The Ginger Child Read online

  The Ginger Child

  Also by Patrick Flanery:

  Absolution

  Fallen Land

  I Am No One

  Night for Day

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Patrick Flanery, 2019

  The moral right of Patrick Flanery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  Interior: Monkeyboy © Kate Gottgens, on p. 136 is reproduced with kind permission of the artist

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 78649 724 6

  E-book ISBN 978 1 78649 725 3

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Mothers

  Birth

  Questions

  Terry

  Nuclear

  Genetics

  Surrogates

  Hugo

  Stages

  You

  Worry

  Hotel

  Queer

  Max

  Queered

  Citizen Ruth

  You

  Searching

  Annie

  You

  Envy

  Prometheus

  Envie

  Alien: Covenant

  Alpha Romeo Tango

  ‘Interior: Monkeyboy’

  Loss

  Sara and Catherine

  On Paper

  You

  Child Parent Child

  Hidden

  Matching

  Me

  Introductions

  After

  Ordinary

  You

  The Ginger Child

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  ginger, n. and adj.1

  A. n.

  1. a.

  The rhizome of the plant Zingiber officinale, which has a distinctive aroma and hot spicy taste, and is used in cooking and as a medicinal agent.

  B. adj.

  1.

  c.

  Of a person: having reddish-yellow or (light) orange-brown hair, and typically characterized by pale skin and freckles. Hence more generally: red-haired.

  3.

  [Short for ginger beer. Cockney rhyming slang for queer.] … (frequently derogatory and offensive). Homosexual.

  *

  ginger, adj.2 (and adv.)

  Origin: Formed within English, by back-formation. Etymon: gingerly adv.

  …

  Cautious, careful; gentle… Also: easily hurt or broken; sensitive, fragile.

  Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition, 2017

  Names and other details have been changed out of respect for the privacy of certain individuals.

  MOTHERS

  Today, many days, I play a private game, imagining hypothetical mothers. Not my own mother, who I know well. Not mothers who would bear a child, abandon it, relinquish it, or have it taken away, a child we would then adopt, but mothers who would bear a child for us, altruistically.

  I look through profiles of friends and acquaintances on social media, think of possibilities, past promises.

  When I see your picture with your husband and children, I remember how you and I pledged to have a child together if we were both still single at thirty-seven. I wonder if you ever think of that now.

  At the time, when we were in our twenties, did you want me to say, ‘let’s have a child now, let’s not wait’? Although that was what I felt, I could not muster the courage to say it for fear you would laugh at me in your charming, heart-breaking way.

  A couple of years ago, when we saw each other for the first time in more than a decade, it felt to me that not even five minutes had passed. Although we both now have husbands and you have children and another pregnancy would be a risk not worth taking just for the sake of a friend’s desire to have his own child, I cannot help imagining what might have been.

  Today, of course, the idea tips us over into the fantastic. But I still think about it, what you having a child for me and my husband, what raising that child, what the closer bond created between us, would do to all of us, for the good.

  But I do not expect.

  You understand, I hope.

  I see your picture, with your two children, your wife, and think about the processes you went through, different anonymous donors, speculating about which traits your children may have inherited from those unknowable men, the way the two girls are so wildly different in appearance and character, both of them dark-haired while you are blonde, as if your genes had left no visible trace on either of them. I think about your generous assertion, after giving birth to the first child, that if you were younger you’d happily get pregnant for us but you could not conceive of a second pregnancy, the first was so difficult and you were getting old, your body could not take the further damage, the risk was so great. And then, a few years later, you decided to try again, for yourself and your wife, and were successful.

  I look at you building a career, negotiating the frustrations of distant family and complexities of sibling relationships, doing it all with such an elegant determination to get things right, while worrying whether you will have the life you want in the end.

  Does it ever occur to you that we could reach a mutually beneficial agreement that would give you something in exchange for the someone we so desire? Such wondering about your own wondering leaves me feeling poorer and meaner, uglier, because it should not be about money, any of this, but only about love.

  You will undoubtedly have your own child or children, and why want the complication of another child, even a child not biologically yours but with that connection nonetheless, of having carried her or him in your body for nine months, a child who would appear before your own children as the first child, the child you relinquished because he or she was not yours to keep.

  How would you explain that, if we did it?

  And would it be so difficult to explain, in the end?

  Would it require no more than saying, I had that child for them because I could? But she is not my child in the way that you are my children, you might say to your sons, your daughters, if that day ever came.

  I pass you on the street as you are talking on your phone, saying, ‘No, Kev, honestly, I got it. Don’t you understand I’m serious when I say I don’t want a kid?’ What would happen if I waited for you, a stranger, to finish your conversation and then asked in the politest, least threatening way I could muster, ‘But would you have a kid for us? I’d pay you. I’d pay you however much you want, even if I don’t have it, even if the law won’t let me, I’ll give you whatever you think you need to make it worth your while, I’ll rob banks to pay you,’ and I know, in that thinking, how deep my desperation has become.

  It feels as if I spend whole days out in the world, on trains and trams and undergrounds, sniffin
g out fertility and sympathy and if not willingness then openness and radical politics and the selflessness such an act would require, to do this without paying scores of thousands of dollars to lawyers and clinics.

  And yet I still imagine, you know, robbing a bank if that’s what it takes.

  (Not that I would.)

  I meet you for the first time in fourteen years and although you are now, like me, in your early forties, you are single and unlikely ever to have a child of your own. Sitting across from you over coffee I think, why would it not be possible? I think this and at the same time I know: this will not happen.

  Yet my brain oscillates between the wondering and the knowing, and when it does not oscillate, holding one in dominance over the other, it holds both the wondering and the knowing (this cannot be) at the same time, concurrent, living the cognitive dissonance of desire and despair.

  I look at you, and you, and you, and you, having one child, two, three, more, sharing photos of them online, expecting us, your friends, to click and like and love and comment with amusement and joy and commiseration when things get difficult, and I think, does it ever occur to you that you have been given a gift you might have shared? By which I mean not the children, obviously, but the exceptional ease with which you and your partners have them.

  And this thinking goes on, stretches over years, loops through the lives of all these possible candidates, friends and acquaintances, strangers, colleagues, and the horror of it is that I cannot bring myself to ask the question, to face the disappointment when each and every one of you would, I am certain, say no.

  Some of you will read this and see yourself, or not see yourself, and some of you not among the yous will see yourself anyway. And I suspect that some of you, whether you are among the yous I mean or not, will feel anger, irritation, but perhaps also sympathy or compassion, and I know that you might feel things I cannot begin to predict or imagine, that your own capacity for cognitive dissonance, for the wondering and the knowing to settle alongside each other concurrently in your own minds, may outstrip my capacity to imagine what you feel.

  And I am sorry if that happens: I am sorry it is happening to you, and also: I am sorry, but that is just what happens, because I desire what you might provide, have provided, still (some of you) may yet provide, no matter how impossible that provision feels or seems to you and me and everyone around us.

  *

  I suggest to my husband that we send out an email, blind-copying everyone we would potentially consider, explaining what we are doing, what we are seeking, how we expect no reply, if the answer is no we do not want to hear it articulated, silence would be preferable so that when we see you again we can carry on with our relationships as if nothing had ever been said.

  But if the answer is yes, then, you know, please write.

  It is too great a thing to ask, he says. We cannot ask.

  Over time, as months and years pass, I begin to wonder why we could not make ourselves more bohemian. We know performance artists and writers and queer scholars and activists. We are proximate to a milieu that I’m convinced could help facilitate our parenthood, bring forth a constellation of people who might be a community of parents to the child for whom I long.

  But perhaps our petit-bourgeois childhoods, our attachment to things, our sense of our own marginality here as immigrants, however privileged we are compared to some, militates against us embarking on a form of family-making that would demand from us and everyone involved a sense of radical fluidity and flexibility. Stable, stuck in our ways, habit-lovers, we are neither radically fluid nor flexible. Surely the bohemian family of multiple parents and multiple homes, in which my own choices about parenting would always have to accommodate the choices and feelings of others in this notional constellation, would drive me mad.

  As if the desire itself has not already.

  I catch a clip of that film from the 1990s about the murderous rich boy lovers. One turns to the other, man to man, sneering, if you could get pregnant you would, wouldn’t you?

  Of course I would.

  BIRTH

  You and I are standing on the stump of a tree in your front yard, on the parkway, that strip of lawn between sidewalk and street. Your house is a few doors down from mine. We have just exchanged vows, though I am only two years old, you a year older, and now we each unroll a baby from our matching raglan shirts and hold these plastic infants up for our mothers’ approval and laughter.

  This has been your idea, the marriage and instant reproduction, you coaching me through the language of vows, providing your dolls as our children. How traditionalist of you to think marriage should precede reproduction, how precocious to understand babies emerge from the lower abdomen.

  But how radical, too, that you should suggest I, a boy, might give birth just the same as you.

  Forty years later, I find you online, click through the family photos you’ve made publicly available, your three children, flesh and blood, not plastic, three children who look uncannily like my memory of you, the five of you now living in the same city as your parents and your sister and her husband and their three children, all of you so close.

  What might have happened if your family had not moved away? We would never have been lovers, because that would have been, for me, an impossibility, for you an exercise in futility and frustration. But perhaps we could have been the sort of friends who remain close throughout their lives, rather than people who drift from such closeness into total strangerhood, so that I wonder now: do you remember me, and our first family? Does someone, you or your mother, still have those children we carried?

  QUESTIONS

  But would you take a ginger child?

  We are sitting in a café in the midst of a London park on a bright autumn day. Mary, the brunette social worker who has asked this question, is in her fifties. It is November 2012.

  My husband and I glance at each other, bewildered.

  We would take a ginger child, a black child, an African, an Asian, an Australian, a South Pacific Islander, a Caribbean, a Latin American, a Native North American, an Eastern European. We would take a mixed-race child, a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Atheist child.

  In this moment, we are open to a child from anywhere, of any race, religion or national origin.

  I am American, white, of German, English and Irish ancestry (as far as I know). My husband, Andrew, is South African, white, of Dutch, French and English ancestry (as far as he knows). Given the long history of my family on the North American continent, and of my husband’s family on the African continent, we assume our genetic makeup may be more varied than genealogy and family lore suggest.

  This, and the fact of our coming from racially and ethnically heterogeneous countries, makes us believe in our capacity to parent a child of any background or identity or race. And after setting aside the idea of making a family through surrogacy, choosing instead to pursue adoption, we are willing to consider any relatively healthy child.

  Yes, of course, we say, we cannot understand why red hair is so often reviled in Britain. We would absolutely take a red-haired child.

  Mary is relieved.

  We have a ginger child now, very sweet boy, two years old, but no one wants him, she says.

  Because he has red hair? I ask, again bewildered.

  Parents think ginger children will be badly behaved, she says.

  Fears of the Celtic. Fears of the fiery. Misplaced fears. Nothing but rank prejudice. We would take the ginger boy now, this instant, except we are only at the beginning of the process. We have not been vetted or approved as adopters.

  What are the red lines? Mary asks. What wouldn’t you be able to cope with?

  Serious physical or mental disability, I say.

  Autism, Andrew says. Sexual abuse.

  What about neglect? Mary asks. Or physical abuse?

  We both hesitate, but yes, we could handle a child who has been neglected or physically abused, although in this moment I am not thi
nking about what the long-term effects of abuse and neglect might be, the degrees of severity, the way neglect itself is also a form of abuse, since abuse means, first, a chronic corruption of ‘practice or custom’, according to my dictionary, and what is neglect but a failure of practice to care?

  Physical disability seems clear-cut. I know that I could not look after a child with reduced mobility, who struggled to move through the world. I imagine a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, a child confined to a wheelchair, and know I am not up to meeting such needs.

  I know we could not handle a child with a serious chronic disease, such as HIV. I know I could not handle a deaf or blind child. This is not a judgement against children who fit any of those categories, but an honest acknowledgement of my own and my husband’s limitations as potential parents. We would find it too difficult.

  Why would we find it too difficult?

  The first answer, one to which I will return over the coming years, is that the red lines of capacity and incapacity have been drawn by Andrew’s and my individual traumas, but also by my desire, problematic as I know it is, for us to turn ourselves into that camera-ready middle-class same-sex couple with a toddling baby crawling across the lawn we don’t have in front of the house we don’t own.

  I know that desire is selfish, perhaps even unethical, and I wonder if our reservations, all those red lines, disqualify us from being parents at all. Couples with biological children have no guarantee that things will go well, and here in the first meeting about adoption we find ourselves ticking boxes, saying no to one category of complication or disorder or life experience and yes to another.

  This form of calculus arises from being made to think about what it means to construct a family without the biological capacity to reproduce. Surely people who conceive biological children are never made to consider what they will or will not be able to handle before ever laying eyes on the child, unless an ultrasound or amniocentesis reveals complications before birth, or unless you know that you or your partner is likely to pass on a particular illness. Which is not to say that such couples don’t consider it, but they are usually not forced to do so.