callum and that they were unaware that their youngest son had met the love of his life and was happy, was finally living the life he was meant to be living and had longed for nearly his whole life.

  “And what kinda fella is yer man anyway, what’s-this-his-name-is-again?” said the large man with considerable interest.

  Jamie was impressed by his interest, which seemed genuine.

  “Please move down the tram,” said the automated female voice that everyone routinely ignored.

  “Callum,” Jamie supplied automatically. Well, he thought, that’s a good one. What kind of a man is Callum?

  They had met two years before when Callum had come into the shop where Jamie worked one lunchtime. They’d clicked instantly, each being young single males who liked their clubbing and pubbing, who were into fashion and good grooming and who openly admitted that they couldn’t live without their phones or social media. It had actually been Callum who’d asked Jamie out that very first day. Jamie had said yes immediately. They’d had a fantastic night together and become a couple straightaway. Now they lived together in a lovely rented house in Beechwood. They shared the place with a heterosexual couple called Chris and Julie, who were totally cool about sharing with a gay couple, and an equally relaxed and liberal heterosexual female called Philippa, whose boyfriend Michael didn’t live with her officially but he might as well have been living there, the number of nights he stayed over. What was so great about the house was that Jamie and Callum didn’t have to pretend they were anything but what they were, a perfectly normal gay couple who had rowdy, noisy sex together sometimes and who took baths together the odd time or used the bathroom together, one in the shower and the other shaving or on the loo. Chris and Julie, and for that matter Philippa and Michael, were all just as sexually active and, since they all paid their rent through the bank, there was no need for a nosey landlord to come over and start making comments about sleeping arrangements or causing trouble for anyone.

  At least, that was how it had been in the beginning. Jamie and Callum still had sex in bed nearly every night out of habit, but they didn’t do the spontaneous things they used to do any more, like making love in different places or at odd times, or whenever they felt like it. Callum was much less affectionate and physically demonstrative these days too. This falling-off of their sexual routine had seemed to start when Callum was let go from the phone shop where he worked. That was four months ago now, and since then he’d made very little effort to find a new job. He spent a lot of time online, supposedly ‘looking for work’, but Jamie was pretty sure he was just slobbing about on social media all the time. Which was perfectly fine, of course. He had every right to take some down-time, Jamie told himself sternly whenever he found himself disapproving of Callum’s online activities. It just would have been helpful if Callum used some of his free time to hunt for a new job, mainly so they could go back to sharing the expenses and bills equally, like they used to do at first. And it would have been even more helpful if Callum had picked up a dish-brush every once in a while to wash up the remains of their meals, all of which Jamie cooked when he came in, hot and tired, after a day’s work. He’d been meaning to talk to Callum about the division of labour regarding the household chores and the bills and stuff, Jamie confided now in the stranger, his travelling companion on the Luas, but the time never seemed to be right for such delicate negotiations. Callum was never in the mood for a heart-to-heart chat these days. “I’m depressed,” he’d say plaintively as he sat on the couch in the mornings with the duvet wrapped around him, watching breakfast telly, eating biscuits and crisps and, incidentally, leaving crumbs for Jamie to vacuum up later. And that would be the end of the conversation. And now it would all have to wait again, because Jamie had other stuff he wanted to talk about with his lover tonight. Important stuff. He had something planned that was guaranteed to divert Callum’s attention away from his worries and woes.

  In the meantime, Jamie didn’t mind paying for everything and doing all the cooking and cleaning for the two of them in their part of the house. He had to do the cleaning anyway if Callum was currently not bothering his arse, otherwise they
wouldn’t be pulling their weight as housemates, and the others in the house might start to object. The last thing Jamie wanted was to antagonise Chris, Julie and Philippa. They were blessed with good housemates and Jamie didn’t want to screw things up. If only Callum would snap out of this self-pitying rut he seemed to have burrowed himself into lately, like a small animal preparing for hibernation. Jamie had a strong suspicion that Callum wasn’t really depressed but merely lazy. He liked lolling around on the couch and letting Jamie take care of him. While Jamie was okay with the way that Callum looked up to him and treated him as big strong Jamie who could handle any problem, he was starting to feel a bit under pressure to constantly take care of them both. At twenty-five, he was only a few months older than Callum, after all.

  Maybe it was Callum’s background that was to blame. Miraculously, Callum hadn’t been bullied in school like Jamie, presumably because he didn’t ‘look gay’, as Jamie felt he himself must have done, and also Callum’s father had died when his son was a baby. There hadn’t been an angry male parent around to go ballistic when it turned out that Callum was gay, only an adoring mother and sister who loved him so much that even his telling them he was a serial killer of baby lambs couldn’t have caused them to withdraw their love for so much as a second. And they’d never let him lift a finger around the house when he was growing up, so that was why Callum wasn’t particularly domesticated, unlike Jamie, who’d been keeping house for himself since he was nineteen. Callum had had a much easier time of things. Jamie, on the other hand, had had to fight hard for his place in life, in school, in his family and in his job. He’d spent his whole life fighting, or so it seemed. Callum really had had things that bit easier. After tonight, after he’d sprung his surprise, Jamie was going to try to get Callum to shoulder a bit more of the load. Callum was at heart a sound guy. Jamie was confident that he could get his boyfriend to see sense and offer to halve the burdens.