Putting aside his book Chris scrutinized Danny, trying to figure out whether he should make a joke or answer honestly.
‘Someone special? Yes. A long time ago. He was a teacher. One of those inspirational types. Thought he could make the world a better place. We were together for two years. The best years of my life. He wanted to move in with me. And I said no.’
Chris studied Danny’s face.
‘You can’t imagine it, can you? Saying no to a man you love?’
Danny couldn’t imagine it. He would do anything for Luis. And he was sure Luis would do anything for him. Chris continued, ‘I was working in the Foreign Office at the time. The Sexual Offences Act was the law. If they found out that I was living with a man, it would’ve been the end of my career. And I was ambitious so I kept him on the side. But being on the side wasn’t enough for him. He was fearless. I was not. By the time I realized what a terrible mistake I’d made, he was sick. The only place he could survive was in a hospital. When I shared my regrets, I saw disdain in his eyes – that it was easy for me to offer my home now that it was impossible for him to accept.’
Almost talking to himself, Chris concluded, ‘On the side is all I could offer. On the side is all I knew. On the side is all I’ll ever know.’
With that he returned to the pages of his book, signalling that the conversation was at an end. Danny packed up his things and rather than catch the tube, decided towalk all the way home, down Primrose Hill and through Regent’s Park.
That evening Luis prepared a dinner of buttery scrambled eggs, heaped on slices of toasted sourdough. Out of nowhere, Danny declared, ‘What if we sold the apartment and bought a boat and sailed around the world?’
Luis helped himself to more scrambled eggs and talked about the sail boats he used to watch depart from the port of Cádiz. Danny wanted to tell Luis he was being serious except of course he didn’t know the first thing about boats despite having grown up on the coast.
Before going to sleep Danny changed the bed linen, a habit of his when he hankered after the psychological sensation of a fresh start. In the shower, quite inexplicably, he wept.
Chapter FiveA Danish Marriage
Though the weekend shifts could be gruelling, Danny didn’t mind being busy that Friday night, hoping it would distract him from his persistent melancholy thoughts – that he was somehow incomplete. Back in his twenties these feelings of incompleteness in part explained why Danny had trained to become a nurse. As a career it had not been his first choice. He had studied theatre at the University of Essex, not acting or directing but the stagecraft, lighting and sound design, arriving in London with dreams of creating fantastical worlds from nothing more than plywood, paint and nails. However, his graduation coincided with a recession and soaring unemployment, one of the worst times to be looking for a job, let alone being a young man with no connections or professional experience. Many West Endproductions were closing, only the biggest shows survived the downturn, such as Starlight Express and Cats. Living on bowls of cereal for breakfast and dinner with cups of bitter black coffee to suppress his hunger, Danny hauled himself from theatre to theatre, becoming numb to rejection, his hope dropping close to the minimum threshold required to climb out of bed in the morning.
To make ends meet he found work as an usher at the hit show Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, playing on Shaftesbury Avenue and starring Peter O’Toole. Earning three pounds an hour, he sold two-pound tubs of Jersey ice cream to some of the most important people in the entertainment business. Rather than living his dream, he was dream-adjacent, figuring that proximity would sustain him until he found a foothold. Night after night he watched the sallow figure of O’Toole ridicule the concept of settling down to an appreciative audience that had, by and large, settled down. Wearing a clip-on bow tie that never stayed straight, berated by customers outraged that the ice-cream queue moved too slowly, Danny wondered whether he was pursuing a true calling in life or whether he was here because, at school, the only gay teacher had run the theatre department. Looking back could his career have been different if his science teacher hadn’t mocked his voice, or the sports coach ridiculed his run? It seemed that his life’s journey had been shaped by avoiding other people’s animosity rather thanhaving any kind of plan, leaving him unable to answer the question of whether he had made his way or whether his way had been made for him.
One evening after work he caught a late-night television interview with Peter O’Toole and presenter Melvyn Bragg. It was a discussion about alcohol, addiction and acting. Midway through, while demonstrating how to hold his drinking glass, Peter O’Toole described Jeffrey Bernard’s way of drinking as ‘poofy’ to laughter from the audience and no admonishment from his host. The next day Danny returned his usher’s bow tie – and the dream with it. He began studying for a nursing degree at King’s College London, eager to play some part in society in a measurable way. And Danny took pride in being a nurse, able to tolerate the long hours for the belief that he mattered. He had worked at hospitals across the city, ending up at St Thomas’ on the South Bank where he had cared for several prominent politicians, some of whom he helped return to health only for them to cross the river and vote against his rights.
For a long time, he had life figured out. He was living with a man he loved, in a place of their own, able to walk to work, often early in the morning, catching the sun rising over the city he had come to call home. Danny had carved himself a groove. He was happy. Fundamentally he was a happy guy, which made this feeling of incompleteness all the harder to comprehend. It wasn’t the deafening sadnessof his early twenties; it was faint, like the mutterings of a conversation he couldn’t quite hear.
Passing the patient discharge lounge Danny noticed an elderly woman struggling with the remote control to the television, her fingers too stiff to operate the buttons. Normally there was a nurse supervising the room, but unable to see anyone on duty he stopped by to help. She explained that she didn’t want to watch the news and Danny was about to change channel when the bulletin began a report from Copenhagen where gay marriage had just been made legal. After pioneering the framework of registered partnerships for gay couples back in 1989 Denmark was, after twenty-three years, allowing them to marry. The law had passed the Danish Folketinget on 7 June, was signed by Queen Margrethe II on the 12th and come into effect today – Friday the 15th. Seizing the opportunity a businessman named Stig Elling had married Steen Andersen, his partner of twenty-seven years. When asked by a journalist how they planned to celebrate, Stig answered, ‘With champagne and a good dinner.’
Danny was so engrossed in the story of their marriage that he forgot to change the channel. Looking down at the woman, he smiled sheepishly as if caught out, hastily flicking through soap operas and quiz shows. When she told him to go back to the news he said that it wasn’t necessary, he’dseen enough. But she insisted. Danny obliged and the two of them watched the footage of Stig and Steen being photographed by the world’s press, a modest couple perplexed by the global interest in their love story. The segment concluded, moving on to coverage of the London Olympics. Touching her wedding ring, the woman said, ‘I lost my husband last year. We exchanged our vows in Lewisham’s register office when I was twenty-four years old, which was considered old back then. It’s not the prettiest of places but it did the job. Afterwards we went to the pub. There were twelve of us. We ate cottage pie and apple crumble. I drank a half-pint of Guinness. To this day, I still regret not organizing a proper wedding. We should’ve celebrated. We should’ve danced. That wasn’t how it was done back then – well, not by people like me. Big weddings were for people with money. But I should’ve stood firm. It’s one of the few days you remember for the rest of your life. Take it from me.’
She concluded, placing her frail hand on top of his, ‘There aren’t many of those.’
Chapter SixFive Burning Rings
In a quirk of fate quitting the theatre business to become a nurse presented Danny with the chance to become involved in the biggest theatrical event in global broadcasting – the Olympic opening ceremony. With under a third of the budget of Beijing’s opening ceremony the British production was depending on eccentricity and creativity to make an impression. The request for doctors and nurses to take part took everyone by surprise since no one associated the National Health Service with the Olympic Games. However, the remit was to showcase anything that was great about the host country, and the director, Academy Award-winning Danny Boyle, selected the National Health Service. The ceremony’s stage was the purpose-built Stratford stadium in East London, once a neighbourhood of derelict factoriesand polluted canals. Though some commentators mocked the stadium’s utilitarian design compared to the grandeur of Beijing’s ‘bird’s nest’ there were hidden triumphs behind its creation, including a massive clean-up operation. Tonnes of arsenic and asbestos were removed from the grounds; decades of dirty coal tar were sieved from the soil. Where there had once been poisons, there was now a park.
Ignoring the naysayers and recalling the excitement of his student theatre days, Danny had put himself forward. Rehearsals started in an abandoned car factory in Dagenham with thousands of dancers and volunteers participating in a process taking many months, with bumps along the way, from government interference to cast replacements and a national crisis of confidence. Yet Danny never lost faith, enjoying every moment, making new friends, including Matt, a mental health nurse from Park Royal Hospital in West London. Finally, the rehearsals moved into the completed stadium. Although Luis couldn’t be in the audience on the opening night since tickets were largely set aside for visiting dignitaries, he attended the dress rehearsal and loved the show so much, he organized a viewing party for their friends at the outdoor terrace of Yard Bar in Soho where he would be cheerleading the crowd.
Waiting for the show to start in a holding area situated off the main stage and dressed in a nurse’s uniform from 1948,the year the National Health Service was founded, Danny focused his hopes on the overcast sky, the audience and the entire nation in willing the storm clouds to pass. At nine in the evening, on Friday 27 July, the collective prayers seemed to bring the rains to a stop. The stadium started the countdown from ten. The Olympic bronze bell sounded out. With preternatural confidence, one young chorister, a boy of eleven, sang the hymn ‘Jerusalem’, the unofficial national anthem, to a pin-drop silent auditorium, and the ceremony began.
In the centre of the stadium was a recreation of Glastonbury Tor planted with living grass and meadow flowers, surrounded by fields populated with a cast of wandering farmers herding goats and geese. The actors were dressed in coarse wools and baggy linens, ambling under paper cumulus clouds in a vision that blended the beauty of a John Constable landscape with the absurd-surreal joy of a Monty Python sketch.
With a switch in tempo set to the beat of steel drums the Industrial Revolution was ushered in by a change of cast dressed in tails and top hats, merchants and traders. Leading them was actor Kenneth Branagh playing the part of engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the mind behind architectural marvels such as the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the original Hungerford Suspension Bridge across the Thames.
As with all great shows, it was possible to project your own life experiences onto the events on stage, with Danny recalling the night when he had stood on Hungerford Bridge, staring down into the Thames, at his lowest ebb, homeless, loveless, drunk on cheap gin and wondering if he should jump into the dark waters below. He had been saved by the city skyline – the spotlit dome of St Paul’s Cathedral to the north and the illuminations of the National Theatre to the south. Understanding that suicide would be the end of everything, not only the end of sadness but also curiosity, delight, laughter, hopes, dreams and the pursuit of love, he walked off the bridge, telling himself that he couldn’t die without experiencing love – no one should die before they’ve experienced love. He had bought a falafel-stuffed pitta from a food stall on the South Bank, a place he had never found again as if it had magically appeared that night, and sat on the cold stone steps down to the river, his fingers dripping with tahini sauce. In the months afterwards he had enrolled in nursing college, met Luis and turned his life around.
Taking centre stage, Kenneth Branagh performed a fragment from Shakespeare’s The Tempest – the ‘Be not afraid’ speech, where the creature Caliban described the magical properties of a wondrous isle seen in an exquisite dream: When I wak’d, I cried to dream again. Danny knew this play, having built the sets for a production at university, andthese lines had stayed with him – the anguish of waking up from an exquisite dream and longing to return to sleep. As a closeted teenager Danny had dreamed about surviving a shipwreck on a remote Pacific Island with one other man, believing that the only way two men could be in a relationship was if they were marooned with no other people to judge and no laws or society to stand in their way, dreams he preferred to reality. The play seemed to have followed him throughout his life. Sitting in a Soho cinema in 1991 he had watched a film adaptation of The Tempest called Prospero’s Books, directed by Peter Greenaway, spellbound by the naked figure of Caliban played by renowned dancer Michael Clark – magnificent, Danny had thought, the shape of his body and the way this dancer moved. The thought was a revelation, that it wasn’t grubby or sordid to admire a man, that men’s bodies could be beautiful too.
At the end of Branagh’s performance the windmills collapsed, the countryside broke apart, and the towering blast furnaces of northern England pushed up from beneath the stage – chimney stacks bellowing steam while a cast of steeplejacks and labourers pounded the stage with giant hammers. From five forges rose five colossal rings. Molten red. Newly pressed. Lifted from separate segments of the stage, they joined together in the air to form the Olympic symbol. As the five rings touched, their surfaces blazed and curtains of golden sparks fell.
Many in the cast wept for joy as they watched but Danny’s elation turned inward, realizing what he should do – what he should have done years ago. This island had given him many opportunities, from performing in an Olympic ceremony, to becoming a nurse, to loving openly and now it was time to take another. Inspired by a national celebration, he was going to create a personal one. He was going to ask Luis to marry him. And he was going to ask him tonight.
Chapter SevenHow Do You Propose?
The opening ceremony lasted three hours from the chiming of the bronze bell to the firework finish. In the show’s second act Danny took to the stage, managing without a stumble to perform his small role. Nurses, doctors and volunteers danced around illuminated hospital beds, each bed carrying a young child, some of them patients from Great Ormond Street Hospital who might not live long enough to see another Olympic Games. Among his fellow cast members, Danny experienced an emotion he was rarely allowed to feel – a sense of national pride. In the past, when the government passed laws excluding him and newspapers ridiculed the few who were prominent while ignoring the many who were sick, patriotism always seemed a prize for others. But it was his as much as it belonged to anyone, andit felt wonderful right now to be part of a country that had staged such a great party for the whole world.
