Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

But Danny’s looking sideways in the office mirror. ‘Easily.’ He slaps a hand at his throat. ‘Particularly when you think you might be getting another one.’

It’s tough life being a gay man, the way I hear it from Danny. He’s ten years younger than me but still he says, ‘On the scene, let me tell you, I’m past it.’ Not that he’s really interested in the scene. He only goes occasionally to clubs although he does do the odd personal ad and online dating.

I nag him sometimes. ‘You’re burying yourself down here in the country. You should get out more. Go up to town. Meet more people.’

He says, ‘Look who’s talking.’

He’s been pretty much single since he moved down here nine years ago, and this in part to start a new life without Doctor Jack, the big love of his life, who spent most of their time together turning him over emotionally before finally dumping him.

‘You’re getting too comfortable , too contented, that’s your trouble,’ I say to him sometimes. ‘Trust me. I know about these things. I’m a spinsta.’

Sometimes I’ll wave exotic job ads in front of him, and he’ll take them with a show of interest but somehow he never applies for them. More often than not he’ll use his parents as an excuse. ‘I like to be near them.’

Danny loves his parents, not least because of the way his father handled Danny’s coming out, which occurred with supremely bad timing at his sister’s wedding.

Danny got rather drunk at Ruth’s wedding, having not long been dumped by Jack. Thus when he was asked by an ancient aunt when he too would be getting married, he answered glumly that he couldn’t say, first because Jack had just dumped him, but more importantly because as yet it wasn’t legal. His mother, standing close by and overhearing this, thus had her worse suspicions confirmed. She promptly burst into tears, refusing to stop until Danny’s father shouted in exasperation, ‘For God’s sake, woman, stop your snivelling. The boy’s queer, not dead.’ Thus instead of pointing a quivering finger at the door and quoting Leviticus (a particularly useful Old Testament book, apparently, especially if you’re in two minds about how to sacrifice your bullock) he merely gave Danny a severe dressing-down for the way he’d broken the news to his mother.

‘Totally thoughtless.’

Which as a matter of fact, growing more penitent, not to say sober, by the minute, Danny agreed with.

Ten years later, Danny’s brother-in-law now being a high-flying academic and his sister all over the place (they’re currently en famille in America), Danny, the gay son (as is so often the case) is the mainstay of the family. Truth to tell, he plays the spinster daughter, visiting his parents once a week (they live in Bath) and accompanying them on their annual cultural trips to Europe (Italian painters, Echoes of Byzantium, etc., etc.). More often than not it’ll be some single attractive woman he makes friends with, and I can’t help imagining the disappointment they must feel with this handsome forty-two-year old, with his serious air and his cropped head and his rimless glasses. Because apart from the odd eye-rolling moment, he hates the whole campy thing and is undemonstrative in the main. A gay man would spot him, of course. Eye contact would do that. But for a straight woman … how sad.

‘Don’t worry,’ Danny says, patting my hand. ‘They soon get the picture when they realise we’re after the same waiter.’

Meanwhile there are fears from Arachnophobia to Zemmiphobia on Peter’s list. Zemmiphobia? Fear of the Great Rat?

‘Fear of the Great Rat?’ Danny shook his head, reading out from the list. ‘What the hell’s that about?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I guess if I’d had it, I’d have been ready for Lennie.’

‘Deipnophobia? A fear of after-dinner conversations. Wooh, that’s weird too.’

‘Not at all. It’s the reason I don’t do personal ads and on-line dating.’

That was when I felt a tap on my arm and found Fleur standing beside me.

The phobia clinic opening was the last place I was expecting to see her. Turned out she’d given up the art course idea, and writing a children’s book (for this, much thanks). Instead she was thinking of signing up for a course in aromatherapy.

‘I have to think of ways of making a living,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own now.’

‘Well, not exactly,’ as I said later to Cass, ‘bearing in mind Martin’s renting the flat for her, and that Fraser family money.’

But Fleur was enjoying herself, I could see that. There was a definite air of nobility about her.

‘I married so young,’ she said, a hand on her chest now and faintly tragically.

‘What?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Like she’d been given in marriage at thirteen to some European crown head.’

‘Of course, I realise it’s going to be hard at first,’ Fleur said, ‘paying my own way and everything, strange too after all our years together.’ She gave me one of those flat-faced challenging looks, the sort you get from government ministers in unsound regimes when they’re shamelessly rewriting history for the cameras. ‘I’m just so looking forward to having time to myself,’ she said, ‘to being on my own.’

‘Un-bloody-believable,’ I said, reporting it. ‘This from the woman who used to shiver at the mere thought of it.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ Fleur said, ‘how much I’m looking forward to being single .’

‘How dare she?’ I said. ‘Calling herself single .’

‘Well, I suppose she is.’

‘Not at all. She’s just claiming the title.’

But the final outrage, as far as I was concerned, was still to come. I was crossing the road from the Avalon Centre, glad to be getting away from her, when suddenly there she was again, beside me.

‘I feel wonderful,’ she said, thrusting her arm chummily through mine, making me feel like I’d been caught by a stalker. She flung her head back, face to the sun in a grand flamboyant gesture. ‘Ah … freedom,’ she said, and there it was, the final insult, the ultimate profanity.

Freedom.

My lodestar. My guiding light. Appropriated by Fleur as part of her new-found persona.

There’s a name for fear of freedom. I found it on Peter’s list. It’s eleutherophobia. A fancy word for the fear of it, but no mention – mark you – of a term for the terror of losing it.

‘I just want to feel free,’ I said to Nathan one night, not long before the end.

He said, ‘It’s just a word, Riley.’

I said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do, that’s all … go where I want to go… live the life I want to live.’

In the silence the air conditioner clattered while somewhere in the distance, a mah-jong piece was slapped down heavily on a table.

He said, ‘I’m not trying to tie you down. That’s not what love’s about, Riley.’

I don’t know why I went travelling. All in all, I could have just stayed at home. Waited for all that bead-and-bangle hippy shit to come walking up the High Street.

Still the facts of the case are that in 1972 I did what it seemed at the time like half the country was doing, at least those of my age and inclinations. I bought a large orangey-red rucksack with a steel frame that bit into my back and rose up over my head like the beak of some giant bird, packed it full of toilet rolls and soap and shampoo and salt tablets, although not all the other weird stuff – mosquito netting and the malaria pills – which Tommy, with his war service in India, insisted I’d be needing.

Some said we did this thing because of a war, others because of a lack of one. Whatever. I did the same as everyone else anyway, went on the Hippy Trail, joined that crazy, grand, absurd, pretend peace and love diaspora.