A Couple of Mates

Let us call him James.  He went with, let you and I call him Don, to Tasmania bush-walking.  James was accomplished and did it often, abseiling and rock-climbing to reach magnificent, inaccessible places.  I was envious because I would have liked to be taken, though now I think of it, I never asked.  They came back rather faster than anticipated, and stayed at my place so no one in their home town would know they hadn’t stayed as long as planned.  I knew another guy years ago, from that same town but no connection, who had taken a job in a lighthouse, promising us all that he looked forward to the solitude; he returned after a couple of weeks and joined the Army!!

It was always my suspicion that something had happened between them.  A few years earlier, James had kissed me.  Once, sensuously but briefly, before glided away and we never spoke of it again.  I wondered if the same sort of thing had happened while they were in the bush.  Don managed to be unobtrusively heterosexual in a non-aggressive, non-macho way.  It was at a time when people were just learning how to raise the collective consciousness of social gatherings.  It may have been a New Year’s Eve late last Century when both James and I floated past each other, briefly alighting on a pile of coats and scarves on a bed in the dark. 

James, as we are calling him, had a Mother from Pakistan.  I believe he inherited the Sensuousness that pervades many cultures in the Middle East as portrayed in the 1001 Nights and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.  Pleasurable physical contact between people need not be sexual.  In countries with total and strict gender segregation, many men behave as do many other men do in prisons or on ships – for the duration.  After a time, he married a charming lady from Scandinavia, who must have found him exotic, though born and raised in Australia and being half Anglo-Celtic he was also like an average local

It was so long ago that I didn’t know what I was, or indeed that I could be anything in particular at all.  Looking back with present knowledge at times long past can be revealing.  Don was well ahead of his time.  In today’s contexts, he could have been gay or straight, it was hard to tell.  Certainly, he displayed none of the overt masculine behaviour of flirting, and certainly never inappropriate behaviour, though he did move in early, liberated political circles.  It was only many years later, but still many years ago, that I returned to the town for a reunion and a party and saw Don in the arms of a woman.  When I commented on it, all the other women in the room laughed and I was told that they had all been one of Don’s ‘conquests’ at one time or another, he was just very, very discreet.  They had all found out a couple of years previously when he invited them all to his birthday party, I won’t reveal which one, and he gave them each a rose and owned up to his infidelities.  

Did I mention that Don was little bloke who didn’t say much, but who was really good at football, all codes, as well as ball games played with sticks or balls and hoops?  He was very popular and had no enemies, so all the husbands, brothers, fathers and sons of the ladies with whom he dallied accepted it as quite natural that it should be so, and were pleased their wives, sisters, daughters and mothers were included.  The only women missing were the visible girl-friends that he had been known to occasionally and briefly have tragically ended relationships, but they had not been at that party nor the one I was attending.  Might I also mention that little Don also worked at the Tax Department, so he probably knew everything about everyone, but was very discreet about that too?