Gay City and Other Stories by Alan Keslian (best non fiction books to read txt) 📕

and waited for me to come up alongside him. 'Christ, what happened to your leg? You'd better stop and call it a day, your dad'll kill me.'
I did my best to smile and said 'I'm okay. Don't worry about my dad, I won't let him see.'
He wasn't happy at first, but eventually he said if I wouldn't give up I should just follow in his slipstream and take it steady. He kept looking back about fifty times a minute to see if I was still there and ask if I was all right. The pain did stop and I kept really close, so he gently lifted the speed until we caught up with his mates a few hundred yards before the last refreshment stop. I could have done with a proper break, but didn't want to hold everyone else up. One of Les's mates pointed towards a couple of parked vans under some trees on the other side of the field and said 'Do you see what I see?'
We all looked over to where, near the vans, the cycling club members had stopped for some serious eating. They had big insulated boxes for food and what looked like a tea urn. 'Let's go for it, we can leave them behind.' We were all keen to set off. Les offered to stay back with me and finish the ride more slowly while the others went on, but I said, 'No, come on Les, I'm all right. I may not be up to doing my turn on the front, but I'll stick behind you.' Without another word we were off.
They set a really fast pace and I was struggling to keep up. We hit a downhill stretch which I thought might be a bit easier, but the road surface was cracked and pitted and the bike was bouncing around under me so much I could hardly hold on to it; my wrists ached from all the jolts coming through the handlebars. They were clearly going to keep the pace up all the way to the finish in Windsor. When the road levelled again, keeping up made me pant for breath and my leg muscles ached horribly from pedalling so hard; keeping a steady rhythm needed all my strength and concentration.
On the outskirts of Windsor we were on some old smooth tarmac, but no-one eased up. We were going hell for leather. Les kept looking back, partly to see if I was OK, but also he was looking out for the enemy, and suddenly he shouted: 'They're round the corner, they're on top of us.' The pace was forced even more and I felt myself starting to go to pieces. My wound wasn't hurting, but my thigh and calf muscles were screaming with pain and my breathing was completely haywire, I was gasping for oxygen and I could hear myself making a weird groaning sound every time I exhaled. My heart was beating like a pneumatic drill smashing up concrete. Sweat ran down my forehead and the salt in it stung my eyes. Ahead I could just make out a junction with traffic lights at green. The stinging made me screw up my eyes, but I could see the lights beginning to change. I wasn't far behind, oh please let me get through, please let me get through. The light was still amber when Les went through and I saw it go red, but I was going too fast to stop and shot across before there was any danger from the opposing traffic. Les shouted 'Yes, we've done it, they'll be stuck at the lights.' We had only a short distance to go to the entrance to Victoria Park and the finish line.
We stopped at last, and despite the stinging salt I managed to keep my eyes open enough to collect the certificate being thrust at me by one of the organisers, and I noticed that the others were dismounting. I felt so shaky and ill I was scared I might fall over if I tried to get off the bike. I rode a few yards to some bushes and got off by sort of letting the bike fall to the ground under me. The taste of sick was coming into my mouth and I went behind the bushes and threw up. Then I sat on the ground, rested my head on my knees for a while, and felt awful. When the sick feeling had worn off enough I pulled myself together, picked up the bike and walked over to look for the others.
When he spotted me Les shouted 'Hey, you've missed Martin Johnson. Come on, I'll get him to shake hands with you.'
We walked back over towards the finishing line, and there was Martin welcoming riders who had just arrived. He was wearing really flash cycling gear and looking fantastic. This was the first time I'd ever seen him in the flesh, and he looked even better than he does in photographs or on TV. Les called to him 'Hi Martin, this is the lad I told you about.'
I was in heaven when Martin turned, smiled and walked over to us. I ripped off my gloves and put out my hand to be shaken, but then I got worried, I thought the state I was in, all sweaty, congealed blood on my leg, and with having just been sick, he probably wouldn't want to touch me. He noticed my leg. 'Have to clean that up when you get home. You didn't let it stop you. Well done. That's what real cyclists are made of.' He grabbed my hand and pulled me towards him and hugged me.
Somehow I found myself hugging him back, I mean without thinking I'd put my arms right round him and was holding him tight. Realising what I'd done I was scared he would be angry with me and push me away, but he didn't. Instead he held me even tighter and leaned back so that he lifted me right up off the ground. While I was up in the air his hair touched my left ear and this amazing tingle thrilled me like nothing I'd ever felt before in my life. Then he let go and said to Les: 'He's great, you must be really proud of him,' as though Les was my dad or something.
Les and I walked back where his mates were longing on the grass. 'Worth it?' he asked.
I didn't answer. He knew how good I was feeling without me telling him.

My Autobiography

One of my boyhood memories of growing up in Liverpool in the nineteen-fifties is of travelling to the holiday resort of New Brighton at the far end of the Wirral peninsula. On some warm summer weekends my father would take my sister and me on the hour and a half journey there from our rented terraced house in Liverpool, crossing the River Mersey by ferry, or taking the local train through the railway tunnel.
In those days New Brighton had a huge lido, through a child’s eyes a vast rectangle of blue water, big enough for hundreds of swimmers. The bath was surrounded by an area of wide steps used for sunbathing, recovering from a dip, or simply sitting and watching others. The lido was enclosed by blindingly white perimeter walls and buildings housing the entrance, changing rooms, a café and so on.
One visit in particular remains strong in my memory. I was trying to swim in the shallow end. I had learned how, when my head plunged beneath the surface, to come up again for air without swallowing too much water, and after many attempts I reached the stage of being able to ‘doggy paddle’ for a few yards before loosing control and going under again.
Once, after I climbed out of the pool exhausted from my efforts, a young girl of about eleven approached me. A couple of years older - and much more confident than me - she probably saw my clumsy attempts to swim and thought she would say a friendly hello to a little boy who, however inelegant, was having a go. I don’t remember what she said, but suppose we would have told each other our names, where we lived, and maybe where we went to school.
Then, unexpectedly, she suggested I go with her to meet her brother. She said he was really nice and that I was sure to like him. Though a bit worried at not going straight back to my father and sister, I followed her around the pool and up the concrete steps to where he sat. He was older, almost a grown-up. He was handsome, his smile engaging, his shoulders strong and square, his body slim and firm. His swimming trunks were smart, white, and very brief. I sat with him and his sister for a little while, but none of us could find much to say to each other, and eventually I told them I ought to rejoin my sister, and made my way alone through through hundreds of groups of bathers before seeing her, with my father sitting next to her.
I was not sure why that eleven year old girl had approached me, or why she had suggested I meet her brother, or why his appearance had made such a lasting impression on me. For their part, probably for the want of anything more interesting to do to pass the time, they were merely being friendly to a little boy she had happened to notice who was struggling hard to learn to swim.
Fifty years after that event, curious to see again places I remembered from my childhood, a world that had come to seem so remote, I returned to New Brighton again. Much of the resort of my childhood had gone. The once busy pier that had stretched out into the River Mersey’s estuary had long been dismantled; the landing stage where, day trippers from Liverpool disembarked from ferry boats was gone; the grand hotel had closed and stood derelict. In place of the fine lido where I had learned to swim, there was only a big hole in the ground. The walls and buildings had been demolished, and coarse seaside grasses waved in the wind where the swimming pool and the concrete steps for sunbathing had been.
I walked to the deserted promenade and looked out across the river estuary towards the Liverpool Docks. Though the morning was a sunny one, a mist obscured the opposite bank from view, and the whole scene from water to sky was suffused with the most delightful blue light. Slowly the haze lifted, and the cranes, gantries and wharves of the container port appeared. Where the land gave way to the open sea, power-generating windmills turned lazily in the breeze.
The once thriving resort of New Brighton had changed utterly, but there was still a fine view across the river, and the golden sands of the beach and the coastline were still the same.
Nearby was an open-sided cast iron shelter, left over from busier times, where promenaders might rest or find protection from a shower. I realised that, despite my decades of experience of life as a gay man, for all the pleasure and heartache that my adult tussles between the sheets had brought, if by chance today I should meet another young man as attractive as that boy in the lido, and if we were to sit down in that shelter to escape the wind, I should still, despite my years of experience, be lost for words, still be puzzled as to why his good looks should have such a strong effect on me, and still not be sure what I ought to do about it all.

AN OFFICIAL VISIT

The clear morning made me glad I had bought an apartment with a