CHAPTER 42
He sat down, and nodded round the table.
“Some of you know me, like, so let’s get that bit out of the way. What we are talking about is over thirty years ago, and I don’t know about people changing, but me, it’s more like waking up. What I was…I think these two lads…this lad and this lass know what I was”
Neil turned a very hard stare on me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Why tell him, of all people?”
I sighed. “Look, at some point, if things go right, then it’ll be a bit obvious, aye? And…I think John has said all that needs saying there, like. Thirty year wounds, they are allowed to heal up”
Neil was still clearly unhappy about it, and for a few seconds I wondered if it was protectiveness towards myself or a sort of resentment that some true outsider was now party to his family’s Big Secret. Change the subject.
“Mam, John has just filled me in on what happened to his brother. You didn’t think, you know, it might have been something to tell us, like?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t think, pet”
She looked meaningfully over at John. “It’s just, that name, aye? It was always one of the names that meant bruises, or a torn shirt. Not the sort of name to bring up in polite conversation with a bairn I hardly ever saw any more, aye?”
The man in question nodded. “I can understand that. I wasn’t exactly mammy’s little darling back then, was I? It’s like Jill says, though. Thirty-odd years, aye? And I am not trying to be funny, like, but our Jim and me, we’re chalk and cheese. I was surprised this one hadn’t heard, like, about our Jim. He’s not like me, he’s a good lad, so please don’t lump him in with what I did. So, as I said, can we perhaps have a fresh start?”
Rachel stuck her hand out. “Hi, I’m Rachel, I work with Jill”
John grinned and reached out to her. “Aye, our kid mentioned you. I see what he meant, too”
She laughed. “Shows that there’s nothing in a name, yeah? We got a sort of friend called John down South, and he is as different from you as can be imagined”
She looked over at me with the word “friend” and it set me thinking. What exactly was the other John to us? There had been a seismic shift in viewpoint there, it was true, but like Forster, Wilkins still carried a freightload of old hurts with him. I also found myself sticking on my own word, “us”. What were we? Survivors, in the end, each of us scarred from contact with the world around us, needy and hurting, and once more I felt a surge of emotion and recognition of what the little group really meant to me and my life. Larinda must have seen it pass over my face, and reached under the table to take my hand.
“John, yeah? I’m Larinda, dunno what the word is these days. ‘Partner’ sounds too much like a business, and ‘girlfriend’ is for twelve-year-olds. I suppose, what, ‘hers’ works, yeah?”
Mam laughed. “I like this one, Jill, I can talk to her, aye? Sorry, Will, not meaning to speak ill of your Mam, like”
Will just nodded. “I know what you mean, Mrs Carter”
“Norma. It’s Norma to ye, lad, when you’re about to go off to college and that, aye?”
I explained. “John, I used to see Will’s mother, and she has what could be called issues with what I am, and her parents are the same, like. So we don’t exactly get on”
Will was on my heels at that. “Yeah, she’s right, and it means I have my own problems”
John nodded. “Aye, what with you being gay and that? Sorry, always had a really strong gaydar, and I’m guessing all of these lot know already. Why do you think I picked on these two so much? I was wrong about you, though, Jill, wasn’t I?”
“Er, no, if you think about it”
“Ach, you know what I mean. So, Will, what brings you up here? College, they said?”
“Yeah, I’m looking at astrophysics courses at Newcastle Uni”
John snorted. “I could tell you a story about the Poly…”
“They already told me. City Uni etc, yeah? Yes, I’m gay, and it’s odd telling that to a stranger when I can’t tell Mam. Very odd feeling…but what I wanted was to get a long way from home, somewhere I could see about being a bit more open, yeah”
John understood. “And somewhere you’d have a bolthole if it went tits up, aye? Sorry, Mrs Carter”
“Norma, from now on, aye?”
“Aye. Ta. So you’d have Norma here, and Neil as well? Aye, back-up, support, like”
“Yes, and maybe a bit of advice from Neil, as well”
Another snort from John. “Aye, as long as it doesn’t involve introducing you to every bloody club on the scene!”
Neil shook his head. “I sort of went off clubbing after the last couple of attacks. I take life a bit quieter now, if you see what I mean.”
“Aye, I do. I went a bit wild myself, like, when they kicked us out the Army, but with our Jim, and Mam’s health, like, I sort of gave up on all that”
Larinda asked the obvious question. He sighed.
“Dementia, aye? She’s still there, sometimes, but she loses days. We gave up about six months ago and she’s in a home over Ponteland way. Both of us have to work, and it wasn’t safe. She’d try and do things, and then she’d forget, and, well, it’s proper care there. Took us a while to find the right one, like, but it still feels…feels like failure, aye? I should be able to care for my own Mam, not have to hire someone else”
Mam was clearly taken with that bit. “Aye, and two of mine are so far away they can’t do anything when I need it, aye? I have to rely on my youngest here. When I had my hip done, it was just our Nelly around”
“Aye, Norma, but no disrespect, like, but you are so far from demented it’s scary!"
Ralph coughed. “Aye, lad, should hev seen hor when she were a young lass, like. She were a dancer, so Ah waddent be quite so sure she wasn’t demented then, what Ah saw of hor, Ah owe!”
“Cheeky bugger, Raafie! Ah, John, back to what we were talking about, aye? If ye’re a big enough man to talk as you are, then here’s my hand on it an’aal”
More flickers in his face, and I wondered exactly how viciously life had turned on him. There were all sorts of things I had read about women like me, where a whole life had been built around an illusion of ‘normal’ masculinity, only to start falling apart as the reserves of strength drain with age, and I could see that in John. The school bully, proving his machismo in attacking anyone who might not be as properly masculine as the unwritten rules of adolescence required. The closet homosexual, pushing it further by entering an infantry regiment, a hard man’s unit at that. And then the failure, and the shame, at being found to be exactly what he had spent his youth attacking. I wondered; was it just a quick fumble, simple sex, or was it something bigger, some affection that his loneliness had finally found? It was odd; I would never forgive him for what he had done to me so often, but I could almost understand it, despite the different routes we had chosen to express our pain. Internal, external.
Raafie brought me back to Earth. “How, my glass has emptied itsel’ “
John rose. “I’ll get these. Rachel, want to gie’s a hand?”
“Why me?”
“Cause it makes our Jim smile, that’s why, and I like that”
One remark, and I realised that whatever the past had been, I actually liked this man. He had made no attempts at self-justification, merely apologising for what he had done and explaining the reasons. Other men might have pleaded special consideration, attempted to diminish their guilt, but not this one. Hands up, fair cop, can we start afresh? Will watched him go to the bar with Rachel, as Jim’s smile returned.
“Jill, was he really that nasty?”
“Oh aye, Will, absolutely. Skinhead, the works. Went off to the Army, and I had dreams, aye? Almost prayers that some arsehole from the IRA would take his head off in Belfast. I hated him, really hated him, and he knew that, and he knew what to shout, how to get me shitting myself even without touching me, aye? But look at him now. I think he broke”
The boy looked over to the bar, where Rachel was in a different pose to what I remembered, head back, tits out, but not the arrogant stance she used to slap people down. This was more flaunting than threatening, I saw, and I wondered where her thoughts were taking her. Jim was beaming, making a big show of how it was his bar, his pub, and John was just leaning on the end, watching and smiling. Will turned back to me.
“Don’t think he’s broken now, Jill. I think he could be one of the good guys”
Comments
Thanks Steph,
ALISON
'we are all frail and human,are we not? Wonderful story,again.
ALISON
it is late
It is late and i should be in bed getting my beauty sleep ,but could not go till i read another chapter of to little to late:)
ROO
ROO
People change.
But I suppose John hasn't really changed internally; just changed the way he reacted to the outside world. Shakespeare said it all when he has Gertrude say in Hamlet "The lady doth protest too much, methinks". It fits many scenarios.
Thanks
Robi
PS Confession time. I knew the quote but not which character or play so I Googled it ;) I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm clever.
People Do Change
But it can be for worse as well as better.
While things can be buried, think of the husband who later becomes a wife-beater, or the idealistic policeman who gets corrupted by the dark side. It is far more common for the good to turn cynical than vice-versa as they are exposed to the full range of human venality during the course of life.
Steph gives us a picture of some who "grow up" and face their true nature and that's valid too. That's likely more appropriate to those who frequent this site and have an epiphany at some stage in their lives.
Of course, our girl Jill collects all these wounded people the way shit sticks to a blanket (I guess I could have chosen a better metaphor :-)),
Joanne
Baggage
I said at the start that this is about baggage, the people and things one thought or wished had disappeared, but then turn up just at the worst (or best?) time. John and Jim are based on a real pairing, with the difference that the real "John" never grew up. I am writing redemption, agaib, the imagined redemption of a real ****. In reality, the 'John' original became a rather predatory homosexual, concerned largely with power as gratification. This is my sweetening of the brew.
The double-John in the characters was deliberate, a small light shining on how keen some/many folk are to see a label as an essence: you are not called what you are, but rather perceived as being what you happen to be called. Perhaps, she says modestly, that is the essence of the whole TG paradigm.
tru dat
I've thought this for some time, though never been able to put it so succinctly.
The brain is largely a pattern matching device. It records our observations of the world along with the experiences that go along with it, so that the next time something similar occurs, we have an idea of what to expect. This pattern matching leads to a tendency to categorise what we see about us, so it is very much human nature to slot everything (and everyone) into neat little categories.
Expectations attach themselves to different categories, sometimes as a result of past experience, sometimes as a result of prejudice passed down from parents or peers. Whatever the expectations, they then become the guidelines that individuals use to base their response to encounters with people or things that fit in a particular category. The label is seen as the essence, as you put it so very well.
Another trait among us, which I still maintain is more strongly (if not exclusively) male, is the tendency to polarise - to group with similar individuals and to stay away from people who are different, then from there to isolate different groups from one another. It's part of the competitive drive men have, and, in extremes, leads to prejudice and propaganda informing expectations of different groups and categories rather than actual evidence.
The TG paradigm has much in common with other persecuted groups, because expectations are based on what people are told to believe, leading to them not wanting to find out for themselves what is actually true; the polarisation has gone too far for most people to have any motivation to discover the truth for themselves. Like the very many people who don't want to touch snakes because they expect them to be horrible and slimy, they don't want to find out for themselves because they believe the investigation itself will be too unpleasant an experience.
Pretty much every group or category of people that exists could benefit from individuals ignoring their preconceptions and doing their own investigations. People with dark skin are just as intelligent and capable as people with light skin, people in wheelchairs are capable of telling you for themselves whether or not they take sugar in their tea, religious people are usual really pleasant to get to know, and not the rabid fanatics we seem so afraid of meeting (although I will own the religion is often a major cause of polarisation, which in turn has led to the prevalent modern (and from my perspective, false) view of God), short people actually do have a reason (many in fact) to live. None of this should surprise us, but when someone doesn't live up to the caricature of his or her particular category, it still causes us to wonder.
The TG paradigm is particularly hard for most people to come to terms with, in part because there are so many glaring misconceptions about it as a condition, and in part because very little actual fact is publicly known (in large part because many people are strongly adverse to listening when someone actually tries to say anything true about it).
Oops, I appear to be standing on a soapboax again. Sorry people. Preaching to the choir too which rarely has any noticeable effect other than to encourage the preacher.
Steps down, dips head sheepishly, exits stage left.
"one of the good guysâ€
Just lovely stuff. My bonnet is off to you, lass.
Dorothycolleen, member of Bailey's Angels
Some break ...
Some break never to heal, some paper over the cracks then tread lightly, some concrete over the cracks and finally, some tear the whole dammned edifice apart before drilling re-bar and rock-pins through the whole shattered mess to pin it together stronger than the original form. Even then, it's only a repair.
I have found the last to be the most enduring but it's the most costly in terms of friends and emotional resources. It still costs even now, and will continue to cost 'til my dying day. Broken rock never repairs. It took me fifty years of trying before I realised I was not 'a rock'!
Good chapter Steph. Some deep insights.
Love and hugs.
XZXX.
Bev,
Growing Old Disgracefully
...whatever the past had been, I actually liked this man...
Right to the heart of the matter. Brokenness and rebirth, forgiveness and the possibility of friendship. Something wonderful happening.