The Water Is Warm

by Jennifer Stawska

  What slowly emerged was a story, a background, that was driven by belief, by religion, by caring for the dying and infirm, teaching, art, languages, nursing children, standing by people whom others had rejected, all the things that I had not done. I listened to his soft voice and compared what I was hearing with my own life. It went a bit like this.

  ‘So,’ Josh often began a sentence with that word, ‘I was born and brought up in Malmo where my parents were both English teachers. We often spoke English at home. I have a sister who now is also a teacher. We lived in a flat on the second floor in an area of Malmo that is full of four storey squares of flats and we lived like most people do there, in a settled family life. Of course we went to Copenhagen and other places in Denmark but, otherwise, we rarely went out of Sweden. My mother’s family come from the west coast of Sweden, a town called Halmstad, and we used to spend summers and Christmases there. I went to school in Malmo and so my childhood was very happy and safe.’

  ‘A bit of a contrast to mine.’ I laughed hoping that I could begin to make light of what I had said about my own childhood because I felt so awkward about the amount that I had told him.

  ‘Yes, I was fortunate, unlike you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted you.’ I was wary about interrupting after that because I saw how easily I could take him away from what he was saying.

  ‘Well, after school I went to university in Stockholm in 1984. I was nearly 19 and I had never been away from home before. I studied English and intended to be an English teacher.’ He then told me about studying English and some of the books and plays he had studied. So we discussed books and academic things for a while. He knew some of Eliot’s poetry so we talked about that. He was incredibly well-read.

  After talking about a whole range of literature, there was a pause and then he said very cautiously, cutting across what we had been discussing ‘and it was at university that I first told people that I was gay.’ And I can remember the relief that I felt that he had said something more about himself. That he wasn’t perfect and that the hesitation with which he spoke was not because he was keeping some superior life story in reserve after being faced with my pile of rubbish. He wasn’t the happy, resolved Swedish guy from a stable background who never stepped out of line. That there was something over which I could try to extend some sort of emotional understanding and pretend to an emotional intelligence that I did not, and do not, possess.

  That’s when he looked up and smiled at me. That’s the moment. And that moment, that is the real Josh. The hesitant, kind, vulnerable, gentle man that I now know and love. Then the conversation just became easier, I suppose because he opened up about the difficult things that had happened in his past.

  Josh went on to describe how, when he went to university in 1984, AIDS had begun to strike down the gay community and so there was an even greater reason for him not to reveal or practise how he felt. Practising gay men were dropping like flies because AIDS was a death sentence. He described how he was afraid, for very good reason as it turned out, that his family would be totally intolerant of him if he told them how he was and so he did not do so. He just hid his emotions away during his teenage years and, when he became an adult, had continued the lie in a superficially sterile life while immersing himself into religion and finding that its strictures kept him from revealing himself.

  When he was due to leave university he felt pulled towards becoming a priest and persuaded his parents to help fund him through theological college. He spent a year there, during which he worked for two months in a church in London – Battersea as it happened - and, after more studying, was ordained into the church of Sweden where his first post was as a chaplain in Göteborg.

  It was there that he was asked to look after a man, Anton, who was dying of AIDS and about whom he spoke often when we were together. How he watched Anton’s body rotting away and saw the anguish of the rejection that Anton suffered from his family, church congregation and many of his friends. As it became known that Josh was caring for Anton, so people had also become afraid that they might catch AIDS from him. The AIDS scaremongering - don’t shake hands with someone who has it.

  ‘Did you contract AIDS?’ I remember asking that and immediately realising how stupid a question it was.

  ‘No,’ he laughed my question off, sensing my embarrassment but obviously wanting to speak about Anton as he did, very protectively. He told me that he had loved Anton and learnt a great deal from him. That only he was with him when he died and saw how, after his death, Anton’s body was put into a bag at the hospital and cremated and how, at his funeral his family spoke of him having died of cancer. He often described Anton as having been treated like the worst type of leper from medieval times and spoke of how many of the other priests regarded AIDS as if it were a biblical plague sent by God as a punishment for sin.

  And then he said something like this: ‘That is when I just lost my faith. Not because of what happened specifically to Anton but because I realised that there is no force of absolute good - why should there be?’ and he looked across at me as though he hoped that I might have an answer.

  ‘I don’t know’ was the best that I could say.

  I remember this part of the conversation well because Josh then gave a very strong outpouring of his frustration with his own inability to find answers to basic questions through Christian faith.

  We spoke of this conversation often, later in our relationship, because it arose at a time which marked the spiritual low point of his life. It also explains why Josh was later to use the state that he was then describing to strengthen the life that we found together. ‘I’m not going back there again’ he would say when we spoke about how he was when we first met. It was his time in the desert.

  Putting it all together what he said then and later went a bit like this. ‘And what does it mean to talk of Anton’s soul - at the moment of his death was he stripped of all his character, his sexuality, his pain, his suffering, his odd humour and turned into something he never was? If so, how can what is left be called Anton? What does it mean to say that a person has a spirit? Where are all these lost souls and what defines them as individual entities if they are spiritually cleansed, their characters and appearance all reformed for eternity? What does eternal life mean and how is it spent? And why should this single entity called God not reveal himself? How can the bible be the word of God if it cannot be taken literally and how could God speak through the many conflicting mouths that contributed to it? How can one religion insist it is right, absolutely right, when other religions speak with equal but opposing conviction? I had no answers to any of this beyond the trite and meaningless things that the Christian church urges upon us. That Jesus is the son of God who redeemed our sins? How can anyone be the son of God and how can any one entity genuinely redeem the sins of others? How can there be a truth that is universal when the stories in the bible are so earth related? It is all so easily stated but, the more I thought of it, the more I realised how meaningless it is.’

  Well, that is a pretty condensed version of what he said. I heard it often enough.

  Josh went on to explain how he left the church in Sweden after it was made clear to him that he did not stand any chance of serving as a pastor with his own congregation even if he did find his faith again. He was also told, very clearly, that he could not discuss with other priests how he felt because homosexuality was regarded within the then teachings of the church as a passing phase, an immaturity – quite simply as wrong. Something to grow out of, pray about and, since it was a matter of choice, change and return to the light of correct thought. But, he said, he did not find the light again and did not renounce his sexuality. He just renounced his church.

  He went on to describe how, at the age of 25 in 1990, he had then become a children’s nurse working in a hospital in Stockholm before spending two years in Uganda on an AIDS programme. When his parents had asked why he was going there he had told them, for
the first time, that he was gay, causing a rift within his family as his sister tried to accept what he was saying and his parents did not. There then followed a number of years back in Sweden when he lived on his own for most of the time, having occasional relationships but never finding anything fulfilling. Much of the time, he said, he was just doing his job.

  He also told me about his last relationship, with Edvin the banker, whose profession, I told him later, should be spelt with a W – what do you call a bunch of bankers? A wunch.

  It must have been about 1997 that they got together. Edvin sounded like a briefcase (with combination lock) wielding, leather gloved, mackintosh (with tightly pulled belt) wearing, designer suited, short and tight haircut, over polished shoes type of a businessman and control freak as far as I was concerned, although Josh would never say that and I tried to keep my views to myself. He buggered off (do I mean that?) to Copenhagen with a woman he had met in the bank after controlling Josh for the six years that they were together. He was 15 years older than Josh and, I am quite sure, must have walked with a mince and had a very limp handshake. They had split up at the end of 2003 and Josh had come on holiday to Sri Lanka to try to get his head back together a year afterwards; he had arrived here three days before the tsunami, the day before Christmas Eve. Some holiday.

  And I can remember the scene, the camera shot, when he got to that point. He just stopped talking, kept looking down at his hands and at the ground and there was a long silence before he said something like ‘oh well.’ I remember looking at him, studying him as he sat there but I didn’t know what to say so I just said something inane again like ‘I’m really sorry.’ Then we sat in silence, listening to the grasshoppers and cicadas and swiping away the occasional mosquitoes that landed on us. I wanted to think over what Josh had told me, to let it sink in but I must have been pretty sluggish by then and also I suspect, at the time, needed to accept that I should not get drawn in to having any expectations from the conversation.

  ‘Sounds like your marathon,’ I said eventually.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Priesthood and Edvin. Where were you in that?’ I thought he was going to cry. He rubbed his forehead gently with his fingertips as if he was trying to stroke out the pain.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, Simon. Nobody has ever put it like that.’

  ‘Typical bloody lawyer, eh?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure. Typical lawyer. Not that I have met many.’

  Again, there was silence, but I do remember that at some point I asked ‘What will you do in the future?’ and Josh stirred and said ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know,’ so I asked him to tell me about the life that he would return to in Sweden. And he told me how he lived in a neat flat, now on his own, and worked in a job which he felt was governed by petty rules in which he felt that he made no difference and did nothing of value. His job was to assess children with mental disabilities and help them to access the support that they needed which, he said, meant that he was involved in constant fights with bureaucrats and administrators. He made it very clear that he did not want to talk about work, though, and switched the conversation in my direction. ‘Why did you want to work with children here? Why not go back home and work with children there – just do something different?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think that I just ran away.’

  ‘Have you stopped running away?’ That was a horrible question and I can only imagine that I answered it by saying that I didn’t know because I do remember what Josh said next.

  ‘Can I ask, are you afraid that you might do as your father did? You sound very sad.’ That felt like when he first touched my arm; it took me by surprise and I didn’t know how to answer that either and so I told him that, before I left England I had thought of suicide but had decided to run away instead.

  ‘That must be really frightening,’ he said. ‘Did you really think of suicide?’ I felt that he had done this before, that he knew what to say. I did not pick up that he also hoped that I would ask him the same question.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ There was a pause.

  ‘But run away to find yourself in the mysteries of the East? Isn’t that a bit of a game...a bit of pretending?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it is worth trying, given the alternative.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I’ve never thought it through. Not properly.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Because if there is no God then you have one life and suicide is the ultimate waste. If there is a God there is nothing to fear in being alive – life here is just a very short passage into eternity.’

  ‘I am not sure I understand but I will think about that.’ It was too much to take in by then and I was tired. What’s more, I realised that it was not much of a holiday conversation for him.

  ‘And you, do you get lonely?’ I asked, trying to take the conversation away from myself.

  And he told me he did and described why. And I remember one thing in particular that he said: ‘What does happen to single gay people when they grow old? Things must look very different then to how they appear when you are in your twenties or thirties. Retirement is already not so many years away. At the age of 39 I can no longer pretend that I am the modern or challenging young man that I was when I set out on this journey. The future frightens me, too.’

  ‘Sounds a bit like me in London,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite so dramatic.’ And he laughed but I didn’t follow through what he was trying to say because, by then, it was the middle of the night. We must have been talking for almost three hours and I was tired and my head was swimming. Josh picked up on how I was feeling and, reverting to his role of nurse, said: ‘You must rest now. Your body needs to repair and sleep is the best medicine of all.’

  It was time to pack up and so I did what travellers do. I asked him to keep in touch and we both promised to do so. We stood up and he could see that my leg was hurting. ‘Let me help you’ he said, so I put my arm around his shoulder and hobbled my way back to the tent. He helped me down on to the bed, looked at me and said ‘Thank you.’ Then he went.

  I felt a fool, as though I had grasped at a kind person who had leant a temporary ear to my misery. His kindness just reinforced my isolation and I kept thinking of things that I wished I had asked him as I thought about what he had said. I put my head face down into the stinking mattress and cried myself to sleep. I think that I was exhausted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The next day was Friday 31 December 2004, New Year’s Eve, and only five days after the tsunami. There had been times over the previous eighteen months when life had been pretty awful and this certainly ranked among the worst. The day started with a request that I should get out of the bed because it was needed by someone else – completely fair but it meant that I had nowhere to put myself. I wasn’t up to leaving the camp on my own and I had nowhere at all to go. Josh had put one of the chairs that we had sat on the night before in the corner of the tent and so I just sat down on that; I had nothing to do, I didn’t even have a book to read, so I sat watching people pee-ing into a bush that served as the local urinal - the bush was my view out of the tent door. I spent much of the day with my eyes shut, pretending to sleep. I hadn’t had a wash for days, since I had been in Batapola, so I stank as well and, although there was plenty of water to drink, there was very little food.

  I had no plans and could not be bothered to make any, I was too tired. Speaking to Josh the night before and telling the story of what had brought me here had been like looking in a mirror and seeing a wreck, and his kindness just overwhelmed me.

  Josh came in and out of the tent, leaving me with a note of his address and email details when he first came in, but he obviously had plenty of other things to do and had the air of someone who was busy. He just said ‘catch up with you later
,’ handed me the note and went on with what he was doing. Part of me wanted him to pay me attention but another big part of me just wanted to be left alone.

  It wasn’t until the evening that he stopped to speak to me again.

  ‘You haven’t moved all day. Are you OK?’

  Although I told him I was fine he could see that I wasn’t. ‘You need to move and, I am sorry to say this, you stink. I’ll get you some water for a wash.’ He came back with a bucket, a piece of cloth and a bar of soap and helped me wash. Then he stopped helping me and, it wasn’t that he said anything but he just looked at me, raised his eyebrows slightly and tilted his head to the side, enquiringly, signalling the question ‘what’s going on in your thoughts?’

  ‘I don’t know what I am going to do.’ I had nothing else to say.

  Josh said something like ‘well you can’t stay here all your life’ and then ‘let me think about it.’

  I thought he was fobbing me off with a technique that I knew all too well. I had used it often enough in chambers myself: ‘Have you got five minutes?’ someone would ask, hoping for a bit of help. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ I would reply untruthfully if I was too busy.

  But Josh did come back. I realise now that he was giving himself some space to think about what he was going to say. So, when he returned he said that he wanted to relax for a while before going back to Sweden – why didn’t we go to Unawatuna for a few days and see if we could find Sunil? I had told him about Sunil and Raja the night before.

  ‘What about your work here?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I’ll be leaving for Sweden soon,’ he replied.

  ‘I don’t want to take you away from the other patients.’

  ‘You’re not. A busload of other volunteers has arrived today.’

  That is how Josh first met Sunil and Raja and was introduced to Unawatuna. Josh had to go back to get his stuff from the hotel where he had been staying and then we went to Unawatuna by taxi the next day, a muted start to the new year, and booked into a twin-bedded room in a modern hotel about a kilometre back from the beach. It had survived the tsunami without too much damage. The first thing that I did was to take a shower and then I slept, really heavily in the temporary security that I had found, tired out by moving from the camp.