Month: January 2009 (Page 4 of 4)

“Come on, you can tell us. Let’s be honest you’d have to be trying pretty hard to shock either of us two!”

Kit sighed and tried to work out how he had ended up having a conversation about unfulfilled sexual fantasies with Sheena and Paul, his two most sexually accomplished and broad minded friends. All he could come up with was two bottles of red wine and perhaps an unconscious desire to share, maybe even to see if they would seduce him. Without really knowing why, he steeled himself and decided to admit something that he thought they were not expecting.

“I’ve always wanted to go down on a man. There you go. I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but there you go.”

Sheena did not say anything, she just smiled a wicked smile and then flashed a look at Paul. He nodded;

“I’m up for it, Kit,and I know that Sheena won’t mind. In fact she really likes seeing me with men.”

“I do, really. Do you still want to?”

Kit nodded. He did not really understand it, but suddenly he was filled with resolve rather than remorse.

“Yeah.”

I remember it like it was yesterday. Sundays were dry beach parties at that time; none of us were old enough to get alcohol from the Spar, not even on the blag, and so we would load up on cigs and anything that any of us could lift from our folks. Dry Sunday parties always started early too, before dark.

I was lying on my back in the sand, watching seagulls wheeling overhead and working my way through the second of my Marlboro Reds, when a face I did not recognise appeared above me.

“My goodness, an Angel!”

The words had left my mouth before I had even considered them, like a reflex. For a second I waited to be laughed at, or hit by a jealous and insecure boyfriend, but neither expected payback was forthcoming. Instead Fate made her smile at me;

“It’s good when men notice that I am heavenly without me having to tell them.”

Sure now, looking back, it’s hard not to think that she was an uppity bitch to my bumbling sycophant; actually it was all without artifice.

As the sun sank an hour later we were sharing a smoke.

“RE-VALLEY! RE-VALLEY!”

The banging on his cell door would have woken him if the shouting had not. Talk about cruel and unusual, to have to be awoken every morning by the COs not only banging on his door but also murderingthe language of his home. Reveille; re-valley? Why was it so hard for them to say the word the way it was meant to be said?

His lawyer had been unwilling to explore the possiblity of petitioning for his return to France, but then what had he expected from the public defenfer’s office? Now here he was, stuck in an American gaol; bad food, bad mattress and oh God the food.

The cell door popped and he knew that there was less than a minute before he had to be dressed and stood by the door, that or face a beating from whichever CO was checking cells that morning. He swung his feet out onto the hard, painted floor; cold. Uniform pants and t-shirt, they were quick to throw on. Then socks and pumps. He was stood up mere moments before the CO came in. He had time to realise that the morning was cold.

The cold air outside the club was not helping. When someone had suggested a breath of fresh air he had assumed, as everyone else had, that it would clear his head and make him feel a little better, but it really was not all that useful. For a start he did not have anything warm with him; he’d been expecting to be inside a hot nightclub so he had just worn a t-shirt. As the cold nipped at his bare arms and his nose, not to mention the slightly more insidious cold that was creeping through the back of his jeans where he was leaning against the wall, he tried to decide why he had not simply gone back inside.

Tina was still in there of course, but then he did not really want to admit to anyone that had not already worked it out that her arrival on the arm of his former best friend had anything to do with his ‘funny turn’. It had been months since Rich and Tina had sat him down and been all adult about the fact that they had fallen in love and had never meant it to happen; when was it going to stop bothering him?

He stood on the corner, his breath turning to a thick fog in front of his face in the cold, and watched them walk away. It was very good to see her happy. He smiled, and nodded. He was acknowledging that she would remind him that she was not just happy because she had found Lee. She had been sad when George had left two years ago, but she had dealt with the loss well and apart from the odd slip of the mask had covered her loneliness quite adroitly.

They disappeared around the corner of the gaol wall and he turned in the opposite direction and started to walk towards his appartment. The cold air was not really moving, there was not even a breeze, so the cold air just seemed to settle hard on his shoulders, like a wet blanket, and naturally he had not worn a coat.

He was crossing the last part of the road – the junction between town and the block which included his flat – when he realised that there was someone watching him, and more to the point this watcher was not burdened with good intentions.

“Who’s there?”

“Left, right, left, right.”

The mantra in his head was not any more complicated than that as he jogged up the rutted path towards the golf course hut. It was fifteen years since he had tried to run all the way over Frostrow Fell and back, but the months of training to get this far told him that he was ready. Everyone wants to believe, later in life, that the effortless fitness they had at school can be recaptured.

He was halfway up the track; already he could see it growing longer and longer with every step. His breathing was already staring to become shallow and desperate, and his legs were starting to burn from the lack of oxygen. Even then he knew that when he reached the hut he would have to turn left and run up to the real summit; no time to recover.

It was all he could do to just repeat his simple mantra over and over, as if anything more complicated would allow an internal discourse, and as soon as he started to reason about his choices, he could weasel out of doing the run.

“Left, right, left, right.”

First of all, best wishes to all for a successful, happy and peaceful New Year in 2009…

Now I’ve got that out of the way…

I’ve been thinking about New Year quite a lot over the last couple of days – natural enough I imagine, I think many people are given to moments of reflection at this time of year. It occurs to me that I am not entirely easy to please when it comes to the passing of one year and the birth of the next; that I tend to find myself suffering a little melancholy and occasionally a little ennui with the whole performance, and I’m not one hundred percent convinced that I don’t simply create those things for myself.

I have been heard to say that New Year’s is a time that I enjoy best when I have a partner, that welcoming the coming year in the arms of a lover is the best and most optimistic way of embracing the future, and there is no doubt that New Year 2006/2007 was a time of very real happiness for me, and that apart from the last New Year we spent together I enjoyed the first three New Year’s Eves that El and I spent together very much, and that they were all the better for spending them with her and being in love and being genuinely content.

Apart from those times I can only really remember being miserable at New Year until really very recently, and while I have genuinely enjoyed the last two – last night and the year before – they have not been quite as perfect as the times that I have been entwined. The sense of family and belonging that I have felt celebrating New Year in Belgium with my brother’s soon-to-be in-laws and their family, as well as our own, has been unparalleled in my life. While I mean to offer no dis-service to my Uncle and his long-standing double-bill of Birthday Party and New Year’s Eve party I never really felt entirely comfortable at them before my grandmother (his mother) died on New Year’s Eve and certainly after that point they became somewhat dour affairs that I escaped at every possible opportunity. Interestingly I feel pretty confident that I would have a whale of a time with them and my cousins these days, as everyone has become more laid back and I am more confident about who I am and I no longer feel as though I am on the outside looking in with them, but anyway I digress…

I suppose the point of all this is that I am not comfortable with the realisation that whether I like it or not there is a part of my head that wants to see the future unfold with someone by my side, and that part of me rebels, even now in the bosom of family and joy, against single-ness at this time of year. There are a thousand reasons why being with someone is a good thing, but there are also a thousand reasons why it’s not a healthy thing to make being involved a contingency for happiness, and while I feel that I have been doing better and better with regard to being capable of experiencing real joy and fulfillment as a single man, this time of year seems to be a reminder of the long road ahead, towards contentment, should it be my fate to remain a bachelor.

It’s all yet to unfold and there are many twists and turns that none of us can see before another year is done – there is as good a chance as any that this year I will bump into the person that I will be with for the rest of my life, or for a day/night, week or month… I suppose that for more reasons than simply avoiding another New Year as a singleton I hope that there is love for me in 2009, but at the same time I really do hope that if I am alone this time next year that I have found a way to not feel this way, but instead to revel in the possibilities that a new year brings and to cherish the memories of a year passed.

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EOT