However, even though it is said that no one has been prosecuted here for homosexuality since 1950, that was hardly the point and there was no way that we, as two westerners, were going to flaunt our relationship together in front of people who would have been deeply offended by it. It would also have been far too complex and risky for us to become known as a couple by our work colleagues in Galle or the UN. Therefore, in a sense, the law was totally unimportant, it was custom that mattered and our relationship would have been deeply offensive to the custom, culture and, indeed, religion of many of those around us, including Raja. So we were very careful about how we behaved in public.
I don’t want to write in any detail about our sexual relationship, fun though it might be. Once the locked-on missile feeling of the first few months settled down we had to work out how we would cope with sex in the long-term. Sex, we decided, is important, at least to us, because it is an integral part of a shared and unifying emotional fulfilment – we really worked on those words, really thought about them. It bound our bodies together as well as our minds and emotions. We realised that it is not just about gratification or recreation even though there was plenty of that too.
For me? Well, as you know, more than anything else it was also about expression. I loved to watch you, to tell you what I was going to do and then do it. To see your face when I asked you to lie on the bed and poured coconut oil into my hand. To use it to tell you how I felt, to protect you.
‘Simon…’
‘Don’t talk, Josh. Just take it.’ And I would start with your toes and work up your body. Telling you what I was doing, what I was going to do.
‘Now, tell me how you feel, Josh.’
Afterwards you would say ‘it’s your turn now, Simon.’ Yes, sometimes we did a double act together. But often I would keep standing over you, stroking your hair.
‘Go to sleep now, Josh. I just want to look at you’ and I would watch you fall asleep, smiling. May God protect you.
That all sounds very serious, I’m sure, but we also had a laugh and Josh could be incredibly liberal. He liked to experiment and push the boundaries, to plot for the night ahead. Nothing was routine.
Learning Swedish helped because, when we were out we could speak without anyone understanding - or so we thought until Josh started being particularly liberal in his speech one day in Arugam Bay and the amused man at the table next to us said ‘Försiktig, jag talar svenska också.’
‘Shit,’ Josh said.
‘And English,’ the man said. Cool, handsome guy; we spent the evening with him and his model-like, super intelligent wife. They lectured at Stockholm University and we spoke to them in a way that we hadn’t before, telling them about our relationship and promising that, if we did ever make it to Sweden, we would visit them.
So, our lives were not just about groping in the half light, even though it did take some time for us to settle down for about the first three months after the dam burst. But after about three months, in the middle of the 2005 monsoon season, we began to find our longer-term way forward; by then we both had ample reason to realise that neither of us wanted the way we were living to be short-term.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
In those first few months, after that rather chaotic beginning, I took the lead between us, trying to reassure Josh and boost his confidence whenever I could. I knew how to live in Sri Lanka and it took Josh time to catch up, especially since I was settled in Unawatuna by then and had also made connections and friends in the camp at Galle. It was difficult because we each had our own work to do during the week and were apart while we did it. However, we developed a pattern where we were together in Unawatuna from Thursday night until Monday morning, on a 4:3 night basis and that seemed to fit in with what was expected of us at work.
Josh never really got stuck in with the other UN workers. He did his job there OK but it was obvious that he wanted to be in Unawatuna and that he found our time apart difficult. Monday mornings had an end of holiday feel about them, a sort of doleful, heavy-headed, back to the grindstone, have-to-do-this dullness and we both counted the hours to Thursday night. I felt that he was very lonely when he was away and I didn’t like it. Thursday nights were really happy…exciting and full of smiles. We usually spent them on our own, dossing around in bars or stretching out under Priscilla’s branches talking like undergraduates.
Then the next three days that we were together were spent helping Raja with the hotel and looking after Sunil. Josh was even worse at DIY than I was so, at least at first, he tended to look after Sunil while I helped out with the building work, but he soon learnt the tricks of the trade and got involved as part of the team. On Sunday nights we would slope off again together, to line ourselves up for the start of the week. We got used to the pattern after a bit and, I suppose, it gave us each some space to adjust to each other; we knew that it was short-term and so we just got on with things.
It was Josh, though, who had started as the more vulnerable of the two of us, that carried us forward through a very difficult time after that settling in period, as my past began to unravel itself in a way that I had really not seen coming.
I had woken one Saturday night, screaming, it must have been in about June 2005. I had never had a full night terror before, despite everything that had happened – maybe because there had been no one to hear it. But that night I sat up on the side of the bed, buried my head in my hands and found myself panicking again uncontrollably. Josh shot up in bed asking ‘what’s wrong?’ So I told him, and it went something like this. I was on my own again. I was running away from something that was huge and devouring and I could not escape it. So I hid on my own, but still it found me and was pulling me out from where I was hiding and, this time, the Colossus was eating me, holding me in its grasp.
‘It’s just a dream,’ he said. ‘It isn’t real.’
‘No, it’s more than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
And so I blurted out my greatest fear, the one I had been keeping in reserve: ‘I can’t bear the thought of being alone again.’
‘But you are not alone.’
‘I really am sorry. It isn’t that easy. You see, I’ve had it for years and it won’t go away. I thought that I had got rid of it but I haven’t.’
Then I said something that I had never said to anyone else. I took Josh’s hand off my shoulder and held it. ‘Please don’t leave me.’ As I said it I can remember how much I hated myself, loathed the fact that I was saying something so pathetic.
And then, worse still and aged nearly 43, I cried like an eight-year-old. I buried my head into his chest and I let go.
Josh held my head and stroked my hair and kept saying: ‘Simon, you are not alone. You are not alone’ and my mind went straight back to how my grandmother had comforted me on the night that my father died. And if that is not pathetic, then what is? So much for being normal.
I got up and walked out of the shack having pulled on a pair of shorts, with Josh rushing behind me in the warm rain of that night. We walked along the edge of the sea with me still trying to fight the dream out of my head and filled with this sense of fear and self-hatred, instinct telling me to run. Josh sensed what was happening, put his open hand on the top of my back and walked, talking to me quietly, asking me to tell him what was happening. Asking me not to disappear on him.
And so I tried to put into words my fear that, having been locked away for so long, for so many years, I would never be able to do what I so wanted to do. To find and give love. That I would remain barren, solitary, hidden away, that nothing would really matter. I described it as feeling like I was floating alone on an iceberg and no one could hear me. I told him how I longed to live in a loving relationship with him where I could give him what I wanted to give him. To be like him, kind, gentle, thoughtful, honest, faithful and open about myself. My fear that I would never shake off the past and had no right to think that I should be able to do so - that I would die and would just have been a was
te of space. That I had thought that I loved Catherine but had just left a trail of devastation behind me.
And Josh listened and then said: ‘Simon, sit down’ and we sat down opposite each other on the sand, toe to toe.
‘Now look at me. Look me in the face. Now, tell me what you see.’
‘I see you Josh.’
I looked him in the face and he said: ‘And I see the man that I love and never want to stop loving.’
And I saw that you, too, were crying and you looked back at me and that’s when you said it: ‘Simon, I love you and will never leave you. I’m not your father.’ That’s when you said that.
And, do you know what? I know, I accept that you meant it, and so did I. For once. I buried my face in my hands and I just sobbed. I have no right, no right at all, to think that I deserved someone like you. That’s something else I knew then and I certainly know it now.
Then we got up and you held me with your arms around me, in the rain as we stood on the beach. You ushered me back to the shack, we lay down next to each other and I held you in my arms, burying my head under your chin. Then we both cried until we fell asleep with you telling me over and over again ‘I will never leave you’ and me sobbing out the words ‘I love you.’
You calmed me down, you straightened me out, you stroked the fear out of my life. You told me that I could start again from where I had left off all those years ago. You told me that night to think of how I had felt about my father and not to hide away from it – to retrieve how I had felt and, by doing so, to understand that I had always had the capacity to love and be loved, it had just got lost.
All that took months to unravel. It wasn’t so much ironing out the creases in my feelings, rather it was bulldozing down mountains or maybe turning a wobbling jelly into something solid. I don’t know - you took over from where my father had left off, that’s what I mean. You became the outlet for everything within me that might be regarded as good and worthwhile as well as mopping up all the crap. I could turn to you and you would smile and then everything would be OK. I became really clingy over the next weeks and even more morose on Monday mornings that I had been before. When you were away I would sieve every word that you had said when we were together, trying to see if there were hidden chinks in what you were saying, constantly analysing, afraid to let go.
It was during that horrible, frightening process that I started to become able to remember things from the past which I had locked away, rather than simply forgotten. I began to want to remember and, when we were apart during the week, I would be desperate to talk to you about things that started to fit into place. So there were lots of three o’clock in the morning slots for both of us – that’s sort of what I was writing about when I first started this tale, all those weeks ago, I suppose.
I had lost the detail of the night my father died because no one had spoken to me about it and it was only through your patient listening, ability to cope with what I was saying and understanding of how much it all mattered to me, that I unlocked so much of it. I kept lapsing into self-loathing and a burning sense of inadequacy – how could I be this age and behave as someone who was so emotionally undeveloped and disabled as still to be affected by things that happened thirty-five years ago? I felt like a silly and seductive adolescent saying to a new love ‘never leave me.’ I felt tiny, minuscule and beyond anyone’s reach. How ever did I manage in London?
I thought that you would get pissed off with me, bored. That you would turn to me one night and say ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, man up.’ But, you see, you didn’t. There was never a hint of it. ‘Feel, don’t think, Simon. You’ve got to let go. You’ve got to say the words.’ Well, I did that, big time – that’s what led to me telling you that you were my father. Poor bloke, however did you cope with me?
As in London, I functioned adequately with other people when we were apart - at the camp, with Sunil, Raja and the other people at Unawatuna but with you I became quite unable to accept that someone as able, complete, attractive and mature as you are could find anything of worth in me. I was truly terrified that you would leave me, see through me and so I used to try and hide it. Why not, I knew I was behaving like a child? I understand it now but I certainly didn’t then.
But you kept on listening and talking to me quietly, softly, never faltering in your love for me and that is when I became someone entirely new. I realise that sounds like a load of nonsense but it’s true. I could feel it happening. I grew up; as I write this I can feel that sense now of opening up, testing the water of life to see if I could swim in it and finding that I could if you were there. At the age of 43, I grew up. And that is also when the transference of all the love that I had felt for my father, all the capacity for love that had been stored away for so long and which I had failed to fully unleash with Catherine, flowed onto you and never went away. How could it go away after all that? You became my alter ego and I became yours – do I mean that? I think I do. It was more than mere love; it was finding where I belonged again.
And you offloaded too, lots of stories of how you had shut down, deliberately hiding yourself behind religion and study, afraid to look over the parapet. Of your sense of losing your family and playing a theatrical part with them, feeling clean and untouchable, sanitised by the expectations others made of you. You told me how lonely you had felt and unloved. How your mother and father had blanked you out and how your colleagues within the church had made you feel wrong, immature, a sinner. How Elvin, the tosser, had treated you like an emotional dependant, a play thing, a tart to be dressed up and wheeled out amongst his gay friends when it suited him but otherwise kept in the shadows. I saw so much of myself in you and after you had started pulling me through the tunnel of my own misery I knew how much I wanted to help you to do the same. And I think we did it. I think that is what we achieved.
The effect on Josh of finding our new life was incredible; he spread his branches and grew magnificent leaves. He smiled and shone. He became tanned and muscular from swimming in the sea and from the work that he did. He became the scruffy, incautious Josh with untidy hair that I knew and loved, at times wonderfully lazy, a totally different Josh to the one who had written to me from a neat flat in Stockholm. He couldn’t give a damn about referring to himself as gay when we talked. He would just say ‘so what?’ He was the volleyball player, the swimmer, Sunil’s co-guardian, the joker, the quiet problem solver, my moral and religious soulmate and judge, the person who helped turn Raja away from his deep depression by finding the most simple solutions – cooking and trade. He became the Josh who laughed and he became the confident Josh who, later, bundled the American tourist out of the hotel for moaning about the tooth pick in his food and who turned the opening of the hotel into a dance party on the beach.
Handsome, confident, loving Josh. My man. My wonderful, wonderful man.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
In November Josh’s work for the UN ended and he joined me in the remains of my work in the Galle camp, which was fast fizzling out – we held a big 40th birthday party for him there as his way of getting known. That meant that we were rarely apart for long from that point onwards. By the end of the year we spent very little time at the camp and hung around in Unawatuna.
Those two years saw many changes in this country as well, with the destruction that had been caused by the tsunami being overtaken by the resurgence of the civil war after the breakdown in the ceasefire. When I arrived here in December 2004 Chandrika Kumaratunga, who led the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, was the country’s fifth ever President and, although she was also the first woman to take up that role, she was far from being the first woman leader here - the famous Sirimavo Bandaranaike was Prime Minister for four different periods between 1960 and 2000. However, not only did Chandrika Kumaratunga have a strong political appeal to many, she also had a strong personal appeal having come to politics six years after her husband, a famous film-star, was shot dead by a Marxist assassin outside the family home in front of their two young
children.
In April 2004, eight months before I arrived, a coalition government had been elected under her presidency but it had fallen apart in June 2005 as a result of disputes with the LTTE about how foreign aid should be applied to repairing the damage caused by the tsunami in the northern and eastern provinces.
In July 2005 a suicide bomber detonated herself in Colombo in a failed attempt to kill the member of parliament for the northern and Tamil constituency of Jaffna, Douglas Devananda, who has remained the MP there since 1994 and who voiced strong opposition to the LTTE. That attempt was followed by the assassination of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lakshman Kadirgamar, when an LTTE sniper shot him dead as he got out of his swimming pool on 12 August 2005; he had been instrumental in securing the international classification of the LTTE as a terrorist organisation, as defined by the code that was created after the events of 9/11 in New York.
When the coalition fell apart, President Kumaratunga was replaced at the next election, on 19 November 2005 by Mahinda Rajapakse, who had been the Prime Minister in the previous government. Although Rajapakse professed to being committed to the peace process, he formed alliances with the Sinhalese nationalist parties and entered into agreements which called for the ceasefire agreement to be revised and which blocked any question of devolution of power to the Tamils. So, the build-up of tension within the country continued and was brought to a head when the LTTE cut off the water supply to the Mavil Aru (or Mother River) waterway on 11 August 2006, leading the Sri Lankan Army – the SLA as it is called here - to begin its offensive in the Eastern Province.
Most of the civil war felt pretty distant to us in Galle. From the northern tip of Sri Lanka to the south amounts to a distance of about 300 miles so the war was not happening in our backyard. Further, we lived in an area that was dependent on tourism for its well-being and so the civil war was played down. There were times when we were exposed to it, such as when there was the suicide assault on gunboats in the harbour at Galle in October 2006. However, for most of the time it was a background anxiety and no more. The main concern was to repair the damage caused by the tsunami, however much that might have been hampered by the conflict.
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