Steve_Bamlett_blog

What does ‘positive impact’ mean? A story from another life not mine.

Daniel wound his arms around himself and squeezed. Usually this kind of pressure seemed a kind of unctuous thing that created a flow of flesh and fat quivering through his body, as if the flesh around him were coiled like a snake, ready to flee in any direction it could when under pressure. Now he seemed to feel his ribs hard in the flesh of his arms. Unused to seeing himself in that bony light, he rather giggled. ‘It’s working. I think it is’. Daniel was very unlikely to have shared this with anyone else, ever ready to believe that praising a success in working towards your goals was the quickest way to jinx that success into reverse, or, worse, to find itself unproven by more hard data.

The vibration of his cell phone in his pocket might have seemed like an omen of the inevitability of disappointment, were it not followed shortly after by the rather vulgar call-tone he had recently chosen for incoming calls.

‘Dan’, the voice said, now labelled Dick: ‘You didn’t call me’.

‘I tried to, Richard … You were always engaged’. Daniel tried not to allow the anxiety that fact had caused him to appear in his voice.

‘What is it with you? You seem to think I should always be on the end of the fucking phone’.

‘No. It’s not that. Last time we spoke you were in so much pain’.

‘I’m sorry Rick … you know I find calls difficult. Sometimes, I feel so inadequate to help you when you’re down’ …. ‘Besides’ (he knew he had to lift his tone, make it all into a joke about himself): “What do you expect from a boring old fat twat’.

‘First, It’s not Rick. Use Dick if you must, because I know I am not Richard the First for you…’ and he purred a kind of mock lion-hearted roar. The softness had returned, Daniel melted like an imagined candle around an imagined wick that had been lit by his imagination.

‘Love you, Dick’.

‘Come off it, you just love the dick shots I send you’. The tone was still jovial but Daniel felt the ground of this conversation turn to the most fragile of egg-shells. Through his mind raced the fact that when Richard had sent him a nude shot of his penis (something that in his 67 years of being consciously gay had never happened to Daniel). It was a picture he had apparently sent to another guy who he felt had rejected him, and for complicated reasons Daniel had reacted angrily. Hurt by the feeling that he was being turned into a man he felt he was not perhaps – a man who perved after the nudity of a younger fitter thinner man. But in truth, his hurt was fired by the act that he had not only greeted that picture with shock and a little fear, but also, as he looked again – for he did many times – with a thrill of something that might be desire. All these thoughts took but a second, though it seemed much longer, Richard had taken another track in his sometimes wild thoughts. He was crying out the pain he wanted to communicate, the connection that gave him with the right to suffer and the soon-to-follow shame at having felt that.

Daniel felt the warmth of his body flee him on an inward path seemingly. As his heart burned, his skin seem literally petrified – a hard stone. He knew where this was going. It was always thus as Richard drank away the symptoms of his physical pain and his dread that the operation to fix it would never come and his evenings turned into lonely self-loathing.

‘I wish – I so wish’, you would let me come and pick you up to stay with me’ – ‘and John’. His husband’s name fell out with a kind of shame, though it was not for a want of loving John, for John was the rock of his being – more solid than he, more than a core. This situation was a new one for him – to feel things for another man than John, floating around and disguising the core in veils of wonder. It stabbed him in the dark, and by now the dark was beginning to fall around him.

‘You want to rescue me- do you?’ The last words drooled out of Richard’s imagined mouth and invaded Daniel like venom, as if spat through the ear buds of his cell.

‘No. No. Don’t say I don’t respect you again. I think I respect you more than you respect yourself …’. He had never, ever said such a thing in these private cold conversations, taken on walks up the hills with his dog, Truffle.

‘Fuck off! Daniel!! … ‘ and the cell-phone connection disappeared.

As he walked down the darkening hill again, as he did still nightly, he marvelled at how fresh and of this not another time this remembered conversation had appeared – how real the memory of being a fat man at the start of it all felt, even during that year of privation when he also went to the gym three times a week. For in the three years since that conversation (or something like it) had occurred, he had not only lost a lot of weight but fallen deeply, madly, truly (avoid that cliché he just  couldn’t) in love with Richard, worked him into his relationship with John and the three had seemed in some way fixed up for life as friends – friends with love a part, seemingly on all sides. Richard had even begun to stop drinking – at least when any of the three of the were together,

After two years Richard seemed to find increasing problem with Daniel’s sloppy spoiled heart that stayed as flabby as his body no longer was, distanced himself, then sent a message by text.

‘Tonight I am ending my friendship with you. Bad for you, bad for me’

Richard died alone in his flat. Dan had been told this just before he walked that night when that moment from the past returned, just as the coils had returned and enswathed his heart. Richard died, possibly of a complication of his alcoholism, possibly at the hands of another. Certainly out of an anger at feeling betrayed b y life. ‘Lots of guys, slept around. Why me the HIV and AIDS related bone cancers’ He never said it. If only he had. He and John wept but Daniel wept harder.

We tend to think things that have a positive impact on us should feel positive as we  experience them. But they don’t you know!. Some people teach you the positivity of loving them the hard way.  Or so Daniel thought.

My story not about me.

With love

Steven xxxx