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I swear I heard a chuckle, but I must have been mistaken. Grumpy, sick, adult Matt? We were a long way off chuckling. What did he find so funny about vichyssoise?
The soup and another dose of painkillers went down a treat, not that Matt would admit it. He looked a better colour afterwards, too, on the parts of his face that weren’t purple.
“You’ve got a big house for a bloke all on his own,” he ventured, taking in his surroundings as if seeing for the first time.
“Yes. Although I’m not always alone. My son stays over a couple of nights a week.”
His left eyebrow moved upwards a millimetre. “I’d say I didn’t know you had a son, but then until yesterday, I didn’t know anything about you.”
I gave him a thin smile. “I’m divorced. My son’s name is Ryan. He’s sixteen, nearly seventeen.”
Matt closed his eyes and digested that for a while. Quite a long while; I wondered if he’d nodded off again.
“I always imagined you’d be happily married somewhere. To a woman, obviously. In a big house with two cars on the drive and two blond kids. Exactly like your parents.”
“You got it partly right. Only one child though, and not happily married. We divorced about a year ago. She had an affair with one of my work colleagues. You’ve met him, actually. The other anaesthetist. They’re now married.”
“He was a pompous twat.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. “He tells the delightful story of how they fell in love, to anyone who cares to listen. It’s charming, honestly, you should hear it.”
My fists curled in on themselves. Even now this tale retained its capacity to hurt. “They were at a school cricket match watching our boys play, and found themselves in a lift together, heading down to the bottom floor of the cricket pavilion to have match tea. My wife pressed the control button on the lift, and Mike asked, ‘are you going down?’ Allegedly, my wife replied yes, seeing as he’d asked so nicely. And the rest of it, as they say, is history.”
I realised I’d never shared this with anyone. I’d overheard it, or coy variations of it, plenty of times. Somehow, confiding in Matt softened the sting. He had the good grace not to snigger at the punchline, unlike most people.
“Sounds like they’re made for each other.”
I gave a weak shrug. “Maybe. I’m over it, mostly. And at least I managed to keep the house. It wasn’t the happiest of marriages, looking back. She always complained I was dull. Insular. Stuck in my ways and unadventurous in bed.” I gave a humourless little laugh. “She was probably right.”
Some married couples rowed about money, or the in-laws, or whose turn it was to put the bins out. Samantha and I had rowed about my defective personality and inability to make her orgasm. And that I was secretive, closed-off, and gave the lawns and hedges closer attention than I gave her. Which was quite a list.
“Wow, she didn’t mince her words, did she?”
I hesitated, hovering on the edge of a conversation neither of us were ready to plunge into. “I probably deserved some of it. I don’t think I was perfect either. I am unexciting. And I…um…I…I…”
Another conversational first coming up. But if I couldn’t talk about it with Matt, then who? I took a deep breath. “I made the diagnosis some years ago, well, a lot of years ago, actually. That…that…I’m bisexual. I’ve never told anyone.” I frowned. “Which makes this the first time I’ve ever vocalised that word, pertaining to me, out loud.”
“You make it sound like an illness, Alex.” Matt’s puffy eyes landed on me briefly. “You shouldn’t think like that. Being bisexual doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you.”
Seemed like this abrasive stranger had a more tender side after all.
“I know,” I admitted. “But it feels like it sometimes. It’s not something our generation really talk about, is it? Or nobody that I know does, anyway. I never told Samantha; she wouldn’t have understood. So when she complained that I was…insular, and accused me of hiding something, she’d sort of hit the nail on the head, hadn’t she?”
“Sounds like you married the wrong woman.”
Amen to that. Samantha definitely married the wrong man.
“And… and it took me a while not to feel ashamed for being attracted to menandwomen. It sounds rather greedy, doesn’t it? I used to imagine if I told people, they’d assume I was some sort of sex pest, who’d take anyone. Anytime, anywhere.”
“And are you?”
I scoffed. “Of course not! The reverse, in fact. When I was younger at med school, I was so confused I stayed away from everyone for years after... after…”
Neither of us needed me to finish that sentence. We both knew how it ended.
Bisexual. Christ. There hadn’t even been a word for it when we were kids. Or if there had, then I’d never heard it used. I’d always fancied girls; as a very young teen I’d been desperate to discover how it felt to have a fat, milky breast cupped in my hand, and horribly clumsy in my attempts to find out.
And then, like a lightning strike, I’d fallen arse over tit for Matt Leeson. I’d become besotted with him, even before I’d worked out my need for him was sexual. His smart mouth and black-eyed wickedness had sucked me in. The way he’d sauntered into, and shook up, my trammelled, middle-class existence, as if my life was his for the taking. Him being a boy had been almost irrelevant, but God, how I’d loved discovering the silky delights of a hot damp dick in my hand that wasn’t my own. Pressing myself against his uncompromising, unwomanly angles. My confusion back then in the nineties, my half-baked explanations to Matt about how I felt, wasn’t me being cruel to him. I’d been terrified. If not straight, then I must be gay, right?
