by Liam Livings
I allowed myself to imagine him putting me through special measures, as he asked more questions that morning, over coffees.
It had started as a casual reference in the middle of a phone call.
'I'm on the Princess stand at a show this weekend. There's a detailing demo too, fancy coming?'
I blinked. I had understood most of that sentence, but the critical words, the words about which I was being asked to make a decision, they may as well have been said in Swahili. 'What's the show? What's detailing?'
'It's a classic car show, they've got one in the Epping Forest, it's a nice drive through the forest to get there. How's it sound?'
'Classic car show. As in old cars?'
He nodded. 'I told you I was into them didn't I?'
Now, that I would have remembered, and I did not remember him saying that.
'The car I drive in, it's from the seventies, a '77 Leyland Princess. Didn't you notice it in the car park at the village hall?'
I had seen an old car, thought, poor sod, they can't afford anything newer. It hadn't occurred to me someone might chose to drive that, voluntarily. None of this was verbalised outside my head. I thought it best, as I looked at his enthusiastic, friendly, smiling face beaming back at me. 'That's a Princess?'
'Same car they used in the seventies sitcom Terry and June. Did you used to watch it?'
'I was a baby in the seventies. For most of them I wasn't born, and you're the same age as me.'
'True. But my dad used to have one, and I've never forgot how I felt when he drove it home from the garage for the first time, its soft suspension, deep seats, bright green paintwork, and it had a vinyl roof. It was the seventies as I said.'
I felt stranded in the middle of an ocean of words like vinyl, deep seats, paintwork, which I didn't really understand, and my normally inquisitive, appetite for learning - my paddle if you will - was gone, nowhere to be seen.
He explained what was usually involved in these classic car shows, it sounded like an awful lot of standing about in a field, next to cars, with some hot dogs and burgers thrown in for good measure. He was really enjoying telling me about what the show would include. He was really getting into it, I could see the twinkle in his eyes. This was his thing. If I wanted to be in with a chance, I would need to stand about in a field next to a door from an Austin from the sixties, displayed against a bit of tarpaulin covered in headlights and brake lights from various Fords through the ages.
This was the person I was going to have to be, in order to be with this person I wanted to be with.
I bet his car friends are fit. I bet they're all toned and covered in engine oil.
What had started as a casual conversation was now, reality. I was right about the tarpaulin, the old doors and the standing about in a field. I wasn't right about his friends: they were all, without exception in their fifties, grey haired, white haired, or completely bald. Some had long-suffering wives with them in tow, others made mention about 'the wife' and others definitely did not have a partner at home, or otherwise.
The horror, the horror.
But once I saw Darren in his natural habitat, I noticed a change in his demeanour, he was so kind, explaining to others how he got into his particular car, he helped one man who was looking for a particularly rare piece of dashboard for his car, by pointing him in the direction of Steve the Scrappy, 'He's got everything. I've never gone to him with a request and been let down.'
He introduced me as a friend, and he definitely wasn't out to this group of friends either. He kept an arm's length apart as I tried to snuggle up to him in the back of his car while he was giving someone a guided tour of the 'typically mid-seventies upholstery in brown velour.'
I watched in awe, and a surprising amount of interest as he talked through the model history of his car to a group of people. He pointed to the series of posters on the edge of the stand, with a variety of old adverts for the car, and explained why they'd changed their advertising approach during the car's lifespan on sale. As I said, he was really into it, and it was surprisingly interesting. Surprisingly.
Helping him pack up the club stand, and put boxes of their owners' club brochures into the back of his car, I realised I'd actually had a good time. I'd spent a day in a field next to some old bits of cars, and had a smile on my face, and now had some new knowledge. 'You don't strike me as a classic car sort of person.' I looked at him as he put another box in the boot.
'What does one of 'em look like then?'
'I wasn't sure. But not you.'
'Takes all sorts. Women, young, old, men. That's what I like about it, and that everyone's so friendly. Always willing to help if you have a question, to share what they've learned.'
I shrugged.
'Besides, you don't really look like someone who's done too much cocaine to me. You look like a teacher who's only seen it on some racy films you watched when you were a student. But who am I to say?'
Who indeed. 'Glad I came. We going now?'
'I'll just say goodbye to the guys back on the stand. Wanna come?'
'I'll just sit here on the seventies upholstery.' I smiled.
He returned with news of another show in a few weeks. Did I want to come to that one too?
'Let's take one at a time. I said I enjoyed it more than I thought, don't sign me up with your little form just yet.'
'Received, understood, loud and clear.' He squeezed my leg next to the gear stick, resting his hand on my thigh.
Another weekend, another afternoon in a café together, I felt confident enough to ask him why he'd played the pronoun game at the group.
To take my mind off actually asking Darren about the pronoun game, I'd filled my morning with a few blog posts, some Twitter and Facebook action for Mr Farnham. I'd taken Clara-Bell's advice, and Mr Farnham had grabbed the bait immediately after I'd e-mailed him explaining I was a social media lead and she'd mentioned that her school was looking for someone to do their social media. A quick phone call, with a deeper voice, and slightly northern accent - it was basically my Coronation Street accent, since it was the only non-southern accent I could manage - and good old Mr Farnham had said when I could start.
Now, I posted one of the blogs I'd written, interacted with some pupils' parents on the Facebook page, and realised I would be late to meet Darren.
In response to my pronoun game question, Darren said, smiling a crooked smile over a hot chocolate, 'I'm out, but not out out. If you know what I mean.'
'Go on.'
'Like, people I know, friends, family, all them lot, they know. I never told the car friends, 'cause Chris, the ex, never came, so it didn't come up, you know. You're not upset about the car friends are you?'
I was a bit upset really, but now he'd explained why, I felt a bit churlish to complain, so instead just shook my head and said no, I was fine, I'd just wanted to understand why.
'But people I might not see again - I don't' go flashing it around. I didn't know how many of that lot I'd see again, and so I kept it to myself. I'm not too obvious, see. So if I don't say anything, I can just pass. No one thinks nothing of it. But if I do tell 'em, that's it, it's out of the box. I'm the gay plasterer who got addicted to coke. I thought there was enough going on, enough for them to ask me about, without adding in that my ex was a bloke, you know?'
I did know, I knew exactly what he meant. 'How do you decide if you're going to pass, or not?'
'Depends on the situation, the people. I don't want to rush into a room, do a star jump and shout that I like a bit of cock. I like to keep it private, personal. I like to keep that part of me hidden from others, kept in the shadows.' He paused. 'It's not the sort of thing you say to a mate in the shower after a football game, is it? Oh, that's a nice cock you've got there. Excuse me while I take a picture I can look at later. I don't think so. It's not like rugby, where they're making calendars and videos of themselves in the buff, selling like hot cakes to the gays, cashing in on the pink pounds. Football - especially Sunda
y league football, ain't quite so understanding, you know what I mean?'
Over dinner, in a local restaurant, he asked me if I liked teaching. His eyes glimmered in the light from the candle - he'd gone bright red when a waiter had lit it, noticing we were a couple. He'd avoided eye contact with the waiter, and very quickly asked for a beer when offered wine.
Do I like teaching? 'I like English, the language, reading. I'm even a bit of a grammar Nazi actually ... '
'You can't say that, that's racist or something isn't it?'
'Why, what did I say?'
'You can't say Nazi, it's wrong isn't it?' He looked quite worried and checked around the restaurant in case someone was walking to our table.
'Grammar Nazi, I think I'll be okay.'
'What's one of them when they're at home?'
'Have you ever read a menu from a magazine and noticed where there are grocers' apostrophes, and you've gone through and corrected it?'
'Can't say I have as it goes.'
'Well I have. And I do it all the time. I once went over to a market stall holder and started to explain to him why pear's didn't need the apostrophe, unless anything actually belonged to the pears.'
'And what did he say? I'd have thought, who's this nutter and told you to do one, but that's just me.'
'No, that was him too. That's pretty much what he said to me. He said the pears belonged to him, if that was any help, and told me to bugger off with my black pen, messing about with his signs.'
'Teaching?' he asked, hopefully.
I remembered how far from the point I'd digressed. 'The repetition of teaching, the having to teach people who don't want to be taught, the pain of trying to explain to someone about the beauty of storytelling, the written word, when the most they normally read is a text message, the endless form filling and report writing to explain how our learning units - that's pupils to you - are progressing through each of the key stages in the curriculum. All that I could do without really. But hey ho, it pays the mortgage so, what am I going to do?'
'Fair enough.'
'What about you? Do you like being a plasterer, working for yourself?'
He took a sip of beer and I noticed his blowjob lips wrapping themselves around the neck of the bottle. A jolt went to my groin. 'Hadn't really thought about it.'
'But there must be things you like about it, things you don't like.'
'I like moving about, I couldn't be sat behind a desk, in front of a computer all day, no way. I like using my hands, seeing what I've done at the end of the job. It sounds stupid.' He looked at the ground.
'No, go on, it's not stupid.'
The waiter appeared and took our orders.
Darren sat quietly and retrieved his phone from his pocket, and started to play with it.
'Go on, I want to hear about it. It's so different from anything I could do. I'm useless with my hands. I can't even wire a plug, or change a washer on a tap. I just call Yellow Pages and get someone in.' I looked at my smooth hands, embarrassed at my awful admission.
He put his phone back in his pocket and rested his hands on the table. They were rough and the nails were covered in white flecks from plaster and all manner of other workmen things. Coo, sexy.
'What don't you like about it, or is it all great. I've told you what I hate. Or do you love it all, and you're one of those sickening people who says they don't do a day's work in their lives because they love it, so they're not really working any more?'
'Tax and all the paperwork. I hate it. Invoicing, receipts, filing, all that. It just gives me brain freeze. I just look at my tax form and I get heart beats in my ears. I just stick the receipts and invoices in a big folder, and once every six months, I go through it and sort it into piles, then put it all back until the end of the year, when I panic.'
'You know you can get someone to do that for you?'
'I have one of them. I give him the stuff in a shoebox where I've stuffed it during the year, and he does what he does, and tells me how much I have to pay. It's all the little things, invoicing, doing quotes, that sort of thing. Every time I sit at home writing a quote, and e-mailing it to someone, I think about how much plastering I could have done, and isn't it a waste of time, me sat in my chair at my computer. Silly really.'
'But you like it, most of it?'
He nodded. 'Yeah, most of it, yeah.'
'Lucky.'
'What would you really like to do, if you could do anything?'
'Writing.'
'What, with a pen and paper? What would you write?'
'That's the thing. You see, I'm not very good at it. The whole, getting it down on paper thing.' I told him about my attempt to write something, when I had reached Olympic levels of procrastination and ended up with just Chapter 1 on my screen.
'That's pretty impressive time wasting.' He laughed.
I nodded, looked at his eye, then looked away.
'But what would you like to write? Books it must be, if you only wrote Chapter 1?'
So I told him about the dream about being a freelance writer, and that I had made a website, but didn't know what to put on it, and that Clara-Bell had told me to write like the wind.
'She sounds like a right laugh. Where'd you meet her?'
I started to tell him about the Romantic Writers Guild and their local meeting, but then realised this was where the two lies became uncomfortably close to one another. So I stopped.
'Go on, I was enjoying that. It's interesting. I've never met a writer before. It's like meeting a famous person, or someone who's flown to the moon, or something else no one else can do. It's like sort of magic. I want to touch you to see you're real.' His eyes twinkled and he smiled. He rested his hand on mine.
I enjoyed the roughness of his hand on top of mine. I imagined its roughness rubbing against other parts of my body.
'Go on, tell me how you do it. Do you plan what you're writing, or does it just come to you? What are you writing about now? Where do you get your ideas from?'
So I did, I told him what I had been writing and that the writers group had told me it wasn't realistic enough, that I had to experience more life.
He listened, the whole time asking more questions to get more out of me about this, a topic I hadn't really talked to any non-writers about before.
We walked to our cars, and after a brief hug and quick peck on the cheek, both conscious of not being in Soho or a club in Vauxhall, I watched his metallic green and vinyl roofed car glide away. He stuck his hand out the window and waved as he passed.
I couldn't believe it, another night of him not wanting to come back to mine for a nightcap. I knew we wouldn't go to his. He'd explained he shared with his parents, so it was a bit awkward, bringing people back. He also knew I lived on my own, not a parent in sight, in a house with two bedrooms. I'd specifically offered him the spare room on a number of occasions, but each time he said he had to get home, saying his mum would be worried if he didn't come home. And each time, I'd gone home, frustrated that I'd come so near yet so far yet another time, and had to relieve my pent up tension with a long hot bath, imagining his rough hands exploring my body as I lay in the water.
Chapter 16
Late one evening, in the staffroom at school, I looked at my watch - nearly eight o'clock, and here I was at another of Mr Farnham's bloody terminal meetings, which seemed very much to have become more often than once a term.
I imagined my laptop sat in the perfect position in the perfect angle on the desk, next to the perfect notepad with the perfect fountain pen I'd bought especially for writing, with a pile of bright pink Post-It notes, which I also knew were perfect. I knew at that moment, that if I were home now, I would have been writing. I knew I'd have written much more than Chapter 1, followed by a cursor, flashing, reminding me that's where it ended. I knew now, at that moment, on that dark night after school, that I couldn't be this person any longer.
Mr Farnham asked me what I thought.
To what? What had he been talkin
g about? Where was I? I scrabbled about in my brain and could only retrieve Chapter 1 and the Post-It notes. And I knew that wouldn't do, I knew he'd want more than that.
'Simon, are you all right? Do you have anything you'd like to add to my presentation about the revised form to capture pupils' pastoral issues? Nothing you'd like to add about the foundation studies cookery classes you're helping with? No burning desires?'
I had none, because, despite Mrs Price's gin and cigarette soaked notes in my pigeon hole, I'd not attended one lesson with her, but I hadn't got round to telling Mr Farnham that. Not yet. I sensed this wasn't the right time for that particular revelation.
Lucy jumped in, catching my eye from the other end of the staff room. 'I think, Mr Farnham, what Simon means, is there's nothing to say, so as such, he's saying nothing. It is, as they say, semper idem.'
Semper idem? Always the same? What was this solid gold bollocks Lucy was spouting on my behalf?
Mr Farnham smiled with his eyes closed. 'Well, in that case I propose we take a comfort break for ten minutes, and resume at ten past eight.'
I stood, grabbed my bag, leaving my papers on the table, and left the room. I walked along the corridor, each wall covered with pictures of previous head teachers, each in the black capes and mortar boards Mr Farnham insisted we all wear for assembly every morning.
As I reached the car park, the cold air hit me, knocked me back to the reality of the situation.
I saw the cursor flashing next to Chapter 1, and I also saw the room I'd just left.
I sat in my car, hand hovering over the ignition key. Part of me expected, hoped, Lucy would arrive in the car park, run up to my car and throw herself on the bonnet, pleading with me to come back to the terminal meeting. Because this wasn't a big budget Hollywood film about a man finding himself, this was my life, that didn't happen. I resigned myself to my slightly damp squib of an exit, and to never returning to that staffroom again, or another terminal meeting.
