The Milkman's On His Way

by David Rees

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  He had hundreds of gay friends and acquaintances now. But he’d been on his own this past nine months, since James had moved out. The real love of his life, I guessed from the number of times and the way, bitter but also affectionate, in which he referred to James. This attic had been their home. Its untidy, almost dilapidated condition, he said, was because the heart had gone out of it. Since James had left he’d existed rather than lived. ‘He was black.’

  ‘Black!’

  ‘Yes, the colour of soot. All over. I used to call him Kwango. You sound surprised.’

  ‘I’ve never thought before about blacks being gay. Or Chinese, or Russians, for that matter.’

  ‘There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be gay Tibetans or Eskimos.’ He was amused. ‘I know a gay Tibetan, in fact.’

  ‘There’s a great deal for me to learn, I’m beginning to realise.’

  ‘I envy you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The voyage of discovery is very pleasant.’

  ‘Yours hasn’t finished.’

  ‘True. But I didn’t bargain for being mangled by thugs and losing a job. James would simply call it one of the risks. Of being homosexual, of leading a gay life. But I don’t see why the hell it should be.’ He got out of bed. ‘I’m going to find something to eat. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Starving!’

  ‘Man cannot live by words and sex alone.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I promised you breakfast, but it won’t even be lunch! A cross between lunch and tea. Stay there; we’ll eat in bed.’

  A fry-up: bacon, eggs, tomatoes, sausages, and toast. And a bottle of red wine. It was much more pleasant than cleaning the toilets at the swimming pool, but tomorrow? The dole queue. And before that, the Suttons. I didn’t want to move: the bed was warm, and it had Robin. More attractive than any other kind of existence I could visualise for myself.

  Hours passed. Robin talked about oppression and gay militancy. His friends. Old lovers. Good clubs. Clubs that were nothing but a rip-off. We had sex again. ‘Are you staying the night?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Oh yes, you can! Go back now and tell those nice but not very sympathetic people you’re lodging with that you’ve found somewhere else to live. Collect all your stuff and bring it here. Then we’ll go out, find a not too expensive restaurant, and celebrate. After that, we’ll return to this room and. . . you’ll be able to stay the night. Easy!’

  I stared at him. ‘Don’t joke with me!’

  ‘I’m not! I mean it! I need someone to help pay the rent.’ He laughed, and said ‘I don’t need any old person to help pay the rent. But this place is lonely. . . and I think I want you.’

  ‘You’ll regret it.’

  ‘That’s in the future.’

  Inside me, stars danced: mad, I said to myself, mad; what do you know about him, what are you letting yourself in for? But, if you don’t leap at what’s possible, what’s offered, you’ll end up with nothing. Nobody had offered me anything before. I kissed him. ‘I’ll try not to make you regret it. Ever!’

  ‘That doesn’t matter now. And don’t ever talk about ever! You’ll regret that.'

  He smiled and ran his forefinger across my face. ‘Your eyes!’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Alight.’

  On the bus, half-way home, I thought: what on earth was I going to say to Frank Sutton? And. . . would I be able to cope with the memories of James?

  Seven: Coming Out

  These questions, I found out, didn’t matter. The first led to a very uncomfortable half hour, but once I had packed all my things and gone I pushed it out of my mind. James was a problem that took a bit longer. Robin made his own position totally clear from the start; I would never be able, I was glad to realise, to use accusations of deception against him. Neither emotional deception — a common human crime is to say ‘I love you above all other; I will love you for ever’ when something else is meant — nor that of any other sort: financial, sexual, a misplaced desire to flatter and please. James he loved above all other, and he said so. If there was a possibility of the black man returning to him he would unhesitatingly say yes. They still met and talked, usually in a crowd at the pub or at a party; it was as if they could not really leave one another alone. As far as I was concerned, Robin thought of me as a friend he enjoyed living with and sleeping with. If ever we wanted someone else, he said, we should, both of us, be honest enough to say so: hiding feelings and pretending no attraction existed when it obviously did, was a sure recipe for the destruction of the relationship.

  ‘You’ll be hurt by what I’ve said,’ he added.

  I was. It seemed to me a very peculiar way of behaving. But over the next few weeks, as I examined what I felt and thought of the implications, I discovered that it was my ego that was bruised, not my emotions. I wasn’t in love with him — he wasn’t Paul — any more than he was with me; it was circumstances that had driven us together, not an all-consuming passion. He wasn’t my ‘type’, sexually — Paul and Leslie were. It didn’t work out in bed; we both wanted the same thing. We were, neither of us, initiators; and screwing just simply didn’t satisfy me, bring any real pleasure or happiness, except on rare occasions. It bothered me still that I wanted a so-called ‘passive’ role: I wasn’t a woman, in no way ! thought I was born in the wrong sex, in no way wanted to act like a woman. The signals I gave out were totally male, and my behaviour and all my preoccupations I considered just as masculine as Paul’s or Leslie’s. ‘Just get on and enjoy it while you have the chance,’ Robin said, when I told him of my worries. ‘You’ve been brought up to believe that because you’ve got a cock it automatically has to be shoved into something. Conditioning, that’s all. If you don’t want to do it, then don’t. There’s no law about it. And if you want a great big cock up you, then go out and find one. There’s no shortage, as far as I can see.’

  It was good advice. I was still the same Ewan Macrae; more of the same Ewan Macrae when I was being fucked, being what I now knew I had always wanted to be: fulfilled, adult, complete. So I slept from time to time with the attractive men who smiled at me in the pub, hoping always that one of them would be that special person I’d fall in love with, another Paul. None of them was. That didn’t upset me very much: time was on my side; I could wait. And living with Robin was relaxed, easy, and open: fun. One day in the future I would be dispossessed from the flat by James; of that I was sure, and the thought made me sadder than the fact that my love life was mostly a series of one-night stands. When James returned I hoped I’d have the strength to be alone. It would be wrong to want to cling, barnacle-like, to the first rock I had gripped.

  I was astonished that Robin, from time to time, still made love with James. I had thought that the black man would be the one person he wouldn’t sleep with, unless they came together again on a permanent basis. But astonishment was a frequent reaction as I began to explore the gay scene with Robin. His friends became my friends. He had no heterosexual acquaintances. ‘I can’t be bothered any longer,’ he said. ‘The pretences! The masks you’re forced to wear! And if they know, they think they’re the ultimate in tolerance, which is patronising.’ He had no one like Leslie. The curiously tangled relationships his friends had were to me extraordinary: not at all what I wanted for myself. Monogamy was rare, though it did exist. Strange polygamous states were more prevalent, triangles, even quadrangles; or total promiscuity, or affairs that lasted a month, a week, before another was tested and that found wanting. Everybody at some time or another, I felt, had slept or would sleep with everybody else. Was this just cosmopolitan London? Did it in any way resemble the heterosexual world? It wasn’t easy to imagine people behaving like this in Bude.

  But they seemed as happy as anyone else. My entire upbringing — which, of course, recognised marriage between one man and one woman as the only possible avenue to bliss — suggested that such a way of lif
e as I was now involved with was like Dead Sea fruit; sterile, unfulfilling, the primrose path to everlasting misery and a VD clinic. Mortal wounds that were not only self-inflicted but inflicted by others on others. Yet quarrels, depressions, jealousies were not all that common. These people were remarkably unbitchy. The petty backbiting, the no-holds-barred vindictiveness, that are tags hung by the straight world on the gay, did not, as far as I could see, exist, except at a joking level, when one man would score off another like a cat sharpening its claws on a chair, just to keep his wits keen.

  I discovered, too, that limp wrists and handbags, mincing walks and wiggling bottoms, were mostly a myth invented by straights. Not that they were totally absent: but they were used more as an act, an entertainment gays put on for each other in the places they met, rather than a mode of existence outside. The desire to outrage the straight world by imitating the stereotype of heterosexual assumption in, for example, Putney High Street on a busy Saturday afternoon was, if not as rare as a black one-legged nun driving a Morgan, rare enough. There were uniforms and stereotypes, but only other gays would see their real implications: the men in leather were not Hell’s Angels, the ones in camouflage not deserters from the white Rhodesian army, the moustachioed clones with short back and sides and nondescript plaid shirt and jeans weren’t having a quick drink before returning to their wives in Twickenham and Teddington. Uniforms exist everywhere: the fawn coats, brown suits, beige pullovers and tan shoes of young middle-class farmers in Bude trying to look smart on a night out; or the long flowered frocks, the dyed permed hair and imitation jewellery of middle-aged women going to the theatre or their husband’s firm’s annual dinner.

  Maybe at this time I was just naive, but would the comments one might make about the sad and sordid, or the joyous and fulfilling, aspects of gay life be very different from any strictures or panegyrics on human behaviour in general? I doubt it.

  We both found jobs quite rapidly. Not through the labour exchange, but through friends of friends of friends. One interesting function of the gay community, I learned, was its ability to help its own members, almost as Jews or West Indians or Freemasons do. Somebody had usually heard of somebody who could put you in touch with a gay plumber, a car mechanic, an electrician, or a television repair man who would do what you asked more quickly, and possibly more cheaply, than people you contacted through the yellow pages.

  Robin got work as a clerk in the tax office. ‘Deadly dull,’ he said, ‘but at half past five I can switch off and forget it completely. And the money’s just slightly more than it was at the swimming pool.’

  My job was a bit more esoteric: assistant stage manager (in theory), general dogsbody (in practice) for a dance company. It operated on a shoe-string budget, touring in the outer suburbs of London; its studio was a ramshackle church hall not far from where we lived. The hours and the pay were, to put it mildly, unpredictable. So were the members of the company. The director and sole choreographer was a fierce old woman, a real dragon with close-cropped black hair and a man’s voice; she tended to regard as a personal insult anything that the company was interested in that was unconnected with dance, and activities that might lead to someone being late for rehearsal or want an hour off she treated as sabotage. Her husband, who wore an ill-fitting red wig, was, though he was much too old for it, the company’s male lead. He could do no wrong, as far as the director was concerned; his mistakes (which were more frequent than those of any other dancer) were always somebody else’s fault. The rest of the company, in a different way, were just as weird. They took themselves so seriously. They lived for their art — breathed, ate, and slept it. Which was undoubtedly meritorious, but they were in the habit of thinking their productions, and the whole philosophy that lay behind what they were doing, were vastly superior to anything put on by the Kirov or the Royal Ballet. Margot Fonteyn was, to them, a four-letter world. The company could not afford an orchestra, and as it was illegal to use taped music without paying royalties, they danced to a cacophonous assortment of noises they recorded for themselves: bangs, crashes and whistles that sounded like blocked drainpipes in agony, or pigs being subjected to medieval tortures. These curious pieces were given names like ‘Summer Night’ or ‘Fragment’, or one-syllable abstractions: ‘Art’, ‘Space’, ‘Planes’. Similarly with the decor: they could never pay for a set, so it became a virtue not to have one. All this economic difficulty was elevated to a spurious kind of excellence: dispensing with real music and scenery made it possible to move nearer the realm of ‘pure dance’, whatever that was.

  Pure hocus pocus was my opinion. Not that I ever said so. I got on with my job — operating lights or the tape recorder, brewing tea, checking seating arrangements, hiring minibuses, darning holes in costumes, preparing salads (they were all ardent vegetarians and obsessed by the need to diet), finding cigarettes at crucial moments — anything that no one else could do at the time. But it seemed to me to be a severe case of the emperor’s clothes. Particularly in the pauses between the grunts and gasps that emerged from the tape recorder: the grunts and gasps of the dancers then became embarrassingly audible, like overhearing other people’s orgasms. That was intentional, I discovered; it was all to do with ‘the total experience’. I was surprised that anybody wanted to come and see such rubbish, but it wasn’t unusual for an audience to consist of two or three hundred earnest-looking souls who imagined they were plunging into an important, if obscure, cultural extravaganza. I found it difficult not to laugh as I wondered who was the most deluded — the audience or the company. Whatever turns you on, I suppose: the human species, I was beginning to realise, was capable of an infinity of variations as far as that was concerned. Though why? It would have been easier to understand if someone in this outfit was laughing all the way to the bank, but nobody was.

  My relationship with my parents at this time was very strained, indeed almost non-existent. My mother, in the past, had called me ‘the jewel in her crown’; I had hurt her once by saying that my father should occupy that place in her affections. But I felt I had been like some precious gem, treasured, kept carefully in a drawer, an insurance against middle age when my mother — grandmother as she looked forward to being — could view with satisfaction her son, married, with children, mortgage, and a safe, steady job. She would never be able to reconcile herself to the fact that I was not a machine for fashioning other Macraes. Many gay people regret that they won’t have children: not me. My mother’s assumptions, and my efforts to copy her behaviour, her moral and sexual attitudes, had imprisoned me in that drawer. But I had escaped now.

  I wrote, giving my new address, and said, briefly, that I was sharing a room with a friend because I was happier there than at the Suttons. I waxed eloquent about the charms and comforts of the new lodgings, describing in detail the splendid panorama I could see from the window. But she was not taken in. Nor was my father. Letters arrived, reproachful, threatening: it would kill them to think I had returned to my bad old ways; they were depressed, and when was I coming home? I asked Robin’s advice. But he had little sympathy, and could scarcely conceal his impatience. ‘Tell them you’re being screwed by every dishy man in London,’ he said. ‘They’re using emotional blackmail. Which is as contemptible as real blackmail.’ It was more complex than that, I felt; they loved me, and cared about what happened to me. As I loved and cared about them. One day I hoped they would understand. And accept me, not just grudgingly, but so that the numerous pleasures and joys of a relationship between parents and sons could again be experienced. ‘You’re asking for the moon,’ Robin said. He was a great one for cutting losses. I was driven to write that they were making it very difficult for me to return, even for a weekend; this produced a frantic reply, and I stopped writing for a while. Eventually I wrote a non-committal three pages, chiefly about the weather. (It was late August, and hot; London sweated and struggled for breath in the grimy heat.) There was no answer. In October I sent my father a birthday card, but that also elicited no
response. I was now more angry than sad.

  But I felt so inwardly well balanced that distress and indignation were emotions I could cope with; they didn’t disturb the happiness of that time. Living with Robin had given me belief in myself. Apart from the pleasures of friendship and sharing a home, I found, with guys I met in the pubs and the discos, a relatively contented sex life. Sexual misery, it began to dawn on me, was one of the most destructive of human conditions; it pervaded every area of activity, sapped the ability to concentrate, the will to do anything other than seek an end to frustration. For the first time in years I could work, read, enjoy people’s company, listen to music, dance for hours at a club, and devote all my energies to what I was doing.

  At Christmas we decided to repaint the attic, and make new curtains, lampshades and cushions. We didn’t start the job, however, for another six months. When it was finished, we sat there for ages, admiring our efforts. ‘I like that mushroom colour,’ Robin said. ‘It soothes.’

  ‘At home we never eat mushrooms. I was sixteen when I first ate one. With bacon and chips in a Wimpy bar.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My mother is so frightened a toadstool might have slipped in by mistake that she never buys them. That way, she feels there’s no chance of being poisoned.’

  ‘Like never crossing a main road because a car might knock you down. She’s round the bend, your mother.’

  ‘No. Not really.’ It annoyed me, hearing him criticise her. Though what other reaction could I expect after what I’d said? His comment was not unreasonable. I was the irrational one here: it was quite all right for me to tear her character to bits, but no one else was allowed to. Robin wouldn’t do so, of course, if I stopped making unfavourable remarks, but that was difficult. One has to talk to someone. I hadn’t in any way come to terms with what I felt about my parents. I should have gone home for a weekend: but that was easier said than done.