Something in common

Relating to the fictitious

I experienced it so often, and it was always the same sort of exchange. It never varied. Yes, it varied in the precise words used, but, then, where the exchange was headed was as predictable as a visit to the doctor’s.

And how are we today?

- Not very well, doctor.

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that; tell me, what’s the problem?

- Well, you see, doctor, it’s my [insert appropriate body part].

In the case I’m alluding to, it’s tourists visiting Europe, and it goes more like this:

Hey, you American?

Sure are, where y’all from?

Lubbock, Texas, up in the panhandle, there.

Tallahassee, beautiful Florida!

Heeeey!

Hey.

American tourists. I think that, when Americans leave their own country, which is vast and knows a high degree of sameness, in terms of the automobiles they drive, the styles of their homes and the products they buy from the shops they buy them from, a part of them flies into a blind panic upon arriving, say, in Budapest, where they can’t even read the street signs. My job, when I worked in tourism, was to guide these lost souls around the wonders of my continent and ensure they didn’t wander too far from my stentorian voice, my balding pate and my skirling kilt.

And, occasionally and regularly, I would hear exchanges such as the above. The difference between the doctor’s and the touristic encounter was that the doctor’s exchange would continue with an analysis of the problem. The doctor knew by then what the patient was there for. And the patient knew why they were at the doctor’s. And, whilst the tourists both had a fairly keen idea what the both of them were doing wherever it was that the encounter took place, that was the sum total of their commonality. That heeeey was the last thing of any consequence that would get said. If of consequence it was.

That’s not a judgment, but an observation: we latch so much onto where we’re from and the labels that tell us who we are, we sometimes fail to explore the true connections that we have with one another, above and beyond our outward, clichéd appearances. Or we seem resigned to the fact that we have no real connection beyond stuff like nationality or residence with anyone, regardless of who they are.

When myself I was in America, I would meet people who knew folk in Manchester, or in Birmingham, and they would ask where I hail from, and I’d say I was born in Glasgow and grew up in Yorkshire, and they’d ask if I knew Charlie Watts from Redcar. And usually I didn’t. I didn’t even know a Charlie Watts in Glasgow, but the chance was always there.

When I played Sir Thomas More in the play A Man For All Seasons, we had a new volunteer who joined the backstage crew to do make-up. Usually, volunteers tend to be ex-pats, but this was a homegrown Fleming. I asked her where she was from, because we were in Brussels. She told me: Lokeren. I said I knew someone from Lokeren, and Belgium is not that big; big enough, but not as big as Texas. Her name was Daniëlla. Els became interested. What was the last name? “Van Malderen,” said I. She regarded me in the mirror, a slightly startled look on her face. She was distantly related to Daniëlla Van Malderen, who had been the office administrator I dealt with when teaching at a law firm in the big smoke.

I became friends with Daniëlla; she would come and stay, for dinner and overnight, when she was visiting her husband, who lay terminally ill in our local hospital. I was at his funeral and Daniëlla herself passed away a few years ago, in Spain, very suddenly, just before Covid; and the last time I saw Els was when she came to pick me up and take me to a celebration of life for Daniëlla, which was held back in Lokeren. Then we went to dinner with her partner and family and she drove me all the way home. I haven’t heard from her since, though I reached out. Perhaps she’s busy. Perhaps I was too much that day at the memorial service. Perhaps our doctor’s appointment exchange became the exchange between two American tourists in Europe. We had a couple of things in common, but that was it.

So often, we look for the similarities between our lives and those of others and we sometimes find them, but we expect them to match like Mr Bun and Mrs Bun the baker in a game of Happy Families, or football fans wearing the same scarves and tee shirts. What we have in common, what unites us, with others is not shirt colours, or scarves, or the church we go to, or even the firm we work for, the bus we take every morning. It’ll never be the beer we drink or the gym we attend. What binds us will always be the pain we share.

I finally finished the book I borrowed nearly two years ago. I was lent it by one of the deepest feeling persons I know, who never shows her feelings. I didn’t ask her to lend me the book, but she lent it to me for a reason, and what that reason was, I don’t know. It’s a book about a gay man, and I’m a gay man, so perhaps she thought it would be of interest to me. It traces this man’s life from age seven to age 70, in seven-year phases. I too was once seven years of age and, God willing, some day in the not-too-distant future, I will be 70 years of age, and perhaps she saw some kind of a similarity, to which I could relate in this book of hers.

The book is very funny. And it serves up shocks and keening tears with an off-handedness that is almost insufferable. I was raised by two loving parents who were my real mother and father, unlike Cyril’s. But, like him, I was besotted as a boy with other boys, my peers, but unlike Julian, they never learned of my distant infatuations. I never married a woman or had a son, like Cyril did, and I never came close, not as close as he did, to committing suicide. I was never present at a terrorist attack, and I never was glad to watch the murder of a boy’s father in the moment when the father would have otherwise murdered his son. And I never married my own mother.

But I knew the Ireland of Cyril. I was there in 1986, in a pub in Dublin with a guy I’d met on the cross-Irish Sea ferry. He was American, and we arranged to meet in what my Spartacus guide had assured me was a gay bar. America and I sat at the bar deep in discussion when an older doyen of the scene leaned over to us and enquired, “Would you two lads be gay at all?” to which I replied, “Yes?”, which elicited the response, “Just to let you know, this isn’t a gay bar any longer, but down an alleyway a short way from here is what you’re looking for. Upstairs, because downstairs is the elephants’ graveyard.” So, off we trotted to The George. And—in those days—up the stairs.

Even Scotland had decriminalised homosexuality in 1981. Later, in Brussels, I would make the acquaintance of a woman whose brother led the campaign for decriminalisation in Ireland, which eventually came in 1993, with same-sex marriage following by popular plebiscite in 2015—the first country in Europe to allow it nationwide. After centuries of bigotry, control, hypocrisy and subjection, Ireland, if nowhere else, knows what it means to speak up for liberty. It knows pain.

But, back then, in 1986, the significance of the advice given to us in that bar in Dublin had been lost on me. In 1982, there had been a spate of murders of gay men in Dublin, led by the shocking case of Charles Self. The gardaí were strongly suspected of involvement. Just as Cyril had been beaten up by a gardaí the night Nelson’s Pillar was blown up in 1966.

After 9/11, Queen Elizabeth famously said that grief is the price we pay for having loved. It is perhaps true: we grieve for those we loved. But do we grieve for those whom we never loved, or even for those whom we never even knew? When we feel pain for the misery of another, when we empathise for their fate, regardless of the grounds, the causes, the merits of what has befallen them, we may be dismissed, as I have so often been—I do not jest—as too sensitive. But if keening with tears at an object of fiction for the reason that it evokes a sense in the reader of the pain they have felt in reality, even if not in the exact same conditions, then, far from them displaying excess sensitivity, it is those who castigate them who display excess insensitivity.

It is not hard to be moved to sympathise with a fictitious character well portrayed in a work of literary art, or indeed in a painting, a sculpture, a work of cinematography, for a good artist will be capable of penetrating the public’s insensitivity. It is the viewer who recognises therein their own soul, however, who empathises, with a pain that is their own, that is awoken and remains awoken as they leave the exposition.

Gustave Flaubert’s Un Coeur simple (one of his Trois contes) is a delightful portrait of a country girl employed as a dutiful maidservant, of whom the author writes in his preface: écrit pour des âmes sensibles, parce que j’en suis une. It was written for sensitive souls because I am one. In his case, the extent of John Boyne’s sensitivity is set out as an epilogue to his novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies, rather than, like Flaubert, in a preface. I don’t know Mr Boyne and I’ve now read but one of his books. But he wrote about a subject that touched me because, very different as our respective lives have been, he and I have shared a host of experiences that made us what we are today, some of which we’d maybe sooner hadn’t happened, but which have led us to a destiny we don’t rue. I feel that, were we to encounter each other in a tourist resort, I could greet John Boyne with at least heeeey.

When I visit my doctor, he spends 20 minutes talking about this and that. I have nothing in common with him, except that he’s my doctor and I’m his patient.