Best Gay Romance 2011, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
ONE FUNERAL AND…
LIBERTY! FRATERNITY! SEXUALITY!
PILLION
THE RED MALO (A POSTMODERN ISLAND ROMANCE)
FOOL’S MATE
FIRST ROACH POND
BAXTER’S SAPFU
LAST CALL AT THE RAVEN
AWAY IN A MANGER
PORCU MEU
YOU’RE A DOG
JULY 2002
HOW BOYS FLIRT WITH OTHER BOYS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Copyright Page
…still romancing
the Asa
INTRODUCTION:
IT’S FOR THE HEART TO HOLD FAST
Sometimes romance lasts a languorous lifetime; sometimes it’s realized in a singular, startling moment; sometimes it’s a wish that remains unfulfilled; sometimes it endures after death. So many want it in their lives; so many fear asking for it. It’s often the province of the young, but witnessing romantic elders can be transcendent. Sometimes it’s a flirtation nestled within a relationship, sometimes it’s prelude to a friendship, and sometimes it’s an emotional bonding unrealized—a romance manqué.
Romance embraces a multitude of experiences. As does Best Gay Romance 2011.
Eric Nguyen’s story of high school boys on the cusp of manhood is about confronting uncertainty. Anthony McDonald’s story of youngsters meeting again as men is about shucking expectations. Derrick Della Giorgia’s story of a well-born man and a butcher’s son is about overcoming barriers. David May’s story of a leader wooing a lesser-born—but not a lesser man—is about negotiating differences. David Holly’s story about love in collision with hate is about standing up to homophobia. Martin Delacroix’s story of one man exulting in a summer romance and another man clinging to the closet is about the release of self-liberation. Jay Mandal’s story of love blossoming after a bashing is about besting trauma. In each story, there’s the possibility of happy-ever-after—the warm, beating heart of romantic desire. (And Simon Sheppard’s story of two lovers meeting again after a separation heralds romance in the hereafter….)
Not every desire to love through a lifetime is realized: Tom Mendicino’s story of a chance encounter at Christmas is about evolving through passion into friendship. Jameson Currier’s story of a mediated encounter at a dinner party is about two paths not quite crossing. Tyler Keevil’s story of a college football player’s attraction to a literary aesthete is about gentle rejection. Shanna Germain’s story of a young man’s attraction to an older man and the role his own father plays in that longing, is about… well, that would be a spoiler. And Edward Moreno’s story of sex on the side respects how a relationship can be flexible.
So: romance is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. It encompasses a spectrum of possibilities, an infinity of beginnings, middles and ends. Whether fleeting or forever, it’s for the heart to hold fast. Read all about it here.
Richard Labonté
Bowen Island, British Columbia
ONE FUNERAL AND…
Anthony McDonald
I was just three when I first went to Endes. It’s one of the earliest memories I can reliably date, because of the five-hour train journey from London to Scotland and the fact that it snowed hard all the way up: new experiences both and guaranteed to make an impression on a small child. Uncle Max met us at Dumfries station—at the wheel of his vintage Rolls-Royce, which was another thing a three-year-old wasn’t going to forget in a hurry. Nineteen years later, I can still bring to my mind the smell of its leather seats, as clear and sharp as if they were with me now, though the car is long gone.
The rest of that visit is less clear, details overlaid by memories of another one four years later. But I remember my wonder at the sheer size of the house, a major culture shock after our own modest home in North London. And the breakfasts: Jenny softly banging the brass gong to summon everyone; then Uncle Max at one end of the long, highly polished table and Auntie Annie (who was my mother’s first cousin and the only reason for our being invited to Endes at all) at the other. Uncle Max ate differently from the rest of us: grapefruit halves, then Ryvita crisp-bread instead of toast. He was on a die-it, whatever that might be. For the rest of us it was the Full Monty: bacon and eggs with mushrooms and tomato, or grilled Finnan haddock, even for me. I’m ashamed to admit I remember the food that Jenny served us more clearly than I remembered the other people who sat around the table with us: that is, the three children of Uncle Max and Auntie Annie—my second cousins. Isabel and Marie were a few years older than me and to my eyes seemed nearly grown up. Both had flaming red hair. Their little brother Felix made less of an impression, though he was the same age as I was. His hair was almost black, not fiery red, and he was—the adults all said—shy. I remember that instead of giving you a clear view of his eyes when you looked at him, he showed you a pair of long dark lashes. No doubt we played together in the wintry garden and the big old house, but I don’t remember that.
We did play together four years later, even if a bit reluctantly. This second visit to Endes took place in early summer, and even my seven-year-old self was conscious of the beauty of the Scottish lowlands then, washed alternately, almost minute by minute, by warm sun and short sparkling showers: a countryside of emerald and diamond. The girls were now fourteen and twelve, far beyond the games of their little brother and myself, so the two of us were thrown together for the week by default. I can’t say we clicked. I thought the seven-year-old Felix was stuck-up, snooty, conceited, pompous and cold: all those adjectives (even if they were not all in my vocabulary at the time) that we use to pigeonhole those people by whom we are subconsciously, and usually unnecessarily, intimidated. (I know now, of course, that Felix felt exactly the same, back then, about me.) He didn’t speak with any suggestion of a Scottish accent; rather he had the posh and assured tones of a boy who has been put down for Eton and knows it. (He didn’t go to Eton, in fact; he went to Fettes, which is approximately a Scottish equivalent—the school, incidentally, attended a generation earlier by one Tony Blair.) I’d thought we were fairly posh, and me especially, even though there was no way I’d be going to Eton. But Felix’s degree of posh unnerved me, put me on the back foot, and so, when our week in Scotland came to an end and I left feeling I would miss so many things—the countryside, the walks with the game-keepers and the dogs, the breakfasts, the arrival in the kitchen of whole fresh salmon from the River Nith—the company of Felix was not included in the list.
A couple of years later Auntie Annie died, of cancer, at the wastefully early age of thirty-eight. I remember that my parents traveled up for the funeral, though I didn’t; I was away at boarding school. And after that there were no more visits to Endes. My parents and Uncle Max exchanged cards at Christmas, but that was all. When I was about fifteen he remarried. His new wife—somewhat improbably in the wilds of Galloway—was a woman from Argentina, called—hardly less improbably—Lolli.
In the middle of last summer, the phone rang. It was my parents’ phone, but I was living with them at the time and, because I happened to be in that afternoon and they out, I answered. It could have been—would most usually have been—the other way round, so it was just chance. Chance! What a maligned word, chance. How we undervalue it. Since that day, that moment, I have given a super-healthy respect to Chance.
The voice on the phone was unfamiliar, but once the name was given I knew exactly who it was. I hadn’t met many other people called Felix. He was phoning to say—and would I pass the message on to my parents—that his father, Uncle Max, had died. Quite suddenly, unexpectedly, but without pain or fuss. I made the usual polite noises, condolences. If there was anything any of us could do… Please let us know when the funeral was to be, and we’d make every effort to be there if we could. On an impulse, though perhaps it was just a reflex born of habit, I gave him the number of my mobile phone.
“I don’t think they’ll expect us to go all that way, you know,” my mother said, when I’d passed the message on. “Of course I’ll phone young Felix and speak to him myself, but I don’t think anyone really expects… This woman…Lolli…the second wife of a cousin’s husband, and we’ve never met. And the children… Well, okay, they’re your second cousins, but even so…”
“Well, I think I ought to go,” I said and heard myself sounding a bit over the top as I said it. “As a representative of the family, you know. On behalf of all of us. Show some support for Felix.” My mother looked at me oddly, as well she might. Felix had done very well for the last fourteen years without my support, or even any contact between us, and I’d managed very nicely without him too. My mother had never heard me mention his name, and I’d scarcely given him a thought.
But I wasn’t quite as mad as I must have sounded. I was living at home, aged twenty-one, having graduated from university in the middle of the biggest recession even my parents could remember, with no job to go to and no prospect of one. I was doing some part-time work for the Royal Mail, on special deliveries. Real fun? I’ll leave you to guess. It wasn’t surprising that I’d want to grab at the chance to get out from under my parent’s feet with a trip to Scotland. Even so, my parents might still have talked me out of it quite easily. (Simply not offering to pay my train fare might have been enough.) But then, less than half an hour later, I received quite a long text from Felix.
He actually spelled in full the words could use
And as soon as I liked.
I told my parents what Felix had said. I would take the sleeper that evening… The sleeper? Cost a bloody bomb…! Well, all right then, the overnight train. Sit up all night. Neck-ache in the morning. Arrive red eyed… My father gave in and let me use his credit card to book a sleeper-berth online.
Felix met me at Dumfries. Not in a Rolls-Royce but in a respectably mud-spattered Range Rover. It was six in the morning, so his presence was good of him. It gave me a shock to see him get out of the car and, with a question in his voice, call my name. “Jonty?” The shock was that he had grown beautiful. He hadn’t been at age three or age seven, from what I could remember, but then I’d hardly have been on the lookout for male good looks in those days. Or I don’t think I was. But now my immediate thought, the cheap, base one, which you’ve guessed already, was…Is he gay? Not, I wonder how he’s coping, what he’s feeling, losing his second and final parent at twenty-one. None of that. Simply: Is he gay? How quickly the thought springs to mind when we meet a new person that we fancy. How much longer before we ask ourselves that question when it’s someone that we don’t.
For all the northern fairness of his skin he had a look more common in South America than among Scots. It was as if he’d inherited them, against all the laws of nature, from his Argentinian stepmother, Lolli, rather than from his real mother, my Auntie Anne. His eyes were large and liquid brown, his eyelashes dark and long. His eyebrows were beautifully shaped, very dark too, as was his hair, which was curly and thick, but longer than most gay guys our age would choose. He was about an inch less than me in height (I’m five foot ten) and very slim. Though that didn’t make him particularly small, he had a delicacy of build—being small boned and finely made—that rendered him both attractively petite and, paradoxically, slightly better muscled than he was. In the same way, though his shoulders were not especially broad, they appeared so in contrast to his slender waist and narrow hips. How he might look from behind I’d have to wait to see. His voice was beautiful too, and he spoke, these days, with a very light Scots accent.
So, was he gay? I hadn’t even thought to think the question till I saw him. Now it preoccupied me, though there was nothing in his manner to suggest he was. We greeted each other with open smiles and a cousinly but perfunctory hug, then got into the car, but there was nothing in my manner to show that I was either, as I’d discovered long before now. Even my parents had been disinclined to believe it when I first told them, though in the end they were—thank heaven—very nice about it.
As we drove along, the warmth generated by our encounter and greeting dissipated somewhat. I think this was because the reality of our situation was beginning to strike home. I’d traveled four hundred miles on a whim, a whim that was joint property of myself and Felix, to spend time with a cousin I hardly knew, at a particularly delicate and difficult moment in his life and that of his immediate family. Now that I was actually here—and with the funeral itself still five days away—I was suddenly awkward, unsure about what I was here for, what I was supposed to do.
Before going to sleep in my bunk the previous night (For you dream you are crossing the Channel and tossing about in a steamer from Harwich, which is something between a large bathing-machine and a very small second-class carriage, as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) I had found myself trying to picture Endes in the throes of full mourning, but laziness and incipient sleep had given me only the scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral where Andie MacDowell marries a dour but wealthy older man in a Scottish baronial castle, and a kilt-wearing Simon Callow dies of a heart attack after dancing the Highland Fling. I’d been just awake enough to tell myself there wouldn’t be dancing. I wasn’t going to even one wedding but to a funeral, full stop.
The same uncertainty about what was to be done with me now he’d dragged me all this way must have struck Felix at the same moment as it did me. Trying to make small talk as we drove through the Galloway countryside (emerald and diamond again in the bright morning) I could feel us slipping back, becoming again the stiff, self-conscious and prickly selves we’d shown each other that last time, when we were seven. I didn’t know what I wanted in the way of a rapport between us now, but I knew I didn’t want that. I took the bull by the horns. “What do you actually want me to do, now I’m here?”
It sounded really awful. Like I couldn’t have been ruder if I’d tried. I added, in a rush to make amends, “I mean, I’m here to help out in any way I can. Just tell me what you want. I’m at your service.”
Felix had looked startled at my first question—which was fair enough—and had taken his eyes off the road for a second to look straight at me, but then, as he heard my attempt to explain myself, there came a quick smile before he returned his gaze to the road ahead and he said, “You know, I hadn’t really thought. I think I just wanted you to be here. If that doesn’t sound too stupid to say to someone I hardly know.” A hint of awkwardness clouded his voice.
“We’ve known each other nearly twenty years,” I said, wanting to ease his sudden discomfort. He would know my answer for the silly, fatuous one it was, but would recognize, I hoped, the friendly spirit behind it. The look of his last quick smile was still etched behind my eyes. He had full lips and a cute, pert nose. His smile had made his brown eyes sparkle and transformed him for a moment into a slightly larger than average pixie.
He said, “It was nice the way you spoke when you answered the phone yesterday. I’d had a whole day of phoning cousins. But you sounded different. Sorry. Forgive me. I’m a bit emotional at the moment.”
“It’s okay,” I said, wondering why he’d thought he had to apologize. It wasn’t as if he was tearing up or anything. There’d been no crack or tremor in his voice. But of course it was okay if he felt emotional. He’d lost his father just forty-eight hours earlier, an experience I’d not yet had and didn’t know how I’d deal with when I did.
Then suddenly, there it was. That moment of vulnerability, the crack in the armor of his invincible beauty, had done it for me. We hadn’t yet asked what we did for a living, if we were still students; neither yet knew even if the other was married, for god’s sake. But it was at that moment, as he turned into the long driveway, beneath the tall trees where herons precariously nested—as I suddenly remembered—that I fell for him. I had fallen for him—to mangle metaphors most horribly, but somehow no other one will do—hook, line and sinker.
Endes looked exactly the same. The gong, though silent this breakfast time, was still in the morning room; Jenny, now elderly and plump, was still in the kitchen, to welcome me with a matronly hug. Dogs greeted me as before, though inevitably not the same dogs. Formality was gone, though, especially this week that stretched awkwardly between death and funeral rite. Breakfast was not a sit-down affair today, but a casual do-it-yourself in the kitchen, like breakfast in any other busy house. Felix, though he had a hundred and one things on his mind, made sure I got fed, that I was introduced to everyone who came and went—especially to his stepmother and his two red-haired sisters and their husbands—and he showed me to my room. “It’s the one you had last time,” he said. It surprised me that he remembered. I hadn’t. Perhaps all junior ranking guests were put in that room and had always been.
Doubts about my usefulness, questions about what I was going to do, quickly melted away. Felix had to drive into Kirkcudbright to see the funeral directors and chase up the death certificate, over which there’d been some admin confusion or delay. Lolli was due to go to a meeting with a solicitor in Dalbeattie, which was in the opposite direction. She shouldn’t have to go alone. Would I…? Of course. Could I drive her car? Did I actually…? Yes, of course I could drive. Of course I would. If Lolli would direct me as we went along.
To my surprise I remembered the way into Dalbeattie from all those years before and didn’t need to be told. My passenger, dressed in smart but sober gray and white was (I was not surprised by this) surprisingly young. Uncle Max had been seventy, but his widow looked to be on the right side of thirty-five. Felix’s sisters, I’d noticed, treated her as an honorary elder sister.
