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9 DAVID

When community spirit was this high, it was easy to imagine it was the height of summer, but as the afternoon came, and David meandered alone to fill the time, there was a slight chill in the air as if the weather wanted to remind people it was still early on. Spring had sprung, but only slightly. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, the sky seemed to say.

If he had kids, maybe there would be a more obvious demarcation of the months and years passing than just the weather. Plants, of course, had their own rhythm and calendar, which felt almost musical to David, but most weeks in the shop did run into each other in a not unpleasant way. Plants didn’t mind if you were a few weeks early or late. They didn’t need feeding on the dot. They were very adaptable, or maybe they just had to be, and their rhythms suited David’s pace of life.

He bought a hot chocolate to warm himself up – he’d also had two lunches, but it was the weekend after all and he was supporting local business – and took a seat at the top of the hill. Perhaps he didn’t need the sprinkles, the flake or the marshmallows, but it wouldn’t be a hot chocolate without them, would it?

A few people passed and recognized him, chatting briefly or just waving. There was a family from down the road who always came in for flowers on birthdays, and there was David’s plumber who had done excellent work updating some of the old pipes in the first flat they had moved to in the area, before they had found the shop and the flat upstairs. He had a gay daughter, David knew, and so he recruited him for the business network.

David had a lengthy catch-up with a couple of women who were involved in the town’s queer crafting club, something David had attended when they first moved, but eventually had to abandon when the flower shop became such a huge part of his week, along with everything else. He wanted to go over and tell them he’d rejoin but Mark’s sensible words rang in his ears. You can’t do everything. But maybe they could hold their meetings in the shop. Maybe running his own events wasn’t enough, and hiring out the space and getting the money from food and drinks was a way to increase profits. They said they’d be in touch.

All this planning for Meg’s wedding made him wonder what might have happened if, years before, he and Mark had decided to get married. He knew Mark was keener on it than him, and still was, but no part of him had ever wanted that many eyes on a performance of their relationship and Mark hadn’t brought it up in years. They were happy. What was there to prove?

David felt strongly their moment, if there had been one, had passed. Their lives were full, and what good would it do to throw a party when a lot of the trappings of a wedding were impossible with him having no family?

From all that was here today, what would he put together for the perfect wedding, if they did have one? It was fun to think about it, he thought. It didn’t mean anything.

He’d do his own flowers, of course. The stalls he’d looked at had bouquets well past the point David would sell them, the leaves drooping and faded, the soil dry and harsh. The DJ – Martha, not whoever was playing songs from the stage now – would play the songs that reminded him of his youth. Not his teens or twenties, which he looked back on with some sadness, but his thirties. The music that got him up and dancing in the clubs when he knew who he was, and where he had first met Mark. Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Kylie. It was funny, at his age, that he had stages of youth rather than just the division of before and now.

Maybe it was the cold but he was hungry again. He’d have to talk to Meg about portions, since nobody wanted to be hungry at a wedding. He was entranced by Raclette A Manger, whose owners were melting and pouring molten cheese onto cubes of potato. The Pad Thai stand, Breaking Pad, was another that intrigued him. Maybe he could buy some and eat it for lunch tomorrow. Maybe it would be worth getting married if he could have a five-course dinner from this line of vendors.

He’d make a speech, if he got married, of course, and Mark would definitely want to, since he thrived on being able to share his jokes with a wider audience. David imagined they might both be a little competitive with their speeches, actually.

If they had married a decade before, when it first became possible, they would have had no money, but maybe that would have been better. Just them, the people who were important to them. David had been to so many weddings where all people did, before and after, was moan about how much they had spent. He had always felt like any gift he gave was just plugging a credit card debt.

With the shop the way it was, how would he afford a wedding now? Life was supposed to get easier as you got older. It was fine. No part of David felt he needed a wedding to consolidate or put onto paper what he had felt over the last two decades and still did, or how important Mark was to him. Mark’s parents could hardly be realistically expecting a wedding, could they?

He sat for a while longer to give Meg time to catch up with her ex, wondering about his own ex-boyfriends who he was unlikely to see in the area. David thought, in a somewhat melancholic way, about what had become of them, but that was all in the past. He wished, more than he wished for a wedding, that he and Mark had had more time together, in whatever form. All those wasted years. If only they had met at nineteen like Meg and Hannah, and all of the rush of David’s twenties had been with fun but dependable Mark.

Stop being a sentimental old fool, he told himself. Maybe it was the music that was doing it to him. The DJ had handed over the mic and a young man wearing a short-cropped white T-shirt was singing and playing guitar, a slow song about the passage of time. That would be it. He always found it hard to remain unmoved in the presence of live music. Maybe he could host an open mic night at Lilies!

David headed over to the stage to enjoy the music up close, and see if he could assess interest in a night at the shop, and when he was closer he could feel the vibrations of the speakers in his bones. He wondered if he should wear earplugs. It certainly felt loud enough he could imagine his doctor telling him to protect his hearing. Another hassle of age. There was a small crowd in front of the stage, obviously friends of the performer cheering near the front, and other groups stood, or sat on picnic blankets on the grass, enjoying it from a distance. He put on a large encouraging smile, in case the singer on the stage was nervous.

Slightly off to the left of the stage, a small boy, who was probably five or six, was with his parents, dancing to the music. The way he moved, the way he spun his hands around his wrists, and the way he fixed his mouth into a pout, was decidedly effeminate, and rather than laugh, he watched how the boy’s parents seemed to encourage him. His mum took each of the boy’s hands in his, and began to twirl him round. His dad was dancing, in his own more reserved way, but beaming with pride at his son. As the song changed, somehow without communicating, they all crouched down onto the ground as if hidden, before bursting back into movement when the next song started.

Back down memory lane – what was it about today? – and David was standing in his parents’ living room at sixteen, after finally deciding he had to come out, facing two stony-faced parents who were surprised when he told them he had something to tell them. He wondered what they’d thought it might be: failed grades, he’d got into a fight, maybe he’d gotten a girl pregnant. He sat on the settee opposite them, adversarial from the off, watching their faces scanning him for a clue, in front of the Seventies-style floral curtains behind them. Their faces almost dared him to ruin their perfect suburbia. He remembered the moment he opened his mouth, and the moment he had gone too far, and the Pandora’s box he had opened was never going to be closed again.

David had been the polar opposite of this happy child dancing now, his whole body seized with panic and the noise of his parents’ anger washing over him. He felt the tendons in his limbs strain with stress at the memory of how he had run out of that room before they could see him cry, and how he remembered he had never looked back. He had never seen them again. Flight, indeed, rather than fight.