Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  To return to Sandra: she’d had plentiful experience of cleaning the catastrophically unhygienic, spoon-feeding the almost dead, keeping company with people who could not remember who she was from one day to the next. The body in collapse was a challenge at which she would not quail, but a messy domestic environment was something she could not abide. Sandra liked to run a tight ship: books belonged on shelves unless currently being read; magazines, once read, belonged in the bin, likewise newspapers on the day after publication; floors were surfaces to be walked on, and should be left uncluttered; the toilet cistern was not to be regarded as an ancillary bookshelf; food-preparation surfaces were to be kept clean and free of printed matter. She saw as squalor what I saw as merely light disarray. (Charlie sympathised with her. ‘When Danny was a teenager his room was a pit,’ he told her. ‘You have to think of it as a kind of protest,’ he said. Maybe, Charlie, maybe.) And it must be recorded that, as with Ms X, matters relating to female nakedness were also the occasion of controversy. The first time she came upon me in flagrante with my computer Sandra backed out of the room promptly, and nothing was said about it. At the second offence I asked her if she was shocked and she confirmed that she was. I remarked that the young woman on the screen evidently had access to some remarkably efficient depilatory products, which perhaps might be of use to me, as razors were too clumsy for the crevasses of my face. This did not amuse. ‘I wish you wouldn’t, when I’m around,’ she said. I agreed to keep my browsing decent whenever Sandra was in the flat, and I honoured that agreement, but there were other incidents: a magazine uncovered during one of her bouts of tidying; a picture that fell out of a book; an envelope ripped when the postman crammed it through the letterbox, disclosing its indecent contents. Entering my bedroom, I saw her lifting a magazine off the floor as if it were a dollop of week-old afterbirth. Her distaste and her disappointment in me were very affecting. ‘It’s a weakness I have,’ I confessed. ‘I have tried to live like a brain in a jar, but I am a backslider.’ This did not get a laugh either. She was angrier than she was allowing herself to appear. In an empty gesture of resolve, I surrendered the offensive publication to the recycling bin. ‘Maybe it’ll be reborn as a flyer for the Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ I suggested. Again, no laugh. Rarely did she find anything I said funny. We were not ideally suited to each other.

  ‘This isn’t news, is it?’ I ask Ellen, after she’s read it. ‘Sandra had told you, hadn’t she?’

  ‘A little,’ she says.

  ‘Does it bother you?’

  ‘A little.’ But she appreciates my honesty, and thinks that some of it is quite nicely written. ‘I can almost see her,’ she says.

  ‘So can I,’ I say. I close my eyes and grin.

  ‘No more of that, Mr Brennan,’ she orders, pulling back the sheets. ‘This came for you,’ she says, handing me a flyer from Stephen, for a season of cult Japanese movies. Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter seems promising: ‘a blaze of knife fights, jeep chases and LSD-tinged nightclub sequences’. Also intriguing is Female Convict Scorpion, an ‘exploitation classic, an art-house wonder and a feminist movie all rolled into one.’ Both are trumped, however, by School of the Holy Beast, described here as ‘an unholy mix of sex, comedy, drugs, flagellation, horror and political commentary.’ Now available on DVD. ‘Perhaps I’ll order it,’ I remark, showing her the advertisement.

  ‘Ho ho,’ she says, easing me out of bed.

  Stephen, I explain, is the Number One friend, and he’ll be visiting us soon. ‘Shall I tell you about Stephen?’ I ask. ‘There’ll be nothing about naked ladies, I promise. Shall I do that?’

  ‘If you’d like to,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I would like to. If you’d like me to.’ I reply.

  ‘Yes, I would,’ she says.

  ‘Now, are you just saying that, Ellen? Are you humouring me? I think you are.’

  ‘No, Daniel, I’m not.’

  ‘I think you are.’

  ‘No. I’m not. I’d like to hear about him. And you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘You’re not just being nice?’

  ‘No, Daniel. I’d like to know.’

  ‘I think you’re just being nice.’

  ‘OK. That’s enough.’

  2

  When the face started to sprout and the limbs to burst into bud, a diminution of my social circle commenced. Several classmates did not respond well to the deterioration of the façade, and – despite my assurances to the contrary – behaved as if the condition might be contagious. Most made an effort to mask their queasiness, but rarely with complete success, and I admit that, upon perceiving what I took to be intimations of aversion, I often took the initiative and began to withdraw. Also to be considered is the simple matter of my becoming unfit for the more boisterous modes of schoolboy interaction – football, for example, was an unwise pursuit when the physique was developing in ways (warping of the skeleton; weakness of major bones) that were unconducive to sporting endeavour. Did I make the situation more difficult than it might have been? Possibly. I don’t know. All I can say with certainty is that, were I to enumerate the friends I had at the age of twelve and those I had at the age of, say, seventeen, the former number, though small, would be considerably larger than the latter. The latter, in fact, would be approximately one (excluding Celia), and that one would be Stephen Siveter.

  The images that have endured most strongly from Stephen’s early childhood, he says, are of his mother and father looking at him across the room, or across the table, or from the kitchen window: looking at him lovingly, gratefully even, but as if they had been entrusted with the care of something that had come into their lives inexplicably. This was in part because, having long passed forty, they had almost reconciled themselves to being childless when suddenly, against odds that doctors had warned them were more or less the same as the odds against their meeting Elvis at the supermarket, Mrs Siviter found herself pregnant, and in part because his resemblance to them did not extend much beyond his having eyes of the same hazel hue as his mother’s, and a head that from certain angles had something of the shape of his father’s. Mr Siveter – a builder – was a powerful little man, with biceps like coconuts, a neck like a rhino’s and legs as bandy as a jockey’s but three times the circumference. Mrs Siveter, in her own words, was not a lady cut out for ballet; I remember her lifting with ease, one-handed, the end of the huge settee. But Stephen was a spindly lad and remained a spindle despite his mother’s unending campaign to put some more substance on his frame through a diet that was heavy with sausage and potatoes. The differences of temperament between parents and child were as striking as the physical discrepancies: Mr and Mrs Siviter were an ebullient and energetic couple, whose idea of fun was a day spent sanding floorboards or taking a ten-mile hike (the family holidays were as gruelling for Stephen as a secondment to the Territorial Army); their son, however, was placid, slow-moving and thoughtful. When Stephen was born there wasn’t a book in the house, but by the age of seven he had acquired such an appetite for information, and such powers of concentration, that he was content to be left in his room with his books for hours at a stretch. He was, said his father proudly, a bit weird. This was one of our classmates’ favoured epithets for him too, but in their case there was little affection in it. His appearance – scrawny; oversized incisors; disproportionately large head; horn-rimmed glasses – was the object of much comment, and his failure to even dissemble an interest in any kind of sport assured him of more or less comprehensive unpopularity among the boys. But, more than any other trait, what sealed his position as the class’s second-ranking oddity was that he had never made the slightest effort to disguise his eagerness to learn. Even some of his teachers were concerned that Stephen’s pursuit of knowledge might be a little too single-minded. He needed to cultivate a few non-academic interests, his parents were told, but Stephen regarded hobbies as a waste of reading time. And once Stephen had read something it was lodged
in his brain as securely as downloaded software. Consequently, he achieved marks that put him in the top three places in every subject. (When the time came to decide whether he was going to specialise in the sciences or the arts, he made his decision (hearing no inner voice) simply by totting up his marks, which tilted the balance by a percentage point or two in favour of the latter.) ‘King of England in 1350?’ – the Mekon could tell you in an instant. ‘Population of Hong Kong?’ – a cinch for Mongo the Memory Man. ‘Formula for phenylalanine?’, ‘What’s the world’s deepest lake?’, ‘What’s a cosecant, for Christ’s sake?’ – just ask The Brain. Exams for Stephen were a pleasure, an opportunity to release all that pent-up knowledge. Sitting an exam was like running down a mountain, he said.

  Although his idiosyncratic features disqualified Stephen as a lust-object in the eyes of the girls, his intelligence earned him a degree of respect from a few, which, when blended with the sympathy stirred by the treatment he received from so many of his male classmates, produced a genuine liking in one or two cases. Melanie Watts, the semi-Belgian girl who kept him off the top spot in French, and Jenny Oakes (called Jenny Bloke because she was good at physics and maths, and was far from pretty) – they both had a soft spot for him. The one girl that Stephen liked more than any other, though, was Celia. ‘She’s bloody terrific,’ he said to me once as Celia left my room (the frankness and the rather quaint usage were both characteristic; in his dress sense, too, Stephen was anachronistic – how many teenagers in south London wore brogues by choice?), having loaned him an album she’d recently bought (The Ramones?). Holding the album with care, he gazed at the closed door as if contemplating the radiant after-image of Celia. ‘She is just great,’ he murmured, dazed. ‘Will C be in?’ he would ask when invited round to our house – not that his acceptance was dependant upon the likelihood of Celia’s being present, but the possibility of a conversation with her would definitely improve the quality of the afternoon. Celia was predisposed to be fond of Stephen simply because of his fondness for me, but she also recognised in Stephen a fellow smart-arse (to quote Charlie). Later, she was to esteem him for his refusal to consider his future in terms of a career. The very word ‘career’ had the same effect upon him as the words ‘golf club’ or ‘Conservative Party’. He despised the idea of defining one’s life in terms of what one does for a living, of ‘forging a life for oneself’, as he once put it – a phrase that Celia liked to quote (as if citing Jean-Paul Sartre) to Charlie, who, having no truck with smart-arsed word-play, refused to see even the tiniest particle of wit of it. For her fifteenth birthday he bought her a Tom Waits album. When she kissed him he blushed like a radish, then said: ‘Another, if you don’t mind. I paid good money for that.’ It would have been not long after this birthday that, teasing Celia about a boy in my class who’d sent her a Valentine’s Day card, I let slip that Stephen fancied her too – at which Celia burst out laughing.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I asked.

  After a pantomime frown, she stated: ‘Stephen does not fancy me.’

  ‘I think he does.’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t.’

  ‘Why “of course”?’

  ‘Come off it, Dan.’

  ‘No, I mean it. Why “of course”? He thinks you’re fantastic.’

  ‘Of course. I am fantastic. But Stephen is not interested in me. Not in the way you mean.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong.’

  ‘I know I’m right.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because he’s not interested in any girls. He’s gay, you prat.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Dan. Yes, really. It’s obvious.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I can tell.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The way he looks at me. The way he looks at girls and the way he looks at boys.’

  ‘He’s never said anything.’

  ‘There are good reasons not to, aren’t there? I bet his folks would go bananas, for one thing. Or maybe he doesn’t know himself.’

  ‘Or maybe you’re wrong.’

  ‘No, Dan, he’s gay,’ said Celia with immovable firmness, as one might tell an infant that playtime is over.

  And of course Celia was right: Stephen was gay, even if he didn’t yet know it. (Another year would pass before Stephen acknowledged it as a fact, to himself, and he didn’t acknowledge it to me until a short time before the 1979 election (gloomy about the way the campaign was going, he turned off the radio and said: ‘I have something to tell you …’), though he’d begun to wonder about his orientation (as he told me on the evening of the confession) during the 1976 Olympics, when the male high-board divers had worked for him in a way that none of the girl gymnasts had.) Her speculation as to how Stephen’s parents would react, however, proved to be inaccurate. For a while they had carried on as if they believed that Stephen was simply too involved in his homework to be messing around with girls. And I think that, as it became clearer that their boy was in fact resistant to the allure of the feminine, they then persuaded themselves that he might be effectively neuter, taking as proof the fact that his only close male friend was a boy so peculiar-looking. In time, though, they must have had their suspicions about their son’s proclivities, and Stephen knew that a declaration of the truth would require some realignment of the parental attitudes. It wasn’t that they regarded a failure to be heterosexual as an unpardonable offence against the natural order (unlike the parents of one of Celia’s classmates, who refused to talk to their daughter for a full decade after she’d clarified the reason for her apparent lack of success with boys), but it was apparent that they were less than entirely comfortable with queerness. It had for a long time been noticeable, for example, that they were irritated by Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams and other performers of that ilk. So Stephen was content to postpone for as long as possible the moment when the household would have to adjust to having an avowed homosexual in its midst.

  During all the years that he lived at home the moment for full disclosure never arrived. Avoidance of the issue finally became an unsustainable strategy in his second year at university, when he fell for a Californian exchange student. Out shopping with his mother, he told her that he’d be going away for part of the summer vacation; to Greece; with a fellow student; called Allen. At this news his mother merely nodded and smiled, a little saddened, powerlessly acquiescent, but as though all she’d heard was that Stephen would not be coming home in July. When, a day or two later, Stephen asked her what she felt about it, she admitted that she’d never get used to the idea that she was not going to have grandchildren, but that she would always be proud of him. (More than once she told him that she was delighted he had the brains to better himself. ‘She’s more of a class traitor than I am,’ said Stephen.) But his father, she warned, hadn’t come to terms with the situation. And to this day his father’s acceptance is perhaps still only provisional. Sometimes – should Stephen happen to remark on the attractiveness of an actress on TV, for instance – he thinks he sees in his father’s eye the last low glimmerings of the hope that his son might one day recover.

  My relationship with Stephen was a case of friendship at first sight, and it began on the first day of his first term at my school. I had been at the hospital for a review the previous week; they were going to excise some lumps from the arms. It was lunchtime, and I had settled myself in an angle of the low wall below the chemistry lab. The angle was in sunlight most of the morning so the bricks were warm by one o’clock, and I liked to tuck myself into the corner to read. Stephen was standing outside the lab, pressing his face to the window to get a good look at the benches and racks of equipment. ‘Nice set-up,’ he remarked, as if he thought I was the person who’d paid for all the kit. The school he’d come from was rubbish, he said, still at the window. He sauntered over to the angle; leaning against the wall, he surveyed the playing fields. ‘This is good,’ he said. Then,
swirling a hand in front of his face, he asked right out: ‘What’s the story with the mush?’ So I told him what the story was, and when I’d finished he looked me steadily in the eye and said, after a lengthy and thoughtful pause: ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So they never go down?’