Tin Man

by Sarah Winman

And Michael said, We carry on and we don’t give up. And he knelt down and kissed him. It was their first kiss. Something good in a day of bad.

Anti-climatic first kiss for me.

He would listen to people at Lewis’s grave comment that he died on the same day as JFK, and they were right, he did. But Lewis’s death was lost to the world as the world mourned Kennedy because sometimes you look away and things change. And every month or so, bright wreaths would adorn new graves and he would acknowledge the grieving. A reminder that he and they were not alone.

And he did come back. Every weekend. Until Mabel died, and then he didn’t.

Sad!

We have to stop this, said Annie one night. Go and find him. No, he said. Fuck him. And that was that. A six-year standoff of wasted time.

Three weeks later, Michael did come back to them as if he’d heard their lament across the sea. He walked in the same way he had walked out, with little explanation and that daft grin across his face. And, for a while, they became them again.

"Don’t like him"--is my first reaction. Seeing what Michael has to go through I just can’t dislike him after all that. So, I love Michael

Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Ell!

Cute moment and an incredibly gay thing to say, as gay men are called a “friend of Dorothy.”

I don’t ever want to settle, said Ellis, looking from one to the other. I won’t let you settle, said Annie. And I won’t let you settle,

For sure won’t!

And Ellis remembered thinking he would never meet anyone like him again, and in that acknowledgment, he knew, was love. He could see his mother concentrating on Michael’s words, how enraptured she was. And when he stopped, she bent down and kissed him on the head and said, Thank you. Because everything she held on to and everything she believed in came together in that unexpected moment. The simple belief that men and boys were capable of beautiful things.

The doctor led him to an empty room where he told him Michael had been taken to the morgue. Ellis said, Why? Is that normal? And the doctor said, Under the circumstances it’s normal. What circumstances? said Ellis. We found a cluster of lesions down his right side. Kaposi— —I know what they’re called, said Ellis. Michael had AIDS,

The one word that will make me cry on sight is AIDS. I have a soft spot in my heart for the gay community when it comes to the AIDS crisis we had not so very long ago. Any story that includes cases where AIDS is discussed or is in any way an attribute to the characters or story will usually captivate me.

I said to him that just because you can’t remember doesn’t mean the past isn’t out there. All those precious moments are still there somewhere.

FROM THE MOMENT I saw him, I wanted to kiss him. That’s my well-practiced and preferred introduction to a conversation about Ellis.

Adorable!

He stirred. He opened his eyes. He sat up disorientated and scratched the salt in his hair. And there it was—all of a sudden—the reddening, the bewilderment, the withdrawing. But I caught it before it settled. Last night was amazing, I said. Amazing, amazing, amazing. And I kissed my way down his stomach—amazing—till he filled my mouth, and we smothered one another’s coming till we could barely breathe.

Juicy writing: visuals that bring deja vu.

And I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit.

She puts her arm around me and says, nodding to the TV, No one thought this was possible ten years ago. And now look. Life changes in ways we can never imagine. Walls come down and people are free. You wait, she says.

How applicable to today!!

But sometimes I feel as if my veins are leaking, as if my body is overwhelmed, as if I’m drowning from the inside.

Ellis is standing there with a young woman by his side, her red-blond hair vivid against the shoulders of her navy duffel coat. There is a familiarity to them already, no space between their bodies, and I know they’ve already kissed. She’s smiling at me and she has eyes that question, and I know I’ll have trouble with those eyes, one day. I don’t want the music to end. I want to keep singing and dancing because I need time to know what to say because I know she’s the One, and I just need time.

How devastating! It was in these moments (and Michael’s whole section of the book) where I am entirely captivated by Michael. I empathize and sympathize with this statement! It’s terrible seeing someone you love. love on another.

There’s something about first love, isn’t there? she said. It’s untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it’s the measure of all that follows, she said.

Quite true, I’d imagine.

As I grew older, I came to understand this woman was my mother’s freedom. We love who we love, don’t we? I hope she loved her.

And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

I look at these young men, not in envy but in wonder. It is for them now, the beauty of discovery, that endless moonscape of life unfolding.

His room was like every other room I’d visited. Smelled musty of sleep and spunk and books.

my loneliness masquerading as sexual desire. But it was my humanness that led me to seek, that’s all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere.

Feel this with my heart.

In my chest, the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.

Recycled imagery from earlier in the book and seen above in the highlights. But, not made about it, entirely.

Keep reading for an exciting preview of Sarah Winman’s next novel, Still Life.

I highlighted this to show the transition between the highlighted parts of Tin Man and the highlighted parts of the Still Life excerpt.

Isn’t that how it starts? said Margaret, handing back the cigarette. What? A book. Yes. I suppose so. Those little moments that nobody else notices. Little sacred moments of the everyday. She picked up her camera (click). Like that moment (click). Or that.

So far really liking the excerpted passage from Still Life and will be adding that to my TBR.