At the front of the Halifax there was one of those little tables for the kiddies, cluttered with Lego. The Child and I played there while Julian queued up, cap literally in hand, for the counter. We were making a tower sort of thing, putting a kind of conversation together. The Child was stuffed into a blue and yellow romper suit; when we walked through town Julian slung him carelessly arm to arm and it was as if the Child bounced, resilient, squalling, and attracting the attention of each shopkeeper we met.
Especially in the indoor market they were known and watched out for; primped and petted, the young father and son exhibiting this astonishing precocity at buying their own groceries. Friday afternoons were when Julian had the Child to himself. This one in November was my birthday and we were having lunch together; at a table strewn with red, white and blue napkins in Cafe Monet.
We spent all afternoon round town and it was dark before the shops shut. We were a family. A gay couple and child. And we basked in the fondness of shopkeepers. How nice it was for them to see how we were coming on. Nice to see the young ones managing. We were laden down with shopping. We bought Earl Grey in a speciality shop where everything came in redolent wooden kegs and barrels. I was learning that Julian and family liked to buy things which were, if not expensive, at least authentic. Handwrapped parcels of moist, fresh, loose tea, authentically dead and dripping birds hung outside butchers’ windows. I got caught up in it and it made me feel more bogus than ever; me with my penchant for snooping round Just What You Need and Superdrug.
That night, the night of my twenty-fourth, I had a lovely time with a friend of mine in a cocktail bar done up exactly like the studio set for The Scarlet Empress. My friend was a sternly phlegmatic, one-handed fencing instructor. He took me to task.
‘You’re fucking with the bourgeoisie,’ he warned, adjusting his glasses and sucking on his cocktail straw. He’d recently done a counselling course and, while he kept the tone of voice they’d given him, he threw out their ideas of objectivity. ‘Or rather, the bourgeoisie are fucking you. They always do. You never win. Don’t bother with it. Don’t be daft.’
I frowned, sunk into myself. ‘It’s just a laugh. I need a laugh. There’s no risk. Nothing’s happened. I can lap up a morning or two of mutual glorification with no strings attached and not get hurt.’
‘I dunno,’ he said. I wasn’t sure if that cast doubt on me or the situation. He added, ‘It’s a complex one. Because you reckon that he’s really a queer, don’t you?’
‘Oh, God, I can’t tell anything any more.’
Nowadays I just thought all sex was pretty androgynous. This caused problems for me in Cult Stud where centuries’ worth of accumulated theoretical discourse told me that there were all sorts of differences to be problematised.
Yet… regardless of the biological accoutrements of the bodies I had encountered, their lovemaking always occurred to me as an androgynous affair. Sleek, lightly haired limbs folded about one another or reserved in a charged proximity. Their very vulnerability in the act or the presence of love helped them transcend gender. Surely.
‘Bollocks,’ said my fencing friend. ‘You’re queer or you’re straight and anything else is just fucking around. Tell him to get himself sorted.’
We wandered home that night and he got me to promise to stop fucking about. He took the radical position. It wasn’t fair to expect people—me, since he was being supportive here—to stand in the background, in their own marginal Position and let others—straights, he spat—get away without commitment.
‘Bourgeois fucking straights,’ he sneered as we walked along the slimy towpath. We went to mine for coffee, and watched Ken Russell’s Women in Love off video.
On the mantelpiece—and the fencer commented on them—in my gorgeous blue Habitat vase: a squashed bouquet of shocking pink and midnight anemones. Their stalks bent beneath the dull black weight of their hearts, and their vellum petals sodden and bruised.
Walking back at teatime, Julian had made me wait outside Interflora with the Child. I had a feeling what he was up to. A nice gesture. A kiss-off. A promise. The Child flapped his arms to be picked up as it came on to freezing rain and I did so and received for my pains a swift, grateful hug. Julian came out with his shoulders hunched, brandishing his prize. He had two separate parcels of dark, glamorous flowers.
‘One for Mummy and one…’ he gave me mine, ‘for you.’
THE LION VANISHES
I was heavily involved reading something and I never noticed when we stopped. When I’m on a train I like to keep my head down much of the time. It doesn’t do to have people think you’re looking at them. Anything might result.
It was a busy train, a trans-Europe express—of Agatha Christie and Kraftwerk fame—and we were crammed into compartments that reeked of pine, tobacco and musty plush. The woman sitting across from me was clutching three sticky cases of Belgian chocolates, a leopard-skin pillbox hat resting ominously on the shelf above her head. Up to no good, I thought, and went to the dining compartment for lunch, not wanting to be involved.
At this stage our journey was all mountains and forests. I hardly knew where we were; if not hurtling through invisible, snow-stormed countryside, we alternated wildly between the dizzying clarity of the severest of altitudes and the vegetable dark of the woods. The landscape was something else, besides my fellow travellers, not to get too embroiled in.
I review books, novels. I had a suitcase of twenty-six in the luggage carriage and by Manchester, England, was meant
