After the holidays, life returned to normal. The autumn drew on, and Tim Sullivan junior (as Paul and I now jokingly called him) went off on his bicycle each morning to his new school, St Thomas More’s Catholic Secondary School for Boys. He fitted in happily enough; for a while I don’t think anyone noticed he was there, really. He used his usual skill of blending into the background and lying low, though after a term or two he made something of a name for himself in gymnastics, since he was in such good physical shape.
He was found to be of above average intelligence, as I suspected, and his reports were good, though unremarkable. He rarely brought any friends home except, from time to time, a nice sporty lad called Jack. Nor did he go to their homes, seeming to be content with his old dad, Teresa, and his Uncle Paul, who came and spent the night at least once a week and often visited for meals at other times. I was sorry that Tim senior did not find time to come up, but once term had recommenced, the needs of the grounds, and even more of his boys, who spent a precious hour every evening in his cottage, meant that he was never free. We spoke often on the phone, however.
Tim junior grew over his fear of sleeping alone, and grew to love his attic room, where he surrounded himself with all the things that boys of his age like. I had warned him that priests didn’t earn a lot of money, and the big expensive shopping blow-out we had when he first moved in was going to be a very rare, and possibly unique, event. He didn’t mind, and seemed to manage on the pocket money I could find for him, plus little extras he managed to charm out of parishioners from time to time, especially at Christmas, when he benefitted from the bonanza that priests tend to receive from their parish. For me it was bottles of wine and whisky. For Tim, computer games, footballs, and book tokens. The parish had adopted him as a sort of mascot, and he revelled in the attention. Boys in residential homes are starved of attention, but now he had amassed an audience of several hundred!
It was now early summer again, when Tim had been with me for about a year, and we had settled down very happily. Paul had indeed been correct that we were made for each other, and I blessed him for his intuition. The weather had grown unseasonably hot, and I could hear Tim in the attic room above me tossing and turning on his bed, as I was doing on mine. I heard a car pull up outside erratically, crunching into something, followed by a big crash as if a dustbin had been knocked over.
‘Shit!’ I thought. ‘Another drunk.’
The doorbell rang and rang. This happens to priests rather a lot; drunks and tramps think that the presbytery is the very place to get whatever they want. Which is usually money, and the time is almost always unsocial.
As usual, I was only in my shorts, so I pulled on a T-shirt and went to the door.
I was confronted with a most terrible sight. A man stood swaying in front of me, his hair and face a mess of blood, his clothes torn. I gasped.
The vision spoke indistinctly, ‘Johnny, Johnny, please help, please…’
He fell forward into my arms. I was frantic. It was Paul! I half-carried, half-dragged him inside to the sofa.
I heard Tim call down,‘Dad, who is it?’
I didn’t want him to see Paul like this, so I said as calmly as I could, ‘It’s your Uncle Paul, Son. Go back to bed.’ But he must have heard something in my voice, so he came downstairs and saw his beloved uncle in that dreadful state. I fully expected hysterics, but was reassured when he calmly asked, ‘Shall I ring for an ambulance, Dad?’
‘Yes, Son, good idea.’ Inside, it was me who was nearly in hysterics.
Paul started slurring again. ‘Please, please…’
‘Oh God! Paul, the ambulance is coming. Hold on, my love.’
Paul began to get agitated.
‘NO, NO, please, please, St Tar’s, breaking it up, boys in danger, please p’leeease.’
Now I understood. Police. I shouted to Tim. ‘Tim, urgent, Police to St Tars!’ Paul collapsed back in relief and closed his eyes. Soon after, his breathing became erratic; I put my ear to his chest and could hear that his heartbeat was irregular, too. ‘Oh, please God, no!’
I ran for the holy oils, then absolved and anointed my beloved as the tears ran down my face. I clutched him to me hard. ‘Oh Paul, Paul, please don’t die. I have never said that I loved you! Oh Paul my love, my love, my heart!’ I was frantic.
I had forgotten that Tim was there listening, but he said to me quietly, ‘Dad, I’m sorry, but you’d better put Uncle Paul down. There may be internal injuries.’
He was right. I wasn’t thinking straight. I stood up, my T-shirt covered with my beloved’s blood, in a mental state little better than his. It seemed like an eternity, but it must have been only a minute or two before the ambulance came. Tim, still calm, let them in, and his tranquillity brought me to a sense of myself again.
The ambulance men were friendly, steady and professional. While Tim brought me a clean T-shirt, they asked me for Paul’s details, and for his next of kin. I told them that we were the nearest thing Paul had to family, and that I thought Paul had named me as his next of kin. So Tim and I got to ride in the ambulance to the hospital.
On the way, Tim talked to me to keep me calm. He said that when he had called for the police to go to St Tarcisius,’ it had been unnecessary; someone else had called both them and the fire service. And of course, that made sense; it must have taken Paul at least twenty minutes to drive from St Tar’s to my home, especially in the state he was in. It still baffles me to think how he managed to drive at all, though it was wonderfully comforting to think that he turned for help to me first.
At the hospital, Paul was rushed into emergency care, and from then on there was nothing we could do but sit in the corridor in our bare feet, shorts and T-shirts, leaning against each other for comfort. We said the rosary on our fingers and just waited. Tim remained calm as ever, and my heart, even in its distressed state, swelled with pride in my beloved son.
‘Don’t cry, Dad, it’ll all be fine. You’ll see.’
My son was no fool. He had always known that I loved Paul. He saw the way we interacted, but had the good sense to keep his knowledge to himself. I dared not ask him whether he thought my feelings were returned, because no doubt he would know that too. And I wasn’t sure I’d be able to cope with the answer—whichever answer it was. I thought back to the night nearly a year before when Paul had put his hand over my mouth to prevent me telling him I loved him, and the thought tormented me now.
A kindly nurse brought us a blanket and a warm drink, seeing that we had no pockets in our shorts, and therefore no money with us, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms. An hour or so later, a policeman called and woke us in order to take a statement. We learnt what had happened at St Tarcisius’ before and after the attack on Paul.
A drunken man whose child had just been taken into care and placed at St Tarcisius’ by social services had gone on a rampage, attacking Paul with an iron bar and running amok. Eventually he set fire to the whole building. Thanks to Paul’s warning, no lives had been lost, and the boys and staff were being taken care of in a local school. The man was in custody. The irony was that his son was not even at St Tar’s but away for the night, staying with his grandmother.
St Tarcisius’ Home for Boys, however, was no more; it had been entirely gutted by fire; the roofs had fallen in. All the students and resident staff had lost everything they owned except the night clothes they stood up in.
The news cast another gloomy pall over us after the policeman left. St Tarcisius’ Home had saved so many unhappy lives over its hundred years of existence. Tim was especially downcast. It had been the place he called home for eighteen months, and had been the beginning of his happier life. He was also worried for his friends who were now homeless.
But with the dawn came better news of Paul. He was safe, thank God, though terribly battered and weak. The wounds to his head were all superficial, though they looked so awful; the important thing was that his skull was not broken. His right collarbone, however, was shattered, and the shoulder itself was dislocated and his left forearm and upper arm were broken where he had tried to shield his body from the iron bar. Several ribs were broken, and there was extensive bruising and lacerations over all his body. The irregular breathing and heartbeat that had so freaked me were the result of the shock he had taken, and these had both now stabilized. Apparently, the fact that he had become so fit on our last summer holiday, and had got his muscles so strong and firm had probably saved his life. We had both kept up our exercise since.
We were allowed in to see him for a few minutes, and we each took gentle hold of a bandaged hand and spoke to him of our love, though we were unaware whether he could hear us. A nurse came in, and ushered us out, and we left. It was as we were at the front entrance that we both suddenly realised that we were still in bare feet, clothed only in football shorts and T-shirts. Well that was not too strange, since it was hot summer, but several miles to walk in bare feet during morning rush hour was a little daunting. Then Tim thought of Teresa, and slipped in to charm the receptionist into letting him phone her. She arrived shortly, full of concern for Paul.
Paul recovered slowly in hospital, and I was with him when at last he woke. His first thought was to smile at me. ‘Hello, handsome.’
Then his face clouded over. ‘My boys?’
‘They’re all fine, Paul. Nobody except you was in the least hurt.’
After Paul had visibly relaxed, we chatted quietly for a while, and I was able to fill him in on the details, which were nearly all sad news for him.
‘All the boys have been rehoused with families or at the seminary or the ones with the short straw at Turling Park, poor sods. It’s a bit tougher on the staff, because they have lost everything, but the diocese and the local authority are seeing to them. I guess there’ll be a huge insurance claim. You don’t have to worry, it’s all being taken care of.’
But then I had to break to him the news that St Tarcisius’ was destroyed beyond the hope of rebuilding, and that with it he had lost everything he himself possessed. I hated to have to tell him, but he looked at me and said quietly, ‘at least I still have something which means more to me than anything else.’
I looked enquiringly at him.
‘You, above all,’ he said. ‘But Tim, too. Both Tims, in fact.’
A fortnight later he was discharged into my care. Tim and I turned up at the hospital with a pair of my shorts and a T-shirt, since he had lost all his own clothes in the fire, and those he had been wearing on the night of the attack had to be thrown away. Somehow the nurses got him dressed, but from there on it was down to us. It was a terrible job to get him into the car with both arms in plaster. We couldn’t even grasp him around the torso because of his broken ribs. In the end, we sat him on the passenger seat and swung his legs in. Getting him out wasn’t quite as bad, and I was relieved to get him upstairs and into my own bed which, being bigger, was better for the purpose than the guest bed he had always used before.
As he eased back onto the pillows he said, ‘Oh Johnny! It’s good to be home.’
I just smiled down at him, thrilled that he thought of my home as his, then I leant forward and kissed his forehead.
‘Mmm. That’s nice. That reminds me,’ he continued, smiling ‘I have this faint memory that somebody not a million miles from here told me that he loved me when I was bleeding myself dry over his sofa.’
Shit! He had remembered, even through all that. So, the moment had come, and I was dreading the time of acknowledgement.
‘Oh Paul, I’m so sorry. It came out all on its own! I couldn’t help it; I was so terrified I was going to lose you that I didn’t know what I was saying.’
‘Are you saying it wasn’t true, then?’
‘No, never that. I can’t deny it, I do love you. Always, everywhere, with all my heart. And I simply couldn’t have lost you without telling you.’
‘And now you’ve got me into your bed at last, you old pervert, hmm? Still, there won’t be much hot passion with me plastered up like this, so I think the Vatican can relax for now.’
I think Paul saw my distress, so he grew serious for a minute. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Kiss me again.’ So I did, on the cheek.
‘No, you blushing virgin, properly!’ So I kissed him on the lips, so very gently. And he turned and whispered in my ear, ‘And I love you too, and I think I always have done from the first day I saw you at the seminary. And now that I have found you again, I find that I cannot bear being away from you. My heart sings when I see you, when I smell you, when I hear the sound of your voice. I love you always and forever.’
There were no tears, but a silent, content sigh. I got onto the bed and lay by his side. And Tim, who had been watching from the doorway, having heard everything, tiptoed out and left us together.
It was Paul who broke the silence with a little giggle.
‘Ow! my ribs! Johnny, I’ve got this little problem.’
‘Yeah, what is it?’
‘Actually, it’s a big problem. I desperately need to take a leak.’
‘Well, you can stand, you can walk, you can use the loo, can’t you?’
It was then that the problem struck me, and I was both amused and appalled. How was he going to extract his little friend to do his business, with both arms in rigid plaster? He looked at my consternation and tried to laugh.
‘I’ve had Nurse Nasty doing it for the last couple of days, after they took out that bloody catheter. It was so embarrassing! To have you do it will be infinitely preferable, believe me.’
‘It wasn’t your embarrassment I was thinking of, it was mine!’
Paul only smiled.
It didn’t work out well at first. If we were simply two mates, no doubt it would have been fine, bar a little embarrassment, which a couple of crude jokes would have solved. I got Paul off the bed and once he was on his feet, he walked to the bathroom easily. But when the moment came to begin operations, my hand began to shake with the sexual tension there was always between us, and the same tension made him nervous when I approached the leg of his shorts to extract his pride and joy. In short, he dried up.
‘Hell, I’m not going to be able to go now!’ he said.
But, nothing daunted, I found his penis and drew it out with trembling fingers. All I could think was, ‘Here I am, holding Paul’s cock at last.’ A similar thought must have crossed Paul’s mind, because he began to grow hard. That was the end as far as peeing was concerned. And then I grew hard too.
‘This is so fucking humiliating!’ he said, and then characteristically started laughing, and yelping in pain from his ribs. In a moment we were both hysterically cackling. When we recovered, I had another idea. Before he could protest, I jerked down his shorts over his erect penis (‘Ow, careful!’) and spun him round to sit down on the loo. I reached over for the shower head, and turned the tap to cold. I aimed at his groin.
‘Johnny, no, please, NO!! Aaargh! You BASTARD! I HATE YOU!! Oh shit, that’s cold. Haha! Oh! my poor ribs!’
He swung himself from the waist and clonked me on the side of the head as hard as he could with a heavy plastered arm, but I pushed him back and persisted until his equipment was soft. His urine released, then, and he sighed with relief.
I said smugly, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!’
That night Tim and I tried to undress Paul. There was no way we could get the T-shirt off, twist as we might, without causing him excruciating pain, and so we resorted to scissors. He would have to stay barechested until the plaster casts came off. Naturally this distressed me enormously. Not!
I then went off to sleep in the guest room. But Paul spend a dreadful night on his own, with all the little discomforts that hot weather, illness and incapacity bring, literally being unable to move a finger to alleviate them, and unable to wake me through two doors when he called for help. When I went in to see him in the morning—late, since I thought to let him catch up on sleep—I found him exhausted and drawn, sorry for himself, and a little fractious and tearful. So the next night, I slept on the floor by his bed, which was almost where I really wanted to be, and tended his little needs through the night. It made me so happy just to be near him, listening to his breathing close to me, and taking in his special smell. Tim suggested we move the spare bed in for me and put it next to Paul, and that is what we did. I could lie awake and just look my fill at my beloved, asking myself, ‘Who needs sex?’ I nearly convinced myself, too!
Tim’s sixteenth birthday came and went. He was so much part of our lives now that I could not imagine life without him. His quiet logical presence, so accepting of the strange relationship between Paul and me, gave me more joy daily. There seemed to be no problems of adolescent angst, and even the humiliating agony of acne hardly troubled him. His schoolwork gave no cause for concern, though the headmaster told me that he was very reluctant to join in the violent games that most boys enjoy. The school had a good rugby tradition, and Tim would be physically sick with apprehension before every game.
I went into school and had a chat with the head, and mentioned confidentially the fact that Tim had had an abusive past, which might have led to an exaggerated fear of violence. Secretly, I suspected that the real reason Tim hated rugby was simply that he was gay. So, every day, when the other boys were hitting each other around on the rugby pitch or soccer field, Tim was allowed to go to the school gym weights room and pump iron. It was already beginning to show in his deepening chest, his broadening shoulders and his narrow waist and hips. And as a result, he was beginning to attract attention from the girls who liked to hang around the school gate, and the boys who simply tended to hang around the jocks. It rather amused the three of us to think of Tim being thought of as a jock!
The hot weather, which continued well into the autumn, meant that I had to wash Paul three or four times a day. It was hardly a chore. I loved tending to his beautiful smooth body, kneeling on the bed astride his slim waist, and our intimacy grew apace. I had to do almost every action for him from feeding him every mouthful to cleaning him when he went to the lavatory. But I loved every minute of it and would let nobody else help. Our summer holiday the year before both of us had regarded as something different, outside the ordinary conduct of our relationship. Midsummer madness had taken us over then, and we treasured the memory without thinking that it would be the norm. We had both taken our vows of celibacy freely and joyfully, and neither of us took that line beloved of certain High Church Anglican clergy who thought that celibacy was simply not having sex with women. But would we ever have taken those vows at all if we had known at the time that our love was reciprocated? Probably, because our vocations meant so much to us both.
We were also both on the more traditional wing of the Church, and we really believed that the consummation of our love, even though we both desired it, would not be a good idea. So there we were. Not an ideal situation. But we loved each other, and loved each other’s company, chattering about absolutely anything and nothing, so I was getting very little writing done which was annoying my publisher. No doubt it was all for the best when the first, and then the other plaster came off Paul’s arms, and he was released into the world once more. But I missed having my little captive audience. I missed the intimacy, frankly.
Paul had lost all his belongings in the fire, as I said, and at first he twitted me, saying that he wanted me to outfit him as I had Tim. But there really was not enough money anymore; that had been a one-off, there was not a lot left, and Tim had to be my first priority. So, since we were the same size and build, I told Paul he could share my clothes with me. I knew the naughty effect that would have on him. And truth to tell, we both found the idea very intimate and rather erotic. It served as a kind of secret surrogate bodily love. Thereafter, whenever either of us bought clothes they went into the common wardrobe.
Our weeks of intimacy had blunted the sad loss of St Tar’s for Paul, but there was little doubt that he had lost a part of himself too, because he had loved the work, and adored the boys. He missed them all and worried about them terribly. I had had to hold the phone to his ear while he made detailed enquiries about each of them, and where they were, and how they were doing. When the plaster came off his arms, I had to drive him round to see all the boys, so that he could see for himself that they were well treated. He worried most about the ones at Turling Park, and spent a lot of energy unsuccessfully trying to convince the headmaster there (with guilty glances at his sherry bottle) that none of his boys would benefit at all from the metalwork classes. He couldn’t come out with his accusations against The Screw without admitting that he had himself been rampaging round the school during the holidays!
Tim having been so easy, and there being a lot of homeless boys since the destruction of St Tar’s, Paul (now living with me) and I began to apply our minds to fostering again. It was hard to choose among the boys, but in the end we decided to take two of those who had been sent to Turling Park, and of whom Paul had been particularly fond. So Marc, who was 12, and Conor, an Irish boy of 10, arrived in time for Christmas. Tim was delighted with the prospect of two new brothers, and spent all his free time decorating the spare room for them to share. This left us with a problem. There was no bedroom left for Paul. Tim, characteristically, offered to move in with his soon-to-be-brothers, but we told him that we thought that he needed his privacy. Which, let the reader understand, meant that we knew very well just how badly sixteen-year-old young men need their privacy, and we didn’t want Marc and Conor finding out about all that sooner than they would find it out for themselves anyway. And secretly, we thought that if we left ourselves no other option, Paul and I could continue sharing a room with a clear conscience. As long as we had separate beds, nobody could point the finger. We hoped.
From the first, Marc and Conor were a complete delight, though they were far noisier and much more rumbustious that Tim had ever been. Paul, believing that the St Tarcisius’ phase of his life had come to an end, had decided himself to be the fostering parent, and so he was Dad to them, and I was Uncle Johnny. It worked fine; Teresa had easily fallen back in to the role of part-time mother, and she said that she felt ten years younger. But really, Tim did most of the work with the lads. He was truly wonderful with them. Paul and I wondered whether he had done this sort of thing before, because he seemed a complete natural with younger boys.
The first time they saw Tim shirtless in the bathroom, the boys conceived a towering awe of this godlike muscular hunk who was their new big brother. They started walking like him, imitating all his little catch phrases, and dressing like him, never wearing their blue jeans again, but sticking to khaki chinos and slim-fitting white jeans. And on his part, he kept an eye out for them at school. He took them there and brought them home. He picked them up and comforted them when they got hurt (which was often, for both the boys were very athletic and competitive), and even mended their clothes. He sorted out their many quarrels, and occasionally, when he thought we were not looking, clouted them over the head for some misdemeanour. He taught them to serve Mass reverently, and would pray the rosary with them every night. In our own prayers, Paul and I used to thank God fervently for Tim, for we should never have managed the lads so well without him. And the boys simply adored him.
As he began to get fit once more, Paul started to worry that, being made jobless by the loss of St Tarcisius’ Home, the bishop would now send him to be a parish priest at the other end of the diocese and we would be separated just as our life together was becoming so rich. He hated the thought of being far from Tim, too, for the two had become closer and closer, and separating Tim from Marc and Conor just was not to be thought of. Then finally, just before Easter, the summons came. Instead of just sending for Paul, however, unexpectedly the bishop sent for us both, and so, with our three sons in tow (all in smart suits), we set off to hear Paul’s fate.
The bishop was charming, and put us at our ease straight away, complimenting Tim on being a fine young man and a credit to his father, and then asking the two lads about school football statistics, complimenting them on their prowess. He was a canny man, who knew that even in the case of priests, the way to parents’ hearts is through flattery of their children. He then sent the three lads out to feed the ducks in the local pond (Tim was a little chagrined at that), and finally turned to us. He got to the point straight away. There were, he confirmed sadly, no plans to rebuild St Tarcisius’. The project was just too large to contemplate, even with the insurance money. The land would be sold for housing. Therefore, henceforward all Catholic boys would have to be sent to Turling Park.
I saw Paul’s look of horror, and I groaned inwardly. However, the bishop had not finished. The headmaster and governors of Turling Park had agreed to the construction of a Catholic house in the grounds of the college, and the bishop wanted Paul as its warden, and me as its chaplain, both jobs to be residential and fulltime. The insurance money from the destroyed home, plus the money from the sale of the land, should pay for the building work, and also provide a substantial endowment for the new house. The school would provide the land free of charge, since it would benefit from the greater numbers (hence getting more money from the state), and be able to hire more staff overall, to everybody’s satisfaction, and the new St Tarcisius’ House would mean that the boys could benefit from the wonderful resources of Turling Park while still having the loving family atmosphere that had always been a feature of St Tarcisius’ Home for Boys. The best of both worlds, in other words.
In the meantime, we could both continue at St Edward’s until the new building was ready. The boys made homeless by the destruction of their old home could stay at the seminary for the time being, but would be admitted gradually to the existing Turling Park buildings as soon as places became available, and when the new building was ready, hopefully in two years’ time or so, they could all move in together. In the meantime, Paul could go in on a regular basis to keep in touch with the boys. By this time, Paul was grinning from ear to ear. His recovery was complete.
We celebrated that night with champagne and a big dinner. Even Marc and Conor got a little champagne, and a lot tipsy. Tim carried both of them up to bed as they fell asleep.
Updated on 4 December 2024