Chapter 28 - The Alien And The Second Argument

Looking back over the party and the argument that changed everything as soon as I felt strong enough to stare into that abyss, it was plain to see that I was at least as 'at fault' as anyone else among the five of us. All five of us were mobile and sociable people, and the more we did and planned our lives in ones and twos, the more we were going to drift apart from each other. We all knew that Sean had to go away to prepare for his training and he could not prepare for that and tell us all what he was preparing for at the same time. For all that I had a duller future life locally than he had planned for himself away from small town life I was not going to wait on Sean until we I found each other, so he could tell me how he planned to leave. The good that the argument did was to clear out months of low level serial miscommunication by compressing it all into one horribly heated discussion of about an hour's length. The argument simplified my life by taking away a lot of experiences that I no longer needed. The other key action of the argument was more problematic. If the five of us wanted to see each other again then it left us with difficult paths for finding each other. I never saw Jenny or Graeme again. Because my sister was family there were indirect routes to us finding each other. I saw Sean once, briefly, two years later. It was clear that he was still planning, still busy, and I was still in his bad books. I could not clear my name of the bad that he saw I had done to him. For however long I had to stay in Sean's bad books I will always be thankful to him introducing me to the cult musician Peter Hammill, who on my own I discovered to be a musical revelation. 

Also looking back, there were clues that when Sean left he would leave me behind anyway. Sometime before the party I invited him to meet my best female friend, Sue Hethershaw who I knew through CND. He got a formal invite to dinner, knew the address, the date and the time to appear. He was late and appeared with Jenny. We had been sitting waiting. When he appeared he apologised that he would have to leave early. To call his manner graceless is to put it mildly. To this day I don't know how much his knowing that Sue was a Quaker made him see her as 'religious' which made him say to himself 'I don't need this' but say it too late to back out of the dinner meeting more agreeably. He presented himself rather arrogantly as the master of the situation when he was in somebody else's house and he had been invited as a guest. I was quickly forgiven by Sue and we viewed his abrupt departure as puzzling but not worth mulling over. Through that scene I got a window into any future where we might have remained friends, it would always be me waiting for him on his terms. I'd had enough of the male sense of entitlement with how I viewed dad and I had ceased to be impressed by it. Sean was nothing like dad in character, but when Sean displayed his sense of entitlement then it hit the wrong spot with me. At the start of friendship with him everything seemed more open and fresh. Now he was gone and I had newer friends and different commitments to maintain. 

At some point after the party Mother had to be told about the party and the argument, though she half knew from my sister's absence that something was amiss. She seemed to take the news calmly on the surface. I don't know how she viewed what I told her but she knew the script, she had been thrown out for no longer fitting in with her parent's household when she was nineteen. My sister was eighteen and with the council flat and job Mother had hoped my sister would 'settle down' for a while at least, but Mother also observed that my sister had been more than restless. Mother seemed 'philosophical' about the forced departure. My mother was apt for putting French pronunciation and words on to basic English phrases, she sometimes called me 'Monsieur Malique'. I knew the French phrase that describes my sister's departure perfectly, 'Plu ca change plu ce'st le meme', the more things change the more they stay the same. We knew what had happened with Mother thirty years earlier, so my sister would find her own way back to us far more easily than Mother had found the same path back to her parents approval thirty years ago.

If Mother was opaque about what she thought of Sean and Graeme, then her opacity seemed empathetic, that was as good as I was going to get. But if for my accepting the end of knowing Sean some sort of balance was restored between Mother and I then we were mistaken.

I find that the most common miracles are miracles of everyday timing, miracles where several events connect, which gives all the events greater meaning and the power to change the course of a life than each event might have disconnected from other events, on it's own. I was still reading the details in 'Depression; The Way Out Of Your Prison', where Dorothy Rowe went into very close detail about what on the surface seemed to be verbal tricks, whether written or spoken which were much more than mere words. She took the verbal tricks at their face value and revealed that there were minds behind their face value, and what seemed like verbal tricks were more like games in which one mind played games with another mind. And she took all the games apart, game by game, move by move, rule by rule, tactic by tactic, until when the reader 'looked' at how other people and they behaved then we were all chess pieces in a three dimensional chess board of varying value where the rules were not as they were presented. 

But of all the things the book did for me, what it did was teach me patience. There was a standard faulty dynamic within my family where when family member A wanted or needed a thing of family member B, or some deed done, then B would make A wait until A got wound up and angry. Then B would say 'I would give you what you wanted but you are too angry now to receive it.'. A might get from B what they wanted much later, but by then the gift or need met seemed much reduced in value and effect for the wait, which created a sense of mistiming over the whole transaction. Then A would say to B 'It was what you wanted. Aren't you glad I got you the thing?'. B would reply 'I meant the need met to be as part of some bigger plan, but your delay meant that the plan got cancelled, the gift can no longer have the effect I wanted it to have', to which A, who half knew the plan it was intended to be part of but B did not now that, would reply 'But it was your anger that cancelled your plan. I was not part of your plan' and so the argument would make circular motions until A and B ran out of logic, good will, and civil words for A and B to say to each other.

The above applied in my family whether the argument was teenagers vs parents, parent vs parent, or as it was with me, my being gay vs me being disallowed from 'coming out', even to myself. My coming out would affect my family and family saw themselves as not needing change and before could even be discussed explicitly refusing to recognise change in family members. Mother's way of masking all this was to make the weak joke about anything 'I'll try it as long as it does not change me'. 

What the book taught me was how and why to hold my anger and tongue back, so that the next time this faulty dialogue tried to repeatedly mis-account for events I could change the process and draw a different result out of the dialogue from all the previous times it had been run. If the dialogue could be conducted calmly then the facts of the argument could be more fully and cleanly exposed much sooner. So that whoever was arguing could hide behind the old 'I could not give to you were angry' extended evasions which became effective way of obscuring the facts, blaming the other person, and making sure they stayed around by making sure they never found the genuine reasons they had for leaving.

I have shared the following story already, twice but so far without putting in the story how and why the argument turned out the way it did, which was my absorption of the Dorothy Rowe book. I was in the parental house with Mother a short time after Sean and friends had left, the flat seemed empty without them. She asked me to find the sellotape in the living room cupboard. It was bunged with things that if a charity shop had got them to sort through and sell they would think it their lucky day. She was saying something non-specific about where my sister might be and how she might be getting on. My thoughts were that even if it started very badly, my sister had a fresh start which must be worth something but at a high price. That might be why Mother and I felt oddly detached that day, we both had different views about my sister who had her own days to get on with. If Mother had asked me for an honest answer about my sister I would have said that my sister was having a lot better time away then she had been having for a long time before she left.

Whilst reaching for the sellotape and being unable to see what I was reaching into I pulled out a fourteen year old letter that had been stuffed tightly between two cloth items that felt like towels but might not have been. It detailed that in May 1972 I had been accepted for a place in a boarding school and I was to start there in September of that year. Ever since I had returned to the parental house from that school and had left the parental house since any questions I had about the school were batted away without me getting on why they were batted away. Mother had always been sufficiently cagey about what the boarding school was for and why I was sent there that I could barely tell that she was being cagey about me. This time I had the letter I had done my homework about how to conduct an argument, and with her sense of loss of my sister, Mother was caught off-guard. She had to explain from scratch what the story of the boarding school was about as properly as she could remember on the spot. With the help of Dorothy Rowe I finally understood what it was she had been covering up for years. The biggest taboo in the house was anger, it was a small house that required whoever was present to be calm, and the more and the bigger the people in it it were the quieter they had to be around each other for them all to stay.

When I was ten and too young to understand matters like space and anger in terms that seemed clear and logical to me, something I experienced outside of the house upset me enough that it was not just anger I felt. There was enough going wrong with me that Social Services had to intervene. Parents used to fear the intervention of Social Services. They dealt with trouble, so being contacted by them was a sign to the family being contacted that they were in trouble, and a sign to anyone who knew the family and knew that social services were involved with them that trouble was afoot. The trouble might be resolved discreetly, with secrecy if necessary, but it would not be resolved painlessly. My anger had to be removed and the source of it, and the memory of it removed also, removed also. To complete the erasure I was sent to 'a boarding school for the maladjusted'. A further part of the erasure became that however much I knew about language the term 'being maladjusted' resisted my understanding. No such mental health condition existed. If anyone was brave enough to dig deep enough into who used the term and why then they could conclude that it was a lay term used by Social Services and mental health professional staff on parents that covered any number of mental health conditions that a child disconnected from their surroundings. The source of the child's disturbance always originated from the culture they were part of and exposed to. Where the term got complicated was that it allowed the parents who were told it to absolve themselves of being the cause of the now disturbed child which Social Services had to accept as the price of helping the child. That the parents were partially 'to blame' for 'the maladjustment' but they could not be blamed meant where the was still blame to apportion the blame fell more on the child. That the child could not understand this at the time made the blaming of the child and absolving the parents easier to do. But what happened when children become adults, like I was doing, became where the past came back to haunt all concerned.

So, the Gordian knot of Mother's fourteen years of evasive silences about why I had been sent to the boarding school were gently untied. I found out that I was never really maladjusted, and nobody was ever 'maladjusted', and that the term was only ever a way for Social Services to temporarily take the immediate cause of the pain that a family put each other through away from that family. She was genuinely sorry that I had been sent off to boarding school for five years. There was a lot that we left unexplored but still it was a neat trick to sort-of dissolve fourteen years of evasions in about two hours. It was the reverse of the argument after the party. My next trick was where I fell, spectacularly.

With my determination and reading up about how to forensically pick arguments apart Mother and I had gotten past her 'We did our best for you' cliches and bromides, though I was still sore and tired from both Sean's and his friend's departure, and the discussion with Mother. The burden of fourteen years of secrecy was now lifted from Mother, and quite consciously, passed to me. Predictably I did not know how to carry it. Dorothy Rowe could not teach me that much and I knew nobody well enough to share the full story of what was now much more my history with anyone. I felt that anyone I knew and tried to go through the story from scratch would not think it credible, and would not want to imagine the evasions and human calculations required to achieve what Social Services achieved with me and my parents. The longer I had to carry it by myself the worse I felt.  

As it had been when I was ten years old my big problem was where to put my anger, but for different reasons to how it was back then. Now I did not know whether to be angry at the secrecy of it all, or the actuality of what happened, they were two different aspects of the same narrative. Also there was the 'the road not travelled question'. I felt that for all the time she had withheld the truth she had withheld from me who I was and who I might become. Finally, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for Mother to have lost one child, who was 'travelling' could be counted as an accident, but for her to find that a second child was not the child she had he was, for made her parenting look like carelessness. I was in shock, I felt like a live bomb with a ticking time clock on it. The only questions left were how and where I went off.

Three days later I went to the Christian arts festival 'Greenbelt' feeling vile. On the last night I dragged myself off to the counselling tent and finally got the queue for counselling. I hoped it would not be 'directive counselling' where my hopes of feeling listened were so slowly dashed that I would have left the session before realising I had been fobbed off. When I got there I recognised the name of my counsellor as the person I had been writing to and I got all the counselling I could in the one very long for my counsellor three or four hour session. I surely exhausted both the counsellor, Chris Medcalfe, and myself. After pouring out of fifteen years of grief and anger I held on to my most manageable delusion, of one day being able to train as a nurse. I had to have something to hope for and I saw that as key to my exit plan out of the small town I was stuck in. Other decisions, where to live, what to do, who to connect with, were more realistic. I did not know how what I wanted might pan out within the confines of where I was returning to. I returned home still not good company for others but for better reasons, I was feeling rather strange and light headed as many do after intense counselling. I could have done with somebody like a counsellor when I returned to check in with Mother after my time away. Up to a point I did have such a person, my compatriot in CND, Sue Hethershaw.

Sue said that she first saw me when I was five and Mother was gripping my hand. I was struggling to keep up as Mother marched through the town. She said that there was something about Mothers body language at that first sight where Sue thought to herself 'There will be trouble ahead for that young man in future.'. If she saw that and thought that then Sue was right. I first knew Sue fifteen years later when we were both in the newly formed CND and I was their first secretary. She was third secretary and it was flagging by the second half of the eighties, but when you give voluntarily you give enough and stop. It was good for me to find an ally among the older generation, but it took a lot more than a shared view of politics for us to get to know each other. Once Mother came with me to visit Suzie. I hoped with the visit that there could be some spark or creative chemistry between them. There was not. The undercurrent of quiet disengagement between them was hard to read but may have concealed a certain low key hostility from Mother. Since 1984 I had been a regular helper and a friend to Suzie. In return she treated me like the son who she had lost, and then found again. It was now her turn to help me and help both of us. Through networks that she had she found me my next flat. Like Mother's networks, local was best and my new address was two minutes walk from Sue's big and slightly derelict three storey council house in which I had painted the various rooms that were most used to cover up the effects of smoking in the house and make the rooms seem more habitable.

When I finally sat down and talked with Suzie, as she liked to be called, we agreed that the flat that Mother had found for me was the starting point of any changes that needed to be made. It was a big place that was now full of ghosts that made me feel my impermanence rather too much. I was going to have to move to another flat where the start was genuinely fresh. I was going to have to start afresh with Mother, and trust her according to her deeds rather than her words, the more prosaic of which might be trustworthy. There was nothing anyone could do about dad, so I was free to leave well alone there. The best point that Suzie made was about how the flat had played such a huge part in helping me realise the limits of friendships with people my own age and younger, and how the flat had helped me through to accept the more grubby sides of my past, which I have to say I did tell her the half of but she knew enough. The flat had also got me away from The Pentes, I no longer needed them as cover for my being gay. She said nothing about how crazy an idea it was of mine to have once thought that they were ever going to be wise counsel about homosexuality. Overall if I now had a life with a lot of holes in it then I was better off  knowing why the holes were there, than trying to fill the holes in or dress them up as something else, even when collectively they formed a history of disappointment.

I was still gay and in the closet, but now I could tell myself that I gay with greater confidence. Though from the feel of the shared life around me I was not going to get much help, much less get well informed support, from anybody locally. Not even from Suzie, who if she had said anything would said she knew little about homosexuality beyond than she always knew better than than to condemn, whatever I presented myself was. One of the mysteries that went with this new relative freedom was discovering how many women there were in the town who were my mothers age and under who liked me as some sort of male friendship, in which men took away the sexual pressure the women disliked, where what remained was an agenda that was never spelled out. I often found I liked these women when they shared an elegance and charm that was natural to them with me, and they liked to leave our exchanges at that. I understood how they wanted the paradox of 'innocent flirting', I understood the appeal of that. Even the lady who ran the local health shop had this coy, overtly asexual, but covertly suggestive, agenda in which she implied she knew more than she could say. Her manner suggested to me that she knew I was gay without the word being thought or uttered. I will never forget the day she claimed that she was putting on a promotion in her shop without saying what it was. When I went along there was this lithe black bodybuilder promoting whey as food for bodybuilders dressed in nothing more than a pair of trunks. I was one of a group of fully dressed physically unimpressive specimens that went along not knowing beforehand what the promotion was for. He did a ritual muscle flexing show he was required to in the rear corner of the shop whilst technically the shop was still open on a late Saturday afternoon. As I think of it now the whole thing baffles me. She was trying to be helpful and the display involved was more mild than freakish, and still wherever partaking of the promotion as an audience member was more about avoiding language and labels, not giving myself ownership of my own wants, and quietly colluding with the completely heterosexual vibe of the town.

I had what could be called 'The Golden Girls problem'. 'The Golden Girls' was an American situation comedy that ran from 1985-92 on UK television. When I was in the closet I thought it was hilarious to watch four single mature women (three of them single, the other one divorced from her husband) who were all over retirement age ruminate through humour about the gaps between sex and friendship. They all dated a fair number of men but always found greater companionship in each other. I had never seen 'accidental' celibacy depicted so positively and with such humour before. This often included a sheer bitchiness that was laugh out loud funny, which was rare on television. When the men that any of them met always proved to be wash-outs you could sympathise with the women, value how they supported each other and wish you had friends like that. Between them all they did a rare type of innuendo which within the confines of their tightly defined shared flat set up seemed to be designed for closeted gay men to enjoy, and see themselves reflected in. Often the humour was not in what was said, it was more in a look or a slight response. But therein lay the trap. By definition the set up had to be asexual for it to justify being inclusively funny about sex. That worked very well inside the vacuum of a tightly scripted upbeat fiction of four independent wealthy women. But I could not call in the script writers of the show to rewrite my life so that it sparkled like the lives of The Golden Girls, however much they wrote how I might want to live.

When this funny mirror of how I and others might be and live was there for twenty five minutes a week it was funnier than the rest of the week put together. The shared humour I had with the local mature women was a very pale compare with what was scripted on 'The Golden Girls', often it was no more than their wish that their husbands were less familiar with them and had more charm. I knew that there were limits to being a pleasing prop for the dreams of people who could not live how they said they wanted to live. Only once did any man make a genuinely witty comment about my situation. He was one of the pub crowd, In private he said to me 'You would make somebody a good wife.'. I liked how he upended the cliches with me, I knew what he meant. Women 'were meant to be soft', they often weren't. Men were meant to combine 'being hard' with 'being protective' and it was a mix that would not sustain much tenderness and fluidity over long periods of property ownership. The women so 'protected' often found better defending themselves.

One of the missed opportunities was my not knowing that I could have subscribed to the newish glossy monthly lifestyle magazine 'Gay Times'. It would have been a window on life across all the regions of the UK, but particularly gay life in London. I had been to London twice on day trips but it seemed to be plain big and noisy, it did not seem attractive as a place. I won't speculate on how reading ''Gay Times' might have got me nearer to greater self acceptance sooner. I would sound like the women I knew and charmed who half feared and half knew that they had married the wrong man but the decision seemed to be for life. What I can say is that had I subscribed to 'Gay Times' then I would have discovered a world where just an hour's journey on a train there plenty of places I could connect with if I knew where to start to make the connection. 

After Sean and friends left I lived for two months longer in the Trinity St flat, and living there alone did improve, but I knew I was past my limits with the place. After two life changing arguments with people who I thought were close to me where the arguments proved how wrong I was and how much I was not who I had projected myself as being, when I was with them. I was glad when Suzie found me a new flat, two minutes walk from her house. With the notice to end the tenancy given then many of the items of furniture, the paintings and whatever else was useful, that were given to me in the flood of good will just a little two years earlier that I could make good will gift of were given away. I did not feel like a bride whose wedding had been cancelled and the gifts given in advance had to be disposed of after the non-event of the wedding cancellation, but I could have felt like that.

On the last day before I handed the keys of the Trinity St flat to Mother and I was fully moving to Spring Gardens, the third and last flat I had one last look around and there was one small personal thing left in view, a bundle of letters. They were all the letters that from 1972-77 Mother had sent to me at the boarding school. After what Mother had confessed to me about how there was no stopping anything after Social Services got involved that had utterly changed how we viewed each other. I knew that the letters had changed in personal value to each of us, I no longer knew what they were worth or what to see them as. I could have seen them as sincere but doomed attempts to make amends, I could have said that they were plain cover ups for a failure that I realised now needed a lot of cover. I left the three bundles of letters behind on the mantelpiece in the Trinity St flat for the next occupant to do what they wanted with.

If  Mother had the key to the flat, and if she went in to make sure the flat was ready for the next tenant, she might have seen the letters and wondered whether I had left them deliberately or accidentally. If she saw them and took them away to keep for herself I would have been fine what. If she did find the letters and keep to herself that that she found them then whatever the letters were worth that worth had found it's place, it's true owner.

Please read Chapter 29 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.