by David Rees
Brian did not follow the general example. I’m not totally certain whether he made himself suppress his prejudices about homosexuality in order to please me, or because he grew to be convinced that the way Mark and Donald were being treated was unjust. He said it was both ― mostly the latter. Whatever the truth, he sought them out at school, spent time with them, and when he was at our house he made sure, if Donald was in, that he went up to the attic for a chat. This did not lose him any friends: was a model others might have copied, but they didn’t. ‘Of the two of them I much prefer your brother,’ he said. ‘Maybe I feel more at ease because he is your brother. Or … I don’t know … I guess I’m comfortable with guys who are into sport.’
‘Mark’s a games player,’ I said. ‘A pretty good one, too. On the tennis court.’
‘Yes. But he doesn’t care any longer. He thinks all that’s beneath him, that he’s into higher things.’
‘He’s got other interests to occupy him now. It is ‘A’ level year, you know.’
‘Same for me. And for dozens of others ― you.’
‘Don’t I know it! I’ve got this awful French translation to do for Ernie Pitt ― I don’t even understand the title!’
I did understand, however, what Brian was saying about Mark. Mark was very self-assured, aloof almost, which to some degree was an admirable strength; but it could be misinterpreted, grow into a source of resentment. People called him a snob. It wasn’t that: he just knew his destiny wasn’t with the straight crowd of beer-drinking, muscle-flexing males. I mentioned this to Ted, who said, ‘Mark’s future friends, I guess, will be women and gay men. As mine are. And as Donald’s will be, when he’s come to terms with losing the heterosexual sporting mob.’
‘But why does that have to happen?’ I asked. ‘Why are there these barriers?’
Ted shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s how it is. You know, I admire the women’s lib movement. I’m very profeminist. But I think the world’s in greater need of men’s lib. Most men are neanderthal in their basic attitudes! It isn’t a question of coming out of the closet; straight man has never really come out of the cave! Women’s lib, gay lib: most men feel threatened by any attempt to structure society in a different way from what is traditionally regarded as normal. A challenge to their status, their jobs, the assumptions on which they’ve always acted. Saying homosexual relationships are good, permissible, acceptable, is implying that marriage and two point four children isn’t the one goal everybody should be aiming for. It’s casting doubts on male dominance. Men on the whole don’t like that! There is one area, however, in which I do sympathise with them.’
‘What’s that?’
Ted, embarrassed for a moment, blew his nose; then he said, ‘Would you be happy if men were allowed into women’s changing-rooms?’
‘I certainly would not!’
‘Why?’
‘Well … it’s obvious … I’d feel very ill at ease with dozens of men watching me get undressed!’
‘It’s understandable, therefore, if heterosexual males feel bothered about gays in similar circumstances. What I’m trying to explain, Helen, is why prejudice is strongest in sport. Explain? Wrong word. I’m hazarding guesses. What I do know is that Donald can’t live openly in both worlds. But he’ll have to find that out for himself.’
The phantom graffiti artist had not struck again: nothing on blackboards, no further paint on walls; and we wondered what he was scheming next. Or did he think he’d said and done enough? Though I had told Brian that Donald and Mark were virtually inseparable, there were times when Donald was alone; Mark didn’t always hang around at school waiting for him to finish a football game. Occasionally I worried about what Brian had mentioned ― the possibility of physical attack ― but I dismissed such thoughts. Brian is an it-could-occur-and-sometimes-it-does person, but I don’t upset myself with imaginary worries, and I invariably refuse to ruin Sunday by thinking depressing thoughts about Monday; in other words I’m a cheer-up-it-may-never-happen type. So when it did happen, it was for me all the more of a shock.
It started in the changing-room after a football practice. Donald, emerging from the shower, and not able to see properly for a moment because of the steam, bumped into Gary. They were both naked. Gary reacted like a dog who suddenly and inexplicably turns on a person it has known all its life, snarling and showing its teeth. ‘Watch it!’ he said. You watch it, you bloody pouf!’
Donald flared up instantly. ‘You just say that again!’
Gary did. Then Jake and Andy seized Donald from behind, and pinioned his arms and legs. ‘Come on, Gary!’ Jake cried. ‘Hit him while you’ve got the chance!’
The rest of the team crowded round, but nobody came to help Donald. ‘Let me go!’ he shouted. ‘Let me go!!’ His struggles were useless.
‘I’ll hit him all right,’ Gary said. ‘I’ll hit him where it hurts, so hard he’ll never bother anyone ever again!’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Donald yelled. ‘I’ve done nothing!’
‘Oh. So coming out of the showers and touching me up is nothing, is it?’
He hit Donald, not where he said he would, but in the solar plexus. Donald was winded, gasping for breath. Then two more punches in the face. The door was banged open: ‘What the hell’s going on?’ a voice shouted. It was one of the P.E. teachers, the first eleven coach, Paul Timms. Jake and Andy let go of Donald and he sagged forward, onto his knees. Blood flowed from his mouth and one eye was already beginning to swell.
‘Don’t move, any of you!’ Mr Timms barked. ‘I said any of you!’ Some members of the team were trying to shuffle away. ‘Now Gary, would you kindly explain what this is all about?’
‘He touched me up,’ Gary answered, jerking his hand in Donald’s direction.
‘That’s a very serious charge,’ Mr Timms said. ‘But … if he did, does that automatically give you the right ― aided and abetted by everyone else, no doubt ― to bash his teeth in? Headmaster for you, immediately after Assembly tomorrow morning.’
‘But ―’
‘Don’t you argue with me, boy!’ Gary was silent. Mr Timms pulled Donald to his feet, looked at him a moment, then touched the swelling under his right eye. ‘You’ll live,’ he said. ‘Go and wash your face, and when you’ve done that, report to my office. As for the rest of you― get your clothes on and get out of here. Any boy in this building in five minutes’ time will also be interviewed by the Headmaster tomorrow morning. And I can tell you right now that when he’s heard my tale he is not going to be in a generous mood. Not one bit! He won’t be thinking in terms of simple little punishments like ten-thousand-word essays or picking up rubbish in the playground for the next six weeks.’ He raised his voice and pointed. ‘Out!!’
Only Gary hesitated. ‘Sir ―’ he began.
‘OUT!!!’
Donald spat a considerable quantity of blood into the nearest basin, and found one of his teeth was loose. He could hardly see out of his right eye. He staggered to Mr Timms’s office, groped for a chair and sat on it, then pushed his head between his legs. He thought he was going to faint. After a while, when he felt a little better, he looked up; Mr Timms, who was staring at him, said, ‘Drink this ― it’s brandy. For medicinal purposes and emergencies only. We keep it in the first-aid box.’
Donald drank. It made him gasp and splutter. ‘It feels like fire!’ he moaned.
‘Good.’ Mr Timms’s face was completely unsmiling. There was a long silence before he spoke again: he was waiting for Donald to recover. ‘I’m not going to ask you any questions about what happened just now,’ he said. ‘I think I can come to my own conclusions about that. Despite what I’ve heard recently, I’d imagine it fairly unlikely you’d be groping another boy in the showers. Not, at any rate, with the rest of the team standing around.’
Donald glared at him. ‘I wouldn’t do it at all!’ he shouted.
‘O.K. I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘I bumped into him. You ca
n’t always see clearly in there. Two weeks back he’d have thought nothing of it! Made a joke about it!’
‘I’m sure you’re right. Just as I’m sure he is not the graffiti expert, either.’
‘No. Of course not! He wouldn’t do a thing like that.’
‘What would your reaction be if I told you I want the Headmaster to deal with him very severely?’
‘Is it necessary?’ Donald pleaded. ‘There’s no harm done. Why punish him at all? I can understand why he ―’
‘Least said, soonest mended, is it? Listen to me, my lad, and listen carefully. Far too much has been said for anything to be mended overnight. I suppose you think if we allow him to get away with it, you can continue to buy your place in the team!’
Donald was shocked. ‘Buy my place… ?’
‘Once you had a place you deserved. It was yours by right. Not any more.’
‘What… do you … mean?’
‘When you bumped into Gary just now, what did he say? Anything?’
‘I’d rather not ―’
‘Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t! But I’m ordering you to tell me!’
‘If you must know … he called me a bloody pouf.’
Mr Timms looked thoughtful. ‘And what do you feel about that?’ he asked.
‘Well, according to his lights, I suppose I am!’
‘So you think you can be in the team, go to practices, play in the matches, put up with that sort of abuse, get the occasional black eye, and everything’s hunky-dory? Donald, I am dropping you. As of now.’
‘But… that’s not fair … that is not fair!’
‘I know it isn’t. It’s the nastiest thing I’ve done in years to a talented young striker. But there isn’t any fairness in this world. Learning that is part of the growing-up process. Do you want to know why I’m doing it? My job with this team is turning all the individuals it consists of into the best team I can make. Capable of winning football matches; that’s its point, its purpose. I can’t have any disruptive influence in that group of boys. I can’t have someone there who upsets everyone else. It destroys the team! The day that garbage was painted on the wall was the end for you. Who did it, or whether it was true or not, is neither here nor there. If the other boys can’t work with you … then you have to go. Simple as that. I’m very, very sorry … because, yes, it stinks of unfairness.’
‘Oh … fuck! Fuck you!!’
‘For once in my life,’ Mr Timms said, ‘I’ll let a kid get away with that.’ He leaned forward, and spoke now in a friendlier voice, more that of a counsellor trying to make a client see sense. ‘Donald … listen … whether you wanted to or not, you have come out ― or whatever the expression is ― as gay. Perhaps been forced to come out rather than doing it voluntarily, but it doesn’t really matter which. You have, as it were, made a big statement .An unpopular one. An uncomfortable one. Most people don’t like it; I don’t like it, and this football team doesn’t like it. As I’ve told you, my job is to get the best team possible. I have to respect some of their wishes. You are dropped.’
‘O.K. I understand.’
‘I hope you don’t bear any malice.’
‘Mr Timms…’ Donald stood up, shakily, and walked to the door. Then he said, ‘You bet I bear some malice!’
‘Not, I trust, against me, personally.’
‘Against you most of all. Sir!’
Mr Timms stared at him, greatly surprised. ‘Get out,’ he said.
SEVEN
Something had to be said to Mum and Dad about Donald’s black eye, and the fact that he needed to see a dentist about his loose tooth. He had got into a fight, we told them ― that was all: these things happen. But with whom, and what about, Mum demanded. She had a good mind, she said, to go up to the school first thing next morning and complain: why should herson be in danger of losing a tooth? Where had discipline and supervision gone? Why weren’t the teachers around to stop this kind of behaviour? In the staff room, she supposed, with their feet up, drinking tea. It was time someone made a stand; why should honest, decent boys like Donald be victimised by bullies and thugs?
It looked alarmingly possible for a while as if she would go up to the school and complain. Donald and I frantically searched for watertight reasons to stop her, but we couldn’t think of anything at all. It was Dad who unexpectedly came to our rescue. ‘Calm down,’ he said to Mum. ‘Did you ever hear of a school where there wasn’t a fight once in a blue moon? Don’t tell me it didn’t happen when you were young.’ He turned the pages of the newspaper he was trying to read. ‘Yes, it’s extremely stupid for boys of Donald’s age to get into a fight. Should have grown out of that years ago. But I think you’ll look a bit silly if you start lecturing that Headmaster about your gigantic seventeen-year-old hulk of a son being bashed up.’
Too much of it goes on these days,’ Mum said. Her tone of voice, fortunately, was a bit less belligerent.
‘Too much of everything goes on these days, according to some people,’ Dad answered. ‘Let’s change the subject.’
It was changed for her by the arrival of Mark, then, a moment afterwards, Brian. The presence in our house of the two young men she assumed were competing for my affections obviously gave her something else to consider; she didn’t know how to cope with both of them at once, so she quickly retired to the kitchen: ‘I must sort out that freezer,’ she said. Mark, Brian, Donald and I went up to the attic.
‘So what do I do now?’ Donald asked. ‘I want my place back in the team.’
‘Nothing you can do.’ Brian said. Mark and I agreed.
‘Huh.’ Donald sat on his bed, shoulders hunched, staring at the wall; the very picture of depression.
The Headmaster did not punish Gary at all severely; he limited himself to a lengthy telling-off for hooliganism, and that was that. Perhaps he thought anything more stringent would make the situation vis à vis Donald much worse. Donald had to share the same classroom with Gary, Andy and Jake, but the sending to Coventry now worked in both directions; he had no more wish to speak to the three games players he had once called his friends than they had to speak to him. Donald wanted to do as little as possible at school now. He did the work required of him as adequately as he needed to, but he gave nothing to the school’s social life. He spent his spare time there with me, Brian and Mark, and Ted was the only teacher he would talk to more than was absolutely necessary. Other kids spoke to him when they had to, but conversation was merely on the level of what book should they take to the Geography class, or what exactly did Mrs McLennan want done for History homework. Donald seemed driven by a slow-burning anger these days.
The graffiti specialist did not strike again, and we heard nothing about his possible identity. What the Headmaster was doing, if anything, to discover who it was, we had no idea. Donald’s tooth was fixed, and Mum and Dad remained completely unaware of the dramas that had occurred. Mark, they assumed, was no longer my boyfriend; he was now a friend of Donald’s and they didn’t see anything suspicious in that, despite him not being in the same year at school. The one thing we couldn’t conceal was that the first eleven had a new centre forward. ‘I can’t pretend I haven’t been dropped,’ Donald said. ‘I can’t take my kit to school and bring it back clean. Or deliberately rub it in the mud so it looks as if it’s been used ― that would be ridiculous.’ Dad was amazed when he heard. Paul Timms, he said, should have his tiny mind examined; no one could exceed Donald for skill and dedication. What was the problem in that school? Standard of the teaching staff, its judgement, its ability, had obviously gone right downhill over the years.
Ted, sensing that Donald and Mark could now cope, withdrew a little from us. Perhaps he thought evenings at his house drinking scotch were not to be encouraged except in the most abnormal of crises. He seemed to be more interested in my ‘A’ level chances than in Donald’s welfare, which, I suppose, is what he was employed for, even if it made me a bit discouraged: the hole we had driven through the barriers between teachers
and pupils I considered a good thing in itself, regardless of the particular circumstances that had led up to it. Why shouldn’t teachers and their sixth-formers socialise out of school from time to time? It would probably help schools to operate much better than they do.
Easter came and went. Now it was the summer term: last-minute revision, then ‘A’ levels. Donald-and-Mark were a constant, something settled and reliable throughout the turmoil of the exam period, and beyond. Perhaps I had thought, initially, that they would be a flash in the pan, a temporary aberration, that Donald would get over it quickly, laugh at himself and begin to go out with girls; but I was quite wrong: it was as intense and here to stay as any of the seemingly permanent relationships that flourished in our school. I got so used to it in time that, if I’d heard they had seriously quarrelled or split up, I would have been astonished and saddened. I became convinced, too, of something Donald had insisted on ever since he first told me ― he was one hundred per cent homosexual and perfectly happy, despite events, to be so. These things began to seem normal to me, just as it seemed absolutely correct to continue, for now, to hide the truth from Mum and Dad ― who never thought it strange that he spent so much time at Mark’s house, or that he often stayed there overnight on Fridays and Saturdays.
Brian and I continued to see one another, though I didn’t think so seriously now that he was the boy I would eventually live with or marry. The four of us occasionally went out together. Never to a disco: barriers again. There was nothing to interest Donald and Mark at an ordinary disco ― what they would want to do most, dance with each other and feel free to touch or kiss, wouldn’t be possible ― and no amount of persuasion could get Brian to venture into a gay disco. His attitudes to gay life had altered, but taking part in it he could not bring himself to do. He might be seen by a friend, he said, or he might be importuned: he’d drop dead with embarrassment. Our evenings out, the four of us, were to the cinema, to a pub, and on one occasion to the theatre. With two couples there are often two conversations going on, and so it was with us ― me talking with Brian, and Donald with Mark; or me with Mark, and Donald with Brian. Never Brian with Mark. Straight males, Ted had said, are still in the cave. Not quite true of Brian ― but he was sitting in its entrance.
