Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

The calls stopped when Callum met Holly, and now Phil’s relationship to Callum is trapped inside an old web of in-jokes and memes and impersonations of things Auntie Sue said twenty-five years ago.

It took a long time for Phil to reply. He switched from sentence-case to lower-case, from abbreviated text speak to full sentences and back again. After his thumb had hovered a millimetre above the ‘send’ button and ounces of prickly sweat had dribbled from his armpits, he eventually wrote yeh gd u?? and immediately regretted the second question mark.

I’m not saying it’ll be easy. Of course there’ll be moments when you’re scared and insecure and think you’re doing everything wrong. But you’ll have people around you who love you and want the best for you, people like Ed and Phil and your mum and me and Callum, and we’ll all be there to figure it out together. Bringing this baby into the world is a group project.

He is desperate, and therefore optimistic. He recently downloaded an astrology app, then downloaded another. In May, he spent a full day inconsolably distressed when the second app told him that the following month would bring about a painful reckoning in his love life. He deleted both apps and revised his opinion on astrology. No longer harmless fun, he said, no longer the inherited wisdom of our genderqueer ancestors. Rather, a sinister exploitation of heartbrokenness, he said, and it didn’t matter that he was a Sagittarius, Keith a Taurus, and Phil a Cancer, meaning that he and Keith were an incompatible match, while Keith and Phil were a match made in heaven.

Most of us know in our hearts but don’t say aloud: we are living through a period of history during which certain kinds of queers have been granted certain kinds of freedoms, but those freedoms are precarious. They may not last our lifetimes. This makes it urgent for Louis to kiss as many parts of Keith’s body as he can while it’s still around to be kissed.

Now, here she is: a sixty-year-old woman, admitting to herself that she’s in a pit. She’s been in this pit for decades. This pit is where she lives. Sometimes she tries to claw her way out of it. Sometimes she bashes her body off its walls in fury at her inability to climb them. Sometimes she simply accepts the pit and tries to decorate it as best she can.

She didn’t just want the choice to have an abortion. She wanted the choice to have a baby as well.

‘Maybe it’s just that Basildon is weird too. I can feel my adrenaline shoot up as soon as I set foot in this place. I always feel like I’m going to have to break into a run any moment. Whenever I come here, I have this irrational fear that something terrible is going to happen and I’ll be stuck here for the rest of my life.’

I have a similar feeling when i visit my hometown too.