Читать книгу You Have to Be Gay to Know God - Siya Khumalo - Страница 7

I first met him in Grade 8. You and I will call him Josh. He reminded me of Robbie Williams, the singer. Josh was a green-eyed, brown-haired bohemian tucked in a green school blazer, innocent, as though he hadn’t seen everything that follows schools and blazers. Oh, parents, lock your teenagers away, I thought.

Given that everyone was attracted to him like a moth to a flame, I’m not sure how I squeezed my way into his social circle and past another guy who also happened to be called Siya. I would never confess Other Siya’s real sins; that, I could possibly go to hell for. That our names were similar caused not a little confusion. Other Siya was also gay and interested in Josh. He and I formed a love-hate friendship, an unspoken peace treaty over our mutual interest.

But Other Siya and Josh were in the cross-country running team, despite what I’d imagined was the former’s questionable athleticism. They were also in Drama together, despite what I’d imagined was Siya’s tepid talent in that arena. Come to think of it, the number of occasions Other Siya spent with Josh grew exponentially each time I looked the other way — that, he was superbly skilled at. Was this not a clear violation of the unspoken agreement on Josh — shared custody, equal visiting hours, the usual? At least I’m above doing anything as pathetic as rearranging my whole life for a guy, I thought as I scribbled my name down on the cross-country sign-up list.

‘You’re going to be glad you joined,’ the teacher in charge of the sport was assuring me. ‘It’s a great team. We’ve got lovely people.’

‘I know. I’ve met some of them,’ I replied, hoping my transparent face wouldn’t betray me. The coach was super-Christian. Probably gay, too. Too bad he was a good boy, my hormones figured. When you took that whole teacher thing out of the equation, he was quite handsome. Stop it, Siya! the voice in my head said.

‘Running is a great sport,’ he continued. ‘The important part is focusing on your core.’

‘I can hardly wait to start,’ I replied. I could see how running after Josh would be a great sport. I’d glimpsed his shirtless core in Grade 8 next to the pool, frantically taking memory pics. What are you judging me for? Instagram hadn’t been invented, and I was a teenager.

Other Siya had no idea what hit him. What I lacked in long-distance running stamina, I made up for in catching up to his agenda and occupying more of Josh (or at least, Josh’s time) than he did. I acted nonchalant about this achievement, as though cute guys always spoke to me without having to be kidnapped and tortured first.

My family was surprised when I picked up running as a discipline and stuck to it. ‘Is he on drugs?’ they must have wondered. ‘Is it compulsory for him to run?’

I went with it. ‘Yes, it is!’ I said. ‘It’s is a white school, fam. You can’t just sit there and not do a sport.’

‘What?’

‘Well, it isn’t compulsory but they want us to become well-rounded, balanced people,’ I explained, knowing full well I’d never be nor cared to be a well-rounded, balanced person.

I was out to my mother and two of my sisters. I told Mom and the younger one about Josh, downplaying his participation in cross-country lest they put two and two together. Still, they figured I liked him probably even before I did. I thought I’d mentioned him once or twice, but they later insisted I’d spoken about him. All. The. Time.

By Grade 11 I’d gotten tired of standing in spotlights where nothing good happened anyway, so I left the light of Josh’s flame. I wasn’t going to be that gay black guy pursuing that straight white boy because then I’d be my own prank; it wouldn’t be someone else doing it to me. Also, Other Siya played dirty. Strangely, that’s when Josh started seeking me out. He would sometimes even evade my namesake to talk to me.

‘They’re efficient these days,’ I would remark, looking up from my circle geometry homework as he approached.

‘Who is?’ Josh said. He’d be dumping his big black-and-green backpack on the bench from which he’d occasionally hurled his Nokia 3310 at the Matric garden wall, for fun.

I replied, ‘My Namesake’s Department of Access to You, that’s who’s becoming efficient. I was just wondering whether to bother applying for permission to say hi — but here you are, in the flesh! Guess the country isn’t going to the dogs, after all,’ I muttered, punching numbers in my calculator. The wrong numbers, because I was suppressing my anger. I wrote the answer down anyway. Theta is 17°.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he replied.

I snapped back with, ‘Talk about what?’ loudly enough for bystanders on our side of the Matric students’ garden to turn and look. Yes, it was small of me but I had to cut that thing. The English teacher had told the girls in our class, ‘You must run away from a man until you catch him.’ I wasn’t a girl, but I liked men and I took great notes. So much as I hated running and liked what I was running from, I would run, properly. If anything was going to happen, he was going to have to come out and put the work in. And I just didn’t foresee something like that happening anytime that year.

The evening after our next running meet, I climbed off the bus that dropped us back at school. I’d asked my parents to pick me up because we would be getting back late. I was walking to my dad’s car when I heard Josh call out for me. At first, I wanted to pretend I didn’t know whether he was calling for me or Other Siya, who shouldn’t have been too far away. But I suppressed my pettiness and instead turned to tell him he’d have to make it quick because I didn’t want to keep Dad waiting.

Josh said he wanted to clear something up.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, blinking innocently. There was no one within earshot.

‘Siya, are you gay?’ he asked.

My eyes shifted to the moon. I could feel my pulse in my toes, in the running socks I hadn’t changed out of and the school shoes I had changed into. I hadn’t showered; my sweat had dried on my skin on the trip back. And he was standing really close. There was no one else around us except Dad in his car. If Josh did something funny like shove me for being gay, Dad would see. Who knew? Maybe Josh had spoken to someone who said I was and he had to sort it out, or people would assume he was gay too.

He leaned forward, pressing into my personal space-zone where he sucked up all the oxygen. I’d have to give him mouth-to-mouth if I wanted to stay alive. The English teacher had also said, ‘A kiss upstairs is an application for a job downstairs.’

‘And do you like me?’ he was asking. ‘Like, really like me?’

Who else could torment me and my hopes as much as he could if I answered his question truthfully? But seeing I didn’t have enough oxygen to dance around the issue, I said, ‘Yes. I am and I do.’ Feeling stark naked, I thought, Siya, which school are you moving to after this?

‘I felt I had to ask,’ he said abruptly, his voice sounding like an auditory hallucination emanating from the moon, ‘because I’m gay and I think I like you too, Siya.’

I don’t remember the trip home or waking up the next morning. In every fairytale ever told, the beautiful maiden knows what to do once she’s caught her prince’s eye. But the English teacher never told the girls in class what they were supposed to do after catching the men they’d been running from; she ended the most useful tangent she’d ever gone off on to pour her considerable wisdom into teaching Shakespeare. Shakespeare!

After getting my hopes up that high, Josh found someone else online as though nothing had happened. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he said, except it was because it was literally over before it began.

We were running at Crawford La Lucia or at some similarly affluent hotbed of masculine beauty when he confessed to hating running more than I did. He had joined because another boy he had a crush on also ran. That boy had his eye on some girl, which was why he ran. Ordinarily, I would have cringed at bigotry but because sometimes God’s prejudice worked in my favour, the crush Josh had pursued in the running team was straight and homophobic. I suppressed a laugh at the image of us chasing one another down a running trail of unrequited affections.

I’d been seeing an educational psychologist and occupational therapist to help me work out why I had irritable bowel syndrome, among other anxiety-linked psychosomatic issues that had me biting my nails and chewing the insides of my mouth. They never explicitly said, ‘You’re struggling to embrace yourself for who you really are,’ but gently guided me towards that realisation.

On Thursday, August 2004 at 4:34 pm, I concluded my last session with the psychologist. I also made my first adult decision — to redirect the sting I felt at the situation with Josh to my studies. My marks caught fire. I went from the middle of the class to somewhere in the top ten. Maths, until then a labour of note, developed one redeeming feature that pulled everything else into focus: Calculus. And by the time I delivered that English oral, I was an avid reader. Bullies didn’t go to libraries so it was perfect.

I also cultivated a stoic indifference to everything. I avoided speaking to Josh, though his registration class desk was seven and three-quarter tiles in front of mine where the summer morning sunlight made his hair look like a bronze spun silk cap above his bottle-green blazer. I repurposed him from The Flame into The Muse. He unknowingly ignited raw, passionate essay-writing in me. I was screaming at him with every sentence, holding the pen in my fist like it was a chisel to his heart where I etched my unspoken words. For Shakespeare, I would not just answer the question about Macbeth’s plot to murder King Duncan. I would argue that everything foreshadowing this assassination proves Macbeth was out to betray his king all along — that he was born a traitor.

This made my teachers sit up and take notice. ‘Your writing is quite refreshing,’ the History teacher would say.

‘Thank you,’ I’d reply, then quickly turn away before she picked up (as some had the perception to) that the source of all this was a wound. The English teacher could tell more than she let on, once pulling me aside to give me a talking-to over a written piece she’d been unable to fault technically, but found lacked emotional risk. I bitched and moaned about our teachers with my schoolmates but on some level, we respected how seriously they took our development as ‘well-rounded, balanced people’. I sensed I was watched over even by teachers who believed my particular disposition, though unchosen, was perverted. ‘I can’t believe Siya claims to be a Christian but chooses that lifestyle,’ one of them said to a girl in a lower grade than me when she became a Matric after I’d left school. But all I’d done was ask questions about Christianity.

In the context of the unconditional acceptance being wrought out amongst us, it was what it was.

Near the end of my Matric year, my family faced some crises so I just achieved the results I wanted. After exams, I was told by some classmates to go look on the Dux Achievers list.

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘Your name is there,’ they replied.

I giggled. ‘Nah, I’m not on that list.’ There must have been some mistake.

While I was completing end-of-school paperwork, I passed the admin offices and foyers. Someone else was near one of the expensive, people-who-belonged-there plaques; I wouldn’t have even known which one to look at. ‘Siya, you’re Dux,’ she was saying.

I looked. Under the column headed ‘Top Boy,’ I saw S. Khumalo in gold letters. I didn’t realise someone else is called that in our grade. Top Boy? Jesus Christ, I’d been on top of a pile of boys and I hadn’t known it? No, wait. There was a big gold dot next to the Top Girl’s name. That meant she was Dux. Oh, I was the academic Top Boy, I realised, relieved I hadn’t missed out on a fantasy come true. How had I passed if I couldn’t figure out what that meant? If I couldn’t even plan my own achievements so I could experience their whole unspoken purpose — Josh next to me in the end? This was like the night he’d declared his interest: I was completely unprepared. Had I been born unprepared? In any event, he’d realise I’d only climbed to the top of that pile of boys so I could yell from its pinnacle, ‘Do you see me now?’ And it still wouldn’t have been high enough because then it wasn’t an organic achievement, but one pulled off for him. It’s nothing personal but smarts don’t make people think, ‘Damn, that one was a keeper.’

It’s okay, Siya; this one’s for you to celebrate with your friends who have not messed with your feelings. Ah, but they’d immediately pick up that the biggest part of my joy was missing. Then they’d figure out the backstory and say, ‘Argh, shame’ the way they had when one of the hot rugby player nerds drew my attraction to him out to toy with me. Those friends knew and loved me better than I was ready to be known and loved. I left that moment, as I had many others and the Matric Dance, too determined to protect my dignity to let go and celebrate. The moment was always a minefield.

The Top Boy before me had been a pretty Indian guy whose favourite colour was the blue of copper sulphate crystals. Prior to him and me, it had been white boys all the way back to when Jan van Riebeeck arrived, so to speak. The year after me, it was a gay black kid whose family was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses. He went on to become a chartered accountant.

I also got the prize for creative writing. That’s what my teachers had been pushing me towards. It felt like their bittersweet way of remembering the boy that Josh forgot. Though, they weren’t supposed to know about what almost was, let alone conspire for my consolation prize.

More than a year later, when I was in military basic training — I’ll explain! — Josh and I got back in touch. Without studies to insulate me from my feelings for him, I was a camouflaged goner, man down without a pile of green-blazered boys to stand on or foxhole behind.

As we chatted on Mxit about his relationship with Online Guy, I sensed it was intense and sado-masochistic. His boyfriend was borderline abusive. At the risk of sounding like I wanted to rescue him, I sent him lyrics from a song that speaks to the difference between being desired and being valued.

His response was brief but powerful: ‘And?’

I kept quiet, having weighed my desire to tell him my unchanged truth against my fear he would run even further than I could catch him. His boyfriend and I also chatted a bit. He nicknamed me Mr Anderson (Neo from The Matrix, I guess) and I called him Clark Kent because one of those names was his first name, and because he’d had to have superhuman strength to make his own way in the world at his age. His backstory involved being thrown out by his family home because his ‘Mormon Aunt Bitch’, as Josh described her, had issues with his sexuality.

I still have vivid memories of Josh’s copper hair waving in the ocean bluster under that coastal town’s skies. Whenever I go to the gym around where he lived, I replay that part of my life. I look at buildings unchanged in over a decade, and see our see-through ghosts running past the holiday apartments. If I strain my ears, I hear the sea breeze and remember our laughter bubbling over the traffic. Other Siya, to his credit, would have run ahead to let us duck out of the path and talk until Coach van der Handsome came running past, doing his head count. ‘Guys, you’ve got to run faster than this at Kearsney on Wednesday!’ he’d say, jabbing at his wristwatch.

‘Of course, we will!’ we’d insist, knowing we were a lost cause.

In one of my dreams, Josh and I were standing on a cliff edge in the sunshine. He was happier and more alive than I’d ever seen him. His laughter was little bursts of colour that sparkled with piercing clarity when the sunshine met the water in my eyes — the unfrozen bits of my heart that had knifed up my throat where I’d choke the words and tears back down. He’d turn to look at me. Brave face on, I’d be ready with an excuse: I got dust in my lashes. But his facial expression wouldn’t change. He never wondered why I was pretending to laugh. Even in my dreams, he knew me well enough to know I was dying inside.

As I thought about the situation at the time, I decided, Fuuuuuuuuuuck this self-pity, I’d go back and fight for him. By staying aloof, of course. By being a possibility but never a certainty in his life. I would be all very Alanis Morissette. I’d found her at the start of Grade 10 in ‘Hands Clean’, her song about an impossible and forbidden romance.

I would be Alanis. I would not be James Blunt (and if Blunt finds out I said this, his track record on Twitter says he’ll take a dig at me to make sure people know he’s too rich to give a damn). I was doing Art as an extra subject when, at our Matric practical, someone played Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’ in the background. No one had really listened to the lyrics until then, when our mouths were shut and our ears were open. After crooning about how much he liked this girl he saw while he was high (‘she was with another man’), after promising he had a plan to ask her out, Blunt ended the song with the words, ‘But it’s time to face the truth: I will never be with you.’ Shocked, half the class dropped their paintbrushes and with those, their marks. I would not be James Blunt. I would be Alanis.

But what if Clark Kent is still around? the little common sense I had about boys asked me.

Don’t disrupt my fantasy, I told Satan. Besides, that boyfriend is not a mountain. He can be moved.

It came to pass that in one of Josh’s messages to me, he told me he’d been admitted to hospital.

‘What?!’

‘It’s stupid — they’re saying I have meningitis. I’m leaving tomorrow,’ he replied, probably not realising how correct this prediction would turn out to be.

The next day was a week before my birthday. After we ran the morning inspection gauntlet at the military training base, I saw that I’d missed a phone call from his number. I’d only be able to return it in the evening; he was probably calling to say, ‘I broke out of jail, bitch.’ I wondered whether he’d gone to stay with his family or with the boyfriend. I started scheming to meet with him either way. Surely those other people could be sent off to do grocery shopping, or knocked out cold with a bedside lamp?

That night, I had guard duty at one of the gates on the base. I returned the missed call between my rove and a colleague’s. To my surprise, a female voice answered. It was his mother. After we exchanged greetings, I asked whether he was out of hospital. Her next few words were spoken so matter-of-factly I thought I’d misheard.

‘He’s passed away,’ she said.

‘Wha —?’ Regroup. I summoned the presence of mind to reply as evenly as I could. ‘I am very sorry to hear that. Thank you for letting me know.’ Looking at the setting sun, I felt my lips mouth, no, don’t you fucking dare.

But Helios’ gold face just oranged and reddened further, sinking into the murk. ‘I am so very sorry to hear that,’ I heard my voice repeat. ‘And thanks again for letting me know.’

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Goodbye,’ I echoed, sharing with her, a near stranger, the word I would have given anything to have shared with him.

I told my mother what happened. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Picking up on the tone of my voice, she asked, ‘Have you been crying?’

I was about to say, ‘No,’ but the moment I opened my mouth the treacherous breath that broke the dam cracked through the hardened barrier that turned out to be just flesh and blood. All the oxygen Josh had stolen rushed back in — chilled, knifing-cold.

Mom later told me that she and my sister had cried together about it as well. They’d never met Josh except through me. They’d once spotted him in a crowd outside my school. ‘He walks like you walk,’ they said at different times, unprompted. I wanted to ask, ‘Didn’t you think he was dreamy?’ but they’d have been scandalised and had me certified.

His mother doesn’t know I know she put his picture up on a site commemorating those gone too soon. I used to look at her Facebook profile on his birthdays and at around the time he passed. I never friended her, though my cursor did hover over the ‘send friend request’ button more than once.

Both the homosexual and the homophobe will die. ‘Mormon Aunt Bitch’ may be dead already. Does she look back at her life and think, ‘Gee, I really should have spent more effort on alienating my seventeen-year-old nephew for liking boys?’ Is the Christian God beaming all his infinite love down on her, saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’ for the effort she did expend?

Does she have any way of talking to her nephew’s boyfriend, Josh, in the afterlife? Or is there a great gulf fixed between them like in the biblical parable? If there is, who’s on which side? Whose God is God — the God of those who never asked to love who they love, or of those who mock them without mercy?

I wish I could say my faith was born in a sterile library through clinically controlled techniques like rational argumentation, proof and analysis. But no! It was a messy breech birth, though when Faith arrived she was the only thing about me that was really kicking and screaming; bloody and bloody angry to have been born premature because God accosted my mind when I was too young to know better.

I also wish I could say Faith was born once but the labour lasted years; at the same time, Faith was already alive, growing and asking tough questions about where her Dad was. I denied knowing her. I called her a mistake — a fluke of evolution, like I explained in my English oral — just as my sexuality had been said to be an aberration. The sterile, the barren and the eunuch conceive not, so how could Faith have been mine?

What was I going to tell people — that the core of my being, characterised by reproductively useless inclinations that God declared an abomination, had been fertilised by his love to conceive her? Or that I’d fallen for a cosmic heartbreaker who then left me holding the baby? Was I supposed to tell people that God gave me a second glance, or that he loved me while I was young and pure but didn’t love me since I’d ‘become gay’?

Faith disrupted an already disruptive life and I hoped she’d die under the avalanche of books and essays I bombarded her with as often as I could. But the brat survived, sustained by hot and endless tears for people I loved more than I loved her. People whose lives I could not plead to save except through her. ‘You will go up to your dad, and you’ll tell him that for child maintenance he has to bring *insert name of recently deceased here* back, now!’ Those cries were met with a silence I could only end by returning to the land of the living where, being a trespasser, I saw little to suggest I’d ever had a God.