Page 3 of Pansies

“Oh right. Right.” He was too dazed to manage anything more coherent. Who waswe? And how did they know? When he barely did himself?

“There’s more te life,” Sheila went on, with the dogged wisdom of the far too bloody old, “than bums.”

Alfie waited, hopefully, to die. And didn’t. “Thanks. That’s… Thanks.”

Uncle DJ had finally remembered he was meant to be providing music, not allowing the room to fill up with awkward revelations of homosexuality, and hastily fired up the “Macarena.” While everybody was distracted, Alfie reeled away to the relative safety of the finger buffet.

The centrepiece of the whole arrangement was a tinfoil hedgehog skewered with cheese and pineapple pieces on cocktail sticks.3 This was as close as North East England got to a canapé. He ate one out of long habit. The pineapple was dry, the cheese too rich and faintly sweaty. It tasted of home.

He could feel about thirty people trying not to look at him, so he began vigorously helping himself to the potato salad. It was basically a bowl of wobbling mayonnaise with a few unhappy potatoes bobbing in it.

Then came the clicking of dress shoes behind him, and he had no choice but to turn and face his best friend. Kevin was shiny-faced with groomly joy and stuffed uncomfortably into a morning suit that had clearly been chosen by someone else, presumably the bride. Alfie had known Kevin for nearly his whole life, and he’d never seemed like a heliotrope cravat sort of bloke.

“I divvent knaa ye were a puffter,” he said.

Alfie picked up a sausage roll so big he could barely get his hand round it, and then wished he hadn’t. “Yeah, sorry.”

“Eee, well.” There was a pause. “Are ye sure?”

He nodded. It was one of the few things hewassure about.

“I dunno, man. Doon sooth for five minutes, first you’re talking like a reet ponce, and the next thing we knaa, you’re an arse bandit.”4

Sweat prickled the back of Alfie’s neck, oozing beneath his collar. “You don’t just turn gay the moment you go past Leeds. And believe me, your arse is very, very safe.”

“Oh aye. Like ye haven’t been after it for years.” Kevin slapped himself soundly on the buttocks and grinned.

It was meant to be a joke, so Alfie dutifully tried to find it funny. Nope. “I really haven’t. Sorry if I wrecked your wedding. I didn’t mean to tell you like this.”

“Dan’t be daft, man.” There was another pause, somewhat more fraught than the last, and then Kevin went on plaintively: “I just divvent gerrit.”

Alfie ran his hands through his carefully spiked hair. The least he owed his friend was some sort of explanation, but he hardly knew how to start. He’d left South Shields his father’s son. And now he…well…wasn’t?

“It’s complicated,” he tried. But then the words came tumbling out of him and couldn’t be stopped. “It took me a long timeto sort of…figure it out. Even longer to get my head round it. I just never thought I was, y’know, that way. But I guess I am? I mean, I must be.”

Kevin blinked. “Wha’ ye gan on aboot?”

The sweat clung cold to Alfie’s body. What was he doing? This wasn’t how they talked to each other. They were mates. They took the mick, they had a laugh, they didn’t emote at each other like southerners.

“I just meant,” Kevin was saying, “I divvent knaa how ye go from, ‘Oh, that’s a bloke ower there,’ to ‘I fancy banging him like.’”5

Alfie shrugged. He didn’t know either. “Look, I’m sorry if—”

“Alfie, ye knaa you’re still me best mate. Ye always will be.”

Relief and gratitude rushed over him, but they were followed by a nasty sort of resentment that the words were necessary in the first place. That Kevin had needed to say them and that Alfie had needed to hear them. As if there had ever been the possibility of another answer. Which, of course, there had.

Kevin grinned. “Even if ye are a shirt lifter.”

If his hands hadn’t been full of phallic sausage, Alfie might have put his head in them. “Kev…” But there was no point. It had been kindly meant.6 So maybethis—why couldn’t he even say it to himself sometimes?—would just be something else for Kev to rip the piss out of, like his hair or his tattoo. Comfortably meaningless. “Well, you’re still my best mate too, even if you’re a complete knob.”

Kev laughed and flung an arm across Alfie’s shoulder. “Takes one te know one.”

“And I should know, right?” Oh God. Now he was doing this shit to himself. But he had to say it, to prove it had no power over him. And it worked. Kev spluttered, caught between shock andamusement, and it was close enough to winning that Alfie was able to be generous. “Congratulations, by the way.”

For a moment, Kev looked blank. “Blummin’ hell, I’m married.”

“Till death do you part.”

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