How to Be Happy

by David Burton

  I had never been outside Queensland.

  We saw theatre, beautiful landscapes, and had a lot of fun. We stayed up late together in our hotel suite in Wellington, looking out over the lights of the city below. We sat on the couch, cups of tea in hand, and talked for hours, before the conversation disappeared and we simply sat in each other’s company.

  We shared a bed.

  What did it matter? I was gay.

  I shared a bed with James. Drunk on cheap booze and filled with enough carbohydrates to run a marathon, we squeezed into Amber’s ridiculously small, single spare bed. Two grown men.

  Then we pashed. A lot.

  I hadn’t asked about James’s romantic history, nor had he enquired about mine, but we had somehow figured out that we were both very virginal. Our level of inexperience showed in our kissing.

  I say kissing. It was more like eating. We both thought bigger was better, and we almost unhinged our jaws in an attempt to swallow each other whole, like two snakes trying to stab the other to death.

  I won’t say it was romantic, but it stirred something in me. Afterwards, my mind was too busy to sleep, and I snuck out to the couch. I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, thinking of what had just happened, and why my jaw felt like it had been dislocated.

  Weeks after the New Zealand trip, I was lying in Rachel’s bed thinking about what could happen.

  It was a hot night. Or warm. Either way, I complained that it was hot, and stripped down to my underwear.

  ‘What would you say if I just walked in one day naked?’ I asked.

  Silence.

  ‘I…I don’t know.’

  ‘It shouldn’t matter, should it? I’m gay. We’re friends.’

  I could feel the heat of her body next to me. I could hear her thoughts, loud. I could see her outline in the dark.

  ‘You don’t know you’re gay,’ she said. ‘And of course it matters. You’d be naked!’

  I could do this, if I wanted to. Gender was fluid. Relationships were just ideas. This person was attracted to me. Somewhere inside of her, she wanted something from me. I could give her what she wanted.

  ‘You’re not experienced enough to know you’re gay,’ she continued.

  I hadn’t told her about James.

  ‘I could become experienced. With you. I could try. And you could try too. We’d just be two friends. Helping each other.’

  I was surprised at how aroused I was. I had a lot of control here. A lot of power.

  Silence.

  I spooned her, pressing the entirety of my near naked body into hers. We stayed like that for a long time.

  No memory makes me more uncomfortable than this little scene. Me pushing the bounds of Rachel’s affection. Using her as some kind of test to prove something about me. Could I be the sexually liberated guy I wanted to be?

  I leant over, and moved my face towards hers.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She got up and left the room.

  That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

  This was how it was supposed to happen: James’s twenty-first-birthday party, at his family’s house, and he’s conspired to have a spare bed for me in his room.

  We’re all there: Ravi, Amber, Nina and I, all drunk and laughing. But the whole night my head keeps going back to that spare bed and what James is expecting. The pressure feels air-tight, and I’m suddenly incredibly uninterested in sex.

  Hours later, I return from brushing my teeth to see James already in his bed, looking at me, smiling.

  ‘Come here,’ he says.

  He’s bigger than me. Perhaps he’ll try to force me if I don’t say yes. We’ve play-wrestled before. But suddenly I feel sick at the thought.

  I get into his bed and we spoon, but his hands tell me he’s after more. I lie rigidly still, my heart beating furiously, ashamed of how soft I am when he feels me.

  After too long, he gives up, and I crawl back to the mattress on the floor.

  I give myself a good talking to: I’m gay, I should be loving this, I should be relentlessly horny and up for it all the time.

  After all this time, all this anxiety, I can’t just not be gay.

  ‘I think I might be gay,’ Rachel says to me.

  We’d kept up a friendship, although we never shared a bed again after that night. But we spent a lot of time talking in the dark, looking out of windows, listening to music. And somewhere in there she told me about the night she swallowed all the pills she could find in the house, praying to go to sleep for a long time. Then she realised she couldn’t feel her right foot, and she told her Mum, who rushed her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped.

  That all happened somewhere in between New Zealand and the night I pressed myself up against her in the bed.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked.

  She shrugged.

  I thought we told each other everything.

  Nina, Ravi, Amber and I told each other everything. Including how Ravi and James now had a fun playmate relationship, and they both enjoyed each other’s bodies with great curiosity.

  James and I fell out of sync.

  Somehow, I’d managed to blow both my chances of some kind of physical relationship, including one with an incredibly sweet, smart gay man.

  I should’ve been disappointed.

  I was relieved.

  14

  Grown Up

  I should mention, my parents were chillin’ in the background this whole time. My brothers were there too, having spent most of the last five years in their bedroom, making their way through video games with religious fervour.

  I had gone through my entire life without ever feeling the urge to move house and leave my family. I couldn’t imagine a world without them. But now that I was at uni, I could see the freedom that Amber and others had was within reach. I could have a whole house to myself, or half a house, or a unit. Not just a room, but a whole place.

  The idea that I didn’t have my own place was outrageous, and I grew bitter about being trapped at home. I took my frustrations out on my family with my best angry-young-man act.

  All the small things about my family that were once mere annoyances grew into thorny resentments. Perhaps this is part of growing up: you suddenly feel entitled to feeling let down, or hurt, by what your family wouldn’t or couldn’t supply to you.

  It had happened one other time in my life, when I was just twelve. It was a Saturday afternoon. We’d travelled to the city with a singular purpose: to have our picture taken with the extended family. It was to be a gift for our grandmother.

  The twins were just ten. I was also in primary school, not too far away from the moment when Cameron’s hands would reach my neck and drag me across a certain visual arts table. The last time my family had been bundled into a photography studio, it had ended in disaster, with Andy and Chrissy spiralling into anxiety. I was already sceptical that my family could pretend to be normal for the sake of a photograph. Before the camera was even set up, there was trouble.

  Chrissy wasn’t happy. It had bee
n a long, uncomfortable drive. He’d been made to wear an ironed shirt with buttons down the front and shoes that weren’t comfortable. Chrissy’s anxiety caused Andy’s to rise in turn.

  ‘Just shut up!’ Andy told Chrissy repeatedly.

  And so Chrissy squashed his anxiety further inside. He turned his attention to the hot red eczema marks that were up and down his arms, and Andy turned to his too. They scratched without thinking, the flaky skin growing redder and angrier with each passing moment.

  A stranger touching Chrissy was strictly no-go, so when the young photographer touched him lightly in an attempt to reposition him for the photo, his body immediately tensed up. Andy, seeing this, but not wanting to chastise him in front of the extended family, whispered a harsh warning. Dad asked Andy to calm down. Andy took to his skin like sandpaper. It began to bleed. Chrissy’s innocent eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Smile!’ said the photographer.

  The moment was captured forever and would be hung on our grandmother’s wall like a prize. I remember looking out into the camera and smiling, but aware of my cousins around me: no one else was having anything like a stressful reaction.

  Why should they? It was just a photo.

  This is the first moment I can remember being properly furious with my family. The boys were exhausted and quiet on the drive back. But now I was the one who wanted to take to the interior of the car and scratch at it red raw.

  ‘Why couldn’t you be normal?’ I snapped at them.

  Dad interrupted before the boys could respond. ‘It’s all right, it’s all over now.’

  But it wasn’t over. This was my family for the rest of my life, and the boys couldn’t even take a photo. I wanted to scream at how unfair my life was.

  Mum tried to calm me down.

  ‘I know it’s hard,’ she said. ‘But you’ve just got to accept it. They are the way they are.’

  I began an extended campaign to prove them wrong.

  While I was trying to survive my personal high-school ordeal, the boys were trying to survive theirs.

  Primary school had been tolerable for them for a couple of reasons. One was the tiny size of the country school, where all manner of eccentricities were accepted and embraced. Another was the fact that my father was their teacher for their final years there.

  A student’s success at primary school is softly measured. Children are measured against themselves: how far they’ve come from where they were, whether they’re in danger of falling back. Once you hit secondary school, you’re clearly told that the time of being a child is over. Success is now measured by the distance between you and that of an acceptably functioning adult. So, the boys went directly from an environment where their own pace of progress was applauded to one where they were destined to fail.

  My brothers attended a large public high school on the other side of town from mine. It was reputed to have the best special-education unit in the state.

  It’s difficult to imagine that first day for the twins. I was in year ten at the time, at the zenith of my complications with Mary.

  There would have been noise. A lot of it. It would have been amplified in their ears, a constant hum of anxiety. Buildings in all directions, jammed full of teenagers—laughing, pushing and cajoling each other. Andy and Chrissy would have been led by the hand to the special-education unit, a beautifully equipped room, recently refurbished.

  Inside, a chaotic mix of strangers awaited them. Students in wheelchairs, their limbs hanging limply and their faces resting on their shoulders, their shirts collecting drool. Another few yelling and swearing at the top of their lungs, trying desperately to overpower the mild-mannered, middle-aged women who were trying to manage them. The silent. The meek. The frustrated. The terminally ill. The boys were brought to this room and told, ‘You belong here’.

  Chrissy’s soul would’ve curled up and tucked itself away somewhere inside, hiding in deep fear. Andy would’ve breathed in, puffed his chest outwards. He would make it his personal mission to be normal, even if it killed him.

  Chrissy’s time at the high school was brief and rarely pleasant. The wonderfully kind, gently innocent individual we all knew and loved was threatening to disappear forever. Under the strain of adolescence and the cacophony of high school, Chrissy was becoming someone else. He would resort to the only language he knew to explain it: the dialogue of Spider-man’s Venom, or Pokémon’s MewTwo, or a ‘very naughty engine’ from Thomas the Tank Engine. Within a few short months, the Chrissy that would never hurt a fly turned angry and dark. He yelled at teachers, scratched his arms raw, and threw punches at desks and chairs. He had an escape valve: a walk around the oval.

  While I’m sitting in a boring lesson, in between trying to figure out if Christine Pennyworth likes me and what I can do to make Mary laugh, my mind turns to imagining what Chrissy’s doing at that precise moment. I see him in the peace of a school oval. The sky is enormous and blue and stretches far above him. He surrenders to it, lost in the endlessness of it. The school, with its noise and nonsense, is miles away, a small collection of buildings in the distance. It can’t bother him out here.

  I imagine I’m walking beside him. I’m envious of his escape route. I look up into the sky with him and wonder if he can see more than me. Maybe he sees beyond the blue, into the black, into the stars and planets that circle around him, letting him play with them in a ceaseless cosmic dance that calms him down.

  I imagine him feeling the gentle tap on the shoulder from his teacher. It’s time to go back inside. His heart breaks. But, because he doesn’t want to let his family down, he turns around and follows his teacher back inside, back to his own personal hell.

  When the time on the oval became greater than the time he spent in the classroom, the futility of the exercise was apparent. Chrissy assumed a part-time enrolment that gradually shrank smaller and smaller. By the end of year nine, he was out of school completely.

  Andy lasted longer out of sheer will and determination. He went to normal classes with the assistance of a teacher’s aide, but he often asked to step outside. The sheer volume of noise and the other students’ apparent inability to listen to the teacher and follow very logical instructions completely stressed him out. High school should be a logical place. A teacher tells you something. You do it. Done. Andy couldn’t accept the huge number of variables within this simple equation. Worse, he was told, implicitly, that these students were ‘normal’ and he was the ‘special’ one.

  Of course, Andy was an easy target for vicious and unintelligent bullies, who would degrade him with the usual litany of insults that the terminally stupid always seem to reach for: gay, faggot, cock head, etc. He would come home speaking of his ‘nemesis’. Seen through the lens of his pop-culture glasses, high school was a battleground, and he was the hero, striding forth to survive in a world that was up against him.

  Andy made it his personal goal to get to the end of year ten. He made it, but the effort left him exhausted. His skin was raw, and he was almost permanently set against the human race.

  Mum, Dad and I were proud of him and of Chrissy for how long they’d managed to tough it out. But I was a loud (and probably annoying) voice in my parents’ discussions about the boys. Mum and Dad constantly wrestled with the question: ho
w far do we push them? How much do we let them rest? Usually, Dad would lean towards the gentler option. I would lean to the more aggressive side. Mum would be somewhere in the middle.

  Part of my behaviour was motivated by jealousy. In fact, a lot of it was jealousy. I had lost so many hours of my life, strapped to a school desk trying to find a way to tolerate and accept the chaos that was happening around me. I’d never once had the option to escape to the school oval for a breather, or to work with a personal assistant to receive my education at my own pace. Mum and Dad had done all they could. They talked with my teachers about bumping me up to classes that were above my year in order to keep me engaged and challenged. They even offered me the same deal they gave to the boys: get out; be homeschooled.

  I didn’t see that as an option; I wanted to be normal more than anything. So I was destined to be unhappy no matter what I did. If I fell out of school, I was a failure, and I resented that I had to figure it out while the boys received a special pass. To be honest, it infuriated me.

  This wasn’t to say that I didn’t regard the boys as special cases, or that I dismissed their very real disability. A big part of me wanted to protect them, to go to their school and fix it for them. This is the contradiction in all families, I guess: that thing that will drive you bonkers if you let it. It’s a feat of emotional quantum trickery: you simultaneously feel protective, loving and loyal to your family, as much as you do infuriated, resentful and bitter about them. And that’s not to mention the incessant guilt that you feel for being infuriated, resentful or bitter about them.

  Underneath all of this I had a deep concern for my parents. Dad was rapidly running out of energy for his teaching career. Mum was under attack from frequent migraines, lost in her own battles between motherhood and career. Both in difficult places and under a lot of pressure, Mum and Dad saw a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who had prescribed them antidepressants for years. The boys, facing their own anxieties, were also given medication. For all of my adolescence, I was the only family member not on antidepressants. Even our dog, bound in neurosis and skin itches, had a pill hidden in her breakfast each morning.