The Edges of Orpington by Eamonn Bhreathnach

A lonely man tries to reconnect with a stranger he encountered four decades ago.

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It was over forty years ago. I was hitch-hiking and he gave me a lift from the ring-road south of Edinburgh to York. He - whoever he was - was driving to his home in Orpington, which was then in Kent. He was making the return journey, having followed a girlfriend to Edinburgh who had told him she didn't want anything more to do with him. He was there one day, back the next. I wouldn't have remembered the lift but for that detail.

At that time, in my mid to late-teens, I was in the habit of hitch-hiking. It was not from necessity, far from it. My family were horrified that I did so when I had the means to travel first-class, but the fact was that I continued to do it for a good while even after I bought my first car. It was more for adventure than expediency; you never knew who might stop or what might transpire. I don't know how it is for straight people, but for homosexual men - for me at least - there was, then, always a frisson of possibility. And in respect of terminology, I am homosexual, not gay. It is a word I cannot accommodate and cannot attach to myself. I am rather more old school - not scene, as they say, queer at a push. And there were occasions during my roadside adventures when things did transpire; not usually, not often, but occasionally; often enough to continue the practice longer than would otherwise have been the case.

The thing is that for as long as I remember I have been lonely. I realise it now. I have craved companionship - a relationship as they say - but such a thing has eluded me. I have everything else needed to furnish a happy life, but not that. There is - there must be - something in me which doesn't allow it. Someone I met many years ago, and with whom I hoped there may be possibilities, said that I was too much of a closed book. He felt that he could not get close to me. I, not able to view myself from the exterior, had little idea as to what he meant.

It must have been sparked by something I read, or saw on television, or which came unbidden into my mind, but I recently did something very odd. I placed an ad in the Orpington Herald. It read:

This is a long shot!!! I am trying to contact a man who gave a lift to a hitch-hiker in the summer of 1971. I don't recall his name, in fact I may never have known it. He kindly picked me up on the outskirts of Edinburgh and dropped me at York Racecourse some three hours later. He was returning to his home in Orpington having been rejected in love.

If it is you, and if you share my curiosity and taste for unusual encounters, you may wish to call me and become re-acquainted. Strange I know, but there we have it.

I left my name and number. I knew it was mad, and even now I have little idea, other than boredom, or a yearning for something which might resemble a belated happiness, as to why I did such a thing. For all I knew, the person in question may have been working on a sheep farm in Wagga Wagga, or be involved in finance in the Montevideo region. Or he may have been killed in his car half-an-hour after I emerged from his vehicle.

A week later he rang. He remembered a detail - that I was returning from a concert in Edinburgh. That detail persuaded me that he wasn't a crank - him a crank, what was I thinking? What would he think I was? We exchanged some brief details on the telephone. He had worked in Australia for many years - although he made no reference to sheep or to Wagga Wagga - but was long resettled in his home town. He seemed amiable enough - his accent was not disagreeable as so many are - so I suggested that I come down and we get together - for old times' sake I said, which I hoped he would realise was tongue-in-cheek. 'Why not?' he said. 'There's nothing spoiling.'

So, two weeks later I drove the two-hundred-and-thirty miles south, booked into a Holiday Inn at the edge of the town, and following a shower and change, made my way to The Bo-Peep pub. From his self-description I knew to look out for a man of five-nine, thinning white-hair brushed back behind his ears, wearing Orford spectacles. There were only six other customers when I arrived, but from the description given I knew he was not one of them. I ordered my diet-coke and took a seat by the bay-window.

I recognised him when he came in, and he me - me being five-eleven, lacking spectacles, head shaven in order to beat baldness at its own game. I stood.

'Jacob?' I asked.

'James?'

'How are you?

'Well. You?'

'Well.'

He bought a beer.

'Well,' I said when we were seated.

'Well indeed.'

'I hope I haven't inconvenienced you.'

'Not at all. So is curiosity satisfied. This is me, your lift.'

'Yes, I suppose it is. Thank you.'

'So.' He looked at my coke. 'You don't...?' He lifted his glass to indicate the word drink.

'Occasionally. Not often.'

I didn't care to explain to him that in my case the word occasionally was almost invariably linked to hospital admissions, stomach-pumps, pep-talks, and bewilderment. The fact is that, for as long as I can recall, I have not been able to have a glass or two with a meal; I was not, and had not been for many years, what is termed a social drinker. I was what you might more accurately call a determinedly unsocial drinker, always solitary, always to suicidal excess, and for some reason not yet fathomed, always to music, my preferences being Bach Cello Suites and Russian church music. I suppose they lend a grandeur to my weakness.

We recalled the lift he had given me, what we could recall of it. It seems that, with no further communication between them, the girl in question, the one who had rejected him, had stepped off the Forth Road Bridge a year later.

'That's sad,' I said.

'Sad indeed,' he agreed.

He had subsequently married, but had been widowed some eight years.

'Sad again.'

'Yes, very sad. You?' he asked.

'No, never married.'

'Are you...?'

'Am I...?

'You know. If you don't mind me asking, inclined otherwise.'

'Otherwise?'

'Gay?'

'I prefer homosexual.'

'Interesting. Did you know that when I gave you a lift? Your inclination, I mean?'

'Yes, I've known it for as long as I've known anything.'

'And were you back then hoping that I, or whoever it might be, might be similarly inclined.'

'I don't recall, I don't suppose I would have been disappointed.'

We found nothing more to say on the subject. So, we commented when something from our youth came through the speakers just above our heads, and we found some references to the weather. After an hour or so he stood and said, 'Anyway.'

I stood too and also said, 'Anyway.'

We shook hands, agreed that it had been pleasant to meet, wished each other good luck, and said our goodbyes.

My room overlooked the car-park which was enclosed by neglected bushes, KFC cartons and tin-cans. It was the kind of view which held a general appeal for me and I photographed it on my camera. Although I own a place in Tuscany - bought at a time when our currency was amenable to such purchases - and found the Tuscan landscape more than congenial, it was more often a landscape of the type which surrounded the Holiday Inn which found its way to my heart. There was something in its air of decay and desolation which sang sweetly to me.

As, ascending the steps, the condemned man can do no other than to look to the rope, I looked to the light of the mini-bar. The cabinet was full, every socket occupied; Palladian lines of beer, wines, spirits and mixers; virgin rows, awaiting violation. I took out the nearmost can and poured its contents into the clear plastic beaker. I switched on the news.

Beyond the edges of Orpington, it was war, and disease, and famine.