On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory by Stephen Benatar Page B

hadn’t been impressed. “I see. So you compare wiping my bum to being tortured by the Nazis?”
    â€œNot entirely. But in either case I feel I’d have to close my eyes and think of England.”
    â€œI’d wipe your bum like a shot.”
    â€œYes but you’re older and wiser not to mention incredibly much nicer. However, just hold on until I’m a bit older and wiser and incredibly much nicer, then we can reopen the whole debate. In the meantime when I say I love you as I happen to be saying, you difficult old man, you’ll know the sentiment is frightfully well considered; contains nothing of the glib.”
    It had been bedtime and I remembered only too well the tussle which had followed on from these remarks. “And you have the cheek to call me ornery!” I told him now. I laughed and felt exuberant and broke into a run and felt free and wondered what he might be doing at this moment and whether I was filling his thoughts as much as he was filling mine; and as I came to a standstill and wiped the sweat off my face and blew my nose I thought about the possibility of my very shortly catching up with him and launching myself into his arms—and I felt almost unbelievably happy. (Actually it didn’t even occur to me that I had blown my nose on an already damp handkerchief; damper than just my sweat alone should have made it. And in retrospect I think I feel glad that this hadn’t occurred to me. Poor Katy.) Indeed I could hardly recall a time when I’d felt happier. Not even when he and I had first got together; and that would have taken quite a fair amount of beating.

8
    The pub was called The City of Quebec. It was in a quiet turning off Oxford Street close to Marble Arch. Not simply a gay pub but a known meeting place for older men attracted to younger ones and vice versa. Brad confessed himself bewildered. “I just don’t see why young guys should fancy men old enough to be their dads. The other way around of course—no mystery. But in your own case you’ve still got a father, a father whom apparently you get on well with. So tell me where the attraction lies. I mean in general; I promise I’m not fishing.”
    I truly couldn’t enlighten him.
    â€œYou may as well ask why I’m gay as why I go for older men. Or why alone in all my family I’m into westerns and musicals and like vegetable marrow.”
    â€œFair enough,” he’d said. “Mine then not to reason why. Mine merely to appreciate and feel happy.”
    Not that I’d ever viewed Brad as old. When we had met I was twenty-four, he forty-three, but I’d never been the kind of adolescent who thought you were virtually past it at thirty and completely washed up at forty. Besides not only did Brad look fighting fit and youthful, there were men at the Quebec who were well into their seventies, even some who were almost certainly over eighty (not for nothing was the place indulgently referred to as The Elephants’ Graveyard), men who even at that age, perplexingly, still attracted lascivious attention and by no means just from the over-fifties … or indeed perhaps not at all from the over-fifties; a seventysomething with the arm of a thirtysomething draped lovingly around his shoulders was assuredly no uncommon sight even if sometimes—to Brad every bit as much as me—it could begin to verge on the distasteful. But Brad looked like a positive youngster in that sort of assembly and for the two of us to find ourselves drawn to one another wouldn’t have seemed in the least unnatural to any of the pub’s countless patrons.
    I had only been to the Quebec a couple of times and no way would I have gone that evening if I hadn’t just survived the final breakup with my current boyfriend. “Well okay I’ll show him!” I’d thought. “Plenty of other good fish in the sea.” But sitting on the top deck of the No 16