My first story in AGES, sorry, I've been ill.
This story came to me in a drugged dream as a result of over hearing one of my nurses talking to his friend about his sister.
It just evolved from the one discussion and flowed out onto the keyboard as you see it and, when I upload the last bit, there's something of everything in there.
After a while I started to struggle to think what category it would fit in to; it's not meant to be a gay story with straight sex or a straight story about a gay man. It's just about people and sex.
I did try and see if I could fit in some romantic alien Lesbian werewolves that were into bondage but somehow the story wouldn't go that way. Em
*
My name is Bill and I'm a gay man; like many gay men I seem resolutely and self-destructively unable to maintain a relationship with another gay man that isn't a total fuckwit or have serious character flaws that I (as a gay man) am duty bound to point out to him the second we get into any kind of argument.
I live at home in South London, until very recently with my mother. Mum bless her, has dementia and has almost no short term memory. She can remember what I did thirty years ago, and give me a list of all the lovely girls I went out with until I finally 'came out' and admitted to the world -- me especially -- that I was a gay man, but not what I gave her for breakfast that morning.
When I left school for want of something to study at college I opted for a pre-nursing course. It was great and I took to the work naturally. I was one of only two men on the course, and with about half a dozen other students from my course, at the end I enrolled with the Royal Navy and spent a really happy fifteen years working across the world in bases and on ships as a medic, finishing my time as a chief, and walking straight from the Navy and taking my experience and my medals from Iraq and Afghanistan into that fantastic institution the British NHS.
It isn't perfect and some people hate it but I love it and would cheerfully man the barricades against the Nazis that would do away with it based on their complete faith in, not say love of, the free market. Sorry, rant over.
The RN wasn't the best place to be a gay man in the nineties, although it did improve as time went on, and I didn't really express my sexuality or particularly practise it until I left. I had of course had several undercover relationships at the end of my career with some great men who taught me very well. Sadly we were all way too much alike and we struggled to live together or remain faithful. So I have any number of casual relationships, a few fuck buddies (one of which is my first lover who gets me but can't live with me or me with him) and I survive from day to day with the support of my family and many good friends and have a good time. No kids, but I have a few nephews and nieces and two godchildren that I dote on.
I like good wine, good company and steak, medium rare with peppercorn and mushroom sauce -- no sexual innuendo there, I actually like beef steak.
I still live in Mum's flat although she is now living in a warden controlled complex that is all on one level; her widow's pension keeps her there in reasonable style while I pay for the occasional day out or new dress should she need one.
Thank God we can pick our friends though; my eldest sister Sandra is a Bitch.
She went to college to be an architect but somehow managed to find herself as a town planner and worked in several London Boroughs working her way up with hard work and pig ignorance to the higher echelons of local government. She was well set for directorship and chief exec jobs but thanks to some internal political and financial wranglings she found herself at the place where the buck stopped with no one above or below that she dyke responsibility onto. She was given a golden goodbye, and presented with all kinds of other gifts by the smiling, back stabbing assassins that had preserved their place at the trough at her expense.
She was a week over fifty so took her pay-off, her lump sum and her pension and was advised by several colleagues to give it a year or two take a couple of holidays and then start applying for jobs outside the capital.
She took their advice and took 'outside the capital' to heart and went first to Canada, where she worked freelance for a while then to an Gulf state where her particular style of management was smiled upon, I mean Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi had gotten away with it for a long time.
The global economic crisis took its toll though and eventually the massive building projects ran out or were left half-finished and she was again sent on her way.
So it was that she turned up on my doorstep five months ago. She wasn't poor by any stretch of the imagination, far from it. She had money invested in all sorts of places but couldn't get her hands on it for the time being and thought she'd kip in Mum's spare room while she got herself sorted. 'Sorted' was to be a job somewhere, and a small house in the Surrey countryside where she could live off of her pension and income from her savings.
She was shocked to see me there at the door bleary eyes and in nightwear as she stood there with her two suitcases at a shade after eleven PM.
"Oh, it's you," she said, "can I come in, it's freezing."
I smiled, "Sandra, how lovely to see you too," I replied and stepped back.
"Where's Mum?" she said, looking at the spot where her chair used to be and then looking around at the changed dΓ©cor.
"She lives in a small retirement community," I said, "warden controlled, all ground floor, her room her things, lots of other people her age, she loves it."
"Why wasn't I told?" she snapped. I fumed; to my knowledge she hadn't spoken to Mum in almost two years, she certainly hadn't spoken to me in that time.
"How was I going to get in touch with you," I said stepping into the kitchen to boil a kettle for tea, for me not her, "Through a fucking medium?"
"Mum had my number!" she snapped back, "She could have given it to you; you just wanted her flat to yourself, this is fucking typical!" she raged flinging her hands around.
"Mum might have HAD your number, but she hasn't given it to me, I expect she lost it."
"Or you threw it away; fucking typical," she snarled, "always the fucking same, typical fucking Poof desire to control everything," I frowned. Sandra had hated me being gay.
She had never needed a man (or woman) in her life as she was so much in love with herself to make room for anyone else's love, but every now and again, after a few glasses of wine she would bitch at me and point out that my homosexuality was a character flaw not a lifestyle choice.
"I didn't throw it away Sandra," I said breathing deeply, "If you'd done more than send Christmas cards with no forwarding address you'd know that Mum has vascular dementia. She doesn't know what day of the week it is let alone where you left a piece of paper with an office number on it. She fell down the stairs just before Christmas and broke her hip. She's taken months to recover and the doctor said that she needed to be in accommodation on one level. The place she is in is sponsored by the lodge."