Giles laughs lightly. “You heard. He had brilliant hamstrings. Every time we’d be in a scrum together, I’d struggle to keep my eyes off them, off his flanks, off his backside.”
“Flanks? We’re back in that historical romance,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Giles rightly ignores me.
“That was probably when I first started to question just how straight I was and I wanted to experiment with that. But I couldn’t exactly go up to this guy and ask him out. I knew he was straight, or at least, that’s how he presented himself.”
“So what did you do?” I ask, hanging on his every word.
“I went out to a party organised by the languages department and took a boy I knew was gay home with me.”
“Just like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“But did you even like him?”
“Yeah, I did. I thought he was cute, but he didn’t have hamstrings you could write poetry about.”
We laugh again. We laugh together easily, Giles and me. Too easily, perhaps.
“And did that confirm it for you?”
“Did what confirm what?”
“Sleeping with a man, that proved to you that you were queer?”
Giles shrugs. “I guess it did. I mean, it was just as good as sleeping with girls. And it continued to be just as good as sleeping with girls. Not that I slept with many people after that. Not at university. My dad died and I wasn’t exactly in the courting mood.”
I ignore another opportunity to diss Giles’ vocabulary and hold his eye contact as I speak. “Yeah, that would have been the last thing on my mind too.”
Giles offers me what can only be described as a brave smile and I take another long drink.
“Why do you ask?” he says and I spend too long trying to determine if there’s anything but innocent curiosity in his question.
“Just interested.” Interested in you, I think, but I don’t say. Instead, I chime my glass against Giles’ and say, “Thanks for sharing with me. So, do you still play rugby?”
Chapter Fourteen
Giles
Time is ticking and I should be done already. I need to get out of here in ten minutes and I’ve still got to mop this floor one more time. I don’t want to be late for Marcello’s meeting with this guy who will potentially sell him a bike for him to race on in the triathlon. I said I’d be there, and I will be.
I just also need to clean the kitchen floor for a third and final time.
Three. Threes. Thirds.Three.
I can remember the exact moment three became my so-called lucky number. It was when I was reading one of my mum’s magazines. God, they were awful magazines. Flimsy pages, saturated colours, and terrible names likeCatch Up,Coffee Break,Me Time. They were as far from intellectually stimulating as you can imagine and yet these well-read, dog-eared magazines were almost all I had left of my mum.
Dad had gotten rid of her clothes and packed away most of her belongings long before my childhood memories began and yet there was always this stack of terrible women’s magazines on a corner coffee table next to the sofa in the 1960s semi-detached house I grew up in in a sleepy suburb of Reading. It was apparently the one part of my mother he couldn’t get rid of. I know my dad didn’t read them, and I knew well enough that they weren’t left for me, and yet they stayed there until the day I cleared out my parents' house after Dad died.
It was a silly little one-page article in one of those magazines that offered a formula for figuring out your lucky number. And I did it. When I was about seven or eight, and Dad was busy in the garden outside, I saton the sofa and flicked through those magazines wondering what my mum was like. If she liked reading about mothers going off with their daughter’s husband or about package holidays to Costa del Sol. But that article caught my eye and I followed the steps and worked out my lucky number was three, apparently.
It made sense. We were supposed to be a three, my family. Me, Mum and Dad. A trio.
It wasn’t immediate. I didn’t obsess about the number three from that moment onwards. It took time. It was almost lazy how slowly it buried itself in my subconscious, but it was deliberate and it had roots. Thick roots that wrapped their way around my brain matter. Sometimes it’s like I can almost feel them inside my head, taking up space and growing stronger and vaster all the time.
At first it was just what I did to light switches. I turned them on and then off and then on again. Or vice-versa. And then I started to do other things three times. I was never satisfied with a double bow in my shoes, I always pulled my laces tight enough so that they were long enough for a triple bow. And I started wearing three layers of clothes – a vest, a T-shirt and a jumper – even in the middle of summer.
I didn’t know I had a problem with pulling my leg hair out until my friend Josh pointed it out when we were sitting next to each other in our rugby kit. He asked why there were patches of my hair missing. I realised then that I’d been pulling them out, three at a time, or six or nine or twelve or many more, so compulsively I didn’t even know I was doing it until it was done.
