Laying a Ghost

by Jane Davitt

  “Distracting and persistent.” John sounded resigned. “Fine. We’ll walk to the beach, I’ll tell you the story of my life up to Monday when we met, and you can do your best to stay awake for the fifteen minutes or so it’ll take to bring you up to speed.” He set off down the driveway, with Nick falling into step beside him, both of them walking in a companionable silence as they crossed the road and started along the narrow track leading down to the beach.

  Chapter Nine

  The grass beneath Nick’s feet was thin and heather grew amongst it. The air was scented faintly with an aromatic, bitter smell that gradually gave way to the salt-tang of the sea. Above them, gulls soared and dipped, their hoarse cries echoing against the heavy crash of the waves. It wasn’t like anywhere he’d ever been, and it still didn’t feel like home, but the muted colors and smooth, weathered land around him were restful, which was just what he wanted right then.

  “So how old were you when you knew you were gay?” John asked him finally when they reached the dunes. “When it all fell into place for you? Or did it just happen gradually?”

  “Fourteen? Fifteen? Somewhere around there.” Nick didn’t really remember how old he’d been. “I guess it happened gradually, but I know one morning I woke up ‑‑ I was lying in bed looking at the ceiling ‑‑ and I just knew.” The sand here, still far from the water, was soft, shifting under their feet as they walked.

  John nodded. “Took me a while to match up the way I was feeling with a label, if you see what I mean. I’d grown up hearing all about the sin of it, along with whatever else the minister thought would have us on the edge of our seats on a Sunday, but it didn’t seem relevant.” He scuffed at the sand with his boot, uncovering a shell, the perfect curve existing only in the exposed portion, rough-edged and fretted underneath. “Relevant was going swimming at the loch, getting an eyeful of Michael’s bare arse, and being awful glad there was a lot of cold, deep water around.”

  “You’d never felt that way about girls?” Nick shot John a look. “You’ll tell me if I’m asking too many questions, right?”

  “I don’t mind talking to you. It’s not like you’re going to tell me I’m a blight on God’s green earth, is it? And I’ve asked you enough about yourself.”

  The beach was deserted, which Nick was starting to take for granted. He supposed if you’d lived here all your life the urge to get a shovel and pail and make sand castles wasn’t all that strong. Maybe it would change once the schools closed for summer, but for now they had the curve of white sand to themselves, flat wet sand giving way to a band of shingle and then the rise and hollows of the dunes.

  “Girls.” John smiled wryly. “Aye.” He bent to pick up a stone, weighed it in his hand, and then threw it out to sea with enough force to send it flying high before it fell and was lost in the rushing waves. “I kissed Sheila long before Michael did. Kissed her and didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t doing much for me or her. But we kept at it for long enough that folks got used to us being together, and it took me a while to realize that she was hanging around me because she wanted Michael, and we were fair inseparable back then.”

  “So people didn’t just get the wrong idea about you and Sheila because they see what they want to see.” Nick crouched down and traced a finger around a large stone that was half-embedded in the sand, drawing a shallow circle in the sand and then spiraling it out into an almost Egyptian-looking symbol. “I take it you and Michael never ...” He let the question fade away unasked, knowing that John would understand.

  “Michael is not gay.” John separated out the words with a careful precision. “He’s also not someone I ever should have fallen in love with, but God help me, I did.” He sat down, drawing up his knees and resting his arms on top of them, the sleeves of his sweater sliding back up so that his bony, strong wrists were bared. “So, no. We never.” He turned his head and met Nick’s eyes. “I kissed him. Once. And that’s not something anyone knows but him and me, and maybe Sheila, just so we’re clear.” There was a warning in his voice, almost an edge of panic, but when Nick did no more than nod reassuringly, he carried on. “I don’t know how old you were, your first time, but I was eighteen and it felt like ‑‑ God, I don’t know how I stood it, waiting that long, but it wasn’t like I’d had any choice.”

  “I was sixteen.” Nick kept his voice low and soothing. “It was with Matthew.” It was always with Matthew, even the handful of times it hadn’t been. “I don’t think we even meant to. I mean, we’d been jerking off together for months ...”

  It occurred to him that he’d never talked to anyone like this before; like sex was just something normal. He and Matthew had never really talked about it at all, and there’d never been anyone else that he’d been comfortable enough with. It wasn’t like you’d talk to your mother about the sex ‑‑ the gay sex ‑‑ that you were having. Or weren’t having but wanted.

  “He had this lube,” Nick continued. “You know, for masturbating. And we put it on each other, and then we were rubbing against each other, and then he was on top of me and ...” They’d looked at each other, and then Matthew had pushed inside him slowly, and it had hurt, but he’d wanted it.

  “It sounds like you were lucky. Both of you. You were friends and you stayed that way.” John grinned unexpectedly. “And over here, all we use is a hand, but fair enough.” He scooped up a handful of sand, letting it pour from his tilted palm, grains of it caught by the breeze and taken away. “I didn’t even know his last name, but I suppose I was lucky, too. Michael and I, we’d gone off the island, you see. There was a friend of ours, bright lad, who’d ended up at university over in Stirling, and he asked us over for the weekend. He was sharing a house with two other lads, and they were off with their girlfriends in Edinburgh at the Festival, so there was room for us.”

  John exhaled. “We got there Saturday morning, and we were drunk within a few hours. Dave knew all the pubs, all the places to go ... don’t think he got more than a Third in his degree in the end, but I doubt he ever sobered up enough to care.”

  Nick rocked back and sat, the packed sand hard underneath his ass, and waited for John to continue. The sound of the waves down the beach was rhythmic in an imperfect sort of way, the breeze a bit colder than Nick would have liked, despite the warm sunshine, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he was content to wait.

  “We didn’t have much money, but people were buying us drinks when they found out we were visiting, and it didn’t take much to get us drunk. And we were all looking to get off with someone, even Michael, because he’d had this row with Sheila the week before about him looking for work on one of the rigs, and they’d split up. Didn’t last ‑‑ they were always fighting back then ‑‑ but right then he was pissed off and looking for something he could spite her with.” John gave Nick a wry look. “I loved him, but I never said he was perfect.” He arched his eyebrow. “Am I boring you yet?”

  “No.” Nick put his hand down on the sand between them. “So what happened?”

  John stretched out his legs and rolled onto his side, propping his head on his hand. He scattered a handful of sand across Nick’s hand, silky and cool, and began to cover it with a concentration that seemed absolute. “We’d got house keys, and we weren’t that far from Dave’s place, so we didn’t care that we’d left him two pubs behind. More fun just the two of us anyway. There was a club and we had enough for the cover charge, so we went in. Michael ‑‑ well, he was a good-looking lad. Still is. Wasn’t long before he’d got off with this girl, and they were away in a corner with his tongue down her throat before I’d even finished my first pint.” He glanced up. “Aye. It bothered me. Partly for Sheila’s sake, because I liked her and I knew she’d be hurt when he told her, but being a selfish wee bugger, mostly for my own.”

  Nick’s hand was buried now, the infinitesimal grains pressing against his skin. It felt odd, as if it wasn’t attached to his wrist anymore, separate from him.

  “Then I saw this
lad watching me from the dance floor, only it turned out I’d been the one staring at him, and he gave this little jerk of his head and ‑‑” John circled Nick’s wrist with his fingers, warm and gritty, and tugged, freeing him. “I went to him and we danced, not even pretending that we weren’t together, though he never touched me. No one noticed; no one cared. Or if they did, seeing as most of them were students, they wouldn’t have said anything. Probably thought it was cool being gay, or something.” John made an expressive face, linking his fingers with Nick’s. “We ended up in the alley behind the club, kissing and touching, and Christ, I think I’d have let him have me there, if he’d asked, but he didn’t. He’d have been in his early twenties, I suppose, and he said he had a flat, said I could stay the night, but I wouldn’t. So I took him back to Dave’s. House was empty, and when we got to my room, I just let him show me, let him tell me what to do ‑‑”

  John’s voice slowed, and his fingers tightened for a moment before relaxing again. He slid his hand free and began to brush the sand from the back of Nick’s hand, taking as much care as he had with the burying of it.

  Nick stayed still, letting John do whatever he needed to. He tried to picture it ‑‑ John as a younger man, in a dark alley beside a club, pushed up against a wall, being kissed and fondled ... then the two of them in a stranger’s bed, on sheets that smelled unfamiliar, naked skin on naked skin ...

  Swallowing, Nick asked softly, “And it was good? You liked it?”

  John blew across Nick’s hand, the warm air lost in the cool breeze after the first instant, clearing away what sand was left clinging to it. He looked up into Nick’s eyes and smiled. “Aye. I was too drunk to be shy, but not so drunk I couldn’t enjoy it, and he was ‑‑ kind, I suppose. Hurt me a little when we finally got around to fucking, but that was my fault for rushing him.” He sat up, his shoulders tensing slightly. “Michael came in to me the next morning. Found us saying goodbye. He was dressed, which is more than I was, and I was half-wanting him gone, but randy enough even with a hangover to be hard just from kissing him, and so Michael got an eyeful.”

  It was hard for Nick to imagine what John might have felt at that moment ‑‑ he’d led a fairly sheltered life in some ways, something he certainly wouldn’t deny. “Did Michael take it badly?”

  “I didn’t give him the chance. The man ‑‑ Richard, his name was ‑‑ took one look at Michael and left us to it. The way I was acting, he probably thought Michael was my boyfriend or something.” John shrugged. “I just went to pieces, and Michael being Michael, he closed the door before Dave heard me, came over, and gave me a shoulder to cry on.” John looked mildly embarrassed. “Literally. I told him everything I hadn’t been telling him, found out it wasn’t exactly news to him, and God knows why he did it, because he can’t have wanted to, but he kissed me.”

  John glanced at Nick. “I’ll not say I didn’t hope ‑‑ just for a moment ‑‑ but he was doing it to show me there was no chance, more than anything, I suppose. And then he remembered he was eighteen, and a lad, and not supposed to be emotional at nine in the morning, and he threw up in the wastepaper bin.” John looked thoughtful. “I like to think it was because Dave had started frying some bacon and it was a wee bit much on top of all the lager he’d been drinking, rather than the kiss.”

  “I feel like I can say with a fair amount of confidence that it wasn’t the kiss,” Nick told him. If they’d been inside, he’d have leaned over and kissed John just to reassure him, but he couldn’t help but be conscious of where they were, of the fact that even though it seemed like they were alone, they might not be.

  It was kind of weird, actually, the instinct to want to kiss John. He and Matthew had never kissed like that. Not casually, not in public. Most of the time, not even when they were fucking. It hadn’t been a part of their relationship for some reason. It had never occurred to Nick that it might have been a way of keeping Matthew at a distance until just now.

  Still, he found himself warming to Michael, who’d comforted John and not rejected him. “I’m glad that he was so good about it. I’m sure it would have been a lot harder if he’d reacted badly.”

  “Back then, the way I felt about him?” John shook his head. “It would have broken me. But he didn’t. And I repaid the favor in the train on the way back by telling him just how hard I’d thump him if he breathed a word to Sheila about the tart he’d picked up. In fact, I took her off his hands.”

  “What do you mean?”

  John grinned. “We got back and told people I was the one who’d got off with Karen ‑‑ not that Michael did more than kiss her, because it turned out she’d a boyfriend waiting at home ‑‑ and he was the one who’d spent the weekend missing Sheila, and didn’t she know he only wanted to work on the rigs to save up enough to buy her a ring?” John rolled his eyes. “So we’re back at me freezing my arse off on the mountain six months later feeling sentimental because it’d never be the same again ‑‑ though seeing as it was another two years before they tied the knot I was a bit previous there ‑‑ and now I’m going to shut up, because you must be sick to death of hearing me talk.”

  “I’m not.” Nick looked up from the small pattern of rocks he’d been creating in the sand. “I like knowing about you. I want to know.” Maybe it was because his own life seemed repetitive when he thought of it, the same stuff happening again and again, but everything about John and John’s life interested him.

  “Well, now you do.” John gave a sigh that sounded more relieved than anything. “I maybe should’ve saved something back for a rainy day, but that’s about it. I’ve spent the last twelve years meeting men like Richard ‑‑ even went out with a few of them more than once, although it never amounted to much ‑‑ and admitting what I was just never ‑‑ it was never the right time, somehow, and now it’s too late.”

  Nick rested his chin on his knee and looked out to sea. There were birds circling, and he didn’t know if they were seagulls or something else entirely. “Why is it too late?”

  “I tell people and not only do they find out what I am, they find out I’ve been lying to them for years. Somehow I can’t see it going down well.” John sounded not bitter but resigned, as if he’d become so used to the situation that it didn’t bother him anymore. “You think I’d do that to my friends? To my mother? She’d be shamed in front of everyone and it’d be my fault.” John shook his head. “It’s too late,” he repeated.

  “So you’ll just be alone and miserable for the rest of your life because you don’t want to upset anyone?” Nick asked disbelievingly, lifting his head and looking at John. “You can’t be serious.”

  John looked stubborn. “It’s different for you. You’ve never settled down any place. I’ve lived my whole life here and I care what people think of me. Care what my mother and sisters would say. I know what they’d be like. I know how they’d change and I can’t ‑‑ I don’t want to see it in their faces.”

  Nick was totally unprepared to deal with this. He didn’t have any idea what to do that might be helpful. He did, however, know that he wasn’t interested in spending the next however many years sneaking around behind everyone’s backs. He’d been prepared to live alone here, but he wasn’t prepared to pretend he was alone when he wasn’t.

  So he brushed his hands off on his thighs and offered the right one to John. “Okay,” he said, as John reached out tentatively and they shook hands. “Well, I’m glad we met. And I appreciate all your help. I’d like it if we could be friends.”

  There was a moment when he didn’t think John was going to get it, but the man wasn’t stupid. Not about most things anyway. The bewilderment and hurt faded off his face to be replaced by comprehension.

  “That’s not going to work,” John told him. “I don’t think you’re serious, and I don’t think you’re the kind of man who bullies someone into a decision they’re not ready to make.”

  “I understand.” Nick didn’t let go of John’s hand. He thought anyone looking at
them would think they were two men making a deal of some kind.

  Maybe they were.

  “And I don’t expect you to make a decision right away. But I’m glad to hear that you think you’ll be making one eventually.” Nick couldn’t help but worry that it would be a decision he wouldn’t like, but he couldn’t focus on that, not now.

  “I didn’t say that.” John’s hand tightened as if no matter what he said he wasn’t prepared to let Nick just walk away. “Nick ‑‑ you just got here. And for all that I’m ready to lose myself in loving you because it’s the easiest thing in the world to do that, I can’t just ‑‑ You could go. You will go. And if I’ve told people ... when you do, I’ll have nothing left.”

  Nick couldn’t help the little niggling feeling of annoyance over the assumption that he’d been lying when he said he had nowhere else to go. He had money set aside, true, but he didn’t plan to go back to his former career, not without Matthew to manage the details, and he didn’t have anywhere else to live. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Tell me that after you’ve spent a winter here. When it’s dark most of the time and you’re stuck in your house with nothing to do but think. And tell me how you plan to live unless you go back to what you were doing ‑‑ and if you do, then you’ll be leaving and we’re back where we started.” John let go of Nick’s hand. “You turned up with less luggage than a tourist here for a weekend and you expect me to think that aye, you’re stopping, you’ll be here next week, next month, next year? And friends? When I can’t see you without wanting you? Oh, aye, I’m feeling very fucking friendly towards you, trust me!”

  Frustrated and feeling like nothing he said was going to make a difference, Nick stood up. “The stuff I brought with me is pretty much everything I own. There’s a box of books that I shipped, but I’m a lot less complicated than you seem to think I am.” He sighed. “And I’d rather be your friend than nothing at all, if we can’t be.. more. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”