A Walk Along the Promenade - 3. Scene One, A Seaside Promenade in Summer, Part 3

Even though his experience with Paul had ended poorly it still didn’t kill his hope he could met a man via his dating apps, and regularly he’d search through them, contacting men who lived anywhere he considered local. Over and over he’d search for a man on those apps, always a spark of hope somewhere at the back of his mind.

He did met men through those apps, many less than he tried to contact, many of those men he would have sex with. If he liked the man then they wouldn’t contact him again, or else he’d receive the reply that the man had a lover/wife and won’t be contacting Shaun. If the man contacted Shaun again then Shaun didn’t want to see that man again, their meeting having left him feeling disappointed. Some weeks he met two different men, other times he’d go weeks without meeting any man or having any sex.

None of this had left him feeling happy or positive about being gay. His flat, which had been an escape from his mother and a chance for him to be gay, soon became his lonely retreat. It would be empty and quiet when he returned to it each evening after work, at the weekend it would feel too big for him to fill on his own. Being in it or returning to it from whatever he had been doing, it always reminded him that he was on his own. He felt such a failure but he couldn’t stop himself looking. If he stopped looking the chance might be that the ideal boyfriend would just pass him by, and he couldn’t take that risk. Many times at night, he would lay awake and worry that he would never be able to find a man to have a relationship with, all he seemed to find were men to have sex with, and nothing more.

He’d been searching those dating apps for nearly eighteen months when he’d met Arron. He’s seen Arron’s profile one Friday evening. He’d eaten his evening meal, slumped down on his sofa, the television playing unnoticed in front of him, and had picked up his phone. He had been idly scrolling through a dating app, not so much looking for Mr Right but just looking, the hope always there, when he’d seen Arron’s profile. The profile picture had just been of a naked torso, no face attached to it, the picture ending just above the shoulders and stretching down his torso to end with the top of a thick bush of black pubic hair. The torso was hairless but rippled with muscles, prominent pecs and a six-pack so well defined that Shaun felt he could trace his fingers along those grooves between the muscles.

Shaun had only messaged him in a vain hope, he was attracted to that picture but men like this usually didn’t message him back, but having a message ignored was the easiest form of rejection to endure. He’s been surprised when Arron had messaged him, only a handful of minutes later. The message had simply read:

“What’s your number?”

Shaun had messaged back with his mobile’s number and a few minutes later his mobile had rung. Shaun had quickly answered it to find Arron on the other end. The man’s accent was local and his conversation had been short. Arron said he wanted them to meet and he wanted to have sex with Shaun, no one had been this forward with him before and he found it very exciting. Arron asked him did he know where the Green Man pub was? Shaun did, it was on the opposite side of town from him, on Copeland Road. Arron wanted to know how long it would take Shaun reach there, and Shaun replied forty-five minutes (doing a rough calculation in his mind on how long it would take him to get ready and drive there). Arron said he’d met Shaun outside the Green Man because he only lived around the corner.

In a rush he’d showered and pulled on clean clothes, clean and snug-fitting underwear, jeans, a cotton shirt and black boots. Finally pulling on his leather jacket, Shaun had left his flat. He’d never been approached so openly and with such a direct display of sexual desire. Arron had been so forward, he wanted sex with Shaun that evening and he wanted it now. Shaun was a buzz with excitement as he drove across the town, to the Green Man pub. This had never happened before, previously he would spend days and even weeks messaging men via the dating apps before he would eventually meet them, no one had seemed in a hurry to meet him before that night.

He'd parked his car on the opposite side of the street from the Green Man pub, the pub had double yellow lines in front of it. There had been one man stood outside the pub, pacing back and forth across a small patch of pavement. He was short, much shorter than Shaun himself, with dark black hair cut into an uninteresting short-back-and-sides style. His body was stocky under his thick parker jacket, maybe it was the packer jacket that made him look so stocky, Shaun wondered as he crossed the road to the pub, maybe the parker jacket was hiding his muscular physique?

“You Shaun?” The man said, in the same voice Shaun had heard come out of his phone when Arron called him.

“Yes, are you Arron?” Shaun asked him.

“Yeah,” Arron replied, not taking his hands out of the pockets of his anorak jacket. “My place is around the corner,” he’d added.

Arron had led him around the side of the pub and down a poorly lit ally way there. They had gone about halfway down the alley way, in silence, when Arron had turned and faced him, stopping in his tracks.

“Give me your money, phone and car keys or I’ll fucking kill you,” Arron had said.

“Fuck off,” Shaun had hissed back, he was a head taller than this man, and turned to walk back out of the ally way. But Shaun found his path was now blocked by two other men, solidly built men, as tall as him and both of them carrying rounded wooden bats.

“Get the fucking queer!” Arron called out from behind him.

Shaun had never been a fighter, not even while at his rough comprehensive school, he’d always avoided fights by running away. That’s what he tried to do then. He went to run out of the ally way, to push those men out of the way in the process but he barely got a few paces. As he ran towards them, one of the men swung his bat low and fast, striking Shaun in the left knee. The force of the blow had knocked his leg out from under him, a sudden pain rushing up Shaun’s leg and throwing him off balance. The next moment his body crushed down onto the cold and wet ground. As he lay there, the pain burning at his knee and rushing up his leg in terrible waves, the two men had struck at him repeatedly with their bats. The first blows had landed on his left shin and left thigh, again and again their bats striking his leg. But quickly the blows moved to his chest. He’d fallen onto his right side and those blows struck him on the left side of his chest, auditable cracks echoing in his ears for a few seconds but the burning pain that followed did not vanish as quickly. There was a sharp and deep pain stabbing into his left side of his chest, stabbing deeply into his chest with each breath, stopping his lungs from taking a deep or gasping breath. It felt as if those blows had burst his very heart.

Then the blows, as suddenly as they had started, stopped. There was silence for a moment. In the distance he could a car accelerate away, a woman shouting obscenities at someone else, a door being slammed shut, but the noises sounded so far away, the pain racking his body seemed to be dulling his hearing. Had they hit his head? Then he heard the one called Arron speak, saying:

“Get the wallet and phone… And his car keys, he drove here in a decent car.”

Hands roughly pulled at him, pushing him onto his back, causing him to scream out with the pain. Hands pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket, his car keys and wallet out of his jeans’ pocket. The pain was too great for him to resist, to put up any fight as they stole his possessions. All he could do was lie there, on the dirty and cold ground, and scream with the pain. Once the hands taken his possessions, he heard the one calling himself Arron speak again:

“Finish the fucker off.”

Something struck him in the left-hand side of the head, a fraction of a second later it was followed by a pain that felt like an iron peg being driven into his head, the pain so sharp that it seemed to take away all thoughts from his mind, all he could think about was the pain. His version blurred, his hearing seemed to be filling up with water, it was becoming more and more difficult to hear with each passing second. He felt more than saw someone step over him. Then something else struck him hard in the stomach, a foot, a bat? He wasn’t sure. His instinct would have been to curl up around his stomach, to somehow protect it even after it had been struck, but the pain was too great in the rest of his body to allow himself any movement. He just lay there, praying under his breath for the pain to stop, for those men to go away.

He closed his eyes against it, and then his mind stopped thinking, a blackness filling his head.

“Excuse me son, can you help me?”

The old man’s deep, baritone voice, heavy with its Southern American accent, had dragged Shaun out of his thoughts. He pulled his eyes away from staring at the sea and looked at the source of the voice. The man was stood at the opposite end of the bench from him. The man was in his sixties, late sixties. His domed head was covered by short, white-grey hair, cut into a uniform buzz-cut style, while his chin was covered in a thick and long beard, the same white-grey as the short hair on his head. Between these his face was round and puffy, red checks and a red forehead both pressing against his eyes. His body was just as round as his face, a round belly in front of a round thick waist. All supported by long and thick legs. The man wore clean, pressed jeans, a dark red sweatshirt writing across the front of it that Shaun couldn’t read because it was obscured by a bright orange cagoul worn over the top of it. The man looked like any one of the hundreds of elderly tourists who filled the town, all except for his Southern American accent.

“Sure, what can I do for you?” He replied to the man.

“Can you tell me where the nearest a garbage can is? I just cannot seem to find one,” the man said, in the accent that reminded Shaun of so many American television programs he’d watched.

“There’s one over there,” Shaun replied, pointing to one of the rectangular, black iron rubbish bins, a few feet along the curb side from were Shaun’s bench was placed.

“Thank you, son, everything is so different here,” the old man replied before turning and walking quickly towards the rubbish bin, he walked much quicker than Shaun could, even with his walking stick.

Why did Americans call rubbish bins garbage cans? Shaun wondered. To him a can was what tinned food came in, whereas a bin was what you put rubbish in. Why did the English and Americans speak such different versions of the same language? He was sure there were language professors or whatever who had written long papers on why, and he could probably find them on line, but did he even have the time to bother.