Gay Before God: An Awakening Love Forbidden by the Church

by William Bruce

  On the sixth day, while Mumsie was in the café gathering some her of family around her, James had the chance to be on his own with Terry.

  “Well, I have got something for you,” James said, drawing them away from a conversation that too inevitably could have been morose.

  “What is it, sweetheart,” asked Terry with a weak smile on his face. He felt exhausted, both physically and emotionally.

  James slipped the ring off his finger and placed into Terry’s palm.

  “But you can’t do that,” protested Terry. “What does it mean?”

  “Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean I am leaving you. I can never do that, but it does mean I have got another one, or better still two.” James pulled out a small box from his pocket and opened it to reveal two shining gold rings. “I went to collect them today, all properly sized, one for you and one for me.”

  James took Terry’s left hand and on the partnership finger slipped a fresh gold ring. It seemed to fit perfectly.

  “And now you can put the other one on my finger,” James said.

  There and then a little ceremony had taken place. An old ring returned, no longer needed, and new rings accepted.

  “I so much wanted that,” began Terry, before his eyes welled up. “I love you and always will, and this ring will never come off me. Let them bury me with it, you know!”

  James managed to hold back his tears. But he felt so very satisfied. There were no witnesses, let alone any official recognition of what they had done, but now they could show their commitment to one another in something tangible.

  “As the Deer, Terry,” whispered James. “You, and you alone.”

  Chapter 12

  By the end of the week Terry had been transferred to the main hospital some thirty miles away. On the day, James travelled on his own while Mumsie went in the ambulance, asserting her right as next of kin. She had summoned the whole extended family as a means of support and display of strength. They followed the ambulance in a convoy led by Victor in his red sports car. James followed some distance behind and in the confusion of the city traffic he lost sight of the ambulance and the other cars.

  After a few wrong turns James eventually found the hospital, parked his car and walked to the main building. He still had no idea where to go, but consulted the hospital map to look for neurosurgery. He rose two floors in a large hospital lift and walked what seemed like half a mile of corridors, each sector painted in a contrasting colour. The walls of neurosurgery were debilitating tangerine, which no doubt helped to keep the patients restricted to the wards.

  He had arrived in the right section, but where was Terry? There was no one to ask, and no one to ring who would be pleased enough to tell him. A sense of despair and loss came over him as he collapsed on to a hard corridor bench. As he sat there he noticed on the wall in front of him a collection of paintings from an amateur artists’ group, mostly made up of poorly executed watercolours of local scenes. They hung there apologetically asking to be bought, all proceeds to a good cause, the neurosurgery patients’ fund.

  Just then he heard a laugh, unmistakeably that of Mumsie. He got up and stalked the distinctive noise, glad at least to have some clue where Terry was. As he turned a corner he caught a glimpse of a familiar face in a hospital canteen. There as he paused, he saw Terry seated at a small table, surrounded, as if holding court, by all the members of his family. Around him were his sisters, with their partners, and various assortments of children, young and old. Sitting next to him with consummate pride was Mumsie, answering all questions and directing the conversation. James stepped into the canteen and was immediately seen. The family grew silent as he walked over to them, but made no space for him to approach Terry. Ignoring every one of them, he gently pushed his way through, bent down and kissed Terry on the lips. It was the most natural thing to do. Victor, sitting between two sisters, visibly stiffened.

  “So this is where you are,” said James addressing only Terry.

  “Yes, we have been here ages," said Mumsie eager to make the point she had arrived in the ambulance. “The ward is down that corridor,” she gestured, as if to tell him to go and wait there while the family meeting was resumed.

  “Let’s have something to drink,” interjected one of the sisters, with the commendable sense of trying to mediate. “Cup of tea anyone?”

  Perhaps it was the suggestion of a drink, or the pressure of the crowd gathered around him, or more likely the sensing of tension in the air and the after-effects of the journey, that made Terry begin to shake. At first it was hardly noticeable except to those who closely observed his every movement. A flick of the wrist and a sudden jerk of the elbow. Within seconds the twitch had taken over the whole arm and it was beginning to creep up into his neck.

  Mumsie stood up and put her hands to her face. She was paralysed with fear, incapable of taking in what was happening to her son, and unable to offer him comfort or succour. James took hold of Terry’s shaking hand and attempted to calm him down. One sister, perhaps feeling she should take over where Mumsie was obviously failing, took Terry’s other arm, and tried the tactic of distraction.

  “What kind of Rolls Royce are you going to buy then?” she said, the words seemed so ridiculous in the context but calculated to be absurd and therefore perhaps of some use. “What colour will it be?” she added quickly.

  People in the café looked on, some with their food suspended between plate and mouth, momentarily distracted from what they were doing. One or two medical staff were wondering if they ought to get involved, and were poised. Another sister had the presence of mind to head off for the ward to fetch a nurse, and within a minute they had arrived with a wheelchair. The fit had reached a plateau, and Terry could be jerkily lifted into the chair and taken directly to the ward. James followed stooping at Terry’s side, still holding onto the hand that shook the most. Behind in the wake was Mumsie, unable to break through her barrier of terror. The first sister had given up her distractions and stayed with everyone in the canteen. Soon the various children in the family were oblivious to all that had happened and were pressing for sweets from the counter.

  On arrival at the ward Terry was quickly transferred to a bed. Within two minutes he developed a full fit, but now because he was attended by two nurses and a trainee consultant, he received the best treatment possible. They tried to calm him down, both with words and injections. Terry thrashed out with his hands against the bed cot sides, pulling his knees up to his chest, and his mouth making contorted and grotesque shapes, accompanied by deep groans. For a while James hung on to the hand he had been holding, and did what he could to help the staff loosen Terry’s clothing. Mumsie stood transfixed at the end of the bed. She had seen nothing like this before, and it was so cruel that the first time should be in the person of her oldest child. A moment later she gained some composure.

  “Shut the curtains,” she ordered, trying to pull them around the bed. No one was to see her child in such apparent agony.

  “It’s ok, it’s ok,” said the trainee consultant, knowing he had to calm her as well as her son. “We see this all the time. He will be alright, once he gets through it.”

  He went back to his jargoned instructions to the nurses, and administered an intravenous drip through the top of Terry's hand. Splats of blood from the injection began to stain the sheets.

  After a short while, probably only seconds but seeming like minutes, the jerking became weaker and the contorted body began to relax. James let go of the hand that had become limp.

  “He is resting now, the fit is over,” pronounced the trainee consultant with an obvious sense of relief.

  James moved away from the bed and stood beside Mumsie. The shock of what he had seen made him feel for her. Instinctively, he put his arm around her, and she for once was unable to resist his comfort. She would have much preferred it to have been Victor or any member of her family, but as James was the only one there, he would do.

  Her charity could not last for lon
g.

  “Why?” she said, converting her fear into an attack. “Why don’t you ever speak to Terry’s sisters? They care for him, you know.”

  James did not answer. It did not seem appropriate or necessary. He breathed deeply instead, closed his eyes and then opened them to look at Terry. He was sleeping calmly, as if the drama of minutes before had never happened.

  “He looks fine now,” said James with a deep sigh of relief. Mumsie did not reply.

  Within about half-an hour the whole entourage of the family had arrived, summoned by Mumsie on her mobile. They did not come quietly to stand at the bedside but rather as a noisy group, crowding Terry’s bed for security. The sisters laughed loudly to protect themselves in an unfamiliar and threatening environment. None of them had been in a hospital before, other than a maternity wing, and the whole concept of illness, let alone the possibility of death, was something to ignore. Worse still, in this ward they were surrounded by people who suffered from a disease of the brain. A man opposite was propped up in bed with a huge bandage around his head. Next to him an old man displayed a spectacular deep scar on his skull that misshaped his whole head. Another patient, much younger and in the prime of life, was shouting out, obviously in some form of mental distress. The nurse was trying to calm him down. In all this apparent madness around them all the family could do was enter into their own tribal jollity.

  James backed off, edging away as more family members came to bolster up the tribe. Maybe they did not see him go, or would not have cared even if they had noticed. He slipped away, back out into the tangerine corridor and to the canteen where all the drama had begun. Now it was deserted, with only the noise of the dull hum of the florescent lights and the chatter of kitchen staff behind a screen. He had a feeling this would become his home for the days and weeks ahead. It was adequate enough with all the efficiency and anonymity of an institutional café, but its lack of windows and natural light gave it the sense of a place suspended in time, removed from reality.

  James looked round and saw the table where the family has been sitting, the chairs cast aside chaotically. At once his eyes caught a glimpse of a small shining object on the floor. He stooped down to pick up the gold ring he had given Terry two days before. James held the ring, so new and shiny, in the palm of his hand. He supposed the jerking actions of Terry’s fit had sent it flying. James slipped it onto his little finger, the only place where it would fit. He felt so relieved he had found it, but so sad Terry was no longer wearing it.

  James wandered away from the tangerine corridors, into other sectors. At one stage he found himself close to maternity where anxious fathers, proud grandparents, and excited if confused siblings, hurried with bungles of flowers in their arms. They had tired and worried looks upon their faces, but behind the visage was the hope and exhilaration that a new birth brings. Another time he found himself in a corridor plastered with gruesome pictures of the latest techniques for straightening the spine. It was a whole sphere of life he had never known, a world of healing, of making better, of curing. These places seemed so different from neurosurgery where the whole body is affected by a tumour the size of pea, and there is ultimately little hope, only containment and the treatment of symptoms.

  James followed the signs to the chapel. It hadn’t been where he had set out to go, but realising it was close, he wanted to see what it was like. He opened the door to a deserted room cluttered with the religious paraphernalia of different faiths. Here every religion was represented but in the profusion probably nobody was satisfied. Glad it was empty of people he sat on the front row facing an altar of the collective effort of humankind to reach God. And he cried and cried. He cried perhaps more than he ever cried before, in this strange place where countless sorrows had been felt and where even God himself could cry. It was because of this magnitude of suffering that James felt he could let his despair come to the surface.

  He must have been there a quarter of an hour before the door opened, and in walked a young chaplain, hurrying about his business with an air of one just about to complete his long shift. At first he was surprised to see James because so few found their way to the chapel outside of service times. But his demeanour changed and even a look of disappointment came across his face as he realised his day of work may not yet be over.

  “Hello,” said the chaplain, holding out a hand that in the last half hour alone had touched a poorly child, a jocular rugby player with a broken leg, and an elderly woman on the point of death. “Did you want to talk?” he added tentatively, for his own sake as much as the one who sat there with tears in his eyes.

  James, at his most vulnerable, felt that he could share his thoughts with this young clergyman. He didn’t know his name, he might never see him again, and everything he said could be treasured in that anonymity. Slowly, in a way he had rehearsed in his mind a hundred times before but never spoken, James told the story of the greatest love and the greatest tragedy of his life.

  A while later there was a pause.

  “I don’t know, I have to say, if I believe in homosexuality,” said the chaplain. “But I can tell you love him, and that love is so strong it has turned your life upside down, perhaps in a way that only God could understand.”

  It was the first time someone with God-authority had said such a thing to James. How refreshing to meet a fellow Christian who had the openness of mind and heart to truly hear what James had said, someone not worried about the scandal or the damage to the institution, someone who was confident enough in his faith not to condemn.

  “I think you should stay with him as best you can. It is going to be hard, but what else can you do? Walk away now and you will feel guilty forever,” counselled the chaplain. “You may never love anyone like this again because love is God’s gift, perhaps too painful to experience too often in life.”

  They bowed their heads in prayer as the chaplain, from the wealth of his learning and with some genuine spiritual encounter, spoke words of comfort. The prayer ended with a deep silence in which James felt both profoundly grateful and affirmed.

  James was aware there had been a great leap of faith in what the chaplain had said. Faced with the conflict between what the bible condemns and human experience celebrates, the chaplain had chosen to verify all he could see as good and godly. The gravity of the theological shift the chaplain made that day may never be appreciated, other than by James who left the chapel fortified in his own love and determined to show it.

  James hurried back to the tangerine corridors, aware that he had been away for some time. He wondered if he had been missed, but his mobile showed no calls or messages. Back on the ward he found Terry sleeping in his bed. The only evidence of the family was a profusion of cards stacked on the bedside table, Mumsie’s prominently placed on top, a vase of rough hewn daisies, and a box of chocolates half-eaten. Around the bed were six empty chairs discarded thoughtlessly when the entourage had left.

  Visiting hours were about to end and he knew that he could only linger for a moment or two. Sitting next to the bed and he took up Terry’s hand. How familiar it was to him, the bend of each finger, and the soft warm palm where he could bury his thumb like he had done so many times before. James took the ring he had found on the floor in the café and gently placed it on Terry’s finger easing it over the knuckle. Then he felt secure again for there was some outward symbol of the love between them, some recognition Terry was the man at the centre of his world. As he held the ring there Terry’s eyes opened and a smile spread across his face.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “I wasn’t asleep you know.”

  “You were just waiting to see what I was going to do, weren’t you?” James stood up and bent over to give Terry a kiss.

  “Where did you go? I missed you,” Terry asked, with some anxiety in his eyes.

  “There was no room for me here. It says up there,” said James pointing to a prominent notice on the wall, “only two visitors to a bed.”

  “You should have sta
yed, and they should have gone,” said Terry.

  “I am here now,” said James and let out a sign of relief. “I went to the hospital chapel and met the chaplain. I think he might come and see you, if you want.”

  “Not sure Mumsie would like that,” said Terry knowing whose feelings had become paramount.

  Just then a figure in dark blue appeared at the foot of the bed.

  “Hello, Terrence, I am the ward sister come to take some blood, is that alright?” said the woman in uniform.

  “Call me Terry,” came the response.

  James stood up to go as the ward sister drew the curtains around the bed.

  “You can stay, if you are family,” said sister, unperturbed to have an onlooker for her procedures.

  “He is my partner,” said Terry with some triumph.

  “That’s fine,” said sister as she placed her syringes and collecting tubes in a little plastic dish on Terry’s chest. “Just stay nice and still and this won’t hurt.”

  James was sitting down again and pleased that he could stay, for every moment was extra time for him. He took the opportunity to ask the sister a few questions. She had no problem working with great efficiency and talking at the same time. It was obvious that her knowledge of brain tumours picked up by years of caring for patients in the ward was grounded in experience. She made no promises, and was careful about giving any false hope, but she did underline the need to make the most of life in the next few weeks. Terry was a little tired and probably unable to take in everything she was saying.

  “Is that alright then,” she said holding the plaster in the pit of Terry’s arm where the blood had been extracted.

  “I don’t think I understood everything you said,” said Terry with some confusion in his voice. Unlike sister he had found it hard to listen and have blood taken at the same time.

  “So are you the blond one in this relationship,” she said to Terry with a smile on her face.