A short story and a kind of modern parable. Not a story for those seeking some right handed action! Was it not Descartes who said: "I think, therefore I am." Some people think and feel in a different way to others. They see the world from other perspectives, and frequently the world refuses to accept that perspective as legitimate, it condemns and ostracises. I think therefore I am, but only if you think in the same way as everyone else. What are you if the world doesn't like the way you think...if it denies you the right to be who you are...disconnected from society, from self, what do you do, where do you go?
Connection Timed Out:
Michael met Stuart, it was an instant attraction sort of thing, something clicked, a connection was made, a pattern emerged; movies, dinner, walks in the countryside, shared interests.
Time moved on, they moved in together.
"Why don't I come with you?" Stuart had no family, his parents had long since passed the eternal boundary. He missed the sense of connection that linked you to some other, subliminal, part of yourself, the ancestral umbilical cord that stretched back through time.
Michael shook his head, "I'd rather go alone, maybe next time."
"You always say that, I'm beginning to think you're ashamed of me, of us."
"Don't be silly." A kiss and the issue was shelved.
More time passes. The relationship deepens, or does it merely become a habit; who's to say, and besides, not all habits are bad, are they?
Once, sometimes twice a year, Michael makes the journey to Scotland to visit the mother he speaks to occasionally by telephone, the mother that Stuart has never met, or even spoken to on the telephone.
"She just wouldn't understand about us. I really don't want to talk about it Stu."
So Stuart didn't press, they didn't talk, and time passed.
On a warm June evening, after a brief conversation, Michael gently placed the telephone receiver back into its cradle. He expected to feel something, but didn't, or if he did, he couldn't name it.
In the sitting room, Stuart heard the click of the phone as it was set back in place and continued to read. The clock on the mantelpiece did its duty, ticking a message of time passing, second by second, keeping friendly rhythm with the words on the page as they filtered through Stuart's mind. After a while, the ticking began to intrude; to move out of step, to interrupt the pattern, so that the words lost their fluency and Stuart was conscious only that time was passing, and Michael had not yet come back into the room.
Setting aside the verbal delights of Carol Shields, Stuart left Larry's Party, and rose, walking across the room into the narrow hall. Almost twenty minutes had lapsed since Michael had set the phone down. He stood by the table, bathed in a pool of evening sunlight that shone through the glass fronted door, his right hand still resting lightly on the receiver, as if he had just that moment put it down.
Unease rippled through Stuart. "Who was on the phone Mike?"
"Colin."
"Your uncle?"
"Aha," the grey green eyes registered slight emotion for a second, "he actually deigned to speak to me." The emotion, whatever it was, faded and Michael's full mouth twisted slightly.
"What did he want?"
"To tell me that my mother's dead." So matter of factly, said in a, 'isn't the weather fine for the time of year,' sort of voice.
Stuart swallowed, experiencing a flashback of pain to the moment when someone had told him the same thing. He started forward. "God, Michael, I'm so sorry, how?"
Michael neatly side stepped both the question and the intended embrace, moving towards the stairs. He didn't glance back.
"Michael?" Stuart hastened after him, only to have the bathroom door shut in his face and locked.
"I'm going to have a bath."
The tick of the clock became an unbearable noise, like nails scraping across a blackboard. A minute...ten minutes...half an hour...an hour. Stuart listened for the sound of the bathroom door opening, but heard only the ticking of the clock.
"Michael," he knocked softly on the door, "are you alright in there?"
Silence.
He knocked again, more insistently, "Michael answer me!" The sound of water draining away caused a surge of relief.
The door opened and Michael emerged, damp haired, his clothes gathered in his arms, he paused to put them in the laundry hamper that stood in a corner of the landing. Then again, without so much as a glance, walked towards the bedroom.
"Talk to me, tell me what happened." Stuart sat on the bed, stroking Michael's hair back from his brow, it seemed to relax him, though he never actually said so. The grey-green eyes stared sightlessly upwards. Stuart lay down beside the prone figure. "Mikey, please, don't shut me out."
The eyes broke their pact with the ceiling to look into his. "Suicide, she committed suicide. I'd rather not talk about it."
The kiss was unexpected...hard...urgent...cutting off words of shock and sympathy.
Thrusting forward with a moan, Stuart felt his own release echoed in the body beneath his. They lay for a moment, still joined, yet Stuart had never felt lonelier.
Disconnecting from his lover's body, he got up, going into the bathroom to shower.
Free at last, she wrote in her flowing handwriting, its elaborate peaks and troughs so reminiscent of the woman herself. When you read this, I'll be free at last.
Michael didn't show the note to Stuart, he never spoke of it to anyone. It arrived the day after he heard the news. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his wallet.
Stuart finally got to make the journey with Michael to Scotland.
"What was she like your mother?"
"I'd rather not talk about her just now."
Driving silently through muffled green countryside.
She looked peaceful in her coffin, something she'd never been in life. Whatever her mood, high, low, it was frenetic, full of power, burning, restless. Laughing, crying it swamped you, overwhelmed you. This dead creature, this empty shell was not his mother, he felt no connection, nothing.
It should be raining, thought Michael, though he wasn't quite sure why. The sky should be leaden, downcast, with water pouring and dripping through the branches of the trees. The sun had no right to shine, it was disrespectful somehow, but shine it did, from a clear blue sky. Today was a seaside day, a picnic day, not a funeral day, but death paid no heed to the weather.
Gentle fingers of warm yellow light caressed the shoulders of those who gathered around a newly dug grave. The birds sang, and the distant murmur of traffic filtered through the cemetery walls, a reminder that life marched on regardless. Michael watched, dry eyed, standing silently as the coffin was lowered into the earth. The priest intoned the final rites, then picking up a handful of soil, sprinkled it on top of the coffin, inviting the other mourners to do the same. Not that there were many: her brother, a few miscellaneous relatives, a few token staff from the hospital and himself and Stuart, who had never met her, and therefore couldn't be counted as a mourner.
Michael stood long after the others had begun to drift away, conscious of the two men waiting, just behind him, trying to be discreet, but exuding an air of impatience; spades at the ready, waiting to cover the simple pine coffin with earth. To hide from view the receptacle that contained the mortal remains of the woman who had been his mother.
"Come on Mike," an arm draped itself around his shoulders. "It's time to go now."
Michael allowed his lover to lead him away from the grave, to the cars that were waiting to take them back to his uncle's house where, for respect and customs sake, a funeral tea was laid on. He felt frozen, numb, lost in a strange limbo that stretched back to a telephone call that could have happened today, yesterday, or a decade ago, it was all one.
Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Michael had almost laughed when the verdict was announced. When had her mind ever been anything else?
He shaped his mouth into a travesty of a smile, accepting condolences, listening to reminiscences, and to clichés about her finally being at peace.
Michael ate nothing. He stood, china cup and saucer in hand, letting the hum of voices, the subdued funereal conversations, accompanied by the chink of cutlery, sweep over him. Gazing out of the window towards the hills, he felt the emptiness of his birthplace press around him, there was nothing here any more, no connection. It was gone, gone to the grave with his mother. He should have felt something, sorrow, release, something, but he didn't, he felt burdened, heavy, as if he too was under a mound of soil.
The hands of the clock moved forward.
As soon as was decently possible, he and Stuart slipped away to the hotel they had booked into.
Stuart un-knotted his black tie, taking it off with a sigh of relief, he had always hated wearing a tie, then he unfastened his top shirt button. He went to the mini bar. "Would you like a drink Michael? I'm going to have one."
Michael nodded, reaching out, taking the glass of amber fluid, sipping at it, as he sat cross legged on the floor, staring at the two cardboard boxes that the hospital staff had given him. His mother's few possessions, the sum total of a person's life packed into two cardboard boxes; she herself now neatly boxed, labelled and decently cleared away, much as she had been for years past, kept labelled and closeted.
A picnic at midnight, in the rare heat of high summer, barefoot on the grass outside. The disapproval, the tainting of a special moment, when with shining eyes he told about the midnight excursions. The exchanged looks above his head, pursed lips and the first inkling that his mother was not quite like other mothers...*
She'd gone away for a while after that, he missed her, he wished he hadn't told.
Stuart watched him, studying the set of his jaw, the dark lashes, lashes that would grace a girl, dark crescents on pale cheek bones. Michael had barely spoken, barely eaten, since the phone call a week ago.
"Don't fight your grief Mike, it's okay to cry."
"Is it?" the lashes flicked up from their lowered position revealing eyes that so far remained stubbornly dry. "Maybe I don't want to cry, maybe I don't have the right to cry."
"We all have the right to cry when we need to."
"Maybe I don't need to cry, and I really don't want to talk about it anyway."
So Stuart didn't press and Michael didn't cry, or talk, and time passed. They resumed the pattern of their lives.
June passed the baton to July who raced into August and then September, the days shortened, the nights lengthened and the ticking of the clock tolled the passing of time, breaking the hush, and marking the growing distance between lovers who sat at opposite ends of the same room. Stuart read words on a page, and Michael watched pictures flit across the page of memory.
A boy standing at school gates, waiting for a woman who didn't come because she'd lost track of time... The highs and lows that left devastation in their wake. A young man visiting a grim hospital ward where a dull eyed woman stared at him without recognition, the short term after affects of electrical impulses passing through her brain. He hated her, he'd gone away for a while after that, to university, cutting all connection for three long years.*
Between a fantasy of written words and pictured memories, two lovers drifted further and further apart.
October merged into November, leaving a trail of damp leaves and aching silences. Even the clock no longer spoke, it sat hunched miserably on the mantelpiece waiting for someone to care enough to do what was necessary to give it back its voice; to reconnect its soul.
Even without the aid of the clock, time did what it had to do, moving on and on. It could do no more. How it was used was beyond its power.
They moved through the routine of daily life, picking up the milk from the doorstep, exchanging small talk with neighbours and workmates while ignoring each other. Stuart moved into the spare room to sleep in the single bed that felt less lonely than the bed he shared with Michael, the gap between their turned backs had become an unbridgeable chasm.
He tried to discuss it with Michael, but, as ever, he didn't want to talk about it and the grey green eyes were blank shutters securely fastened from within. Stuart ached for a man who had been his friend, his lover and was now just someone he shared a roof with.
November died quietly, unlamented.
December came and brought the dark days. On a cold morning, frost heavy on the ground Michael silently packed his possessions into bags and boxes.
"I'm leaving." He had announced it the day before, "it's for the best."
He hadn't wanted to talk about it.
Stuart didn't press, neither did he go up to bed that night. He sat in the armchair downstairs, keeping silent vigil with the aphonic clock.
Time crept apologetically on, bringing the morning when Michael would leave, when his union with Stuart would be disconnected.
Stuart hesitated outside the bedroom where Michael was gathering together the last of his possessions. He turned away, going back downstairs to the room he had occupied all night, feeling its emptiness press around him. Without the tick of the clock, the room was soulless. He stared at its reproachful face and suddenly knew what he had to do. Rummaging in a drawer he found the key, made the connection and gave the clock back its voice. It smiled ten past ten gratitude and filled the room with words, words that told of a space of time; seven years, shared with Michael.
"Where will you go?"
Michael turned as Stuart entered the bedroom, he shrugged, but said nothing
"I love you Michael," he said the words that had never once, in seven years, been returned to him. "I don't want you to leave. I want you to talk to me, to tell me what you're feeling, what you're experiencing, what you're holding inside."
Michael placed a childhood keepsake, a large conch shell, streaked pink and lemon, on top of the box he had just packed and lifted it up. "I really don't want to talk about it Stuart."
Anger surged through Stuart. It couldn't end like this...seven years packed silently into bags and boxes. He removed the box from Michael's arms and dumped it roughly on a chair. "Well I do. I do want to talk about it! I will talk about it, and so will you! I've invested seven years of my life in this relationship. I'll be _d_a_m_n_ed if I'll let you just walk away without a word, without an explanation, without at least TRYING to salvage it. You've called all the shots throughout our time together, shutting me up, and out whenever it suited you and I foolishly let you do it, but no more. You're going to tell me what you're feeling! What you're thinking!"
Michael shook his head, "Stuart, I'm sorry, but I..."
"...don't want to talk about it...I know, and I'm pretty _d_a_m_n_ sick of that phrase if you want the truth, and I don't want to hear it again, ever!"
Michael wasn't quite sure how he came to be lying face down across the bed, or how his jeans and underwear came to be around his knees. He tried to struggle, but Stuart was strong. Michael buried his face in to the covers, trying to disconnect himself from what was happening...
The first contact of bare flesh to bare flesh unleashed a tidal wave of emotion in Stuart. The room resonated to the sound of hard smacks and soft grunts as he put seven years of pent up anger, frustration and guilt behind every blow. Guilt that he hadn't done what he needed to do, what Michael needed him to do, to take charge, to be strong, to help him connect.
"Let it go Michael, _d_a_m_n_ you, let it out!" Stuart's hand began to sting and still Michael hadn't made a sound.
The broad leather belt slithered easily from the loops of his jeans.
Michael gripped the covers on the bed more tightly. The belt fell harder, making contact with flesh already made tender by his lover's hand. His lips parted releasing a small sound, a whimper as the heat in his buttocks built and the sting became something he couldn't shut out, no matter how hard he tried. He tried to squirm free, to move away from Stuart, away from the lash of the doubled up belt on his backside, but Stuart was not letting him go, not this time.
Soon all Michael was aware of was the raw pain in his bottom, it cancelled out everything, including the pain in his mind. He opened his mouth, the whimper became a yell, a cry, a plea. Oh God, he wanted to talk, more than anything else in the world, he wanted to talk especially if it would stop the agony that every fibre of his being was attuned to. The _d_a_m_n_ burst, tears streamed down his face, his throat burning as sobs tore their way out.
The sobs eased, then faded, and Michael talked, lying in the circle of his lover's arms, he talked, and felt cleansed and peaceful.
He told of the mother he loved and loathed at one and the same time, who was never quite like other mothers, which when you're very young is wonderful. He told of time passing and how the child in him died, and the emerging adult became tainted with the world's prejudices, and how he learned to be embarrassed by a mother, who woke him at midnight to go for walks and picnics in the garden, who took him to the seaside instead of to school, who sometimes held conversations with people only she could see and hear, and who just didn't seem to connect with the corporeal world. He told of his guilt for the times she was shut away, not only in hospital wards, but in a corner of his mind, and how he learned to disconnect, so he couldn't be hurt.
Then there was silence.
The kiss was soft, slow, sensual, sharing...it said more than words.
Stuart pressed forward, entering his lover's body, moving rhythmically towards a shared orgasm. They lay quietly, conjoined.
Time did its duty, ushering seasons in and seasons out, turning the wheel full circle back to June.
After laying flowers on a quiet grave, Michael lifted his face to the sky, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun to watch a skylark wheel and turn in the air, its song breaking the silence of a summer day.
Setting aside the hate, the shame, the embarrassment, the confusion; he remembered with joy, and love, a woman who ran barefoot across sandy beaches, who climbed recklessly over rocks to find a conch shell so that he could hear the sound of the sea whenever he wanted, who gave him midnight memories of moonlight picnics and swings, who told him never to be ashamed of what he was, to own himself with pride, and who had chosen to disconnect from a world that hurt, frightened and shunned her, and who was free at last.
Time did what it had to do...walking on...Michael and Stuart walked with it....hand in hand.
The End.....