Footy

REHAB (27)

The rehabilitation center was a large two-storeyed Victorian building in Parkville, just north of the great ring of parks laid out by Governor LaTrobe, which surrounds the original city of Melbourne as it had been before the boom that began with the discovery of gold in the eighteen-fifties. It was built in a rectangle around a paved courtyard, and painted white, with pine green window frames and doors and verandah railings. It looked exactly like what it was, an old hospital, and Emma could imagine nurses in highly starched white uniforms and ridiculous headdresses dispensing comfort and primitive drugs to wounded soldiers back from the Boer war or the disasters at Ypres or even survivors from the Pacific campaigns of World War Two. But despite the whitewash, the rose garden, venerable liquidambars and palm trees, and the courtyard pond, encrusted with water-lilies (but shallow, for the inmates were after all not to be trusted), it was a dispiriting and depressing place. Its underlying function and reality were revealed by the bars on the windows, and the elegant and beautifully proportioned paint-caked doors to the upper verandahs, which were always kept locked.

Will had been in intensive care for three days before he was transferred to rehab. The doctors at the hospital had explained to Emma that the Panadol could cause severe and irreversible liver damage, unless an antidote were injected soon after the pills had been taken. Fortunately, Sean (“your husband’s friend”) had found Will in time. At one level, Emma was glad Sean had found him before it was too late. On another, she was deeply resentful. She had asked Will why Sean had come to the house. Light had flared in Will’s eyes for an instant, and then he had shrugged, and stared away. He seldom spoke, and then it was in a whisper, and if she didn’t hear or couldn’t understand, he refused to repeat himself.

She had called the rehabilitation center and spoken to one of the resident psychiatrists.

“Mrs Beaumont, he is still at risk of self-harm.” As if that wasn’t perfectly obvious! She was his wife. She knew him better than anyone. “It’s best if he stays in here a bit longer, until he’s more himself.” The man mentioned some of the drugs he was prescribing for Will. He suggested electro-convulsive shock treatment. Emma, angry and disturbed, point-blank refused. She avoided discussing why Will had tried to kill himself. When the psychiatrist asked her outright whether she had any idea why Will had done what he’d done, she pretended not to know. She was so ashamed and angry that she simply couldn’t bring herself to talk about it.

--oo--

Will got no better.

One evening, about a week later, the house silent and sad around her, she looked down and saw something shiny between the cushion and the armrest of the sofa. Intrigued, she reached down and her fingers closed on a small hard object. It was Will’s mobile phone. On an impulse, she flipped it open. The screen came alight. With a shock, she read the letters that made up the name ‘Sean’. Before she could stop herself, she’d pressed the call button.

“Will?” The voice was incredulous, excited, pleased.

Furious, Emma cut the connection. In a moment, the phone began to ring, and kept on ringing until it cut out. Her hands trembling, her heart beating, she put her hands between her knees and squeezed them, comforted by the gesture she’d not used since she’d been a little girl.

--oo--

When Sean arrived at Jasper’s house, the door was answered by Adam.

“Hi.” His face was polite, and if he wondered why Sean had come back so soon, he didn’t show it.

“Look, can I ask you something? It’s about... it’s about Will.”

“Yeah, ’course.” This time the smile was genuine, and kind. Sean wondered about him, about whether he was real, whether he really cared, but right then, it didn’t matter. He needed someone to talk to. Almost anyone would have done.

“Some coffee?”

“No, no thank you.” Sean hadn’t learnt his manners from his parents, but from other people. He didn’t bother with formal manners with equals, and if he’d thought about it he would have said that he considered Adam an equal. Yet he wanted something from him, something personal.

Adam gestured to him to sit down. They were in the same room they’d been in before, when Sean had broken down. Adam’s stiff body and solemn face suggested he’d remembered it too. It was only a few hours before.

“Will tried to commit suicide.” Giving Adam no time to respond, he went on, “After I left here, I went round to his place. I just knew I had to talk to him, find out what he really felt.” He stopped for a moment, shamed by the catch in his voice. He looked down at his motor-bike boots, unable to meet Adam’s eyes. “I love him so much. I’ve been so stupid.”

Adam waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, said softly, “What happened?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Sean flicked a smile towards the other man. “I found him. Slumped over, packets of pills all over the floor.” His nonchalance was automatic. He knew he would never be able to explain the horror and terror of that moment. He shook his head to clear it. “I called the ambulance.”

“Will he be OK?”

“I don’t know.” Sean looked directly at Adam. “But if he is, I’ll look after him. I’m strong enough for both of us.”

“Yes. You are.” Adam suddenly smiled at him. “You’re a top bloke, Sean. You’ll be right.”

Sean studied the toes of his boots, deeply embarrassed, the color rising in his cheeks. His first instincts were to say something offhand or dismissive to ease his discomfiture, but he clenched his teeth to stop himself. He owed Adam more than that. Instead, he nodded, silently.

“Does his wife know?” Adam’s tone conveyed his clear understanding of Sean’s mind.

Sean met his eyes. “I left a note for her.” He swallowed, trying to wet his dry throat. “At the hospital she told me to go. She said Will was hers. I saved his fuckin’ life!” His remembered anger was tinged with guilt.

“It can’t be easy for her. I’m sure she loves him.”

“Yeah.”

There was a silence for a few moments.

At last, Sean said, “I love him too. I love him so much. And he loves me. When I found out... I was so angry.” And hurt. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. Not to this collected, together, strong man in front of him. He realized that he needed to admit to himself, at least. “I should of contacted him. I shouldn’t of let him stew. It’s my fault.”

Adam didn’t bother to correct Sean’s grammar. “No it isn’t, mate. It’s the situation. Look, Sean, it’s not easy being bi. You want both things. And society makes you choose. Whichever way you turn, you’ll deny half of yourself. Are you bi?”

“I dunno. I mean, I’ve had women. But what I feel for Will... It’s just right. It’s good. Adam, it’s... like comin’ home. When I’m with him I feel... complete.” Sean was struggling to get to the truth. He’d never had to ask himself before what he felt. There’d never been anyone else who had mattered to him before. Except his brothers. But that never needed saying. It just was. A fact of life, like summer heat and the hardness of getting by and the general arseholeness of upper class people. Brothers were family. Sean was the eldest, and that brought some privileges, but also giant responsibilities. With his father and his mother the way they’d been, it had been Sean who’d brought up Patrick and Damian. Sean looked directly at Adam. “I love him,” he repeated, as if it were a mantra, that saying it enough would make things right again.

Adam studied him for a moment. “Will you fight for him?”

Sean nodded fiercely, then stood up abruptly and began to pace up and down. “Am I right to do that? I mean, do I have the right?” He flicked his fingers against each other in distress.

“Does he love you?”

“Yes!” Sean almost shouted the word. “Yes,” he repeated more quietly. “Yes.” He was silent for many heartbeats. Then, with absolute certainty, so soft it was almost a whisper, he said, “Yes. I know it. He loves me.” He knew he was right. Bone-deep, he knew. Will wasn’t pretending when he showed love. He hadn’t said it. Neither of them had said it. So what? Yet now he wished he had spoken. Perhaps that would have made the ache in his heart bearable.

Adam smiled at him. “’Sokay, dude. I’m just making sure of the facts.” He looked at the other man for a while. “OK. There are a couple of possibilities. You could fight for him, and maybe win. But if you do that, you’ll hurt his wife. Dunno how much, ’cos I dunno how much she loves him.” There was no upward tilt in his tone, but Sean answered the implied question anyway.

“Yeah,” he said morosely. “She loves him. I mean, I dunno. But she must do, she still wants him. Yeah,” and this time, he was thinking of her face when she’d come into the ward cubicle where Will had been lying. “Yeah, she loves him.” He sat down and put his head in his hands.

“And if he’s bi, you hurt him too. If he loves her... And if he leaves her, he’ll always be attracted to women, even if he has you.”

Sean felt a spike of anger inside himself. No he wouldn’t, he thought. I’d make sure he never had time or need to go outside us.

Adam, not taking his eyes off Sean’s face said, as if he was aware of Sean’s thoughts, “One day Tom – you know, my guy – might – will want to have a woman again. Do you think I would stand in his way? He’s bi. No, not even that. I’m the only man he loves, the only one. He’s a straight man who loves only one man. Me. Mind you,” he smiled, suddenly, and Sean’s heart turned to water at the love and affection and brimming joy in Adam’s expression, “he does love me a lot.”

Sean shook his head. What he was disagreeing with, neither of them could have said, but Adam knew what he meant, by some process of intuition and deep-down insight that he could not have explained. He got up and sat down on the sofa next to Sean.

“I’m gonna share Tom. I dunno how, but I will. Somehow. If it happens. It’ll hurt, it’ll hurt like fuck, but for his sake, for ours, I will do it.”

There was another silence. Sean turned these new ideas over and over in his head. “How...?”

“How?” Adam cocked his head to one side, in a gesture Sean would come to know well, and raised a single eyebrow.

“How dya do it? I mean... ”

“Ah. I get it. Well, I dunno how Tom and I will do it. But Markie and Fee and Jas seem to make it work. It’s early days, yet. They have a whole lifetime ahead of them to get it right.”

There was another silence, a peaceful and accepting one. Sean recognized that Adam didn’t doubt that they would get it right. That gave him hope. If Adam’s sister and her blokes could, perhaps he and Will could too. And then he recalled Emma’s face when she’d told him to go, and his heart sank.

“Emma has to agree. She won’t. Ever.”

“You don’t know that. It’s all still new to her. Was it easy for you?”

“Nah.” He flashed a quick grin at Adam. “It was fuckin’ hard.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah.”

“Go slowly. And you must win Will over first. If he agrees, he will help persuade Emma.”

“It’ll be hard.”

“There are much worse alternatives.” And all at once, Adam’s face was bleak.

Sean stared at him as the words penetrated. “Yeah. But I can’t use that. She’s gotta agree from her heart. So’s he.”

“I didn’t mean to use what’s happened as a kind of threat. But, fuck, Sean, it’s happened. You can’t ignore it. None of you can. It can’t happen again.”

He’s so strong and wise. Sean felt a sudden burst of hope. He’s made this journey, and he’s OK. They’ve all travelled down this road. All of them. If they could, so could he. With their help, with these people who had taken him in, and welcomed him, he stood a chance. He would do it, too.

He had no idea how, but he would find a way to be with Will. He would.

***

Sean went directly from Adam’s house to the hospital. He was expecting to be refused entry to the ward. He was certain that Emma would have given orders that he be excluded. But there was no desk with someone behind it standing guard at the entrance to the ward. There was, however, the matter of visiting hours, and a locked door, which opened only to doctors and nurses and orderlies pushing gurneys and waving security cards. They wouldn’t let him in. And in any case he had to work. He decided he would come the next day.

As he drove the Suttons around, his mind was only intermittently on his driving and his employers. This wasn’t unusual. What was different was the intensity of his thoughts. His mind went back over the events of the last week, again and again, revisiting everything he and Will had said and done. Sometimes, it seemed best to just give up. At other times, he was convinced that he and Will were meant for each other. But threaded through all his thoughts was his guilt at not going to see Will earlier.

The next afternoon, he again went to visit Will. The crowd assembled outside the locked doors of the intensive care ward were from every Ozzie ethnic group, but the largest number apparently belonging to one extended family, Turkish or Lebanese, judging by their coloring and the black-garbed head-scarfed old ladies. He wondered whether it was a good idea for somebody suffering the stress of serious illness to be surrounded by this squabbling noisy mass. But then, (the thought came unexpectedly into his head) perhaps all the children and grandchildren and the two old ladies cheer the patient up. His brothers and sisters and aunties, his old mum, his cousins and nephews and nieces. And then, his heart suddenly bound by bands of stone, he wondered who would come and see him if he got sick. All at once, the absence of friends from his life seemed intolerable, and his mind went back to the five people at the house in Carlton and the unusual family they’d created. He’d never understood it before, before Will. He was lonely. And the understanding hurt, made his heart ache, made him want to weep uncontrollably. Sean MacDonald, he told himself sternly, this will never do, mate!

At that precise instant, he caught sight of Emma. She hadn’t seen him yet. He ducked behind a pillar, his heart thumping, guilt sending a surge of adrenalin through him, driving the sorrow and self-pity out. He stayed where he was until the noisy throng had swept into the ward, and went home, his head in turmoil, and his heart aching.

On the way home, he stopped for a caffè latte in Brunswick St. He had come to like coffee taken this way. He no longer ever drank instant coffee. He was amused by these new middle-class habits, until he remembered that he’d learned them from Will. What was he going to do? His resolution to somehow keep Will in his life had become stronger, more insistent. Will was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He wasn’t going to give him up without a fight. Sean, tough, a fighter, hardened by a hard life, had learned unexpectedly that he needed to be loved, that he needed to love. As he sipped his coffee, this realization hit him with all the pounding force and direct brutality of a sledgehammer wielded by hulky demolition navvy. His skin went cold with shock. His heart jolted.

But then his hard upbringing reasserted itself. He still had to win. He had to get Will for himself and keep him. He began to plot strategy. He was working that evening but was free the next day. He decided to visit Will in the morning, because Emma was unlikely to be able to get off work then. He would have a better chance to get to see him.

Before he went into the hospital, he put on dark glasses just in case Emma did in fact turn up. She might not recognise him in them, if she caught sight of him by chance. He waited discreetly around the corner for the doors to the ward to be opened. But Emma didn’t appear.

His heart thudding, he went in.

Will was lying in bed, motionless, staring at the ceiling. Sean was quite unable to speak. He stood at the edge of the curtained-off cubicle, with its transparent illusion of privacy, staring at Will. Will hadn’t turned to look at him. Sean stepped into the space around the bed, and dragged the plastic chair over the bare lino tiles towards the bed. Will heard him, and turned his head briefly towards the sound. His eyes met Sean’s, and held for a moment. Sean stared into the toffee-colored depths, a lump in his throat, his eyes pricking. Still Will didn’t speak.

Sean swallowed hard. “Will.”

Will stared at him. Clear as pebbles on the bed of a mountain stream, Sean saw the emotions flow through Will’s face. Overwhelming and profound love. Grief. Unbearable pain. Anger. Indifference. Despair. Oh God, most of all, despair!

Will turned his face away. He swallowed. “Go away.” His whisper was almost inaudible.

Sean’s heart dropped, and sorrow filled his being like icy water. It had never occurred to him that Will wouldn’t welcome him back with open arms. His misery and anguish gave him the courage to speak, to say what he realised now, too late, that he’d thought so often, but never expressed in words, though he had in every other way that mattered. Except when Will had been unconscious – then he could say it. His cowardice sickened him. Not one moment’s further delay. He would say it now.

“I love you, Will.” His voice cracked. This wasn’t how Sean MacDonald was supposed to be. He was a boy’s home graduate, and then there had been prison – and he remembered the General’s shrewd face as he questioned him about his record, and how he hadn’t been able to meet the General’s compassionate and wise and tough old eyes – and his parents, and oh God, his mother. Sean would have sworn he was hardened against this. He knew better now. Almost, he was angry with the man in the bed in front of him. Unable to articulate these feelings and judgments, he repeated the words, wanting to take the other man into his arms, knowing that if he could he would be able to make it all right.

Will was obstinately silent. He stared away, and Sean saw his throat moving, and he knew that Will was crying, and somehow, illogically, that was utterly intolerable. With his own cry of agony muffled by the sleeve of his leather jacket across his mouth, he pushed the chair back so hard it fell over, and fled.

***

He didn’t go back to see Will for several days, and when he did, there was someone else in the bed. He felt sick with shock. Where was he? For one horrible moment, he knew Will was dead, and then commonsense came to his rescue.

“Where’s Will?”

“Will?”

“He was in that bed there? Yesterday.”

“He’s been discharged.” The nurse’s face was giving nothing away.

Sean knew all about authority, about how those who had the power used it and abused it. He didn’t bother arguing. He went round to Will’s house. But there was no one there, even though Will’s car was parked just across the way. He assumed that Will had gone out with Emma, and heartsore, but not yet despairing, he went home, back to his dreary flat above the garage at the Sutton’s.

When he went back the next day, the car was in the same place, and there was again no one home. If he had known Will’s second name he would have phoned Will’s work.

Sean went every day for a week to the house. He lurked in the alley, until one day he heard the sound of a police siren in the road at one end of the alley, and deduced, correctly, that someone had seen him and had called the cops. He ran, and hid behind an electricity substation, in the gap between the station and the adjacent house. He waited twenty minutes after the police car had driven away, before coming out of his concealment. He wondered if it had been Emma who had called the police, but decided she probably hadn’t. He had been very careful not to be seen by her. But he obviously hadn’t been careful enough with everybody else, with all the other people in the terraces on either side of the alley.

When Emma rang his mobile, he was in fact having a latte only a couple of blocks away, on Lygon St. After he heard Will’s phone ring out when he rang him back, the temptation to go round to the house and confront Emma was almost irresistible. He knew it was Emma, because if Will had rung him, he wouldn’t have hung up. For a moment, he doubted that, wondering whether Will might not do that, now.

He sipped his coffee carefully and slowly, and thought. Will wasn’t at work. He wasn’t at home. So where was he? And then, in what some may call coincidence, he saw Emma’s car, stopped at the traffic light twenty meters from where he was sitting. At first, he wasn’t sure, but she turned her head and looked, not at him, but in his direction. He flung down a fiver on the table, and ran. His bike slipped between the stationary lines of cars at the next set of lights, and he had time to give silent thanks that he was on a bike, and could follow her, quickly and anonymously, his features obscured by his helmet.

The BMW turned left at top end of Lygon St, and Sean followed, a discreet couple of vehicles behind. Emma turned left again into a tree-lined street which had obviously once been part of the park. There were buildings dated from the turn of the last century, and ultra-modern laboratories, and a borstal. Sean stopped his bike for a moment and looked at the youth prison. He shuddered a little, overwhelmed just for a minute or two by his memories, though he hadn’t been sent to this particular place. The trendy architecture didn’t fool him. There was the same scent of misery and hopelessness, the miasma that clung to dog’s homes and orphanages and all those official places where the authorities tried in vain to compensate for the actions of the heartless and selfish and thoughtless, for the random beatings imposed by life.

The slate car slowed and turned into a utilitarian but nevertheless elegant building, white with a grey slate roof and green trimmed windows and doors and verandah railings. The neat notice at the gate was plain. The Bainbridge Institute. Phone numbers. Visiting hours.

“Yes!” Sean hit one gauntleted hand with the other, and his heart lighter than it had been for weeks, he headed home.

The next morning, he arrived a minute or two before the morning visiting hours started. He didn’t recognize any of the cars. He went into the building.

“Will? I’m a friend.” There was some little difficulty that he didn’t know Will’s full name, but Sean turned on the charm. It worked. He followed directions to a room overlooking the verandah, with a view of the ancient gum trees which lined the street.

When Will saw Sean, he turned his head away.

“Can we go outside?” Sean asked, terror making his heart whack against his ribs, a wild animal caged. “Please, Will?” He had no time to wonder at the pleading in his tone, at the way he placed himself under someone else’s power. It too late anyway for such thoughts. That war had been lost long ago.

Without a word, Will rose from the chair he’d been sitting in. They went outside. There were benches arranged under some birches near the pond. They had small plaques on them. Sean read them without taking in what he was seeing. “In loving memory of Phyllis Speakman, wife and mother, 1888 - 1951.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Well?”

Sean quailed at the hostility in his tone. He scuffed the gravel with his biker boots. Staring down at his leather pants and his boots, he said, “I’m sorry.”

Perhaps that was the bravest thing Sean ever did.

And perhaps, if he hadn’t heard the tremor in Will’s voice when he answered, he would have stopped right there, stood up, and gone home, and lived for the rest of life with half of himself missing. “A-a-about w-w-what?”

“I should have come to see you. I’m sorry I was so angry with you. I... I’m trying to understand.”

Will whispered something.

Sean was still staring at his boots. Summoning his courage, he turned and looking into Will’s eyes, deep smudgy wells of sorrow and grief, eyes that were fixed on him with an intensity that hurt, that frightened. Answering what he thought the question was, he went on. “I was so hurt, I... ”

Will interrupted him.

Sean couldn’t make out what he said. He was afraid for this new person, so different from the one he thought he knew. “What?” They were still staring at each other.

“I’M ALWAYS HURTING PEOPLE.” The yell was such a contrast, Sean jumped.

Sean was losing himself in the sorrow and guilt in Will’s eyes, in the darkness of the dilated pupils. He knew he had to say something, or he would never have the strength or the chance. He used the skills he had learnt, bringing up his brothers. Patrick and Damian knew he was strong, but also saw the side of him no one else knew of, his tender affection, his encouragement, his comfort, his profound love.

“Hush, buddy. Hush your foolishness.” He wanted to take Will into his arms and stroke his back and his head, as he had done to his brothers, when they had needed to be loved (since his parents weren’t there to do it), but it was in public, in full view of everyone. In some muddled way, Sean was afraid he would be stopped, made to leave. But his tone was tender, intimate. The words didn’t matter. It was no different to gentling a frightened horse or dog. It wasn’t about logic.

Sean felt his love swell in him, flowing down his arms and legs, through his body, making him feel simultaneously weak and silly with it, and yet also empowered into a profound strength. “Hush,” he said again, and he took Will’s hand in his. The world stood still, and the winter morning thickened into gold.

When he left, he knew what he had to do. There was only one way. His determination cutting the lines in his face deeper into his flesh, he rode back from the asylum to Will and Emma’s house. As he knocked on the door, he stepped from one foot to the other, and wondered what the fuck he was going to say.

<<Chapter 26

© 2009 Nigel Puerasch. All rights reserved.
Romantic m2m novels and short stories