Free Demons by Bill Nagelkerke

you were in the same class, studying the
same subject. I wasn’t ‘one of the boys’ either. Do you know
something, I wondered early on if you were lesbian.’
    ‘ So did they,’ I say. Becs,
as I eventually
    discovered, had hoped I was. ‘And what if I
had been?’ I ask Chris.
    ‘ The poet Sappho was
lesbian so it wouldn’t have worried me apart from the fact we would
never have taken things any further.’
    ‘ God Chris, you’re
impossible.’
    ‘ But then,’ he continues,
‘after we’d been talking for a while I felt I was really getting to
know you, and like you. I liked that you were different. You liked
me for being different. It felt as if we were on the same
wavelength even if we weren’t on anybody else’s.’
    I nod. ‘Yeah, that’s what I felt too. No
other boy loved classics as much as you. I liked you for that.
Chatting up girls for the sake of it wasn’t your style.’
    ‘ I wondered but I never
asked, if it took you long to decide to go out with me?’
    ‘ I said ‘yes’ straightaway
didn’t I? Well, almost straightaway.’
    ‘ I meant, had you already
planned to say yes before I’d asked? In case I asked?’
    ‘ Remember I once told you
that you were arrogant? You haven’t changed. I’d never ever thought
of the possibility.’
    ‘ Yeah, sure,’ says Chris, a
knowing grin on his face. ‘Have another coffee?’
    But of course I had anticipated the
question if only to dramatise in my own mind what it would sound
like and what my answer was likely to be. But I wouldn’t have told
him that then. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him now.
     
    Classical studies
    Year 13 dragged to begin with because, for
the first time, I found it almost impossible to relate to anyone in
my class. The two girls with whom I’d loosely
    hitched up in Year Nine, Michelle and Jo,
had already left school and were working. Jo at S-Mart and
    Michelle at Fancy Free Hair.
    Both were saving to travel. Boys, beaches
and surfboards were in their schemes and dreams. On the odd
occasion I tried to imagine myself surfing too, waiting for the
next big wave to carry me somewhere exotic but then, I’d never been
greatly into beach culture so the imagining did me little good.
    I felt at a loose end. I hadn’t been to
church for more than two years and had quickly lost contact with
the youth group members. Mum and Dad had eventually started going
to a different parish altogether. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t
because they were in any way ashamed of me or let down that I
wasn’t going with them any more. It was because they had discovered
a parish priest who both openly supported the ‘Women Knowing Our
Place’ group and was very active in social justice issues.
    I thought the emptiness I was experiencing
would soon go away yet strangely it didn’t. I missed the security
and reassurance of what I had believed in but, at the same time, I
knew I couldn’t go back to the way things had been before. I’d made
my own bed and now I had to lie in it.
    However I’d often thought
about the priest-playing days and, just lately, I’d made a
connection between the game I used to play and Michelangelo’s
painting The creation of
Adam , which Gran and I had long ago looked
at together. When the mysterious, magical transformation in the
Mass took place it somehow sealed the tiny but, at the same time
significant, gap between God and Adam. It made everything right . That fingertip
touch, I decided, allowed for the possibility of a
Happy-Forever-After
    place. Without it, Forever would be
impossible.
     
    Schoolwork wasn’t easy but it wasn’t too
difficult either. Truthfully, not much of it held any great
interest. Most of it seemed pointless, except history because we
were studying Ireland and the 1916 Easter Uprising, something Gran
had always gone on about, had in fact lived through as a baby, if
babies can be said to live through events like those - and
classical studies, because of the fact that Chris turned up