The White Family (27 page)

‘Baldwin’s, like, an icon,’ Winston said, and smiled his radiant smile at Thomas, the smile that usually made people like him, the smile that probably protected him (because Shirley sensed he was vulnerable).

But Thomas didn’t respond to his charm. The conversation faltered and died; Thomas’s coldness made things awkward. Winston suddenly remembered he had things to do. Shirley felt sorry; it had been a rare chance for her to be alone with him. She had been sure he wanted to talk. Now Thomas had put paid to that.

Shirley stared after Winston forlornly. She felt she had failed him in some important way. He had asked the family to come to the film; only she had come. And she’d let him down. She watched his elegant narrow head weaving away through the indifferent crowd. His shoulders looked rounded to her, defeated, as if he had lost an important battle. She told herself she was exaggerating. But later she would remember it.

‘I’ll drive you home,’ Thomas said.

‘You frightened him off. He’s a very sweet boy.’

‘I’m sure I didn’t.’ But he looked triumphant. ‘Have you known him long?’

‘Yes. Why?’ She was aware she was snapping.

‘Oh nothing.’

She could see there was something. It has to be jealousy, she thought, and found herself faintly stirred. Thomas was a big man. Clever. Attractive.

She knew she mustn’t think like this. ‘I’m not going home, as a matter of fact. I’m going to the hospital to see Dad.’

‘I’ll drive you there.’

‘I thought I would walk. It’s a lovely day.’

He was visibly relaxing. ‘I actually saw your dad this morning … But I’d like to walk with you, if you don’t mind.’

It was almost as if he wanted to protect her. They walked together to the hospital, talking about the Baldwin film. She warmed to him, finding he had liked it too.

‘I thought he was amazing,’ Thomas said, as they crossed the road, arms touching lightly. ‘That bit when he said to the journalist, after the deaths of Michael X and Martin Luther King, “I have been trying to write, between assassinations.”’

‘Yes. Very witty. But terrible. But what got to me most was the simplest thing. He said something like, “They’re killing my friends, and have been as long as I’ve been alive.”’

‘At least things have never been that bad in England. I watch a film like that, and get all fired up –’ He was waving his hands, and walking faster.

‘That’s to your credit –’ she said, eagerly. (Perhaps that was why he had been rude to Winston. Perhaps he had simply been upset –)

‘– and I realize things are relatively OK here.’

She digested this. ‘Mmm. Well, I was married to an African.’

‘You don’t agree?’

‘Look, it’s complicated.’ But Shirley didn’t want to argue.

So Thomas felt encouraged to go on. ‘At the library, you know, it’s all sorts – West Indian, Asian, Irish, a Swede – and nearly half the staff are black. But we all get on. It’s just
not an issue
. Apparently the only time we didn’t was the eighties, when the council got terribly p.c. and sent two race relations advisers in. Then everyone started to hate each other. Meanwhile these advisers ruined the stock, chucking out books that had the, quotes,
wrong message
and spending the earth on, I don’t know, huge glossy books on Portuguese slavery that cost forty quid and never went out … Hundreds of books on racism. But the public doesn’t care about things like that. People aren’t interested, is the bottom line.’

He obviously thought he was being daring. Shirley was used to people doing that, priding themselves on saying the unsayable. Though what they said was often predictable. ‘Are you sure no one’s interested?’ she asked. They were turning in through the gates of the hospital. ‘Surely a lot of the readers are black. Winston for example. My boyfriend’s brother.’

There was a silence. His step checked slightly. ‘Just now?
Was that man your boyfriend’s brother
?’

Why did he seem so taken aback? Had he assumed her boyfriend was white? ‘He’s doing a thesis on James Baldwin.’

‘What? …
Is he
?’

Thomas looked shell-shocked. Irritated, Shirley expanded.

‘At University College London. Not just on James Baldwin. On another two writers who were friends of his as well.’ She tried to remember. ‘Norman Mailer. He’s American too. And – Eldridge Cleaver. Who turned against Baldwin … He hated white people and, you know, homosexuals. Winston was telling me all about it. I think he’s been taking notes in your library. So some of those books would have come in useful. What’s the matter, Thomas? Your mouth is open.’

He looked briefly like her father remembering a name, slowly, unwillingly, with very great pain, when he needed it, and her mother was out.

Winston walked quickly into the Park. He felt as if skeins of inky water were twisting and turning into one great river that poured, undeniable, through his head. He was exalted; he was cast down; he was electric with conviction, leaden with doubt.
The Price of the Ticket
– Baldwin paid the price. He would like to speak the truth like him, he would say it, speak it, sing it out – life would be simple, lived in the sunlight (life was detestable! he lived in prison …)

He’d come here regularly when he was thirteen and Elroy had bought him rollerblades. The Park meant ice-creams and heat and shade, under the trees where you lay and got your breath back. He admired his brother, and wanted to be like him.

But around fourteen, the other thing started. The sense that he was not like the others had begun to be stronger and more fixed than his vague yearnings for Elroy’s friends. He could not let himself think what it meant, because what it meant was impossible. He was a normal boy, from a normal family. A normal, God-fearing family. His father was no longer around, of course, but his mother marched them to church every Sunday, and there they stayed for two or three hours, listening to the preachers shouting from the pulpit, hammering at him till his head ached, then the waves of song washing round like balm. Sex meant sin (but he knew it didn’t, because Elroy and all the other big boys went looking for it, talked about it all the time, teased the younger ones about not getting it). Winston joined in with the foolery but he always felt he was missing something.

He fell in love with the new head teacher who came to his primary school when he was in Year 6. Mr Glover was tall and athletic – he demonstrated a sprint start on Sports Day – but best of all, he liked poetry and read them a poem every morning in assembly. When he noticed how gifted Winston was at English, he often asked him to read instead. Then Winston wrote a poem for homework so good that Mr Glover printed it in the School Newsletter. He called Winston’s mother in to see him, but she refused to tell Winston what he had said.

‘No good will come of it. I won’t do it,’ he heard her jabbering to his sisters. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ How tired Winston got of hearing that phrase.

Later, too late for him to try it, his elder sister let it out that Mr Glover had recommended he try for a scholarship to public school. ‘Mum wasn’t having it. And she right! You don’t want to go to no battyboy school.’

So he didn’t go to a battyboy school. But he still grew up clever. He still grew up different.

Unthinkable, impossible. But true, and real.

There was no one he could tell. He was completely alone. At first he thought that only white men were queer, because his brother said it was a white thing, that only white men were dirty perverts. At school, ‘battyboy’ was the worst insult, but they threw it around with perfect freedom, because they knew none of them was gay.

None of them was gay. So nor could he be.

(He sometimes found himself imagining, insanely, that his father would come home, and he could tell him everything. A father who was young, kind, all-understanding … In real life, Winston had a scanty memory of a tall grizzled man who had once been handsome with an overhanging belly and big gold chains. Elroy had once told him Dad had fifteen children. What would it be like to know your father?)

Winston had tried to go with girls. They often liked him, because he laughed a lot, and made them giggle. Because they felt safe with him, unlike his friends. Because he didn’t hassle them for sex.

Of course he didn’t. He didn’t really want them. They were hot and shrieking and smelled like his sisters. He watched the boys doing weight training. Silent concentration; sweat, muscle. They must not notice him watching them.

And so his life became a net of secrets. He had to go with girls, or his family would suspect him, but after he’d had two or three girlfriends, and had sex with them adequately, but with little pleasure, he told his brother that he had decided to follow the teaching of the Church.

‘Winston,’ said Elroy, who was in his mid-twenties, still working, then, at the Leisure Centre, where his smile and his six-pack was a hit with the world-a-girls. ‘I feel that way once a month as well. Lasts me ten minutes after the service.’

‘I mean it,’ said Winston, and he did. Though Elroy playfully beat him up.

Then Elroy had gone through his own bad times when his baby mother Desree got another man and said she never wanted to see him again, and Elroy changed completely, pining for his son, starting to retrain with the NHS, going to the Temple every other week.

Not that it had lasted, Winston thought. His brother might be crazy for Shirley now, his brother might even want to marry that girl, but he still went clubbing and saw the sistas. One or two sistas in particular. As far as he could see, Shirley knew nothing. And Elroy seemed to almost believe his own propaganda, reformed man, pillar of the Temple …

But now he’d started getting at Winston again, nudging him to come down the club with him, asking him things about his sex life. ‘Why you so close, man?’ he’d asked last week, running into Winston in the supermarket car park. ‘Reckon you running a baby mama somewhere. Now you got to make a honest woman of her.’ But underneath the jokes, was he on to something?

Winston knew his family could never accept him, never in a thousand years. So he had started to avoid them. But James Baldwin said, ‘You don’t ever leave home. You take your home with you.’ Terrible but true. He stared at the pleasant green hill before him, crowned with its ring of waving trees.

He began to walk up the side of the hill, past a bed of red tulips blazing red in the sun, stiff as soldiers, with sooty black centres. Danger; anger. He had to be himself. But they’d never, ever let him be himself.

And Elroy thought
his
life was complicated …

Brother, brother. Winston needed a brother. But the bredrins all hated battyboys. To think it was still actually illegal in Jamaica!

This Park had changed forever one day. He was – fourteen? Fifteen? It was high summer. There had been a row in school that day. There was an Asian boy whose name he had forgotten, perhaps because he didn’t want to remember – Ramesh, yes. The shame, the shame … He had been seen walking in the playing-fields at lunch-time with the R E teacher. The boys had suspicions of Mr Webster already. Someone had seen him buying food with a man. A dozen or so boys trapped Ramesh by the toilets after school and, with Winston watching, shoved him inside. At the last moment before he was dragged out of sight, his eyes seemed to meet Winston’s in desperate appeal, saying,
please, Winston, are you like me
? – and Winston could neither deny what he telegrammed, nor find the courage to answer it. He stood fixed to the spot, sweating, wincing, till the screaming started and he ran home.

Later that evening he had come into the Park and sat alone on the seat near the gates. He was going to kill himself, that was clear. He’d felt better, he remembered, having made that decision. But a young white man in jeans and a black singlet came and sat beside him. They looked at each other. Then Winston got up and followed him.

It was a kind of pattern, for the next six years. Except it lacked the beauty of regularity. And Winston could never tell his family. So he had to travel on in the shadow of the lie. And part of him went on hoping he would change. He might fall in love with
– anybody
. He might suddenly find he was in love with a girl, and the cramped knot of falsehood would resolve, in an instant, everything would be free and easy –

But it never happened. He knew it never would.

So he had resolved they would have to know. They would have to know, or he’d never be free. Even if they rejected him (but his worst fear was simply of hurting his mother; of watching her sit and shake and cry). He felt pity for her, then burning rage, because why should he always feel pity for others? – why should he think about his family’s feelings when they cared as little about his feelings as if he had just dropped down from the moon –?

He would tell them even if it killed him
. He thought, in the end I would rather die –

His life for six years had been horribly lonely. Endless deceptions. Constant watchfulness. And he had grown weary. Too weary to bear it. They did not know him. So did not love him. They refused to know him, so could not love him. Lies, lies and loneliness.

He had tried with hints, small acts of daring. Choosing Baldwin, for example, for his third-year thesis. But his family were too ignorant to take the hint. What they did not want to see, they could not see.

So he’d asked them to the film last week. Surely Elroy or one of his sisters might come. They might see in a flash what he’d been trying to tell them. But only Shirley took up his invitation. He had still been hopeful. Would she understand? If so, maybe she would talk to his brother … He had nerved himself to tell her everything, although she was white, although she was a woman. There was something about her he almost trusted. As if she had been hurt, so would not hurt him.

Then that fule fule librarian had come along. And there was no more chance of saying anything.

He felt lonelier than ever, as he came up the hill with the low afternoon sunlight dazzling his eyes. He couldn’t see where he was going; dogs barked, birds sang, he walked blindly onwards.