Tigers on the Run Read online

  Readers love the Tigers & Devils

  series by SEAN KENNEDY

  Tigers & Devils

  “Sean Kennedy weaves us an interesting story of love and romance full of surprises that will both have you crying and surely make you laugh.”

  —Top 2 Bottom Reviews

  “I absolutely fell in love with this book and its characters.”

  —Feminist Fairy Tale Reviews

  Tigerland

  “There is pathos, love, humour, drama, friendship and lots of fun in this book, which makes it stand above the rest.”

  —Reviews by Jessewave

  “I enjoyed this entertaining and well-written story. The pacing is smooth, the personalities nicely developed and the relationships believable.”

  —Literary Nymphs Reviews

  “…I think that’s what I love best about Sean Kennedy’s writing. The realism.”

  —Live Your Life, Buy the Book

  By SEAN KENNEDY

  Australian Christmas in New York

  With Catt Ford: Dash and Dingo

  I Fell in Love With a Zombie

  Ports of Call

  Protests and Proposals

  Secret Santa

  Wings of Equity

  TIGERS & DEVILS

  Tigers & Devils

  Tigerland

  Tigers on the Run

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Published by

  DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Tigers on the Run

  © 2015 Sean Kennedy.

  Cover Art

  © 2015 Catt Ford.

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-63476-474-2

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-63476-475-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907247

  First Edition July 2015

  Printed in the United States of America

  This paper meets the requirements of

  ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  For Sandra.

  Coin Toss

  FROM REACH Out Magazine, 16 April 2004

  OUT AND ABOUT WITH JASPER BRUNSWICK

  AN INTRODUCTION

  Hello there, new friends!

  With the departure of Max Hayes, I will be taking over this column. Although I cannot hope to fill Max’s rather large shoes, I will try my best.

  I have come from the world of film, where I helped run the Triple F Festival. They were well known for the contributions they made towards showcasing quality LGBTQ shorts, and while working with them, I have developed many contacts throughout the community so I will not be coming into this blind!

  Although I had the opportunity to continue as a manager of the Triple F—

  I couldn’t even finish reading it.

  Although I had the opportunity to continue as a manager of the Triple F—

  Okay, I had to. I couldn’t help it. It’s a compulsion. Or an illness. I haven’t decided yet.

  Although I had the opportunity to continue as a manager of the Triple F I decided to turn it down in order to take on working for the Reach Out. I have always been a people person, and this column will allow me to continue working with a wider range of people and doing what I love best—socialising with my fellow queers!

  Okay, the deed was done. I screwed up the paper in disgust. “The opportunity to continue as manager? Nobody wanted you, Jon Brown, or Jasper Brunswick, or whatever you’re bloody well calling yourself this week!” I threw it into the bin, but it missed, and thanks to gravity, the bin toppled under its own weight and rolled across the empty space that was my new office.

  Sighing as dramatically as I could, I launched myself out of my chair and went to fix the mess I had created.

  “And really, you turned down this position to be a bloody gossip columnist?”

  The audacity of his lies! The nerve!

  And other things!

  I couldn’t even believe he had managed to luck into doing the column for the Reach Out. Did they not know they were hiring Satan himself, a man who would cause them untold misery and probably become a black hole that would consume them all?

  And sure, I probably wasn’t looking like the best advertisement for the Triple F management at that very moment, but I was a damn sight better than Mr. Jon Brown.

  “You wouldn’t even know how to do this job!” I admonished the invisible (and fictional? Could one say he was real?) Jasper Brunswick sitting across from me. “When we worked together, you didn’t even know what a mockumentary was. You’re not even fit to be my assistant!”

  “No” came a sweet, feminine voice from behind me. “Hopefully that’s going to be my job.”

  I turned my chair around so fast I almost did a complete three-sixty, but stomped down quickly enough to stop the spinning and confront the intruder. My heart was about to leap from my chest. For the past three days I had been alone in the office, and I had become accustomed to talking to myself so the silence wouldn’t fall and crush me. The 2004 festival season had just ended, all the volunteers (including one Jon Brown, aka Jasper Brunswick) had moved on to other positions, and I was in the process of wading through film stock and promotional materials to return to the distributors as well as procrastinating about preparations for 2005.

  “You’ve got tickets on yourself,” I said, sizing up the rather striking woman standing in the doorway. Her poise could have intimidated me, especially since I was currently bent like a human pretzel, but I nonchalantly untangled myself under her cool gaze.

  She grinned, in no way unnerved, and her grin was so daffy that it changed her entire face. The smile made her eyes widen absurdly until she was an anime character come to life; her life-force filled the rather drab interior of the office. “I do! My granny used to say that it never hurt to have a high self-esteem about yourself, and that’s exactly the kind of person you need in this position!”

  Maybe it was, but you shouldn’t let them get the upper hand on you before the interview even started. Five points for fitting in a wholesome granny homily, though. That took chutzpah because not many people could pull that off convincingly.

  “Anyway, you must be Simon Murray?”

  I offered her my hand. I still didn’t have the faintest idea who she was. “Yep. And you are….” I stretched out that last word for as long as possible, hoping I would finally remember.

  She was still shaking my hand. “Nyssa. Nyssa Prati. I had an interview with you at one.”

  “You did? You did!” Always best to present a professional face. Bec
ause I didn’t have it in my diary. In fact, I didn’t remember even having talked to a Nyssa Prati before today. Was she my Mary Poppins, unasked for but needed? Would we skip off to Fitzroy Gardens later on, where we would dance with a man with a terrible Cockney accent and animated penguins?

  Nyssa surveyed the office with a critical eye. “You really need a lot of work done in here.”

  Oh God, she was about to break into “A Spoonful of Sugar.” And, man, I really wanted her to.

  “Sure, but we have just moved.”

  “We?” she asked pointedly, looking behind me for my invisible colleagues.

  “The royal we.”

  “Aah. Got you.”

  “We haven’t any budget for renovations or decorating anyway. Unless we go to the local Sammy’s or Savers.”

  “You’re saying ‘we’ again. Careful, or people might think you’re crazy.”

  “That ship has sailed. You caught me talking to myself, remember?”

  “Don’t worry, we’re all a little crazy!” She cackled, and instead of throwing me off and wondering if she was a Manson bride, it only made me like her more.

  “Then I’m in good company, I guess? Anyway, I mean ‘we’ as in ‘soon to be me and whoever my assistant turns out to be’.”

  “I’ve already told you,” Nyssa said, “that’s me.”

  I liked her attitude, but it was her contagious smile that won me over more than anything. But as I glanced at the clock, I realised it was actually a quarter past two. Roger and Fran would already be waiting for me at The Napier, and a beer was calling my name.

  “Hey, wait! You said your interview was at one. I take it punctuality isn’t one of your strong points?”

  For a moment she looked startled out of her hard sell, but she recovered quickly. “I have plenty of others to make up for them.”

  “Like?”

  She pointed to the rusty kettle languishing on the sink to my right. “I could make you a decent cup of coffee, even from that.”

  She had found my weak spot.

  My eye fell upon the binned Reach Out. Once again I thanked my lucky stars that “Jasper Brunswick” hadn’t even made it to the interview stage. Hopefully the only time I would ever hear of him again would be through his rubbishy column.

  Which I would be avoiding from now on.

  I turned my attention back to Ms. Nyssa Prati. Why think of past nemeses when there were old friends waiting and new ones ready to be put into the mix? “So, Nyssa, have you ever heard of bog-off-to-the-pub Fridays?”

  It turned out she hadn’t, but she proved to be a quick learner.

  First Quarter

  Chapter 1

  SOMETIMES WHEN I look back at my life, I find it hard to believe there was ever a time Declan Tyler™ wasn’t in it. Like early 2004 B.D. (Before Declan), a time when Roger and Fran were my closest—and probably only, as my shithead of a brother Tim, would point out—friends. It was a period of change. Roger and Fran had just recently married, started a mortgage, and I was taking up a new job as the director of the Triple F Film Festival. It wouldn’t be that long before a series of people would start entering my life, who would all have their parts to play—entrances and exits, re-emergences and temporarily written-outs, cameos and short-term regular players. But they would all have major impacts upon me, leading up to the dawn of a new age—2008 A.D. (After Declan).

  Nyssa was probably the first to come along after Fran and Roger and make a huge difference to my life. She had been there in the early days of Dec, and her presence had often helped soothe me when the swings and roundabouts of my personal life had gotten too much.

  Communication was sporadic between us after her move to New Zealand, but heartfelt when it resumed. It seemed so long ago when she first entered the office at FFF, wanting a job and basically refusing to take “no” for an answer.

  She had now been gone for years, with only a few visits back. Dec and I had gone over to the land of the long white cloud, where I bored him silly with visits to every Lord of the Rings location, embarrassing him with my need to act out scenes, often in the company of fellow geeks—“If you want him, come and claim him!” I cried out in the middle of the Arrow River while clutching Dec to my chest—he retaliated by giving me heart attacks when he threw himself off bungee towers and went white-water rafting. He was far more relaxed when he cooed over Nyssa’s kids—big softie that he was.

  Now that I am in my golden years, the early thirties (in gay years, you might as well be settling into a retirement village), I’ve become a bit more nostalgic, and frighten Dec with sudden desires to make photo albums—the kind that you do on your computer and then send away for them to come back as a sturdy hardcover. I haven’t devolved into scrapbooking—that’s far too much effort—but the albums are sorted into themes; Dec is most embarrassed about the huge three-hundred-page doorstopper devoted to his footy career, but I’ve caught him looking more than once at the one dedicated to the first few years we were together.

  It’s gotten to the point, although I would refuse to say it to him in fear of the shit he would give me, that I can’t believe I actually lived my life without him at some stage.

  That there was a time in my life where Declan Tyler™ didn’t figure prominently.

  That there was a time when Declan Tyler was only one thing to me: a sexy guy in football shorts who used to infuriate me when he played against Richmond and often had a huge part in their defeat. It was a time when I was alone and thinking I loved it. Despite having best friends in Roger, Fran, and Nyssa, I refused to entertain the notion that I wanted a partner.

  I guess it was lucky I was picky (despite not being a great catch myself). It meant I waited until the best came along.

  And now he was stuck with me.

  Maybe I was smarter than I gave myself credit for.

  FOR THE eleventy-billionth time that night, I snuck into the spare bedroom under cover of darkness and once again stubbed my toe on the portacot. This led to a dance of pain, muttering shit shit shit (although only in my head, as I could not stand the thought of awakening those two little fragile beings before me). But little Frankie and Georgina slept on, oblivious to the huge bumbling idiot hovering above them.

  It had taken a lot of effort and heartbreak to get them here. A lot of money, too, but was that really important when they were finally with us? I didn’t think so, and I was pretty sure everybody else would agree. When they were brought into the world, screaming like their father at a football game, there wasn’t a dry eye among those expecting the news in the waiting room.

  I checked to make sure they were still breathing—I was paranoid they would somehow stop on my watch—and when there were little sleepy whimpers, I slumped in relief. Now I could have ease of mind until the next five-minute check.

  “If only I had my camera to capture this moment,” Dec said.

  “Shh!” I admonished him, louder than he had been. “You’ll wake them!”

  He took my hand and led me out of the room, closing the door behind us. “You looked the picture of the perfect doting dad. I should have taken a picture and sent it to your mum.”

  “The perfect doting paranoid dad. And don’t send such a thing to my mother. It will only make her worse.”

  “It’s not like we haven’t talked about it ourselves.”

  “Yeah, when the time is right.”

  “When is the time ever right?”

  “I think it’s a bit different when a woman is involved—”

  “I’m pretty sure a woman has to be involved.” He led me into the lounge and we slumped upon the couch, which was strewn with baby wipes and dirty bottles we were too exhausted to clean up just yet.

  “Don’t be a smartarse.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s your job.”

  I groaned as he started using my lap as a pillow. I had been thinking of doing the same to him. “It’s different for us gays.”

  “Us gays,” he mused. “We’re a conglomerate,
are we?”

  “There’s a lot more planning. A het couple can just have an accident, like a broken condom or a lot of alcohol and loss of inhibition, and whoops, they’re pregnant. Gays have to find a surrogate mother and then do IVF.”

  “Or a cooking syringe.”

  “Not with the laws here.”

  “Lesbians can have a baby. There’s already a woman there.”

  “Yeah, but they need to plan to. They still need—”

  “A cooking syringe,” Dec said, quickly.

  “And sperm,” I said, just to rattle him.

  Like clockwork, he winced. “Well, that just means that us gays have to make up our mind earlier than most. To give us time to get all the specifics ready.”

  “You still have to be emotionally ready for it.”

  “A lot of couples aren’t when they find out they’re pregnant. They become parents anyway, and learn as they go along.” He sighed. “So, when do you think is the right time?”

  I started to feel a little panicky. This conversation always caused tightness in my chest and a lack of oxygen to my brain. “I don’t know. I guess you just feel it when it’s right.”

  He looked disappointed. Dec was definitely feeling the urge for a family. All of his siblings now had kids, and I guess he really wanted some of his own that could grow up with their cousins and have the same kind of childhood he had—some faded-picture postcard of nostalgia where extended families had regular barbecues and children played cricket in the backyard together. Okay, we were already kind of living that life with our families, but Dec obviously wanted to add to it and see his kids among the mix as well.

  I was the one dragging his feet. I loved our life together, and selfishly, I liked having Dec to myself. But that’s what it was: selfishness. By procrastinating I was the one denying him further happiness. Yet he also didn’t want to push me.

  But something was going to have to give eventually.

  I did, at times, think how lovely it would be to have kids of our own playing with Frankie and Georgina. Not that those two could do much of anything at the moment except cry, demand food, and poo themselves. Although I guess children would be like that all throughout their lives, except they became housebroken at some stage.