When Love Comes to Town (9 page)

“Sorry, your names are?” Neil shouted after them when they reached the gate. Gary held his middle finger up in the air.

Neil closed the door and dashed upstairs for a shower. It was time to head to Becky’s.

As always, they went upstairs to Becky’s cluttered bedroom. Neil lay across her bed on his side, propping his head up with his elbow and letting his feet dangle over the edge. She continued to pack her rucksack while he gave her a detailed account of his exploits the previous night. There was a slight hint of I-told-you-so in her nods as he informed her that the crowd in the pub, for the most part, was exactly like the crowd you’d find in any city-center pub. She told him not to worry about Sugar Daddy, insisting that if he was that mad about him, he was hardly going to jeopardize his chances by saying anything out of place.

“So how did your own night go?” he asked eventually, remembering Becky’s date with Brian.

She turned and beamed at him. “Great. I followed your advice and treated him just like he was a friend. No heavy stuff at all.”

Neil had warned Becky not to behave the way Yvonne Lawlor had behaved with him, telling her that it would scare any bloke away.

“He’s really upset that I’m going,” she added in delight.

“Course he is.”

“All I have to do now is forget about him,” she sighed.

Neil smiled. He sat up straight when Becky’s mother came into the bedroom carrying an assortment of Becky’s clothes. They exchanged a friendly greeting. But Neil always felt awkward with her. Like his own mother, she didn’t understand his relationship with her daughter.

After her mother left the room, Becky surprised him. “A couple of the slags in my class know I’m having an affair,” she told him.

Neil didn’t know what to say.

“We were spotted by Tara what’s-her-face and a friend of hers, and as luck would have it, her friend just happened to live on the same road as Brian,” she muttered, rolling her eyes up in resignation.

But the arrival of two of Becky’s friends prevented Neil from saying anything. He grinned in embarrassment as the two girls started to discuss their sex lives in front of him. Even Becky looked slightly embarrassed. A couple of veiled, giggly references were made to the size of various bloke’s sex organs. Blokes that he knew. It crossed his mind that maybe Becky had told her friends that he was gay and that was why they were treating him like one of the girls. Then he remembered that the conversation had been equally crazy on the other occasions that he had met them. When the pair of them started to discuss the art of giving blow jobs, he began to feel uncomfortable, made up some feeble excuse, and left the house.

The afternoon sun glared down on Booterstown Avenue. Neil started to wish he had gone to Brittas Bay with the others. He reached the church, checked that no one was looking, then ducked inside. Silence. The church was empty. He shivered slightly in the coolness. Goose pimples rose on his bare arms. Why was he here? He walked up the center aisle and looked at the tabernacle. Anyone home? he felt like shouting. Long time, no see.
Compose yourself, will you. Kneel down and say a prayer. Like what? Please God, give me seven straight A’s on my finals? Or, please God, just make me straight? Make me happy? That’s it, as a birthday present, make me Mister Happy again. Turn back the clock, make me twelve years old again.

T
he night of his birthday, Neil avoided all his friends and went for dinner in Liam’s apartment in Rathmines. He knew it would cause a hassle, especially after all the birthday cards he received, and the ultra hip shirt that Gary and Trish gave him, but he wasn’t in the mood for pretense. Tonight was a special night. A night for honesty. The summer evening buzz in Rathmines fascinated him. This was student town. Carefree bicycles with two, sometimes even three, people on board whizzed past him, blatantly ignoring traffic lights and one-way signs. Music blared out of shops and passing cars. Old world three-story houses sat next to tacky fast-food restaurants with glaring neon signs. Each street corner seemed to have its own slick twenty-four hour shop with bored-looking assistants sitting at computerized cash registers. Plastic bags filled with rubbish sat in little clusters at gateways, and every doorway had columns of anonymous doorbells. Empty beer cans, chip bags, cash withdrawal slips, and burger wrappers littered the pavements. But the people here looked and behaved differently to the people he knew in Blackrock. These were country kids, who seemed to specialize in wearing clothes and hairstyles that were a couple of years out of date. Country kids whose hard-pressed parents probably fretted and worried about them. Neil liked the way they didn’t seem to care about their appearance, unlike his own friends, who spent hours in front of the mirror before they’d even venture out to the shops.

He stopped outside a record shop to listen to the song his mum had sung at Kate’s wedding.

Now the harbor light is calling

This will be our last good-bye

The clear female voice left a lump in his throat, just like his mum’s rendition had done when he was thirteen. She had ruffled his hair when she came down off the stage, but she must have noticed the glistening in his sensitive eyes. It had been the same that morning when she had given him the watch for his birthday. He had smelled her familiar perfume as she leaned forward hesitantly and kissed his cheek. Then she put her arms around him and gave him a tentative hug. His eyes were definitely glistening as he grinned awkwardly and thanked her. “You don’t look a day over sixteen,” she said jokingly, and inside him, the volcano was rumbling, bursting to tell her the secret that had mounted the invisible barriers between them. But, as always, he mumbled an excuse and made a hasty retreat upstairs to the safety of his bedroom.

The high standard of Liam’s spaghetti Bolognese surprised Neil, and after a few glasses of red wine a warm feeling glowed inside him. All his anxieties were replaced by a pleasant vagueness.

“Try it, Neil,” Jackie insisted, handing him the joint that Liam had rolled carefully. Neil hesitated; he had taken a few pulls from a joint at a house party once, and he still had a vivid recollection of the half-hour he spent leaning over a toilet bowl afterward. Ever since, the smell of the stuff had been enough to make him nauseous.

“Go on, it’s your birthday,” Liam said, smiling. Both he and Jackie were wearing odd shoes for the occasion. Neil put the joint to his mouth and pretended to take a drag. He leaned back on the tatty sofa bed as he exhaled, hoping that the others wouldn’t notice the absence of smoke.

“Good, isn’t it?” Jackie enthused.

“Cool,” Neil said in his hippie drawl, bringing a burst of drunken laughter from his dinner companions, especially Jackie. Neil knew she was delighted that he had come for dinner, and he was delighted himself when Liam and Jackie gave him the tape of Sinead O’Connor’s
Am I Not Your Girl?
to add to his collection of birthday presents. Kate and Dan had given him a rugby ball autographed by the Irish team.

“A fucking rugby ball?” Jackie exclaimed.

Liam was smiling, his eyes glassy.

“You’d swear I was still fourteen,” Neil replied with a laugh.

“What did Kate ever see in that dork?” Jackie sighed.

But the best present of all was the four hundred dollars he got in the mail that morning from his two brothers in New York, together with a note telling him to buy a plane ticket and come over for the summer. His mum had been quick to discourage this possibility, pointing out that New York was far too dangerous a place for someone his age.

“You should definitely go,” Jackie insisted when he told her. She couldn’t understand Neil’s reluctance. But later, he would tell her about the beautiful sixteen-year-old boy who, unknowingly, dictated the pattern of his life. He would tell her about how his brothers had promised to fix him up with some randy New York women, and he would explain to her that he could never tell his two brothers of his fear of this situation. They wouldn’t want to hear it.

Am I not your girl?

Am I not your girl?

Sinead’s evocative vocals flowed out of Liam’s boom box.

Neil didn’t feel nervous when he broke his news. Maybe the story gets easier with each telling, he thought as Jackie, tears streaming down her face, embraced him and kissed his cheek. Liam draped his arm around his shoulder, the way an older brother would.

“Oh, Neil,” Jackie sobbed, hugging him again, “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not that bad, is it?” Neil said, smiling at the pair of them.

“No, it’s just, I knew something was wrong,” Jackie said, holding his face with her tiny hands, her bangles falling down out over the sleeve of her blouse. “I should’ve said something to you.”

“You won’t be able to lift your arms soon with all those bangles,” Neil said, attempting to force a laugh from Jackie and Liam. He wasn’t in the mood for a heavy soul-searching session. It struck him though, that her reaction was what he would expect if he had said he had cancer.

“I love you, Neil,” Jackie muttered in his ear, and Neil had to struggle to hold back his own tears.

“Listen, Neil,” Liam spoke in his slow stoned voice, “I just want you to know, it makes no difference to me, man … that you’re like, gay.”

Neil nodded. He tried to imagine what Liam’s reaction would be if he made a pass at him. He’d probably just laugh. Liam was okay, and Neil had known that there would be no problem in telling him.

Neil told them about his sortie into the gay scene. They laughed when he told them about Uncle Sugar, but he didn’t tell them that he had seen the same Sugar’s car parked down the road from the house one night. Nor did he tell them about Ian, afraid that they might consider his blind love a bit pathetic. Inevitably, the question of telling their mum and dad cropped up.

“I don’t think it’d be a good idea,” Liam said with a smile, and Neil agreed wholeheartedly with him.

“Well, I think you should tell them,” Jackie insisted. “After all, you are their son, and they’ll just have to accept you the way you are.”

“Can you just imagine Mum?” Neil sighed.

“She’ll just have to learn to live with it, won’t she?”

“I think it’s Neil’s decision.” Liam’s was the voice of reason.

It was Jackie’s idea to go into the gay bar. And once they arrived at the pub, Neil was glad that they were with him. There was no nervousness this time.

“It’s a weird place!” Jackie exclaimed.

“No weirder than where we normally go,” Liam said in his drawl.

To Neil, the pub looked incredibly ordinary in comparison with his first night. He felt as if he was in his local place. Liam bought the drinks and Neil felt like a tour guide as he showed them around. Waves of electronic rave music, with its pumping drums, staccato, computerized vocals, and space-age noises, reverberated off the walls. Despite Jackie’s attempts to appear relaxed, Neil could sense her unease. On one occasion, he caught her staring at him. It was the same stare his mum often gave him. The “What’s wrong with you, Neil?” stare. He knew that she wanted him to grab her by the arm and reveal that it was all an elaborate hoax, that he wasn’t gay, that her little brother was just like everyone else.

Then the incredible happened. Neil spotted Redser, a bloke who had been two years ahead of him at school. Neil remembered him as a quiet, scruffy sort of bloke, who always moped around the school corridors with a glum look on his face. He was anything but that now. He was holding court at a small table before two guys around the same age as him. His face was animated, he gesticulated wildly while he explained something to his amused listeners, each of whom had their stools tilted forward to huddle in closer to the speaker. Redser was wearing a trendy red waist-jacket, a green silk shirt, and his hair was gelled back stylishly, nothing like the nondescript hairstyle he had at school. Then their eyes met. Redser nodded in recognition but Neil automatically averted his eyes.
Oh Jesus
, he thought,
what now?
He considered walking on, pretending he hadn’t seen the guy, but Jackie put an abrupt end to that possibility.

“Redser!” she exclaimed, holding her arms out and embracing the surprised-looking, red-haired giant. “I didn’t know you were gay!” Jackie was too hyper to consider the embarrassment she may have been causing. But Neil also sensed her relief at spotting a familiar face.

“I’m not Gay, I’m Redser,” Redser replied deadpan, making his two pals laugh.

“A Blackrock reunion,” Redser joked, smiling at Neil.

“If Donno could see us now,” Neil tried to sound relaxed, but inside he was a cauldron of anxiety.

“He’d probably give his left testicle to be in here with us,” Redser said with a laugh.

“Spare me the thought,” Neil grinned, conscious that Redser’s pals were giving him a good look-over.

“Let’s have some introductions!” Redser said, clapping his hands, obviously delighted with the new arrivals from his hometown. Stools were organized before Redser did the introductions. And Neil made sure he was sitting between Jackie and Liam.

“This is Dave,” Redser announced, pointing to the smiling pudgy-faced bloke with the closely cropped brown hair. Dave smiled and gave them all a nod.

“And this is Daphne,” Redser patted the head of the skinny, ultra-camp bloke with the pale complexion.

“Hi,” Daphne said in a high-pitched, effeminate voice, waving to the three newcomers.

“Daphne!” Jackie shrieked with mirth, a mirth that Neil knew was false.

“It’s Eddie really,” Daphne protested indignantly in his deepest voice, and this brought a burst of laughter from Redser and Dave.

Neil couldn’t help staring at Daphne. He was such an effeminate-looking bloke, not just physically, but in mannerisms, facial expressions, and speech. And that awful clipped accent couldn’t possibly be the way he really spoke. This put-on gay accent annoyed Neil. Why couldn’t he behave like an individual, instead of mimicking pouting stereotyped clones from some American soap? How did he ever get through school, Neil wondered, and what did his parents make of him? But Neil’s thoughts were interrupted by Jackie announcing to the assembly that today was her younger brother’s birthday. This precipitated a flurry of embarrassing pecks on the cheek from Redser and his pals, all of which, of course, were encouraged by Jackie.