In Defence of the Act, page 13
I would love to tell her this new corker. So just for a moment, as I turn into the road my office is on, I allow myself to imagine what it would be like, to tell Jamie. I could simply take out my phone now and dial her number – which I can still recite by heart – and hear her voice and tell her what happened to me today on my lunchbreak. I could listen for the anticipation in her voice as the story built, listen for the glee as it became increasingly ridiculous, listen for the note of concern at the bit where I fell, the relief at knowing I caught myself, that this story was a happy one, a funny one. And her delight, her horror, her disbelief, her sympathy, it would all make me feel seen, understood. It would make me, and the events of my life, feel real and acknowledged. And I would love her for that. And she would love me too.
And then I pass a woman grappling with a baby who’s dropped its dummy and managed to wriggle its arms free from the restraints of a pushchair. The child’s screams cut through my thoughts, but the woman, who is even closer to those grating decibels, doesn’t seem too perturbed. She picks up the dummy from the pavement, pops it in her own mouth for a moment – gross – and returns it to the baby’s mouth, thankfully corking the wails inside. She then strokes the baby’s sparse hair with one hand, soothing it sufficiently for it to allow her to place its now floppy and pliable arms back inside the buggy’s harnesses. The baby locks eyes with me for a moment and I wonder if it can tell I’m not quite right. Are babies better at seeing it than others? Like the way they can see ghosts and sense evil?
The woman stands there stroking the baby’s head, her frazzled and exhausted look beginning to dissipate. And now, with the baby asleep and quiet, with her hand moving so tenderly across its face, the mother looks serene, happy. Then the moment is finished, and she strolls on, and I’m reminded I won’t be telling my new ridiculous story to Jamie. So, I call Freya instead, partly to check in on her. She seems to be doing well today. I walk around the block eating my panini and telling Freya about its provenance. She interrupts several times with questions, but she also laughs, and tells me about a time she slept with someone and stayed at their house and left for work in the morning and only when she went to a café loo at lunchtime did she notice she had dried sick in her hair from a tactical vomit in the club the night before. She was the café vomit guy. She says it’s the first time she’s ever told anyone that story. And there on the phone we make each other feel real.
Three weeks later and I’m at my mum’s house having tea. Rob is out. Or maybe he’s not. Who can say? After the normal medical appointment updates from her, and work updates from me, my mum boldly asks if I ever see Jamie nowadays, and if it’s definitely, definitely over. I’m a little taken aback. This isn’t something my mum has previously shown much interest in, not enough to raise the subject unprompted at least, and Jamie and I have been apart for nearly two years now. Can that be right? Nearly two years? It feels like half the time, although that’s probably because after my first few weeks as a complete and utter wreck, I spent the rest of that first year on autopilot, constantly surprised it wasn’t still the January in which we ended, shocked when birthdays and Spring and Summer and then Winter and Christmas arrived. Shocked that the world was still spinning.
I ask my mum where this is all coming from and if she’s been speaking to Freya. She tells me that yes, as it happens, she has. Freya’s in Greece at the moment, having taken out a loan to travel around Europe and visit refugee camps to do her bit. She’s been making noises about heading out there since the refugee crisis began, but this time she’s really gone. Except so far it seems she hasn’t made it past the tourist beaches. But yes, my mum tells me they’ve had a chat on the phone and although they don’t agree on much, they do agree Jamie was the nicest girl I’d ever introduced them to, and they’d simply like to know what she did that was so wrong that I ended it.
It wasn’t Jamie, it was me, I tell her. Again. But my mum clearly doesn’t want to let this go, so she asks if I still miss Jamie, if I still think about her, if I was sure about the breakup, how I knew I was sure, if the breakup still affects me now, because I don’t seem to be trying to move on at all, or maybe I am moving on and just not telling my silly old mum because what does she know, and of course I’m not getting any younger so if I’m not thinking of moving on then I probably should be, and that I can speak with her if I ever I need to, and that her friend from volunteering has a daughter who isn’t gay per se or not officially anyway but my mum’s seen a picture of her and she has short hair and seems to play a lot of sports and has been single for a while so she might possibly be interested.
I really don’t want to chat about this with my mum, not now at least, not without prior warning. I have to mentally prepare myself whenever I’m going to talk about Jamie. So much so that I’ve left all social media and let relationships with our mutual friends disintegrate to avoid dealing with the torture of seeing or discussing her. Because, I think to myself, still shocked by the line of questioning, yes sure Mum, the breakup still affects me. I’m only human, and Jamie was…well, Jamie was Jamie, so of course losing her still affects me. Massively. Constantly. But, I remind myself, I’ve been taking great strides in the right direction. For instance, when Jamie and I first parted ways I couldn’t listen to music. Like, any music. I couldn’t listen to sad songs because they were sad and I was sad, or happy songs because they were happy and I was not. I couldn’t listen to songs about heartbreak because I was heartbroken, or songs about love because I’d lost it. I couldn’t listen to songs that weren’t about love or heartbreak because they seemed to be the only things in life that mattered. I couldn’t listen to music I’d listened to with Jamie, or music I knew for certain Jamie liked, or music I suspected Jamie would like, or, conversely, music I knew Jamie didn’t like, or music I suspected she wouldn’t like if she heard it. I couldn’t listen to music containing the sounds of guitars or pianos because Jamie played the guitar, and the first time I’d seen a grand piano up close had been in Jamie’s aunt’s home. I couldn’t listen to music from the ‘80s because Jamie was being born in the ‘80s, or music from the ’90s because Jamie was coming of age in the ‘90s, or music from the ‘00s because Jamie was at university in the ‘00s, or music from the teens because the teens was the decade that contained my happiness with Jamie, and my devastation without her.
So yeah, at first I couldn’t listen to any music but after about a year and a half, so a few months ago, while I was picking up a Chinese takeaway, I happened upon a Chinese rap song that I could sit through and tap my feet to without welling up or wanting to punch myself in the ears. It’s generally upbeat without being obviously happy, and I have no idea what’s being said. I Shazzammed it and now I’m able to listen to that one Chinese rap song on repeat on my commute to work, which has really brightened up the journey. I feel certain in time I’ll find other Chinese rap songs that’ll work for me too. So, yeah, I think to myself, I’m doing ok, I’ve made real progress of late. But I don’t tell my mum any of this because she probably wouldn’t get it. Instead, I ask if we can talk about something else. Her second choice is nearly as annoying, but far more predictable at least.
My mum asks me how my dad’s doing. She always asks this as though she couldn’t possibly have any idea herself. Yet she knows full well how he is because she calls him a couple of times a week, visits him a couple of times a month, often cooks his favourite foods for me to take to him and even stands in for me as carer on the rare occasions I have other plans. If Jamie was puzzled by my continued contact with my dad, I’m absolutely flabbergasted by my mum’s. She has never completely cut him off, even in the years directly following the divorce when he would frequently phone the house to shout abuse at her and blame her for all his problems, or show up on her doorstep at night to deliver his message in person. She would still invite him around at Christmas and Easter, no matter how disastrously it always ended, still send him a text if she hadn’t heard from him for a while, still write him birthday and Christmas and Father’s Day cards, still berate my siblings and me for not seeing him enough. I usually refrain from being a broken record about it but she’s got me a little riled up after blindsiding me with the Jamie quiz, so today I pick at the scab.
‘You tell me how he is. I’m sure you’ve spoken to him more than I have.’ I say, accusatorily.
‘Yes,’ she replies, deliberately ignoring my tone, ‘I spoke with him last night and the night before and he seems to be ok. His hip’s hurting but he says he’s fine. As nice as it is, I’m sure it must get lonely for him in that place. But he doesn’t like being fussed over of course.’
‘So why do you fuss?’
‘I don’t fuss. I just check in to see if he’s ok. I don’t like the thought of him suffering there all alone.’
Why do we fuss? My mum spent the majority of her life – what should have been her best years – fussing over him. Although fussing doesn’t quite do it justice. It was work, a full-time job alongside her actual full-time job. When she wasn’t doing the hard labour of raising their children, maintaining their home, keeping in contact with his family for him and walking on eggshells to ensure he wasn’t too depressed or upset or slighted by anything she, or we, said or did, she was doing the labour of being his emotional – and occasionally literal – punching bag. So maybe it’s simply out of deeply ingrained habit that, even after he can no longer be legally or morally considered any of her responsibility, she is still doing that labour, that fussing. Naturally, after we found out he was ill, she’s been reaching out even more. I’ve told her repeatedly that she doesn’t owe him her time or her consideration or her sympathy. She doesn’t owe him anything. But my mum is a pretty nice person I guess and my dad is a man she once loved very deeply. Perhaps that’s all there is to it then, she’s being a saint in tribute to the good ol’ days, even though only a handful of them were actually any good.
But what about me? I don’t consider myself a particularly caring person, but maybe all I can be is what I have seen. Maybe I’m on autopilot, doing as my mother – my role model – does. And maybe she fusses because she saw her mother fuss before her. And maybe that’s because she and I and all of us have been completely duped into doing what society demands of us: looking after men, even when they’ve behaved horrifically. Too strong? Perhaps. But I don’t see anyone, apart from Jamie and Freya, rushing to tell me I don’t owe him anything. And I certainly don’t see anyone expecting my brother to lift a finger to help my dad. So perhaps there’s something in it. Or maybe it’s not that – not for me at least. Maybe I do my duty because I know if I don’t, yet more labour will fall to my mum, and I won’t allow that. Whatever the reason, I know my mum’s only trying to help, so I drop the subject and stop being so snippy.
A while later we’re watching a terrible film about a man whose child has passed away. He keeps seeing flashbacks of the child and every time we see the child my mum comments that I had a pair of dungarees just like that when I was little. At the end of the film she won’t let the dungarees thing go, asking if I remember them, insisting that I must. As I can’t, she heads out to the garage to fetch a photo album she thinks may contain a picture of them. I shout after her that she’ll never find it in all that junk, the garage being an even worse hoarder’s paradise than the main house, but she ignores me. I’m surprised when she returns in only five minutes and tells me there’s a method to her madness, she knows where everything is and she fully intends to get rid of most of it, she’s just working her way through it bit by bit. She’s been saying that for years. Here, she says, and opens it to a picture of me indeed wearing a pair of very similar flowery dungarees. I must be about five or six years old in the picture, my hair is dark but still fine, long before puberty left its frizzy wake on it. I’m on my dad’s lap, beaming at the camera. He’s very thin and is also smiling. Although his smile seems familiarly strained and empty, mine is totally genuine.
‘Look at you, so happy there on your dad’s lap,’ my mum says. ‘He was always your favourite of course.’
‘What?’ I ask, probably too aggressively. ‘Are you trying to do a funny joke? Are you being sarcastic and just getting the tone wrong again? You’re obviously my favourite by a long shot, and that’s not even a compliment!’ I laugh, trying to take the anger out of my voice, trying to make my reaction seem light-hearted.
She laughs too, because it’s true. But then she says, ‘No. Of course now I’m your favourite, I know that, and we all know that doesn’t mean much. But don’t you remember how you doted on him? How he was the best dad ever? How you wished you could spend more time with him? How you did all those little drawings for him and wrote him all those sweet little notes? It would make me jealous actually, although that’s a silly thing to say, but it did a bit. I was happy for him too though, and for myself I suppose, as I don’t think he could have handled me being the favourite.’
The thought of this makes me embarrassed at a deeper level than the normal looking-back-at-old-pictures-of-me embarrassment. I turn the page and find a picture of myself with my mum’s parents and use that to move her onto another topic.
On my ride home, as I watch the rain fall against the bus windows, I think about this idea again, that my dad was my favourite. And I remember something. I remember being walked somewhere, I don’t remember where we were going, and I’m holding someone’s hand as we walk along the street and I’m kicking puddles and I’m lost in my own imagination. And I remember this was a frequent imagining I’m lost in, something I would often fantasise about. I’m imagining that it’s just me and my dad living together. That I don’t have a mum, because when Mum’s there I have to do cleaning and reading and there are always fights and she takes my dad away from me. And my dad is much cooler and nicer than my mum because he gives me the sweets I want and he wears cooler clothes and plays with me more and listens to music with me and he rarely goes to boring work during the daytime, which I know is boring because my mum has taken me to her work once and I was so bored and she basically just ignored me all day. I love him so much and I really just wish it was him and me more than anything. I don’t imagine my mum has died or anything, that seems a tad harsh, but I imagine that she maybe turns out somehow not to be my real mum, that there’s been some mistake and actually it turns out I only have a dad, so I get to just live with him forever and he lets me never go to school and we just play and eat sweets all the time.
I suppose this isn’t exactly shocking news to me. I know full well I used to really quite like my dad when I was a child. I just don’t often tend to give it much thought. In fact, the only time I ever have cause to remember it is when I am posed a stroke-of-genius question like: ‘Do you think maybe you’re a huge gay because your dad was such a huge prick?’ It’s sort of a basic question, right? But people invariably ask me as though they’re having a eureka moment, as though I couldn’t possibly have already considered it myself, as though I should thank them for the gift of their extraordinarily astute insight. On the contrary, this question usually makes my blood boil. It provokes a knee-jerk reaction compelling me to jump to the defence of my sexuality. It makes me want to scream: ‘Who the fuck cares what caused it? I’m gay, ok? Why are you pushing your compulsory heterosexuality onto me? Why are you searching for the reason a good normal straight human has veered off course into gaytown? Why does the why matter so much to you? What are you going to do with that why? Why the fuck are you straight? Why do you feel the need to explain away my sexual preference? Why are you linking my entirely valid way of life to something negative and harmful? Why don’t you just fuck the hell off and let me live in gaytown in peace?’
Thus far though I’ve always managed to bite my tongue for long enough to let this overly emotional reflex pass. And, of course, to recognise how utterly hypocritical any such outburst would be, given my whole career has been built on exploring the why underlying people’s behaviour. Instead, I tell the smug questioner that, sure, my dad certainly wasn’t a persuasive advert for selecting men as life partners, and that yeah, there’s actually a fair bit of evidence suggesting LGBTQ+ people are more likely to report experiencing childhood abuse than heterosexuals. So, ok, maybe there’s something to their genius theory. Maybe they’ve solved the puzzle of me. Maybe I’m really that simple. Although I’m always keen to slip in that knowing the reason doesn’t change the outcome; I’m a gay through and through, and indeed I’m happy with that fact. But I also tell them the jury is still out on the reason for the correlation between sexual orientation and abuse. Researchers are still asking themselves what came first, the chicken or the egg? Are you gay because you were abused, or were you abused because you are gay? Researchers aren’t even completely certain more abuse has actually been suffered, wondering if people who’ve already stigmatised themselves by coming out as queer are simply more willing to identify as an abuse survivor than people who are still firmly part of society’s in-group.
