Neal Doran - Not What They Were Expecting

Kam knocked back the end of his beer. ‘Pint?’ he asked glancing quickly at his watch.

‘Sure.’

‘Good man.’

While his friend went to the bar, James sat agitatedly playing with his beer mat, worrying away at an edge damp and sticky with spilt lager. He looked up when a rowdy bunch of young lads, trainee somethings still not at home in their workwear suits, gave out a large camp ‘oooh!’ as two of their gang headed towards the Gents at the same time. As they came out again they were playing along with the joke, the first dabbing the corners of his mouth as if he’d swallowed something tasty, and the second walking as if doing so was causing him a degree of discomfort. By the time Kam got back with their pints, the beer mat was in tiny pieces on top of the empty crisp packet.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ said Kam sitting down, ‘there was this other guy with a keyboard that had a small little plant growing in the dirt and hair and dead skin collected underneath his Escape key. Claimed it was from a seed on a roll he’d eaten at this desk, but there was a suggestion he’d fixed it and brought one in he’d been working on at home. I would’ve believed it was genuine though, grubby bastard that one.’

James went quiet for a bit, and sipped on his beer and nibbled crisps for a while.

‘Did you ever have any trouble with your parents because of you and Kate?’ he finally asked, ‘Y’know cultural differences? Prompting a family crisis?’

‘Nah. Kate was a smart girl anyway, got gran on her side early on, and that cut out any “I don’t mind, it’s just what poor old nana-ji thinks” bollocks that anyone else could come up with. Anyway, we’re Hindus, which is like the C of E of Indian religions, anything goes most of the time.’

‘Kate’s parents were OK with it too?’

‘Pff,’ exhaled Kam leaning back on his stool, ‘I reckon they were horrified but too embarrassed to say so.’

‘And with the kids coming along no fall-outs there?’

‘Happy families, mate. All happy families. It’s like we’re colour-blind and living in one of Michael Jackson’s songs.’

‘So you’ve not had any major falling outs with parents or in-laws at all in the past ten years? That’s no help at all.’

‘Now I didn’t say we hadn’t had our tiffs. I was only talking about the racialist stuff.’

‘Oh really?’ James said perking up a little.

‘Kate and her mum have blazing rows. Totally out of nowhere they can just explode in front of everyone, one’s all “you never thought I was good enough”, the other’s all “you always try and push me away”. One thing I’ve learned is you don’t try and get in the middle of them when it kicks off though.’

‘And these rows, they can fester and linger after the event?’ asked James hopefully. ‘Loads of tension that’s never acknowledged?’

‘Nah. After about half an hour the blubbing really kicks in and they’re all huggy and kissy and telling each other “I love you”. Why you’d need to do that with people in your own family I’ll never know, but that’s their way. When the whole thing starts me and Dave usually just go into another room and watch football without talking much.’

‘Oh,’ sighed James, disappointed.

‘Family problems huh? Whose side?’

‘Well, it’s like this. It’s Rebecca’s dad.’

Pausing only briefly halfway through to get more drinks, James told Kam about Christmas Day, and the news about Howard’s arrest. He explained how she’d been upset about it, but didn’t usually want to talk about it much, but then got angry when her parents were acting like nothing had happened. He told Kam how Rebecca was pissed off because she was pregnant and everything should be about that right now, but there was this thing spoiling it a bit. And how he felt kind of the same way.

‘And do you think he was doing it?’ Kam asked.

This was the second time James had been asked that question. The first time it had been Rebecca, when they were sitting in together on New Year’s Eve. They’d been talking about the year ahead of them, and thinking that this time next year there would be three of them, and being up at midnight would probably be a daily occurrence. Then, in the middle of romanticising sleeplessness, Rebecca had gone quiet and asked him did he think her dad was gay.

His mistake had been how he’d reacted. He said, ‘What? Gay? I hadn’t really thought about that…’ in such a way that it was obvious that it was something he’d been thinking about a lot, and that he thought that Howard probably had done it. To him it had felt like the sort of thing you hear about all the time, the stuffy conservative family man with a double life, having angry self-loathing encounters in public parks. But he hadn’t wanted to let her know he was thinking that. It would have felt like providing proof that that was precisely what everybody who ever heard about it would think.

Rebecca didn’t say anything after his overly-mannered denial, but she seemed to shrink a little.

‘Would it be a problem if he was?’ he’d asked her.

‘He’s my dad,’ she’d told him. She said it wasn’t the gay thing that was the problem, it was the cheating aspect. If it was true. But what else could he have been doing?

He is the sort of man who would talk to strangers in a lavatory, James had pointed out, although he was pretty sure it took more than a remark about the weather and a bit of a peek to get arrested for cottaging these days.

‘It just makes everything complicated,’ she’d said.

James had told her that everything was going to be fine. He didn’t mention he’d been having sleepless nights waiting for something to appear in his dad’s paper. That he thought they’d dodged a bullet with the crime news in brief round-up that just mentioned several men had been arrested in the station toilets as part of a crackdown. Still, he knew in local newspaper terms, an ex-councillor in the nick was going to be trouble. He assumed Rebecca hadn’t made the connection yet. She wouldn’t have spent years hearing about how these stories got put together in the same way he had, the little battles between all the personalities involved. The likelihood that someone, somewhere, with a grudge would be out to stitch him up.

But it hadn’t happened yet, and so he just had to keep positive. There were topics he’d been getting good at avoiding. He was keeping quiet about all the crap going on at work, and focusing on the good stuff with the baby. He’d deleted from the laptop’s browser any trace of the research he’d done on the problems stress can cause during pregnancy – reading what he’d read about stress looked like it could be so stressful it would just make the risks they talked about in the articles all the more likely. No, he was going to make sure that Rebecca got through this as serenely as possible, and that was an important part of what being a good dad was going to be all about.

‘Well,’ James finally said in answer to Kam’s question, ‘I think if he was going to do that kind of thing he’d be more of a local park or common guy. Bit of fresh air and dog-walking to go with his blowing strangers. “Exercise, James! Important to get your exercise!”’

‘Ah but if he feels like degrading himself, wouldn’t a glory hole in a filthy public bog be the place to go? “As a successful businessman I’ve always appreciated a bit of rough trade!”’

‘But as he’s often told me, he’s a man that likes to do things face-to-face,’ said James.

‘Might be tricky if he’s on his knees or bending over…’

‘Good eye contact and a firm handshake are his watch words.’

‘What’s the hand shaking?’ asked Kam.

The two men spent the duration of the rest of a pint with smutty gags about Howard’s predicament, each more tenuous than the last, and each getting a bigger laugh. James couldn’t quite help thinking: what if Rebecca could hear him now? Or his parents, who’d endlessly made sure he knew better than the macho bullshit that goes around homophobia? But Jesus he’d needed this.