I heard his voice. I knew that voice. It hadn’t changed.
The sun was shining brightly, I could see blue sky beyond the windows. I’d been to the supermarket and I just stopped in for a coffee and a custard Danish.
He was older, of course. Fatter. But he still dressed the same. He still had the same haircut and that same ‘fay’ manner.
They all knew him, the girl's behind the counter dressed in white. He got thick sandwiches in a brown paper bag. He said have a nice day to all three of the girls behind the counter, as the three gathered together and giggled, as one handed him his lunch.
Peter Morrison, well I’ll be. I wondered what the late middle-aged “girls” behind the counter would think if they knew the truth.
I’d finished my coffee, I was done. The empty mug and the white plate with cream coloured crumbs sat in front of me. I had no reason to sit there any long and I had more reasons to leave, actually. So, I headed out after him. My feet led my brain. I wasn’t at all sure if I’d thought this through. He stepped to the curb and was looking each way to cross. “Um… er… Mr Morrison?”
He looked around. “Hello?” He stepped back from the curb. He was still that kind of gay effeminate, posh, well spoken, just a little too well spoken, but now he was fat and middle aged.
“Christian. Christian Fletcher,” I said. “Smithton. You taught me.”
He looked directly at me and kind of refocused as if going through his back catalogue of faces. I guess any man who taught at a boy’s school for any length of time would have to do the same thing.
“You used to pick me up from choir, on Sunday nights. We drank coffee at Brummells. You used to drive me home.”
“Christian?... oh Christian.” Recognition. Then recollection. “Oh… um.” Bingo, he knew who I was. I could see it in his face.
“You remember?”
“Yes. Christian. What have you been doing… er… since school?”
“Uni. Career. The usual thing, I did finance, um,” I said.
“Good career, finance. It is where all the big money is.”
“I found that rather than chasing the corporate round about of more and more, I have opted for a shorter working week and less money, of course. But a great work life balance.” I was just babbling now, I could hear my own voice. “Are you still teaching at Smithton?” I didn’t draw breath, I should have drawn breath, the sudden jump took him by somewhat of a surprise.
“No.” We made eye contact. He looked away. “I have taught at Gilmour, on the mount… for some years now.”
An exclusive girl’s school, practically a finishing school for snotty blue blood girls. “Probably best,” I said. I laughed, I didn’t mean to, it struck me as funny, it just came out.
“Yes,” he said. We made eye contact for a second time and there it was, laid naked in that snatched glimpse. He knew, that I knew, that he knew, exactly who I was. “I’ve found girls… um,” he looked away. “Less trouble.”
“I bet you have.”
He looked nervous, as though that particular topic of conversation should have been passed over by now and we should have got on to other pleasantries, like he did, I presume, with most of his other ex-students, you know, the ones, I presume, he didn’t try to touch.
It was the first time that he and I had been together as two men, as equals. Power shift, dynamic change, I could feel it and it felt oddly fearless.
Truthfully, I’d barely given him much though over the passing years, it hadn’t been that much of a big deal. But seeing him, so unexpectedly, in my new adopted country town, where I felt right at home, after so many years, it was now my stomping ground, I felt very at home there.
“Your car, your dirty magazines out the back of Royal South Yarra?” There used to be a car park, kind of at the top where you could park at all hours of the night. I don't know if there still is? I said it quietly, deliberately, as though I was just filling in the facts so there could be no misunderstanding.
There was silence, that seemed to ring between us for an inordinate amount of time.
”What do you want?”
I didn't want anything, I told him. “I don’t want anything.” And I didn't. I just wanted to see the look on his face. I cleared my throat. I just had to say it. “Do you remember what you did?”
”I didn't do anything to you.” Technically, this is correct. I saw him going for it. He touched me between the legs, I guess. I said, “No,” And he stopped, he didn’t do anything else after I said no. But how else would he explain the thirteen year old in his car in a car park in the dark with him with pornography on his lap?
That kind of pissed me off, as we both knew what I was doing there, even if I didn’t at the time. “Oh yes you did,” I said. “You tried to…”
He laughed nervously to cut me off. ”Look… I don't really know who you are?” That came a bit late in the conversation to be believable, he suddenly didn’t know who I was?
”I was thirteen,” I said.
”I think you must have me mistaken for somebody else. Sorry.”
“Are you Peter Morrison?”
“Yes, yes I am.”
There was momentary silence.
“Look… I’m sorry… “ He shrugged. “I’ve got to go.” He gave me a please-don’t-let-there-be-anything-else, like I was hunting him down, this can’t be happening, kind of look. Funny, I thought, if anything, I was the victim in this situation.
“Look, I just used to drive you home,” he said in a whisper. “We ate cake some nights, sure, I thought you liked it.” He looked quite nervous, suddenly. “I just drove you home,” he said, as though he was trying to tell me the facts.
"Does that excite you?" and "Let me see what you've got there, I remember you saying that night… before you drove me home.”
He looked both ways up and down the street. He looked back at me as though he was going to give me the last word like, is that it, are you done, written across his face. It was almost a-nice-chianti-and-fava-beans moment, if his jaw had quivered, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Scared, huh, I thought. I said nothing.
We stared at each other. He looked away. He crossed the road and walked away hurriedly. I could feel his hand groping me all those years ago, as I watched him walk away.
Well, there you go, I thought, as I turned away. I’d wondered once or twice over the years how it would go if ever I saw him… and now I knew.
The sun was shining as I walked back to my car. Peter Morrison, I thought, well how about that?
I guess I was groomed, as they say, I thought. Something that I hadn’t thought about before, I’d never thought about it that way. I sang in the church choir on Sunday nights and Peter Morrison didn’t really have a reason to be there. He said he came for evensong, and he just drove me home afterwards. But, some Sundays he’d just be waiting in the car park having not gone to the service at all. This went on for weeks.
Timing was on my side, however. As it turned out, coincidentally, on the night in question, the choir master had told my parents, during the day some time, that my voice was breaking and that that Sunday would be my last night singing in the boy’s choir. If I wanted to join the men’s choir at some time in the future I could, but I didn’t want to. I’d had enough. I’d enjoyed my time singing with everyone, but I wasn’t going to continue. I found this out when I got home, which kind of distracted me from Peter Morrison and his wandering hands. I didn’t tell Peter Morrison this, it never occurred to me to tell him.
I wondered if Peter Morrison was sitting in his car in the car park the next week waiting for me, who never turned up.
He wasn’t one of my teachers, but interestingly enough, he was one of the boarding house masters. (raised eye brows. Fox. Hen house. What do you reckon?) That was how I knew that he was gay, a couple of the gay kids used to go over to his room in the boarding house and hang out there. I never did, as I am not sure that I ever really liked him that much, as he was much too effeminate for me to want to hang out with him. (Talk about a neon sign gazing back at me) That was how our orbits came into contact though, one of the gay kids who was, for want of a better expression, a part of Morrison's circle took me over to the boarding house one day just out of the blue. (I remember his leopard skin jocks laying casually on the carpet) I wondered now, as I walked down the main street of Kyenton, if that was, indeed a matter of chance, as I’d always assumed it was. I guessed it must have been. I wondered.
The sun was still shining, the sky was still blue, when I got to my car.
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