Forever Is Over

by Wade, Calvin

  I’m not like that. If God had have given me a son, I’d have wanted him to be gay! Clean, tidy, polite, good taste in films and shows and theatre, love your mothers, tidy nails, what more could a mother want?”

  I was completely dumbfounded. I looked at her, then looked at the fifty something year old Freddie Mercury clone standing behind me. Luckily, at this point, Jemma started to come down the stairs.

  “I’m not with him” I exclaimed, “I’m with her!”

  I pointed towards Jemma, who was halfway down the stairs. I’d like to think if I had been gay, I wouldn’t have chosen someone who could have slotted right into the Village People, if you pardon the pun.

  The landlady took another drag on her cigarette, which was now little more than a filter.

  “Sorry love!” she cackled, “I thought you and Magnum P.I were together!”

  Our leather clad friend stayed mute, just smiling pleasantly.

  “Now, it was a double room you wanted, wasn’t it love?” Scouse Hilda continued, searching around for the guest book, “I know we’ve got Tropical Beach available for £18 a night or Tropical Heat for £16. Which do you want?”

  “What’s the difference?” said Jemma as she arrived alongside me.

  “Tropical Beach has an en-suite bathroom and a radiator. Tropical Heat is up in the attic, so you have to use the communal bathroom, there’s no central heating in the attic either, so its fan heated.”

  “Tropical Beach, please!” Jemma and I both responded simultaneously.

  As the smoking antique went in search of the keys, Jemma whispered,

  “Good move! I’ve just been in the communal bathroom. It stinks! There’s a floater in there too and before you say it, neither the smell nor the floater belong to me!”

  Several years later, Jemma and I were out for the evening with two of our friends, Dogger and Sandra. After too many wines and gins and amarettos, the conversation sank to the depths conversation often sinks to, when drink affected. We began talking about losing our virginity and subsequently where we first slept together, as a couple. Sandra confessed their first time together, was in a sauna at a sports club when things turned steamy for more than one reason.

  “What about you two? Where were you?” they asked.

  “Tropical Beach in Tropical Paradise,” I stated, without even a hint of irony.

  Jemma

  “Richie! Move your head! QUICK!”

  Richie was kneeling on the floor with his head nestling in pubic hair on the rim of the toilet in the “Tropical Paradise” Guest House, Southport. I would have loved to have taken the moral high ground from that day forth, constantly reminding him how I had sobbed heartily into my concrete pillow after he had thrown up moments after we made love. Sadly, the moral high ground was a place I did not get to trample. Richie had hurriedly dashed from the bed, with the desperate message,

  “I think I’m going to be sick!”

  Seconds later, my brain sent a message to my throat and mouth that my stomach was refusing to forward my food and drink to my colon, to package it up ready for delivery at my rear end and had instead decided to return it to sender. Thus, I found myself kneeling down next to Richie, like two commode devotees, retching and allowing my partially digested lunch to join Richie’s for a midnight swim. As the bile and the putrid stench left me, my eyes filled up and I started to cry.

  Richie offered his sympathy.

  “Hey Jemma, don’t cry! It’s not sad, it’s funny. Look at the pair of us! I’ve been sick too, it’s OK.”

  “That’s not why I’m crying,” I said as I wiped my mouth and prepared myself for a second bout of vomit, “I’m crying because I’m a bad person. I hate myself, Richie. I really hate myself!”

  My hearty sobs continued. I don’t think I’d cried this month since Jon Voigts character died in “The Champ” and little TJ tried to wake him up.

  “Well, that’s ridiculous, Jemma! You’re a great person!”

  As expected, I threw up a second time.

  “No, I’m not Richie, I’m a bad person. That’s why I’ve just spent nearly two years in prison. That’s why I’ve just slept with my sister’s ex-boyfriend. I should not be having sex with you. You do that sort of thing with my sister, not me. This isn’t right.”

  “Jemma, it is right.”

  “Well how come we both keep feeling so guilty about it? Sometimes you feel bad about it, sometimes I do, sometimes we both do. If it was right, we wouldn’t be feeling like this. Should I be jumping into bed with my sister’s ex the moment I’m out? No, I shouldn’t!”

  “Jemma, it’s not yesterday that I went out with your sister, it’s three years ago. Kelly is just a memory to me now, whilst you’re here, sharing a toilet with me, having the most bizarre, backwards midnight feast! Now is not the time to feel bad about Kelly any more. We’ve done that. Let’s move on.”

  Grabbing a rough looking towel to wipe my mouth, I replied,

  “Richie, I don’t know whether I can. You will always be Kelly’s ex. Maybe it will always feel wrong.”

  “I know where you are coming from, because at times it still feels wrong to me, but other times it feels like the best thing in the world and it feels like the best thing in the world more. We are not bad people. Jemma, you have just sacrificed two and a half years of your life for a crime that we both know you did not commit. You allowed yourself to carry the can for your sister’s actions, so don’t feel bad about falling in love with someone she abandoned three years ago.”

  I vomited a third time. Not much came out. It was just retching now. It was becoming humiliating.

  “I didn’t say I was falling in love with you, Richie!”

  “Then tell me you’re not!”

  “I’m not! Falling implies that I’m still in the process of falling in love. Listen carefully to this, Richie, as I don’t flatter people often, but I have fallen in love, Richie. Every second I spent in Styal, I was just thinking about the day I could come out and spend time with you. That’s why it all feels so weird. I should feel fantastic now. I don’t. I just feel guilt.”

  Richie rubbed my back as I continued to retch!

  “Look Jemma, when you’re sober, you are going to have to straighten this out in your head. If you think you can handle it, I think we will be great together. If you don’t think you can, we can just call it quits, no harm done.”

  “Except that I have slept with you for a second time!”

  “Second time?”

  “The first was at the Birch’s party.”

  “That wasn’t me, Jemma.”

  “Yes, it was! Anyway, do you know what it is that is stopping me just going for this.”

  “What?”

  “Fear.”

  “Fear of what?”

  “Fear that I could be completely in love with you and then one day, Kelly will come back, she’ll click her fingers and you’ll drop me like a stone.”

  Even though I stunk, I looked dreadful and had vomit on my chin, Richie placed his hand on my cheek and turned my face towards him, before saying,

  “That won’t happen, Jemma. I promise you, that will never happen.”

  Jemma

  From the day I stepped out of prison, to the day we were married, life was almost perfect. Granted, I had my moments of feeling tetchy, hopeless, in despair and totally fed up but I think God gave women stormier waters, as we are the ones who have everything thrown at us in life. God gave men calmer seas because he knew once their seas started to get choppy that their boats would sink! To be fair, Richie is one of the few exceptions to this rule, when God made Richie, he put some of the sterner stuff in.

  My relationship with Richie kickstarted from when I left Styal. In spite of the initial doubts, as each day passed I became increasingly convinced that I needed Richie in my life. I needed him as a friend, as a lover, as a calming influence and as a motivator when times were tough.

  Six months after leaving Styal, I moved out of Amy’s Mum and Dad�
�s place and started to rent a smart, terraced house in Mill Street, Ormskirk. My old school, Ormskirk Grammar was at the top of the road, so if I was ever at home on a school day, it was really busy between half eight and nine and then again between half three and four, but on the whole, despite the odd can of Coke and Mars bar wrapper finding its way on to my path, they seemed like good kids. I could have thrown a few buckets of water over some buck toothed, metal mouthed minxes, but I was hormonally challenged at that age too, so I refrained from running the taps.

  Finding work was difficult. Once your curriculum vitae has a prison sentence for manslaughter on it, getting employment is tricky! Luckily, there are kindhearted souls around though who are prepared to give people like me a second chance in life. I started off working in a mobile café that was parked just off the M61 in Chorley. The bloke who owned it, Eric, was an ex-con himself from old Skelmersdale, he had served two years for handling stolen goods back in the sixties and once he went straight, he learnt to appreciate how difficult it was for ex-cons to get a foothold on the jobs ladder, so he started employing them. Eric used to drive across from ‘Skem’ to pick me up at Amy’s Mum and Dad’s at six o’clock every morning and his café would be open from half six to half two each day. Most truckers and drivers were after sausage, bacon, eggs and burgers, so Eric had noticed over the years that he only had to be open for breakfast and lunch as by mid-afternoon, business began to tail off. It was certainly different to working in a bank, but I enjoyed it as everyone who stopped seemed to be an interesting soul with a bit of time to tell a story.

  As I managed to get through six months with Eric without killing anyone or stealing anything, I was able to graduate to a job “waiting on”, in a coffee shop in Ormskirk, ‘Caffeine Corner’. Eric had given me a glowing reference and although providing middle class housewives with carrot cake and coffee wasn’t overly taxing, it gave me a bit of cash, which originally allowed me to offer Amy’s Mum and Dad some keep, (which they refused to accept) and subsequently allowed me to rent a place of my own. When I moved into Mill Street, I gave Richie the option of moving in with me, but he turned it down. He said he would help me with the rent, as he knew I would struggle to cover it alone, but he didn’t believe in living with someone before marriage. I kept asking every day from the day I visited the house for the first time until the day I moved in!

  On the day I moved in, Richie was helping me unpack everything and I found myself becoming a little irritated with him for not taking the plunge with me.

  “How very 1950’s of you!” I told him, once Richie had again reiterated his feelings that it would be wrong for us to live together before marriage.

  “I’m old fashioned with things like that!”

  “So you’ll get home from work, have your Mum cook your tea, give her your dirty laundry to wash and iron, pass her your plates to wash and then you’ll nip on the train here, have a couple of beers, watch TV, screw me and then nip back home to check whether your mother has hung your jacket up and pressed your trousers for the next day! Don’t try and fool me by saying you’re a traditionalist, you just know how to get your toast buttered on both sides!”

  “No, its nothing to do with that! I just have values, that’s all!”

  This grated with me.

  “Are you suggesting I don’t?”

  “No! Stop trying to turn this around! I just don’t think we should live together before we are married.”

  I softened a little each time he said this as there was an implication that we would get married. I decided to check out whether the implication was intended.

  “So, do you think we’ll get married?”

  “I’d like to think so. Do you?” I just gave him my sexiest smile.

  “I’ll give you my answer when you’re on one knee. Not before!”

  “A man needs to know he’s going to get a good response before he asks!”

  “Well you’ll know, because if I ever think we haven’t got a future together, I’ll dump you!”

  “Come here!”

  Richie grabbed me and gave me what started out as a playful bear hug and developed into a kiss and then ultimately resulted in sex on my unmade bed. When I think back to those days now, the one word I would use to describe our sex life would be - frequent! Not necessarily long sessions, but regular, repetitive sex sessions. Back in the day, before life wears you down, I wasn’t a girl for saying ‘No’! Richie also had an ability back then to re-charge his batteries in next to no time! It was start, stop, start again ten minutes later. Once you have kids, it becomes start, stop, start again same time, same place, next month!

  Despite Richie refusing to sacrifice the joys of his mother’s cooking for a place with me, he spent almost every evening at Mill Street and our weekends were pretty much love-ins that John and Yoko would have been proud of. The train journeys Richie was taking on a daily basis, to and from work in Maghull and to and from my house in Ormskirk, were becoming a bind, so he enrolled in an intensive learner driver course and after one failed attempt, he managed to pass second time. Fifth time overall! We celebrated like we had won the pools and he bought a lime green Toyota Carina that set him back £500. Richie bought it from an eighty year old man with failing eyesight and reactions and it was the type of car designed with the more mature driver in mind, but it was reliable and took us to places without us having to rely on public transport, so it added a new dimension to our lives. We could now go to places like the Lake District and the Yorkshire Moors, that we had never tackled by train.

  Richie and I both loved walking in the countryside. When you are cooped up in a café all week, the last thing you want to do at weekends is go shopping, you want to be out in the open air. One sunny spring Sunday, Richie drove us up to Ambleside and from there we had a wonderful walk up Loughrigg Fell. After a couple of hours walking, we sat down on a bank, looking down upon Loughrigg Tarn and Richie opened a wicker picnic basked he had brought our lunch in. He took out two plastic champagne glasses and a miniature bottle of champagne.

  “Wow! You’ve come prepared, Mr Billingham! I am impressed! Look at this view, isn’t it amazing!”

  “It is,” said Richie, he looked red faced and a few beads of sweat had gathered on his forehead, “but it needed to be after lugging this picnic basket up here!”

  “Be a man! It’s a picnic basket not a suitcase!”

  “I get no sympathy from you, do I?” Richie said in an amused tone.

  I lay back on the bank so my whole body was resting against it and put my hands on my head.

  “This has got to be the most beautiful spot in the whole world!” I said as Richie forced the cork off the champagne bottle. It flew up in the air and down the bank, Richie ran down after it, keen not to litter such a clean and picturesque place. He strode back up with the cork in his hand.

  “I’m glad you said that, a bit of an exaggeration maybe, but I’m glad you said it!”

  “Well, it’s definitely my favourite place in the world!”

  “It might be mine too, in a minute.” Richie replied cryptically. He passed me a plastic glass of champagne.

  “Cheers!”

  “Cheers!”

  “It is just an amazing place to be though, isn’t it? It makes you appreciate how lucky you are to be alive and to have the freedom to come somewhere like this. Look how the tarn reflects the trees and the clouds in the water and everywhere is just so green and bursting with life. It just gives you a brilliant buzz being here, doesn’t it?”

  “That’ll be the champagne!” Richie responded with a giggle.

  “Don’t be daft! I just think it’s fantastic. In a way, it makes me think about everything that’s gone on in my life so far. Vomit Breath was an idiot but I didn’t help the situation being a hardnosed, stroppy little madam either. When she was using my face as a punchbag, Kelly, Tut and I should have thrown a sack over her head, bundled her into Tut’s car and driven her up here. We could have shown her this view and tried to educate h
er that there’s more to life than fighting, fags and booze.”

  Richie shook his head.

  “Your Mum was beyond educating, Jemma. If you’d have brought her here, she would have taken out a bottle of whiskey and a pack of fags, drank and smoked herself silly, then gone in search of the nearest offie, leaving her bottle and fag packet behind. She was a nasty piece of work and she was never going to change.”

  “She didn’t deserve to die though.”

  I had thought about Vomit Breath a million times since she died. She was a horrible woman but I blamed myself completely for her unnecessary death. Although I sometimes tried to kid myself that I was wrongly punished for Kelly’s misdemeanour, the reality was somewhat different. If I had not been waving a knife at Vomit Breath that evening, that sorry episode would never have happened. The guilt and responsibility lay squarely at my feet. I should have run away or reported her to the police. On reflection, I fully deserved the punishment I received.

  “No,” said Richie after a pause, “but if she hadn’t been a child beating, evil cow of a woman, she would still be alive. Anyway, nothing can ever change history. You can regret what happened, but you can’t change it.”

  “True, but it can change me. It has changed me.”

  I decided the conversation could become too morbid and the huge high I was feeling could be taken from me if this conversation continued.

  I changed the subject.

  “Do you think we’ll bring our kids up here?”

  Richie smiled the broadest smile I think I had ever seen him smile.

  “I’m not supposed to know yet whether you’d marry me and here you are talking about our unborn children!”

  “You can have children without getting married, you know!” I joked.

  “I can’t! Stand up.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t question me, just do it. Stand up.”

  I was a little worried.

  ”I’ve not been lying in dog poo or anything, have I?”