Epilogue
Thirty-Two Years Later
Kate
Forever Young by Alphaville
There’s a strange man in my house. And he’s plucking my son’s eyebrows.
A quick glance at Sharon and my defences and shoulders relax. She’s smiling at the pair of them, and laughing. All three of them are laughing, in fact.
I make my presence known by dumping my bags on the kitchen counter.
“Kate!” Sharon stands and rushes to me like she always does when I return from work. “You’re home early!”
“No,” I kiss her as she leans in. “I’m not.”
Sharon looks at the clock on the wall behind my head. “You’re right, you’re not.”
“I’m always right,” I wink at her and she barely has time to pout before she takes my hand and leads me to the other end of our kitchen-dining space where Daniel and the stranger are sitting.
“This is Jake,” Sharon says, and a puzzle piece falls into place. Jake Forester. Her boss. Or at least, that’s what he’s possibly led to believe. In reality, like all Sharon’s former ‘bosses’ she is the one who is truly in charge. “And Jake, this is my wife, Kate.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” I say, holding out my hand to him.
He stands, shakes my hand with a warm but not-too-tight grip and then looks at Sharon behind me.
“Pleasure to meet you too, Kate,” he says but he’s still looking over my shoulder. “How on earth did you bag her, Sharon?” He has absolutely no shame in asking and I turn to gauge my wife’s reaction.
She’s scowling at him while biting back a smile, which tells me everything I need to know. She likes him. Heck, the fact he’s even in our house should have told me that. She’s never invited any of her other bosses back to our house before.
Suddenly Sharon is a hive of activity. She leads me back into the kitchen and starts pointing at dishes on the hob and our rice cooker in a corner. “I made huiguorou, some yu xiang aubergine and there’s rice of course. And I picked up some sufganiyot for dessert.”
“Yes!” Daniel calls out. Huiguorou is his favourite pork dish and sufganiyot – a Jewish type of doughnut you normally only eat at Hanukkah but we like to bend the rules in this house – one of his favourite sweet treats.
“Hello baobao,” I say to him in Mandarin. He’s far too old for him to call him that – my baby, my treasure – but until he asks me to, I’m not going to stop.
“Hi, Mum,” he says, also in his, our, native language but he’s distracted once more by Jake and a pair of tweezers.
“Why is Jake plucking Daniel’s eyebrows?” I ask Sharon as she gets plates and cutlery out.
“Jake was telling me about his brows appointment today when Daniel came home from CrossFit. He sat down and listened attentively and then asked why exactly Jake was having his eyebrows shaped and Jake then launched into this whole monologue about the benefits of well-shaped brows to one’s general appearance and well, Daniel started rubbing at that ever so slight monobrow he has and, Jake, he offered to pluck it for him,” Sharon says with a brief shrug.
“And Daniel said yes?” I ask, disbelieving. Our son is autistic and doesn’t like unsolicited and unnecessary touch. Particularly from strangers.
“I think…” Sharon steps closer and lowers her voice. “I think he feels comfortable with Jake because Jake is, you know, super gay.”
“And so is Daniel?” I whisper back.
“Well, we think so, don’t we?”
At twenty-three, Daniel has yet to come out to us.
Generally speaking, he doesn’t share a lot of personal thoughts or feelings with us.
He also is very selective about where and how he socialises.
He has his chess club, his CrossFit – a special group specifically for neurodivergent young adults – and two friends who he’s been skateboarding with since his teens.
He doesn’t really deviate from his schedule and he has shown next to no interest in going down the path people his age often do with drinking in pubs, dancing in clubs, and signing up to dating apps.
And that’s fine for him, for us. We don’t ever want him to do anything he doesn’t want to do.
But there have been possible signs that Daniel is…
queer. There are the films and TV shows he binge-watches – Heartstopper, Young Royals, Call Me By Your Name – and the books he reads – Cemetery Boys, Gideon the Ninth, and Captive Prince – and he has been obsessed with rainbows since a very early age.
This is not unusual in and of itself, but his parents are queer.
We have rainbows in our house and on some of our clothes for a reason.
We go to Pride every single year. We celebrate World AIDS Day every 1st December.
He knows he was named after his queer uncle he never met.
He is well aware of what rainbows stand for and yet…
he has never told us he’s queer himself.
And why should he? We don’t care. One way or the other, we just want him to be happy.
That’s why, when I look at him now, eyes closed and face tilted towards Jake, I don’t care about labels for him, at all. I just want him to have a life full of moments like this, where he seems perfectly content with himself, with the company he’s in, with the moment that is playing out around him.
“How was work for you?” Sharon asks, filling up a carafe of water.
“Work,” I mumble. “You know it’s not really work.”
“I know that’s exactly what it is, whether you’re getting paid for it or not.”
I retired from nursing just under five years ago.
After thirty years of working in hospital wards, I hung up my scrubs and took retirement.
I still loved the job, but I was tired. My back was so sore waking up each morning that I would hardly sleep with the fear of the coming pain.
But after one month of not going to work each morning, I was bored senseless.
Even Sharon’s long list of errands to run and dishes to cook were no match for me.
And then I found out about Heart Hospice.
Providing end-of-life care for predominantly queer people, they were very welcoming to a highly trained, highly skilled nurse who had been on the frontlines of caring for queer people back in the 1980s and 1990s when our world was on fire.
Or something like that is what the director, Joyce Olawame, said at my interview.
Now, I volunteer there three days a week, providing support to the paid nursing team and company to the patients.
Sharon had questioned my decision to work there after so many years being exposed to so much pain and loss. Didn’t I want a break? Couldn’t I volunteer at a school or a community centre or somewhere where people aren’t dying?
No, for some reason I couldn’t. I didn’t turn my back on those who needed me in the Eighties and Nineties and I’m not about to do it now. Besides, I get to sit down a lot more at Heart Hospice. And I even drink my tea while it’s still hot. Although I still make it my way.
“It was okay,” I say. Sharon pauses, no doubt waiting for me to elaborate if somebody passed on or a new patient arrived or just to share a story of my day, but I keep quiet. Today really was okay. Uneventful. Unremarkable. And sometimes those are the most precious days of all.
They certainly are with my wife and my son.
Thirty-two years ago I didn’t think that such normal days would be possible. So yes, I’m going to treasure each and every one.
We weren’t the first same-sex couple to get married in the UK when the law changed in 2013 but we were among the first one hundred.
We were almost certainly the only couple dressed up as superheroes.
But there was no way I was going to wear a white dress to our registry office wedding and Sharon’s suit was pretty much the Director’s anyway so I made some necessary and slightly more luxurious adjustments to my Lady Phantom outfit and we walked down a short aisle together dressed up as the comic book world’s first sapphic couple.
AJ Ripley was true to his word and he gave them a happy ending in the final issue of Lady Phantom which was published in 1995.
And he was also kind enough to accept our wedding invitation and act as one of our witnesses.
Deepak, who now lives in York with his husband, Clive, and three anti-social rescue cats, was our other witness.
I’m staring at the photo of us on our wedding day over on one of the shelves on our exposed wall.
We renovated this house together shortly before we adopted Daniel in 2006, when he was a shy seven-year-old.
Until then we’d lived happily in Sharon’s Shepherd’s Bush flat but when this Victorian terrace became available in nearby Chiswick, we jumped at the opportunity to move into more space and make a home for our family.
I still haven’t been able to completely shake the conflict I felt adopting Daniel from the orphanage near Chengdu, in Sichuan where my grandparents were all born.
My whole body felt on fire with the cruelty of taking him away from the only home he’d ever known and bringing him to London.
But the orphanage told us too many stories about him being non-verbal making it ‘difficult’ to find willing parents for him, and that the older he became the more ‘challenging’ that would be.
Daniel is not difficult. Daniel is not a challenge.
Daniel is a whole world of love and stories and feelings.
Daniel is also the reason I joined a local Chinese Social Club to improve my Mandarin and rebuild a connection with my culture.
As he attended Chinese school each Saturday morning, I would sit and drink green tea with other parents and grandparents of Chinese origin and slowly, surely part of me started to heal.