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At the age of 22 Adam unexpectedly inherits a large house and a small vineyard in south west France. He goes to live there. A few months later he travels to the other side of France to find the young man named Sylvain who had been his lover when he was still a teenager and from whom he’d been forcibly parted. For the last bit of the journey he has hitched a lift.

-

As they arrived among the clutch of barns and houses that comprised the village of St-Nicolas, Adam called out: “Stop. You can drop me here.” His attention had been caught by the back view of a figure, just ahead of them, on the other side of the road. It was a perfectly ordinary back view: of a young man dressed in jeans and working boots, with a shabby leather jacket whose collar was pulled up around his ears against the cold; he had an untidy mop of thick dark hair, and was of the same trim build and medium height as Adam himself. Nevertheless Adam would have recognised Sylvain anywhere. “Thank you very much for the lift. But, believe it or not, that type over there is the person I’ve come all this way to see.”
Adam jumped down. Going in the other direction, a tractor was bumbling past. Eight other vehicles followed the tractor, at an infuriating snail’s pace. “Sylvain!” Adam shouted. “Over here! It’s me.” And between the crawling vehicles Adam caught a series of glimpses of Sylvain against the backdrop of rolling fields – as if in a sequence of time-lapse photographs: first turning, then looking, next expressing doubt, then wonder, disbelief, and then amazement and, at last, pure joy. They met in the middle of the suddenly empty little road. Too surprised, too overcome to hug or kiss, they just clasped hands.
You could imagine that they had both been carrying an unsafe quantity of treasures and keepsakes beneath their arms; imagine how, when they extended their arms towards each other, those precious things would have fallen and crashed in confusion about the road. So it was that their memories of things shared together came suddenly unfastened, as each took the other’s hand, and came tumbling in disorder into their conscious minds: not only memories of high exalted moments, but everything together, all mixed up.
You are the man, the very same, into whose pockets I used to put my hand – how I remember those ripped and bottomless pockets – to caress your handsome cock as we walked side by side among the fields.
Voici les dents – les mêmes – que je t’ai cassé… Those teeth of yours I accidentally chipped.
Damson brandy beneath the floorboards and a smell of hay.
C’était tout d’abord les jonquils… the daffodils that started everything.
Sylvain spoke. “I dreamed you’d come. Last night I dreamed you’d come.” He sounded very choked. “I thought this morning it was just a wishing dream. But now … now you’re here.”
“And now I don’t know what to say.” Adam’s voice sounded thinner, like the uncertain, youthful one that had been his on the day he’d first met Sylvain and said bonjour m’sieur, as he dropped out of a tree into his path among the woods, and then been shown the daffodils – and other things besides.
A minute later they were seated at a table in a rough and ready café-bar. The people in here didn’t seem to know Sylvain. Perhaps he still tended to be a loner. They ordered two espressos.
“Show me your hand again,” Sylvain said. He had clearly noticed something. “How did you get those blisters?” He gently explored with a forefinger the little water-filled domes at the base of Adam’s fingers and on his palms. “Your hands are like bubble-wrap.”
“Pruning vines,” Adam explained. He told the whole story. It was good to have something concrete to discuss, a definite problem to share, rather than to try, at such a moment, to find words to express the complex cut and thrust of emotions he was feeling.
“Your front teeth,” Sylvain suddenly said. “They don’t look so jagged as they did when they first got chipped. Just slightly shorter than other people’s. Je peux?” He extended a finger and explored the edges of Adam’s top incisors while Adam submissively opened his mouth and curled back his upper lip. “All smooth now,” Sylvain said. And then, “You’re still beautiful.”
“So are you.” No-one in the bar heard or heeded this intimate exchange.
“If you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this about the vines,” Adam suddenly blurted, “it’s because I’m all behind – and I desperately need help from someone. I could only think of you.” He stopped. He had seen something darken in Sylvain’s face.
Sylvain laid his hands on the table, palms down and fingers spread. It was a gesture Adam had never seen him make before. “What are you saying?” Sylvain sounded sad and hurt. That was less of a novelty. “– that after nearly six years when you haven’t come to see me – that you’ve only come now because you want me to prune some vines for you – and that’s because you can’t get anybody else?” He looked down at the table, traced the rim of his saucer with one finger.
“Hey, it’s not like that. You make it sound like…”
“There was me thinking – hoping – when I saw you across the road just now – right after my dream last night – that you’d come for some bigger reason. Or at least a better one than that. I was wrong. It was just a wishing dream after all.”
Adam’s eyes felt the sudden prick of tears, but he was cross with Sylvain too. “Don’t be like that. Not when we’re just meeting again – just starting, trying, to get to know each other again – after such a long time. And anyway, you didn’t try to come to find me either.”
“And how would I have done that, Adam? I was forbidden to contact you again, if you remember, by the court. But I still wrote, even when I hardly knew how to. But could you have imagined me turning up at your parents’ house? I hardly think so. And you never invited me to your student place in London. You didn’t expect me to just turn up there, did you? With no money to my name and not speaking a word of English.”
And vulnerable and epileptic. Ashamed, Adam put out a hand and placed it over one of Sylvain’s on the table. “Please, please stop. We can not, must not, start like this. I’m sorry, really sorry. I was talking stupidly. Insensitive. I didn’t mean… Look, I’m here because of you. Forget the bloody vines. I’d been wanting to come for ages. But I was scared. Tu sais? I know you understand that, because you must have been scared yourself. What would I be like, you must have asked yourself? How much would I have changed? Would you still…? Let’s just forget the vines. Either you can help me with them or you can’t. It really doesn’t matter. And your dream wasn’t wrong. I’m here because – because I love you. I don’t know if your dream told you that.”
“I think perhaps it was trying to. But when I woke up I didn’t dare to think about it too much. But then I heard you – actually heard you – just a few hours later, and saw you, calling across the road between the cars…” It hurt to be sitting at a table in a public place, not to be able to embrace and cry together as they had done in the past when making up after a row. But they had weathered their first ten minutes together after years apart. The signs so far were good. Better than Adam could have imagined. But then, with a jolt to his system so violent that it made him feel for a second that he was going to be sick, he remembered Stéphane. Stéphane was his current live-in boyfriend. He hadn’t yet mentioned Stéphane’s existence to Sylvain. At some point he would have to.


Reprinted with permission from Anthony McDonald's new novel, Blue Sky Adam(BIGfib Books, 2009)

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