Mr Mikey’s Ladies by Lucy McCarraher.
Publisher: YouWriteOn/Legend Press December 2008
Category: Modern Fiction
Paperback: 264 pages
Dimensions: 22.4 x 14.8 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1849233594
ISBN-13: 978-1849233590

"Michael Gorman flung open the French windows and stepped onto the sloping slats of the verandah.

He inhaled the humid heat of high summer Sydney which, even at six am, felt clammily claustrophobic to an Englishman. Particularly a South Londoner with delicately freckled skin and strawberry blonde hair - what was left of it, he thought rueful-ly, rubbing his scalp which was still tender from the highlights he’d administered last night.

How sad was he, staying in on a Saturday night to dye his thinning hair?

He leaned against the wrought iron balustrade to catch a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge, glinting in the early morning sun beyond Balmain’s untidy patchwork of tiled and corru-gated roofs. Sydney was better than Sydenham by a long chalk, he admitted to himself yet again, and there was no way he would, or could, be heading back to London any time soon. Home was where the heart was, and his aching heart was still sealed in the urn on the mantelpiece along with the handful of ashes. But he would have to break out.

Sooner, rather than later. He couldn’t go on like this.

Michael had become trapped in a situation that had only ever been intended as a temporary measure. He desperately needed a plan - however far-fetched, however long term - to move him on.

‘I want to break free,’ Freddie Mercury sang along with him in his head. ‘I don’t want to live alone, god knows, but I got to make it on my own...’

He looked down onto the street where a couple of young guys had paused in their meandering walk home from a night’s clubbing for a lazy pash on the pavement outside his front gate. Michael stepped back into the shadow of his curved tin roof to protect their privacy, but they hadn’t even clocked his presence above them. Maybe it was more that he didn’t want to be seen: unshaven, hair un-gelled, his tattooed biceps flabbily revealed by the Harley Davidson singlet stretched across his belly which overhung a pair of shabby designer undershorts.

He had gone to seed in the four years since he and Bryan had come together with all the electricity that was pulsing between the boys beneath his feet. Since he had sunk his savings into the holiday of a lifetime at Surfers Paradise after Deidre, owner of Sydenham High Street’s ‘Hair Today’, had sacked him for running rainbow streaks through the brass blonde perm of one of her old dears. Michael had furiously packed a bag and flown standby to Queensland for a fortnight of fun and sun before starting the search for another dead-end hairdressing job.

But he’d reckoned without meeting Bryan.

On his first day he’d noticed a rather gorgeous, greying man perving on him as he paraded in his Speedos at Main Beach; that night the guy had cracked onto him at MP Dance Club, and in the small hours of the next morning successfully seduced him in his Stay Gay High Rise holiday apartment.

When they’d woken up that afternoon, it turned out they had fallen in love.

In all his (then) thirty nine years, it had never happened to Michael Gorman before - ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby! And Bryan had been single and celibate for half a decade since his last long-term partner had run away with a twinkie surfer.

The ghost of a grin lifted the corners of his mouth as Michael recalled the wonderful whirl of rainbow romance the next two weeks had been.

Bryan had nicknamed him ‘Mr Mikey’ and sworn he would never let him go - home to England or anywhere else without him, ever again. Over dinner in the Davenport Bistro on what should have been his last night before flying back, Bry had ordered champagne, torn up Michael’s return ticket and proposed marriage.

A marriage of convenience, that was, to his little sister Dolly with whom he shared a house in Sydney, so that Mr Mikey could reside long term and legally down under, where he and his man would stand by each other for ever after.

And they had.

For a year before and just three weeks after the wedding to Dolly.

That was as ever after as it had got for Bryan.

Michael watched the boys in their tight jeans and t-shirts wander off up Rowntree Street hand in hand and wiped a tear from his eye. What wouldn’t he give to be coming home from a night’s clubbing, high and happy with Bry, he wondered, as he turned and walked to the bedroom they had shared? Just like he had expected to do on the last night they had gone out on the town together.

It had ended tragically early, while Mr Mikey had been getting in another round of tequila slammers from the bar at the Imperial Hotel. He had left Bry boogying on to his favour-ite trannie, the one with the Marilyn wig and hormone-induced breasts, as she lip-synched to ‘Young Hearts Run Free’.

It was then that Bryan’s not-so-young heart had decided to stop running free, or indeed in any way at all.

There had been a crash, and cries of horror. The unaccom-panied backing track to ‘You Can’t Stop the Music’ had been switched off with an unseemly screech. Someone must have called 000, as minutes later a brace of butch paramedics had busted their way to the dance floor through a flurry of screaming queens.

After administering mouth-to-mouth under Mr Mikey’s jealous eyes, but failing to resuscitate him, they had reinstated their straight cred by flexing their bulging muscles and bearing Bryan off on a stretcher through the pale and loitering poofs. As they loaded him into the ambulance with sirens wailing, the tall one with tight buns was already calling Dolly, the official next of kin, to report to the hospital.

While he pulled on bathers and a clean t-shirt, Mr Mikey winced, as he did every time, at the memory of having to bid farewell to his beloved in the role of brother-in-law. Grabbing a towel and goggles, he recalled with the clarity of a bad trip the sympathetically starched nurses swabbing bereaved sister Dolly’s tears, and his own wretched attempt to act macho, despite his clingy clubbing gear: patting Bryan’s lifeless hand and muttering "I‘ll miss ya, mate", when he just longed to kiss those purple lips, fling himself on the motionless chest and cry into the unhearing ear, I can’t live, if living is without you!"