(32) Eddie Creamer: Falling
If a whole life can be told in a couple of paragraphs, then here it is. Begin in London, 1959, with the bloody push and the bright hospital light, his mother’s screams then his own, and life, new and fresh like a blank white page. Skip over the early years when the world is what he can see or what he can reach with a stubby arm then a crawl then a half-walk, half-run across the room, parents watching with glazed joy and fear where he might be going. Soon it’s school where he struggles a little shy and prone to outbursts of tears. Not the kind of boy’s-boy who gets an easier ride. Often if he’s home alone he’ll go into his parents’ room and put on his mother’s jewelry, scarves, maybe a pair of shoes, just to see how it looks in the bathroom mirror. He never lets anyone see and one day he stops, there’s a last time and he doesn’t do it again. Around that time, he falls out of a tree and breaks his arm, shock of bone sticking out through the skin, and for the rest of his life, he’ll have a scar to remind him he was foolish. But for now, he’s a teenager, hard for everyone though maybe particularly hard when you kiss a girl for the first time—also the last—and realize you don’t like it, lips too delicate and a body beneath her clothes you don’t want to touch, soft and curving in all the wrong places. He craves something else, a hardness that matches his own, which he finds in his last year of school with another boy in his class. He loses his virginity—well, almost. Both of them too scared or too excited to get as far as that dark wet place, pink and puckered like the cowrie shells he used to seek out on holidays to Cornwall, those shells being the hardest to find and therefore the most precious. After that it’s university, passing in a flash of books and exams and fucking when he plucks up the courage, which in those days is technically illegal at their age but who’s checking? Into the 80s and we know where this is going, unavoidable for this story though at the time it might have been stopped if anyone had cared. But as it is nobody does, or no one that matters, and people he knows, lots of those boys from university and after, are dying and he might have done too, a life cut short right here mid-senten—
But he’s lucky. He and the man he happens to be seeing around that time, name Derek, make a pact they’ll be exclusive just till all this blows over. Kind of like a game of musical chairs: the music stops, and they’re stuck with each other. It doesn’t really blow over. In the meantime, the thing with Derek becomes more than convenience: they’ve been through a lot and when they hug Derek’s smell is like coming home and maybe that’s what we mean by love. When Derek gets a job in New York they go together. He doesn’t have a passion like Derek does, but the idea of New York is exciting, like something from a film or a story. It’s good and then it isn’t—Derek so often working, the city large and unfathomable. He spends a lot of time walking the streets by himself: crowds of people, each one with a purpose he still hasn’t found, buildings tall and flat like so many dominoes all waiting to fall. In the end, it’s him who falls—this time not from a tree, just collapsing right there on an American pavement—he never says sidewalk. In the hospital, they say it’s exhaustion, nothing terminal. What he has to be exhausted about he doesn’t know, but even so he and Derek agree they’ll go back to London, nearer to friends and family. It becomes possible to get married and they do. After all the years it means nothing, and it means everything. His mother is there, in her 90s now, but still going strong. She gives him her ring, for the engagement. Derek retires soon after and these are their golden years, enough money to travel when they want and when they don’t, they’re at home, both of them in the garden or reading next to each other on the sofa. They might exchange barely a word of an evening, but the silence between them is deep and filled with a meaning they both understand. When the end comes it’s easy, slipping away in his sleep. Probably, he knows nothing about it but if he does, if he wakes in the night with some premonition of death, he might take a look at that old scar, like a message from the boy that he was, and all there is in response is the thought, it wasn’t so bad after all.
Eddie Creamer is a lawyer and writer based in London, who writes short stories and fiction mostly about queer Londoners. His work has previously appeared online in Queerlings Magazine and the 2021 Goldfish Anthology. He is currently studying for an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University, London.