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The afternoon's freezing fog had turned to steady rain. The hat he'd pulled down about his ears quickly became damp, though the walk from the bus station, his hands deep in his pockets, was no more than ten minutes. The high street was desperately jaunty with Christmas lights, so that everything looked a little less shabby, even the defunct phone boxes and the vandalised flowerbeds, the empty shops that in the daylight would have gaped like missing teeth. The Hog’s Head appeared before he was ready – closer to the junction than he remembered, squeezed between a nail salon and a betting shop – the windows bleary with condensation, the merry pulse of light and bodies spilling out onto the street.
The sound broke over him as he slipped inside, voices and voices, shrieks of joy and the hollow crack of a pool cue, Jona Lewie on the jukebox. Not much had changed since he was seventeen, holding the barkeep’s eye – Otis had this theory they’d be less likely to card you for cider – the garish carpet the same, and the clipping from the local paper about the charity tombola. Or eighteen, results day, feeling as though it all mattered so much. The world ending, and beginning. He’d kissed Siobhan Crosby in the hallway by the loos, half-heartedly, and she’d said where are you going next year and he’d said Bristol and she’d squealed and said oh my god me too isn’t that amazing, and it made his stomach lurch.
He paused in the doorway, thinking about leaving. He could spend the evening in brittle conversation with his mother instead, listening to her list the accomplishments of her neighbours’ children, eating M & S canapés because they felt they ought to.
“You coming or going, pal?” the barkeep asked amiably, weaving past with a teetering stack of dead pint glasses. “You’re letting all the heat out.”
“Sorry,” Ben said, and decided to stay. It was crowded, of course – the Christmas Eve swirl of sequined dresses and novelty jumpers. There were too few people behind the bar, and the sixth former wrestling with the optics was looking harried, the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck mousey with sweat.
He scanned the pub – a few new booths since he’d been here last, years back now, and they’d remodelled the bar, so that he had to crane his neck to see whether the lads had found a table in the back, near the entrance to the beer garden.
“Benjamin!” someone yelled, drawing out the last syllable: a war cry, or a mockery of one. It sounded ridiculous, trotted out in full like that. Benjamin was what his mother called him; so had the lecturers at Bristol who’d seemed mildly surprised when he sidled into seminars, and had tried to hide their swift glances down at the register to remind themselves of who he was. Benny, Michaela had called him sometimes, when they were weaving their way back to the flat in Fallowfield, drunk, the entrails of their kebabs littered behind them. Benny. Her eyes trying hard not to tell him she liked him. Another gentle thing he'd ruined.
“Mr. Benjamin Hope!” He knew it was Harry, even before he caught sight of him muscling through a group of girls who scowled at his oblivious back. Harry, the same as ever, the bellow and stride of someone who'd never had to consider his place in the world. Harry, who sold new builds now, the sort where the plaster bulged within six months and the doors never hung quite straight. The young couples wondering was it the house that made them miserable, or were they always doomed to it. Harry had a girlfriend and a French bulldog and it was easy, so easy, to sneer at his life as it floated by on Ben's social media feed, and to pretend it was disdain he felt, and not envy.
“Mate!” he said, louder than he’d meant, and matched the vigour and studied heterosexuality of Harry’s back slap.
“Thought you’d pussied out.”
“If you’re too skint to buy me a pint, just say.”
Harry threw back his head and laughed. “Missed you, bro. Told them, I said you’d come.”
“How you been, then?” Ben asked, in case Harry asked where he’d been the year before, or the year before that, or why their friendship was like a guttering candle, barely kept alive by banter that was already becoming stale when they were sixteen.
“Oh, you know, mate, not bad, not bad. The missus let me out tonight – time off for good behaviour, you know.” He grinned again. “How long you in town for?”
“Driving back on Boxing Day. Flying visit.”
“And you still made time for us? We should be flattered – oi, look who I found!” he shouted back the way he’d come, and through the press of bodies Ben could see them all squashed into three sides of a booth, the table bristling with prosecco flutes. Some faces he recognised, some he didn’t. Harry’d picked up other mates, when Ben left Truham, and it had been one of Ben’s favourite ways to torment himself, in the years afterwards, wondering what Harry was telling his new friends about him. Or worse, maybe he never talked about him, as though he’d never existed at all.
“What you drinking?” he asked, and Harry didn’t catch it under the din, so Ben said it again, his mouth closer to his ear.
“Snakebite,” Harry said, and Ben thought, sneeringly, fucking child, before he could stop himself, and nodded, and began pushing towards the bar.
“Scuse, scuse,” he said, but the stressed bar girl was at the other end, pulling Guinness, and all he could do was squeeze himself into a gap between a cackling grandmother wearing a bright pink cowboy hat and a burly guy in a heinous jumper, and look hopeful.
“Okay, who’s next?” the bar girl said, finally wiping her hands on her apron, on the brink of a breakdown. She nodded at the guy next to Ben.
“Oh, I think this gentleman was before me,” the guy said, and half-turned to indicate Ben. They both realised at the same time.
“Nelson, fuck, what are you –” Ben stammered. He could feel himself colouring.
Nick’s mouth tightened.
“Fine, if neither of you want serving –” the bar girl snapped, and leaned in close to the grandmother until the fringe of the cowboy hat was almost in her eyes.
“Alright? That jumper’s criminal, mate,” Ben said. He meant it as a joke – perhaps back in year ten, before Charlie, Nick would have taken it that way, and Ben’s voice wouldn’t have hardened without his meaning it. Now Nick’s brow furrowed. How long had it been? Five years, maybe six. Ben felt his mouth go dry. The fear of this was half the reason he’d avoided these Christmas Eve get togethers for so long. The worst reminder of the worst of him.
“You okay, then?” Nick said warily. He wanted to turn away, Ben could tell – he wanted to be anywhere else but here. Ben tried to stop his eyes wandering, to see who Nick might be here with. He’d never really understood, when they were kids – Nick was too smiley, and puppyish, too earnestly straightforward to be remotely interesting. What had Charlie seen in him? And the reverse. What he hadn’t seen in Ben, what he might still be lacking. Nick’s back was even broader now. He had a piercing through the top of one ear; it sent an unexpected shard of desire down Ben's sternum. Ben wondered how he looked to Nick. Perhaps he looked older. He wished his hair was still long. It had given him something to do, pushing it out of his eyes, or hiding behind it.
“Yeah, I’m alright,” he said mulishly. “What you doing with yourself these days, then?” he asked, out of politeness, and to stave off the question lurking behind his teeth.
Nick shrugged. “Teaching. Primary – got year four this year.”
Ben puffed out his cheeks, and said what people always said. “Knackering, I bet.”
“Pretty much – just got done with the Christmas show. The noise thirty nine-year-olds make when they’ve had a bellyful of cupcakes and pop. Think I’ve permanently damaged my ear drums.”
Ben squinted at Nick. It didn’t take much to imagine him as a teacher. That wide, open face. So sincere it made Ben want to look away, still.
“Are you –” he stopped himself. Are you out at work. It was none of his business. He remembered a snatch of conversation, years ago, as they turned away from Mr. Ajayi’s parents’ evening station, his mother saying totally inappropriate and his father saying it’s indoctrination, that’s what it is – Ben had tried to concentrate on the kind, encouraging things Mr. Ajayi had said about his watercolour project, when all he wanted to do was shout it’s just a fucking rainbow pin, who’s it hurting. Maybe Nick wore a pin now, or a lanyard, or hung pictures of James Baldwin in his classroom; maybe parents with narrowed eyes and minds wrote cruel, hounding letters to the head because of it.
“Am I what?”
“Na, nothing. I – yeah, I reckon you’d be good at it.”
Nick shrugged again. His shoulders were huge, almost ridiculous in the ugly Christmas jumper. Some part of Ben’s lizard brain registered it, dully. “It’s pretty full on. Only had my PGCE a coupla years. Gotta get easier some time, right?”
“Right.”
“How about you? Where did you go again – York?”
It might have been a power play - from anyone else, it would have been. Nick had never been like that, though: he'd genuinely forgotten, or had never made it his business to know.
"Bristol. Well. First year. Then." It felt like a split timeline, like another version of him was perhaps still living in that cramped, unventilated room in Clifton. He'd thought that night in Paris, after leaving Tara's party, was the loneliest a person could ever feel, the remorseless maw of it clamped around his thighs. And then he'd gotten to Bristol - his dad drove him down, and left without a hug - and he'd realised that Paris was just the dress rehearsal.
"Dropped out at the end of first year. Business, you know - my dad's idea. Wasn't really my thing." That line had worked on girls at Manchester, when he'd started over, English this time. They said he was a true romantic, following his passions like that, and he let his hair fall across his face, and read Joan Didion in the student union bar, where interesting girls would see.
"Were your parents okay with it?"
"Dunno - I guess. They could see I was happier, maybe." It felt unconvincing in his mouth, and he could tell from the look on Nick's face that it sounded so, too.
He kept starting over, promising himself it would be different each time. Sixth form, then Bristol, then Manchester: this time, he'd be kind. Kind, and straight.
Instead, he messed the girls about, and scrolled Charlie's Instagram obsessively, though they hadn't spoken in three years, and thought about moving to Phoenix. Perhaps the heat would burn it out of him. The PhD student who led his second year Cyber Fictions seminar had a shock of black curls and frayed cuffs and drank rooibos from a flask decorated with Moomins. Ben made himself utterly miserable over him. Afterwards, when he could sleep again, he wondered if it was karma.
"Manchester was better. Course was better. Liked the city more, too." That was code for what he couldn't yet bring himself to say out loud - the boys down on Canal Street, some of them students, some of them not, who told him they liked the colour of his eyes, and told him they liked the shape of his mouth around their dicks. He had no idea what he was doing, and drank too much. Swallowing his courage, or else drowning his shame. He liked getting on his knees in badly lit bathrooms, and hated that he liked it. Some of the girls were into it, when he let on that he hooked up with guys, or they let him mess them around a little longer. He wrote his dissertation on Whitman, and got a first for it, and his supervisor wrote in her feedback, sensitive work clearly underpinned by a deep personal investment in the project, and it made him want to burn the whole thing.
"You here with anyone?"
"No - oh, um - Harry's here. Greene, a few of the Truham lot."
"Oh, yeah. I said hi. Can you believe Otis got married?"
Ben didn't care. "Mental," he said blankly.
"I meant - have you - are you seeing -" He went slightly pink.
Ben's stomach flipped.
“I...yeah, I suppose...kinda... it's sort of new, so. Don’t wanna – you know, jinx it.” He trailed off.
It wasn’t new. Nearly two years. Kieran stayed over more than he didn’t. He touched the base of Ben’s spine sometimes, when they were in the Tesco Metro with a basket full of ready meals, dithering over the Shiraz. They kissed in public. Chaste kisses, but real. Ben's body tensed every time they did, still. It was like every nerve cell was being stretched on its own little rack. But he forced himself not to recoil, because Kieran was kind, and funny, and when he called him a bitch for some snide comment that blurted out of him, old habits still dying hard, his eyes were always laughing, as though he knew that wasn’t really Ben. As though he knew there was someone good in there somewhere, someone who wanted to kiss his boyfriend standing on the pavement outside HSBC, pigeons and cigarette butts at their feet.
“Right,” Nick said. “Got it. I get that. Hope it –” He set his jaw as though deciding something. “Hope you’re nice to her.”
They were still standing at the bar, hemmed in by the raucous crowd.
“Yeah, I –” Ben said. “I –”
Kieran was with his sister in Sunderland, and tomorrow he'd call Ben early; he'd take time out of his Christmas Day to call, even though he actually liked his family, and he'd tell Ben silly, rambling stories about how annoying they all were and how next year it'd just be them, bit of peace and quiet, just them and a panettone each, and a bottle of Bailey’s to share, and Ben would take that little bit of selfless love and push it into the middle of his chest and pretend he deserved it.
Nick was watching him. It was like he was waiting for something; it dawned on Ben that Nick knew, somehow, had worked it out, and had thrown down the gauntlet: say it. Go on, say it out loud. Maybe it wasn’t a challenge: maybe Nick had meant it as an opportunity, an offering. Tell me about him. Tell me you've moved on. The moment stretched. The opportunity passed.
“Nicer than I was to Charlie,” he said, finally, pathetically.
Nick snorted. “Setting the bar a bit low there, don’t you think?”
Ben looked away. Harry and his group had forgotten about him; they were huddled around the quiz machine, a row of closed-off backs.
“Yeah,” he said, quietly. The question behind his teeth dissolved: they were still together, Nick and Charlie, he could tell. “How is he?”
He watched Nick bite back the urge to tell him he didn’t get to ask that. Instead, Nick said, “Night shift. He’s doing his paediatrics rotation. Sucks he’s on call for Christmas, but it means he gets it off next year, guaranteed.”
Next year. Like there was no doubt they’d still be together then, and the Christmas after that.
He’d known Charlie was doing Medicine, of course – he’d run into Imogen a few years ago, and they’d had an awkward, prickly sort of catch-up that had made him thoroughly miserable for a few days, and which he suspected had upended her week, too. But that was abstract, the knowledge of it: Charlie, in a lecture hall somewhere all the way up in Edinburgh, Charlie, bleary-eyed in the library with a stack of textbooks, Charlie, in a lab coat, maybe, peering into a microscope. He’d forgotten that he’d have graduated by now. His own false starts jumbled the timeline.
“Does he like paediatrics?” he asked – the sort of mundane question a second cousin would ask, or an old teacher.
“Sort of,” Nick said, still with a guarded note in his voice, his hackles up the minute the conversation went anywhere near Charlie. “He did palliative care last year – I think he’ll probably end up specialising there.”
“Palliative –”
“End of life, you know. Hospice stuff.” Nick laughed awkwardly. “Bit grim, but someone’s got to –”
“I bet he’s good at it,” Ben blurted. He remembered how much Charlie’s hands used to shake, constantly, when they were around each other. He’d have his hands in Charlie’s hair, or his jaw held firmly in his palm while he kissed him, and in return he’d feel Charlie’s fingertips fluttering cautiously against his shoulder, never quite settling, as though he knew they weren’t welcome. That was what had struck him so much about seeing Charlie’s hand in Nick’s at the cinema – why he couldn't shake the memory of it, even years later – Charlie’s hand, still and calm, filled with nothing but certainty that it belonged there.
Charlie, in scrubs, a stethoscope around his neck, his beautiful hands deft with care. God, Ben thought. Imagine the last touch your dying body feels, and it’s Charlie. He wanted to ask Nick how he wore his hair now, whether his shoulder blades still stuck out like little stunted wings. Did he still play the drums. Did the corners of his eyes still crinkle when he smiled. How often did he smile.
“Yeah, he’s good at it,” Nick said. “He’s good at everything.”
“Except rugby.” It came out the way he’d meant it this time, light and teasing, the opposite of cruel, and Nick took it well. He huffed half a laugh.
“He’s not bad at rugby.”
“Better than me, anyway.”
“Don’t know how good you are if you don’t try.”
“Is that your Mr. Nelson voice?” He could see it now, Nick leaning against a desk with his arms folded, dispensing sombre, heartfelt advice to some cowering kid. Making people feel like the centre of the universe.
“Spose – doesn’t make it not true.”
“Yeah, well –” Ben looked away again. Shane MacGowan on the jukebox; the crowd was becoming maudlin. Can’t make it all alone; I’ve built my dreams around you. “I didn’t want to – Jesus, it’s so – when everyone was signing up, I was like, what if people – you know, if they catch me looking at them or whatever, or, like, I like it too much – the scrumming, or whatever. The bodies. The bodies touching. You know.”
It came out in a jumbled rush, and Nick probably caught about a third of it at most, beneath the crowd singing tunelessly through the instrumental. He must have got the gist of it, though, because he looked stricken for a moment, and his hand twitched as though he might reach across and touch Ben, a secret, fleeting moment of comfort – or of something shared, the fragile points where their queerness overlapped.
“You were okay at running, though,” Nick said finally, his fingers curling into a fist.
Ben grinned ruefully. "Well. Not as good as Charlie.”
Nick’s smile was full, then, a proper Nick Nelson beam, the sort that made Ben think oh, that – that’s why he chose him. “Told you,” he said, no malice in it, like there was not a drop of bad blood between them, like Ben was a good person, someone to joke around with in the pub on Christmas Eve, someone to boast about your boyfriend to, someone worth being friends with, “Charlie’s good at everything.”
That was the end of it. Nick was already turning his body back towards the bar. Ben caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror above the till. He looked young, suddenly, slight and sallow. He could tap Nick on the shoulder right now, tell him about Kieran, about all the ways his mother hadn't loved him. He could tell him about how he'd spent years replaying every moment with Charlie. Listening to him talk about his winter break, instead of lunging in to kiss him. Going round his house, lying on his bed, saying yes, yes we're boyfriends. Every moment forked in half: what if Ben had done the right thing, the good thing, the thing he was brave enough to imagine, and sometimes to want, but never to do. He wondered if that sort of bravery came easily to Nick.
The rain had stopped when he slipped back out into the street. A straggling, giggling trail of revellers was weaving towards the taxi rank. He could ring Kieran, though he'd no idea where he'd start. He could go back inside, let Harry tell him about his trip to Abu Dhabi. The thought of his mother's house was horrifying.
He pulled his hat down over his ears, and started walking, the sound of Slade fading behind him. Above him, fairy lights spelled out Se son's Gr eti gs.
Happy Christmas, Charlie Spring, he thought, with perhaps a little less bitterness than in the years before.