Sottopassaggio (11 page)

I frown. “When he was touring?” I ask. “What did
he
do
?”

Antonio licks a finger and smoothes an eyebrow. It's a strange gesture. Out of place.

“He's a dancer,” he says.

My world stops. I stare wide-eyed at Antonio. He simply stares back.

“What?” he asks me eventually. “You don't think dancers can be straight? I can tell you that the majority …”

“Hugo
Damiano
?” I say.

Antonio's eyes widen. “How do you know that?” he asks.

I shake my head and blink.

“How do you know that?” he repeats.

I smile in confusion. “I dated him,” I say.

Antonio shakes his head. “I don't think so,” he says. “He only dated me. He's straight.”

I shrug. “Well I dated him,” I say. “For 9 months.”

Antonio frowns and shakes his head. “No,” he says. “You didn't.”

“He had a
Ducati
motorbike,” I say.

Antonio shakes his head. “No,” he says again. “It can't be the same …”

“And two cats,” I continue. “Garam and Masala.”

Antonio frowns and pales a little. “OK, you know him,” he says. “But you didn't date him. I don't believe you.”

I rub the bridge of my nose. “Antonio. I went out with him for
nine
months.”

Antonio shakes his head and shrugs. “I'm sorry,” he says.

Tom frowns at me, then at Antonio. “Hey, Antonio. If Mark says he did …”

“But he has a
wife
?” I say. “Is that
true
? Are you
sure
?”

Antonio shakes his head. “It can't be the same guy.”

“Did you
see
his wife?”

Antonio nods. “Sure, and his kids. You see; it's not the same person.”

I look at Tom. He's biting his bottom lip, looking from one to the other, excited yet perplexed.

“Look. Antonio,” I say. “I don't want to get vulgar or anything.”

He looks vacantly at me.

“But his dick,” I say. “Well, it's big, and it curves to the right. It's really big. And it curves a
lot
,” I add.

Antonio stares at me wide eyed. His eyes start to glisten.

We sit in silence for a moment, each trying to reassemble the truth.

Tom speaks first, rubbing Antonio's shoulder. “Why is this so important though?” he asks, a worried tone creeping into his voice.

He looks back at me and stretches his fingers. “Why?”

I can tell that I'm flushing red as my anger mounts. “It's just a bit of a shock,” I explain.

Antonio looks up. “Yes,” he agrees. “His car was a VW, a Beetle back then, right?”

I nod. “A white one. It never worked.”

Antonio nods.

Tom shrugs. “But so what?” he says.

“It's a shock,” I say. “To find out someone you loved, someone you spent time with lied.” I shake my head still absorbing the truth of it all. “To learn that anyone can lie
that much
.”

Tom nods at me blankly, then looks back at Antonio who has slumped over the table, his forehead resting on his hands.

It's the missing information, without which our break-up could never make any sense, and without that sense, all relationships since have been compromised.

If you learn that someone can get up and walk away from the best relationship you've ever had; if you learn that apparently for no reason, anything, no matter how good it is, can just
end
, well, it makes it hard to believe, hard to trust, hard to truly give yourself over to building anything ever again.

But there
was
a reason, a reason for the mysterious trips with his brother, a reason for the private phone calls, and ultimately a reason why he dumped me.

Hugo had a wife. Hugo had a bloody wife and kids!

I'm confused. I feel both relieved and angry at the same time. Actually I'm feeling
really
angry; I almost feel the desire to punch someone.

“I'd like to go,” I say, standing. “Sorry.”

Antonio looks up at me. He too has angry tears in the corners of his eyes. He nods coldly.

“Um, I'll catch you two later then,” I say.

As I walk away, I hear them start to talk in Italian. It sounds like an argument, but then, to me, Italian always does.

As I walk home, I do a lot of head shaking. This elicits some strange looks from the shoppers, but in the end I neither strike out nor weep. In fact, by the time I get home, a peculiar feeling of amusement has developed.

The whole thing is just so ridiculous, so unbelievable. Could the idea that I dated a man with a wife and children for nine months and never even suspected the truth be anything
other
than a joke?

Back at the house, I sit staring at the wall, and gradually I realise just how many signs there were, how many indications I naively ignored.

The private phone calls “about work” that always had to be made in another room, calls that ceased if for some reason I walked into the room. The trips away with his brother to see their old grandmother;
Jesus
! The kids' toys in the cupboard, supposedly left by a friend who used to share the flat with him. It's amazing, but in half an hour, I have gone from pure disbelief to a more satisfactory understanding of our entire relationship than I could have dreamt of.

I'm actually feeling relief that there
was
a reason Hugo left me. It's been so unnerving living with the concept that the guy I loved most left me on a whim, or worse still, was
with
me on a whim.

But then I realise that with my relief comes a kick. Sure, Hugo was straight, so the reason that relationship ended was that he wanted to go back to his wife, to his children, to his old life. But he was also a liar. Someone I loved was capable of consistently, undetectably lying through his teeth every day for the best part of a year. If you can't trust the person you love the most, then can you ever really trust anyone again?

I stare at the wall, obsessively running images of my yearlong relationship with Hugo through my mind, hunting for clues. The reality gap between the Hugo I dated and Hugo, Antonio's ex doesn't, I realise, mean that my version of the truth is the false one.

Perhaps, I reason, there is a third reality, a third version of events able to encompass everything that we both believe to be true, but try as I might, and no matter how many times I sift through the images, no new data comes to light.

The phone rings, and because I am grateful for the interruption, I snatch it from the receiver, but when I hear the voice at the other end I grimace.

“He lives!” Jenny exclaims. “Jees Mark, I've been trying to call you all week.”

I silently mouth the word “
fuck
” and swallow, biding for time. “I, um … Did you?” I say unconvincingly.

“You know I did. I left enough messages,” she spits.

I wince. “Messages?” I say. “How are you ever going to pull this off?” I wonder.

“Erh,
hello
?” Jenny says sarcastically. “You know,
messages
? On your
answer-phone
?”

An idea starts to form, and I grin at the naughtiness of it.

“Answer-phone?” I repeat, suppressing the smile. “There is no answer-phone, Owen doesn't have one,” I say.

“But I left …” Jenny pauses.

“I don't know whose phone you left messages on, but it sure wasn't here,” I laugh.

Jenny pauses. “But …” she says. “Really?”

“Really,” I say.

“No, hang on,” she says. “It has Owen's voice on it,
and
his number in Australia.”

I frown, getting into my role. “Really?” I say. “I don't see …”

“Oh, I get it, he must have BT Call-minder. Oh Mark! Didn't you even know?”

“Call-winder?” I say. I bite my lip wondering if I'm overacting.

“Yeah, huh! I suppose you have been in France. Yes, English phones have a built in answer-phone,” Jenny explains. “You have to dial 1571 to access it.”

I smile at the conceit of “English phones.” My French phone has had voicemail for fifteen years.

Jenny calms down and explains the intricacies of BT Call-minder to me; how to tell if there are messages, how to consult them, delete them. I'm such a good actor I actually write the instructions down on a piece of paper. I'm feeling so pleased with myself that I forget why I didn't want to answer the phone, and so, am taken by surprise when she asks me what I have planned for the weekend.

“Nothing,” I say.

I mouth another, “
fuck
.”

“Good,” Jenny exclaims. “Well, get your party shoes on ‘cos Jenny's coming to town.”

“Oh good!” I say.

Critical Mass

As we take our seats I glance nervously at Tom and Jenny's faces. I'm having trouble imagining that the
evening is going to be a party at all; Jenny looks glassy and hermetic, Tom has a pale flushed air about him, and anticipation of the two together makes me feel stressed and twitchy myself.

“So where's Antonio?” Jenny asks.

Tom shrugs and starts to remove his leather jacket. “He's changed his mind. Tired or something,” he says.

Jenny wrinkles her nose. “Or something,” she says. “Sounds ominous, did you two …”

Tom gives her an icicle glare, freezing her mid sentence.

She glances towards the bar. “I'll get some drinks then shall I?” she asks, forcing a smile.

“Antonio's not that comfortable around my gay friends,” Tom says with a shrug.

“Really?” I say with a grimace. “It's a shame, I wanted to talk about Hugo, to fill in some of the gaps so to speak.”

Tom nods. “That's probably half the problem actually. He hasn't wanted to discuss that business at all. Not once.”

I nod. “I was pretty angry at first. But then it just started to strike me as funny.”

Tom smiles weakly. “Yeah?” he says.

“I suppose that sounds weird,” I say.

Tom shrugs. “Hugo sounds weird,” he says.

I laugh. “That's the funniest thing. He wasn't weird at all. He seemed perfectly normal, quite lovable really.”

Tom nods. “I think it dented Antonio's ego a bit. I think he liked being the only guy ever to have netted him.”

Jenny arrives with my pint and returns to the bar for the others.

I nod. “I guess you could feel that way. If you were into the whole hetero thing.”

Tom blinks slowly and works his mouth. “I'm jealous actually,” he says.

I shrug. “Well don't be. You're worth ten Hugos.”

He blushes slightly. “Yeah, but it's like, he was so important because he was
straight
.”

“
Supposedly
,” I point out.

“Yeah,
supposedly
, and Antonio was so flattered because this straight guy chose him. I guess my being with him means nothing really, me just being a big poof and all.”

I nod my head sideways to suggest uneasy agreement. “I think you're overstating it, but I know what you mean. It
is
a bit homophobic.”

“You said there's a lot of it in Italy?” Tom asks.

I nod. “I don't know whether it's because they're Catholic, or because the language barrier has cut them off from the whole gay lib movement, but so many French and Italian men have issues with their sexuality.”

Tom frowns. “That surprises me,” he says.

I shrug. “You deal with it, but it gets to be a bore. Every relationship seems to have this time bomb just waiting to self destruct.”

Tom raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“It's complicated,” I say. “But there always seems to be a moment when the parents turn up, or the little sister finds out, or some colleagues from work see you out together. There always seems to be some moment when it all goes haywire.”

Tom smiles and laughs sardonically. “Or the wife
and kids turn up.”

I nod. “Exactly,” I say.

“Still,” Tom forces a smile. “Look on the bright side. Antonio says I look like Hugo at least.”

I nod. “Yeah. I thought that too actually. You really do.”

He wrinkles his nose.

“That's not a bad thing though,” I say. “Believe me.”

Jenny sits heavily, plonking the pints on the table. She looks even bigger than during her previous visit. I almost mention it but, watching her drink a third of a pint in one sip, I change my mind, deciding it's really not my business.

“That guy has no idea how to pull a pint,” she complains.

I lift mine up. “Looks fine to me,” I say, sipping it. “Tastes fine too.”

“Yeah, well, you didn't see him do it. It took him forever.” She shakes her head and turns to Tom. “So how have you been?” she asks.

Tom nods half-heartedly. “Good,” he says. “Antonio came over, which was a nice surprise.”

Jenny nods. “Yeah, so I gathered,” she says. “He lives in Italy right?”

Tom nods. “Yeah, in Genoa, near the French border. It's quite near Mark's place actually, well, a couple of hours away.”

“Must be hard,” she says. “Living that far apart.”

Tom shrugs. “He comes over every couple of months, and usually, I go over too, so …”

I know I can't ask Tom about it again, so in my mind I
will
Jenny to do it for me, beg her to ask him how often, when he goes, why he hasn't been
recently, but she just nods and looks around the pub distractedly.

“Not as busy as the other one, the airport-lounge-place is it,” Jenny says.

“Charles Street?” I prompt.

Jenny nods.

“More of a chatting pub this one,” Tom says.

Jenny laughs. “An
ugly
pub, more like.”

“Hey,” I say. “That's not fair.”