Gordon’s head, resting on Tania’s left breast, rose and fell gently with her breathing. They were lying on the settee while she watched a cookery programme. She spent a large part of most days watching television, following the leading chefs and their demonstrations almost obsessively. It seemed to him there was always someone promoting a new way of eating healthily or dieting, showing how to create easily a scrumptious meal in less than ten minutes, how to feed a hungry family of five with two eggs and a cabbage.
He had little interest and was happy to have his back towards the set in the corner of the sitting room. Lying like this, nestling into the curves of Tania’s body, was what he enjoyed most. He hugged her tightly and she stroked his hair. Relaxing his arms again he let his mind wander and it drifted back, as it still did at moments like this, to that morning shortly before his eighth birthday.
His parents had closed the kitchen door, a clear sign they were going to discuss a subject that small boys were not meant to overhear. He thought it might be to do with presents, so had crept along the corridor. Even at that age he had felt that these private conversations, when he had occasionally listened, were not really discussions, but rather opportunities for his father to further dictate to his mother what she was allowed to do. Gordon picked up the end of a sentence, the Scottish accent coming clearly though the door.
‘... stop all this mollycoddling.’
‘No. It’s not right, Angus. He’s only seven.’
Her voice was raised, which scared Gordon far more than if it had been his father’s. Such a response was tantamount to a rebellion. It must be extremely serious for her to answer like that.
‘I’m not having him growing up to be queer and that’s what’s going to happen if you carry on the way you are, Margaret. You’re too affectionate. He needs to be toughened up. You’re doing him no good. I hope you’re listening to me. You know what I say is always for the best.’
Gordon didn’t catch any reply and after a while he heard weeping. His mother was the gentlest soul in the world, but she was stoical almost to the point of martyrdom and it was rare indeed for her to cry. The sound made him lose his nerve and he slipped back quietly to his bedroom. It was such an odd bit of conversation that he couldn’t make any sense of it. Who was getting too much affection? Why would this make them queer?
That evening, for the first time, Gordon had to sort himself out when it came to having his bath and there was no bedtime story. There wasn’t even a goodnight cuddle. He had changed into his pyjamas and climbed into bed as normal, then simply been left alone to go to sleep.
However, it was the next day that he was confronted with the greatest shock. He had managed to poke himself in the eye with a toy. It wasn’t anything really, but he burst into tears and ran to the kitchen where he knew his mother was making lunch and flung his arms around her waist.
After a short while, when he had quietened down, he realised that she hadn’t hugged him. There were no words of comfort. Gordon had pulled back and looked up at her, mystified. She was standing ramrod straight with her arms by her sides, staring above his head at the wall behind him, her dear, kind face a mask of conflicting emotions that made no sense.
From that day, she had never again had any physical contact with him. It was as if she had decided it was all or nothing and even a hand on a stick-like arm was too much. Although he didn’t realise, his world had changed forever, and the direction of his life set upon on a course that would invite disaster, pain and despair.
Apart from kissing a visiting aunt on the cheek, or shaking someone’s hand at Christmas, Gordon had not touched another human being for years. At school he avoided contact sports, which he hated and was useless at, while the idea of a girlfriend was so unlikely that he never considered it. The occasional punch from one of the local thugs was almost written up in his diary as a high point. They had at least acknowledged that he existed.
When he was seventeen he began to understand how his father’s phobia of homosexuals was linked to that childish incident, so long ago. One day around this time he broached the subject with his mother when they happened to be alone. It was a rare event as his father always tried to prevent this from happening. The conversation was not an easy one as such subjects were simply never referred to.
However, after they had spoken Gordon began to appreciate that, although this strange change to family life had been very hard for him, enforcing such unnatural behaviour had been incredibly difficult for his mother. A door had been so firmly bolted shut between them, it could never be reopened.
Gordon met Tania when he was twenty and his world altered completely. She had been hugely affectionate and he brushed aside the hurtful things she said or did. She was his first girlfriend while he was the ‘only person who had ever understood her’. There had followed a whirlwind romance, engagement and marriage in little over a year.
But the immense sense of loss he had felt at the age of seven was always hovering around somewhere in his subconscious, so he hugged Tania tightly again, while a voice behind him talked of oven temperatures and cooking times. She ruffled his hair absent-mindedly and he smiled, though she couldn’t see it.
Eventually, the theme music for the programme filled the room and she turned off the television using the nearby remote.
‘Was it interesting?’ he asked, without looking up.
‘Yes,’ she replied, stretching her arms towards the ceiling.
Gordon had never known her to create a meal that she had seen demonstrated by one of these famous chefs, yet he never pointed this out. There was a small library of cookery books in the dining room and she normally picked a recipe from one of three particular, rather grubby, titles, although much of what they ate came as ready-meals from the local Marks & Spencer.
‘What do you want to do tomorrow?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
His wife would never propose doing anything, apart from having people around for a party.
‘We could drive over to Amberdale Water and perhaps walk around a bit of it.’
The latter option was extremely unlikely as Tania hated walking. Gordon knew that what they would do is drive there to admire the scenery and birds, then he would suggest a short walk and she would say she didn’t have the right shoes. So they would come home again. It was like a scene from a play repeated at regular performances, but he didn’t have the strength to rewrite the script by suggesting she put some suitable footwear in the car before leaving.
‘We’ll see tomorrow,’ she said.
This was another scene. Tania never said ‘yes’ to anything straight away. He would plant an idea then they would come back to it later on. That was how things worked between them. Often the opportunity was lost. If they were in the car and passing near to a friend’s house, he would normally suggest they should call on the off-chance they might be in. She would automatically reply ‘no’; a reflex action with no thought behind it, then when they were several miles further on, and it was too late, she would say ‘well, we could call in I suppose’.
‘Amberdale is such a beautiful loch,’ he said, keen to get out somewhere that Sunday. He hated being inside too much.
When Tania pushed him off the settee it was so totally unexpected, and with such a sudden force, that his head only missed the empty wine glass by chance. Then she was on her feet, pointing at him with a quivering finger as he lay on the carpet, her nostrils flaring in rage.
‘Don’t ... you ... call ... it ... a ... loch. It’s a lake!’
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why did I call it a loch?
‘Sorry,’ he said, lifting his head and raising one hand in the air in a gesture of submission. ‘It’s just a word I’ve picked up over the years from my dad.’
‘But you’re not Scottish. You’ve never lived there. You don’t call it a loch, YOU CALL IT A LAKE!’ she screamed before storming out, slamming the door behind her.
He flopped back on to the carpet, laying one arm across his eyes and feeling utterly drained.
Stupid. Stupid.
Before initiating any conversation with her Gordon would always try to analyse what he was planning to say, whether in fact he should say anything, when he should speak and how he should do it. In this way, he generally managed to avoid igniting her temper, though he didn’t always succeed. It was the everyday conversations that tripped him up. He wasn’t fast enough in thinking through his answers to ensure he didn’t imply the wrong thing. On many occasions his mistake was never made clear to him.
He curled up on the carpet. It was inconceivable to him how, in the brief moment it took to utter one syllable, a person could change from having an everyday chat about where to visit for a couple of hours to completely losing control.
I’ll make a list of words that I mustn’t use, write them in the back of my diary. I’ll forget otherwise. I’m too stupid.
If any of his friends could see him now they would have been puzzled and shocked, horrified at the sight of a twenty-eight-year-old man lying in a foetal position on his sitting room floor, trying to identify what words he mustn’t use in front of his wife. But Gordon no longer considered it unusual. He had ended up like this so often during the latter half of their marriage that it seemed normal.
Tania was in the kitchen. He could hear her. She would be drinking and smoking; activities carried out with great enthusiasm. He found the whole concept of smoking repulsive. When they had been courting she had stopped in response to his requests, but she had restarted only days after their honeymoon. It was for her ‘nerves’. Another woman at the office was giving her a hard time. Wherever she was employed, there was someone giving Tania a hard time.
She hadn’t actually worked at all for the last three years. But she was very good, because he was so against the habit she never did it upstairs. Not once. He couldn’t fault her for that. Really, he was very lucky.
Gordon was too much like his mother; mortified at the prospect of conflict or confrontation. Tania was always telling him he should stand up to people; a rather ironic comment when you considered who was making it.
He decided to lie quietly on the floor. It was mid-afternoon, so she would soon be going for her afternoon sleep, probably when the cigarette was finished. Tania nearly always slept during the day. Sometimes at weekends he would join her because he was so exhausted.
Today he would leave her alone. He would have to work out what words he shouldn’t use in addition to ‘loch’. It worried him that he couldn’t think of any, as there must be plenty that weren’t allowed.
Eventually, he heard her slow, heavy tread going up the stairs. That was good. She was merely tired. Gordon thought it might be best to do some tidying in the garden, so that he didn’t disturb her. Afterwards she would be alright again, no doubt giving him a huge hug before making dinner then they would watch a film together. Everything would be fine. He just had to try harder and be more careful in future. That’s all.