Work Text:
1979-1980
Gethin can’t refuse the invitation to a New Year’s Eve party. He feels as though he isn’t allowed to. It’s an odd fact that, in London especially, it’s not only disappointing but somehow improper to refuse a New Year’s invitation, in a way that it isn’t improper to refuse, say, a St Patrick’s Day celebration, or an Easter lunch.
It’s even more improper for someone to suggest that, rather than attend a New Year’s Eve Party, they’d prefer to sit in their flat with the gas fire on, accompanied by a large bottle of brandy left over from Christmas, and a small stack of mildly trashy books.
This is precisely what Gethin’s ideal New Year’s Eve would look like. He even knows which pyjamas he’d like to be wearing in the scenario, which radio show he’d have buzzing quietly away on the transistor.
It’s not that he doesn’t like parties, or company. It’s that he likes those things quite a lot, and has in the denouement of this year managed to bring himself to the brink of total collapse in pursuit of both. There was his pal Daniel’s annual Christmas Eve Eve do, followed by Nathan’s Christmas Eve party, and then of course Christmas Day itself (spent with the Gay Lib lot; ratatouille and a cheese fondue; lots of boozy, impassioned speeches about the oppressive heterosexual orthodoxy), and then the Saturday after was a hazy night out at Bang, his memories of which are reduced to whiskey macs, Natalie Cole, and an impulsive one-nighter where Gethin felt he performed, despite the whiskey macs, remarkably well.
He’s tired, God, he’s really tired. And yet the only acceptable excuse to be offered in these situations is that one has already confirmed one’s attendance at another soirée. Gethin can’t use this excuse because he hasn’t been invited to any other soirées. If he tried to lie about this then Julian, the friend who’s invited him to the New Year’s party, would know because, as he insists while he drapes himself and his monstrous paisley scarf over the counter of the bookshop, everyone Gethin knows will be there and (added with a wink) “some you don’t know. Yet.”
Gethin, pricing books, says, “I don’t want to come out of there with a boyfriend, if that’s the idea.”
“The idea is that you bring in the New Year with your friends, not hole up in your flat with your woolly socks and a dirty magazine. I know what you’re like, Gethin Roberts.”
Which, Gethin feels, isn’t particularly fair, especially given the aforementioned four-day festive bender. He’s quiet, softly spoken, and this can often be mistaken for withdrawn. Even when he’s at the bloody parties people will feel it necessary to comment upon this, you know, “Oh you’re so quiet, I wouldn’t have thought this would be your kind of thing,” as though misanthropy is somehow related to the decibels of a person’s voice.
Gethin has accepted that this perception of him will persist for as long as he’s a mild-mannered Welshman working in a bookshop – which will probably be forever – but it’s still annoying to hear Julian say, “I know what you’re like,” in that scornful, nasally way of his.
Anyway, Julian doesn’t know what he’s like, not really. It’s not as if they’re best mates, lunching together on their work breaks, or helping lug old bits of furniture out of one another’s flats or whatever. Julian just comes in every few days to gossip at him, and flip through the paperbacks without buying any, and sometimes they’ll get a coffee at the café round the corner because Julian’s unemployed and bored, and Gethin rarely has the energy to say no to him.
They do share friends, though. If Gethin didn’t show up at the party, Julian would only tell tales on him (probably use the socks and dirty magazine line, end with, “I always thought he was a bit funny that way”). And so, despite the appeal of the pyjamas-and-brandy scenario, come the 31st Gethin finds himself shivering outside Julian’s council flat armed with a bottle of Cinzano and a six-pack of lager, teeth gritted against the cold. He presses the doorbell three times before someone answers.
“Geth-in!” Nick, Julian’s boyfriend, flings back the door. “Haven’t been out here long, have you? Can barely hear the door over Donna. Poor Cheryl was stood out here for twenty minutes, can you imagine!”
It would never occur to Nick to turn down Donna Summer in order to hear the doorbell ring. Still, despite the frostbite setting in, Gethin likes Nick a lot. He’s far less snotty than Julian, perpetually and unapologetically cheerful, and when he lets Gethin in and takes the bottle from him he says, “Ooh, now I do love a bit of Kints-ano,” and throws an arm around Gethin’s shoulders as he leads him through into the kitchen.
Julian’s in there ladling out jaundiced fruit punch. Mike (one of the lads on Gay Switchboard, hangs about in the shop a lot) is up on the counter next to him, long legs dangling as he peers into the bowl.
“Julian,” he’s saying, “you’re gonna poison people, mate.”
“There’s only three hours left,” is Julian’s prim response. “We need to get pissed quick.”
“Gethin, tell him,” Mike says when he sees him. “He’s put three-quarters of a bottle of rum in there, and a gallon of ice cream.”
“I call it a Caribbean Snowstorm,” Julian says proudly. “Want some, Geth?”
“I’m alright, you know.”
“Suit yourself,” Julian shrugs, before sweeping into the front room and hollering something to the effect of, “Alright, poofs, who’s for punch?”
“Glad you’re here, mate,” Mike says, as Gethin leans against the counter next to him, tugging a lager out from the six-pack. “Julian’s got all his actor friends round.”
Mike’s been in London since he was eighteen, and he still wraps his tongue around certain words like a Lancashire housewife. Ac-tor.
“Really?” says Gethin. “No one we know?”
“Well yeah, but they’re all mingling, all in a big circle, like. Not that I’m not up for that. Just… not quite there yet.”
“Have some Caribbean Snowstorm, that’ll sort you out.”
“Yeah, I wanted liquid confidence, not heart palpitations,” says Mike, but he slides off the counter top, making sure to take his drink with him.
When they go out into the front room everyone is in a bit of a circle. It’s perhaps because the hosts haven’t bothered to de-clutter, and so everyone feels the need to arrange themselves around the Formica coffee table in the middle of the room. At least they haven’t yet delved into a monologuic sharing circle. Different conversations are going on around the room, and Gethin and Mike soon spot familiar faces and seat themselves on the floor by their friends, beside an overlarge potted fern.
Gethin sees what Mike means now. When he looks around the room he sees lots of people he knows, if not closely then as acquaintances; customers in the shop, friends of Nick’s he’s chatted to briefly in the loo queue at bars, that sort of thing. The ones he doesn’t recognise appear distinctly theatrical, if that can be a fair term to use (which, Gethin thinks, it is, because it’s not exactly offensive, is it, it’s just a look). There’s a man in black tights and a sort of brocade smock, and beside him a woman with very short hair and a very, very large scarf, even though she’s indoors. There’s one really quite handsome man Gethin doesn’t recognise. He’s wearing an ordinary white shirt but he manages to look theatrical too – perhaps because he’s rolling a spliff? Or maybe it’s the way he sits, legs out and crossed over one another, rather boyish? Most likely it’s because he’s sitting with the man in the tights.
At first no one on either side seems keen on mingling. They’re all busy swapping their Christmas stories with the friends they haven’t seen over the festive period. Gethin, for example, endures a twenty-minute tirade from his friend Will, who spent Christmas with his family in Berkshire where he was glutted with constricting heterosexual ideologies and bad turkey.
Gethin bites back the part of him that wants to say, “Well, Will, you know, you’re twenty-one and your mum pays towards your flat in Clapham, and your family still invite you for the holidays, and me, I had fucking ratatouille for Christmas.” Instead he says, “I know it’s frustrating. You wait all year for it and the bloody turkey comes out dry.”
Which, judging by the look Will gives him, isn’t the desired response.
“Seen Nick guarding that Dansette?” Mike says suddenly. “Is he really gonna make us listen to Bad Girls all night? It’s already looped twice. I’m gonna have to have a word with him, I can’t end the year like this.”
Mike cannot mingle when he’s sober, but he stands with admirable confidence to tackle Nick and his partner in crime, Donna Summer. When he’s moved away, Gethin has a better view of the maybe-Thespian in the ordinary white shirt. He’s long since finished rolling his spliff. It’s now tucked behind his ear, which strikes Gethin as something he might usually term silly-cool – as in, if anybody else was doing it (himself, for example) it would look ridiculous, but somehow, in this context, against that unusually tanned jaw, that little gold earring, it looks just right.
And of course, Gethin gets caught looking, and has to pretend he’s interested in the other large fern just past maybe-Thespian’s head. It’s a habit he can’t seem to shake, even when he’s trying to make eye contact with a bloke. He’ll be in a bar staring right at the side of someone’s head, and the second they turn and look at him his eyes will shoot up to the ceiling tiles, or down to the sticky floor, because God forbid anyone actually be aware he’s trying to make the first move. No, Gethin much prefers the psychic staring effect, followed by feigned obliviousness. It works – sometimes. It worked on Saturday at Bang.
It seems to be working now. When he’s finished pretending to be interested in the fern, he peeks back at maybe-Thespian and finds he’s still looking. He smiles a small smile directly at Gethin. Gethin smiles back, just as Mike plonks himself down in front of him again.
“Bit of Boney M’s all I could get him to agree to but, you know, it’s a change.”
“I don’t know many people who’d stand up to Nick and his Dansette. You did the right thing.”
Mike shrugs modestly. “Had to get me good deed in before year’s end. Right, you, ready for another of those?”
Gethin shakes his can. It’s still about a quarter full. Midnight’s only two and a half hours away.
“Yeah, better crack on,” he says, getting to his feet. “Need to start mingling with the ac-tors.”
***
An hour or so later and Gethin is starting to get a little drunk, which is pleasant. He’s sitting in a circle with ten or so others, some of whom he knows, and some of whom look theatrical. Julian has finally taken the reins on the party, pushing the coffee table to the side of the room and enforcing a team-building exercise. Everyone is staring at Mike, who has a slip of paper sellotaped to his forehead. It has Mussolini written on it.
“Am I, erm… am I funny?” he asks.
“Funny ha-ha, or funny-strange?” somebody theatrical says.
“I dunno. Funny ha-ha, I suppose.”
“No,” they all chorus in a monotone.
Gethin has already guessed his own identity. Marlene Dietrich is scrawled on a curling paper slip beneath his empty can. It’s been fifteen minutes, and Mike still hasn’t figured out he’s a fascist. People are starting to lose interest and slip away, sloping off to the toilet or on to the front balcony for a smoke. When it gets to a point where he thinks Mike won’t mind (at this point the game has rather been finished off for everyone) Gethin stands a bit unsteadily to get another drink. He goes into the kitchen and finds the man in tights and the next door neighbours all talking over one another and sharing dry-roasted peanuts. On the other side of the room is the maybe-Thespian in his nice white shirt, considering the bowl of punch. He notices Gethin before Gethin can attempt the psychic staring effect.
“Hi!” he says, very pleasantly.
“Hi,” says Gethin. Then, after a pause, “Going for the punch, I see.”
“Yes, well.” The man peers into the bowl, which has huge chunks of lime floating in it. “Julian won’t stop going on about it, feel a bit rude not giving it a go. Though…” He ladles a decent amount into an empty glass, avoiding the fruit, “generally speaking, I’m not really a punch fan.”
“I should probably warn you –”
The man has taken a healthy swig before Gethin can cough the rest of his warning out. They look at each other, Gethin feeling partly responsible for the look of despair settling on the man’s face. He swallows it down with obvious effort. His voice is a little strained when he speaks.
“I know punch is multi-layered. I just didn’t realise there’d be quite so much, you know…” He waves his hand, searching for the right word. “Shit in it.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s very cold.”
“It’s a Caribbean Snowstorm,” Gethin says, dipping his head apologetically, as though they both should have known better.
“Well. Given me a kick, at least.”
“That’s what you want on New Year’s Eve, isn’t it? If you’re not completely pissed come ‘Auld Lang Syne’ you’ve not done it right.”
The man laughs. He’s got a lovely wide smile that makes his eyes crinkle. Gethin is suddenly aware of the need to make it clear that he came to the kitchen with a specific intention, that he isn’t just here to loiter around the punch bowl, and so he makes for the cans of lager.
“Marlene Dietrich, right?”
Gethin fumbles with the can in its plastic ring. He didn’t realise the other man had been watching the silly game. Certainly not that he’d been watching intently enough to see what was written on the pink paper foolishly stuck to Gethin’s head.
“Oh, I – yes. Ja.”
“Considerable likeness. I’m Jonathan.”
“Can I offer you one of these, Jonathan?” Gethin holds out a can, and Jonathan’s smile, which hasn’t disappeared yet, broadens.
“Thanks. What’s your real name?” he asks, snapping the tab open.
Gethin looks at him. “Marlene,” he says. It’s the kind of joke an uncle might make but Jonathan laughs. “Why’d you think I had it on my head? We were all getting to know each other.”
“Of course. So that was your friend Mussolini with you?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s a bit of a mouthful, we all just call him Benito. Benny.”
“Much better.”
Gethin smiles at him. His fingers tap against the top of his lager, which is still sealed.
“I’m Gethin,” he says, softer than he’d like because they’re suddenly much nearer to one another and he’s gone a bit shy. The man in the tights and the next-door neighbours take their peanuts into the front room, leaving them alone.
“Well, Gethin.” Jonathan touches his can to Gethin’s. “Very nice to meet you.”
“And you. How do you know the hosts, then?”
“I’m a friend of Julian’s, we’ve worked together. Well, just the once actually. We did a play at Wilton’s. Don’t know if you caught it at all…”
Gethin thinks about lying, but he’s not drunk enough to pull it off if Jonathan starts asking for reviews. “I didn’t see that one actually, no…”
He’s dutifully attended most of Julian’s dubious plays. Just his luck that the one he managed to dodge had a man in it he’s now rather wanting to flirt with.
“Probably for the best. I can’t speak for Julian, but it’s not one I’m particularly proud of. It was this modern-day Robin Hood idea. Robin’s a homeless man in Nottingham city centre, Marian works in a chippy and gives him free scampi when her boss isn’t about.”
“Who did you play?”
“Tucker, the hippie Methodist minister Robin seeks out for counsel every now and then.”
“That sounds…” Gethin pauses, for a bit too long. “Really interesting.”
Jonathan laughs again. “Thank you for being diplomatic. Many aren’t. How do you know Julian?”
“Oh, well I was friends with Nick first, and that’s how I met Julian. Nick comes to one of the, er… at the shop, we have…” He’s struggling, because Jonathan’s just told him he was in a rubbish play, and Gethin doesn’t want to turn around and say sorry about that, I own my own shop. “We met at a Gay Lib social.”
Jonathan squints at him for a moment. Then he extends a finger from around his lager and pokes Gethin gently in the chest.
“I’ve just realised who you are.”
“Oh God, that sounds ominous.”
“Gethin. With the shop. Julian’s told me about you!”
Gethin’s skin prickles a bit at that. I know what you’re like, Gethin Roberts. What kinds of bitchy tales has Julian been spouting about him to handsome actors?
“I’ve been to it. I was looking everywhere for a copy of Naked Lunch, and of course it was nowhere, but then it was somewhere because Julian said he had a friend who owned a bookshop bound to stock it, and so off I went to this charming little place, and there it was. Sorted under Classics, I think.”
“Bit of a transgressive classic, but yes, I couldn’t think where else to put it. Did you like it?”
“Oh God, no. I couldn’t get past the halfway point, the man was completely stoned. Dreadful stuff.”
“Fair review,” Gethin shrugs. “Who sold it to you?”
“I can’t just remember. But it wasn’t you. I’d have remembered you.”
Jonathan says this warmly, looking directly at Gethin, which Gethin is pleased about because it confirms that they’re definitely flirting. Even after years in London he still likes to be quite certain about these things.
“I have, ah… I have a lad who does a few mornings a week. Must’ve been him.”
“Must’ve been.”
Jonathan’s looking at him quite intently now. Gethin isn’t sure just what to do. He isn’t used to amorous exchanges taking place in a domestic setting, and certainly not in such bright light. Perhaps he could suggest they go outside. Perhaps he could pretend he smokes. One of the only reasons Gethin has considered taking up smoking is so he can do something very impressive and romantic with it. Like that bit in Now, Voyager where Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes in his mouth and gives one to Bette Davis. Gethin reckons he could light two cigarettes in his mouth at once, given the chance.
He hasn’t got any cigarettes but Jonathan smokes, Jonathan will have cigarettes.
“D’you want to –” he starts to say, just as Nick sweeps into the room exclaiming, “Why aren’t you in here playing charades? You’ve just missed Ian’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
Gethin, who felt that he’d been acquitting himself rather well in front of handsome Jonathan, gives Nick a tight smile. To be suddenly manoeuvred into a game of charades seems somehow unfair. But just as he resigns himself to the moment being lost, the two of them following Nick into the other room, Jonathan brushes his arm against Gethin’s.
“Whatever you were going to ask,” he says in a low voice, “the answer’s yes.”
***
Midnight comes around quickly after that. By the time they’re counting down from ten Gethin, in line with his own views on appropriate New Year’s etiquette, is good and drunk. He’s spent the last hour of 1979 with Mike and Jonathan and Grumpy Will and Julian and the man in tights, who’s called Cormac and is actually very pleasant, and they’ve been swapping their best clubbing stories the whole time (which might seem unusual, but the reason this has been the exclusive topic is due largely to Julian’s fondness for exaggerated twenty-minute monologues).
Now everyone’s crammed into the front room, the few people with empty glasses desperately filling them so they have something to plunge into the air as a midnight toast. Gethin’s chanting along with everyone else, but he’s worried when he looks about and Jonathan isn’t in sight. Gethin’s head is a little cloudy, but one very insistent thought in his mind right now is that Jonathan should be his New Year kiss. Lovely, handsome, smiley Jonathan, who bought Naked Lunch from his shop, would you believe it? But the countdown hits one, and everyone shouts Happy New Year! and Gethin’s New Year kiss is Grumpy Will, which is alright, but not ideal. Then Cormac kisses him, for a bit too long, then Mike gives him a big hug because he’s completely pissed and if he tried to aim a kiss on anyone he’d end up head-butting them.
Someone knocks Sister Sledge back on, and suddenly the music and the jeering and the cackling is even more deafening than before. Gethin downs what’s left of his drink and ducks out of the hot little room, into the relative quiet of the hallway, then out into the cool freshness of the night. The block of flats is alive with lights and noise. A couple of Nick and Julian’s neighbours have extended their party to the balcony, singing a flamboyant rendition of ‘Let’s Start the New Year Right’. Jonathan’s smoking by the railings, watching them. He looks sideways and smiles when Gethin stands next to him.
“Oh dear, have I missed ‘Auld Lang Syne’?”
Gethin grins. “I think you wanted to miss ‘Auld Lang Syne’.”
“Of course I didn’t. I just wanted a fag more than I wanted to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, but that doesn’t mean it was never on the cards.”
“Well, never mind. We brought 1980 in with ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer’ instead.”
Jonathan huffs a little laugh and flicks his cigarette stub over the balcony. He turns and says, “Happy New Year, Gethin.”
Gethin, dimly aware that they’re almost touching, says, “Happy New Year,” and then Jonathan takes Gethin’s face in his hands and kisses him.
It’s quite long, and so probably doesn’t constitute a conventional New Year kiss. Nobody shouts anything obscene; the balcony partiers have retreated inside. When they break apart, Jonathan hangs on to him. He says, “Do you speak Welsh?”
Gethin nods, eyes locked on Jonathan’s dark ones. “Why?”
“What’s Welsh for ‘Happy New Year’?”
“Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.”
“That is utterly ridiculous. I knew it would be.”
“Then you say ac i tithau.”
“I’ll spare us both the embarrassment, shall I?”
He kisses him again, his thumb stroking gentle circles against Gethin’s jaw. Gethin puts his hands on the back of Jonathan’s neck because he’s too tall for Gethin to loop his arms properly around his shoulders, and when Gethin thinks about this, and about Sister Sledge and about everything, he can’t stop himself from doing this silly, woozy laugh against Jonathan’s mouth, even though nothing’s really funny.
“What is it?” says Jonathan.
Gethin pulls away and looks at him. “Nothing. Only… before, when we were talking, I was going to pretend I smoke so that you’d come out here with me and I could kiss you without anyone catcalling.”
This makes Jonathan laugh loudly. “You should’ve just said ‘look, love, I don’t smoke but I can’t be waiting around until midnight’ and then whisked me away. I wouldn’t have minded.”
“It’s not really my style. Not much of a… whisker.” He leans back, his hands still on Jonathan but travelling down now to his chest. Gethin looks at him thoughtfully. “I quite fancy myself a smoker. Only ‘cause of Lauren Bacall, like.”
“Lauren Bacall?”
“That bit in the film where she’s standing by the door and she says ‘anybody got a match?’ and both the blokes are just staring at her like she’s saintly, and she just…” He lifts his hand away from Jonathan to act it out, “tosses the matches over her shoulder when she's lit up. You must’ve seen it.”
“I’m ashamed to say I haven’t.”
“Well, you ought to, and that’s the only reason I’d smoke. To do things like that. But I don’t like it.” Gethin flicks the gaudy Christmas lights wrapped around the railings. “Sorry. I’ve had a bit to drink. When d’you think’s the appropriate time to leave these dos? Once the new year’s dawned and everything?”
Jonathan gives his watch a cursory glance in the light of the flat window.
“I was going to suggest we head off in the next ten minutes or so.” He looks up, sees Gethin staring at him, gives him a cheeky smile. “If you fancy it.”
Gethin’s head is clear enough to know that when Jonathan says if you fancy it, he isn’t necessarily talking about the heading off part. And if he is talking about something else, Gethin’s been fancying it since about half past nine.
“Yeah,” he says, going for casual then ruining it by saying, “I live nearby, you know.”
“Good, because I don’t. Do you have coffee at your place? I could murder a cup of coffee.”
“I’ve got coffee, and I might even have a packet of biscuits for you, what do you think to that?”
“I think I’m starting the new year right, you big smoothie,” says Jonathan, pushing himself away from the railing and tugging Gethin back towards the door of the flat. “Let's go and say ta-ra to everyone. What was it again? ‘Happy New Year’ in Welsh?”
Gethin says it, and Jonathan says it back, badly.
“Needs some work,” Gethin decides.
“Well, that’s alright,” says Jonathan, stepping inside and pulling Gethin in after him. “We’ve got all night.”