That evening, when the loneliness became too deep, Gethin told his parents he was gay. Ann said she’d ring one of the psychiatrists at the hospital. Llŷr knew of a healing ministry on the Wirral that had some success in saving homosexuals. They both wanted the best for him. Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas, Deus ibi est.

Later that evening Kevin Bateman talked with his brother’s lover, David, about what support he might offer Gethin; ‘You could suggest that he phone the gay help-line in Bangor….’ He then wrote Gethin a note to say that he was sorry for letting him down and he put the phone number David had given him clearly on the bottom. Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas, Deus ibi est.

But Names will Never Hurt Me

The seagulls have already been squealing for an hour or more. You give in to your restlessness and lie, wide-awake, in the damp, tangled sheet trying to identify the different birds by their calls. The herring gulls, by far the commonest on your stretch of coast, bark their deep kyow-yow-yow while the lesser black-backed gulls’ more throaty ow-ow-ow-kyoww offer the chorus in the dawn concert. There are rasping kierr-inks of sandwich terns and the fast, chattering kirrikiki of little terns. You remember the afternoons you spent with Deio-flat-fish on the quayside learning these strange bird voices. You’d been much younger then and your world hadn’t seemed so complicated.

They’d started calling you names even before it had dawned on you. You wondered sometimes, if it hadn’t been for the name-calling, whether you would even have thought about it. You’d known that there were people like that, in the worlds of soap operas, television personalities and big cities, but your little piece of Welsh coast seemed so untouched. Of course there were the holidaymakers and their antics, but they came and went. The first time they’d called you bum-boy you hadn’t really understood what they’d meant; then it was shirt-lifter, and that one had really baffled you too. Effing queer was much more straightforward, even if you couldn’t understand why they were calling you that. But then, as the months passed, you came to recognize in yourself what others had already seen. It was unspeakable.

By the time the name-calling had become a daily event, the name-callers had grown bored and dissatisfied by your apparent indifference to their taunts and they’d begun to push you around. In the changing rooms before and after games they flicked their towels at you. One day they even forced your head into the toilet bowl while two of the boys pissed on it and another flushed the toilet. Everyone was laughing when Mr Jones, the games teacher, came to see what all the commotion was about; he’d laughed too. You had thought many times about telling your mam, but how could someone talk about the unspeakable?

You couldn’t tell when you’d actually started to believe you were a bad person; perhaps it had been during those months when none of your friends would let themselves be seen with you. You’d spent lots of time on your own then and all the bad names they’d called you seemed to get inside you. Was it then that you’d been with the boy in the toilet by the golf course? You don’t remember the sequence of events now, but you do remember how dirty you’d felt afterwards. You can still recall the smell of the greasy haired youth’s sweat, the taste of the white scum under his foreskin and the stale urine stench in the uncared-for public toilet. After that it wasn’t just the bad names under the skin that made you feel bad.