There was nothing I could do immediately to repay Michael’s family for the way they included me, but a while later I wrote a character sketch of him for the Independent’s ‘My Hero’ column, and sent a bale of copies of the magazine out to New Zealand. By the standards of public life Michael, dying at twenty-six after years of illness, could lay no claim on an obituary, but I made the most of the opportunity I had to write something loving and to have it printed.
In a small way Michael’s death made a difference to my dealings with my mother. From then on Shee became my regular form of address for her. She seemed to like it, and I didn’t mention the low Channel 4 provenance of the abbreviation. Calling your parents by their first names is a stilted little intimacy, most obviously so when it is a new practice, before it beds down as a reflex, self-consciously undertaken to make clear that you are no longer bound by the contracts of childhood (and who wants to be a pensioner calling a centenarian ‘Mum’?). Calling Sheila ‘Shee’ was a way of keeping alive Michael’s warm teasing, and so of keeping him dimly alive too. One evening, eating out at Joe Allen’s off the Strand, I recognized Sue Johnston, the actress who had played Sheila Grant, and offered her a glass of champagne in recognition of the walk-on part she had played in my halting emotional development.
Dad wouldn’t have enjoyed being ‘Bill’ to his sons, nor was it a style of address that appealed to me. Now that I think about it, I might have enjoyed calling him ‘Lloyd’, the name harking back to remote Denbighshire and a pre-hyphenated innocent, teenager with ukelele.
The conversation about how good I had been to Michael was certainly the low point of our relationship. After that, Dad slowly lost his horror of my sexual identity, though he never got as far as acknowledging a partner of mine. Long before a genuine mild dementia made him forgetful of the lovely Nimat, though she came every day to help him shower, he had perfected a frown of absent puzzlement (who could this be?) to use when not-quite-greeting Keith.
The slow relaxing process may partly have been due to the collapse of two of his arguments. I didn’t seem to be especially held back in terms of career by my sexual preference, though that had only ever been a high-sounding justification for existing prejudice. As for his sorrow on my behalf at my exclusion from the joys of family life, that argument was torpedoed, sent to Davy Jones’s locker without much of a splash, by the arrival of Holly in 1991. My parents saw more of Holly than their other grandchildren, who lived further away. Gray’s Inn Walks were as well suited for children’s play as they had been a generation earlier, even if children were much less a feature of the Inn’s life than they had been, with assured shorthold tenancies being the only option for incomers.
As an Inn child I had resented the ban on dogs in the Walks. Lobbying strongly for a pet, I had overcome the first objection (noise) by finding in my Observer Book of Dogs a breed that didn’t bark but emitted a sort of yodel (the basenji). The basenji came with the bonus of a looped-over tail like a pig’s, only hairy. Then I was brought up short by the impossibility of exercising the proposed animal, which was bred in the Central African bush for the hunt, and possibly not well suited to WC1 anyway, yodelling madly down Chancery Lane in search of eland. As an adult supervising childish play I was grateful for wide stretches of lawn free of fouling, banks that could be rolled down without fear of any contamination worse than grass stains.
It was certainly true that Dad wanted the joys of family life for me, but he also wanted for himself the possibility of a conventional family portrait on the mantlepiece. Our new family grouping looked more standard than it was, and I could hardly blame Dad for setting store by its air of normality. Now he could talk about me in terms that didn’t contest any other information that might be circulating. He could paint a picture that was just as true, however incompatible it seemed with the official version.
Useless to pretend that I didn’t notice, and occasionally exploit, my new status as a man with a baby. I had served some sort of apprenticeship while looking after my nephew, Ebn, when he was little, and had noticed how obliging everyone became at a normally unwelcoming West End gay bar called Brief Encounter when I turned up with a small beaming child strapped to my chest, lamenting that I wasn’t allowed to take him inside, and wondering if anyone would be so kind as to bring me out a Guinness. Child care was certainly good for you, if you were an unspectacular gay man on the street carrying a cheerful baby.
So when Holly was about a year old, and I was queuing to pay at the Brixton Marks & Spencer’s, I wasn’t too shocked to find myself being attentively considered by a man standing by the racks of socks. It seemed unlikely he was having trouble making up his mind between competing products — it’s a dressy man who dithers over socks, and this man was not dressy. It was always possible that he was impersonally pleased to witness solo fathering (still then something of a novelty), seeing it as socially progressive, but that was a risk I was willing to take. I approached him and said, ‘I’m Adam and this is Holly, and we would like your telephone number.’ Written down, this seems as manipulative as any Disney film ever made, but perhaps casting and chemistry improved on the script.
I had also given out my own number. When the man phoned after a day or two, I was much less sure of myself. Sheila had once remarked that she thought she understood the basics of how my world worked, but she didn’t know how I had the nerve to make the first move, something she had never been able to do. It’s true that the first move hasn’t usually been a problem for me. It’s the second move that gives the real trouble. Still, Keith had begun his leisurely transformation from shopper who can’t decide about socks into leading man.
The balance between father and son at this point seemed approximately equal enough to be durable. I was the misguided pervert who had nevertheless been polite enough to reproduce. He was the hectoring brute who had kept his home open to me. As Holly grew, though, Dad seemed to notice that our arrangement, however visually soothing, diverged from the standard pattern. ‘How’s the little family?’ he would always ask, and started to see it as a brave experiment in some way.
This was welcome but unduly flattering, at least as it applied to me. Brave for Holly’s mother, Lisa, to trust an arrangement that though not necessarily ramshackle, and as full of good intentions as any other, lacked any formal or informal guarantees. Not so brave for a man to sign up to fatherhood on something like a freelance basis, with an enviable freedom to pick and choose. Not sharing a roof with my daughter, I experienced a minimum of disturbed nights.
Dad’s change of heart, so long delayed, went further. Seeing me with Holly, he said he regretted his own failure to touch his children when they were small, blaming it on a foolish fear of homosexuality, the terror of breeding sissies. It was unheard of for him to own up to a fault no-one had even accused him of. It seemed entirely genuine, but somehow genuine in the wrong way and thereby deeply fishy. I thought about it a moment and told him that he had touched us often but in his own style, which was horseplay rather than tenderness as such.
He would hold our hands when we were small, facing us, and encourage us to walk up his legs, then he would flip us over and return us fizzing to the ground. He didn’t do hugs but he did aeroplanes. Mum didn’t do aeroplanes.
I wonder where it had come from, Dad’s little moment of artificial apology? By this stage he didn’t stray much from the flat, otherwise I might suspect him of dropping in to a men’s support group, though I don’t know where he would have found such a thing. Holborn Central Library, perhaps? Or at the Mary Ward Centre in Queen Square? Over towards Bloomsbury any cultic practice might find a home. Or perhaps he had been watching some tearful family drama on the box, one long orgy of confrontations and breakthroughs, and I should be blaming television.