The Leaving

by Gabriella West

  “Do you think people are better anywhere else?” he asked doubtfully.

  I yawned. “Maybe not. But the way they live is better. The way you live affects your character. If you live a boring, pointless life like Mum and Dad do— ”

  “That’s it,” he said. “They’re the real problem. Mum and Dad.”

  I said nothing. Stevie’s recent awareness of his sexual preference had changed some things about him. He had always been such a good boy, such a dutiful son. But now, even to my mother, he was growing increasingly remote and inaccessible. Between him and my father there seemed to be some kind of mutual hatred and disappointment that I didn’t understand. But perhaps it was this. He expected more from them than I. And he simply wasn’t getting what he needed. For me this was normal, depressing but normal. I had him, after all.

  “You accept them, don’t you? You think they’re OK.” He sounded accusing.

  “I wouldn’t say that. No, I don’t.”

  “Maybe they are OK. It could be just me.”

  He got up and held out his hand to pull me up.

  “Oh, do we have to go?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “We do. I can see you spending the rest of your life here. Come on, get up!”

  Grumbling, I got up. “Well, let’s come back,” I suggested.

  But we never went back.

  * * *

  Nearly five years later, I had forgotten about the farm in County Meath. It seemed like a childish dream, that Stevie and I would go there, meet our grandparents, and be welcomed as lost lambs coming back to the fold. I imagined that my brother had forgotten about it too.

  Our parents never went on holiday. It was just one of those things. It wasn’t something that their own parents had done, and they wouldn’t have known how to handle or organize a trip away. For the last couple of years, Stevie had been restless as summer neared, wanting to do things and go places, places as far away as possible. We didn’t have much money for that, though, certainly not enough to leave the country. Neither of us had ever been out of Ireland.

  “So what are your plans for the summer?” My father asked both of us on Friday night.

  I had no plans. I looked at Stevie. I always felt intimidated by my father throwing out a direct question and expecting a resourceful answer. He wouldn’t get one from me. I also knew that this summer would be different. It would be lonely. Stevie would spend most of his time with Ron, and I would be alone. Unless, of course, I got on with this Joe person and I joined Susie’s gang ...

  “Cathy!” My father’s voice snapped me awake. “Did you hear my question? Are you deaf?”

  “Yes—Yes,” I said hurriedly. “This summer... well... I hadn’t really thought. I’d like to get a job, but... ”

  My father rewarded me with a frown and glanced at Stevie.

  “Me too, Dad.” Stevie smiled at him. “Any chance of your taking me on for a few months until I start college?”

  My father sighed. “You’re utterly inexperienced.” At the same time there had been amazement in his eyes when Stevie spoke. “And it’s hard work, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Stevie politely.

  My mother took off her glasses and began polishing them, a faint smile on her face.

  “And me.” Something prompted me to speak, perhaps the fact that I always followed Stevie’s lead in the summer. “I’m available to work.”

  He looked over at me. “Cathy, I admit that you’re probably as strong as your brother, which isn’t saying much, but I can’t take you both on. There’s a possibility, if I get a big job, that you could put in some hours.”

  “And that’s all you’d want to do,” put in my mother. “It’s filthy work. You need stamina for it.”

  “Muscles,” said my father. “You need muscles.”

  I blushed. You need to be a man, is what you really mean, I thought. If I was your son, you’d take both of us on.

  But at least he’d been relatively kind about it.

  “When she arm-wrestles with me,” said Stevie, “She wins.”

  There was affection in his voice. I laughed.

  “We haven’t done that for a while.”

  “Bet you’d still beat me,” he replied.

  We smiled at each other. Then, seeing my father’s face, I gulped. He was about to lash out.

  He glared at Stevie. “I can’t believe you’re proud of that! I can’t believe what I just heard. You’re pathetic, that’s what you are! You’ve no pride at all, have you? Have you?”

  I hoped Stevie would answer, but he didn’t. He had gone very pale. He fiddled with his fork and knife.

  “Jesus,” said my father. “I swear, I didn’t raise you to be like this...”

  My mother drew in her breath sharply. I could sense the worry she felt.

  Stevie’s adam’s apple moved. The atmosphere in the room had gone from playfulness to rage so fast that I could see he was not quite sure how to handle the situation.

  Finally he looked up. “Like what?’

  My father just stared at him. I trembled. To be the object of that disgusted gaze would crush me completely. I would go to pieces.

  “Like what?” Stevie repeated. “Like a girl?”

  “Your sister’s tougher than you are,” my father said scornfully.

  “More macho, you mean?”

  He could not keep the ironic tone out of his voice. To him, these gender distinctions were amusing. To my father, they were deadly serious.

  Dad was in a rage. The thought of him hitting Stevie sickened me. My stomach was all tight. It seemed inevitable.

  “Yeah. More macho, if you like to use fancy words.”

  The tension in the room was unbearable. I put my hand to my forehead and closed my eyes. I could hear Stevie say, quietly: “I’m happy as I am.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be!” Now he was shouting.

  “I am, though. Are you saying it’s my fault?”

  “Well, it’s not my fault!”

  “Nobody’s blaming you, Patrick,” said my mother in a muffled, trembling voice.

  I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see their tense, fearful expressions. I knew the word homosexual would not be mentioned. My father was just annoyed, or more accurately enraged, that his son was not strong, heavily muscled, deeply masculine. That he didn’t go out with women was not quite what irritated my father most. It was not the issue yet. When it became the issue, I knew Stevie would have to leave. And then I would be alone with them—these strangers.

  The quality of the silence had changed. I opened my eyes. Stevie’s place was empty. My father had lit a pipe and was puffing away. My mother was turning over the pages of the TV guide. Her glasses kept sliding down her nose.

  I was surprised to find that I had tears in my eyes.

  * * *

  I did not see Stevie again that night. On the Saturday morning—the day of my “date”—I woke with a sense of excitement and apprehension. The sun was flooding in at my window. I pulled open the curtains, unlatched the shutters, and stood bathing in the ray of warm spring light for a while. There was a peaceful silence in the house; I could tell my father was out on a job.

  If he disappeared, I thought, would any of us really care? Stevie and I and my mother would go on living quite happily together, but ... on the other hand, who would support us?

  I smiled at the unreal idea of my strong, healthy father dying. He wouldn’t. Much more likely that Stevie or I would be driven to suicide first.

  We could do it together, I mused. A suicide pact. It had a nice cozy ring to it. And if we did it this morning I wouldn’t have to go out with Susie, Jeff and Joe later on that night.

  Even now, I couldn’t imagine killing myself. Unhappy as I was, it didn’t appear to be an option. And there was no easy way. If I could have just snapped my fingers and disappeared, though, I might have actually done it that morning. My feeling of dread about the evening to come was so strong. I had no illusions that it woul
d go well. It couldn’t. Unless a miracle happened. I pondered the likelihood of a miracle happening and drew my nightdress over my head.

  * * *

  Stevie was sitting in the kitchen. I looked at him timidly. After last night, I felt a little shy with him. I didn’t expect him to want to talk to me or even to meet my eyes. How I wished I could have walked out when my father started snarling at him. But I didn’t have the courage for that.

  He was reading Hamlet, which was on the Leaving syllabus. He looked pale and there were dark circles under his eyes. When he glanced up I noticed how dilated his pupils were. His lips were puffy. Odd. I took a seat with a feeling of uneasiness.

  “Stevie,” I said. I felt that he would barely talk to me, and I hated myself for bothering him. All the same, I felt the sadness emanating from him this morning, the vulnerability. I wanted to help. How little I could do.

  “Hmm?” His voice was low. He raised his head from the book. He looked exhausted.

  “Stevie, are you OK?”

  He shrugged. Then he laid Hamlet gently down.

  “There are some similarities,” he observed, “between our father and Claudius. Did that ever strike you?”

  I giggled nervously. “Last night was horrible. You must be fed up.”

  “It’s worse than that.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t want to hate Dad. I didn’t plan on it. But now I’m wondering how I can make it through the next few months. What else does he have up his sleeve? Last night I sat upstairs and said to myself: do you want to run away? It’s the...” he paused, as if he had lost his train of thought, “it’s the fight or flight dilemma. He’s taunting me. He’s saying ‘Come out with it, so that I can beat your brains out.’”

  I put my hands over my ears. My face was burning. “Stevie. It’s not that bad.”

  “It’s every bit that bad. You can’t understand—and I’m glad you don’t—what I feel. Last night I couldn’t stop trembling. For about half an hour after I left the table I sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. It’s not that I’m so afraid of being hit, it’s that my whole identity is starting to unravel or come apart at the seams... I feel he’d rather kill me than have me say, in front of him and Mum, “I’m gay.” He’s making sure that I’ll never say those words to him because they’ve become so utterly unsayable now.” He swallowed. “And I despise myself for my own silence.”

  It was as if he were talking to himself. But that didn’t matter.

  “Stevie,” I said urgently, “Listen to me. I think he’s just being a bastard. I don’t think that he knows about you and Ron. Really. So don’t do anything stupid. Don’t get rushed into going away. Please. Do the Leaving, you’ll need a degree, please don’t run off now.”

  He smiled at me, and his eyes traveled over my face for a moment.

  “Cathy, it’s sweet of you to say that, but for the kind of work I’ll be doing in London who’s going to care about a piece of paper?”

  “What kind of work?”

  He heard the horror in my voice. “No, silly, not selling my body. Dad’s kind of work. Painting, drilling the road, that kind of thing. They always need Irish guys for manual labor.”

  “And that’s what you want to do?” My voice had risen to a shrill squeak.

  He shook his head solemnly.

  “No. But I’ve got to be practical. I want to survive, Cathy. And I’m not going to be able to do it in this house.”

  “That’s great.” I could barely talk; the lump in my throat was so big.

  “Leave me here then. You don’t even care about me. You think I’m better off without you. Well, you’re wrong. And I do understand how you feel. Does Ron? With his parents, how could he understand what you’re going through? He doesn’t even come here!”

  Stevie closed his eyes for a moment. Then he got up. His face looked all closed off.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean it.”

  He stood in the doorway. “I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m going to have a rest.”

  He told me years later what he had done that night. As I heard him slowly climbing the stairs I wondered if he had possibly been out. But then I thought: no. No, he wouldn’t have dared.

  But he had dared. This was what I imagine had happened, the way it had been for him. He had waited until he had heard my father and mother stop making going-to-bed noises, and then he had slid off his bed and turned the handle of his door. He knew he should have waited twenty or thirty minutes but he couldn’t be bothered. He had stopped shaking. It felt good to have determined to do something.

  He had tiptoed downstairs, taken his coat off the coat rack, put it on, opened the front door and pulled it slowly shut behind him. There was just a little click. He had looked up to see if there was a light in our parents’ window. There wasn’t. He had climbed over the front garden wall: the gate creaked. He had begun to run.

  It took him about half an hour to get to Ron’s house. It was a windy, clear night; there were few cars on the streets. No buses. He breathed in the night air and planned his strategy for getting in to the McConnell’s house.

  He thought he had a good chance of getting through the whole thing without a hitch, but there was a definite possibility that he might be caught tonight. He told himself he didn’t care.

  If I understand my brother’s character correctly, he would also have thought: is this fair on Ron? If we get caught tonight, I’ll have done a very selfish, stupid thing. Will he even be glad to see me, or frightened at what might happen?

  That was the big question in his mind, I imagine. How would Ron react? I see him saying to himself: if he doesn’t come through for me now, he’s not worth the trouble I’m taking over him.

  But he would never have set out if he had not been pretty sure that Ron would comfort him, reassure him. And he had to see Ron because my father’s words had set up a terrible fear in him: was it better perhaps to end it with Ron, not to put himself and his friend at unnecessary risk? Was it safe to keep on seeing Ron as often as he did? Or at all? Could it be that one day he would leave Ron’s house in the late afternoon flushed and invigorated from lovemaking only to find our father waiting on the doorstep? If this was a fantasy, why did it seem so likely, so inevitable? And then our father’s arm and fist would descend—like the wrath of God.

  No. He shuddered. He couldn’t allow that to happen to them. They would have to start being more careful, they would definitely have to. But not stop seeing each other. Unless Ron demanded it, saying he couldn’t put up with Stevie’s paranoia.

  But Ron was in love with him.

  Ron had played a coy game at first, making Stevie wait, wonder, then making him go slow, telling him when to stop, what not to do, and Stevie had always obeyed, had reluctantly pulled back. But now Ron wanted him, wanted everything, and their desires matched each other in intensity. It had become a love affair, and not the kind of narcissistic mating ritual his straight friends were going through either. No—a real love. So real that he was jealous, terribly jealous, when Ron mentioned anybody’s name. Which was why, he guessed, Ron had become most friendly with a couple of girls. But even the girls... he knew their names and he had mentally prepared for the fact that Ron might fall for someone else.

  Or that Ron might tell him they had gone too far, too fast.

  Because it was scary, sometimes, the way he wanted Ron. He wanted him that way tonight. He wanted to spend the night with him. And if Ron didn’t let him, that would tell him something about what they had together.

  How strong was a love that consisted of afternoon encounters?

  * * *

  He pushed open the wooden gate at the side of the McConnell’s majestic brick house on Marlborough Road. It was really dark, and he shivered. Ron’s parents were nice, but Stevie had never met them. Why? He wished he had. It would have been better to prepare the ground in case one of them received a threatening phone call from his father. He could just imagine his father’s blustering tone. Or in case so
me afternoon one of them came home early, and quietly climbing the stairs heard sounds of passion coming from their son’s bedroom. But being Ron’s parents, and civilized, educated people, they wouldn’t burst in, or quietly turn the doorknob and stand watching...

  Ron and he never bothered to lock the door.

  For a moment Stevie hesitated. He could turn around now and go back. It would have been a bracing walk, an innocent stroll. So he would say if challenged. From the moment he threw the pebble at Ron’s window, or whatever, it would turn into quite a different enterprise.

  He stepped out onto the lawn. Now which was Ron’s window? It was so high! Why did they live in such a tall house?

  On a previous occasion he had glimpsed a ladder lying by the garden wall from his friend’s window. The ladder was still there, glimmering in the moonlight.

  He lifted it up. It was heavy, but manageable. Everything was easy tonight. He placed it gently against the back of the house. OK. Would it creak? He got on. Glancing at his watch he saw that it was even later than he’d thought. 1.20 a.m. Well, Ron would be asleep. But not deeply asleep.

  He took a long breath, exhaled. For a moment the stillness of the night-scented garden, the big, lush garden with its fuchsia hedge and plum tree and daffodil patch, distracted him and he stood on the ladder, rubbing his hands together and thinking: should I wake him?

  He felt better already. He had reached a different world, a world of peace. Maybe he should just go. Maybe Ron would be sleepy and unwelcoming, angry that he had come. It just wasn’t fair, perhaps, to test him like this.

  He looked up at Ron’s window again. He blinked. There was a soft glow as if a light had been switched on.

  Green light, he thought. He began climbing, step by step. Soon he was at the top. He grasped the window ledge, trying not to look down. What a way to die, or break your back more probably. Being paralyzed for life wouldn’t be very romantic.

  Ron would have to haul him in.

  He reached his arm up and tapped gently on the window.

  Nothing happened.

  He tapped again.