It was predictable that the Friday I left Gainsborough was packed and sociable. I woke up with Alan. He was friendly but left in some haste whilst I was making my breakfast. Mid-morning Mother came and went, with her shopping trolley, taking away perishable food I had left. Later I walked a few doors up the street and said 'Goodbye' to Sue Hethershaw at her house. She was cheerful about it, as if my coming and going like this was nearly normal. Her husband, Nick, was about and distant but pleasant, as if I were interrupting his work-I was. As she put it 'You are not going away forever. You'll come back.'.
At home I checked again the boxes I had filled, took out the boxes I had part filled and stored out of sight, and since it was a sunny day put them in the yard ready for Graham to put in his car. I was at ease when Graham, leader of the Christian youth group, appeared. We very quickly used all the space in in his car that was not for the driver and passengers as we economically packed every box in it. I had only ever been a part time student in lieu of being unemployed in my home town, I was unused to support that both encouraged me to move, and supported me with the move. My family were not like that. I never recognised Graham's help as being like that of a parent who helps their new student son or daughter to move into their first digs for the first time. But that where Graham was coming from.
The ending of locking the door, putting the keys through the letter box, and setting off with Graham felt so light, it did not feel like the ending it was. The biggest change seemed to be the change in certainty levels. With my life up to leaving Gainsborough, Gainsborough was my safety net, and many times I had felt was supporting it, more than it supported me. But I could not say that without seeming churlish. A lot more could go both wrong or right now, and I would have my wits and sense of being an adult to rely upon to get me through.
My knowledge of Graham was built around how he had led the ecumenical Christian youth group, rather than sharing a car with him. In such groups the group always mattered more than the individual. I knew that there was a lot that he did not know about me and I guess I knew relatively little about him. Friendship built on the absence of knowledge might well have been more common than we realised. Discussing it might change that too much. He was a patient driver. I was surprised at how good I was at giving directions and telling him which lane to be in with the multi-lane roads. He helped me unpack my boxes and put them in one corner of the living room. At first sight they seemed an odd collection of things that jarred against the sleek modern ambience of the new house in a way I had not predicted. Graham spoke briefly and pleasantly with my new landlord and got an image of somebody who lacked maturity from him, and the impression my tenancy would not be long there. Then Graham gave me a firm hug as he said 'Goodbye'.
By 6 pm I was in the house and on my own with the landlord for the weekend. I forget his name now, I am going to call him Mike. Mike gave me a run through of the rules of the shared house, where several words came to the fore of mind that I just had to avoid saying, these words included 'bachelor pad style furniture', and 'unused kitchen' because that was what I saw. The impression of him being a show-off bachelor was further cemented with the arrival of his guests that evening, two young women; Mike's university friends who both had bank clerk type jobs. One of the women lived there. It clear to me that Mike had designs on her being more than a friend. The second young woman was her friend who was there to make sure his designs on her friend remained that-unimplemented designs. I was part of the evening but I felt tired. The two women were pleasant enough but opaque to me, at best.
My landlord worked as a junior manager for a bank. It was easy for me to excuse myself from their shop talk by recognising that how they talked was mild stuff but above my grade of benefits. The main reason Mike had the house at such a young age, about the age 25 to my by being 27, was because of special low interest loans his employer had offered him, which he thought he was putting to good use by investing the debt in property. If money had proven anything to me, then I could recognise that I was going to have a hard time proving anything to him. I had spent the last decade of my life always close to being on the dole and never earning much more than dole money levels of income when I was offered work. Most of the work I had done was on government conscription jobs. Any discussion would have been a small-town-hick-vs-city slicker type dialogue.
But first there was the beer and pizza evening with the two young women to get through, after their hard week working behind glass shutters in their demanding white collar jobs.
The evening ended on a an a beyond weird note for me, though I hid my bafflement at the time. At some point Mike put the television on and left it on ITV for the late Friday night what-to-watch-when-the-pubs-are-shut entertainment. Somewhat distractedly I watched the WWF, World Wrestling Federation, wrestling programme for that evening starting, whilst the girls contrived to ignore the television in the corner, I assume because they believed that such a well coordinated exhibition of apparently pure testosterone could only be fantasy, and whatever they fantasised about it was not television depictions of machismo.
But to me, closeted and gay, raised within macho small town values that I could not, and did not, want to copy, but which nonetheless remained the popular image masculinity. To fit in I watched the television pretending to watch partly from the perspective of the young women present, bemusement and disbelief at the WWF wrestling. As the new tag team 'The Powers of Pain', The Warlord and The Barbarian, both very big, very fit, very lean, men in black tights and boots, demolished two anonymous no hopers who were marked out as such from the start. The Warlord and The Barbarian performed with an agility that belied their size, performing somersaults and back flips before ending a very short bout. There were several more wrestling matches in that hour long programme. But to me, tired and socially out of my depth, the mix of the acrobatics, the great size and strength, the perfect finishing skills, and most importantly a pliant referee who looked the wrong way at the right moment, was such a stunningly intense, but brief, show that I'd had my fill of the whole programme with that match.
To be directed to Chapter Four please left click here.
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