Open, Heaven

2002

Autumn

I knew Thornmere was not like other places – the cities I saw on television, their buildings and roads rising and falling, or the towns around us gone ruinous after the factories closed. It was as though time had visited it just once, in the early nineteenth century. Like some industrious bird, it had busied itself there a little while, and then had flown the nest. In its wake, on its way to more interesting places, it had left the white cottages snug in a nest of canals and towpaths. The station house of the old railway, abandoned at the far edge of the village, stood now presiding over nothing but a narrow, submerged lane fragrant with buddleia and with elderflower. The village, in fact, appeared all the more swaddled for these occasional traces of industry, and from what could be spied beyond its southern perimeter: a power plant, a detergent factory, a twenty-four-hour supermarket. Thornmere’s outer reaches were crossed over by two motorway viaducts – people were always passing by, but not stopping. As far as I was concerned, it was nowhere’s junction and no one’s destination. Only the vague hum of distant traffic, and the graffitied undersides of the far canal bridges, gave any hint of a more virile life beyond.

Most of Thornmere’s five hundred or so houses were occluded by the treeline, so as the summer months came there was a sense that the village was slowly hiding itself, retreating stealthily into a lush covert. In those months, it was like a coin dropped into a field of tall grass – found occasionally by the winking sun, or stumbled across by an unlikely passer-by. No new houses had been built there for decades, and there had been no additions to the circular arrangement of the streets. Having lived there my whole life to this point, I knew all of its small passageways by heart. I could have walked from one side of the village to the other blindfolded. I knew each tree, each garden, each car on each street, each slipaway through the alleys and the broken fences. The canals, of which we had two, were my secret thoroughfares. I have never since felt so much like I owned a place; or, rather, like I was owned by it.

Time’s flight, however, went some way to explain the stagnation of the people who lived there. The millennium had come and gone, but the people looked back over the past century and saw only the apparently glorious punctuations of the two world wars. It was as if every day, for them, was a battle against the modern world. They clung to the village’s old festivals – the rush-bearing, the May Queen, the harvest – and found safety, or anchorage, in them. Change had come once and had left the people comfortable and ensconced. Like sober victors at a gambling table, they preferred not to risk their luck a second time.

This was how it was after I came out to my parents, too. In the quiet idyll of the village, I was the rupture, the punctum in the landscape. It wasn’t so much that either of them cared, or let on that they cared after the initial shock. It was the awkwardness of their friends; of Sylvia, who ran the post office; of the strangers who seemed to know me all of a sudden, though I had never spoken to them before. I knew how far the news had spread by the almost imperceptible difference between the way I was treated before and after. No one really said anything, but I could feel the tension around me, as though I would have to be rehabilitated in their eyes. In the end, I found that I didn’t have the energy for it, all the politeness, the humbleness I would have to show before I had a hope of being forgiven.

Perhaps my parents felt the same, and they also fell into a shamed silence, not wanting to stand out any more than they did now that I had attracted the pity and discomfort of their friends. They worried about me, but their worry only made me feel worse. They had chosen me over the village, and now I couldn’t be anything but perfect. In my mind, though, it was as though a veil had been lifted. Why things were the way they were, why some things were praised and others scorned, began to seem less and less a fact of life, and more and more like a collective hallucination. The pretence of childhood was gone, and the pretence of innocence with it. I had upturned their life, and then I had closed down, shutting them out, whether to protect myself or to protect them, I’m not sure. Then so much time passed that neither they nor I was able to puncture the silence. They knew I was gay, but that was as much as I told them; that is, until that year and the indignance caught up with me. I could not reconcile myself with the village, which suddenly seemed hypocritical and conservative, and I wanted everyone around me, including my parents, to see it. Because I did not feel at home anymore, I had begun to turn against it.

Towards the start of that school year, my father had come back from the pub on a Thursday evening and said that he had good news. We had hardly spoken for weeks, and he seemed glad to have lighted on an opportunity to break the awkwardness. His friend David was our milkman, and the boy who had used to help him with the morning rounds, my father told me, had broken his collarbone. ‘Rollerblades,’ my father said. He smiled, as if this explained everything, and then left a pause. I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Good,’ he said, after a few seconds, though I hadn’t replied or made any conscious gesture. I could see that he was hurt by my not responding, but I didn’t know what to say, and a sternness came back over him.

‘Well, it’ll save us money, anyway, now that you can pay for your own dinners at school. You can call David tomorrow.’

It was in the slip of the unsaid that evening that I found myself being hauled out of my bed at 5:00 a.m. the following Monday to begin my first job. At the time, it was nothing but another indignity on the road to the adult world, something that ingrained my sense of being beholden to the family, to the village. I didn’t know, then, that it might be something else, the cause of a new hope; that it would lead me, bleary-eyed, to Luke.

On that first morning, I could see my breath in the still-dark bedroom; the windows, when I drew the curtains open, had lace patterns of an early frost around the edges, and the glass had bloomed in the centre with a milky condensation. It wasn’t usually this cold in late September, though the fields surrounding the village had a tendency to hold the night air longer than other places. There was a peach-coloured light outside, and the garden was still and silent. I pulled my old bike, which was covered in a layer of sawdust, out of the shed. I picked the loose, rusted chain back onto its spines, and cycled, half asleep, down the lanes to the crossroads nearest the motorway, where David was supposed to pick me up.

There were two big horse-chestnut trees there, at the entrance to the village, just past the sign that said Thornmere. They looked like guardians, towering and stooping on either side of the road. That morning, the spiked green shells were just about heavy enough for the occasional gust of wind to send a few falling down from the branches. They battered onto the roofs of cars and onto the tarmac and split open into perfect clean halves. I had locked my bike to a fence nearby, and was standing back from the trees, looking up nervously at them.

After a few minutes, I saw the milk float come heavily around the bend, and David called out to me as he slowed to a stop on the roadside. When the wheels bumped the kerb, the milk bottles in the back chimed precariously. David was in his early forties, and wore the same blue work jacket and pair of scuffed cargo trousers every morning. I thought I was probably the sort of boy he would have bullied when he was at school, which gave him an allure for me. I was unused to being alone with older men I wasn’t related to, and I didn’t know how to read their attractiveness. At first, I mistook his arrogance for good looks, but as the weeks went on, I found that he was the same as all the adult men I knew: unsure, performative, and slightly awkward when he was alone.

The seat in the front of the van was just a long black wooden box to which David had glued some cushions, and we drove along with the side doors pulled open, so the wind fluttered icily at the sides of the driving compartment. On the dashboard, David had a list of all the streets and the houses, with their orders marked down for each day, and when we were driving it was my job to read it aloud. When we turned down a new street, he would call out the name (‘Glebe’, ‘Longford’, ‘Water’) and I would list off the orders: ‘No. 32: two pints whole’; ‘No. 34: one pint skimmed’.

Although I was always groggy and cold, I liked the way the work repeated, and how most of it was carried out in silence. Before I had the job, I had never been up early enough to see David on his rounds. The milk had just appeared in the morning. Now I felt like I was part of the workings of the village – as if I were privy to some small aspect of its mechanism, and knew more about it than all those sleeping strangers in their dark houses. And I liked that those strangers, who had known something about me, who had whispered about me, did not know that I was here, and did not know that I was learning things about them, too. I could gauge their incomes by their orders; I could sneak looks inside their houses. Some of them – the wealthier ones – would order pints of orange juice as well as milk, and in other houses the mothers stayed home in the day, unlike mine, so I knew that the father had a well-paid job. If, on the morning round, we saw movement in one of the houses where a bill had not been settled, David would stop the van and come with me to knock on the door, as if he were my backup, and something about him standing there behind me, tall and strong and suddenly authoritative, made me feel briefly valued. We would wait for the light to flick on in the hallway, or for a shadow to appear behind the distorted glass. It was at moments like that when I felt what I understood was a sexual thrill in being alone with him. Hardly any of them ever answered, but it gave David and me something to talk about afterwards, and I did a good job of pretending to be on his side, which was more than I could do with my mother and father. It was then that I realised that I had started playing up to him, wanting him to like me.

We took a more or less clockwise route through the village, passing my house just after the midway point of the round. The whole family would still be asleep, the blinds drawn, and the hallway unlit, and I found it eerie now to have taken the position of that silent gift-giver, leaving the bottles at our own red door. I remember that, when I took the bottles and walked down our drive, past the neat hedge and the Japanese maple, it was always the strangest moment of the round. Although a part of me was starting to imagine that I did not belong there anymore, I still felt a pang of love, or regret, whenever the van pulled onto our street, and I would walk up to the door of our house and leave those bottles on the terracotta-tiled doorstep.

There had been times, recently, when I was sure they would be better off without me. Money was always tight, and that caused tension, but, added to that, I had become distant. Perhaps, since I had come out, I thought I had less in common with them now. Perhaps I had withdrawn out of self-protection. Either way, I felt, as I placed the bottles down and then turned to leave, something of what it would be like to be a stranger to those people, for my mother not to know me, for my father, too, and my brother, Eddie, for all of them to be asleep, not knowing that I was there, outside, half willing them to wake up, to wave to me from the window, to know that I was one of their own.

I would walk back to the van still hoping deep down that I would be proven wrong, that my mother would call my name, or open the front door, or be woken at least by the low voices and the clanging of the bottles. But then I would hop back up onto the float, and David would begin to drive down the road again, and neither my mother nor my father nor Eddie was any the wiser.

Sometimes, in the empty stretches between orders, David would try to talk to me about women, or about football, and I would have to lie my way through the conversation, sinking into a tedious fiction to cover up the fact that I wasn’t interested in any of those things, that I wasn’t a man like he was a man. Occasionally, if he glimpsed a young woman or even a schoolgirl getting dressed in an upstairs window, he would nudge me or slap my knee and say, ‘I’d give her one,’ and I would smile awkwardly, a lump in my throat. I still had no concept of what all these urges added up to. There was little cohesiveness to my own desires, which moved between boys my age and older men, attaching and failing, fixating on discrete parts of bodies and personalities and then flitting on to something else. It was like this urgent force that was so energetic it couldn’t be satisfied with any one thing. With David, I had tried to reimagine his confidences as erotic, but it never worked. I would close my eyes some nights and picture his large, cold hand reaching over and touching my knee, the unexpected brush of his palm on the crotch of my jeans. I would imagine him standing behind me at the door of one of those houses, telling me off, driving the van somewhere quiet, and then the ugly heft of him, lifting me up, but in the end, I found myself pitying him instead, and I could never get past it.