Winston walked quickly into the Park. He felt as if skeins of inky water were twisting and turning into one great river that poured, undeniable, through his head. He was exalted; he was cast down; he was electric with conviction, leaden with doubt. The Price of the Ticket – Baldwin paid the price. He would like to speak the truth like him, he would say it, speak it, sing it out – life would be simple, lived in the sunlight (life was detestable! he lived in prison …)
He’d come here regularly when he was thirteen and Elroy had bought him rollerblades. The Park meant ice-creams and heat and shade, under the trees where you lay and got your breath back. He admired his brother, and wanted to be like him.
But around fourteen, the other thing started. The sense that he was not like the others had begun to be stronger and more fixed than his vague yearnings for Elroy’s friends. He could not let himself think what it meant, because what it meant was impossible. He was a normal boy, from a normal family. A normal, God-fearing family. His father was no longer around, of course, but his mother marched them to church every Sunday, and there they stayed for two or three hours, listening to the preachers shouting from the pulpit, hammering at him till his head ached, then the waves of song washing round like balm. Sex meant sin (but he knew it didn’t, because Elroy and all the other big boys went looking for it, talked about it all the time, teased the younger ones about not getting it). Winston joined in with the foolery but he always felt he was missing something.
He fell in love with the new head teacher who came to his primary school when he was in Year 6. Mr Glover was tall and athletic – he demonstrated a sprint start on Sports Day – but best of all, he liked poetry and read them a poem every morning in assembly. When he noticed how gifted Winston was at English, he often asked him to read instead. Then Winston wrote a poem for homework so good that Mr Glover printed it in the School Newsletter. He called Winston’s mother in to see him, but she refused to tell Winston what he had said.
‘No good will come of it. I won’t do it,’ he heard her jabbering to his sisters. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ How tired Winston got of hearing that phrase.
Later, too late for him to try it, his elder sister let it out that Mr Glover had recommended he try for a scholarship to public school. ‘Mum wasn’t having it. And she right! You don’t want to go to no battyboy school.’
So he didn’t go to a battyboy school. But he still grew up clever. He still grew up different.
Unthinkable, impossible. But true, and real.
There was no one he could tell. He was completely alone. At first he thought that only white men were queer, because his brother said it was a white thing, that only white men were dirty perverts. At school, ‘battyboy’ was the worst insult, but they threw it around with perfect freedom, because they knew none of them was gay.
None of them was gay. So nor could he be.
(He sometimes found himself imagining, insanely, that his father would come home, and he could tell him everything. A father who was young, kind, all-understanding … In real life, Winston had a scanty memory of a tall grizzled man who had once been handsome with an overhanging belly and big gold chains. Elroy had once told him Dad had fifteen children. What would it be like to know your father?)
Winston had tried to go with girls. They often liked him, because he laughed a lot, and made them giggle. Because they felt safe with him, unlike his friends. Because he didn’t hassle them for sex.
Of course he didn’t. He didn’t really want them. They were hot and shrieking and smelled like his sisters. He watched the boys doing weight training. Silent concentration; sweat, muscle. They must not notice him watching them.
And so his life became a net of secrets. He had to go with girls, or his family would suspect him, but after he’d had two or three girlfriends, and had sex with them adequately, but with little pleasure, he told his brother that he had decided to follow the teaching of the Church.
‘Winston,’ said Elroy, who was in his mid-twenties, still working, then, at the Leisure Centre, where his smile and his six-pack was a hit with the world-a-girls. ‘I feel that way once a month as well. Lasts me ten minutes after the service.’
‘I mean it,’ said Winston, and he did. Though Elroy playfully beat him up.
Then Elroy had gone through his own bad times when his baby mother Desree got another man and said she never wanted to see him again, and Elroy changed completely, pining for his son, starting to retrain with the NHS, going to the Temple every other week.
Not that it had lasted, Winston thought. His brother might be crazy for Shirley now, his brother might even want to marry that girl, but he still went clubbing and saw the sistas. One or two sistas in particular. As far as he could see, Shirley knew nothing. And Elroy seemed to almost believe his own propaganda, reformed man, pillar of the Temple …
But now he’d started getting at Winston again, nudging him to come down the club with him, asking him things about his sex life. ‘Why you so close, man?’ he’d asked last week, running into Winston in the supermarket car park. ‘Reckon you running a baby mama somewhere. Now you got to make a honest woman of her.’ But underneath the jokes, was he on to something?
Winston knew his family could never accept him, never in a thousand years. So he had started to avoid them. But James Baldwin said, ‘You don’t ever leave home. You take your home with you.’ Terrible but true. He stared at the pleasant green hill before him, crowned with its ring of waving trees.
He began to walk up the side of the hill, past a bed of red tulips blazing red in the sun, stiff as soldiers, with sooty black centres. Danger; anger. He had to be himself. But they’d never, ever let him be himself.
And Elroy thought his life was complicated …
Brother, brother. Winston needed a brother. But the bredrins all hated battyboys. To think it was still actually illegal in Jamaica!
This Park had changed forever one day. He was – fourteen? Fifteen? It was high summer. There had been a row in school that day. There was an Asian boy whose name he had forgotten, perhaps because he didn’t want to remember – Ramesh, yes. The shame, the shame … He had been seen walking in the playing-fields at lunch-time with the R E teacher. The boys had suspicions of Mr Webster already. Someone had seen him buying food with a man. A dozen or so boys trapped Ramesh by the toilets after school and, with Winston watching, shoved him inside. At the last moment before he was dragged out of sight, his eyes seemed to meet Winston’s in desperate appeal, saying, please, Winston, are you like me? – and Winston could neither deny what he telegrammed, nor find the courage to answer it. He stood fixed to the spot, sweating, wincing, till the screaming started and he ran home.
Later that evening he had come into the Park and sat alone on the seat near the gates. He was going to kill himself, that was clear. He’d felt better, he remembered, having made that decision. But a young white man in jeans and a black singlet came and sat beside him. They looked at each other. Then Winston got up and followed him.
It was a kind of pattern, for the next six years. Except it lacked the beauty of regularity. And Winston could never tell his family. So he had to travel on in the shadow of the lie. And part of him went on hoping he would change. He might fall in love with – anybody. He might suddenly find he was in love with a girl, and the cramped knot of falsehood would resolve, in an instant, everything would be free and easy –
But it never happened. He knew it never would.
So he had resolved they would have to know. They would have to know, or he’d never be free. Even if they rejected him (but his worst fear was simply of hurting his mother; of watching her sit and shake and cry). He felt pity for her, then burning rage, because why should he always feel pity for others? – why should he think about his family’s feelings when they cared as little about his feelings as if he had just dropped down from the moon –?
He would tell them even if it killed him. He thought, in the end I would rather die –
His life for six years had been horribly lonely. Endless deceptions. Constant watchfulness. And he had grown weary. Too weary to bear it. They did not know him. So did not love him. They refused to know him, so could not love him. Lies, lies and loneliness.
He had tried with hints, small acts of daring. Choosing Baldwin, for example, for his third-year thesis. But his family were too ignorant to take the hint. What they did not want to see, they could not see.
So he’d asked them to the film last week. Surely Elroy or one of his sisters might come. They might see in a flash what he’d been trying to tell them. But only Shirley took up his invitation. He had still been hopeful. Would she understand? If so, maybe she would talk to his brother … He had nerved himself to tell her everything, although she was white, although she was a woman. There was something about her he almost trusted. As if she had been hurt, so would not hurt him.
Then that fule fule librarian had come along. And there was no more chance of saying anything.
He felt lonelier than ever, as he came up the hill with the low afternoon sunlight dazzling his eyes. He couldn’t see where he was going; dogs barked, birds sang, he walked blindly onwards.
Up at the top, the view opened up. Turning east was the graveyard, grey and final. He could hang himself by his belt from a tree. It would not be so terrible, maybe, up here, with the view of the city and the children’s playground, and the golden light bathing everything in kindness. Then he turned west and looked over the roof-tops, their hard, unforgiving regularity, the way they marched on to the edge of vision …
The hills could crumble into the sea. The gardens could dry and become a desert. The rooks on the plane-trees could burn to ash. This cruel city could come to dust, the people of the city run gnashing and weeping, their children’s children wither away –
But Winston’s family would never accept him. Never accept that he was gay.
He could hate himself, hang himself, hang himself. He could punish his sin, as they would wish. He looked at the branches of the nearest tree, thick and strong, but salted with green, where the leaves were coming, slowly, unstoppably –
Would they grieve? They would come and grieve. He saw ghosts of flowers underneath the tree, bunches of bitter flowers, drying. He saw his mother with her thin frail arms, clutching the trunk, being pulled away –
He turned back, and saw in the middle distance two men idling near the aviary.
Life was better than death, he knew it.
Lying was better than endless nothingness.
Could he make use of his wound, like Baldwin? For the root of suffering, the dark smothered root, was also the root of everything that lived, reaching up shining and straight into the sunlight –
Making up his mind, he left the Park, but he knew before long he would be back.