Luke and John
“Dad,
when is Daddy coming back home?”
Luke smiled at the two uses of the
word Dad in the same sentence.
He and his partner, John, had talked
about what their adopted daughter might call them, in the days long before they
had even laid eyes on Rosie. They imagined what she might look like; blonde,
with tightly curled ringlets, peach pinked cheeks on porcelain skin. John would
teach her to sing; she would be a broad-way star, with a voice like Idina
Menzel. Luke would introduce her to poetry, Yeats, Frost and Blake, and fuel
her with a love of language. She would speak perfect French, Spanish, and a
little Portuguese. She would live in their house with them, a beautiful cherub,
sent by the angels. They would call her Diona, and she would call them...
What would she call them?
John suggested “Daddy Number One” and “Daddy
Number Two.” Luke didn’t have to ask outright, he knew that John would
insist on being referred to as the former.
They tried it out for a while, when
Rosie first started to speak. The problem was, Rosie couldn’t pronounce “Two”
properly, favouring P’s and B’s over M’s and T’s in her early
days. With some minor modification, John was shining “Dadda One” while Luke became “Dadda
Poo.” While Luke was never ashamed of his sexuality, he had never quite
been as confident about it as John. He found it difficult enough explaining his
relationship to outsiders, without his daughter running up to him and
consistently shouting “Poo!” at him
in public. John had found it hilarious, but for Luke, the joke wore off
quickly. Instead, he put forward the suggestion that Rosie would refer to Luke
as ‘Daddy’ and John as “Dad.” John had quibbled over this, something about
semantics, and the connotations of soft y’s,
and in the end, they settled that Luke would “Dad” and John would be “Daddy.”
Luke didn’t know when John was
coming home. He tucked the blankets around Rosie, who incidentally, was not
blonde either. He stroked her thick, ebony hair and wondered what he was going
to tell her, when he, himself, didn’t know when his partner was coming back. He
said nothing and waited for her to fall asleep.
John had been gone nearly four days.
It was the longest they had been separated since they had become a couple. Luke
had been on a themed night out to celebrate a joined birthday party of his
friend Mark, and another man who he didn’t know, when he first met John. All
were dressed up as either Michael Jackson or Madonna. Luke dressed as Michael
Jackson, figuring this to be the safer option. He was from a shy, conservative
family, and feared his family’s reaction, should photographs ever emerge of him
in a dress. John had no such concerns. Luke’s first sighting of John was of him
in the iconic, gold, cone shaped Madonna bra, wearing a blonde wig with tousled
curls. He had taken Luke’s breath away.
It was John that struck up the
conversation at the bar. He insisted that Luke do shots of tequila with him,
breaths of conversation between mouthfuls of alcohol and two weeks wages. Luke
soon felt giddy. Giddy on life, with all its amazement. Sometime in the early
hours, John offered his blonde wig for Luke to try on in the bathroom of a club
called Colada, which Luke had never
been to before. He had never felt more beautiful.
John had soon occupied Luke’s
apartment. It happened without Luke really realising. One day, it was his
apartment, solo, with his things. The next, it was their apartment, with Johns
things strewn everywhere. There had been an argument. Luke had said John was
suffocating him. John packed up his things and left. It was only overnight, but
in those twelve hours, Luke realised that he needed John.
There had been petty fights in
between; it was usually John who took umbrage to a statement or suggestion – he
could pack a suitcase and make a dramatic exit within an average of twenty
minutes, but he was usually never gone the night, especially not since Rosie.
The worst fight Luke could recall was when they first decided to try for
adoption.
Luke had always wished to become a
father; he’d known this from a very early age. Sadly, it was around this early
discovery of self awareness, of his goals and ambitions in life, that he
realised he was gay, which seemed to throw up no end of problems for him. He
had to repeat to himself, frequently, when he was alone, that it would never be
possible for him to have children – it was not physically possible, if he were to have a partner of his own
choosing.
Luke
kept all this hidden from his mother, a primary school teacher, and his father,
a policeman, for theirs was a small village, and news travelled fast. Mr
Gossamer at the end of their street sat in a deck chair in his garden and had
colourful names for men who took a liking to other men; he spat them out
whenever he had opportunity to do so. Gossip was rife in their small community,
and Luke never wanted his mother to be at the receiving end of someone else’s
cruel tongue. Rather like his hopes for children, he kept his true wishes
hidden, packed up in a small battered suitcase that lay dormant until he moved
to a larger city, where he could get lost in a sea of generic faces; a place
where nobody even knew their own neighbours.
It
was John who had brought up the suggestion of adoption. He would sometimes ask,
after Luke had come home from teaching English to secondary school children,
whether he had ever wanted one of his own.
“What
do you mean?”
“Have
you ever wanted one?” said John. It
always caught Luke off guard whenever he said it, which was usually just as
Luke was about to dose off to sleep at night. It seemed like it was one of
those things that played on Johns mind in the last moments of consciousness for
the day. Luke never knew how to answer, having long convinced himself that it
wasn’t possible. Luke didn’t know what John meant, but it did get him thinking.
The next time John asked, Luke was ready for the question. Instead of feigning
sleep, he answered him.
“Yes.”
He’d said. “I want children.”
John
didn’t reply.
That
next morning when Luke woke, John was nowhere to be seen, which was peculiar,
as Luke set his alarm for seven o’clock every morning, ready for school. Luke
didn’t even know what time John usually got out of bed, for John never had
anywhere he was supposed to be. Sometimes he auditioned for parts in musicals,
and often he did get a role, but the musical would come to an end after a
number of weeks, and then John would return home, only auditioning for new
parts when Luke encouraged him to. John would moan that he didn’t want to audition anymore, that he
enjoyed cleaning, socialising, and day time television, and he wasn’t afraid to
admit it. Luke worried that perhaps John felt insignificant because Luke was
the main bread winner, but John looked offended at the thought.
“But
I’m a house husband!” He declared, when Luke had brought it up in
conversation.
“How
can you be, we’re not married.” Luke laughed.
It
was true; they weren’t married. The thought of the ceremony terrified Luke, who
disliked being centre of any attention, and the process seemed pointless to
John, who believed it was how people acted that determined that they loved each
other – not a piece of paper saying so. It turned out that John didn’t want to
be anywhere else, with anyone else, other than Luke, looking after their home,
and Luke was content with that.
Luke
stepped into the kitchen in his school uniform to find John had cooked him
breakfast. He was up to something. John smiled as he poured Luke a coffee, then
perched himself on a chair waiting for Luke to finish.
“What’s
all this?” Luke asked, bemused. John’s face recoiled.
“Can’t
I just do something nice?” He was grinning; there was an envelope in his hands.
John slid the papers across the table, and Luke realised they were information
sheets about adoption. It was the first time in twenty years Luke cried.
The
second time was a few months later, when it appeared the agency wouldn’t allow
Luke and John to adopt. It wasn’t out loud crying, not lavish, salty tears with
sound effects and snot, but quietly to himself, when he thought John had fallen
asleep.
That’s
when the argument started. The big one. It was when John had caught him
praying.
“What
the hell are you doing?”
“What
does it look like I’m doing, John?” Luke said. “I’m praying. Praying to God
that we get our Diona, praying to God that we raise her properly, and praying
to anyone who will listen that she grows up to love us, and not hate us for
giving her two dads.”
“If
we get that child, it will be with no thanks to God,” John sneered. “You think
God loves us, Luke? To have ‘made’ us like this, and then tell us we’re wrong
for feeling how we can to feel? For making us ashamed of who we are, and what
we do? If there is a God, Luke, he’s sick, and I don’t want you speaking to Him
again.”
Luke
had laughed. “You don’t want me speaking to
Him? We’re not in school, John; you can’t just ban me from speaking to someone,
especially not God!”
“I
thought you weren’t religious?” John asked.
“I’m
not,”
“Good,
because there’s no place for us in God’s world, Luke. And He has no place in
ours.”
They
did adopt Rosie, eventually, and they didn’t call her Diona.
Luke
continued to live his life as a Godless secondary school English teacher, and
John stayed home as a house husband and a Daddy. It was four years later, when
Luke was handed a pamphlet on the way to his car that things changed.
It
was raining that day. It had soaked Luke right down to his underwear. He was
worrying that the pamphlet might rip before he had a chance to show it to John
and placed it carefully in the foot well of his car, hoping it would dry.
He
waited for John to put Rosie to sleep before showing it to him. John’s lips
twitched as he read it.
“What
are you showing me this for?” John asked.
“Haven’t
you read it?” Luke said excitedly, hovering over his shoulder to see if John
had read the right passage on the paper. “There look,” he said pointing a
finger at the pamphlet. John’s expression didn’t change.
“I
don’t understand?”
“Well,
it says that we can be Christians... did you know that? I didn’t know that – I
thought if you were gay, that was it really, there was nothing you could do,
and you’d just be going to hell...”
“There’s
no such thing as hell, Luke.”
Luke
faltered. He hadn’t been expecting this reaction. He thought John would be
delighted at this news, that they could both be saved, somehow, by this sodden
little pamphlet.
John
stood up, trying hard not to raise his voice so he wouldn’t wake Rosie. “Are
you reading this properly, Luke? It says that we can be gay, and that’s fine,
but we can’t act upon anything. What do you think that means?”
“Well,”
Luke said. “I think it means we wouldn’t be able to, you know...”
“That’s
right. We wouldn’t be able to have sex anymore, Luke. We’d be living together
for the rest of our lives as buddies.”
“But
I thought that was a small price to pay! God damn it John, I thought you’d be
happy! We could—“
“We
could what?” John said throwing his hands in exasperation.
“We
could both go to heaven.”
Luke did think it. He thought that the time he
and John were together on earth was nothing, if all he, John and Rosie could
all be together in heaven forever.
“I
never thought we could have children, John, heaven was something I never even imagined could be in our grasp.”
John
was biting his lip. “I thought this was our
heaven, Luke. It should be heaven for
you, here, now, with me and Rosie.”
It
was the last thing John said to him before he left.
*
The
day Luke brought home that stupid God booklet had been the worst day of John’s
life. It felt like someone had smashed a gong around his ears, shaking his
balance, moving the floor out from under his feet. If he was honest with
himself, John wasn’t all that surprised – it didn’t shock him, he just wished it had never happened. Over the years,
Luke had mentioned God and heaven, and other things that John had tried his
best to stamp out. To nip it in the bud, and hope that he’d never say any more
about it. But he did. Every now and then, God would creep into Luke’s life, and
John was powerless to stop it.
He
felt awful leaving him that day - he knew Rosie would be fine - and he always
knew he was going to go back home. He just didn’t know when. He didn’t know
what he was going to do, now that everything had changed. He loved Luke, he
always had, and he always would. He knew Luke wanted to go to heaven, if he
possibly could. He knew that somehow, he even had the twisted notion that John could get into heaven. John knew
that it would take a lot more than abstinence to ever get him into heaven, but he kept that quiet from Luke.
When
John returned, four days later, Luke was a mess. He said he’d never mention
anything about God again, and that yes, this was their heaven that they were
living in, and he never wanted to give that up.
John
had smiled, and said it was fine. That he would give things a try. They would
take things slowly. John saw tears filling in Luke’s eyes.
That
night in bed thought to himself, in those last moments of consciousness, that
if there was a heaven up there and there was a slight possibility that Luke
could go there, then John damn well wasn’t going to stop it. He was going to
make this work.
John reached for Luke’s hand and lay there, in
their heaven.
