Larry Stylinson - Turning From Praise (AU)

20.

It was November by the time Father Marshall finally plucked up the courage to pull his partner out of the congregation at church and bravely announce that he was gay.

By that time, Harry had passed his exams, excelling at English, Science, and, ironically, RE, doing reasonably well at his other subjects and failing Art completely, since he’d been unable to resolve his differences with the teacher. He was now happily settled in at college, still firm friends with Niall and Zayn but he’d made himself a couple of new mates, too. One of them was your average teenage guy, with nothing extraordinary about him other than the thickness of his eyebrows, and the other a self-acclaimed emo-goth-mosh-hipster-punk who couldn’t decide which fashion he liked best and so wore a little bit of everything. Seeing a guy with pink and black hair walking down the street in black boots, a loose woollen sweater, girls’ skinny jeans and with six different piercings and an ear stretcher, carrying a cup of Starbucks coffee, would have put most people off, but Harry liked him. Louis quite liked him, too. He was very in favour of equal love and so on, and had a diverse range of musical tastes, and told lots of dirty jokes. But what Louis liked most about Harry’s new friends was that they didn’t judge him, and that was a far more important quality than being able to decide what clothes you wanted to wear.

Louis had some new friends, too. He’d received a promotion at work, so that now he was allowed to help make some of the pastries and yell at the guy who worked on the desk, which was nice sometimes, although he felt mean if he yelled too much. He’d become friends with one of the girls who also worked in the catering side of the bakery, who had ruffled his hair when she first met him and called him “cute”, and when he blushed and said sorry, he had a boyfriend, she giggled and said “not that kind of cute”, and that she knew and that he and Harry made a great couple. Her name was Em, and she was nice. She flirted with everybody, which meant that Harry didn’t like her very much, because he didn’t like people who flirted with Louis and he didn’t know how to react when people who weren’t Louis flirted with him, but Louis thought she was great.

Since his promotion he’d also been able to afford a flat, and his other three friends lived in the same tower block as he did. It was a relatively decent flat; one-bedroom, but it had a kitchen and a living room and a bathroom, and it was clean and the central heating worked and you got a TV and DVD player thrown in, and he liked his neighbours, so Louis was pretty happy with his lot.

One of his neighbours was called Basil. He had long hair and smelt funny and Louis was pretty sure that he smoked pot, but that was his business. He also liked cuddles, had a slight addiction to soap operas and owned more cassette tapes than anyone Louis knew, refusing on principle to buy CDs except to record them onto cassette tapes. He had a cat but it didn’t have a name, and it often wasn’t around because it would mooch in and out of his life whenever it felt like it, and he didn’t seem to mind. “We have an arrangement,” he’d shrug, and that was that.

Another of them, Gina, liked baking. She didn’t actually work in the bakery, which surprised Louis, because baking was something she did pretty much all the time. It was very rare to walk into her flat without being greeted by the warm smell of pastry or chocolate or biscuits wafting around you – she baked so much that she didn’t know what to do with it all, so every week she’d walk down to the nearby homeless shelter and give them several boxes full of food. Louis helped her sometimes; he enjoyed the walk, and how happy it made both Gina and the starving people. They’d hug her and shake her hand and rub their bristly cheeks against hers, and she didn’t seem to mind at all even though most of them were a bit smelly.

The final neighbour was very quiet. Her name was Nadine, and she had long black hair and always wore patterned tights and denim shorts. She was very pale and very spindly, like she was made of porcelain and would be terribly easy to snap in two, and didn’t say much to anyone, and she had some wild weird boyfriend who’d come over, spend weeks with her and then vanish in the middle of the night, leaving her drooping and miserable for days until he came back. Louis felt sympathetic for her. He had a feeling that she was lonely – so lonely that she’d rather have a shitty, dysfunctional relationship than none at all. She’d sit with Louis sometimes, on the communal balcony they shared, and they’d look at the sunset and say nothing, and from that mutual silence a friendship had sprung. Louis hoped that one day she’d trust him enough to talk to him, and he’d be able to help her – but until then, she seemed to appreciate his friendship, and she’d give him quick smiles in the corridor before hiding behind her curtain of hair, and that was rare enough for him to appreciate it.