Expanded excerpt from Diary, 'Thursday 2nd April 2020. George and John arrived 11.30, I had hurriedly tidied the house and boiled the kettle just before they arrived. I did not really want them to visit, I was feeling weird because of how Covid was filling the news. When they arrived I should have asked them what they wanted to drink. I made them a brew of gunpowder tea, forgetting that in earlier contact they, well George, had specified coffee.
In the media there had been worrying stories, well more unsubstantiated rumours, of the police setting up road blocks on the roads out of Belfast where they stopped all 'unnecessary journeys' by sending the drivers home. The break out of Covid meant obeying multiplying numbers of different regulations to avoid other people where ever possible, and these new regulations were all 'for our own safety'. To get around the two of them potentially being sent back home in the car they two had a shopping list from me. They had been to Sainsburys to prove his journey was 'necessary', just in case they were stopped. £24 worth of shopping was not a lot. With hindsight I think George felt coerced into doing something helpful that he did not want to do when he got me the shopping. I was thankful for the four shopping bags of groceries that they brought in.
Outside I had also lined up a bag of early rhubarb for them to take and some kindling and logs of wood for their open fire. I served tea and cake and we talked. George did what to him was his main reason for being there; he handed over to me his old fancy smartphone as a gift to me since he had got a new smartphone from John. George then went out and toured the garden, leaving John and I to take the backs of both old mobile phone and the new smartphone to try fit my old sim card in the new smart phone. My sim card was a larger size to the card that was meant to fit in the new 'smart phone'. We stopped. I was happy to shelve all further thought about the phone. Who was I going to ring anyway? I did not know why the gifting me his old phone was that important to George. He remained outside 'inspecting the garden'. I sensed that he was peeved and tense, but I could not fathom why. My brain was in a fog from the last few days news, but the fog was clear enough for me to know that asking him why he was tense was a bad idea. From experience I knew he was quite capable of being both unstoppably irrational and jealous. I had felt him being possessive towards me before and tried to keep my distance from his possessiveness whilst avoiding pointing out to him how transparently 'grabby' he was being. I did not want to think that he was trying to 'buy my loyalty' with the gift of the phone but the thought was inescapable.
George and John packed the car and left 12.30. I felt alone and relieved with them leaving. I wanted to be alone to look back on the life I had forty years ago when I had youth, I had energy, I had choice even though I did not know what my choices consisted of, and I did not know myself by my limits as well as I do now.'.
I rarely spoke with John on his own. George did not give John much chance of that, but John was always civil towards me and had been of some help to me with a laptop I owned in the past. It mattered little if John said and wrote nothing to me ever again. But it felt different when from that day on, after nineteen years of us knowing each other on and off, George never spoke to me again. He left me with two mildly disparaging emails by which to remember him. I defended myself against the substance of his emails with quite reasonable replies, but to no effect.
For several years, when he knew I was home, he habitually rang me at around 7 pm and telling what had filled his day that day. I tried to make a presentation of the little that had happened to me in return, my days had less to share in them than his did. He always got maximum drama out of what he experienced, and made me seem like a wallflower. At first when he did not ring me up to talk through 'The Archers' of an evening it seemed both odd and a relief. I could get back to my favourite radio soap opera, rather dull as it became whilst it was recorded under Covid isolation conditions. As time stretched out, so the Covid crises extended, and so did George's silence. I let the time and silence expand. I did not start it and I felt that whatever my mistakes had been with the visit, they should be easy enough to forgive given the grander scale of the weirdness that was treading the world via Covid regulations which made people frantic to turn the radio off when the news came on.
I reflected on how George and I first met, nineteen years earlier. He and I had both spent the afternoon in the then recently opened 'gay sauna', a first for Belfast, in 2001. As we walked away from the building that Sunday afternoon so we talked together since we were walking in the same direction. I was walking towards one bus stop, he was walking towards another. We found that we both knew of people that had recently met each other in the hope of being friends, or something sustainable, and the evening had not gone as expected. His life partner was one of them. My life partner was the other, me and my life partner had been together for eight years at that point, and the emotional component was strong. It needed to be at times with me since I needed a firm human anchor to be tied to, even as I might go to places like 'the gay sauna' to have my sexual needs safely met. Nobody I knew saw anything wrong with this. After all heterosexual married men had been making discreet arrangements for sex outside their supposedly monogamous marriages, based on their personal wealth, for thousands of years.
I was new to the idea of saunas, as, well, play spaces for male adults. In a previous life in a different city the play space, and area where gay men discovered that other men were gay, was in certain public toilets. I'd had many adventures in those places, some of them good, most of them rather forgettable, but for a few times the experiences were life-changing. The life changing experiences had taken me away from 'cottaging' as visiting these places was known and became part of a wider process where I sought public acceptance as a gay man. Gay men, whether they were married to women or single, were often seen to be dubious characters because the understanding of their sexuality was shunned by heterosexual society which assumed to shut down what it was careless about comprehending. Thus 'cottaging', sex in public toilets became the sexual outlet for gay men because they were 'closeted' by a heterosexual society, and the closeting-their identity being hidden or ignored-reinforced the anonymity of the sex they chose.
I was thankful that in the times of the life-changing experiences there were several high profile actors and musicians who had 'come out' as gay, Ian McKellen among them. Their stance-that 'being out [of the closet]' made them more whole as human beings and better actors etc had improved public perceptions of homosexuality.
But to fast-forward to when I first met George, when I attempted to be a friend to him. He taught me a lot that my life partner shrank from telling me. I was glad that I'd found my own way of finding out without my partner's help, it took some pressure off the relationship. When I first met George I had been volunteering on the gay helpline in Belfast for six years, I thought I knew most of what I needed to know because I had the talent sufficient to make the callers who rang the service feel less alone and keep them up to date with information about where there was to go to meet other gay men socially-the pubs, clubs, and the very few non-alcohol based meet-ups that there were.
George was an experienced attendee of saunas. He had gone to saunas in Manchester and other cities across the midlands of England when he lived in Manchester. He knew the etiquette for how to get on in these places, the hierarchy of how people there presented themselves, the labels they used, and what those present expected of others. My life partner was somewhat older than me and had missed all that. George was roughly the same age as me and showed me how to adapt in situations I had never adapted in before.
The deal between us seemed simple enough. It would sound grandiose for me to say that you have to be the change you want to see in the world, so I am not saying that. But I did want to show George the consistency of some sort of friend because I knew that firm friendship was difficult to find in the gay milieu, arguments where feuds happened often and seemingly randomly. In return he would be some sort of guide to the areas of 'the modern gay life' that so far I had missed without realising that they might have something to show me that I would be better for knowing.
I have resisted describing George, he was six foot two, or three, tall, weighed something under twenty stone, and often said that he was 'trying to lose weight'. He rarely changed in what he said and what he weighed. Only when he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes did have to change. He had to stop smoking and be more selective about what he ate, and even there he would play hide and seek with himself, or with John, over what he said ate and what he actually ate. He spoke with a soft County Antrim brogue and used a lot of expressions local to where he grew up, but he always spoke them too fast for me to catch the expression and write it down. He considered himself to be alpha male/'a top' socially where as I felt that social hierarchies always depended on something contrary to the expression of them for the hierarchies to continue. He kept his beard and hair short, when his beard turned grey he shaved it off. I am five foot ten tall, twelve stone plus and I kept my beard long even when it thinned and went grey, whilst keeping my greying hair cropped short.
I only ever lived at one address in all the time I knew him, deep in rural County Down, Northern Ireland. He and John rented whilst claiming state benefits at at least five different addresses in Belfast, minimum, and they probably rented at several more addresses that I have forgotten. For him the first problem was often that if the house was what he wanted then the rent was close to his limit, financially. But then he would find fault with the landlord-either that they were mean with money or not-so-quietly homophobic. It did not take much to make him want to move, or fall out with places that up till recently had been supportive of him. In the last place he lived that I knew of his landlord was gay so there was no homophobia there, but equally his gay landlord could be an inconsistent and contrary character. I maintained with him that the key to a successful long term tenancy is being able to trust the landlord even as you live at a distance from him, that he (it usually will be a he) will do what is right by the property and you.
To live anywhere even half comfortably George would have to be worn down to settle into the place, to end his restlessness. George and I both became teenagers in the 1970s, we both grew up in working class homes where our mental health as we grew up became a problem to our families. We both experienced that strange limbo when what was wrong got attributed solely to us, but what was wrong was between every member of the family. To confuse matters further the label applied solely to us was a non-technical term that was euphemistic at best, where the experts kept the long words, the technical terms, to themselves. So we were both labelled and for both of us the label was deceptive and inaccurate, sometimes malignly so. Second to last we were both raised on values of thrift which were more short term than they were admitted to be. Finally as adults we had to cope with the dishonest amnesia, often combined with a working class homophobia, among our relatives that we had ever been labelled and 'been difficult' when we were younger. I don't know now what acronym or mental health term I might apply to myself now. But I certainly know that if George ever found the mental health label that fitted his symptoms then he would have fought the acceptance of the label as if it were the plague, until he saw some wider gain to him in accepting it.
He once tried a course of therapy at a place where I thought he might feel okay, the donations they expected were 'voluntary'. He would have felt safe if he gave them little. But he attended the sessions intermittently and terminated the course well before it was meant to end. He decided that whilst the issue he went to them with was real enough, he wanted to preserve the issue, undealt with, as another convincing bargaining chip for when he next had to renew his claim for state benefits, including housing benefit.
It wish I could resist more firmly saying plainly that he was bipolar, or resist writing about how he told me how he got medication for being bipolar every month from his doctor, but he refused to to take it. I admit here that his insistence on giving me a smart phone and no help with how to use it, was another of his bipolar outbursts.
I could take the outbursts on subjects where we had something in common, the subject allowed us to differ and respect each others' differences. But on the subject of mobile phones we had nothing in common.
My first mobile phone was an ordinary Nokia mobile phone with a pay-as-you-go virgin sim card in it. I used it very little. I kept it charged for travel purposes mostly and for telling George where I was when I was on the bus on my way to see him in Belfast to see him. Any serious data processing I kept for my laptop. I could send text messages but I had to remember how to each time I did it. I sent messages that infrequently. If that was over compartmentalising everything then it was also keeping my communications simple, and as direct as possible.
George eventually proved right to try to get me interested in a new phone, but the way he went about it remained irredeemably clumsy and at the time I went through the change of phone I thought he was somehow jinxing me from afar. With the the first lockdown, and life on my own, the silence from George meant that the Nokia phone never rang and I had no cause to ring anyone. The following August I used it for the first time in months when I went abroad to see friends. That was when I got a message from virgin to tell me to request a new sim card as the one in the Nokia was about to expire. I managed to send the message and get them to send the sim card to my home address, whilst I was abroad. Then the phone stopped working. When the new card was sent out to my home address I got it sent to where I was, abroad. If the phone seemed not to work then I trusted that the lack of sim card was the reason why it was not working. But when I put the new sim card in the Nokia phone it still did not work. I could not work it out, and being on holiday and not needing the phone I set it aside to deal with the matter at home, much later.
Back home it became clear that the old Nokia phone had chosen the time of the change over from the old sim card to the new sim card to pack up altogether. Who would have thought such timing was likely? My adventures with setting up the smartphone to suit me took several odd turns before I simplified it all. The best thing I did to get myself better informed was go to a pawn shop where they sold reconditioned smart phones and get the sales assistant to explain to me what was smart about smartphones, and why some of the smartphones on display in the shop cost more than others. Supported functions was the short answer-the more functions the phone had that were supported remotely by the manufacturer the later generation the phone was, and the more the phone should cost.
With that explanation everything became easy to understand, the less a smartphone's functions were supported by the manufacturer the nearer the phone got to being a large sized old Nokia and the cheaper it was. Now if I had sat down with John and he had explained all that to me, instead of George behaving like a bull in a china shop..... But the break between us had to come sometime, and more friendships were to sever after the first wave of Covid, until it became quite easy for me to live at home and for the land line to not ring for days on end, and for me to not hear a live voice from another person address me for a week at a time.
Not even the live voice of some beleaguered telesales worker for whom English is their third language, and they are trying to make a living by speaking over the noise around them to make me want to buy something reciting a script from a screen which was politely over-familiar with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment