The Child's Child (5 page)

Bashir al Khalifa had been their friend, and they were with him in that Soho club. A bunch of thugs who were something to do with the English Defence League had set about him at three
in the morning when they all emerged from the club. They called him all the names people like that use to insult gay men, and perhaps they abused him rather than Andrew and James because my brother and his friend hadn’t stripes of purple and white running through their hair and weren’t wearing white suits. But they too were surrounded by the EDL men and friends who joined them out of the gathering crowd. They punched Bashir to the ground, kicking him, and one of them pulled a knife out of his pocket and stabbed him. When Andrew and James struggled with them in an attempt to pull them off, they too were thrown to the ground and might have suffered Bashir’s fate if the police hadn’t arrived.

“We’re covered with bruises and sore all over, but nothing’s broken.” Andrew made a face and rubbed his left shoulder. “I’ve never been kicked before. It’s worse than being punched.”

“I don’t know,” said James. “It depends on the size and probably the youth of one’s assailant and what size boots he takes. We spent the rest of the night and some of the morning in a police station telling them what we could.”

“It wasn’t much.” Andrew shook his head. “We knew him and we liked him, didn’t we, James? But all we really knew was that he was gay and an actor.”

They had to go back to the police station later on. I sat about all the afternoon, reading
The Vicar of Wrexhill
and thinking Frances Trollope wasn’t a patch on her son Anthony. How oppressive it must have been for those English nineteenth-century writers who weren’t
allowed
to write about sex at all; how nice, good babies apparently came simply as the result of a wedding ceremony, while wicked, bad babies came because of an unnamed sin. And how they harped on marriage, how they clung to it, even the greatest of them, even Dickens. I’ve already said that we don’t expect reality from him, and perhaps we understand how, in satisfying his public, he makes sure that in
Great Expectations
Estella’s parents are securely married, though it’s most unlikely that a convict
and a slum woman would have been. Back in those days my friend Sara’s baby would be one of the good ones because Sara is married, while Damian’s girlfriend’s baby would be bad, stigmatised for ever because Fay has told me that, though the law has now changed, in those days, even if the mother and father of an illegitimate child got married after the birth, the marriage wouldn’t legitimise it.

Andrew phoned to say he and James had to pick out one of the men who attacked Bashir, at an identity parade. They did it separately and both picked out the man called Kevin Drake. Later, from another lineup, they’d go to see if they could pick out the one who kicked Bashir in the head. Both of them hated doing this, though they knew that the man they had to identify killed someone for no more reason than that he was homosexual.

They failed to identify the man called Gary Summers and were relieved they had failed, but were now responsible for a man being charged with murder, and James particularly dreaded having to be a witness in court. That wouldn’t happen when Kevin Drake came up before the magistrate that morning. He would plead not guilty and be committed for trial to the crown court. Both Andrew and James would probably be required then, and though Andrew said he was sure that when the time came he could face it without too much angst, James, who had more imagination than my usually cheerful brother, said that if he was cross-examined, if for instance some barrister asked him if his testimony had been influenced by “the kind of books he writes,” he might find himself unable to speak or else burst into tears.

“I know what you’re thinking, Sis,” Andrew said to me. “You’re thinking that if he does, that the judge will feel that these queers are all the same. Crying, struck dumb, they’re all the same.”

“I wasn’t thinking that. Don’t
you
ever think that since your guesses about what’s going on in other people’s heads are always wrong, you might stop guessing?”

I was having lunch with Sara that day. She was just back from her honeymoon and now she knew she was pregnant. She’d had the test. Of course she knew this or was pretty sure before her wedding, but now it had been confirmed and she and Geoff were overjoyed. Both of them had got an idea in their heads that they couldn’t have children.

I asked her why she thought this, and she said because they had both had relationships before “without issue,” as she put it, giggling.

“But you were on the pill, weren’t you? And no doubt Geoff and his previous girlfriends were using something.”

“Oh, yes, I know. And as soon as I stopped, I got pregnant. But I suppose I don’t really trust these things.”

“You will now,” I said.

In Verity’s day there were pregnancy tests, she once told me. I was amazed. I thought early detection had come about in my own lifetime. But, no, the woman who thought she might be pregnant had a sample of her blood injected into a rabbit, and if she was right, the rabbit died. I think that’s how it was. Doctors didn’t much like having this done, and one woman Verity knew was told to wait and see because “you wouldn’t want to kill a poor little rabbit, would you?” There was still a long time to go before you could buy a home pregnancy test over the counter.

T
ALKING TO
the police, being questioned, and facing the possibility of a court appearance had a bad effect on James. He couldn’t write. He was starting a new novel and was pleased with it, but now he had a kind of writer’s block, something that had never happened to him before. When he closed his eyes, he saw the killing of Bashir all over again. He heard the man’s desperate cries and saw the blood spouting from a stab wound. Things were very different for Andrew, who was coming to accept what had
happened. It was terrible, it was meaningless, but it was in the past now and they had to get over it.

James said, “How long, O Lord, how long?” meaning when will people accept homosexuality, all of them, as just another lifestyle, and I told him—unnecessarily and pointlessly—that prejudice targets others who differ from the norm, ethnic minorities and the disabled, members of certain religious bodies, the overweight and even redheads.

“It’s not the same,” James said. “When did you last hear of a woman who hasn’t got a husband being set upon by thugs because she’s had a baby? When? It never happens.”

I couldn’t argue with that because he was right. I
had
never heard of a single mother being attacked because she was unmarried, though maybe they were seventy or eighty years ago. But James was off in telling me I should find a worthier cause to support than “little bastards and their mums,” God knew there were plenty. I didn’t support them, I told him, they didn’t need anyone’s support, they were not persecuted. Ever optimistic Andrew started laughing at us, telling us—he had got hold of statistics from somewhere—that homophobic attacks were becoming less frequent. The assault on and murder of Bashir was the first in a long time. Still, he was sympathetic to James in his way, though I was not sure that telling a fiction writer he’s got too much imagination for his own good was the best way to go about it. For his part, once they’d got past the trial, Andrew would teach himself to forget the whole affair.

Meanwhile, I had begun to write. There was more reading to do, but the writing had to begin and I was asking myself if, considering the subject I had chosen, it was possible not to get emotionally involved. How to convey the hope, the dread, the panic, and the horror and finally the absolute, beyond-a-doubt confirmation. This was the point at which so many young girls decided that they preferred death to disgrace and drowned themselves.
Of course, I’m not writing fiction, I am writing about fiction. I should be detached, I should be objective. It was easier for a man. He could stand outside the issue because he could only experience an unwanted pregnancy vicariously and often not even then, but I am not a man.

I had told myself that this was the point at which, the research virtually finished, I would begin
The Child’s Child.
It was weeks now, a couple of months, since I had brought the book home from Martin Greenwell’s house, and I was starting to feel guilty about it. Lying on this table or that in this big house, it seemed to reproach me as I came into the room where it was, its bright, tasteless cover eyeing me and telling me I was neglecting it. So I sat down and wrote a letter to Toby Greenwell—the first letter as against an e-mail I had written for years—apologising to him for not as yet having started on the book and pleading pressure of work. No reply came from him, and that made me feel worse. Andrew, who came in briefly to tell me how unhappy James was at the prospect of appearing in court, said I should remember that I wasn’t an agent, I wasn’t being paid for doing this—what was wrong with me?

I
N THE
end I tucked the book under a cushion on Verity’s chaise longue so that it was out of sight. There it remained while I worked on the thesis in solitude. It really was solitude for I had hardly seen anything of Andrew and James since the day my brother told me about the Bashir al Khalifa murder. That they were there I knew from the faint hum of the television from Andrew’s living-room across the hall, a sighting of him turning at the top of the stairs to wave to me. As a result I had lost my fear of James’s coming to live at Dinmont House and of our all being able to share without constantly bumping into each other. I might almost have been the sole occupant for all I saw of them.

Until that evening it hadn’t been important. I assumed that by this time Andrew had cured James of his fears and all was now well. In which case we could perhaps all meet and have that supper together which had been refused last time. I didn’t just walk in; I thought discretion might be better and knocked on the door. Instead of calling to me to come in, my brother opened the door and said, “I thought you were the ghost.”

“The ghost?”

“James says there is one. It knocks on doors.”

James was half-sitting, half-lying in an armchair, staring at the ceiling. I could tell by just looking at him that his fears were still with him. He didn’t speak but turned to me a small, rueful smile and that in itself seemed very unlike him. Andrew said he was
going to get the two of them something to eat and did I want to join them? James didn’t move.

For the first time I was glad our circumstances made us share a kitchen. Andrew got smoked salmon and cream cheese and a loaf out of the fridge while he talked. While he was resigned to appearing in court and answering searching questions put to him by Kevin Drake’s counsel, for James this had become not just an unpleasant prospect but a kind of doom. He could see nothing beyond it. The date of the trial, set for November, had become his death date. It was an absolute finality. He had become ill, couldn’t write, and scarcely went out.

He sat, Andrew said, or more likely lay down, upstairs and he barely ate. Andrew had to go to work but he said that he devoted more time to James than to work.

“I’ve never before come across anyone so imprisoned—for that’s what it is—in fear.”

These words were so uncharacteristic of my brother that I found myself turning away from the pain in his face. He truly loved James, I could see that. “I won’t join you,” I said. “Better not.”

He gave me one of those uncharacteristic kisses. “Good night, Sis.”

Next day, when his lover was in a sedative-induced sleep, he told me how James had become humble and curiously meek. He constantly apologised. Over and over he said he was sorry, but he couldn’t help himself. Andrew said that in the days before witnessing the murder, James never spoke like that. Andrew had never known him to say he was sorry. James was a different person, he said, the smoothness, the sophistication, and the sexiness (Andrew’s words) all gone. Sometimes, when James had taken one of the doctor’s sleeping pills and I was taking a break from the thesis, Andrew and I talked it over in my living-room or Verity’s study. What were we to do? How could he ever be actually
got to court? Could he somehow, by legitimate means, avoid this ordeal? Was there some let-out? There are all sorts of reasons for getting out of being a juror; do the same rules apply for avoiding being a witness in a murder case? Our mother, Fay, said not when she looked in later, and she should know. She didn’t understand what was wrong with James and put it down to what she called “affectation.” No one was going to be unkind to him. Counsel might and likely would say that he was mistaken and try to show he was not a reliable witness, but he wouldn’t be called a liar.

“Ah, diddums,” she said when Andrew was out of the room to check on James, “no one’s going to make him cry.” She had read James’s first novel and said she couldn’t understand how anyone who could describe such vicious acts and write such penetrating dialogue could be so feeble.

“You know what he’s most scared of?” Andrew said when he came back. “One of the things. He’s afraid counsel for the defence will ask him about gay men’s lifestyle. What were two highly educated men like him and me doing in a club like that in the early hours of the morning?”

“He or she may ask that,” Fay said.

“Would
you
?”

“I don’t know. I’m not likely to be in that situation. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’d ask a similar question of a comparable man and a girl in a similar club at the same sort of time.”

“James will never see it like that. He’ll see it as being singled out because he’s gay. The trial of Oscar Wilde may have been more than a hundred years ago, but he says things haven’t changed that much. The public may tolerate gay people, but they don’t want to know what we do, and if their attention is drawn to it, as the jury’s will be, they’ll all be disgusted. I’m telling you what James believes, not necessarily what I think.”

“Necessarily?”
said Fay.

“Not what I think, then.”

“That fantasy of his is meaningless. Things have changed enormously. The law has changed. Ask him if he thinks you could have discussed this subject with your
mother
even fifty years ago.”