Public Secrets

the egg this way and that, watching the ring slide from side to side.
It had been a careless thing, Johnno thought. A machine that took American quarters, and he’d had change left after his speedy shopping spree. More touched than he wanted the others to see, he opened the egg for her, then slipped the ring on her finger.
“There. We’re engaged.”
Emma beamed at the ring, then at him. “Can I sit on your lap?”
“All right then.” He leaned close to her ear. “But if you wet your pants, the engagement’s off.”
She laughed, settled on his lap, and began to play with her ring.
“First my wife, then my daughter,” Brian commented.
“You’d only have to worry if you had a son.” Stevie tossed off the words as easily as he tossed off the drink. Then wished he’d cut off his tongue. “Sorry,” he muttered as the room fell silent. “Hangover. Puts me in a filthy mood.”
At the knock on the door, Johnno gave a lazy shrug. “Better put on that famous smile, son. It’s show time.”

Johnno was angry, but hid it well as the young, bearded reporter sat down with them. They had no idea what it was like, he thought. None of them, save Brian who had gone to school with him, had befriended him. The names he’d been called—fag, pussy, queer. They had hurt a great deal more than the occasional beatings he’d taken. Johnno knew he would have had his face smashed into a pulp more than once if it hadn’t been for Brian’s ready fists and loyalty.
They had been drawn together, two ten-year-old boys with drunken fathers. Poverty wasn’t uncommon in London’s east end, and there were always toughs ready to break an arm for pence. There were ways of escaping. For both him and Brian, the escape had been music.
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters. They would pool whatever money they could earn or steal to buy those precious 45s. At twelve, they’d collaborated on their first song—a really poor one, Johnno remembered now, lots of moon/June rhymes set to a three-chord rhythm they’d pounded out on their battered guitar. They’d traded a pint of Brian’s father’s gin for that guitar, and Brian had taken an ugly beating. But they’d made music, such as it was.
Johnno had been nearly sixteen before he realized what he was. He’d sweated over it, wept over it, pounded himself into any girl who would have him to turn his fate around. But sweat, tears, and sex hadn’t changed him.
Finally it had been Brian who had helped him to accept. They’d been drinking, late at night, in the basement of Brian’s flat. This time, Johnno had pinched whiskey from his father. The stench of garbage had been rank as they sat with a candle between them, passing the bottle back and forth. On the dented portable record player, Roy Orbison had been soaring with “Only the Lonely.” Johnno’s confession had come out with drunken weeping and wild threats of suicide.
“I’m nothing, and I’ll never be nothing else. Living like a bleeding pig.” He’d guzzled whiskey. “My old man stinking up the room and Mum whining and nagging and never doing nothing to make it change. My sister’s working the streets and my little brother’s been arrested twice this month.”
“It’s up to us to get out of it,” Brian said with boozy philosophy. With his eyes half closed he listened to Orbison. He wanted to sing like that, with that otherworldly melancholy. “We’ve got to make a difference for ourselves, Johnno. And we will.”
“Difference. I can’t make it any different. Not unless I kill myself. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just do it and be done with it.”
“What the bloody hell are you talking about?” Brian searched in their crumpled pack of Pall Malls and found one.

“I’m queer.” Johnno dropped his head on his folded arms and wept.
“Queer?” Brian paused with the match an inch from the tip of the cigarette. “Come on, Johnno. Don’t be daft.”
“I said I’m queer.” His voice rose as he lifted his tear-stained, desperate face to Brian. “I like boys. I’m a freaking, flaming fag.”
Though he was shaken, the drink was enough of a cushion to make him open-minded. “You sure?”
“Why the bloody hell would I say it if I wasn’t sure? The only reason I could make it with Alice Ridgeway was because I was thinking of her brother.”
Now that was disgusting, Brian thought, but kept his feelings to himself. They’d been friends for more than six years, had stood up for each other, lied for each other, had