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Mosaic

Alone once again, he attempted to make sense of what was becoming a common occurrence of late - this departure from his usual self, a carefully measured persona, which had taken him years to construct perfectly. It was more effective than he'd imagined it would be, especially here in America where people were more expressive. Back home he was just another cheeky-yob-turned-good but here with the Yanks, he was unique and this made him a resounding success with them. His humour retained a hint of Essex vulgarity and he enjoyed watching the more conservative Americans squirm, just as much as the responsive ones squealed with laughter whenever he dropped his one-liners. Plus the accent helped. That too was neutralised with practiced deliberation, the Cockney affectations hadn't dropped themselves. Even now though, some of his consonants would go by the wayside when he was agitated. "You fuckin, wha!" was his father's catch phrase and with changes to tone and delivery, it made an appearance several times a day in almost all of Tony's conversations. It could be surprisingly versatile in its connotations.

When he was fourteen, Kevin's dad Tony took his latest bird to Blackpool for a dirty Christmas weekend, but since he was an all expense spared kind of guy, it was mid-week in dark and dank January. Uncle Brian volunteered to keep an eye on Kevin so that his brother could have some ill deserved time away from his son. Brian a self-employed fencer was a grafter with a perplexing fondness for garden fences; he loved nothing more than to head down to his local, The Man Under the Moon for a few pints of bitter and wax lyrical about all things fences. Be it the differences between a feathered fence and a slotted fence, or the best kind of wood for carved trellises, he could expound on the minutia of them for hours on end and he did so with alarming regularity. It wasn't good for his business but his wife worked behind the bar there and he enjoyed seeing her even more than he did talking shop. Not an ambitious man, he was content to have the basic necessities, more than a generous supply of Younger's Special, his kids and most of all, his boorish yet affectionate wife, Cleo. Kevin was absurdly fond of his humdrum uncle and he in turn accepted his nephew completely, unlike his brother who struggled to form a bond with his son. Although personally, Brian was as far removed from the struggles of a fourteen-year-old boy in denial of his homosexuality, as he could get, he had an uncanny understanding of him. From the moment he had first met Kevin, the swaddled babe, he'd felt a peculiar partiality to him, it was a special love that he didn't even feel for any of his own kids. He had known that Kevin was gay for well over a decade before Kevin himself knew and he wanted to help him come to this realisation.

Brian wanted to create a safe haven for Kevin but being bromidic he lacked the tools to do so and without any concrete advice to offer up to his nephew, he did the only thing he could think of doing. So, Brian took his rebellious nephew to the train station and sent him off to the Big Smog, with twenty quid in his pocket and detailed instructions, hidden amongst some fence related metaphors, to seek out the sights and sounds of Soho. Letting an already impish, sometimes miscreant teen play truant from school to see the gay quarter of London could technically be seen as an ill advised move, but it wasn't and Brian knew this with absolute certainty. He wanted Kevin to see for himself that he wasn't alone in this world; that on Romford's doorstep was a world where he would not be seen as a freak; or where he wouldn't be vicitimsed because others failed to understand him; where he wouldn't have to lash out just to be heard and where he could just be himself. He wanted Kevin to feel accepted by others, and for that to give him the strength he needed to accept himself so that he could find a more salubrious outlet for his creativities and put an end to his petty thefts and other misdemeanors.

With the lack of a singular professional or personal role model to base himself upon and tenacious to the core, Kevin had pieced his personality together by observing people and borrowing from them what he needed for his existence to feel more fulfilling. He had the first taste of what he wanted to be, that day in the Admiral Duncan on Old Crompton Street. Clearly under aged, he charmed his way into the bar and even managed to get a drink. He had spent three years hanging out by Beam canal, drinking copious amounts of White Lightening with Toby and the gang and would normally do anything to get his hands on some alcohol, but on that day he chose differently, because he could sense the significance it would play in the construct of the rest of his life. A pint of coke in hand he sat innocuously in a slightly tucked away corner of the bar and just observed. When he looks back on his youth, he knows that so much of what he is now, had started to dawn on him on that icy January day in that bar and as he wandered the streets of Soho.

Even though it was the middle of a workday, people milled in and out of the Admiral Duncan, drinking, socialising, eating lunch and all in complete ignorance of the scraggly kid who sat mere feet away from them, enthralled by their very existence. Nothing out of the mundane ordinary happened in those three odd hours and Kevin couldn't recall a single event or person that was there that day but with sparkling lucidity, he could recount how he felt. It was the very first time that he saw men who had lived through the turmoil of discovering that they were gay, fighting the crippling urges to fix themselves by any means possible and finally finding peace in self-acceptance. Just by being in their presence he could feel their personal accomplishments, they had embraced their sexuality and it wasn't an impediment anymore, it was just another inextricable part of who they were. Kevin saw beyond that too: he saw professional success, happiness, love and he knew that the greatest hurdle he needed to clamber over wasn't one that his family or friends had placed in his path but one that his fear had instilled in him... and he was going to change that. It was only the start though, of a long, tumultuous journey of self-discovery.

In hindsight, most of what he saw and felt that day was projection but he remembers leaving the bar with esoteric knowledge and a very specific ratification about his life, which was in him to this day.

Kevin could list the bits of his borrowed self: Uncle Brian's passion for his craft, his unquestioning love for the people that mattered to him; his dad's resilience in the aftermath of brutal defeats; his mother's courage to pursue what she wanted, even at the detriment of all else; and Jon, without whose coxing he would still be harbouring hatred for his mum. Kevin was a mosaic of mottled, fractured fragments that he had cherry picked, from all the rudimentary people around him and it had taken him years to make himself whole. In the absence of a strong familial springboard, he had learned to be completely self-reliant and in the process learned to unashamedly use his wiles as his greatest assets. Having sculpted it with reverential devotion, he was cognizant of the most powerful weapon in his arsenal, his body. His taut sinewy packaging gave him the confidence he needed to be a cut above the competition, he knew the power it yielded him and in extension, the power it gave him over others. It also made him irresistible to men, and women... and he loved it.

Kevin Matheson knew himself with unmitigated certitude. Until he met Patrick Murray.