As you shower that sunny August morning of your seventeenth birthday, you think about all the hurtful names you’ve ever been called. There’d been effing queer; there’d been turd-driver and arse-bandit. Rent-boy, though, didn’t sound so bad.
My Velvet Eyes
Prysor Lewis lay, still and shrunken, in a tangle of tubes and wires. After some time staring at the bedside monitor, fascinated by the peaks and troughs, Sam could recognise none of the feelings he thought a son might have at a father’s deathbed. He’d even found himself fantasising about Frank, his father’s nurse, wondering if the three studs in his left ear were an indication that there may be other pierced bits under his uniform. Slouched in a chair at the dying man’s side, his arms folded across his chest, he tweaked the nipple rings through the cotton of his tee shirt unconsciously and thought about what sex with Frank might be like.
After some time, he wondered what Sawel Rhys would have felt. Maybe hurt and anger at his father’s rejection? But Sam’s invention of himself had so displaced Sawel that he couldn’t reinvent the mindset of his former self. He remembered his father’s pronouncement: ‘A gay son is as good as a dead son!’ Obediently Sawel Rhys Lewis, that timid little Welsh son, had let himself wither away. Sam Rees, young gay man about town, had taken his place. No more Welsh novels, Welsh rock or S4C for Sam; he was into Manchester pink politics and HIV support networks. And when Prysor had excluded him from his own mother’s funeral, Sawel had allowed himself to be buried with her.
He was only at the hospital now because of his sister Jane. Adrian had tried to dissuade him from backing out of their planned walking trip, but four kids under ten, a three hundred mile journey with snow in the Borders, and a husband on a business trip abroad had made it hard to argue with her. She’d get there when she could.
When Sam had arrived at the hospital the Charge Nurse in ITU had taken him to one side and warned him gently of Prysor’s grave prognosis. Despite the antibiotics they were pouring into him the septicaemia seemed to be knocking out all his vital organ functions, one by one. He’d cautioned Sam of the peculiar contrasts of his father’s state, combining periods of lucidness with confused babble and total lapses of consciousness. But it was only when the regular lines skipped out of their pattern, breaking the screen’s mesmerising grip on Sam, that he realised he couldn’t remain a passive observer at his father’s mute death bed. The old man had returned.
Prysor Lewis, oblivious to his son’s presence, began to speak. He admonished a patient for inadequate flossing and asked the nurse to mix an amalgam: forever the dentist, he’d returned to his surgery… But then, to Sam’s incredulous ears, he began to speak in Spanish. ‘Rubén, Rubén,’ he called. ‘Ot-ra-vez, Rubén… ot-ra-vez… dam-ef-uego.’ The words were meaningless to him, apart from scattered Welsh and English references to newspapers and ‘the big scandal’, but he jotted them down, noting in particular a phrase repeated endlessly by his father, ‘Mi-soch-os-de-ter-theo-pelo’.