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“Call us hopeless romantics, call it the triumph of hope over experience – most of us think when people love each other and want to make that long-term commitment, that is a wonderful thing. So why would we stop a loving couple getting married just because they are gay?”
– Yvette Cooper, Labour MP, 2013
The boy by the door was small for his age and trying to look smaller, chin buried in the collar of his puffy dark blue jacket, hands stuffed in pockets, eyes staring right at the floor. He slouched, sliding down in his chair as if hoping to be overlooked completely. Maybe his plan was to slide all the way to the floor and then commando-crawl to the exit. Johnny regarded him with studied calm. “I’m not impressed at all with this.”
The boy glanced up. His jacket shrugged.
“If you only knew how many times I’ve sat here…” Johnny sighed and smoothed back his hair. When he’d been that age he’d been twice the kid’s size, with about half as much sense, all attitude and bleach-blond quiff and ripping off lunch money from every kid who deserved to have their lunch money ripped off them for being too short, too fat, too brown, too speccy. He’d sat exactly here on too many occasions, right here, facing the headteacher’s door, even though the walls had been puke green then, not the bright, summertime-sky blue they were now, littered with pictures from the art department. “Your dad’s going to be right pissed, Mo. You know what I mean?”
Mo was no professional at the bad boy game. His mouth twisted in contemplation and remorse.
“Your sister, all right, I expect her getting in a tussle. But you?” He adopted the boy’s usual quiet, polite tone: “I just want to read for a couple more hours, Dad. I’m not bothered about the footie. Yeah, right. Then you come to school and turn into a right little hard man, don’t ya?”
“I was just…”
“I know what you were just. It don’t cut it. You know it doesn’t. All you just was got me dragged down here. I’m too old for this, Mo. I’m a good boy now, all right?”
The door opened. Kate, the headteacher, smiled at him. “John, thanks for coming. Mohammed. Why don’t you both come in?”
They took seats in front of her desk, Mo doing his very best to look everywhere but at either one of them. Kate looked pained as she opened the folder on her desk. “I suppose you know what happened in the playground,” she said to Johnny. “You don’t have to tell me it’s out of character for Mo, but in some ways that concerns me more. I don’t believe in talking about ‘good kids’ and ‘bad kids’, but usually the ones who act out do so consistently.”
“I know what you mean.” Johnny glanced over at Mo. “He’s been good at home. His marks are pretty good. I don’t know what to tell you. The other kid just set him off.”
“I’m afraid that’s no excuse. There are words, and then there’s physical violence.”
Mo’s chin raised from his jacket. “He called my dads faggots.”
“Yeah?” Johnny laid a hand on the boy’s puffy shoulder. “Well we are, ain’t we? There’s worse things. Like wasting all our time here when you’re supposed to be doing your homework and I am too. Your dad’s going to kill me by the time we get home. God knows where your sister even is.” He turned back to Kate. “We’re going to have a talk about this, me and him and Omar, but if you think there’s something more formal…?”
She shook her head. “Given the circumstances, I think I’ll leave it up to you for now. But the next time anything happens, there will have to be action taken. And I think he’d be our first pupil to actually be upset about being suspended, so let’s not let that happen, okay?”
“I’m sorry,” Mo mumbled as Johnny ushered him out.
“Yeah, yeah…”
The carpark was near empty by the time they left – not even teachers stayed late on a Friday if they could help it. Johnny drove slowly, Mo a lumpen presence in the seat next to him, looking out for a doubtless aggravated teenage girl.
They found her about halfway home, somehow flawlessly weaving her way past pedestrians and lampposts while tapping away on her phone. Johnny wound down the window and banged the flat of his hand against the door. “Nadia!”
She assumed the lowered eyes of mortal embarrassment, and got in the back. “Where’ve you been, then? If you’d just let me take the bus…”
“Mo got in a scrape.”
He could see her looking at him with concern and disbelief. “Someone beat you up? Who?”
Mo shrugged, but by the time they made it home through the rush hour traffic jams she’d wheedled it all out of him and naturally taken his side. As a father, as a teacher, Johnny was supposed to condemn all violence – the school said he should even look down on self-defence – but he couldn’t help glancing at the kids when they were paused at traffic lights and be proud of the two of them.
Omar had grown up expecting that his future would be centred around marriage and children. His own wishes, and even his sexuality, seemed to be at best a distant, barely significant consideration. It was his duty as his parents’ good and honourable son. Once, a very long time ago, when the extent of Johnny’s possessions had been a mattress in a rented flat, Omar had lain in his arms after they made love, stared at the ceiling, and said: “I wonder who they’re going to line up for me to marry now Tania’s gone.”
“You don’t have to do what your uncle says,” Johnny had said. “You don’t have to do what anyone says.”
Omar had shifted, uncomfortable. “You don’t understand.”
With many aspects of Pakistani and Muslim culture, Johnny had accepted this might be true. But Omar was warm in his arms and smelled of soap flakes and Johnny never wanted to let him go. “You can marry me then,” he’d said.
To his surprise, Omar had let his head fall back against Johnny’s chest. “I just might.”
They’d barely seen each other for the first few months, working opposite shifts at the laundrette, getting the business up to speed. But Omar put down a deposit on a flat with the first salary he paid himself, and just like that they had a place of their own, complete with furniture and a total absence of manic parties downstairs.
By the time the peroxide grew out of Johnny’s hair and Omar had taken him shopping for at least one half-decent suit, they’d worked up enough courage to have dinner with Omar’s father. They’d had dozens of dinners before, in the days when Omar’s mother had cooked up mounds of traditional Pakistani dishes that had usually set Johnny’s mouth on fire while he tried to understand the intricacies of their maths homework. Johnny had never been so nervous about anything, he’d sat on his hands and stared at the table while Omar launched into some enthusiastic explanation of their future plans that only incidentally mentioned that he was an irredeemable homosexual in love with a former white supremacist. His father had taken a good long look at Johnny before sighing and saying, “Well, as long as you’re going back to college.”
Johnny’s parents hadn’t been overjoyed at the news either, happy as they were to see their son alive and clean and no longer at perpetual risk of being locked up for the rest of his life. Omar’s uncle had just thrown up his hands: “Whatever next!” And then inquired about the current profit margin of the laundrette.
The next autumn, Omar really had gone back to college with the aim of studying accountancy, all the better to run the business. But somewhere along the way his father’s endless pleas for social relevancy had stirred in his brain and he’d switched to law. It wasn’t a good school, but Omar was smart and driven enough to achieve anything when he put his mind to it, and at nights they’d sat on the dryers eating pizza slices while Johnny drilled him on test questions.
After a while, Johnny hired a couple of trustworthy neighbourhood kids to cover some of the shifts. It was mainly so he could spend more time with Omar, but it wasn’t long before Omar started telling him he should go back to school too. “You’re not as stupid as you make believe,” he’d said, actually started saying it while they were shirtless and kissing. “Are you going to wash underpants all your life?”
“Washing underpants is an honourable profession.” Johnny had been more interested in removing Omar’s at the time.
The thought had stuck in his head, though, less because he was unhappy than because Omar was – and now Omar was surrounded by what passed for intellectuals in these parts, men who earned more and could hold a conversation about the fine arts and could go to museums without being looked up and down like they were going to make off with a priceless sculpture under their jackets.
Perhaps nothing would’ve ever come of it, perhaps Omar would’ve finally ditched him, if one of their old teachers hadn’t come into the laundrette one evening when Johnny had his toolbox out, fixing a machine while the place was quiet.
“You own this place?” the teacher had asked, as if Johnny might have stolen it.
“Me and my partner. He’s sleeping. Exams tomorrow.”
After a while, a cycle or two, when Johnny had banged the machine into cooperating, the teacher had spoken again: “Ever thought of going into teaching? Technical might be your field. Plenty of kids like you were, and honestly geography isn’t going to be the thing that inspires them to make something of themselves.”
Johnny had wiped his hands on his jeans. “Dunno,” he’d said. “I got into trouble once. Don’t think they’d let me.”
He’d looked into it, though, found out that no charges had ever actually been brought, which mattered. He’d have to make up for skipping his A-levels by taking some courses, but it was possible… In bed one night he brought up the idea to Omar, and Omar didn’t actually laugh. “If it’s what you want to do.”
“You know… Could make a difference, maybe. Some kid like me.”
Soon they’d been doing homework together again, eating takeaway, Omar helping him with his English and history courses. He really wasn’t stupid, once he got into it, but it took some doing, getting his head in the right space, thinking of himself as someone kids might pay attention to, even look up to.
It took years to get into a classroom, and by that time the guys he’d hired were running the laundrette by themselves, Omar was practicing law, and they had a mortgage together, which was more or less like marriage really. The schoolkids always managed to find out about Omar, to figure out that Mr. Burfoot was a queer. But he was a queer with a hammer and an electric drill, which put paid to most of the snickering and “do you take it up the bum, sir?”
About ten years ago, Omar had come home from what was a relatively new job at the time, working in immigrant advocacy, slipped his arms around Johnny’s waist as he was doing the dishes, and said: “What do you think about having kids?”
“Did I knock you up or something?”
“We can adopt now. Still plenty of hoops to jump through, but there’s plenty of kids too. We both grew up with parents. Don’t you think we’d be good at it?”
Johnny had come to recognise that he was pretty good with working with kids at school, getting them to sit down and shut up if he wasn’t actually inspiring them and changing their lives. But he also got to come home to a quiet house and to Omar. The kids might respect him, more or less, at school, but there was a lot different about embracing a gay, interracial couple as parents. Still, “Yeah,” he’d said. “Maybe. But I’m not changing any nappies.”
Nadia had been six, almost seven, when she’d come to them with learning disabilities, behavioural problems, and a history of being bounced around foster homes year after year. Johnny’s hours at the school had meant he spent the most time with her, which mainly meant cooking dinner and marking homework while the two of them sat watching cartoons. By the time Omar made it home, they’d be lying on the rug, checking over her spelling sets with pink and purple pencils. It hadn’t all been easy, but they’d been her parents and at least that was a start.
A year or so later they managed to scrape together the time to sign all the paperwork for a civil union, which had just become legal. Around the same time, Johnny had floated the idea of finding a sibling for Nadia: “We were both only kids. Look how messed up we were.”
Tiny and silent, three-year-old Mo had been terrified of Johnny, baffled by Omar, and Nadia’s instant best friend. In time he’d got used to them all and started to grow a bit and talk a bit, although not particularly much of either.
Neither of the kids had ever found it that troubling to have two dads – plenty of their classmates lived with one parent or with other relatives, and once they reached high school, ground zero for bullying, Johnny was always around to step in if necessary. Besides, Omar’s large extended family was perpetually ready to shower them in a surfeit of uncles, aunts, and cousins, most of whom still looked at Johnny with immense suspicion, even after he turned fifty, as if he were about to pocket the silverware.
So now that it was 2013, almost thirty years since they’d first opened the laundrette and an even more unspeakably long time since Johnny and Omar had met each other on the first day of primary school, Johnny was just an ordinary father bringing home his two kids for the weekend. Just. He’d never dreamed he might get this far. He would never have got this far, would never have survived, without Omar’s enthusiasm and brilliance and love.
Inside the house, he chased the kids upstairs and took off his own jacket. “Omo?”
“Don’t you ever answer your phone?”
Omar was sitting at their dining table, files in front of him. He’d come home early, but brought his work with him.
“I switch it off for classes and I don’t switch it back on. Give me a break, man, I’m old and senile.” Johnny leaned in and kissed his cheek. After so many years, it was difficult for him to think Omar had changed at all, barring some grey in his hair, some lines around his eyes. Same broad white smile, boyish good looks. “Summoned to the head’s office.”
“Who did you stick in the toilet this week?”
“I was only tempted.” He sat down in the chair by Omar. “Mo got in some trouble.”
Omar glanced up. “Mo did?”
“Beat up a kid who called us a couple of bad words. Or tried to. Our little hero.”
“We’ll have to talk to him.”
“Yeah, but tomorrow. It’s date night.” Johnny stroked the hair by Omar’s ear. “Or did you forget?”
Omar sat back in his chair, still playing with his pen. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to leave one juvenile delinquent in charge of the other.”
“They’re a lot better than I was.” Johnny kissed him there, on the side of the head. “C’mon. I’m not waiting another week.”
They left the kids with dinner and their Friday night selection of movies and computer games, extracting the weekly solemn pledge that both would be in bed well before midnight. Judging from the yawns they normally encountered the following morning, this was a pledge motivated by the need to get their parents out of the house rather than genuinely good intentions. But Johnny was happy if neither one was actively breaking and entering or dealing drugs, and Omar was usually too weary to object.
Their date restaurant had for years been a little Indian place in the old neighbourhood, where tiny old ladies in saris prepared mountains of rice and curried chicken larger than themselves. They generally ladled it onto Johnny’s plate, complaining about him being far too skinny, while trying to set Omar up with their eligible young nieces.
“They’re taking the piss,” Omar assured him at least once every six months.
Johnny sipped his beer. “They’re older than my gran.”
“You think your gran never took the piss?”
Tonight they were mostly undisturbed, a birthday party going on in the other half of the restaurant that was demanding the attention of the already-harried waitress. “So Mo’s not in any trouble then?”
“Not much. Throw him out and the class average goes down about ten points.” Johnny pressed a shushing finger to Omar’s lips. “Did you see the debate this week?”
The debate. Other than whatever Omar brought up over breakfast, it was the only thing Johnny really paid attention to these days when it came to current affairs. Omar nodded.
“Could be legal before Christmas.”
“I wish they’d spent the time on a real issue,” Omar said. “Thousands of kids living below the poverty line, family businesses closing all over the place, youth unemployment higher than ever, refugees spending half their lives being processed… Not to mention the gay and trans people being bullied and attacked all over the country. I’d take any one of those issues over a little romance.”
Johnny laid his hand over Omar’s on the table. The thin white scar from long ago still looked shocking in the candlelight. “And I’d take a little romance over all the rest of the bullshit they waste their time on. I said I’d marry you, and I’m going to. I might be eighty-five when I do it, but I will. I’ve got no clue if our son might be gay, or how many kids I teach every day might be, but I know I grew up thinking I had to be anything but what I was, even if that meant finding a group of bloody fascists to hang around with, just so I could have a them and us that wasn’t about being straight or gay. Even if that meant fucking up my friendship with you. Maybe if I’d had a teacher married to a boy it would’ve been different.”
Omar frowned just slightly. Johnny’s criminal past was something they joked about out of the kids’ earshot. His brief period as a foot soldier on the extreme right wing was something neither wanted to remember. “You didn’t need any of that to be with me. What did we have in the eighties? Nothing. Nothing except what we built for ourselves.”
“Yeah, so we take one thing. We already did the civil union.”
“For the kids. For the legal rights.”
“And we do this for the kids too. Some young gay man? It’s a lot different thinking he can grow up and get married and have kids if he wants, be exactly like his straight best mates. Course that’s all really… what’s the word?”
“Heteronormative.”
“Yeah, right. But even if you don’t do it, it matters that you can.” Johnny gave his hand a squeeze. “Omo, I love you, but you’re making this the least romantic proposal in the history of– “
A foot lightly tapped his shin under the table. “You already proposed. Twenty-eight years ago.”
“I’m getting old. But I don’t think you ever actually said yes.”
After dinner they took a stroll around the corner. Omar had given up protesting that it was dangerous for them to hold hands in this part of London. Johnny just shrugged and said he’d sort out anyone who even said a word. It was probably less true now than it had been twenty years ago, but Johnny was still fit, over six foot tall, and well aware of where the kidneys were located.
The neighbourhood shops had changed again and again over the last thirty-odd years. Many were still owned, or partially owned, by Omar’s family, although Omar’s family by this point included dozens of people even Omar’s elderly uncle had never met. Others were boarded up with half-hearted graffiti over the boards. The laundrette had endured. “Underpants never go out of style!” Omar repeated like a mantra.
It could do with a new lick of paint, some tinkering with the electric signs. Johnny had resolved weeks ago to collect up some of his more dedicated students and give them a fiver each to come get some work experience. It hadn’t happened, but the Easter break was coming up…
“One machine’s on the blink,” Ajay reported when they went inside. “Waiting for a part to be delivered. Not much else. Been pretty quiet.”
Friday nights usually weren’t prime laundry time, falling between the rush of a Friday afternoon to have clean clothes for dates and the clubs, and the post-vomit Saturday morning. This was at least part of the reason Johnny and Omar had decided to take it as their one shift in the week: eight hours alone in the laundrette, in the place they’d practically built from the ground up, where they’d fallen in love for the second or third time.
Johnny walked round, checking the slots for unclaimed change. “You know I’ve been thinking about it since we were five.”
“Thinking about what?” Omar had already collected the books from the back and was going over the numbers, pen in hand. Even in 2013, the laundrette hadn’t quite managed to adopt a computer and come into the 21st century.
“I remember that first day of school. This shrimpy little brown kid who hogged all the crayons and kept calling me John.”
“That’s what was on your sticker.”
“Could’ve said Little Bastard for all I knew.”
Omar smiled. “And you kept calling me Omo.”
“What? Omar’s not a real name, is it? So I looked at this little smartass, with the big smile and chubby cheeks, and thought ‘I’m going to marry him when I grow up’.”
“You did not.”
“Fair enough, I also wanted to marry Thomas the Tank Engine, but you get the idea.” Johnny sat down on the centre seat and leaned into Omar’s shoulder. “Marry me.”
Omar glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “D’you want a dress?”
“I want a ring. A nice one I can pawn for crack if you ever wise up and leave me. And a honeymoon, which we can get out of the way now if you want.” Omar’s cheek tasted of aftershave under his tongue.
They locked the door, hung up the rarely-used “Closed” sign, and retreated into the back room. Ajay and the other regular workers mostly stored spare parts in there, changes of clothes, a stack of Red Bulls, and seemingly endless amounts of soap.
How many times had they snuck in here, even with people outside, just to touch each other in the old days? Touches that went beyond a brush of fingers, a sneaky kiss to the cheek. “Nothing fancy,” Omar said, sitting down while Johnny unbuttoned his shirt, pressing a kiss to his chest. “Not one of those ultra-liberal churches or mosques or anything. Just the papers. Just so we can say it.”
“Just so you’re my husband,” Johnny agreed.
Omar buried his fingers in Johnny’s hair. “Just so.” He leaned back, hands planted so Johnny could lean into him, over him. “You know I forgave you a long, long time ago. Papa too.”
“What’re you talking about?” Johnny kissed him, drew back to take off his own shirt. So many buttons these days. Too formal. He used to never wear anything he didn’t mind getting splattered with paint, that could be slipped off in seconds if the opportunity arose.
“The marching. The hate.” Omar pulled off his shirt, levered off his shoes against the edge of the bed. “It never mattered anything to me after we... After we did this the first time.”
Johnny stood with a hand on his belt. “Omo. You think I stuck around for thirty years, went to college, lived with you, raised two kids with you, got civilly unioned... just cause I felt guilty?”
“No. But I think you still feel guilty.”
“It was a bad thing.”
Omar sat up just far enough to grab Johnny’s belt and pull him down roughly, jerking him off his feet. “Yes,” he said. Johnny’s body was pressed to his the way it once had been when Johnny had poured champagne in his mouth and made love to him the first time, the way it now was on an enthusiastically frequent basis. “And now we’ll do a good thing, and keep doing it.”
Johnny ducked his head to kiss Omar’s throat. “I dunno what my stamina’s like these days,” he said, and Omar thumped him in the ribs.
The “closed” sign remained on the door for the rest of the night.