We also discover that we both went through a ‘heterosexual phase’, but giggled that this is probably quite normal for most young people, experimenting with the opposite sex, trying out the word ‘bisexual’ for a time. How dated that seems now … With immaculate timing, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ now starts to reverberate around the pub, you frown and say something disparaging about The Smiths. I’m rather shocked, and you grudgingly admit that this song is ‘OK’, and your face cracks into a wicked, teasing smile … When the pub closes we continue talking animatedly on the pavement outside. But now it’s time for us to part, and I’m suddenly indecisive, wistful, and sad about the age gap between us:
‘Well, Felipe, I’ve had a really lovely evening … Isn’t life weird sometimes? I, I was just thinking …’ I look across and your eyes encourage me to go on: ‘Well, if only you were a few years older and I was a few years younger …’
You look startled. ‘Is it a problem for you? Really?!’
‘Well, I mean … Isn’t it for you?’
‘Not at all. Dan, I’m really shocked – you, of all people! That’s so conservative!’
‘So, you mean, you’d like to …?’
‘Yes, absolutely!’
*
Our second meeting. The following day is the start of the Easter weekend, you’re in Edinburgh, I’m in Suffolk. We’re talking every day, aching to see each other again. Easter Monday, you’re back in London, going to the ballet that night, but I’ve borrowed a car, and persuade you to ‘meet me halfway’. Chelmsford station, from this day on, will never be the same again. In the drab car park, next to the bus station, completely oblivious to gaggles of teenage schoolkids, we kiss with a wild hunger, darting tongues, rooting, branching, searching. Feeling every part of our bodies alive now. Wanting more, wanting it all, but also savouring this stage, which we know is very short, and very tender … We drive east, talking non-stop, laughing. As I change gear your hand finds mine, and stays there. You ask about my text yesterday, ‘everything very beautiful here – carpets of flowers, april sunshine, baby lambs gambolling … missing you. come down tomorrow, it’s only an hour from liverpool street.’ You want to know what ‘gambolling’ means, and I smile, describing the combination of little leaps in the air and rushing around. ‘Gam-boll-ing,’ you roll the sounds around your mouth, as if tasting the word, ‘yes, I like it!’
We drive to Bradwell, I want to show you the tiny chapel. But you just want to kiss again – deeply, thirstily, like a wanderer at an oasis in the desert. Walking down the track, hand in hand, we stop at a gate to watch the lambs, and, as if on queue, they start to gambol. You find this incredibly funny, and soon we’re both doubled up. Inside the chapel you tell me of a very religious year you had at the convent when you were fifteen years old, going to Mass daily. But later you began to find Catholicism far too controlling, too judgemental. Two butterflies flap at the little window high up the wall. We walk down to the mudflats, soon finding beds of seashells, bleached in the sun. We lie down. Utterly blue sky above us. Time then becomes suspended. We are in another space, so absorbed in the moment that hours pass but we have no consciousness of time. Lying curled next to each other, gazing into the other, the strangeness of eyes up so close, kissing, whispering questions and answers, kissing again, unbuttoning, tickling, nibbling, biting. Lips, necks, stubbled cheeks … At one point you stop, look rather serious and say: ‘Dan, there’s something I have to tell you. I probably should have told you before.’ I freeze, scanning my mind rapidly for possible confessions. ‘What is it?’ I ask nervously. ‘Well, it’s quite embarrassing for me to tell you … You see, erm … I’m not much of an intellectual. I hardly read at all.’ And then you crack the widest smile, and I punch you playfully on the shoulder. ‘You fucker! You really had me worried!’ Soon you’re resting your head on my chest, and I can feel both of us slipping into sleep, hands entwined, I see your fine head rising and falling on my chest as your eyelids close.
When I return to consciousness, it comes with a surge of joy. A kind I haven’t felt for a long time. I reach out for your hair, unable to believe in your corporeality. You turn towards me, half sleeping, half waking, and I feel the tenderest brush of your eyelashes against my cheek. The tiniest touch, yet enough to overpower me. You open your eyes, and then point at something in the sky, questioning. I follow your finger. High above us, we’re astonished to see a small white bird hovering. Immediately above us. Five minutes, six minutes, maybe more. We cannot speak. Reduced to the awed sounds that children make. I’ve never seen anything like it, before, or since.
You stroke my cheek, ending at my lips again, and whisper: ‘I want to stay like this for ever. It’s like a miracle.’
‘Not like a miracle. It is a miracle.’
*
Third moment. Six weeks on. The middle of May, my birthday, and a more significant one than usual. Happiness and joy. Has anyone ever really been able to differentiate these two close friends? For me happiness is a purring, rumbling state, and joy is a burst – rapid, glorious, transient. Joy can enter into times of happiness, making delirious raids that intensify this state; but happiness has no effect on joy. It is not needed.
In moments close to death, we are told that images of your life flash before you. As if, in those seconds, memories of all that you have lived, loved, suffered are telescoped into some kind of meaning. If this is so, then for me the weekend of my fortieth birthday will surely be one of those reappearing memories. Ageing is a process of disbelief and coming to terms with absurdity; I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who feels their biological age. I certainly have never achieved this state. But this doesn’t make ageing any easier. So I hadn’t been looking forward to entering my fifth decade; it had crept up on me in a slightly shocking way. That realisation that, however you might feel, the world outside no longer regards you as young. Then, six weeks before, the night at the King’s Head happened which transformed so much. Now there is another to help me navigate this rite of passage.
On the eve of my birthday we have a drink at our favourite pub in Hackney. I’m feeling strange, wobbly about the ‘end of my youth’. I manage to express this, and you’re lovely about it, saying that everything’s in the mind, and that I’m just as young as you are in so many ways. Then you quote that wonderful Dylan line, ‘But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’. I feel a lifting. Yes, you’re right. I was older in my twenties, so much more puritanical and judgemental. Political purity seemed the most important thing when I was young. Now often I see, in any unbending political position, only the seeds of authoritarianism. So much to be done. So much to change. But let’s start with the human, the fallible. You agree passionately, that’s where all activism should start – with listening, with recognising the simultaneous imperatives – of raging against injustice, and loving each other. Then we head home. We’re almost back at the flat, at the top of my steps, and, as if to prove what you’ve just said, we start kissing animalistically there. We’re tearing at each other’s clothes, no time to close the front door properly, we’re soon fucking wildly in the hall.