Out of the Woods - 6. A Label Pinned onto his Blazer

In my dreams, I watch the locks of my hair fall languidly to the ground. They’re beautiful in their lifelessness: shiny and dark and utterly dead. They litter the floor around the barber’s chair like a massacre of autumn leaves; and I’m mourning for them, filled with grief, the tears crawling over the flesh of my cheeks—because it’s amazing to me and miraculous that they grew from my head in the first place, those dark, shining curls; and now they’re no longer there.

I’m bald again.

Well, not really. Not at all, actually. In fact I have this aversion to hair that is no longer connected to my head—I can’t touch it, and I have difficulty even looking at it. The barber’s floor makes me want to violently throw up.

Life got better after my haircut—my god, how it got better. Gone was the fog, the grey murk I had floundered through; gone were the bad days and the frayed nerves. The string of freak-outs were a thing of the past.

Sophie and I had been dating for almost two weeks, and as I waited for her outside of Harvey Nichols as she single-handedly kept that absurdity of a store afloat in an otherwise difficult financial climate, I had never felt better.

If she’d just stop leaving me outside like a dog while she bought stuff I’d probably propose to her within the week.

My phone rang. It was Tom.

‘Hey—’

‘Hey! So, I’m bored, let’s do something!’

Ah, crap. Someone drank all the coffee.

‘I’m sort of on a date.’

A pause. ‘Oh.’

‘I’m with Sophie. I’m stood outside Harvey Nichols, drinking a chai latte. It’s a girl’s drink, I know. But they’re so good. She’s returning something.’

I heard him smirk. ‘The Mulberry purse?’

Yes, I’d told him all about the Mulberry purse. We’d had a good laugh.

‘Nope, not this time. It’s a dress. It’s got a label that I can’t pronounce and it’s also worth about three hundred quid.’

‘No way.’

‘Yup. I’m thinking I should just cut my losses and marry her now. I’ve had my fun, right? Then, once the marriage dissolves, half goes to me, and the fun can continue.’

‘Nah, my good lad, no chance. Half goes to me.’

‘It does?’

‘Yup. We’re marrying as soon as the divorce is official.’

I couldn’t help it—I flushed. My heart leapt.

I viciously quashed it.

‘But then you’ll only get half of my half, retard. You can do better than that. Why don’t you find an old person’s home and befriend some half-dead biddy? She’ll leave you all her cats in her will.’

Tom laughed. ‘You twat. Why can’t we just marry for love?’

‘You’re dull, mate. I’d be so bored on our wedding night I’d go out and find someone else to consummate it with.’

‘True, true. So, I’m bored. Can I join you?’

I was reluctant. There were a thousand reasons I could have mustered up as to why it was a bad idea, but the biggest was that Tom was my best friend, and not as stupid as I liked to suggest; considering he was my best friend I was well aware that he didn’t know me half as well as a best friend should—but even so, I was half convinced he would take one look at me and just know, just like that, that I was somehow acting different.

And yet, it didn’t work like that, of course. I knew that. These many personas of mine were mine—they were in my head more than anything else. I changed my words around Sophie, and some of my actions, and the way that I did little things, but it wasn’t obvious enough for other people to notice because people are naturally stupid. People, quite naturally, have difficulty noticing anything that might take place beyond the end of their own nose.

And yet… I still didn’t want Tom there.

Frankly, there was also that it was weird. It wasn’t normal. No matter how close you are with the guy, and no matter how much you fancy the girl, what sort of a person tags along to another couple’s date?

Sophie emerged from Harvey Nichols. She wrapped her arms round me, reached over from the back and kissed my cheek; I could smell her perfume, and her blonde hair tickled my ears. ‘Hey,’ she whispered. ‘Who’s on the phone?’

‘Tom. He wants to meet up.’

‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed but she hid it quickly. She shrugged. ‘Invite him along.’

‘What? No, it’s fine.’

She took the phone. ‘Tom, get over here now. We’re getting drunk in Waterstones.’

Waterstones was, after the Hardings’ residence, my second safe-house. The miracle of its undeniable bookstore smell combined with its leather chairs on the quiet top floor forgave it of the fact that it was as shamelessly mass-produced as Starbucks. Most of my trips to town ended with me curled up in an armchair on the top floor of Waterstones, adrift in that same solemn, sanctuary feel that you found in libraries.

Only it was a thousand times better than a library—because in a library, you never knew whose grubby hands had pawed the book before you.

Sophie was eighteen already. She had already bought cheap whisky and the bottles of apple juice from a corner shop; together we quietly poured the apple juice into a floral planter by the benches in Park Square. Tom was under the mistaken impression that we would be mixing the whisky but we weren’t—the grimaces, grunts and groans of taking the stuff straight were part of the fun. They increased the risk. I had never gotten caught doing it before but it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to suppose that Waterstones wouldn’t thank us for our behaviour if we were discovered.

We made our way there, the whisky-filled bottles hidden in Sophie’s absurdly expensive handbag. She warned me, several times and none of them jokingly, that if any should spill on the bag I was dead.

‘It’s a Fendi. Anna’s just waiting until I spoil it.’

She frowned.

They hadn’t been getting on so well recently; it went unsaid and unlabelled, and to most people entirely unnoticed, but last week she had asked me if Mark Little, the hot blond on the swim team, was seeing anyone. When I asked her why she had brushed it off—but I had already known that she was trying to set him up with Anna.

But Anna didn’t like Mark Little—I knew it, and Sophie knew it too. Anna liked me.

We made our way to the business section and sat down behind a smaller, mobile bookshelf. Immersed in that smell of ink and paper, all talk of Anna was soon forgotten; my face was moved by an unusual smile. Strangely, despite that I am a horrible student, there is an intangible quality to bookstores that makes me think of home.

Not my home, of course—but home; that strange, undefinable idea, elusive and amorphous, like a warm embrace from someone who you love, and who you know loves you; someone who would never hurt you, and with whom you are safe. If home had a smell it wouldn’t smell like fabric conditioner, or a mother’s perfume, or freshly-baked muffins, or golden chicken soup. If home had a smell, for me, it would smell like a bookstore.

I couldn’t imagine a place I’d rather get wasted in.

We kissed for a while, our hearts thumping dangerously; Tom rang to let me know he was there, and before long he was squeezed next to me, grinning ridiculously. He took one swig and began coughing.

‘There’s nothing but whisky in here!’

We got drunk.

We took trips into Waterstones proper and came back to our hideout with books we found amusing. We weren’t quiet at all: it was a miracle we weren’t thrown out. We tried to smother the sounds in our clothes and failed miserably; and we would dare each other to take a swig, to take a longer one, to down it up to my finger, down half of the bottle, and it was disgusting. It was disgusting, and I hadn’t had so much fun in a long time.

Sophie was the first to need the restroom, but the restrooms were for paying customers only. She was forced to buy a book—the new Twilight book, to our delight—and she was forced to wait in the queue to buy it, trying to act sober. The code for the bathroom was on her receipt, and after that we took it in turns to take the receipt with us.

While she was gone I did something stupid.

We took a book on modern photography off the shelf and began flicking through. We pointed out all the dirty pictures. They weren’t dirty, of course—they were artistic—but that didn’t stop Tom and I from laughing at every breast or pubic bush, or the sensuous curve of an ass or, one time, a black and white of a penis, side profile, complete with a tiny glistening droplet hanging off the tip.

If you think about it, they’re actually pretty weird looking things—and that goes for all genitalia. Women’s included. Breasts, pert, round or sagging: what is that? It’s the human version of udders—it’s milk and fat in a sack. If whatever resourceful creator that made us hadn’t had the foresight to make sex so good, the thought of procreating would be so distasteful that humanity would have died out with the first generation. The sight of that penis, so blunt and tactless on the page, had me crying from laughter.

I brought the book up to my face and sniffed suggestively. And, in return Tom pretended to vomit. We were laughing so hard we were starting to get irritated glances.

‘That’s disgusting!’ Tom cried. ‘Laurence, I knew it—I knew it! You’re so, so gay!’

‘You wish,’ I snorted, and brought the photo up to his face. He pretended to lick it and wiggled his eyebrows. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘You’re disgusting.’

‘Well, you’re gay.’

‘No, you’re gay!’

I poked his side. ‘Fine. But you know who really is gay,’ I leaned over, though I knew that I shouldn’t. I knew, somehow, that I’d come to regret what I said next. ‘Jamie, that new kid on the swim team. He does art with me. I saw him at that sushi restaurant I took Sophie to. I saw him with his boyfriend.’

‘No!’

I nodded solemnly. ‘Yes.’

‘No way! Does Sophie know?’

‘Nope.’

Sophie returned, unsteadily, brandishing her new book. She flopped down, her head resting in my lap, and grinned up at me. She waved the receipt in my face. ‘Who’s next?’

Jamie was outed a week later.

***

It was all over the school.

It was all over the school, and I thought, why doesn’t he deny it? It was a constant surprise to me that, whenever they whispered, whenever they talked or pointed or stared, he did nothing. He just sat by himself, perfectly still.

Nothing happened, of course. Nobody bullied him. He wasn’t beaten up for it, he wasn’t even laughed at; no one shouted fag at him down the corridors or sprayed it onto the front of his locker. Perhaps it was that it just wasn’t that sort of school. Regardless of the reasons, they all left him alone, and that suited him perfectly well.

That is to say, at first I thought it did. But it bugged me for some reason, the idea that Jamie was perfectly fine; I had no reason to believe otherwise except that it seemed odd to me, knowing what I did about him, that he shouldn’t be bothered by the looks and the whispers. Kids like Jamie hate all kind of attention, not simply the sort that forces interaction with others: the mere knowledge that he was the subject such scrutiny, that he existed, seemingly for the first time, in other people’s minds—it should have been driving him crazy. It was irritating that it wasn’t.

Only, it was; I just didn’t find out until Friday’s art lesson when he had a breakdown in the middle of class.

It was the paintbrush that marked the beginning. It clattered onto the floor, leaving lurid red stains; I turned at the sound, mildly, hardly thinking at all, to the sight of his back as it shook.

And the paintbrush was still rolling gently away.

Nobody seemed to notice. Vampire Weekend was playing on the radio, inanely, and Harry’s braying laughter could be heard in the corner; at the far side was the faint, low murmuring of the alternative kids. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at all and I almost turned back to my work but those sudden, jerking movements alarmed me; I stood up and made my way over to him, placing a hand on the booth wall instead of his shoulder.

‘Jamie, are you okay?’

He didn’t seem to hear me. I wondered if placing my hand on his body would help him focus or push him over the edge altogether. After a moment’s consideration I took the chance.

‘Jamie, come on. Let’s go somewhere else.’

I manoeuvred him out of his seat. Nobody turned to observe but for a few of the alternative kids in their corner.

Through the art department, past classrooms of quietly working students; into the dark room, where his shaking began to worsen.

I turned on the red lights and sat him down on a chair.

‘Hey, do you want to talk about it?’

Jamie didn’t say anything, but he started taking slow, deliberate breaths, pausing for a few seconds in between each; I knew enough to recognise it as some sort of therapy-approved coping mechanism, and I stayed quiet.

His eyes were wild and wide and terrified, and he would shut them tightly every few moments, as if to deny the existence of his own reality; his lips moved but nothing came out. After ten breaths, he opened his eyes, and stopped shaking enough to talk.

He sounded strangely calm.

‘Everyone knows.’

I nodded. ‘Yes. But nobody cares.’

He didn’t seem to have heard. ‘Everyone knows,’ he said again, as if he was commenting in mild surprise at the rise in the price of milk at the supermarket.

‘Yes. But it’ll be forgotten by the end of the week, you’ll see.’

‘Was it you?’

Was what me? I opened my mouth to ask him, and when I realised I stopped; I opened my mouth to deny that it was me—of course it wasn’t me, why would I tell anybody?—when I realised that it may have been me after all.

I frowned.

But of course, it wasn’t me—not really. I had only told Tom. How was I supposed to know that Tom, in the sudden terror of being left alone with a member of the opposite sex, would tell Sophie the moment I stood up for the bathroom? How was I supposed to know that Sophie would tell a few of her friends, and that they would tell their boyfriends, and that by the end of the week the entire population of both schools would know?

I certainly couldn’t be blamed for not foreseeing that happening.

‘Of course it wasn’t me,’ I said.

‘But nobody else knew.’

I shrugged.

He was getting agitated now, his shakes returning, his fingers clenching and unclenching, leaving angry half-moons in the flesh of his palms. ‘Nobody else knew but you,’ he said, his voice louder and shrill now, his eyes roaming with hysteria. ‘No one will talk to me now… Only Mark Little will talk to me. Of course it was you, of course it was! You’re the only one who knew!’

‘It wasn’t me, Jamie.’

‘Yes it was!’

He looked as if he’d either slap me or burst into tears. I saw this degenerating, unravelling at a languid pace, slowly and yet somehow beyond my grasp; I watched the control slipping quietly from my fingers. Oh dear, I thought, but in my mind the thought seemed almost funny.

His mouth was opening and closing uselessly; either nothing coherent was coming out or I had lost focus somehow and could no longer hear it. He stood up, the legs of the chair scraping against the floor. The sound of it made me wince. ‘It was you,’ he said, almost slowly it seemed.

When he spoke it came out so slowly.

‘It was you!’

I shrugged. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘Don’t lie!’

‘It wasn’t me. Maybe someone else saw. After all, you were practically humping in a public restaurant. Perhaps if you’d found a room—an empty room—things would have been different.’

I left him, suddenly speechless, and made my way back to my desk. I picked up my pen and drew for ten minutes; but afterwards I threw the paper in the bin.

The whole thing clawed at the back of my head—Jamie in the dark room, quivering with fury; Tom, next to me in the bookstore, shocked and delighted at once; all the students in the corridors, whispering, snickering and smiling. I was right, of course—within the week it would die down. By next Friday everyone would be joyfully chewing away at the next limping victim, the next juicy piece of gossip. By next Friday Jamie would be fine.

Except that it wouldn’t be back to normal—not really. Not entirely. Jamie may well be able to go on exactly as he had before, never saying a word to anyone and being happily absent from the minds of anyone who saw him, but he would never be completely the same because there was a label now, a label pinned onto his blazer.

He wouldn’t be simply weird, athletic, tall, dark, brown-eyed anymore: now he’d be gay as well.

Just as, if ever the same happened to me, I would be different too. Gone would be my reputation of quirky, fun, alternative, bi-curious. Gone would be my wit and my sharp tongue, my lithe body, nice ass and face like a Botticelli angel.

Well—not gone. But that new label would still be there, pinned on my school blazer along with all the others.

I tried to ignore it but the fact of it was too blatant; I tried to push it away but it was everywhere, and it was too big. Because it would happen, eventually, whether I wanted it to or not. It would happen.

I didn’t want that label.