It was a love story; Jamie and Ste, two boys his own age, falling in love with one another. There were no steamy love scenes and but for a fleeting glance at Ste’s naked bottom there was no nudity, so Gethin got few clues as to what two boys might actually do together. When Jamie and Ste ran through the trees chasing one another and finally embracing and kissing, Gethin had become aroused; he’d wanted to be Jamie in the film – to be held and kissed by Ste…. He’d wanted his own mother to be as accepting as Jamie’s and he’d wanted a friend like Leah to talk to.

Outside the cinema it had stopped raining so Gethin decided to walk back to Eilir’s flat near Princes Park. Wandering along Princes Avenue, he came to understand that something had changed in his life and nothing would be the same again. Behind the screen that he’d erected to keep himself from thinking about the other thing he’d felt closed in silence – a silence which had left him anxious and uncertain, even fearful. But the screen had been pulled away by Jamie and Ste and their story had begun to give that unspeakable part of Gethin’s life a shape. For the first time Gethin really understood what his father had so often preached to his congregation – ‘That stories give shape to lives and that without stories we cannot understand ourselves.’ Of course, the Reverend Llŷr Jones had a certain anthology of stories in mind for giving shape to lives and Gethin knew that his father wouldn’t include Jamie and Ste’s story alongside those of Jacob, Jeremiah and Jesus. Llŷr Jones wouldn’t see the two boys’ story as a ‘beautiful thing’.

Gethin recalled that Sunday during the age of consent debate. His father, in a fiery sermon, had exhorted the congregation at Tabernacl (Methodistiaid Calfinaidd – 1881) to write to the local MP urging him to vote against lowering the age to sixteen. Gethin remembered the discussion over the roast beef after chapel, his father – with all the authority of an M.Th. and a dog-collar behind his words, saying that homosexuals were sinful and his mother – in her calm ‘I’m the doctor, you can trust me’ manner, saying that they were disturbed and needed psychiatric treatment.

Crossing Princes Park, Gethin sat by a reservoir of the city’s debris that had once been a lake. He watched a used condom navigate its course on a stiffening breeze through the squalid waters between the half-submerged skeletons of an old bike and a supermarket trolley until it came to lie, stranded on the shore of an abandoned pram. He thought about his father and mother; how he loved them – but how he now didn’t think he knew them at all. If he told them about the film – about Jamie and Ste and about what he now knew to be true of himself, would his father’s love be acted out in some kind of exorcism and would his mother want the best medical care with visits to some psychologist? Gethin wondered if their love and trust in him were deep enough to challenge thirty years of belief in Calvinistic Biblical scholarship and 1960s medical science? A plastic baby’s arm reached from the crib of slime in which it lay, grasping an empty sky; Gethin wondered if his reaching out would be as futile. Back at the flat, Eilir wanted to talk about her first AIDS patient – and about the fungus on the kitchen wall.