CHAPTER 45
That was indeed the start of a new life and lives. Em was home in a few days, and as a constant stream of wellwishers, including several pupils, came round the house to pay their respects and leave flowers and chocolates, babygros and bootees, we learned how little sleep it is possible to exist on.

Not ‘live’, not even ‘survive’, but just exist. The twins worked a tag-team system of early morning alarm calls that left me pondering the age-old parental question: why exactly had we done this?

I could go into another long and detailed description, this time of the learning process involved in everything from nappies to bathing, but there are some things it is best to draw a veil over. The one good thing was that we had such a list of girlfriends and relatives who wanted, or needed, to come round and enjoy the two. Karen, of course, spent as much time as she could just holding them, and I hurt deeply for her inability to follow our path. While I still felt an ache that the twins were not really mine, it was different for a woman, for giving birth was so more emotional, personal.

So, we had Kaz, and Sally, and Nana (“Great grandma. Bugger a hell”) of course, and Hilda, and Barbara and Audrey, and then Tessa insisted on coming up and was even soppier than Kaz, which was a new and very real bond between them. Neither could, both yearned. And then there was Sid.

Sid was almost as bad as the girls, but he would never say, and I could never work out, whether he was suffering some sort of maternal impulse, combined with a similar sense of loss to that felt by Kaz and Tessa, or if it was just another aspect of the love I realised he felt for me. I wasn’t just the one who got away, I was the one I suspected he saw as living the life he might himself have had.

The boys, though, were no surprise at all. A double act in so many ways, they balked together at nappy changing but delighted n bath time. Wyn…

Wyn, and Tom, and Brian were so much alike. All three were hard men, used to physical contact in a sharp and brutal way, and yet the way they held little Stevie, or Karen, was enough to make me cry. Big hands, tiny children, utter and perfect gentleness. Was this how it was in all families? I wondered if my own father had held me so lightly, so tenderly, and there were a couple of dark times where the loss of both my parents tore at my soul and I just had to cling to my wife, who needed no telling.

All of this time, I had been fighting with the powers that be to allow me access to my medical records, but I kept hitting a number of very solid brick walls. Firstly, the local health authority made noises about ‘confidentiality’ and I took that to mean that they interpreted the doctor’s rights to privacy to be above mine. More importantly, it seemed, when they admitted what little they did let out, that somebody had burned a lot of records in several locations. I had seen the partly-burned evidence at the trial, but the arson was widespread and not just limited to my own files. Eventually, under Roger’s relentless prodding, they had to admit that much of the material was simply not there. Mitchell had, apparently, cleared his desk before escaping. It seemed that I would get no answers until the bastard was run to ground.

As the years went by and our twins became real people, Tom was still working to find him, and I was deeply touched to learn that it wasn’t as an employee of Brian that he did so, but at his own behest and in his own time. I lay in bed one night with Em and tried to put my thoughts into words, and she just slapped my arm.

“Husband, dearest, any more false bloody modesty and you will sleep in the spare room. You know damned well why I married you, and all they are doing is for the same reasons”

“What, they wanted to hear me snore?”

Slap. Emily is a woman of her word, but she relents very quickly when caressed the right way. So I did, and we did, and I was nearly late for school. That was our little nod to convention, the big butch breadwinner returning home with the fresh meat after the day’s hunt. So I hardly looked like a macho barbarian hunter, so what, I had to face schoolchildren for a living, and surely that gave me club membership?

We took a few days off for yet another party, when we descended on Boot again for the christenings that Barbara and Nana insisted on, and I thought that as a group we were probably doing for Arthur what I had done for Dave, as one way or another he seemed to have a really steady flow of funds arriving from us.

Two children left us relieved of one dilemma, that of accidentally insulting someone by leaving them out of the godparent circuit, and it wasn’t till we sat down together and drew up the list that Em and I realised that there was only one ‘normal’ person on it. Three gay men, one transsexual woman, and Hilda. We had dithered over Tom and Sally, but they were so wound up in planning their own family that we decided to spare them. We also waited, with a real and slightly nasty dose of schadenfreude, for their hollow faces and bloodshot eyes when they finally got there.

It was a good day, though the Lakes weather gods had obviously cleared off to Magaluf on a cheap package, because half of the year’s allocation fell on us that day. Arthur had prepared, and we had the marquee of marquees to dance and drink in, as Young Arthur cast a careful glance over Wyn before being hauled back onto the dance floor by the Ravenglass girl he had at his side.

I felt odd at times. Karen, little Karen, more than Stevie, would grasp at me as if I was her mother, trying to get me to feed her as she pawed at my breast, and there were times…

No. It was all the time. I had no wish to be a woman, I have never, since my early boyhood fantasies, considered it as being anything that I wanted. I was emplaced in this body, tied down while it was grown over my soul, so unlike Tessa as she was then, but. But. Each time I watched Emily feed one or both of our children I wished I could share the intimacy, share the load. I have read of sympathetic lactation, but that never happened to me. I just felt my own breasts ache with the need to suckle my twin darlings.

I ran that past Val, and she just said “Intimacy, Steve, and love. They are your flesh, as much as they can be, and you are jealous of Em’s bond. It’s all normal, for any loving father, but because of the damage to you it tugs harder. Look, if it helps, you might try letting them have a suckle, but I would be sure, if I were you, to give them back to Em when they start teething.”

No, nice idea, but no. My body image was screwed up enough as it was, and that would send me over the edge. I stayed with the bottle and the burping.

They grew. They walked, at last, and there were first words and first tantrums, first tears of anger followed by tears of apology, as our little pieces of flesh became little human beings. It all happened so fast!

Professional criticism, that was what it was, not smugness, when we first dropped the par off at the infant school to be looked after by teachers who couldn’t possibly be up to Netherhall standards. If they had been, they would have been there alongside us, mature individuals n our thirties producing the leaders of tomorrow…what a load of crap teacher training colleges talk. We were two ordinary people who loved to see the expression on the faces of young people when the fire was lit within and the glow shone from their eyes, and Stevie and La’l Kaz were simply another two setting out on that road.

1989 brought a surprise, during half term break, when Roger and Simon appeared on our doorstep totally unannounced, Wyn and Tessa close behind.

“Darlings!”

Simon was in full flow, but rather than his usual exuberance there was an edge to him, a real light in his face.

“Can you possibly get someone to take the two little ones? We have a journey to make!”

Once in, he could hardly sit still as we fed them what we could, and he relaxed only slightly, Roger clinging to his hand and smiling like a maniac, as Tessa smirked.

“We are taking you on a boat ride. You will need best bib and tucker, and bring camera and dancing feet! Now, do you have Sid’s number here?”

Sid had a passport, it turned out, and Tom and Sally took the pair, and we still had no idea of what was going on. The next morning, we were off in two cars along the Military Road (“Slower, but so much more delightful, my dears”) to Newcastle, and then the Tyne Commission Quay for a ferry to Esbjerg in Denmark. It was truly odd, how the two boys could gush so freely yet remain absolutely tight-lipped about what they were up to.

We ate well on the boat, a full Danish buffet of open sandwiches and sea food, before retiring to our cabins for the crossing. I actually got a chance to talk to Wyn on the rare occasion he wasn’t being wrapped by Tessa.

“Yes, I know exactly, Steve, just like I know about you, and she is more of a woman than all of the slappers that chased me through college. That is all I am saying on that aspect, but there are things about this trip I, we, have a deep interest in. Just go along with the boys, and you will understand.”

I couldn’t draw him any more, so I gave up and drank the Carlsberg before retiring to our bed to listen to Sid snore on the upper berth.

We arrived off the industrial port, and after Roger had found a street map we worked our way past odd little sausage stands and quirky houses to a large carpark by a government building. Locking the cars up, Roger led us into a shopping area where we grabbed a rather greasy meal while awaiting Simon. He was back in time to have some of Roger’s gigantic round beefburger thing, but none of the beetroot, his face beaming.

“All set, loves, all set. Now, off to the little boys’ and girls’ rooms for posh frocks. Chop chop!”

What the hell was getting him so wound up? It was made worse for me by the fact that Em had obviously worked it out, and was giggling happily with Tessa at my confusion. Glad rags on, we headed back to the government building, and after a short wait a Dane in a sort of college professor’s gown led us down a long corridor as Tessa handed me two small boxes.

The ceremony was in both Danish and English, and I had worked it out by the time I handed the rings to my two friends as their civil union was solemnised in the first European country to allow such things, and the newly legal couple kissed as the world suddenly became a much better place.