Playing Out by Paul Magrs (free biff chip and kipper ebooks TXT) 📗

to snog in full view of town, neither side of the canal. How, unlocking the door and unmindful of being heard by those on the other side, I had told him I could really fall for him in a big, bad way. At the time he urged me to keep that to myself and in retrospect it wasn’t just to keep it private.

Later Emma said, ‘Didn’t you even think about how I would feel, seeing you kissing in my kitchen?’

In the middle of that night, though, after three, after Emma had seen her last guests off, after they had filled the house with black smoke from making popcorn and we had watched it seep under my door, we listened to Emma clump her platformed way up to bed, slam her door, and then we started to laugh.

We imagined Emma’s dinner-party repartee. How she was having the builders in. She was going to have her hymen knocked through. A darling little archway affair.

How she liked to have nice things around her. Living with a faggot was so convenient. She could do with two faggots, really; paint them green and stand them to attention either side of her darling archway.

So we laughed and in the morning, around nine, Emma kicked open the door and brought us coffee. The room was overly bright because my friend had tugged the curtains closed and they hadn’t been secure enough. They were in a dusty heap on the floor and all the street, it seemed, could see into my room.

We were squinting as we woke and before we knew where we were, Emma had left the coffee on our respective sides of the bed and whirled out again.

We had slept without covers and I had found myself cupping his bollocks in my hand. An unconscious gesture I recall now with embarrassment, not because she would have seen it, but because he might remember it.

He went on a late train that Sunday night, never came back.

After an eleventh-hour shag I sat in the freezing station with a dribble of sperm tickling at my ankle, inching into my sock.

In less than three hours, I thought, he’d be back with his real lover, in another town, in the sunken bath he’d described to me, with candles nicked from the nearby cathedral lit all around him.

And, before he went, he talked about that commitment to the man with the sunken bath. I’d said something about no one’s commitment to me, the bitterness easing out.

On the train as it pulled away he was reading the book I’d lent him. It came back a fortnight later in a brown envelope, without a letter, and Emma commiserated.

The week after he went she had another meal and invited me too, to cheer me up. I’d been looking depressed, apparently, and had shouted at her when she burst a bag of sugar on the kitchen floor.

Emma had been so shocked at my shouting that she ran to throw up, went out to buy two bottles of Bulgarian red and spent the rest of the night telling me about her father, how he’d forced her to the brink of suicide on numerous occasions.

When she was home for some religious thing that year, she wrote to me and said she was, at that moment, sitting on her packed suitcase, cutting off clumps of her hair.

‘I am mutilating herself,’ she wrote, in her distress.

To this meal she invited Simeon, who was directing Cabaret. He was pale with dyed black hair so dull it made his acne seem lustrous and healthy. He wore perfect white gloves and talked incessantly about Liza Minnelli. The girl he lived with, who looked uncannily like Liza Minnelli, was also there, discussing isolation with Clara on the settee.

In the kitchen, stirring her chicken broth, Emma hummed ‘Maybe This Time’.

Simeon did a long monologue, later that night, about coming out and being fucked over by an older man who locked him in a room for a week. Really, he could only face the world these days because of the friendship of the girls he had met since.

I took the last of the Bulgarian red and watched as Emma and Clara took one gloved hand each and squeezed it, wringing their affection into him.

I went to bed.

Usually that meant whirling around, flat on my back, for an hour or more, until sleep slammed onto me like a lid. I would miss sex because it often filled that worrisome hour and prevented me from raking up each terrifying aspect the future liked to present.

That night I heard a rustle under the door. When I switched on my light, I saw that Emma had sent me a note.

She was confessing how much she cared for me. Said that we really had to talk. That she knew I was a man and that she wouldn’t shy away from ‘the physical act’.

Even though, I was thinking, as I tried to sleep, stunned, even though her virginity was displayed and dusted off before each surprised visitor to our house, like an especially posh coffee table they were invited to admire.

When I slept I dreamed I was pregnant.

At teatime the next day I spent three hours being sensitive.

I said I thought we were like brother and sister.

That although, yes, I had and did sleep with women… no, I wouldn’t be doing so with her.

I said that friends meant much more to me, as a rule, than lovers. I’d had that said to me a year before, and despised the person who said it. How easily it came to me now!

When I think of this scene—explaining patiently to Emma, watching her tilt her cheekbones as if receiving successive glancing blows—I see us sitting in an odd location on the living-room floor. I have a good memory for locations, so it must be true. We were sitting where a door used to be, between front room and kitchen, the flowered curtain between pulled back. Emma sat on the kitchen lino and hugged her father’s