Reasons for Not Speaking

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Winner of the The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024.

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The conversation has shifted to coming out stories. You do not want to talk about coming out stories. You do not want to talk about your tricky experience with queerness since you are the only brown person, apparent Muslim, here. You will not give these white people a chance to come down hard on Islam.

But these are not just white people, these are queer people. And what is that supposed to mean? Is queer some reliable thing? Rewind to your experiences in the noughties. Soho bars that were full of white men. Do you remember one man putting his hand out as you approached, letting you know from an embarrassed distance – his friends turning their crew cut heads – that it was a no, so don’t take a step further? Do you remember before that the palms of various bouncers too, stopping you, asking if you knew what kind of bar you were entering? Perhaps they were forewarning you about what lay inside… But, really, you knew they stopped you because a lone brown, bearded man entering a gay bar during the War on Terror was something to be suspected, wasn’t it? Even your parents would have understood the suspicion if you were able then to admit to being in that particular context.

That’s another story: the way your parents have always come down on the side of whiteness. It’s a familiar move. When you try to lecture your mother and father about their defence of white people, they will not take it. You mother, for instance, will say to you, Who do I trust the least? Your uncles. They have swallowed up our family home between them and denied me my inheritance. Who do I know that has treated me the worst in England? Your father’s mother, coming to live with us when you were a baby, expecting to be treated like a queen, telling everyone that she helped me raise you.

Listening to your mother, your arguments hang their heads. You have saved up a snotty-nosed phrase that goes she and your father were raised on the milk bottle of colonialism – but you don’t say it. Your mother is close to seventy years old now, your father is close to eighty. So you just stay quiet. Just listen uncomfortably to what they have to say which, predictably, leans into a right-wing first-generation-immigrant complex.

Retreat now from that maze of thoughts. Come back to where you are.

It is a bookshop on a Wednesday evening in north London. You are sitting in a circle with the book group. It is your first time here. The book under discussion is The Swimming-Pool Library.

You have always felt the whole business of sharing opinions quite off-putting.

One of the people who runs the group, a man wearing a checked shirt that is a little tight over his paunch, directs attention away from coming out stories back to the novel. There are a couple of people he can rely on, talkative members of the group. They seem to be ready always with opinions.

If you were honest you would say that you have always felt the whole business of sharing opinions quite off-putting. The opinion-giving that you hear, that flows at this very moment, is a strain of English taught in private schools: a language that is all hard edges, wit and derision. It is your madeleine. What comes to mind is a campus of listed buildings, wrought iron gates and rugby pitches. You can hear, just there, the sound of a teacher screaming at a boy.

To admit that you are suspicious of opinions is a perilous business. It’s an easy enough argument for your interlocutor to say you are in fact a fascist wanting to close down opinion, dissenting voices, and so forth.

As a result, you do your normal thing and stay quiet. You had the luck of being immersed in that way of speaking at a young age and now you refuse to spar.

But silence does not guarantee safety. Something is happening now, something more pressing. You have become aware of a closing in.

The man sitting three seats away from you spoke about a minute ago.

After him, the man two seats away from you said something.

Now it is your neighbour speaking.

It will be you next. The opinion-giving has found you out. It will be you who needs to contribute, to follow tradition.

You find that you are holding your breath. You tense up; stay very still.

Checked Shirt Man looks at you, makes a little smile. You smile back uncomfortably, then shift position. Your chair creaks awfully.

You don’t take the bait. You decide are not going to say anything.

Checked Shirt Man begins speaking himself. He saves you.

It is a relief, but the pressure builds quickly again because you think you cannot really be a member of a book group if you don’t speak up, make your feelings known. To be literary is to nail one’s colours to the mast.

If you were to speak, it would be about a couple of things that are currently on your mind.

The first is that your parents would have arrived in England about five years before the action of the book starts. There are stories from that time that your parents choose not to mention, stories you have had to piece together from conversations you overheard while you were growing up.

There is one scene that you tend to return to: an incident in which your parents locked themselves in their car to avoid a gang of white men on the street. This was sometime in the late 1970s. Shift the focus, angle the lens one hundred and eighty degrees from Will Beckwith and his belle époque and you will perhaps spot your parents, sinking into their winter coats. But you never press your parents on that story, never pin them down. Why rehash it, hark back to beginnings? The family’s époque anglaise remains unfinished.

The other thing you are thinking about is a subject that has already been mentioned quite a few times – which is the treatment of the non-white characters in the novel. Everyone in the group seemed to nod in agreement when someone said that the racial politics of the novel is shameful, that the black men in the story are sex objects and nothing else.

When this was said you noticed that people turned to you, as if you needed to confirm their opinions. Was it your nod they wanted? Perhaps they expected you to say something noble about race and how you found the novel’s depiction of it unsurprising?

Noble and novel have an unhealthy similarity and, as it happens, your thoughts are less clean. You don’t speak because you have something odder (or more predictable) to admit.

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What you have to say is that your own desire is a kind of inversion of the novel’s. You are a brown man who desires white men, specifically older white men. In this way, you fix your glance where the author fixes his. They are two sides of the same coin, the desires of whiteness and the desires for whiteness.

At heart, you do not contest the book’s politics – you want to see them out.

How long is it, for instance, since you have been back from the holiday?

If you take out your phone it all will be catalogued in your inbox – the date of the outgoing flight and the return, the booking confirmation and the reminders.

You will also find there the messages between Richard, Liam and yourself. And, before that, the initial messages between you and Richard.

You realised that the template of coming out didn’t quite map onto your particular circumstances.

It was on the street that you called out to him. Excuse me, you said. Richard turned his head, stopped. He was not a handsome man, and that made you hard. You brainwashed thing: this is what the teachers looked like at your beautiful school.

Richard came into the office one or two days a week. He did consulting work. You had noticed each other; he tended to walk by your desk in the open plan. One day you followed him out of the building: he always left earlier than most people, the perks of being a consultant.

I was waiting for you to say something – that was the first thing he said to you.

He told you, by email in fact, that he had an open relationship with his husband. It was what you wanted to hear, but you simply said that you were okay with that arrangement.

You found out from searching online that he was sixty-one years old.

One day, later on in the relationship, as you were parting from one of your ‘meets’ – this was outside of a Travelodge in east London – Richard said that he had told his husband about you, specifically about your interest in having a threesome.

The topic of sexual fantasies had arisen once in a conversation between yourself and Richard, and you found out that a threesome was a fantasy you and he shared.

Well, Richard told you, Liam had said yes, that he was interested in the three of you getting together. Richard had a picture of you, perhaps it was one of the nudes you sent him (Richard called them nudie shots), and had showed it to Liam.

So, one day you went out of the city to their house in the suburbs where you slept with them. You were the guest and took both of them inside you. You all enjoyed it – and it became a timetabled thing. On Saturday afternoons you left your place and arrived at theirs an hour and a half later. You had some fun together and they treated you to dinner.

This went on for half a year. You spent quite a bit of money on travelling across the city. No, not quite a bit – hundreds of pounds. You had this money to spend because it was the amount your parents sent you each month, worried about whether you had enough to live on from just your salary.

You had come out to your parents in your early twenties, but it wasn’t something they wanted to discuss. It wasn’t something they could discuss, openly. If they did, they would have to come out to their community. You knew the difficulty of coming out in the first place – it had taken you twenty-five years to admit it to them – so you didn’t want to force them through that same process, to have them break with their own people who were scattered throughout the diaspora, thousands of miles away.

You realised that the template of coming out didn’t quite map onto your particular circumstances. After coming out you discovered that you weren’t going to follow its line of disclosure and severing of homophobic ties and immersion into a gay world. It’s not like that world was a particularly welcoming alternative to you.

And now your mother and father, who were at a loss to say anything about your sexuality, were unknowingly enabling it. It could be read that using your parents’ money in this way was a passive method of getting back at them for having a difficult time with your homosexuality, that this was what they owed you.

What followed was a holiday, of course. Richard invited you to Malta. He and Liam always went to a house they owned on the island for four weeks in late August-early September.

You spent your parents’ money on flights. The taxi from the airport took one hour. When you arrived at the house, Richard offered to pay for it, but you didn’t accept. It was as if you were denying the fact that you were going to be their boy for the week.

It is the second generation of the diaspora that have the world at their feet.

As soon as you entered the house, went to the toilet, took a shower, had a drink, the three of you began. For most of the week you all walked around in shorts or trunks, or nothing. One of them just had to reach out and you were there.

When the week drew to an end, Richard and Liam asked if you could stay longer. They wanted you to. But you had booked your flights and you had work, which you couldn’t postpone. You weren’t your own boss, or retired.

You came back home.

When you thought about the holiday, you found yourself smirking. There was an image you kept on thinking about: you standing at the pool’s edge and these two tanned, retirement-age white men below you, naked in the water, looking up at you.

It is the second generation of the diaspora, that have made it into the middle classes, that have the world at their feet.

Worth getting tested remember, we will do the same! Richard wrote in a message you received when you landed back in the UK.

Will do! you wrote back.

And now you are here, in the bookshop, in search of something, what is it – forgiveness? Friendship? An audience for a story about a perfectly colonised prince?

Those who have brought the book with them hold the copy in their laps. On one of the editions, the front cover bears an image of a man with his arms crossed in front of him: an aesthetically pleasing posture of fear.

Checked Shirt Man is wrapping up.

What is the title for next week? he is asked. Can it be something shorter? Can it be a book of poetry? Do we do poetry?

You hover for a while. He looks your way, Checked Shirt Man, but he is surrounded.

What will you do? Will you wait for him? Perhaps he is one of those older white men who like brown men, who have been out with many of them. Perhaps that will ease things, he will know your body, he will know your relationship with family, and will not be surprised.

For that reason, he will feel comfortable asking, Why did you not say anything?

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Amaan Hyder is the author of the poetry collections At Hajj (Penned in the Margins, 2017) and Self-Portrait With Family (Nine Arches Press, 2024). His poetry has appeared in a range of publications including The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London. He is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and has reviewed for the TLS and Poetry Birmingham. His poem ‘duas’ won a Clore Prize in 2019, and his short story, ‘Postpositions’, was shortlisted in the 4thWrite Short Story Prize 2021. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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