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It’s hard to feel the absence of something, if you don’t know what’s supposed to be missing.
He’d wondered, briefly, if it was a sign, that maybe he ought to become a priest. His gran would have loved that. She’d gotten more and more religious in her old age, religious in the way that people get when they’re afraid. It might have been because she was getting older, coming to terms with her own mortality. Or it might have been the book, long gone now but the sticky, cobwebby trails of it still lingering in their little house.
Yes, for a brief time, around the age of fourteen maybe, the priesthood had seemed like a very good idea indeed. It wasn’t that he thought the Church was an entirely benevolent entity, but he knew from personal experience that there were much worse things out there, things that couldn’t be explained, things that, in all his naiveté, he’d thought that Holy Orders might offer some protection from.
There was a place inside of him where (he was given to understand from what he could piece together) there was supposed to be desire. And he thought it might be empty. Or maybe it just didn’t exist. He supposed, looking back on it, it had been easy to mistake that for a calling to something higher, something spiritual, perhaps. He’d thought maybe he was just above it all, on some level. He’d been fairly insufferable that way.
Then something else had turned his head. A prospectus had landed in his lap from a PSE teacher who probably ordered it as more of a joke than anything else, given the sorry state of the local comprehensive. Oxford, with spires and spiral stairs and ancient old libraries full of more than he could ever read in a lifetime and he’d felt a different kind of calling. It was the closest thing he’d ever felt to what he imagined seduction to be, a tight, yearning in the pit of his stomach. He took it home (nobody cared) and he flipped through the course catalogue with a sort of grim reverence and he knew, felt it in his chest like it would burn him from inside, that this was what he wanted.
He held on to that small, white hot flame and he nursed it through every lesson, every grim day in that cold and concrete place, even when the other boys fired spitballs at the back of his head, or when the girls played off one another, trying to get a reaction by whispering words in his ear that confused him to the point of panic. He imagined it as a prison sentence and he survived by keeping his head down.
He thought his gran might have been happier for him when he got in. She seemed more appeased about it when he clarified that his student loan would cover everything, although she expressed some doubt about whether a BA in Classics was really going to get him a good job at the end of it all. She would not, she reminded him with no hint of irony, be around to look after him forever.
University realised one of his biggest fears. Namely, that he wasn’t as clever as he'd thought he was. Where, at school, he’d been an outlier and an anomaly, he now found himself pitted against the best and brightest from private schools, the sort of students who’d benefited from extracurricular tuition from primary school age and who sat there in lectures, brimming with confidence from day one, talking with erudite ease while he was paralysed with anxiety. He was middle to bottom of his class, not failing but certainly a small fish in a very big pond. For someone whose sense of self worth had been entirely and exclusively tied up in his academic abilities, it was a hard blow. He withdrew, studied harder, ground his teeth, berated himself, but it didn’t matter. Nothing he did could make up for the sort of head start these people had.
And it wasn’t just the academic side of it. At secondary school, he hadn’t fit in because he’d seemed too ‘posh’, eschewing the local slang for what he had convinced himself was ‘proper English’. In this brave new world, he was out of his depth in the opposite direction. Everyone seemed to see him for what he secretly feared he was, the token admission from a state school. He started hearing a regional inflection to his own voice that he hadn’t even realised he had until it was thrown into stark contrast with the flawless received pronunciation of his peers. Slowly, grindingly, painfully, he continued to surgically eviscerate his own speech, brutally checking himself every time he pronounced ‘bath’ with a flat A. He listened more than he spoke and eventually, he learned to camouflage. Not enough to fit in, but enough to stop standing out.
Occasionally the way a girl’s hair glinted in the sunlight, or the curve of the cupid’s bow on a boy’s upper lip might hold his attention for a moment and he’d catch himself wondering if this was what attraction was. But he told himself that he was too busy for that. If he’d had friends, then he might have gleaned enough from banter and pub confessionals to work out that it wasn’t just that. But he didn’t.
“It’s not a sin to be gay,” his grandmother had told him during the summer holidays that year, in a rare, unprompted and wholly unwanted moment of something beyond the perfunctory. “It’s only a sin to act on it.” He thought maybe she’d intended that to be comforting.
It wasn’t until he met Georgie that he felt something he might describe as a need. He saw her, and he wanted her to see him. She was beautiful, taller than he was and brimming with an easy kind of confidence that he wished could just envelop him. He’d learn later just how much she’d gone through to establish that confidence. He found himself trying to impress her, desperately wanting her to like him in a way that felt like yearning. He thought maybe that was what attraction was, so he asked her out, in a way that was so horrifyingly stilted that it took her a moment to realise what he meant. She’d laughed then and asked him what he’d thought their last two dates had been, and he’d flushed to the roots of his hair.
They’d lain one day on the single bed in her halls of residence, fully clothed and kissing. For him, it felt like enough and he could tell that, for her, it felt like a prelude to something. She looked down at him with a hazy want in her eyes that he couldn’t relate to and it was clear that, although they were doing the same thing, they were experiencing it in such utterly different ways that he froze, suddenly cold.
“It’s ok,” she’d said gently as he choked on an apology. “I get it. I had a religious upbringing too. It took me a while to get past my hang ups.”
And he nodded, but he knew it wasn’t that.
Things with Georgie petered out, in a way that was more relief than heartbreak. They stayed friends, after a fashion. He got the impression that she was very careful with him, protective in a way that always seemed slightly sad. But at least, through her, he could say he had some semblance of a very occasional social life.
He stumbled, bewildered, through his honours thesis and his grandmother made it to see him graduate with a 2:2 before she died.
He learned then, the hard way, that the real value of an Oxford degree wasn’t the degree itself, but the contacts that you made while studying there. And he’d unfortunately neglected to make any. His peers seemed to slide effortlessly into gainful employment. He took his savings from selling his gran’s house, moved to London in the hope of finding museum work and ended up taking a job in a council library in Hackney. It had brown carpets and the space heater was so barely adequate that he wore fingerless gloves at his desk in winter. The only clientele were elderly people wanting to be shown how to use the computers (which he wasn’t great at himself) and a couple of older teenagers who, he suspected, were dealing drugs out of the non fiction section. He sent out applications, relentlessly, for something, anything else and at night he went home to his tiny room in a flatshare with people whose names he barely bothered to learn, and ate Pot Noodles in his room to avoid having to use the communal kitchen. Sometimes his stomach would growl and he’d impatiently light a cigarette to curb his hunger, instead of bothering to cook. It didn’t matter. There was nobody around to tell him how terrible he looked.
He’d spent his entire time at uni petrified and anxious, waiting for the next step in his life, wishing time away to the moment when it would all slot into place. Now he missed that time so much more than he could even articulate. If he’d known that this was what was waiting at the end, he’d have held on a little tighter to the courtyards in summer, the smell of the old buildings, the rows upon rows upon columns of books that had held so much promise, not like the pulpy paperbacks he was surrounded by now, all covered in those smeary thick plastic dustjackets.
He heard that Georgie had moved to London. He considered sending her a message, but thought better of it.
The thought came unbidden that, at graduation, she’d been the last person to hug him, perhaps the last person to even touch him, notwithstanding the jostling awfulness of the Tube. He sat at his desk and wrapped his arms around himself and told himself it was just because it was cold. He snapped at an old lady who was trying to work out how to use internet explorer and it made him feel better for a fraction of a moment before it made him feel much worse.
One evening, when he came home, there was a letter sat haphazardly on top of the electricity meter. His name and address were typewritten on thick cream paper and the first strange thought that came to him was that it looked like a wedding invitation. It wasn’t. It was an invitation to a job interview, at a place he couldn’t quite recall applying to.
He supposed he must have. He had sent out rather a lot of applications, after all.