A Time for Friends (28 page)

‘Man’s inhumanity to man is endless indeed,’ Jonathan sighed, filling the dishwasher.

‘If I asked you something would you tell me the truth, son?’ Nancy said hesitantly, filling the kettle to make another pot of tea. Her heart started to pound.

‘Eh . . . yes . . . of course I would.’ Jonathan looked at her in surprise.

‘Good,’ Nancy said weakly. ‘That’s good to know because I want to ask you something.’

‘Right, fire ahead.’ Jonathan frowned, seeing how troubled his mother had become, and wondered what was up.

Nancy took a deep breath. ‘When you were young did anyone ever do anything bad to you? Anyone at school, the teachers, or the priests or the brothers? Were you ever abused?’ She
studied his face intently, her blue eyes filled with concern and dread.

It was as though time had stood still in his mother’s kitchen. Jonathan was acutely aware of the silence between them. The aroma of the meal they’d just eaten lingering in the air,
the kettle beginning to hiss as it boiled. The steady tick-tock of the clock on the wall and the light of the moon glimmering through the frosted-glass panes in the back door lent an almost surreal
air to the moment. Nancy stared at him expectantly, her hands clasped so tightly together her knuckles were white.

Jonathan swallowed hard, his heart pounding. ‘No, Mam, no priest or teacher or brother ever did anything to me when I was young,’ he answered truthfully.

‘Oh thank God for that, Jonathan. I’ve been so
worried
about it. Every time I hear something on the news now, about child abuse, I wonder did anything like that happen to my
lovely boy. I was afraid something had, and that you had to carry it alone. And I thought that was the cause of your sad moods.’ Nancy’s blue eyes glistened with tears and she fished up
her sleeve for her handkerchief.

Jonathan put his arms around her. ‘Don’t ever worry about me, Mam, I’m fine. Honest.’ He struggled to keep the emotion from his voice. He wanted to cry.

‘Did
anything
ever happen to you? I know you got into fights and scraps. I used to cry myself to sleep worrying about you when you’d come home with a black eye or bloodied
nose. Did anyone ever abuse you, Jonathan?’ She drew away from his embrace and looked up at him.

It was the moment he could have told her. His mother was no fool. She’d finally put two and two together. But how could he tell her that the neighbour she had lived beside for so many
years of her life, and who she thought of as a good person, someone on whose door she could have knocked in times of trouble, was the very one who had abused him. If Jonathan told his mother that
Gus Higgins had perpetrated the crime she feared, her peace of mind would be shattered for the rest of her life. Much as he longed to blurt out the truth he knew that he couldn’t. She too
would become a victim of Higgins if she knew the reality and that he would not allow. But it wasn’t fair either to palm her off with a flat denial, he reasoned.

‘Something did happen,’ he said quietly.

‘I knew it. I
knew
it. When I started going back and thinking about it I knew
something
must have set off those depressions. Oh Jonathan, why didn’t you come to me,
why didn’t you tell me,’ Nancy exclaimed, aghast, her face crumpling into tears.

‘Aah now don’t cry, Mam! Let’s bring our tea in beside the fire and we’ll talk about it and then I want you to put it out of your mind, because I have,’ he said
firmly.

‘Did he hurt you? Was it anyone we knew? What age were you?’ Nancy sobbed.

‘No, no, no, no one we knew,’ he lied. ‘Go in and sit down, and I’ll bring in the tea.’ He hated seeing his mother cry, hated the way her shoulders had sagged when
he’d confirmed her worst fears.

What would he say had happened him? He thought frantically, pouring their tea into mugs and sugaring and milking them. He couldn’t tell her anything like the truth. That would devastate
her completely. He’d have to make up some story that wouldn’t be too disturbing for her but yet ring true.

He shucked some chocolate rings onto a plate and put everything onto a tray and carried it into the sitting room. Even in his distressed state the sight of the soft light, the terra cotta lamps
spilling their warm pools of colour around the snug sitting room that he had decorated for his mother, gave Jonathan immense satisfaction. The fire was crackling in the grate, the yellow-orange
flames flickering and dancing, casting shadows thither and yon. He had been so looking forward to lazing in front of the fire, but now both of them were upset and the evening was not turning out as
he’d expected.

‘Now, Mam, here you go, and I want you to stop agonizing or I won’t talk to you about it, OK?’ He handed Nancy a mug of tea and offered her a biscuit. ‘Come on, take one.
The world hasn’t come to an end.’ He tried to lighten the mood.

‘You should have told me, Jonathan,’ Nancy said miserably.

‘Mam, you had enough on your plate when we were young, and besides I dealt with it.’

‘But it sent you into depressions. I’m your mother, you should have come to me,’ she protested.

‘Well I know that, but part of the depression thing was because I realized I was gay and I didn’t want to be. I just wanted to be “normal”.’ He did air quotes.
‘Whatever “normal” is. I
hated
being different. I just wanted to be ordinary.’

‘And what happened to you and what age were you? Were you a child?’ his mother asked fearfully.

‘No, no, no,’ he assured her, knowing that he was chickening out but comforting himself that it was for the best possible reasons. ‘Look, I was a teenager and I was walking
down by the train depot and this fellow jumped me and shoved me down Leyden’s Lane and . . . well basically he touched me up.’

‘God above, that must have been so frightening. You never think of it happening to boys or men. You always think of women when sexual assault is mentioned. It’s shocking.’ She
shook her head. ‘You should have gone to the police.’

‘It was different in those days. Now I would,’ Jonathan assured her.

‘And did the judo help?’

‘Oh . . . oh . . .em . . . it sure
did
,’ he said hastily, forgetting when he had concocted his story that he was trained in martial arts and his mother would have expected
him to defend himself. ‘I was able to flip him over my shoulder when I had a chance to manoeuvre and then I gave him a good kick before I took to my heels.’

‘And you didn’t know who he was?’

‘Not a clue. Whoever he was he had a couple of bruises when I was finished with him. I never saw him again.’

‘Thanks be to God I sent you to those classes.’ Nancy began to relax a little as she sipped her tea and nibbled on a biscuit.

‘They were such a help and I got great confidence from knowing I could use what I was taught if I got into a tight corner,’ Jonathan said reassuringly.

‘Well thanks be to the Holy Mother the priests and brothers didn’t abuse you, although I have to say we’ve always had very nice priests in this parish. That I know of,’
she added doubtfully.

‘We have, they’re sound. Father McManus is exceptional,’ Jonathan agreed, knowing how kind the parish priest was to the elderly of the parish.

‘You should have told me though. And I’m sorry I didn’t realize the difficulties you were going through about being gay. I didn’t really know what being gay was, when you
were young. Things like that weren’t spoken about in our day. And being gay meant being happy and carefree,’ she added wryly. ‘I just thought you were a gentle child who liked
playing with girls and doing girlish things. I thought that was because you had no male influence in your life, because of your daddy dying when you were just a toddler. And then when I
did
realize what it was all about I wondered was it because of anything I did or didn’t do.’ She gazed at him, distraught. ‘I feel I failed you.’

‘No, Mam. You didn’t,
ever
. You did great. Even if Dad were alive, I’d still be gay. It’s who I am.’ He knelt beside her chair and took her hand in his.
‘Don’t ever think like that. We all have to walk our own path in life and this is mine.’

‘And do you hate it? Is it a burden to you? Are you unhappy?’ she asked earnestly.

‘I did hate it at first. I hated myself, and it
was
a burden when I was young and had to hide it, especially here in Rosslara,’ he admitted. ‘And when I started
working first, I had a boss who was homophobic and he gave me a very hard time—’

‘I hope you reported him,’ Nancy bristled.

‘Oh I sorted him, don’t you worry!’ Jonathan said grimly. ‘But I’ve made great friends in Dublin. Hilary and Kenny and Russell, you know them. And I go to a great
counsellor called Hannah Harrison. You’d love her, Mam. She’s amazing. She’s made me look at everything so differently. If my boss hadn’t bullied me, for example, I might
have got stuck in a rut in the Civil Service, but because of him I was determined that no one would treat me like that again and it motivated me to do the interviews and climb up the grade scale.
So Hannah says that on a soul level he was a great teacher for me in many ways. His homophobia made me stand up for myself and gave me the kick in the ass I needed to move upwards.’

‘Oh! Well that’s an unusual way to look at it, I suppose,’ Nancy said dubiously.

‘Yeah, she makes you think about stuff differently.’ Jonathan stood up and went and sprawled on the sofa. ‘She believes in reincarnation. And she says we come to teach each
other lessons in life to advance ourselves spiritually.’

‘And do you believe in reincarnation?’ Nancy asked, thinking that she would have chosen for her husband to live, and not to have spent most of her adult life as a widow, if
she’d truly had a choice.

‘I think it makes sense, really. I’ve read a good few metaphysical books, and yes, it explains a lot.’

‘Even why you’re gay?’ Nancy ventured.

‘
Especially
why I’m gay,’ Jonathan laughed. ‘I’ve been straight in other lives. It’s all about the challenge and how you deal with it and you know,
Mam, right now I’m doing fine. I truly am, so you’ve no need to worry about me. As Alice Walker, one of my favourite authors, said,
We have to own the fears we have of each other,
and then in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than what we were brought up to.
That makes such sense to me. It can refer to anything in life,
religion, politics and cultural differences. Fear of each other causes so much turmoil and violence in the world.’

‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Nancy. ‘She put it very well. It’s all about fear, isn’t it, that homophobic stuff? I mean
who
could be afraid of you?’

‘I can be pretty fierce,’ Jonathan teased. ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be able to sit and talk like this. I’m so lucky to have you, Mam.’

‘And I’m so lucky to have you, son. Just promise me you’ll never keep anything from me again,’ Nancy said sternly.

‘I promise,’ he assured her, utterly relieved that she had believed his story. It was a relief to be able to put her mind at rest too about how he felt about his life path. The
evening wasn’t a disaster after all, even if he had held back on the most horrendous events of his childhood, he decided. He had not betrayed himself. He had
chosen
not to inflict
emotional carnage on his beloved mother.

‘And you know something, Mam, I don’t define myself by being gay. That’s only
part
of who I am. I am a man, like any other, with a successful career, my own home,
great family and friends, who happens to be gay. I never feel I have to introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Jonathan and I’m gay.” I hate the fact that people feel they
have to “come out”, or others feel that gay people have to be “outed”. It’s no one’s business really. I mean you would never dream of introducing yourself as
“Nancy who’s heterosexual”, would you? All that stuff pisses me off big time.’

‘And rightly so, why wouldn’t it?’ Nancy agreed. ‘The next time I go with the parish group to an event where we meet new people I must introduce myself as “Nancy
the heterosexual”. That would make a few jaws drop,’ she laughed, tickled at the notion.

‘All these labels we hide behind. Straight, gay, upper class, lower class, highbrow, lowbrow, black, white, they’re all designed to make us forget that we are all equal, all one from
the one Source, even the ones who abuse us. That last one takes some getting your head round, I can tell you.’ Jonathan made a face.

‘But why does it happen? Why does all this evil exist in the world?’ Nancy sighed.

‘Hannah says it’s because we’ve all forgotten who we are and why we were created. She calls it “the vale of forgetting”: we come back to earth and forget what
we’ve come back to do. Life’s hard knocks are one way of getting us to remember.’

‘I like the sound of this Hannah. She has an interesting take on life.’ Nancy stretched her feet towards the fire.

‘You can say that again. She puts it up to you to stop feeling sorry for yourself, and really makes you look at it all from another perspective.’

‘I didn’t have time to be sorry for myself, but you know, before your daddy died, I wouldn’t say boo to a goose and I depended on him a lot when we married. Too much really.
And when I was widowed I
had
to stand on my own two feet and just get on with it, so his death made me a much stronger person. Was that his gift to me, I wonder? Was that the life path I
decided upon, do you think?’ She stared into the flames with a faraway look in her eyes.

‘You see, when you start looking at things differently
everything
changes,’ Jonathan exclaimed. ‘It’s not easy and you have to try hard but when it works, it
works.’

‘She sounds like a lovely lady who talks a lot of sense. In fact I might pay her a visit myself sometime,’ Nancy declared, throwing a briquette onto the fire and sending a shower of
sparks up the chimney.

Jonathan stared at his mother, astonished. Nancy had surprised him with her openness and acceptance of the esoteric teachings Hannah shared with him. He hadn’t been so accepting the first
few times she had volunteered them. He had argued truculently with her many times, affronted that she could suggest that Gus Higgins was a ‘teacher’ on a spiritual level. But she had
always given him time to absorb what she said and told him only to accept what resonated with him.
When the pupil is ready the teacher will come
. Even when you were nearly eighty, it
seemed.