devi | Ten years ago

Reading

verlaine's recent heartbreak story sent me tumbling back into being sixteen, clumsy and shy, and for the first time in years I remembered Douglas. For those of you who read Matt's journal, he was my Grace.

I had just started to have a life. I'd never really had friends at school, except for Margaret who studied till her eyes bled and Paul the neo-conservative, and even with them I was reserved and nervous, never inviting myself round to their houses in case they wouldn't want me there.

Then I discovered sci-fi fandom. Lightbulbs lit up, bells rang and organs burst into the Hallelujah Chorus in my head. At last! At last, people I could start conversations with! People I could discuss things I loved with! People with whom I could lose my self-consciousness because I was so caught up in a discussion of warp drive, or the Fermi Paradox, or what sort of language a race of glass spiders might speak! I was in heaven. Or maybe in orbit.

I'd never clicked with people before. Which made it all the more earth-shattering when I met Douglas at a convention in Dun Laoghaire. He was from Belfast, had sharp features and floppy hair and intense blue eyes but it wasn't even really about his looks, it was about the click. I'd never experienced a runaway, laughter-filled conversation like the one we had for maybe eight hours straight, in the lobby and the bar and the backs of video rooms (annoying other congoers) and comics workshops, one idea sparking off another. I went back to my hostel that night all moony and stunned. I was nervous meeting him the next morning, but the nerves disappeared as soon as the Mother of All Conversations started up again.

But here it becomes almost exactly like Matt's story. We wrote to each other, he introduced me to stuff like the Hitch-Hiker's radio series and things on the computer called 'gopher' and 'veronica' (my first unwitting brush with the mighty force that was about to take over my life), I went up to see him playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at his school in Belfast (he dreamed of being an actor, and was already a damn good one), we wrote some more letters, then there was another convention weekend. In the run-up to it I yo-yoed between scared and thrilled. The Click had seemed so strong that surely Something Might Happen (I was too ridden by Catholic guilt to think of it any more clearly).

Nothing did, though I spent a lot of time in darkened video rooms wondering what would happen if I moved my hand just a tiny bit to touch his. Maybe it was the fact that his friend had recently died and he was still grieving. Maybe it was a conversation I cringe to remember now, where he told me he was an atheist and I made a clumsy attempt to convert him. Maybe he just didn't fancy me. Whatever. Nothing happened and the letters tailed off. I remember making a bargain with God - okay, God, if he doesn't write in the next two weeks I'll take it as a sign that he's not interested - and one of my prayer-group friends telling me it was bad and evil to make bargains with God, like you were ordering Him around, and me feeling very ashamed.

The gaps got longer and longer. I lost touch with him about a year later, when he went to college, but by then life had suddenly got much more interesting and it all faded into the past.

But Matt's post made me wonder where he is now. I searched for a while, then found this, in a local Northern Irish paper from 2001:

THE works of Shakespeare will be on view in Carrickfergus Castle this Friday (24th), as 26 year-old Belfast actor Douglas Burke performs a one-man show in aid of Action Cancer.

It was the death of a friend from the disease that prompted Douglas to stage the charity event. He said: “I wish to dedicate my performance to the memory of my late friend Kam On Wong, who died of cancer in 1994.”

So he was still acting, even if only in Carrickfergus, and still grieving. I feel all mixed-up and joyful and sad. I want to congratulate him for keeping it up, and to apologise for the horrid, fluffy-bunny platitudes I gave him about his friend's death, not even really believing them myself any more.