Free Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Page A

becoming somebody else. It was like taking a holiday from yourself, and always brought with it a whoosh of joy that would make him gasp.
    People were wrong if they thought it was a game, though. It was a way of life. He owned clothes that he had picked up from stalls on Walcot Market, knowing they were not really for him but for one or other of the not-Michaels. He had shooting clothes, double-breasted suits, bomber jackets, flamboyant waistcoats—even a silk cummerbund—that he would never wear as Michael. Today, the unfashionably bright blue jeans, checked thick shirt and Timberland boots were helping him to be Jeff Stevenson, and as he drove along he rehearsed Jeff Stevenson phrases about the troublesome van for the benefit of the vicar, whose name was Gordon Brookes.
    Gordon Brookes was waiting in the vicarage, which sat in the shadow of the church. From the window of the parish office at the front he could see down the churchyard to the lychgate, which needed re-thatching and where used needles and condoms had been found again two days ago. Sighing, he was trying to rearrange his restless dissatisfaction about the absence of his wife, coupled with the problem of his son, and re-mould them into the shape of the lychgate problem. The lychgate seemed to him, as he looked at it, more and more of an affectation. It wasn’t as if it was ever used, he thought petulantly. Coffins came in by the south door, even Wendy’s had, on one of those wheelie things, because all the hearses went straight round to the far side where the car park was. The lychgate had probably not been used properly since the last time a horse-drawn cart carrying a coffin stopped in the lane.
    Jeff Stevenson was now three minutes late and the problem of his son Simon floated to the top of Gordon’s mind. The problem troubled him because although it was as yet still vague, it was not vague enough. Certainly Simon’s deciding that he needed to ‘make a contribution to global equality’ had seemed as flimsy as most of his previous notions about what he should do with his life. But his intention, announced a fortnight ago, that he and his wife and the new baby should embark on ‘a new life based on service to others’, was solidifying in a way that Gordon did not like. Simon was leaving in four weeks’ time, and his wife was refusing to go with him. This morning his daughter-in-law had been on the phone in tears, asking him to change Simon’s mind; Gordon had felt distressed for her but at the same time irritated. It was the sort of call that Wendy would have dealt with. And the ringing of the telephone had interrupted him in a mood of guilty introspection about Wendy, so that instead of agreeing with his daughter-in-law that Simon was simply running away from his responsibilities, he had heard himself suggest that perhaps, if a person feels a calling to higher responsibilities than the ordinary domestic ones, a wife might find her own happiness in supporting him in that calling. Wendy had been happy in
her
supporting role for thirty-eight years, he told her in a cracking voice, hoping very much that he was right. He had been met with silence. Then he had said that not for a moment did he underestimate the effort and difficulty, even sacrifice, that would be involved. ‘Oh no?’ his daughter-in-law had asked tearfully, and rung off.
    Gordon sucked on his bottom lip, feeling misunderstood and a little peeved. Women were better at these things, that was all. It had been Wendy who made sure that Simon’s many lurchings in and out of physical and psychological health, education, employment and relationships remained, to Gordon, vague; with Wendy gone Gordon now felt in danger of having too much expected of him. This raised in him a mixture of fear and indignation because, having forgiven himself within a year of Simon’s birth for a detached paternal style which some might have called inadequacy, he no