Other Halves

by Nick Alexander

  “That Dad has a boyfriend,” Luke said.

  “You have a boyfriend?” I asked Cliff, astonished.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “He’s really nice,” Luke continued. “And his name’s Rod.”

  “Rob,” Cliff corrected before raising his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

  “And you’ve met him? You’ve met this Rob?”

  Luke nodded. “He’s a tree doctor.”

  “Surgeon,” Cliff said. “He’s a tree surgeon. But he’s not my boyfriend, Luke. He’s just a friend.”

  I turned on Cliff now, with genuine outrage. “Well you kept that one quiet. Don’t you think that this is something I should know about?” I asked.

  “What?” He sounded genuinely confused.

  “If Luke’s hanging out with your new ‘boyfriend’ . . .” I said, making the quotes with my fingers.

  “They haven’t been ‘hanging out’,” Cliff said, aping my quotes. “They haven’t even met.”

  “Well Luke says they have.”

  “Yes, well, Luke’s lying.”

  “Dad!” Luke whined.

  “That’s not fair,” I said, noting this first breach in their solidarity. “I think Luke’s telling the truth and you know it. So blaming him because you’re too ashamed to admit the truth is grossly unfair.”

  “I’m not ashamed of anything. How dare you!”

  “Well then . . .”

  “OK. Whatever. Luke’s telling the truth,” Cliff said, sounding exhausted.

  “And has anyone thought to ask Luke how he feels about that?” I asked.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Cliff said.

  “Don’t swear, Cliff. Please. So, Luke. How do you feel about that?” I asked.

  Luke frowned. “About what?”

  “About your father. Wanting to be with a man?”

  Cliff gasped, then opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

  Luke creased his brow. “God, Mum!” he said. “He’s just gay. It’s not a crime. It’s not, like . . . the middle ages anymore or anything!”

  And that was when I knew that I had definitively lost this battle.

  Faced with another united front, I had no idea how to respond, and after a few speechless seconds, I muttered “You two are impossible,” gathered my things and in sheer embarrassment I walked out, slamming the door on it all.

  When I got home, I found James packing his suitcase in the bedroom. He looked up at me, said, “That didn’t go well, I take it?” and then, as I folded into tears, dropped the socks he was holding and wrapped me in his arms.

  His sympathy towards me lasted precisely as long as my sobs did, because as soon as I was able to explain that the tears were born not of Cliff’s reaction to the divorce papers, but of the fallout from my own lack of self-control, he too turned against me. “Bloody hell, Hannah!” he exclaimed, releasing me and stepping backwards. “You just blurted it out? Jesus! Think about the boy a little, won’t you?”

  The next morning, I was driving a still-vaguely-frosty James to Heathrow when Cliff phoned. I didn’t listen to the message until I got home.

  I entered the silent house and slumped onto the sofa then hit the voicemail button on my phone: “Hannah, it’s Cliff,” the message ran. “Luke says he wants to stay here for the week. He actually says he hates you, so well done on that front. I can’t say I blame him. That was a despicable trick you played last night.”

  I sighed and laid the phone down beside me, and stared at my reflection, alone, in the television. If I had had any tears left, I might have cried some more, but I just felt washed out and exhausted, unloved and yes, ashamed.

  I phoned Luke twice during the week but he didn’t take my calls so I left messages telling him that I was sorry for how things had gone, and that I had just wanted him to know all the facts so that he could make adult decisions.

  Eventually, a full eight days later, unable to stand it any longer, I went to the school gates to meet him. Luke was walking diagonally across the playground with Billy when he spotted me. Shockingly, he pretended not to have seen me and diverted, with Billy, towards the side gate.

  I ran along the street to catch up with them and after an initial bout of speed walking, Luke said something to Billy and they separated, Luke slowing down to allow me to catch up.

  “Luke!” I said. I was out of breath.

  He turned to face me. “I’m going to Billy’s,” he said, icily. “Dad’s picking me up later.”

  “Please come back with me tonight. We can call your dad and let him know. We need to talk, Luke.”

  “Only we don’t,” he said.

  “I—”

  “I hate you,” Luke said, interrupting me.

  “You don’t mean that. I know you don’t.”

  Luke nodded exaggeratedly. “I do. I wish you’d just go to Australia and stop ruining everyone’s lives.”

  “Luke!” I protested, hesitating between anger and a sudden desire to cry.

  Luke looked down at his feet, shook his head slowly in apparent disgust, and then turned and ran to catch up with his friend.

  As other kids streamed around me, I watched my son walking away until he reached the brow of the hill. When I heard him laughingly say a sentence containing the word, “Crazy,” I thought, You know what, he’s right. This is crazy. This is all, absolutely crazy.

  I dried my eyes and strode back to the car.

  The very next morning, the postman rang the bell and, in exchange for my signature, handed me an ominous-looking envelope bearing the moniker Jeremy Brown. Solicitor. Eyeing the envelope, I made myself a coffee, then sat down at the kitchen table to examine the contents.

  Inside were almost thirty sheets of paper. A quick scan revealed that they comprised the divorce forms, a Statement of Child Arrangements and a legal contract regarding the house. The fact that Cliff had hired a professional for all of this made me suspicious. I remembered only too well my meeting with Steven Bower-Reddington.

  The covering letter was clearly designed to put my mind at ease. In it Jeremy Brown explained that he had been hired by my husband to represent both of us in a sprit of uncompromising fairness, for the simple reason that despite the best intentions, without professional guidance, divorces could become messy.

  He explained that because some grounds had to be cited for the divorce, Cliff was filing on grounds of adultery. This, he said, would enable us to forgo the usual two-year separation period. He wanted to draw my attention to the fact that the child arrangements form, though acknowledging my desire to leave the country and according full parental responsibility in my absence to Cliff, explicitly ensured maintenance of equal parental rights over Luke at any time during which I was present in the United Kingdom, and at any time during which Luke, of his own accord, chose to visit me in Australia.

  Finally he explained that although the contract regarding the house contained a blank percentage regarding the proceeds from the sale I would receive, he strongly advised both Cliff and me to agree to the standard fifty-fifty split so that visible fairness could be seen to have been upheld by both parties in all dealings.

  The letter continued: As emptying, listing and selling the property at the current time would appear to be a lengthy process, your husband strongly suggests that the house be “dust-sheeted” and simply maintained, in stasis by himself until such a time as you have decided definitively on your future whereabouts and until such a time as the housing market has (hopefully) recovered. Your husband is prepared to assume all maintenance costs and relevant taxes in the meantime, and this would have the advantage of enabling you to expedite your relocation plans, which, I gather, are somewhat urgent.

  Reassuring letter notwithstanding, I read through every horrible line of legalese in that paperwork, but as the letter had claimed, everything did seem to have been drafted with the utmost fairness. Other than the fault for the divorce being attributed to Yours Truly, I really couldn’t find a single issue with
it, and even that, once I phoned Brown (and then the Citizen’s Advice Bureau to check) came to seem, if not fair exactly, then necessary at least.

  Finally, with a deep sigh, I settled down to do what I had been meaning to do for days. I phoned Cliff to apologise, an apology he accepted magnanimously.

  We discussed the paperwork, and Cliff reiterated that both Luke and he thought it in everyone’s best interest if I were to go and join James sooner rather than later, and that dust-sheeting the house in the meantime was the obvious option, at least until I was able to make a definitive statement about where I wanted to be. “If it goes on too long, I can always stick everything in storage and get some renters in,” he said.

  I asked him why he was being so damned reasonable, and he asked me if I had ever known him to be anything else.

  “You mean other than when you told me that James was dead?”

  “Other than the James thing,” he said, with a laugh, and I thought, Gosh. Are we supposed to laugh about that now?

  “And other than the fact that you—?”

  “And other than my confusion about my sexuality,” he said, interrupting me again to show that he was well aware of his faults.

  I was forced to admit that with those two exceptions, Cliff had been a model of reason for as long as I had known him. Certainly his equanimity over the divorce settlement was something I couldn’t fail to appreciate. “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “You take your time, and when you’re ready, you sign the paperwork and send it back to Brown,” Cliff said.

  “And then?”

  “And then you book yourself a flight to Brisbane, I guess,” he said, and I thought, God. Can it really be that simple? Have we really reached that point?

  “I’ll need to resign from the school and work out my notice period,” I said.

  “Yes. I suppose you will.”

  “How’s Luke doing?” I asked. “I miss him so much.”

  “He’s here,” Cliff said. “He wants to talk to you too. So are we done?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think we’re done.”

  “Goodbye, Hannah,” Cliff said, and with the paperwork before me, that goodbye felt shockingly final.

  After some scratchy microphone-blocking noises and some distant mumbling that sounded a lot like encouragement, Luke came on the line. “Hi, Mum,” he said.

  “Hi, Luke.”

  “Are you OK?” he asked me.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine, dear,” I told him. “Look, I’ve apologised to your dad, but I want to apologise to you too. I behaved dreadfully the other day.”

  “It’s OK, Mum,” Luke said. “Everyone’s stressed out at the moment.”

  “I miss you so much.”

  “Me too,” Luke said, and my heart fluttered.

  “You do?” I croaked.

  “Of course,” he said, then, “Can I come to yours this weekend? Would that be OK?”

  “Yes . . .” I gasped.

  “Can Billy stay too? On Saturday?”

  “Yes. Of course he can,” I said, tipping my head back to stop my tears from falling onto the Statement of Child Arrangements.

  Late that night, I phoned James to explain all the details. Through crunching sounds from the breakfast cereal he was eating, he told me that he loved me, that he missed me, but that there was no rush for anything. “Take your time,” he said. “Read everything carefully. Get legal advice if you have to. And then do what your heart tells you.”

  I slept fitfully, my dreams filled with impossible forms and scary lawyers, then awoke the next morning feeling as though I had spent the entire night discussing divorce arrangements – feeling so exhausted with the subject that I couldn’t summon a single coherent thought.

  It was a breezy sunny day and I wasn’t due at the school until the afternoon, so I took a long energetic walk into town in an attempt at clearing my head.

  When I got back, the pile of paperwork was still there of course, staring up at me accusingly from the kitchen table, and in a sudden frenzy, I signed every single sheet of paper, stuffed the lot into the return envelope, licked the seal, hesitated, pulled it all out to remove the house sale authorisation, then resealed the envelope and, lest I might change my mind, literally jogged to the post box.

  Back at the house, I looked up the dates for the coming summer break and then logged on to the Quantas website to book myself a return ticket to Brisbane, before savouring, over lunch, the knowledge that at least from the twentieth of June to the third of September, I knew what I would be doing and who I would be with, and that it would be far, far away from all of this.

  Beyond that, I decided that I wouldn’t, for now, even try to imagine what came next.

  That Saturday morning over breakfast, I told Luke about my plans.

  “You’re not going to try to make me come with you again are you?” he asked in dismay.

  I shook my head. “Absolutely not. That’s all over.”

  “Yeah!” Luke mugged.

  “I honestly think you’ll want to come one day,” I told him. “And I think when you do, you’ll really like it. But in the meantime I’m not going to do any more pushing, OK?”

  Luke nodded. “OK,” he said. He looked unconvinced.

  “That’s a promise,” I insisted.

  “OK.”

  “But if you ever do fancy some time in the sun, you just let me know and I’ll organise it, all right?”

  Luke nodded again.

  “So are we OK again?”

  Luke looked confused.

  “Are we friends again?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

  Though I had managed to sound very business-like about it all, I was gagging with emotion, and the second he headed up to his bedroom I turned to look out at the garden and silently cried.

  Cliff’s offer to dust-sheet the house took away a surprising chunk of the stress associated with the numerous changes happening in my life. Whether he had come up with this idea for the sole purpose of getting rid of me more quickly or because it truly did, as he claimed, make financial sense, it certainly made everything far more digestible. Leaving the house, changing country, committing to James, deciding where my future would be, even leaving Luke – it all seemed far less dramatic once I could pretend that nothing had really been decided, once I could tell myself that it was all, if I so decided, nothing more than a nice long holiday.

  In my heart of hearts I knew that this wasn’t the case, so in a way I was pretending. The “holiday” fiction allowed me to remain in denial about what was really happening to my life, but sometimes denial is the best place you can be.

  Despite my new holiday myth, I found myself watching Luke with new fervour. It was as if, knowing that I wouldn’t see him for over two months, I had developed tunnel vision in which his presence shimmered with uncanny intensity, to the point where I could see little else even though looking at him gave me a physical pain in my chest. Frequently Luke would catch me staring and ask, “What?” and I would reply with some platitude. “I was just looking at how tall you are now,” I would say, or, “I was just thinking that we need to get you some new jeans.” But I wasn’t. I was trying to burn every detail – the very essence of him – into my mind’s eye. And I was trying to imagine how long I could survive without him.

  Once the divorce papers had been signed and my trip had been booked, things eased considerably between Cliff and myself. We were both explicitly moving on and that seemed to take the tension out of our relationship. By May, things were calm enough that we could actually exchange a few banal phrases beyond those required to organise Luke’s trips back and forth.

  One particular day, Cliff admitted that he wanted Luke to spend the Friday night at mine so that Rob could stay over, and that conversation felt like a milestone in our relationship. Being able to talk calmly to my ex-husband about his new boyfriend struck me as almost absurdly sophisticated and really something of an achievement on both of
our parts.

  “So is Rob becoming a permanent fixture in your life, Cliff?” I asked in my special fake-casual voice.

  “I’m not sure,” Cliff replied. “I hope so.”

  I suggested that if this was the case perhaps I could meet him, even if only briefly, and Cliff replied that, yes, maybe I could.

  My relationship with Luke had also calmed down to the point where eventually I was able to ask him what he thought about Rob. This led to a stunning revelation – that Luke had never met Rob at all. Cliff had been right: Luke had been lying.

  “Would you like to meet him?” I asked. “Or do you think it’s better this way?”

  Luke shrugged. “It’s up to Dad, really, isn’t it?” he said.

  Partly out of sheer nosiness and partly because I suspected that the second I was out of the country Rob would move in with Cliff, I was keen to meet him myself. Oh, I didn’t want some agonising sit-down dinner, but I did want to exchange a few phrases so that I could get a feel for the guy and at least have an opinion on whether or not he was someone I was happy for Luke to hang out with.

  But though Cliff agreed in principle that this was a good idea, he seemed to do everything possible to make sure that it never actually happened. Rob was always kept out of sight of both Luke and myself, and I started to wonder why that was; I started to worry what might be wrong with the guy that Cliff should be so reluctant for anyone to see him. So, of course, I started to scheme as to how I could bump into him of my own accord.

  TWELVE

  Cliff

  Even trying to suggest that Rob might meet anyone proved explosive. Initially, because she had requested it, I asked Rob if he would meet Hannah. Rob and I had been getting on well and ever since Luke had revealed his stunning tolerance for all things gay, a tolerance that left me feeling as proud as I ever have, I had been fantasising about integrating Rob into my broader life in a more satisfying manner for all concerned.

  “No,” Rob said simply, when asked.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why the hell not?”