Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  It is ironic that the very people who condemn gay men for founding their lives on their sexual preferences should feel threatened by a relationship that is asexual. When an American comedian claimed that women, by kissing their gay friends, were importing AIDS into the heterosexual community (Is this the Mary Magdalene kiss to rival the Judas one?), he was resorting to the age-old practice of using a joke to attack what he was unable to understand. Words can be weapons and just as they have long been directed at gay men, so they are now used against their women friends; whether it be the English ‘fag hag’, with its hard-toned hints of Morgan Le Fay, or, even worse, the American ‘fruit-fly’, which makes the woman sound parasitical and the man putrid.

  My relationship with Candida may not have been protected by law or respected by language, but it was no less real or potent or committed. It was not an escape from sexual relationships, still less a parody of one. It was resented both by her men friends and (I have to admit) by my boyfriend; and yet its supreme strength was the quality of its love. It was not a love without issue; for, despite all the gleeful-gloomy predictions of my lonely old age – the sterile senility which is seen as the just reward for a misspent youth – we had a daughter. I say we, although I am not the child’s natural father. For years, I jibed at Candida’s refusal to say who was, but I have finally understood her reasons. She was intensely superstitious (remaining on palm-crossing terms with several fortune tellers); it is as if she had a premonition of her death and wanted to pre-empt disputes. She was determined that her child should be mine.

  I know that there are many who consider this to be the height of irresponsibility, and I have no doubt that their objections would have been stronger still in the case of a boy. If gay men did not exist, society would have to invent us … by stigmatising strangers, it conceals the far greater dangers that lurk within the home. Far from threatening the family, we are its prime defence … a smokescreen to obscure the prevalence of paternal abuse. Even Freud, who first unearthed the evidence, chose to treat it as infantile fantasy for fear of offending his wealthy patrons. He knew not to go a taboo too far. We would do well to learn from other cultures, such as the Mohave Indians in America, where homosexuals are traditionally placed in charge of children: a role for which they are felt to have special aptitude.

  Candida’s hope of avoiding disputes was thwarted and her daughter has been removed from my charge. This is not the place to inveigh against what I regard as a gross injustice; but I should like to examine the forces that underlie it. I have recently received a pamphlet from a group calling itself Focus On The Family, which claims that ‘In the increased tolerance of homosexuality lies the greatest danger to the survival of civilisation’. This begs the question not only of the vast number of homosexuals whose work stands at the heart of civilisation (avoiding the familiar roll call of artists and philosophers, I would single out the mathematician Alan Turing, without whose code-breaking skills ‘civilisation as we know it’ might have fallen to Hitler) but of why the boundaries against barbarism must always be drawn in the bedroom. Surely the ever-worsening problems of homelessness, nationalism or Third World debt – to take three glaring examples – represent a greater threat to civilisation than society’s tolerance of two men making love?

  I too would like to focus on families and on the place of gay people within them. Families are bigger than conventional definitions. As adoptive parents know, they are not limited to those who share your blood; as stepparents know, they are not limited to those who share your name; as homosexuals know, they are not just about procreation … a view that is as outdated as that of the nineteenth-century politicians who wished to restrict adult suffrage to those who had a stake in the land. The struggle for the right to a family is as pertinent at the end of the century as the struggle for the right to vote was at the start.

  We are frequently exhorted by politicians and pundits to reassert family values. What are family values about if not love? Is that solely the province of two parents with two cars and two point four children … or of their counterparts with two point four servants a hundred years ago? Survey upon survey has shown that the rise in single-parent families has no bearing on the rise in crime and yet right-wing politicians continue to link them. Another recent survey has exposed the myth that teenage girls become pregnant in order to jump council housing-lists and yet it is still put forward by people who have never been near a council house except during an election campaign (which explains why they persist in regarding a fifteenth-floor flat in a tower block as a coveted prize).

  To give their sophistry authority, these politicians claim historical precedent and call their values Victorian. That may satisfy their yearning for a golden age of imperial power and social hierarchy, but, as historians have shown, the idea of the ideal Victorian family is an illusion. In 1861, for instance, at the height of Victoria’s reign, sixty per cent of first children were born out of wedlock; and, as for Victorian childcare, it was not until 1885 – a mere two years before the Queen’s Golden Jubilee – that the age of consent was raised from twelve to sixteen. The proposal provoked outrage in the House of Lords, where peers declared that they had long enjoyed access to this ‘unripe fruit’ and demanded the same rights for their sons.

  There is currently much talk of the problems posed by the break-up of extended families. I maintain that gay men and women are those extended families … we are brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and, not infrequently, fathers and mothers. But, instead of opening its heart and mind to acknowledge our contribution, society prefers to exclude us. Mrs Thatcher famously – fatuously – spoke of ‘pretended families’; but the true pretence is the perfect nuclear family. Now that all other nuclear protections have been exploded, is it not time to explode this one too?

  In fact, the rush of reactionary politicians to shore up the ‘traditional’ family is a sure sign of its obsolescence; a decline that is inevitable since the very forces that led to its creation – the rise of capitalism and the need for a stable workforce – are themselves threatened by the flexibility of modern capitalism and an economy that no longer requires so many jobs. And yet, afraid to confront new ideas and structures, conservatives (both large and small) are fighting a rearguard action to defend the status quo, retreating behind rusty ideologies which buckle under the strain.

  To return to the language of my post-bag: homosexuals are not freaks or perverts; our increased visibility over the past thirty years might best be described as a process of normalising the natural. There is still a great deal to be done; the ghetto is no answer to the closet. A Buddhist monk once told me that the purpose of existence is not to strive to become perfect but to strive to become human … the whole life is the holy life. In which case, just as the integration of all the aspects of one’s own personality is the key to a healthy life, so the integration of all its members is the key to a healthy society. Exclusion risks unleashing the twin forces of repression and revolution. This is why, although gay people may be a minority, securing our rights is not a minority concern. Homophobes must confront their prejudice and liberals their privilege to ensure that we are not merely tolerated on the fringes of society but are enabled to take our places at the heart of family life.

  The Observer, 13 June 1993

  1

  I rap your father’s head against the door … a personalised knocker seems such a strange – and telling – retirement present.

  ‘Who is it?’ your mother calls superfluously.

  ‘Leo Young.’

  ‘It’s not five o’clock yet.’ She slams the window shut. I shuffle on the mat with its inappropriate wording. This is absurd. Do they intend to keep to the letter of our agreement and the chime of the clock? I gain momentary satisfaction from switching the tail of their fretwork cow from ‘No milk today’ to ‘Six pints please’, until the futility of the gesture overwhelms me. Your mother opens the door. ‘I’m prepared to make an exception this time, but it really is most tiresome. An arra
ngement is an arrangement.’ I look at my watch. It is four fifty-four.

  ‘Is Pagan ready?’

  ‘Patience!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Even after three months of forced fortnights, I am not expecting this degree of rudeness.

  ‘Patience. We have no Pagan here.’ For one flesh-creeping moment, I take her at her word, but reassurance appears at the top of the stairs.

  ‘I told you to stay in your room until I called you, miss.’

  ‘I want to see Leo.’ The miss in question darts down the stairs and throws herself into my hug.

  ‘Must you make such an exhibition of yourself? Whatever will Uncle think?’

  ‘What did you mean “we have no Pagan here”?’ I ask, although I fear that I am beginning to understand.

  ‘We don’t, do we, Patience? We have a new name, or rather a name … since Pagan’s not so much a name as an act of defiance.’

  ‘You have no right!’ I rage.

  ‘We have every right. Patience has started a new school … begun a new chapter.’

  ‘It’s monstrous. A name isn’t just a tag on a uniform. It’s how she thinks of herself.’

  ‘And more importantly, how others think of her. What’s Pagan? Drugs and drums and child sacrifice. Whereas Patience is a virtue … an opera.’

  ‘And a card game for old women so lonely that they have no one to cheat but themselves.’

  ‘I hate it,’ Pagan says.

  ‘Nonsense! You’re far too young to hate anything.’

  ‘This is the height of cruelty.’

  ‘Pas devant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pas devant l’enfant,’ she insists in her worst wogs-begin-at-Calais tone. ‘Patience dear, will you see that you have everything ready for the weekend?’

  ‘I’ve already seen it.’

  ‘Would you like to come into the living room?’ she asks me. She turns to Pagan. ‘Remember what happened to Miss Answer-back!’

  I walk into the room where every cushion is plumped, every fringe primped and every surface polished, and recall your story of the royal visit for which your father told his groundsmen to whitewash the coal. He now sits, with his face concealed behind a newspaper like a cornered husband in a farce.

  ‘Father,’ your mother calls, ‘Mr Young is here.’

  He greets me gutturally, stands and holds out his hand. On a glance from your mother, he reconsiders and scratches his head. She picks up the paper, shakes it, folds it and places it in a rack marked Magazines.

  ‘I’ve been explaining to Mr Young about Patience.’

  ‘I heard,’ your father confesses. ‘We thought it for the best, old man. Not much of a change, really. Just a few letters but they make all the difference. You’ll soon get the hang of it. Fairly trips off the tongue.’ I think of how, despite every entreaty, my mother never came to terms with Leo. Now I am glad of the occasional Lenny; it is a passport to a vanished world. Will I be the only Pagan-speaker? Will I rule myself out of her present and become a relic of her past, by turns obsolete and quaint? ‘We had little choice. It was hard enough getting her into St Andrew’s in the middle of the year. If it weren’t for Mother sitting on the preservation committee with the Headmistress …’

  ‘She thought that the name might be disruptive.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘There was a lot of disquiet among parents when she let in a boy called Saddam.’

  ‘He doesn’t eat food; he sits on a bench in the corridor,’ Pagan interjects. ‘I wish I could.’

  ‘Don’t you like the food?’ I ask.

  ‘It tastes like poison.’

  ‘What a thing to say! Think of all the little black girls who are starving.’

  ‘Apart from the food, are you enjoying it more?’

  ‘I hate it. I want to go back to Miss Lister’s.’

  ‘She’s just had a few teething problems.’

  ‘Miss Hewson pulled my tooth out with a piece of cotton.’ She flashes a lopsided grin. ‘Then I put it under the pillow, but the fairies only gave me a pee.’

  ‘Ten pee.’

  ‘The hotel fairies gave me a pound. I thought seaside fairies were kinder.’

  ‘Ten pee is quite enough for one tooth, young lady,’ your father says. ‘What do the fairies want with your mouldy old molar?’

  ‘They can sell it.’

  ‘Who to? Would you like something from someone else’s mouth?’ He leers at her.

  ‘I would if I was old.’ She turns to me. ‘He has no teeth. He takes them out like a trick and snaps them and …’ she falls silent.

  ‘Really, Edgar! What on earth possessed you to do that?’ I am cheered by this sign of dissension.

  ‘I was just trying to buck her up; she looked glum.’

  I repel the image of your father stripped to the gums and return to the matter in hand. ‘What teething problems?’

  ‘Settling down, making friends, obeying her teachers: that sort of thing. It’s a traditional school which believes in the three “r”s.’ To listen to your father, you would think that she learnt nothing at Cottesmore Gardens but potato-prints and plasticine.

  ‘Patience has to realise that she’s not as special as she thinks she is,’ your mother adds.

  ‘What nonsense! What do you mean?’

  ‘Of course she’s special to us. I mean in regard to other children. Her teachers say that she fails to concentrate. She answers back; she’s a disruptive influence.’

  ‘I’m amazed. There’ve never been any problems before. Her general reports were excellent. And her drawing was considered exceptional.’

  ‘Ah, drawing,’ your mother says.

  ‘Drawing,’ your father echoes.

  ‘There’s been too much drawing.’

  ‘She’s six years old!’

  ‘I won a prize for my painting last week,’ a small voice speaks out.

  ‘That’s wonderful. Do you have it here?’

  ‘They wouldn’t buy it.’ Her eyes water. ‘It was for the dolphins. Everyone else had someone to buy theirs and they didn’t win.’

  ‘So that’s what all this is about?’ your mother says. ‘All this fuss over a little picture.’

  ‘It wasn’t little. It was of me and Leo.’

  ‘So it shouldn’t have been eligible for a prize. You were supposed to paint your family. The others chose mummies and daddies and dogs. How do you think that Grandpa and I felt to see a picture of a little girl – if it was a little girl; I really couldn’t tell – staring at a head in a box?’

  ‘It was a television!’

  ‘It made me shiver.’

  ‘I’d like to buy it, if I may.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she says sadly, ‘they’ve pulled it off the wall.’

  We return to London, pursued by your mother’s strict injunction against my attempting to unsettle Pagan. She insists that she has no wish to question the Court’s decision, and yet she cannot help feeling that it has been far too liberal in allotting my weekends; no sooner have they accustomed her to her new routine than I reintroduce her to the past … She need not worry. Pagan appears to view the prospect with indifference, as she sits listlessly in the car, rubbing breathy drawings on the glass. She disdains all her favourite songs, leaving me to accompany the teddy bears on their picnic and Cliff Richard on his summer holiday alone.

  Her arrival is marked by none of the extensive toy- and doll-kissing of previous visits. She even shrinks from Consuela, squirming out of her embrace on the grounds that the smell of onions on her apron is making her cry. She opts out of her prandial guessing-game and, on hearing that we are having tortilla, shows neither pleasure nor surprise; until the sight of Consuela’s pained face prompts her to relent and confide that she too is learning to cook.

  ‘For school?’

  ‘No, in the kitchen. She – the word ‘Granny’ is still taboo – ‘taught me how to make jam tarts. But she wouldn’t let me taste them except the broken ones. She said they w
ere for her ambulance. I said people who weren’t well won’t be hungry. She said they were to sell … I hope no one buys them and they go green.’

  Consuela’s offer to bake a cake which she can eat elicits no reaction. I take her into the living room, where she shuns her customary place on my knee in favour of a space under the seat of my armchair. I suspect that she is angling for a game of hide-and-seek, although there would be precious little mystery about where to find her; but she rejects the suggestion and insists that I stay where I am. She crouches with her face to the floor and clings to my ankles, as though they were the bars of a cage. She chatters to herself, rebuffing my response with the charge that it is naughty to listen. When I ask whether she feels cramped, she replies that she feels ‘safe’.

  She returns to her refuge after dinner and settles down to watch television. It seems that your parents limit her viewing in the early evening and ban it completely after seven p.m. ‘They won’t even let me switch on you, cos they say I see too much of you already.’ At the risk of extending the gulf between the ‘no’ of Hove and the ‘yes’ of Holland Park, I allow her to watch her fill … which she does through the frame of my calves. Her one distraction is the arrival of Trouble, although even he fails to arouse the expected enthusiasm.

  ‘Would it hurt if we cut off Trouble’s tail?’

  ‘What do you think? It’s not like clipping his fur … more like chopping off a leg.’