Page 104 of The Moon & His Tides
The first: losing my mother in the car crash that had her pinned behind the wheel, dying rapidly but not fast enough beside me in the driver’s seat. I’d held her bloody hand while she died, her last words a slurring rush of “IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou” that I could hear in the echo of my heartbeat anytime I felt panic. No one should watch their mum die, but the trauma was compounded by the way my father reacted.
Stiff upper-lip British stoicism.
Even though he was obviously eviscerated by her death, he insisted we move on briskly and efficiently.
Within a week, all her things were packed up and sold off or disposed of, the empty spaces in the house glaring to my eleven-year-old gaze.
We weren’t allowed to talk about her. The name Juliet scrubbed from our vocabulary as if she had never existed.
And then, ten months from the day, my father remarried a woman whom he’d courted for the past four months.
Within the span of a year, the memory of my mother was eradicated except for the special space I kept for her in my own heart.
Happily, I was sent to Eton shortly after and then Oxford after that.
Though the family purse supported me until graduation, I never returned home to visit him and his new wife.
And when I enlisted in the Royal Air Force to be with Arthur Whitley-Fairfax, the future King of England, because he was my brother more than Andrew had ever been my father, our last correspondence was the letter he sent me threatening to disown me if I risked my life so foolishly.
I didn’t mention I was enlisting with the bloody Crown Prince of Britain and that our station was probably the safest place on earth because of it. It wasn’t worth the breath it would have taken to reassure him.
The second was just as devastating but perhaps harder to categorize.
Arthur and I had another best mate in grade school at Eton, a lad by the name of Gregory Madison. The three of us were thick as thieves until our third-year in uni when suddenly Gregory stopped coming round.
Arthur and I both pretended we didn’t know why, but we did.
The last time we’d seen Gregory, he’d been bent over the couch in his apartment, taking it from behind by an older bloke I recognized vaguely from the graduate library.
I didn’t know why I didn’t ring him and say “Hi, mate, no need to feel embarrassed. I bugger the occasional bloke too. Looks like we have more in common than we thought.”
But I didn’t ring him.
And then it was too late.
Because Greg decided to take his own life two days before graduation after he told his parents he was gay, and they told him they never wanted to see him again.
Arthur and I found him when we dropped round to drag him out for a pint to celebrate the end of our courses.
Whenever I needed to summon tragedy for a role, it was Gregory I thought about. The way his beautiful body had looked naked and pale as paper in the bath surrounded by bloody water and the glint of razor blades. The way I’d dropped to my knees hard on the tile and dragged him from the cold water into my lap to begin CPR that was much too late. The way Arthur had stood there utterly ashen, looking as close to death himself as he could get while still breathing.
This was the boy who’d encouraged me to join the school theatre group. He’d rode his bike to my mother’s house in Chelsea, where I stayed during holidays, nearly every day to keep me company in the big house. The first lad I’d ever thought to fancy with his big grey eyes and coltish limbs, who bit his lower lip when he was nervous, which was often because he was sweet but shy.
The boy who’d been my best mate for more than half my life.
Dead in my arms because of the shame others had forced upon him.
When I enlisted that summer, I knew it was Arthur’s way of running from the incident but also from his truth.
Not one of us three had been straight as an arrow, and Gregory’s death stalked us like some dark, knife-sharp shadow.If it caught us, I don’t think either of us knew what would happen.
When I met Bryce in the Air Force, I wasn’t ready to accept any part of my bisexuality, but he was hard to resist. Stolen moments in empty barracks, weekend leave spent in hotel rooms we never left.
At first, when he was killed in action, I thought it was inevitable.
Of course, he would die.
That was what happened in these kinds of situations.
