Make or Break

‘Good morning, sweet girl!’ Diego said as I walked into the kitchen the next morning in a pair of Jimmy’s boxers and his oversized T-shirt. He stood in the kitchen in a hot-pink vest, arranging fruit salad into two earthenware bowls. ‘You’re the girl who never leaves! Not that I want you to.’ He pulled me into a bear hug then held me at arm’s length. ‘Big night, huh?’

Ian, who was not normally at home at 8.17 a.m. on a Friday, sat on a stool wearing impeccably pressed navy trousers and an ice-blue shirt, open at the collar. He stood and gave me a kiss on the cheek then returned to his seat.

‘A late night,’ I said, my voice hoarse from lack of sleep. It had been past 4 a.m. when I’d finally fallen into a fitful slumber, my mind spinning with images of Pete and Giselle. And Jimmy kissing me. I’d woken at 7 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. My eyeballs looked like I’d exfoliated them with hedgehogs. ‘Jimmy’s still sleeping.’

‘Then you must join us for breakfast,’ Diego said, getting out a third bowl and holding up his hand at my protest. ‘We insist. Coffee?’

I nodded gratefully. ‘This is strange,’ I said, indicating the torrential rain outside and climbing onto the stool next to Ian with considerable effort.

‘But needed,’ Ian said, shifting a newspaper out of my way. ‘Rain is good news in summer.’

‘And it means your site inspections get cancelled and you can have fruit salad with your beloved,’ Diego said, passing Ian his fruit salad, which had bits of decorative mint on top.

‘That I can.’ Ian’s eyes twinkled.

Over breakfast Ian and Diego got on to the topic of why Jimmy had come to Cape Town and how they thought it would be better for his writing and music career to be back in London, but that Jimmy was reticent.

‘Jimmy has always felt that he needed to protect me from any gay backlash,’ Ian said, folding his napkin neatly and laying it next to his empty bowl. ‘Even though, if you’re going to be gay, Cape Town is the place to be.’

‘The place,’ Diego echoed.

‘Jimmy knew I was gay before I knew.’ Ian pushed his bowl to the side and picked up his espresso with hands that had been recently manicured. ‘He used to get into all kinds of scrapes sticking up for me. But don’t think he was the tough guy sticking up for the gay sissy. He might be big now but he was a scrawny kid, a foot shorter than all his mates. I was double his size.’

‘Jimmy is a pussy cat,’ Diego interjected. He stood and began clearing the breakfast bowls.

I smiled.

Ian nodded. ‘But if he thought I was being picked on he was in there like a feral cat. Most of the time I wasn’t even being bullied. Or if I was, it wasn’t for being gay – just regular kid arseholery.’

‘Kids can be nasty,’ Diego fussed.

‘I was twenty-four when I’d worked up the courage to tell Dad. But he didn’t react well.’ A brief sadness crossed Ian’s face but dissipated in an instant when Diego laid a hand on his shoulder. Ian smiled and continued. ‘He denied it and said I was trying to be fashionable or that I was copying things I’d seen in the movies. Admittedly, I did once dress up as Julia Roberts and pretend to accept a plastic necklace from the coat stand—’

‘Who didn’t?!’ Diego exclaimed as he filled the coffee machine.

‘But he was wrong. I’m gay to my bone marrow. I didn’t just watch Will and Grace and think, “My god he has impeccable suits, I want to be like him”.’

‘You do have impeccable suits, though,’ Diego said.

‘Thank you,’ Ian said with an affectionate glint in his eyes. ‘Anyway, Dad was ashamed. And Jimmy wrote him off that day. It was either Dad or me and Jimmy chose me. And now it’s been almost ten years.’

Diego shook his head and tsk-ed.

‘Jimmy sees the situation with Dad as either/or, black or white. But life isn’t like that. There are variables and grey areas and the only way through anything is to recognise that we’re all different. A knee-jerk reaction is understandable – but it needs to be reassessed. And Jimmy just won’t do that.’

I frowned. The Jimmy I’d spent the past ten days with was the most open-hearted, non-judgemental person I’d encountered. It seemed strange to hear he wasn’t willing to forgive his father.

‘Dad was shocked, that’s all,’ Ian continued. ‘He didn’t expel me from the family, but for Jimmy he may as well have.’ Ian checked the time on his sleek watch and stood. ‘Dad and I started talking a few years later. It took him time to understand. To accept me as Ian, his son who had always been his son.’

‘He reassessed his knee-jerk reaction,’ Diego said.

Ian smiled. ‘We’re OK now. And we’ve been OK for a number of years. We just need to get Jimmy on board.’

‘Fucking stubborn, that boy,’ Diego said, but he had a fond look in his eye.

‘Yes, I am fucking stubborn,’ Jimmy said, walking into the room wearing just a pair of shorts, his hair looking like a dog’s breakfast that a fox had a go at first. ‘Did Ian tell you Dad is a Classics professor majoring in Greek History? You’d think he of all people would understand. The Greeks invented the gay stuff – it’s all over their crockery.’

Diego and Ian exchanged looks.

Jimmy ignored them and pointed to the rain. ‘My hangover place doesn’t open in the rain. It’s a beach place.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know if Jimmy would remember kissing me, or what he’d said about Pete before he fell asleep. I found it hard to look him in the eye and I felt the unsaid words between Ian and Diego watching us.

Jimmy scratched at his hair. ‘Want to drink coffee and watch the rain instead?’

Downstairs Jimmy opened the sliding doors to the balcony off his bedroom. The room filled with the sounds of the rain hammering on the sand below and the angry surf beating at the shore. Despite the inhospitable weather the air was still warm. Jimmy pulled Oscar the Couch up to the open doors and sat at one end with a tiny guitar that may have been called a ukulele.

‘Sorry about the rain ruining our plans,’ Jimmy said, twanging at the strings.

I shrugged. ‘I like weather,’ I said, taking a seat at the other end of the shaggy sofa. ‘Rain gives you permission to just be, not do. It reminds me that nature is in control. No matter what I try to organise, the world will do what it wants to do.’

‘For a crazy person that’s a pretty chilled-out view.’

For a while we sat on the sofa and watched the rain make date-sized dents in the golden sand. I sipped an awakening lemon-ginger tea while Jimmy sang Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’ but exchanged Layla for Flora, then moved indiscriminately through his favourite parts of ‘Runaway Train’, ‘Black Hole Sun’, ‘Take Me to Church’, ‘Lola’, ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and Talking Heads’ ‘Wild, Wild, Life’.

‘Pete kissed the gazelle,’ I said between songs.

Jimmy stopped strumming and looked at me with an expression that made my heart break. ‘How do you know?’

I told him about the photo. And about Pete telling me he’d had doubts about us for a while, how I’d been totally blindsided but now that I’d had time to think, realised he was probably right. We had ‘grown apart’.

‘When I met you guys, I know it was only for a few minutes, but you seemed to be really different.’

‘We didn’t used to be. But I guess we are now. We were into all the same things when we were young – running and travel and stuff – but then I got distracted by Annabelle and didn’t realise we’d . . .’ A couple of tears ran down my cheek. I was embarrassed and tried to quell them with my fingertips but they kept leaking.

Flora, who’d been sitting on her silk cushion, trotted over, hopped up on the sofa and curled in my lap.

Jimmy smiled. ‘She does that,’ he said, reaching over and giving her an affectionate tickle behind the ears. ‘It’s the best thing about dogs. They have a reflective nature. If you’re happy they’ll join in, instantly ready to party. “Where? What? Who cares! We’re HAPPY!” But if you want to mope they’ll flop next to you, instantly more depressed than you . . .’ Jimmy frowned. ‘Actually, that part annoys me. I want to own my depression.’

I giggled through my tears.

‘Is there anything I can do . . .?’ Jimmy said, resting a hand on my knee. ‘Or say . . .?’

I shook my head.

‘Or sing?’

I opened my mouth to speak.

‘Just not “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”, he said with a shudder of distaste.

‘Then no,’ I sniffed.

I smiled at Jimmy. His tactic had worked. My tears had dried. He smiled back and plucked at the ukulele/teeny guitar thing.

‘Well, you turned me down last night and it looks like you needn’t have.’ He gave me a quick sideways glance but otherwise kept his gaze on the rain that was now easing to more of a patter.

‘I didn’t know if you’d remember that.’

Jimmy turned to me. ‘Of course I remember.’

I waited to see if he was going to say anything else but he just kept looking at me.

‘It wouldn’t have been right. I didn’t know if Pete and I were going to break up when he got back or . . . what was going to happen. As much as I wanted to . . .’ I felt myself blushing. ‘It would have felt like cheating. To me, anyway.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s best to have a clean break before, you know, doing anything else with anyone else.’

Jimmy looked at me for a long moment. ‘Do you always do the right thing?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I do what I want. And what I want is usually the right thing.’

Jimmy emitted a short laugh. ‘What do you want now?’

I looked at Jimmy, waiting for an answer, and then shifted my gaze to the sky, now a pale grey-ish white. A rainbow appeared over the blue-grey ocean. It was a weak, pathetic one that was only a portion of a rainbow. Jimmy strummed his tiny guitar and started to sing ‘The Rainbow Connection’. I looked at his profile. His eyes were always on the verge of crinkling into a smile. A smile he was generous with, a smile that had lifted my day so often recently.

I looked down at Flora. What do you think?

Do it, Bitch, Flora seemed to say. I’d do it but I don’t know how because, as you so kindly pointed out, it’s hard to figure out which end is arse and which end is face in this fluff.

1. Do you mind fucking off then?

My pleasure. I can’t think of anything I’d rather see less.

Flora jumped off my lap (OK, I helped her with a well-intentioned shove), crossed the room and headed out of the bedroom door. Probably to go upstairs and tell Lucy what a bitch I was. I looked at Jimmy at the far end of the sofa.

When did the sofa become so long?

He was miles away! If I wanted to kiss him I’d have to shuffle along for like, an hour and a half. I might lose the inclination halfway there. Or get hungry and have to leave to make a sandwich.

Maybe it would be better to just look at him with ‘meaning’, then he’d know what I was thinking and we could rush at each other and meet, romantically, halfway across this expanse of shaggy green fabric.

I gave that a go. Jimmy kept strumming and singing, his eyes on the escalating rain.

Why isn’t he noticing that I’m looking at him amorously?

I huffed out a sigh and looked at the rain. Why was it so hard to make the first move? I knew Jimmy wanted it. I was pretty sure he knew I wanted it. Why, then, could I not do the sofa shuffle? Why did Gus and Sam and André and Bryn make such a long sofa? I’d be having words next time I saw them.

‘Jess,’ Jimmy said.

I turned.

He leant forward and put the ukulele/baby guitar on the floor then held out his arm.

‘Come here.’

I shuffled down the sofa, which, in the end, wasn’t nearly as long as I’d thought, and tucked myself under his arm. He shifted so his back was against the armrest and I lay against his chest. He smelt of sleep and yesterday’s suntan lotion and cologne and comfort. His heart was beating fast. It didn’t take long for our fingers to intertwine and then we were kissing, uncertainly at first, and then deeper and more intensely. His hands were at the back of my neck, and on my cheek. I ran my hands down his chest, feeling a thrill as my fingers dipped and rose over each muscle. Within moments we were pulling each other’s clothes off. The sound of the rain pelting at the sand and the waves thrashing against the rocks heightened the atmosphere. With my legs wrapped around his waist, Jimmy put an arm around my back and we moved towards the bed, slamming the bedroom door shut on the way.

‘You know what you want now?’ Jimmy said, his body pressing down on me, his lips on my neck and his voice deep and hoarse.

‘Yes,’ I said, pulling at the waistband of his boxers. ‘You.’