Pretty Good Years
By Matthew Keeley
Inbox. Drafts. Sent. Junk.
Greig.
His own email folder, even still. Scrolling to the bottom, time travelling back through decades, I find his first email. In it, Greig described what he looked like – ‘about 6’0 with blonde-brown hair and blue eyes’ – listed the subjects he was studying at his sixth form college in England, told me the ages of his brothers, and detailed his favourite singers. Some were the predictable pop divas I was a fan of too; others, alternative artists whose songs I wasn’t cool enough to know, including one in particular whose name I recognised: Tori Amos. I didn’t ask any more about her just yet, though.
Greig and I had graduated to email-writing from a prototype social media network for teenagers. Bolt.com was a precursor to Facebook in the mind-blowing early days of dial-up internet. I’d unwind the Rapunzel extension cord from our spare room to the phone socket in the hallway, and ‘meet’ people from all over the world via my dad’s work computer. I remember the gaudy orange and blue webpage taking stretching seconds to load, pixel by pixel, populated mostly by text. No endless timeline of filtered photos and videos. At the time, though, it was thrilling, like a digital youth club filled with profile pages of thousands of friends-to-be. Amidst the innumerable users, Greig and I found one another, connecting over our pop music knowledge, love of films that we naively considered to be edgy, and identical star signs, born less than a month apart. What had first caught my attention and pulled me towards the little message icon, though, was one word on his profile page: ‘Gay’.
After back-and-forth short notes about Madonna and exam results, we swapped email addresses and moved onto paragraphs and P.S.s, finding out more about one another’s lives: family members, friends’ names, the universities we wanted to go to, and weekend plans – Greig would often be at parties with older teens, playing drinking games, while I’d be at cinema matinees with my cousin, Grace, or playing board games.
He’d told me early on that he was out; a profound novelty, unheard of at my school. It was probably this that stopped me from telling my few ‘IRL’ friends about Greig. How could I explain sending online messages to a gay guy in England without raising suspicion? I hadn’t come out to anyone and had even told Greig I was bi, still clinging to some desperate pretence that I could have a girlfriend and convince people I was ‘normal’.
So Greig was my new, secret friend, part of a separate, electric life I was building; one that Grace and my other school pals wouldn’t understand. Greig would tell me about boys he liked at his sixth form college, bullies who’d taunted him, and a headteacher who’d told him to ‘ignore it’. I didn’t know anyone else like him. He was a character I’d only seen in soaps, and I felt like an extra with a few lines and the chance to act with the star.
Sending weekly emails and telling one another our secrets became our version of diary-writing. We began blending into one another’s lives. I’d ask about those boys at college; he’d ask about me about boys at school (there were none I liked). I’d tell him about my mum nagging me; he’d tell me about his doddering grandma who he lived with. We’d discuss beautiful men in our favourite TV programmes, and review the latest Madonna and Mariah albums, track by track. And soon, a new bond tied us to one another: Tori Amos – this enigmatic name Greig had mentioned before.
Tori was a singer I’d heard of, and I knew a couple of her songs. Her debut album was even in the CD rack in my house, probably bought by one of my older sisters. Greig was a Tori obsessive. He knew the albums, singles, music videos, B-sides, cover songs, live bootlegs. He’d send me audio files on MSN Messenger, which we’d begun using each night, and I’d listen, hypnotised by the music and the pull of Greig’s gravity. He was clever, cultured, and mature – a whole month older than me, after all – and I wanted to like what he liked, be a true best friend. Pen pals were for kids and we’d transcended that.
As months passed and we moved onto university – Greig in London and me in Glasgow – mobile phones replaced instant messaging on boxy PCs. We swapped numbers and felt like rich kids in American TV shows, texting between lectures and while lying awake late at night. Cupping his phone number on the little screen in my hands brought a new possibility, too, with only one tiny Call button between us. I could find out what his accent sounded like, hear his laugh, have whole conversations without waiting minutes, hours, days for replies. I think we were both afraid to press the button, though. Revealing our voices, really talking, would have felt like putting our diaries down and staring at one another, but we still needed to hide behind those pages.
Texting was enough for now, and it was while texting Greig that I made a gargantuan decision: I would come out to my friends. And not to tell them I was bi, but that I was gay. Greig had done it years earlier, so I could too. He coached me through black words on a tiny screen while I cried and planned who I’d tell first. I couldn’t hear his voice, but his bolstering guidance was loud. I don’t know how many more years I would have waited without his presence in my life – albeit a faraway presence.
Rather than transitioning to phone calls, our correspondence took an old-fashioned shift – letter-writing. I remember admiring Greig’s neat, simple handwriting as his first envelope slipped through the letterbox. Holding the paper he’d written on felt like shaking his hand. I still have those too – folded wads of lined, crinkled paper, covered with that tidy ink telling me about new boys at university, conflicts with his brothers, and late nights spent in London pubs and student dorms. I hadn’t moved out from home, too scared to leave my familiar house and live with strangers, and Greig’s life in the city seemed wild and filmic and unfathomable to me. Oddly, my parents never questioned where these handwritten envelopes were coming from, or if they did, I must have concocted some clever story to keep Greig concealed. Keeping secrets was something at which I’d become a life-long expert.
When one particularly bulky envelope arrived, I scurried to my room with it, tearing open the treasure buried under paper. A mix CD. Tori Amos. Greig had curated an album for me, even designed and printed a personalised front and back cover – since he was endlessly artistic and digitally talented. It was full of songs I hadn’t heard yet, but that he suspected I’d love. And I did. This time I wasn’t only enamoured with Tori because of her association with Greig, but because of the music itself. As soon as I slid the CD into my stereo, the first song, ‘Pretty Good Year’, hypnotised me with its melancholy and wistfulness. From there, the CD swelled with ornate piano introductions, cinematic strings, cryptic and mystical lyrics, and a voice that morphed from ethereal whispering to siren calls.
Greig’s CD became a diving board and I leapt from it into Tori’s back catalogue, delving inside each album and devouring the songs, choosing my favourites – Cooling, Mother, Cloud on My Tongue, Father Lucifer – and discussing them in new letters and emails and texts. But still not phone calls.
Months later, though, a fresh chance for us to drop the diaries from our hidden faces arrived. Tori, a prolific live performer, announced a new world tour. We had to see her. Had to hear all those songs that connected us across hundreds of miles. Together. I can’t remember which of us was bold enough to suggest it, but we decided we should meet. In person. We were twenty by then, and university had exposed me to so many new people that meeting Greig wasn’t daunting enough to stop me anymore.
I booked a cheap hotel in Bayswater and we agreed to meet there in the lobby. By this point, we knew what one another looked like having shared awkward photographs of ourselves. I sat in a huge armchair in the foyer, gripping the fabric with clammy fingers while tourists in caps wandered in and out, laughing, glancing at me. When Greig squeezed through the entrance door and peered around, I recognised him from the photograph – taken in front of a full-length mirror and the sickly orange wall of a student hall bedroom – but was struck by how tall and skinny he was. When he spotted me and I stood, we didn’t hug or shake hands. An awkward “Hi,” was enough, and we shuffled to the elevator to collect things from my room.
“How are you?” I asked, smiling.
“Fine.” A flicker of eye contact.
“Did you get here OK?”
“Yes.”
Those face-concealing diaries weren’t so easy to drop.
We ascended through the floors with claustrophobic silence filling the little metal cell and by the time we reached my room, gathered my bag and coat, and ventured back outside, we’d exchanged another handful of words – enough for me to notice just how ‘English’ he really sounded.
On the Tube to the Hammersmith Apollo, the excitement of the approaching concert fuelled our conversation a little more as we guessed what songs she might perform and how good the view from our seats would be. The whole time, we didn’t even address the enormity of what we were doing. Talking. Sitting together. Looking at one another instead of at pixelated words. Arriving at the venue, we saw other fanatics gathered in yakking groups, dressed in official tour t-shirts with dyed red hair and piercings. Greig and I tottered by in our cords and backpacks and waited in our quiet seats with fidgeting hands.
Soon, Tori appeared under a moon-white spotlight, swathed in a flowing, silky dress, scarlet hair billowing around her, and took her spot at the Bösendorfer grand piano, a high priestess ready to incant her sermon. Ah, so this was what live music should be. She improvised new openings to familiar songs, carried by the muses. She grooved on her stool, playing an electric organ with one hand and the piano with the other, and looked us in the eyes while singing every poignant, clever, and eccentric lyric. Her silvery voice reverberated through the hall, filling all the silence that had built between Greig and me.
Afterwards, floating off towards the Tube on a euphoric cloud, we said goodbye, half-hugging this time, and half-agreeing to meet again the next day.
We didn’t.
Greig sent me an email weeks later, apologising and detailing his chronic timidity that I’d sensed as soon as he stepped into the hotel lobby. He’d felt sick with nerves, unable to let go of his diary and engage with me. It made me wonder how exaggerated his tales of London nightlife and college friends might have been.
We wrote to one another less often after that, reverting to emails rather than our letters by post. Still, we shared details of further intense events in our lives: Greig’s revelatory trip to Malaysia with his mother; my fallouts with friends from school days who seemed so different to me now and who couldn’t seem to accept my sexuality; Greig’s decision to leave university; my decision to finally move into a flat in Glasgow with my first boyfriend.
We did meet again, though. Every couple of years, when Tori would embark on a new tour, we’d make a pilgrimage to see her together, sometimes in London, sometimes in Glasgow. The further we moved into our twenties, the easier it became to overcome our introverted habits and talk in person, relax, laugh together. A little. I think Greig was finally connecting me with the diary pages he’d filled for years.
Ten years ago, he even moved to Scotland to the same city as me – something seventeen year-old me would never have imagined. But despite living minutes from one another, we didn’t see each other often. Geography meant nothing. We’d send messages here and there, occasionally go to the cinema, and of course, scramble for Tori tickets on each of her tours. But in between, our emails and letters had stopped. I tried once or twice to reignite our written album reviews, but my messages faded off, unanswered.
Tori remained our one dependable chain, tethering us to one another. None of our other friends understood the music. Seeing her on tour was our ‘thing’, a familiar ceremony like Christmas dinner.
But eventually, even that became a tradition Greig had gorged himself on enough.
Last year, tickets to Tori’s latest tour were released a week or so after the death of my mum – something Greig knew about from social media. I texted him to tell him about the tour dates. He replied a day or two later saying he hadn’t known she was touring. He didn’t mention my mum.
I bought Tori tickets for us. Greig didn’t come.
Matthew works in TV Development and podcasting. He is a winner of the Theresa O’Hare Poetry Prize 2022 and the Eddie Mail Non-Fiction Trophy 2022 and 2023. His supernatural coming-of-age novel The Stone in My Pocket was published by The Conrad Press and his first poetry collection will be published by Drunk Muse Press in 2025.
Artwork Source: “Communication Revolution in Health: Media, Counseling, and Gender” Poster. Johns Hopkins University (ca. 1994). In the public domain.
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