Two men

Fiction, about two adults over 18. I had told one woman in my life and it had gone badly. Telling a man seemed considerably worse, for reasons I could not have explained and had never examined.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I am fifty-three. I have known about this since my early twenties, in the way you know about a thing long before you have a word for it, and I have told precisely two people in thirty years.

The first was my wife, in about 2009, in a conversation I handled so badly that I still wince at the kitchen we were standing in. She was not cruel about it.

She was baffled, and then a bit frightened, and then careful with me for about six weeks in a way that was worse than either. We divorced later for other reasons and I have never been able to get the two entirely separate in my head, which I accept is probably unfair to both of us.

The second was Ray, on a Tuesday, in a pub in Kentish Town, and it took me eleven months to get to it.

I want to set out the thing I could not have set out at the time, which is why asking a man was harder than asking a woman.

With my wife, the fear was that she would find it strange, or off-putting, or would see something in me that she could not unsee. Bad enough. But underneath that there was at least a story available: men are supposed to want odd things, and a wife hearing it is on familiar ground even if she does not like the ground.

With a man it is different, and it took me a long time to work out why. What I was actually frightened of was being sized up. That he would hear it, and something in his face would do the small recalibration men do about each other, and I would be filed.

Not disgusted. Just downgraded. I have spent my working life in a trade where you are read in the first ten seconds and never entirely re-read, and I could not see how a sentence like that survives contact with another man.

That is the whole of it. Not shame about the thing. Fear of the reclassification.

Ray I met at a discussion group in a room above a pub, which I had gone to four times before I said anything beyond hello, and twice more before I said anything true.

He is sixty-one, retired from the fire service, and has the specific unhurried quality of a man who has spent thirty years being calm in situations that did not merit calm. He does not fill silences. He asks a question and then waits for the answer rather than for his turn.

We had eleven months of ordinary friendship first. Pints, football we both only half follow, a conversation about his knee replacement that went on for most of an evening. None of it was strategic on my part. I was simply not able to do it and so I did not do it, month after month.

When it happened it was almost an accident. He said something in passing about somebody at the group, an observation about how long people take to say what they came to say, and there was a gap, and I heard myself say, "About a year, in my case."

And then, because he did not jump in, I said the rest of it. Badly, and looking at the table, and a good deal faster than I meant to.

What I said, roughly, was that I had wanted this for thirty years, that it had nothing to do with sex and never had, that I had never had it, and that I did not know what I was asking him for.

He drank some of his pint. Then he said, "Right."

Then he said, "Do you want to do something about it, or do you want to have told somebody? Both are fine, I just want to know which we are doing."

I have thought about that question a hundred times. It is the most useful sentence anybody has ever said to me. It contained no shock, no reassurance theatre, no lowering of the voice, and it did not require me to have my whole position worked out. It just asked which of two reasonable things this was.

I said I did not know. He said that was fine and we would leave it a fortnight and I could tell him then, and then he asked whether I had seen what United had done at the weekend.

That last part matters more than any of it. He put it down. He did not carry it round the rest of the evening being sensitive at me.

The reclassification did not happen. That is the finding, and it took me months to trust it.

I watched for it. Of course I did. I watched for the small adjustment, the slight extra care, the tone people use with somebody they have decided is fragile. It never came. He is exactly the same with me as he was in month three, which includes being fairly rude to me about my parking, and I cannot express what that has been worth.

We did the practical part the way you would expect from a man who used to do risk assessments for a living. What, where, how much, what stops it, what happens afterwards, what this is and is not.

He was direct about the last one, in the pub, out loud, which I would not have managed. He said neither of us is interested in men, this is not that, and if it ever starts being that for either of us we say so immediately and stop. I said yes. That was the whole conversation about it and we have never needed to have it again.

His spare room. A Sunday afternoon. Over the arm of a sofa that has seen better days.

I am keeping the middle of it to myself. What I will say is that it was quiet, and unhurried, and that at some point roughly halfway through, thirty years of holding something in a locked room simply stopped being a job I was doing. I have never had that from anything. Not from drink, not from work, not from the four sessions of counselling I paid for in 2011 and did not go back to.

Afterwards he put the kettle on and we sat in his kitchen and he asked me whether I was all right, once, and accepted the answer.

Then we talked about his greenhouse for twenty minutes, and I sat there with a mug I had used before, in a house I had been to before, having been more honest in the previous two hours than in the preceding three decades, and nothing had changed in his manner at all.

That is the thing I would want another man in his fifties to know, if he ever found this. Not the mechanics. The finding was that another bloke can hold this for you without it altering what he thinks you are, and that men do not get many opportunities to discover that about each other, about anything.

Most of my friendships with men have been thirty years of standing next to each other looking at a third thing. This is the only one where somebody turned round.