Short story: Dust

Naturally I’m upset that Mum’s dead. She was so important to me. My mother. You only get one. What can I say? I sit with my cup of tea on an unconvincing little patio wall that looks like it was made by Sandra’s husband one Sunday afternoon, and I think, How nice the garden is looking. What are those pink things called?

Soon I will be distraught. I will be; yes, soon. It will sink in and I’ll wake up and feel absolutely devastated. But for now I’ve got more important things on my mind. Life doesn’t always behave itself. It loves to deal us hands we cannot possibly play. Or hands that we can play (because what else is there?) but in the playing, everything is lost, leaving us ridiculous, someone for children to tease and dogs to bark at.

So here I am at Mum’s funeral tea and instead of feeling knocked for six I am buoyant. For the time being I am buoyant, with a fragile joy that cannot last. The garden is glowing. Life is glowing. I have an appetite. Sandra has made not just sandwiches but wraps. I adore wraps. I first had them in Los Angeles. I just love the way you bite into them. Sandra’s made prawn and avocado, and tomato and chevre. Tea is being served by Mum’s jolly friends, venerable old ladies in Dunhill tartan skirts who have really done stuff with their lives. Their eyes are bright and beady and they are completely focussed. They see it as their role to provide backbone while close family members flail about in the icy waters of grief. Quite so. My sister Sandra, I think, is devastated. Devastated. You can see it in her hair. My brother Daniel missed the service and is due any minute. He’s about to burst through the door, handsome and sad. All the way from Florida. Just think.

Reaching for a wrap, I catch sight of myself in a mirror and see a man who has to some extent kept his figure, by which I mean, has opted to become gaunt and hollow-eyed rather than surrender to the usual outline of early middle-age. I think it is fair to say I look unloved. You can tell by looking at me that no-one helps me buy my clothes. You can tell I eat alone. I’ve got that look. You look at me and you know all about where I live: dust and white formica. A certain amount of filth in the nooks and crannies around the toilet. Shampoo brought home from guesthouses. I’ve tried cleaners. The women end up hating you and the men make the place even dirtier, leaving grimy dust-pans on kitchen worktops, unless they’re queer, in which case they end up saying It’s so hot in here, and taking their clothes off and after that they’re not really your cleaner any more, are they? If someone had told me, when I was young, that men marry out of a terror of dust I wouldn’t have believed them. But look at me now. My last cleaner was an Irishman called Connor. He was fifty, white-haired, but like me had looked after himself. In the summer heatwave he cleaned in nothing but a pair of red satin shorts. When we made love, his flesh was firm and dewy but I was annoyed. It felt nasty paying him after I had been inside him. And he was looking at me that way. That way. I said, “I’ll call you and arrange your next appointment.” Then the dust got worse and worse and eventually after three months I was desperate so I called but all I got was a guy who said, No, Connor doesn’t live here anymore and no I don’t know where he is and as a matter of fact he owes me rent. And I was disappointed, because the place needed dusting, but also relieved, because I could have ended up with some kind of weird psycho-drifter boyfriend-servant. These are the sorts of things you can tell by looking at me. You can form a fair guess that this is the way my cookie has crumbled.

From looking at me you might surmise that I go out dancing. I do. Or at least, I go out where people dance, but I no longer understand the music, perhaps because I’ve stopped taking the drugs. There’s a club called Fuck The Pain Away, which I go to, in Brighton. Drive there. A few times a year. I think it was the name that attracted me at first. Fuck The Pain Away. Marvellous. The old lie.

Perhaps I should explain.

My brother Daniel and I never looked very alike, but any resemblance there once was has long since faded. Dan’s straight, has a wife and kids and has become heavier than me. A few extra pounds keep a man looking boyish. There comes a point in life where you have to chose between waistline and face. She cooks for him every night, I imagine. Here you are, sweetie-pie, a nice dinner. Nice warm piping hot dinner on a cold winter evening. After a difficult day. Warm you up in no time. You know how much you like this one. Shall we have wine?

(You can tell from looking at me that I go to restaurants a fair amount. Two or three times a week. I like the bit where they bring your food to the table. The secret of eating alone is to bring a book; and the corollary of this, avoid candlelight.)

The thing about my brother Dan is, he is the most handsome man I have ever met. Which is what I mean by life playing tricks. I go through the motions with other studs, but it’s like I’m watching myself in a play. Date, seduction, sex. A passable performance, but you can tell from the back of the upper circle my heart’s not in it.

I shall tell you what happened and then you can judge for yourself; you can decide whether or not to bark at me. Daniel came back from his first term at boarding school and his body had suddenly changed and I was fascinated, mistakenly believing that in three years’ time the same thing would happen to me: a broadening of the shoulders, a thickening of the muscles, a whole new world between the legs. (I got the new world between the legs but the shoulders and muscles eluded me.) At Christmas we stayed at our grandparents’ and shared a bed, and when we cuddled, as we often had before, his erection was now simply too big not to become the focal point of the evening. We were embarrassed at first but we got over it. This new apparatus of his was more interesting than any of the presents either of us received that year. We did the kind of things that brothers do, and some of the things they don’t. Looking back, I would say my mistake was to take it seriously. The sex, I mean. And now here we are, both in our forties, and Daniel has three children and clean shirts and I have nothing.

When Mum sold her London flat, what happened was this. Sandra and her husband built an extension onto their pebble-dashed bungalow in Effingham. Here’s the beauty of it: the extension was a carbon copy of Mum’s old flat. The layout, the dimensions of the rooms, the windows. So she was able to move into her new home without even rearranging her furniture. All that changed was the view. Everyone thought this was a marvellous solution, although it did occur to me that if it had happened to me I might have gone mad. Mum woke up one morning and everything was in exactly the same place, only where once had been a sophisticated urban vista including the treetops of Kensington Gardens and a beautiful old red-brick synagogue, now there was just a field. But she took it well. Never was a complainer. Talking about the early years, the difficult years after Dad left, Mum would say, “Well it never occurred to one to lie down in the middle of the day and take a rest. It just wasn’t done in those days. To think about oneself. One just carried on.” For twenty years she carried on, looking after us, never taking a rest in the middle of the day, while the world around her decided that self-sacrifice was silly and old-fashioned. Dear Mum. Any natural son would be inconsolable. And I will be; give me time. But to explain why I’m not, not yet, I need to tell you about when Dad died. And I need to preface that by saying that I’m ashamed of myself.

If I described my brother Daniel to you I think you’d be less inclined to yap at me and bite my ankles. He is what you might call the male equivalent of an English rose, although by this I do not mean that he is in any way unmasculine. On the contrary. What I mean is that he represents a rare flowering of his race: a kingly beauty born to an ill-favoured, thin-lipped tribe. He is six-foot-one, blond, with a body made for the javelin and the discus and the laurel. Daniel has metallic grey eyes and wears his features in an expression of careful seriousness, as if the family madness were a dog and he its wary warden. His jaw is strong – but not square – and if you are lucky, at week-ends, you may see it dusted with a golden growth, the kind that would tickle your tongue if you licked it. He still has all his hair, and although his skin is no longer what it was, it is firm across his face and speaks of the woods and rain and sun. When he was thirteen, you see, Dad sent him to a school in Scotland known for turning boys into tough little soldiers, and at the end of five years they sent him back, and my beautiful brother had had all the doubt scrubbed out of him. Needless to say, I never made it to the spartan academy, and from this time onwards we became increasingly estranged. After three years we hardly had sex at all.

I sometimes wonder if Daniel resents me because I have chosen to live openly as homosexual. Is that how straight men feel about queers? After the shirts have all been washed and ironed and the dinner served, do they dream of another life, of spontaneous open-air sex with strangers and the lack of ties? Do they dream of keeping their bellies flat, and tight T-shirts, and pulling? I have tried to be an uncle, but have never felt entirely welcome in any of the homes Daniel and his wife have set up. (They live in Florida now, for some unfathomable reason. This is why he tends to be late for his parents’ funerals.) There has always been a certain froideur, not in what has been said, but in what has been omitted. That is how families communicate: by omission. And then again, sometimes I wonder if I terrify him, putting him in mind of the proposition that if I can be queer, so could he. And in my wilder moments – precious few – on a gin-and-tonic upswing perhaps or when pogo-ing in the front row of a Bjorn Again gig, I tell myself that it is because he loves me. All this. The froideur. LOVES me. That he is no more over me than I am over him. Yes I know it’s delusional and silly and flying in the face of the facts, but then so are a lot of things in life that turn out to be perfectly true. And actually, there has been some evidence to support my theory.

The fun thing about funerals is, you can pretend to be a normal person. You can put on normal-person drag and drift from room to dreary room eating wraps, and no-one takes you to task for not reproducing or for indefinitely extending your adolescence. All that shit tends to be reserved for weddings, where the gods of heterosexuality are on the rampage and where queers are only fractionally higher up the pecking order than staff. At funerals Thanatos holds sway and people are on their best behaviour. They are hedging their bets. Reproduction is hubris, and who knows, maybe queers are magical people after all, maybe we have information they themselves will need when the Handsome Boatman eventually comes to call. You can look suburban fathers in the eye and dare them to patronise you. Homosexuals are more visible at funerals because there is less requirement to cower. Queer uncles shyly blossom and dykey retainers frequently become the life and soul, making long speeches about the importance of this and that and assuring the women that their charms are eternal. I can see one right now; she has my Auntie Joan spellbound. “I remember you in 1960. You’d just married that difficult man. You looked so strong. Suffering makes a woman beautiful.”

I’ve been putting this off, but you might as well know. When our father died Daniel and I flew out to Australia to sell the house and wind up the estate. It was just me and him, wifeless, kidless. Neither of us wanted to sleep in the bed Dad had died in, so we ended up sharing again, just like in the old days. This was when I realised that certain clouds have silver linings. I saw his body for the first time in twenty years. Can you imagine how that felt? To have no idea what the love of your life looks like in his boxer-shorts, and then finally to get an update? On the third night I got him drunk and we broke the ice. He wasn’t much cop the first time, but the following night he was sober and did me long and hard. And when he came, he said certain things that it would be in poor taste to report, the kind of things that brothers say, and a few that they usually don’t. Of course a man deserves a wife and children, of course he does, but there are times when only a brother will do, times, for example, when the grim reaper is holding court right there on your front lawn, and you’re feeling cold and naked and afraid.

“Little brother,” he said as he came; “Never leave me.”

For ten days I had him all to myself and my joy was indescribable. And then we flew back to our former selves and the shutters came slamming down again. I went back to my white formica and he went back to being loved.

We all get a bite at the cherry. Some of us spend our lives gorging on it like maggots; others have to get by on the memory of the taste. My misfortune has been a congenital inability to pretend that my feelings are not my feelings. Love cracked me open like an egg; I have never given much serious consideration to the notion of trying to put myself back together again.

They are going to the wide picture-window and murmuring with subdued excitement. I put down my wrap and hurry to join them. A sleek black car is coming up a stubby little drive bordered by ornamental grasses that sit in clumps like exiles, displaced and despondent. The car is slowing. It has stopped. He is taking the keys from the ignition. He is checking his hair in the mirror. The door opens and he emerges. He is black-clad, immaculate.

Red-eyed.

My mouth waters and I smell cherries.

COPYRIGHT ROBERT FARRAR 2005