Ffion McDade hugged her two elder brothers tightly as they said their last goodbyes to each other. This was it – her first week at university – and she was determined to do it without their help. God knew they’d helped her more than enough – more than she would ever have dared ask them to – already. They’d only been at university themselves when they’d taken her in. That had been a hell of a day. Thank God she’d forgotten just how much pain she’d been in. That was one thing she’d managed to put out of her mind, along with the way her foot had looked after the fall. When she thought back to that day now, she could only see a blur where her foot was meant to be.
“You be good,” said Harry, wagging his finger at her mock-reprovingly, “Don’t do anything I’d do. And, no, I didn’t misspeak just then. You study hard, you go to bed on time, and you remember to eat, for goodness’ sake.”
Ffion nodded. “Like I’d forget.”
Joe, the eldest of the three of them, tutted. “You forgot to eat all the time when you were doing your A’ levels. I had to keep bringing you snacks.”
“Fine, fine, I won’t forget again,” Ffion corrected herself. “But I’ve got plenty of food. You should know. You really didn’t have to take me around the shops, I could have done it myself.” The idea of unpacking a whole week’s shop at once was more than a little daunting. She thought of the five full shopping bags she’d left in the kitchen of her student flat, and wondered if they’d still be there when she got back to it. Or if someone else would have snaffled them before she could put the milk away.
“Get on the road,” she said quickly, glancing back at the building where she lived now. “It’s getting dark. You want to be home before midnight, don’t you?”
“The Witching Hour,” said Harry, jangling his car keys. “Are you sure you’ve got everything? Nothing left in the car?”
“Checked it myself, said Ffion, hugging each of them again. “Now hurry up and get going.”
“Are you OK?” Joe said.
Harry nudged him in the ribs. “She’s dropping a hint,” he said, “And she knows where we are if she does need us, don’t you, Fifi?”
Ffion scowled at him. “You call me Fifi again and I’ll chase you out of the car park with a broomstick.”
“Hint taken.” Joe grinned, clapped Harry on the shoulder, and walked back tot he car with him.
Harry got into the driver’s seat, revved up the engine as Joe did up his seatbelt.
Ffion waved as the car pulled away.
And then she remembered why she’d hurried her brothers off. She swore under her breath, spun on her heel and ran back up to her flat.
No, there was all her shopping, still in its bags on the kitchen table. Saying a quiet prayer of thanks, she opened up the fridge and started to pack it with perishables.
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Chapter Nineteen of "This Still Happens" is now available to read on Wattpad!
(If you like hurt-comfort, this one's for you!)
"But then there's a noise outside, or she sees something out of the corner of her eye, and Mrs Paulson jumps to her feet, peering out of the window. "Oh, thank the Lord," she whispers, pressing the tips of her fingers against her collarbone."
"But then there's a noise outside, or she sees something out of the corner of her eye, and Mrs Paulson jumps to her feet, peering out of the window. "Oh, thank the Lord," she whispers, pressing the tips of her fingers against her collarbone."
BEHOLD!! I'm 45,000+ words into This Still Happens, have just titled my first Ffion-centric chapter, and in doing so have invented an excellent new word which I shall certainly be putting into a lot of use very often!
Snactuary (noun): a safe place to hide one's food, a safe place where good comfort food is available, a sanctuary for your snacks.
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Ffion shrugs Scott's hand off her shoulder and snaps at him. "Don't fucking touch me! And don't tell me how to feel about Gordon disrespecting my God!"
Oh, for fuck's sake. I scoff. "Ffion," I say, as if she's three and I'm thirty-three, "It's only disrespectful if the thing I'm talking about is worthy of respect. Else, it's just called talking."
I've passed 11,000 words on this draft of This Still Happens, and I'm getting near to the end of Chapter Two, which is where things really take an awful turn.
We're seeing a really nasty side to Gordon in this chapter. He's hurting inside, and he's lashing out at other people--mainly Sophie and Ffion so far--because of it. That's in no way OK, and I'm in no way condoning it, but I do think it needs talking about.
As a Queer Catholic, I have a really complicated relationship with God--as do most people--but I've often felt like I can't do the religion thing and be Sapphic. Luckily I've always been aware that being Queer isn't smething I can change--it's just the way I am--so I've never been in such a place where I've tried to "fix" myself in order to feel like a proper Catholic... but its gone the other way. For a long time I felt like I couldn't believe in God, because I was always told to pray for the the homophobic bullying I've experienced to stop... and then it didn't. Instead of blaming the adults I should have been able to trust, I blamed God, and decided I didn't want to know Him.
If He would allow such horrible things to happen, why would I? In later years I've come to realise that it wasn't God who allowed it to happen, but authority figures--teachers, parents--and that God never would allow it to happen.
This is a major reason why I don't believe God to be omnipotent. Omnibenevolent, yes, and omniscient, yes. He knows who I am and He loves me--He made me that way--and He knows what happened... but He couldn't have stopped it. Humans do bad things to each other, and it's gone beyond a level God can control. I hate that, I really do. But it's not God's fault, and through Him I've been able to find better acceptance of myself as a biromantic lesbian, far more than I would ever have found growing up in the house, the town, the environment I grew up in.
My approach to Catholicism is by no means traditional. I don't go to Church, I'm not baptised or confirmed, and I don't believe in the omnipotent God most Catholics--for example, my Grandma--do (did, in Grandma's case, may she rest in peace). But I do feel it gives me a sense of protection, stops me from feeling isolated, and stops me from feeling powerless in times of trouble. I pray at home, I pray at university, and I pray when I'm out and about, for safety and happiness for my friends and me. I feel God in nature, God by the sea, God in the forests where I walk, and I feel better about the world and the people in it. God wants what's best for us, His children, and He would give it to us if we could. But most effort must come from us--people--because there's only so much God can do.
We must be the ones to seek happiness and to create it for other people. We must be kind. We must not lash out, even when we are in pain; that just creates so much more, pushing the world even further from the one God wants us to inhabit.
Gordon takes a different view. and we see that in the way he interacts with Ffion McDade, a Baptist girl in his class, and Sophie Wainwright, his friend of many years, herself a devout Roman Catholic.
"Soph, come on. Be reasonable about this," I say, leaning on my upturned hockey stick as Chris hands out bibs and Sophie pretends to be intrigued by the patchy grass.. "Chris loves you so, so much. Please don't throw that away on my account. I'm OK, I promise. He made a bit of a silly mistake, but, honestly, I think he was just a bit… knocked for six by my coming out. Given time, he'll be every bit as accepting as everyone else. You'll see."
Sophie huffs, and thumps the ground with the curved end of her stick. "That's only part of it," she mutters, "There's a lot more to it than you know, more to it than you can understand. By treating you like crap for being gay—the way God made you, by the way—Chris is saying God made a mistake. And I can't be OK with that, Gordon. You know I can't."
I shrug. "I don't care. I don't believe in God."
"Yeah? Well, I do," Sophie says, hooking her thumb around the chain of her necklace and showing me her crucifix, as if I needed reminding that she's Catholic, like most people in Chase Valley. I'm constantly being reminded of how fucking Catholic everyone is. Pisses me off no end.
Sophie sets her jaw, and speaks through gritted teeth. "So I'm sure you'll forgive me for being uncomfortable with Chris turning his back on you for the way God made you."
I snort with laughter. "I don't think he'll be turning his back on me any time soon, Soph. That's kind of the point."
"For fuck's sake, Gordon, that's my boyfriend you're talking about!" she snaps, putting her hands on her hips and scowling at me with hard black eyes. "Can you try and take this seriously? This isn't easy for me!"
"Fine," I say, "I'm very sorry your boyfriend's a little bit homophobic. But I'm fine. And he's apologised. And he's trying to be better. So I don't know why you're getting so pissed off about all this. It's not like it affects you."
Sophie rolls her eyes and mutters heavenwards. "You have no fucking clue what you're talking about, do you?" she says, turning her eyes back on me.
I shake my head. "Apparently not."
We're seeing everything from Gordon's point of view in Chapter Two. That's the benefit--and the drawback--of the first-person style. Although we get a very clear picture of what Gordon's thinking and feeling, and therefore a better understanding of why he acts the way and does the things he does... we don't get that for other characters, because nor does Gordon. Something we'll learn about Gordon in coming chapters is that he's very set in his ways, very determined to hold onto his views, and little ready to listen to those that differ. He rejects the idea of religion because he thinks it makes people closed-minded, but never stops to think that he himself is closed-minded. And that's his main problem.
Gordon won't see Soph's point of view because it involves a belief in God. What Gordon doesn't know--because nobody has told him, and he's only seeing the world through his own eyes--is that Sophie is bisexual, and has been struggling to reconcile this with her faith. A few days ago, she went to Confession, and confided all this in Father Matthew... expecting ostracism... but finding acceptance. Father Matthew tells her it's OK to be Sapphic, because God made her that way... but Gordon doesn't know. He expects the same rejection of his gayness that Sophie expected for her bisexuality, and because he deliberately steers clear of the Church... which means he never gets to know what is actually being said there.
Much as Gordon might want to think he's super-open-minded due to his militant atheism, he's actually closing his mind off to the idea that there's a higher power who loves him the way he is. While he has no problem accepting himself as gay or anything else--any other aspect of his identity or personality--he creates for himself an extra sense of persecution on top of that which he already experiences as societal homophobia. It's a shame, really. It turns him into this angry person who won't see other people's viewpoints, and picks arguments where there really aren't any.
As a result, he misses out on friendships, pushing people away because he expects them to hate him. And while sometimes he's right about that, he's often wrong. By avoiding talking to Ffion--who is proud to be Christian, proud to be Baptist, and feels at home in her Church--he never gets to know her properly. Unfortunately, Ffion's particular Church community is very scornful of the LGBT Community, and she ends up seeing him in a similar way, as someone to be avoided, and so she too never says a friendly word to him. There's this massive divide between them, created by their expectations of each other, which neither of them can surpass until they start to question those.
Because they're both so closed-minded, they can't do that on their own; it takes the work of their mutual friends and the creation of some desperately horrible circumstances for them each to realise the other isn't so bad. There's a friendship coming out of this, but not for a while.
Gordon has to change dramatically first, just as much as Ffion does. Can he overcome imagined prejudices in order to save and create friendships in the face of real ones?
Dreams of a stage career in tatters, Florian Fleet has come to university to build himself a new future. Ffion McDade - barely beginning to reckon with her past - is his upstairs neighbour.
