Free The First Time I Said Goodbye by Claire Allan Page A

am – but I’m not in the closet. My mother, well, she pretends to get it. And she even pretends to be cool about it – but I very quickly learned that she doesn’t really understand at all. She still thinks it’s just a phase and when I get it all out of my system I’ll settle down with a nice woman and furnish her with 2.4 grandchildren and a dog called Buster.”
    The great boy his mother was so keen to marry off. How must that feel? In that moment I felt my heart ache for him a little.
    “She tolerates it,” he said. “She tolerates me.”
    “I think she loves you very much,” I said and I meant it. I was sure there was more than mere tolerating going on.
    “Okay, to word it better, she tolerates my lifestyle – only just. As I said, she keeps thinking, for whatever reason, that it’s a phase. I try to tell her that twenty years is a bit more than a phase, and that before I came out I was gay and always had known I was, but I think there is a part of her which will always think I’m nothing more than an attention-seeker. She wants me to modify my behaviour – you know, so that when the day comes when I finally admit I love women instead, I don’t have too seedy a past to dig over.”
    He was upset as he spoke. He tried to keep an upbeat tone to his voice but I could tell this was hurting him.
    “Surely she should just accept you as you are?”
    “She should,” he said. “And in a lot of ways she does. I mean, we don’t talk about it all the time. It’s not this gaping chasm between us, but it is there and when things happen like family get-togethers I can feel her watching me out of the corner of her eye, scared of her life I’m going to cop a feel of a hot waiter or launch into a rendition of ‘I Am What I Am’.”
    “Is that your party piece then?” I asked, stupidly. I don’t even know why I said it. It felt awkward and horrible but I didn’t know how to have this conversation with him. It wasn’t one of those ordinary run-of-the-mill things you talked about with someone you had only known a matter of days.
    “Ah no. The thing is, my mother lives in absolute terror of me acting the flamboyant queer when, apart from the frock shop obviously, I’ve never shown an ounce of queendom in my life. My party piece, should I ever have been allowed to perform it, is actually ‘Fire and Rain’ by James Taylor, which is pretty much middle-of-the-road, chilled-out, middle-aged toot.”
    I thought of my standing, American flag flying over my head, singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ while Auntie Dolores cheered on and I pondered on the ridiculousness of it all. I was allowed to be flamboyant but only because I fitted the mould.
    “I’m sorry to hear all this,” I offered pathetically. I knew there was little point in telling him that it would get better and that she would more than likely wake up one morning and realise that it was okay to have a gay son and that she had nothing to be embarrassed about. And then I realised how horrendous it must be for him to feel as if the very person he was was somehow embarrassing to the people who loved him most. Perhaps I was being all sappy American about it, or perhaps it was the horrors of the hangover knocking my emotions all out of kilter, but I felt tears well up in my eyes.
    “It sucks,” I offered as a tear slid down my cheek.
    Sam reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “As I said, it’s not there all the time. But some times are harder to deal with than others.”
    I knew even as he spoke that, while it was not there all the time, it clearly was always there at the back of his mind, no matter how hard he tried to push things back and ignore them. I knew that because I was the self-confessed queen of hiding things and pushing them to the back of my mind when I felt they were too uncomfortable to deal with. I knew why sometimes that was a necessary evil.
    Drying my eyes and sipping from my coffee, I offered a wry smile. “I suppose