“God, do I have to justify myself?”
“I’m not asking you to justify yourself,” I said. “I just want to know why.”
“Look, Cliff,” Rob said. “You asked me if I would mind. You have my answer: Yes. I mind.”
That conversation was followed by a shorter-than-usual visit (he left at eight-thirty rather than ten) and the withholding of all physical contact – a first. It was hardly encouraging, and so it took me two weeks and four further visits, not to mention repeated prompting from Hannah, before I dared revisit the subject.
This time I was sharp enough to wait until Rob was leaving before I tackled him – I wasn’t going to forgo my dose of intimacy this time around. “Rob,” I said. “I know you said ‘no’ already, but I was wondering if you’d reconsider meeting Hannah. Just for a coffee.”
“Sure,” Rob said. He was pulling on his coat.
“Oh. Really?” I replied, disconcerted.
“Sure. I’ll reconsider,” he said. He squinted at the ceiling for a moment. “There, done. I’ve reconsidered. The answer is still ‘no’.”
I pulled a face.
“Cliff. I’m married. You know this. I have kids, I have—”
“Me too,” I interrupted. “And Luke will be living here come June. So it would just be easier if you would spend five minutes meeting him and his mother to put everyone at ease. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Now, you want me to meet them both?” Rob asked, pulling on his lumberjack hat – it was raining outside.
“Ideally, yes,” I said, annoyed, but despite myself thinking how cool he looked in the hat.
“There’s no way, Cliff,” Rob said, pulling his keys from his pocket and heading for the door. “So drop it.”
“So what happens in June, Rob?” I asked. “What happens once Luke’s here?”
Rob paused at the front door just long enough to deliver his parting shot: “Who says we’ll even be together by then?”
So I was worried. Rob had been coming to my flat twice or three times a week for almost three months and though his other life as we referred to it, remained strictly off limits, we had spent enough time together to know that, fundamentally, we got on well. In fact, we got on brilliantly – we agreed on politics (both centre-left), we liked similar foods, we enjoyed the same films, appreciated each other’s music collections, fitted together perfectly in bed and best of all – and most surprisingly for me – were having lots of good sex.
Sex had always been a complicated subject for me, and my fifteen years with Hannah had done nothing to ease that. Rob’s attitude was that sex – which he generally referred to as a quickie – was as unworthy of concern as any other activity. Whether Rob had engineered his belief systems to justify cheating on his wife, or whether he was just built that way and the cheating naturally followed, this down-to-earth attitude was exactly what I needed. It neutralised a lot of the guilt I felt myself around the subject. Seducing someone (particularly a man), or allowing myself to be seduced, were both complicated for me, and yet responding to Rob’s request for a quickie, or even sometimes a quick quickie, a request presented with all the nonchalance of a request for a coffee refill, enabled me, somehow, to relax about the subject. Gone too was any requirement for performance. If one of us couldn’t get it up, or one of us couldn’t come – and we all know that these things happen – in Rob’s book, it was as noteworthy as leaving that cup of coffee to go cold; it simply didn’t matter. After trying to perform for Hannah all these years, as much to reassure myself as her, that was a major relief.
In many ways, Rob’s grounded nature reminded me of James, and I wondered if there wasn’t something terrifyingly Freudian lurking in those particular depths. But the implications of that were so unsettling that I decided early on simply never to go there, and rather successfully blocked any thoughts on the subject from my mind. It was the only aspect of my new life that I never discussed with Jenny either, the fact of which probably speaks reams.
Rob cancelled his next visit. He claimed it was because he needed, bizarrely, to cut down someone’s Leylandii after dark, but I suspected that he was teaching me a lesson for having brought up the subject of Hannah and Luke again, so I gave my family reunion project up as a bad job. If Rob would not meet Luke then there was no reason for him to meet Hannah anyway, I reasoned. One five-day period without him was enough to remind me that what mattered here was not that our relationship fit some external model of normality, but that it quite simply survived. I would just have to organise regular evening activities for Luke so that Rob and I could continue our “relationship”, within the constrained space that Rob allowed.
Three weeks from the end of term, Hannah phoned me at work. She was in London renewing her passport and had received a call from Luke’s school. He had, they shockingly claimed, attacked another boy. One of us needed to go in, and that particular day, this meant me.
By the time I got to the school, the victim of Luke’s aggression had been shipped off to Accident and Emergency, where he was reportedly receiving stitches to his eyebrow. Luke and Billy, who was also involved, were sitting on a bench outside the headmistress’ office looking muddy and sheepish.
“She’s not there,” Luke said the second I arrived. “She said she’ll be back in five minutes.”
I sat down on a chair opposite and looked at the two boys. “So what happened?” I asked.
Luke shrugged.
“A shrug won’t cut it this time,” I said.
Luke shrugged again anyway.
“Do you have any idea how much trouble you could be in?” I asked. “You need to tell me your side of the story before she gets here.”
Luke glanced at Billy and I saw him shake his head almost imperceptibly.
“He was giving Billy a hard time,” Luke said.
I looked at Billy. He had mud all up his left side and his collar was ripped. He reminded me of myself during my own school days. “Have they phoned your parents?” I asked.
“They’re both working,” Billy said.
“What was he hassling you about?”
Billy shrugged. “Nothing.”
At that moment, the headmistress appeared. She was a stern-looking woman in the Margaret Thatcher mould, who I had always found to be firm but fair in past dealings. Her name was Mrs Slocombe, which always supplied a brief pique of amusement when we met. I presumed that, luckily for her, most modern kids knew nothing of Are You Being Served?, nor of Mrs Slocombe’s endless problems with her pussy. I wondered if Luke was old enough yet to share the joke with.
“Mr Parker!” she said, opening her door and ushering me in.
“Mrs Slocombe,” I said, stifling a smirk.
“So, as I’m sure you have gathered, this is a rather delicate affair,” she said as soon as the door was closed. “Unfortunately, the boy Luke hit, Karim, is claiming that it was a racially-motivated incident, which puts us all in a rather difficult position.”
I frowned at the preposterous nature of the accusation. “I really rather doubt that,” I said. “Luke doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”
“Well neither Luke nor Billy have provided any other explanation, so I’m afraid that we only have Karim’s word to go on. Now we haven’t got the police involved yet because, frankly, knowing Karim’s parents, they won’t be keen to make a fuss, but unless we can get to the bottom of what actually happened, it may still be the best option.”
“The police?!” I exclaimed.
“A boy has been injured,” Mrs Slocombe said with a shrug. “Action may need to be seen to be taken.”
“OK, well we had better get Luke in,” I declared. “Maybe he’ll talk to me.” Upon which Mrs Slocombe shouted Luke’s name in an astonishingly loud voice that made me physically jump.
Once he was seated beside me, I told him, “So, things are getting serious here, Luke. You need to tell us what happened. Because Karim is saying you were being racist.”
“Racist?” Luke sai
d. “No way.”
“Did you call him Osama Bin Laden?” Mrs Slocombe asked.
Luke shrugged and stared at his feet. “He called Billy worse.”
“What did he call Billy?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Did you call him Osama because he’s Arab?” I asked.
“No, I . . . It doesn’t matter.”
“Luke. You’re not helping yourself here,” I said. “Once accusations of racism are made then things are out of hand. You need to tell us what happened.”
“He wrote all over Billy’s books,” Luke said.
“What did he write?”
“Just stuff.”
It was like extracting blood from a stone, but by interrogating Luke and then Billy and then the two together, and by forcing poor Billy to empty his schoolbag, we were able to discover that Karim had crossed out Billy’s name on all of his schoolbooks and written “Ellen” instead.
“Why Ellen?” the headmistress asked.
Both Billy and Luke stared at the floor.
I sent the boys back outside so that I could speak to the headmistress privately.
“Well?” she asked, once the door had closed again.
“I think I know what this is about,” I said.
“Good. Then please share. I really want to get to the bottom of this.”
“Billy’s mother lives with her partner. A woman.”
“Yes. I’m aware of that.”
“So I think we can be pretty sure Karim was taking the mickey out of Billy because of his mothers.”
“Because of his mother’s . . . ?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Because of his mother’s what?”
“Oh. No. Because of his mothers. As in the plural of mother. Ellen is an American chat-show host, she’s a lesbian, so, his calling Billy ‘Ellen’ will be a reference to that.”
“Ah. Yes, I see.”
“You’ve seen Billy’s clothes, right?” I asked.
The headmistress nodded.
“So you can see that he was being bullied.”
“I can’t really make that deduction, no,” she said. “And unless we get the whole story, I think getting the police in may still be the best option. They have a tendency to get to the bottom of these things.”
I had been casually flicking through Billy’s geography exercise book as I spoke to her, and now I had reached the end, I flicked it closed, revealing what looked, initially, like a game of hangman on the back cover. On closer inspection though, the hanging man had glasses and a Tintin quiff like Billy’s. Beneath it, the completed letters of the “game” read, “Sharia Law: Hang The Queers.”
“Ah,” I said, turning the exercise book so that it faced Mrs Slocombe. “And what about that?”
“Oh dear,” she said with a sigh.
“Indeed. How does homophobia stack up against racism in the great league table of modern wrongs?” I asked.
She leaned towards me to study the picture, then sat back in her chair, pursed her lips and said a prolonged, “Humm.”
After ascertaining that Karim had indeed been defacing Billy’s books with death-sentence artwork, Mrs Slocombe and I resumed our discussion. “Between you and me, I don’t think any of this would have happened if Billy’s mother had kept her private life private.”
“Really?” I said, feeling a swell of outrage rising.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for live and let live. But kids will be kids, and at this age they’re all homophobic. Billy was bound to be hassled about it once it became known.”
“And that’s OK, is it?”
“Not at all. I’m not condoning it. No, of course not. I’m just saying that it’s a fact of life.”
“And racism, then? Is that not a fact of life?”
“Well we do everything we possibly can to combat racism. I’m sure you’re aware of some of our actions.”
I nodded. I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. For the first time in my life, I felt the urge to become militant. I wanted to say, “So gay parents should just keep it a secret? Gay partners should be banned from picking their kids up at school so that everyone can just pretend that we don’t exist?” But I knew that Luke would hate me for that. He had already intimated that both he and Billy agreed that Billy’s mother should have been more discreet about her living arrangements.
Instead I asked, “So what do you do at the school to combat homophobia?”
Mrs Slocombe frowned at me. “I’m sorry?”
“You say you do everything you can to combat racism.”
“Yes. We have a number of programs that fight—”
“So what do you do to combat homophobia?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not currently part of the curriculum,” she said.
“So, nothing at all?”
“No. No, we don’t specifically have, um, a policy on that.”
“Might that not explain why the kids all seem to be so homophobic?”
“Yes, all right,” she said. “Yes, I get your point. We should probably look into that.”
As I drove Billy home that night, he begged me not to mention what had happened to Brenda or Sue. We came across Brenda carrying a huge bag of clothes and gave her a lift for the final half a mile. She seemed far more concerned at the state of Billy’s uniform than at what might have occurred. “I’ve just been to the launderette,” she told him, fingering his blazer. “I’ll have to hand wash that now. As if I don’t have enough to do.” Turning to me, she added, “You come out of a day of slog, spend two hours in the launderette and then have to go home and do it all again. Honestly! Kids!”
It was fair enough, and I could see her point, but I couldn’t help but wince at the memories of my own mother slapping me because someone else had dragged me through the mud, and I admired Billy for not revealing how this had all come about.
I realised the multiple stresses upon the boy, caught between taking flak at school because he was being raised by two women, yet hiding those stresses from the women in question to avoid making them feel guilty for his troubles. In that moment, I came to like Billy a lot, and I decided that Luke had a friend worth defending.
A week later Hannah and I were summoned to the school once again to meet Karim and his parents. Mister and Mrs Khoury were mortified by their son’s behaviour, that much was clear.
“What on Earth has got into the boy?” Mrs Khoury declared. “We’re not even Muslim.”
“We left Persia to get away from all of that sharia silliness,” her husband remarked, holding his son’s drawing in one trembling hand.
Karim, his brow beautifully stitched, stared at his feet until the criticism moved onto Luke. When Hannah asked him whether he thought that punching Karim had been the right solution to this particular problem, Luke, perfectly coached by me, declared that, No, violence was never the answer, before apologising separately to both Karim and his parents.
“He’s a good boy,” Mister Khoury told Hannah. “You’ve brought him up well. That much is clear.”
On the way home, the moral dilemma of the situation was clearly playing on Luke’s mind. “Dad?” he asked. “I know I had to say sorry and everything. But it wasn’t really wrong to punch Karim, was it?”
I glanced at his puzzled face, then back at the road. I thought about my own father and the fact that the only time he had ever showed me any respect was when I had beaten another boy senseless. I would not become my father. “You could have just told a member of staff,” I offered instead. “Don’t you think that might have been easier?”
“But I did,” Luke said. “Billy did too. But it didn’t make any difference. Karim wasn’t going to stop punching Billy because a teacher told him to. It just made it worse.”
“Yes, I understand that,” I said. “But did splitting Karim’s eyebrow actually stop him?”
Luke nodded energetically. “Well yeah!” he said. “Of course it did. He wouldn’t dare touch him again.”
<
br /> “Then I don’t know,” I admitted.
“With people like Karim, whacking them one is the only thing that works,” Luke said. “You can’t just let someone beat your best friend up, can you?”
I suspected from the bullies I had come across in my own childhood that Luke was probably right, and I felt surprisingly proud of him for standing up for his friend, and relieved that he was capable of landing a blow on a big guy like Karim and coming out on top. But I knew if I sanctioned violence as a solution, it would, at some point, come back to bite me, and again, my father’s memory lingered over me like a cloud so I simply said, “Hum,” winked at my son, and left the question hanging there.
Amazingly, a few weeks later, I came home from work to find Luke, Billy and Karim playing on the Xbox.
I put down my briefcase and removed my tie, then headed to the corner of the room so that the boys could see me. “Hello,” I said, shouting over the noise of the racing game they were playing. “Hi, Karim,” I added. “How’s the eye?”
They were so absorbed by the game they barely looked up.
“Luke. May I have a word?” I asked.
“I’ll just finish this level,” he said, “then we can pause it.”
I went through to the bedroom to change and was just pulling on a T-shirt when Luke put his head around the door. “Is it about Karim?” he asked.
I nodded, beckoning him in. “Yes,” I said once he had closed the door behind him. “I thought we had an agreement that you would ask before bringing any new friends home.”
“Yeah, but you said anyone you don’t know,” Luke said.
“Exactly.”
“But you know Karim.”
I laughed. “I don’t think meeting someone in the headmaster’s office because you’ve whacked him in the face for being a homophobic bully really counts as meeting him, do you?”
Luke frowned but nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “Do we need to go out then?”
I sighed and put my suit in the closet. “First explain what’s going on here,” I said. “Are you two friends now?”
Luke shrugged. “Kind of.”
“He’s not pushing Billy around anymore?”
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