it, you put in three and a half hours of overtime yesterday, it’s forty minutes to end of shift right now, and if you don’t claw back some personal space, HR will notice and send you on a mandatory work/rest chakra-rebalancing course again (because the new-age hippie counselling shit is cheaper than paying for stress-related sick-leave).
Anyway, haven’t you got a date?
It’s time to go home and shower, then off to the wine bar to see what Dorothy wants—whether it’s you, or just a familiar face in a strange town. And to maybe bring down the wall and get comfortably numb for a few hours before you climb back into the broken hamster wheel of your career and scamper round again and again . . .
Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you and Dorothy have been friends for, oh, ever so long. Since maybe back before you were in primary two and Miss Simpson started in on the utterly bowdlerized sexed coursework, which was all they were allowed to hand out back then. Back in the early nineties, in the dog days of Section 28—the part of the Local Government Act that banned local councils and education authorities from admitting that homosexuality even existed, much less allowing teachers to tell isolated kids that being destined for the Adam and Steve alternative didn’t mean they were pariahs or perverts—back then, even aged eight, you’d figured out for yourself that this stuff was all wrong. You’ll never get me to do that with a boy. Well, maybe —but why bother? It’s an awful lot of hard work—and no little mess—for something that doesn’t look much like anything you’d call fun.
On the other hand, that was before you hit your teens—and ran into crushes and BFFs and all the weirdly incomprehensible playground politics that never really made sense to you. Because your crushes were all wrong, and you were afraid to talk about them: Is she a lesbo? was about the second worst thing they could say about anyone, and you knew that if you gave them even a hint about what you dreamed about, about what made you wake flushed and sweating in the small hours, it’d be the absolute end, utter humiliation for the rest of your life.
So you giggled along with them, and learned to lie, didn’t admit to watching and rewatching Xena on video until the tapes chewed themselves up, and made a point of going to church so that when you said you believed in no-sex-before-marriage, they believed you and forgot to ask the obvious follow-on question: So who’s the lucky boy, then? You even did the Alpha course when you were eighteen, and lied enthusiastically right up until the speaking in tongues bit (which caught in your throat).
But then it was time for university. Where you met your inner Dorothy and got to know her . . . quite well.
Learning who you are is something every teenager goes through: But if your identity isn’t an identikit match for any of the role models on offer, it can take quite a while and take you up some strange paths on the way. You figured out you wanted to be a cop quite early—maybe it was Uncle Bert’s fault (even though he never bothered taking the sergeant’s exam), and maybe it was connected to the hard-shell uniformed image: self-sufficient, justified, not taking shit from ignorant assholes. You wanted that, you wanted it badly , and you believed in rules and telling the truth and punishing bullies. But maybe there was something else going on as well, something you didn’t understand at the time.
When you got your A-level grades and that place at university and broke away from the home-town claustrophobia for the first time, you didn’t bother joining any wishy-washy clubs and societies: You signed up for Archery and SCUBA Diving rather than the Feminists Society or LGBT Soc. You did your drinking in a pub on the wrong side of the tracks, where you unconsciously felt safe, not realizing that you were missing out on all the torrid flesh-pots of academia; and it was from the
Anyway, haven’t you got a date?
It’s time to go home and shower, then off to the wine bar to see what Dorothy wants—whether it’s you, or just a familiar face in a strange town. And to maybe bring down the wall and get comfortably numb for a few hours before you climb back into the broken hamster wheel of your career and scamper round again and again . . .
Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you and Dorothy have been friends for, oh, ever so long. Since maybe back before you were in primary two and Miss Simpson started in on the utterly bowdlerized sexed coursework, which was all they were allowed to hand out back then. Back in the early nineties, in the dog days of Section 28—the part of the Local Government Act that banned local councils and education authorities from admitting that homosexuality even existed, much less allowing teachers to tell isolated kids that being destined for the Adam and Steve alternative didn’t mean they were pariahs or perverts—back then, even aged eight, you’d figured out for yourself that this stuff was all wrong. You’ll never get me to do that with a boy. Well, maybe —but why bother? It’s an awful lot of hard work—and no little mess—for something that doesn’t look much like anything you’d call fun.
On the other hand, that was before you hit your teens—and ran into crushes and BFFs and all the weirdly incomprehensible playground politics that never really made sense to you. Because your crushes were all wrong, and you were afraid to talk about them: Is she a lesbo? was about the second worst thing they could say about anyone, and you knew that if you gave them even a hint about what you dreamed about, about what made you wake flushed and sweating in the small hours, it’d be the absolute end, utter humiliation for the rest of your life.
So you giggled along with them, and learned to lie, didn’t admit to watching and rewatching Xena on video until the tapes chewed themselves up, and made a point of going to church so that when you said you believed in no-sex-before-marriage, they believed you and forgot to ask the obvious follow-on question: So who’s the lucky boy, then? You even did the Alpha course when you were eighteen, and lied enthusiastically right up until the speaking in tongues bit (which caught in your throat).
But then it was time for university. Where you met your inner Dorothy and got to know her . . . quite well.
Learning who you are is something every teenager goes through: But if your identity isn’t an identikit match for any of the role models on offer, it can take quite a while and take you up some strange paths on the way. You figured out you wanted to be a cop quite early—maybe it was Uncle Bert’s fault (even though he never bothered taking the sergeant’s exam), and maybe it was connected to the hard-shell uniformed image: self-sufficient, justified, not taking shit from ignorant assholes. You wanted that, you wanted it badly , and you believed in rules and telling the truth and punishing bullies. But maybe there was something else going on as well, something you didn’t understand at the time.
When you got your A-level grades and that place at university and broke away from the home-town claustrophobia for the first time, you didn’t bother joining any wishy-washy clubs and societies: You signed up for Archery and SCUBA Diving rather than the Feminists Society or LGBT Soc. You did your drinking in a pub on the wrong side of the tracks, where you unconsciously felt safe, not realizing that you were missing out on all the torrid flesh-pots of academia; and it was from the
Similar Books
