Mr Bateman had learned to speak Welsh; perhaps this was what Gethin liked best about him. Very few of the English people who’d settled in the area had bothered to learn the language, but he had, and Gethin was hard put to detect an ill-formed mutation or a confused gender; Mr Bateman spoke better Welsh than many native speakers and Gethin admired him for the respect he’d shown to the language and culture of his adopted home. And there was football too; Gethin thought highly of him for that! Mr Bateman had grown up in Manchester and everyone at school knew how fanatically he still supported his home team – United, not City. Gethin supported Liverpool and went to some home games with Mel Tudor, Mel-siop-baco as everyone knew him, who had a season ticket at Anfield.

Gethin carried the Welsh novels back to their shelf wondering if he dared start a conversation with Mr Bateman. He needed to talk to somebody. The school summer holidays had been such a mixed time; although he’d been confident enough of good grades, waiting for the GCSE results had found him lurching between the certainty of staying on at school to do his A-levels and the uneasy emptiness of ‘What if?’. It was then that the other thing bothered him; it had been there for ages, of course, but ‘Doing well in your exams,’ and ‘Going to university like your brother and sister,’ had been a sufficient enough screen to hide behind. The kiss on Brookside, outing bishops and the debate about the age of consent had made the screen wobble a bit, but he really hadn’t allowed himself to think very much that he might be, or what that might mean, until those moments of uneasy emptiness had folded over him. And now he knew that he was and he needed to talk about it.

He’d tried to talk to his sister. Gethin had stayed with Eilir in Liverpool at the beginning of July; he’d tried talking to her after seeing the film, but she’d seemed so taken up with her patients, her new boyfriend and the hassles she and her flat-mates were having with their landlord about the fungus growing on the kitchen wall. It was because she’d been so preoccupied that Gethin had spent his time in the city alone and had the chance to go to the cinema on a rainy afternoon. He’d read a review of Beautiful Thing in The Guide that came with Saturday’s Guardian, and when he saw that it was showing at the ABC on Lime Street he’d loitered on the opposite pavement for almost an hour trying to muster up the courage to go in. It was the rain that eventually sent him through the glass doors into the garishly lit foyer of the cinema to face the spotty, many ear-ringed boy in the ticket booth who dispensed the ticket with a wry smile. Gethin had panicked, interpreting the boy’s smile, as ‘I know you’re queer… all the boys who come to see this film on their own are!’ Only after taking his seat in the darkened auditorium did his panic subside.