Equivocator (6 page)

‘No offence but a baby is a parasite,' she says, out of nothing. ‘It will leech every particle of nourishment from a mother, even if it kills her. A baby is your enemy, in that limited sense. Isn't that so?'

‘Well, I suppose so – in a strictly scientific sense. But—.'

‘Now, where were we? Yes, tell me, what are you doing in Wales, dear?' Elise asks.

‘Oh, a conference. And I didn't want to lose the chance of seeing you, darling.'

‘
Another
conference? Whatever can be left to confer about? So, tell me, how are those mummies and sphinxes and suchlike faring, Seb? Much as before, I imagine. I can't think where you got your passion for cadavers – it certainly wasn't from me. And you have given a learned paper? On?'

I shift in my seat, embarrassed. ‘A bit of a whimsical-sounding title – “New Light on the Abomination of Monthu”.'

‘Dear oh dear!' She chuckles with relish, a luminous silver-grey figure in her immaculate silk blouse, a cameo at the neck. ‘Sorry,' she says, choking with giggles like a girl. ‘But – honestly! And who or what is or was this Monthu?'

‘Well …'

‘On second thoughts, don't tell me! What world do you people live in? Wars and invasions and persecution – these, Sebastian, are abominations. Streams of refugees coming out of Syria and Sudan and Iraq – yes, you see, I do keep up with the news and I trust you do too. Sometimes these poor people seem to be flocking out of the TV into my living room. I can hardly breathe for abominations. If you are interested in the real thing.'

I want to cheer her on. She still suffers reality to imprint itself on her conscience. My mother remains courageously enrolled on the side of practical ethics. Elise remains Elise, for all her daunted awareness that her brain may betray her. Snaring her hand in both of mine, I rub it with my thumbs. She must have seen the homage in my face, the gratitude. And, moved by it, she asks if there's anything I need.

‘I need to ask you about someone.'

‘Yes?'

‘A friend of Dad's. Rhys Salvatore.'

‘Never heard of him,' Elise says firmly and withdraws her hand. ‘Next question.'

I deflate, thinking: whatever did I expect? And my quest seems as anachronistic as a fossil hunt.

I divert Elise by describing a mineshaft I explored in Egypt. My friend and I were checking out Roman mine workings, leaving our equipment at the surface, to try out techniques used by the original amethyst-miners, some of them children. They worked in near-dark, with the most basic of tools. I went first, Aziz puffing along in my wake. We penetrated to the point where the narrowing tunnel fell sheer away. I made out hack-marks on the walls, perhaps left by the children.

I held my lamp over the drop. And there below me was … something terribly human. A basket. Just an ordinary basket of woven reeds like those used by present-day peasants.

‘Two thousand years go by,' I tell Elise, who's listening intently, breathing deep. ‘Egypt falls. Rome falls. The British Empire falls. The miner's lunch box is still there. Never decaying. Down those shafts nothing changes – there's no humidity. It's not subject to time. The basket remains exactly as the miner left it. Then my friend and I clap eyes on it.'

‘What do you suppose they had for lunch, Seb?'

‘Bread, certainly. Figs? Fish? Falafel?'

‘Couldn't you, I don't know, hook it up or something?'

‘I stretched but it was too far down and there was nothing to hold on to. A parlous place to fall – the basket being on a ledge and the shaft pitching way down beyond that. We had nothing we could use to hoist it up. I expect it's still there.'

‘And I suppose Aziz was your lover?'

‘Pardon?'

‘You heard. Yes, of course I know! What kind of ninny do you take me for? Once you asked for a cat,' she continues, without a pause, leaning forward in her chair as if this was the whole point of the conversation. ‘Remember that?'

I shake my head.

‘Of
course
you can have a cat, your dad said – he was just back from his travels, with bundles of notes to write up and in a sunny mood – and he started play-punching you. Being nice. Of course he was volatile, he could turn. Just like that. In Iran, he told you, every neighbourhood has a
laat
. A boss-cat who beats the crap out of any other cat. We'll get you a
laat
.'

‘And what did I say?'

‘You said you didn't want a nasty horrible
laat
, you just wanted a pussy cat. To cuddle. Jack started to mimic your manner. As if your gentleness was soft and prissy. As if you were not the offspring he'd envisaged. He was doing these limp-wristed gestures and calling you Pansy. He hurt you; he fully intended to hurt you. I was disgusted. I objected. He said, “Oh but pansies are such tewwibly charming flowers!” I thought: it's something in himself Jack's parodying. You were cut to the quick. But I thought – and this has just come back to me: one day Seb will be taller and stronger than Jack. He's already gaining on him. You see? So,' she asks abruptly, ‘when are you going back to Manchester?'

‘No, Elise, I'm not at Manchester any more.'

‘Oh, I think you are.'

‘No, darling. Really. I live in London now.'

‘You're sure about that? Think about it.'

*

It was the Manchester of my first love, Justin Knight. And also of James Anderton, Chief Constable and evangelical Christian, who harried gays, accusing AIDS victims of ‘swirling in a human cesspool of their own making'. For Anderton queers threatened the straight population. They were rats that harboured fleas that spread the plague. Officers on motorboats cruised the locks and bridges of the Ship Canal with spotlights.

So this is who I am, I thought. Of course I'd always known the nature of my sexuality in a way – but the knowledge had been without substance. I understood not to make undue claims on Justin: they'd scare him off. Amongst Justin's hangers-on, I'd be low in the pecking order. Still and all, I felt … I was going to say, ‘happy' – but ‘exalted' is nearer to it. Nothing had changed in my world; love had not come, only carnal knowledge. By coincidence, I'd also found a vocation: to become a star scholar like the visiting academic, Rhys Salvatore, scattering light.

Next day police were everywhere and our usual wing of the library was cordoned off. We migrated to Engineering and I sat where I could see Justin, schooling myself to wave and smile only if he did. Which he did. He sauntered past; paused, pushing back a wing of dark blond hair.

‘I was wondering, Sebastian – fancy a night out?'

God, yes, I thought, mentally punching the air. I wondered vaguely about the Geek, who had become an accidental arsonist. Weird little sod, I thought. Oddball. Which I somehow, suddenly, wasn't.

Saturday night though started disappointingly, for Justin's invitation wasn't exclusive. The whole world crowded into Justin's room. Candlelight flickered on punkish lads and made-up girls. Although they might not all be girls. Justin had become Justine for the night. I'd expected him to look stunning. What I couldn't have foreseen was that he wouldn't remotely resemble an impersonator.

My lover was – surely, I thought – the real thing, with subtle lipstick and mascara. His fair wig was understated; the blue dress implied rather than advertised the possibility of breasts. We drank, laughed, and everyone kissed Justin and Justin kissed everyone and we all kissed one another. His Tower room, with cartons of stale milk on the windowsill, became a magic, whirling chamber. Later that night we hit a wall of sound and heat and smoke at the Haçienda. Music throbbed through us, noise annihilated thought.

On the street when we spilled out in the early hours I was aware of guys clustering round the beautiful Justin-Justine.

Why wouldn't they?

Through the surging crowd of – were they? yes, definitely – straights, I glimpsed part of my lover's face and his braceleted wrist in motion. First a come-on, then an oh-no, oh please, let me go, don't, I know you're only messing around, and I will give value, but for the love of God don't hurt me.

His head was dragged back and the wig stripped off. I glimpsed Justin's terror.

Huge laughter. Fucking faggot. Poofter. Tranny. Come on, darling, come with us, we'll show you a good time. Guffawing, braying. Fucking freaking disease-riddled arse-cunting whore.

No one went to Justin's aid. I did not. Why did I not? Was it, as I later told myself, that it was all over in one stunning moment? that there were too many people between me and him? or was it that I was crapping myself with fear?

As he was dragged into the car, Justin dropped his golden handbag in the gutter.

*

I wondered if I'd ever sleep again. My mind was all over the place. I'd done a lot of crying in the night and my puffy eyes were half closed. Traffic let loose by the lights at the junction of Platt Lane with Rusholme bellowed past as I made for the infirmary.

The ward sister refused to say how Justin was progressing, since
I
‘and the literally dozens of friends who keep phoning' were not family. Yes, we might visit, but not in a gang.

I'd never before witnessed the obscenity of violence. Shrinking back, a perfect coward, I'd let the thugs batter my friend senseless. I would always do that, I thought, as I bought anemones at the infirmary kiosk.

Justin had known what was coming, the second the pincer movement closed around him. He'd been manhandled into the car and groped and insulted. He'd been driven to a car park in Droylesden, taken into the bushes, beaten up, stripped and – after Christ knows what other abominations – left for dead.

Justin drifted in and out of sleep. When his parents arrived, we were shooed away and lingered at the ward entrance. His dad, a builder – huge man, as dark as his son was fair – was a complete surprise. Not least perhaps to Justin, who'd complained that his father neither understood nor approved of him.

Well, Mr Knight understood him now. He sat cradling his son's head: ‘There's a good lad. Be all right now, angel, you'll see.'

After his discharge, we helped cart Justin's belongings between the Tower and Mr Knight's van. The Infirmary had saved his eyesight; the ruined face was healing. Only after years of plastic surgery would Justin dare show himself again. Even when Harley Street restored his violated face, he was never as he had been. The yobs had trashed some loveliness that was vulnerably innocent. Justin was, he wrote, a self-impersonator.

As I have been. From that day onwards.

*

‘You don't mind if I nod off a little, my sweetheart
,
do you?' my mother asks.

Elise, you called me sweetheart. That is enough. Why should I disturb you by dredging up questions you've had reason to place out of our reach? I watch over my mother, extended on the bed, a luminous silver-grey figure, well-dressed as always, in her immaculate silk blouse, a cameo at the neck.

I close the sliding door between bedroom and sitting room. She'll be asleep for an hour perhaps. Time to conduct my researches.

As a kid I truffled around in Elise's bedside cabinet on evenings when I could rely upon her absence. She was always in demand at functions – a dinner at this consulate or that. My foraging never unearthed much of interest, or at least nothing I could easily interpret – bar the packet of johnnies that scalded my fingers. I dropped it with a yelp, slammed the drawer shut and scarpered.

Now, while my mother sleeps, her hair silvering the pillow, the pearl buttons on her grey cardigan luminous as the eyes of nocturnal animals, I am in two minds. Sweetheart, she said, sweetheart. A woman to whom endearments had never come easily. For they might prove costly. The territory of the maternal heart is to Elise (I've always thought)
terra incognita.
That doesn't mean that she hasn't cared. Unbending as she is, lacking in comfy qualities, Elise has still been my all in all. Am I prepared to gatecrash the integrity of her secret world now that she can less readily defend its frontiers?

Apparently I am. I open her laptop. Guess the password. I'm in. And rifling through the documents she's been scanning and the start she's made on her autobiography. It's the business of five minutes to copy the files to my memory stick: here's a find dislodged from a deep stratum, holding traces of cryptic living tissue. Doubtless this will prove a rather dark form of enlightenment and a grubby form of knowledge. My partner's anguished words come flocking back: ‘I've always been second-best – you keep me in the dark – you disrespect me – am I not enough? – why can't you just be straight with me? Even to yourself you are not straight. You range about like a thief in the night.'

*

What is it about Jack? my mother's diary asks in 1979. Light and flighty, wings on his heels, mercurial, he has something coiled within him that is life itself,
life
, she can't think of any other word. Erotic charm is part of it: wherever Jack goes people fall for him, men, women, dogs, cats. It's ridiculous. And exhausting.