Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2002 21:58:13 +1000 From: David Spencer Subject: Landlord-Stephen-04 So Stephen was into landscaping and Matthew was into making concrete statues for gardens. Both pretty physical work. Both pretty blokey type work. No girlie, squealy types here, right? Right. Stephen told me once he was gay because he liked sex with males. If he was interested in sex with girlie types he'd be hetero. Most females were almost as girlie as the girlie type gays. The others of course are so butch it makes you feel as if you're back behind bars again. I rather gathered Stephen was not so impressed with butch dykes. Though some of them make pretty good motor bike mechanics, he said. I thought he might be making some obscure cross allusion here to town bikes that everybody rides, and the people servicing the bikes, with a play on the words ride and servicing. But I couldn't work it out at the time. I still can't, but I'm so tired these days that I don't think it matters anymore. So Stephen and Matthew were into much the same thing. Work wise, at least. I didn't really want to know about any other wise. Well, only from a parental point of view, maybe. I wasn't completely sure Matthew knew about some of the walking-death bug-bags. Shazza had told me bout some of the ones at the Barracks who were HIV positive. They seemed to think that since they were HIV positive then everyone else should be too. And they seemed to delight in taking the youngest first-timers home and ramming them. If the youngsters got infected, well, so what. Serves them right for being so young and desirable. If the rammers could no longer be young and desirable, then why should anyone else be. I was appalled that anyone could have that sort of attitude. Shazza told me about it at great length for weeks and weeks. It was like looking into the eyes of a king cobra. Both fascinating and deadly together. Apparently these HIV infected bug bags were so pissed off about their death sentences that they wanted to spread their ill-fortune among as many people as possible. Since they were losing their looks as well, they delighted in the idea of all these young things rapidly losing their good looks too. I suppose it made sense in some sort of ghastly way. Thank goodness only a small number of HIV positive people behave that way. So I was worried about Matthew. I mean almost every kid experiments. As dear Grandpapa Freud used to say: 'we're all unselective at first'. I gathered Freud meant that we choose just any object for our sexual attention, indiscriminately, until we somehow learn what sort of objects to select. Well most of us learn by trial and error. Experience might teach the hardest lessons, but by goodness you learn those lessons quickly. So I was somewhat concerned that Matthew might be a little unselective in his object preferences. I didn't want him to end up being unprotected with the walking dead. I didn't really know what had been going on up there in Matthew's bedroom when Mum was downstairs talking with Dale. I wasn't all that concerned because Matthew was the sort of person who would go for what he wanted in his own personal life no matter what other people felt about it. And Stephen was a pretty decent sort of bloke. He would never harm Matthew. So if Matthew wanted to experiment that way, then I preferred him doing it in his own bed with someone who wouldn't hurt him. But exactly how much Matthew needed to learn for his own self protection I didn't really know. I did not want to talk to him about it because I did not want to be seen to be prying into his own personal affairs. Stephen must have been feeling rather, um, delicate, about the whole thing. He didn't know that Mum was downstairs until he came wandering down. Matthew had not returned to alert him. Stephen gravitated down the stairs and walked right into it. No wonder he scooted off back to his place straight away. So I put the last video into next door's letter box. I'd changed the label to include a printed Postage Paid rectangle. Looked really professional, I thought. Stephen wandered in early the next afternoon. Matthew was at work. Dale was off doing Dale things. Stephen's partner was at work with the arty stuff. A good opportunity to have a quiet talk. It only took me about 20 minutes to realise that was what Stephen intended. He started off by saying the change in label made no difference. Except it confirmed it was me. Stephen admitted he had related most of last week's conversation to the partner. So when the last video turned up with the altered label, it was proof positive that I was responsible. Oh, hum. One for the partner. Of course this irritated me even more than I was usually irritated at the time. So I asked Stephen, he was the messenger of the bad tidings wasn't he; I asked Stephen whether he was seeing Matthew outside of here. That stirred up the ants nest, didn't it. Stephen tried not to blush. Strike one for the retaliators. I pressed home the advantage. So when are you going to see him next. Squirm, shuffle,unshuffle. Got him well hooked here. I lay back to watch the barb dig in. Stephen took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, exhaled and collapsed. I almost started to realise what a prick I was being. `I really like Matthew. I mean he is so fresh. He is so active. He's full of life. He likes the same things I like. He likes the same music. He's easy to talk with'. `And you give him the loco weed don't you; he likes that too, doesn't he'. `I don't give him that much. He's got his own sources. He's growing some of his own too, you know'. `No, I didn't. Go on'. Well Stephen did go on. At length. About how he is trying to cut down on the silly weed and how Matthew wants to too. That took another 20 minutes. I was totally fed up with the direction of the conversation by then. `But what about sex.' Well, that blew the lid off it, didn't it. Not that Stephen was at all interested in talking to me about his sexual interest in Matthew. And Matthew was my own first born son after all. I wasn't going to pry into his bedroom affairs. What happened there was not really my business unless he was likely to burn the place down. Even then I was only concerned that we could both get out before the place burnt down around our ears. For some odd reason the insurance company decided to insure the building on a reinstatement basis. If it burnt down they would pay the cost for it to be rebuilt. They worked out the cost of rebuilding on a floor area basis times a standard rate which increased year by year and was determined by the region in which the house was located. So if the house burnt down I would have had enough insurance to rebuild it new. I didn't want to lose the staircase though. It was solid kauri pine with a Red Cedar handrail. The king post was over 18 feet long, was a single piece and was turned for the top three feet. It had a large ball turned on the top which was part of the one piece of timber. It must have been turned in a spar lathe. The type they used a couple of centuries ago for turning ships spars. I didn't think you could get a single stick of clear kauri like that again. I doubted whether you could find a lathe to turn the piece like that either. So when the offer was made to have the place burn down I thanked the person profusely and said I shall consider. On the couple of occasions when Queen Victoria refused assent to laws passed by the New South Wales parliament, the legal formula for refusing assent was `We shall consider'. And of course she considered, and considered, and is probably still considering, wherever she is at the moment. Similarly, I was suggesting as politely as I possibly could to this rather alarming person, that I really was not all that interested. But I didn't want to offend the person in any way at all by suggesting that he was an out and out loony, or something like that. When I was telling Stephen about it the next afternoon over a cup of Russian Caravan in his back garden, he suggested I didn't really want it burnt down because I didn't want to run the risk of the insurance company doing me for arson. I explained that was not a worry because I was insured with the same insurance company which insured the same bloke who torched seventeen houses and made claims on all of them with the same company. It was only when he torched number eighteen that someone twigged. And it was not the insurance boffins at head office. The clerk of the local court was also an agent for this particular insurance company. The gentleman with the phosphor finger tips took out his seventeenth policy through the local court house when he first moved into Coonabarabran. The house burnt down and the local coroner was informed of the fire. Phosphor fingers came back in after his payout and asked to insure number eighteen at the same office. The clerk organised it and wondered a bit. When number eighteen burnt down a few months later it was reported to the local coroner again. The local coroner remembered the previous fire with the same owner. The local coroner was also the clerk of the local court. The clerk of the local court was also the local agent for said insurance company. Funny about that. He had a few drinkies with the local sergeant that Friday evening at the local rissole club and, goodness me, the following week the arson squad travelled the three hundred miles up country from police headquarters to sniff around. They sniffed propellant in the latest torched house. They also sniffed a rat. The rat came before the court. The beak on the bench had been oiled up before not to ask questions about how the accused came to be caught. It didn't make the press, but this was the same insurance company I was insured with for my house in Islington. No Stephen, I was not the slightest bit worried about the insurance company smelling arson. They wouldn't recognise arson if it burnt their pubes. After the case went up for trial, we found out that the insurance company decided to ferret around through their records and found he was a regular customer of theirs. Regular for signing up, and regular for being paid out too. Seventeen payouts. Would you believe? Duh. I mean? The insurance company attitude seemed to be, who cares. We can just lift premiums to meet any shortfall can't we. We don't have to suffer, do we. We will always be able to wander in to the Leagues Club next door for a long liquid lunch before shuffling off to Wynyard to catch the early train back home each afternoon, won't we. Why worry? No Stephen. I wasn't worried about those clowns. But I didn't want my staircase burnt. Or Matthew. And I suppose it was probably better if I didn't get cindered too. Well not that way anyhow. I didn't have a valid will anymore. Not since the divorce. So what's on between you and Matthew huh? [ If you would like this story to continue please email me: davidspencer1@hotmail.com Positive comments are always welcome ]