The Professionals Circuit Archive - Charity Begins at Home	   Charity
Begins at Home

 

by Rebelcat 

 
 "Hello, what's this?" Doyle surveyed the mail he'd just tossed down on
Bodie's kitchen table.

 "What?" asked Bodie, distractedly. He was trying to arrange two kitchen
chairs so that he could put his bandaged ankle up on one, while sitting on
the other. 'Just a sprain,' the doctor had said, but it was hobbling him
every bit as effectively as a break, and without the solid support of a
cast to walk on.

 "I think you got some other bloke's mail," said Doyle. "No, hang on. It's
addressed to you..." He held up an envelope and frowned at it, puzzled.

 Bodie fell back into his chair with a graceless thump. He looked up.
There was a brief pause as he focused on the envelope in Doyle's hand, and
then his face became utterly expressionless. "Yeah, that's mine."

 Something wicked took possession of Doyle. "*You're* sponsoring an
African child? *You?*" He made a show of looking around the kitchen. "Got
the pictures tacked up on your fridge, do you? Get regular letters from
the little dears? I suppose you include them in your prayers..."

 "Give me that!" Bodie tried to snag the envelope out of Doyle's hand, but
the other man stepped back out of reach. "Yeah, okay, have your laugh,
then. But you're not one to talk. Look at all the time and money you've
put into that sports club of yours."

 "That's different," said Doyle, still grinning. "This is a scam! It's the
kind of thing old widows and pensioners go for." Mocking, he said, "Your
precious child is little Nbumbo. He's living in a five by five cardboard
shack in a malaria-infested rat-ridden slum with his thirteen brothers and
sisters. He walks ten miles uphill each day just to get clean water, and
his dream is to be able to go to school and become a neurosurgeon, so he
can cure his littlest brother's epilepsy."

 "It's not a scam," said Bodie, biting off each word. "I looked into it."

 "When?" asked Doyle, pulling out another chair.

 Bodie scowled at him. It was the kind of look that made hard men tremble
in their boots.

 Doyle stayed where he was, grinning. Bodie was too far away to hit him,
and too crippled by his ankle to tackle him. He had the advantage and he
meant to make the most of it. "When?" he asked again.

 There was a momentary pause, and then Bodie visibly relaxed. He slouched
back in his chair, and folded his hands over his chest. "I'll have you
know I'm a modern, sensitive, and caring man, in touch with his feelings.
This whole hard-bitten, conscienceless, but irresistibly handsome,
mercenary image is all a ruse."

 Doyle sniggered. "I'd say you're right about handsome being a ruse. But
you haven't answered my question. When? How long have you been giving
money to these people?"

 "Christ, Doyle. When you get on the scent..."

 "Yeah, that's me. A bloodhound. *When* Bodie?"

 "A year." Bodie shrugged, elaborately. "So?"

 Doyle tapped the edge of the envelope on the table, thinking back. A year
ago, Bodie was... "Good god, you don't do things by half, do you?"

 "Look, why should you care where my money goes?" Bodie picked up an
envelope at random and winced. "Soddin' 'ell, is the gas past due already?

 "It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing," persisted Doyle.
"If you're feeling guilty about the things you said to that black doctor
when you were off your head with a temperature, there are better ways to
make amends."

 "You've missed the point by a mile, old son," said Bodie. "I apologised
to the doctor, and took the nurse out to dinner."

 "Right, because there's nothing women want more than a chance to be wined
and dined by you. You're such a philanthropist." Doyle pushed his chair
back and went to fill the kettle. Over the sound of running water, he
said, "Foster children programmes breed inequity. They favour one child
over another, and they don't do a thing for the root causes of poverty."

 "Solving the world's problems is your mission, not mine," said Bodie. He
reached across and retrieved the letter Doyle had abandoned on the table.

 Doyle switched the kettle on and turned around to look at Bodie. He'd
opened the letter and was going through it, making tching sounds under his
breath.

 "If you wanted to help kids, you could do it right here," said Doyle. "Or
didn't you think you could pick a charity any further away from home?"

 "What do the kids here need?" Bodie flapped the letter at Doyle. "See
this kid? His mum and dad were raped and murdered right in front of his
very eyes. And then they tried to burn his house down around his ears."

 "Where does it say that?" Doyle grabbed the letter and quickly scanned
it. "It doesn't say a damn thing about rape!"

 "You've just got to read between the lines," said Bodie. "Says his mum
and dad were killed by rebels right? Well, from the rebels' perspective
shooting 'em would be a waste of perfectly good bullets. And the mum...
Even if she was getting old and dried up, they're not going to let her go
to waste, right?"

 Doyle dropped the letter as if it were poisonous. "You're twisted."

 "It's a twisted world we live in," said Bodie, easily. "Anyway, some of
'em might be mine."

 "You never!" Bodie was a lot of things -- stubborn, racist,
more-than-occasionally homicidal -- but Doyle was certain he wasn't a
rapist. If he was, Doyle would have to accept that he didn't know the man
he'd been partnered with these past years at all.

 Bodie gave him a disgusted look. "There's a pile of papers over on the
coffee table. Get that them for me, will you, mate?"

 Doyle almost told him to get them himself, before remembering Bodie's
gammy ankle. By the time he'd collected the pile and deposited it on the
kitchen table, the kettle was beginning to boil. He left Bodie to sort
through the stack of bills, junk mail, and, evidently, communications from
his charity.

 He was rinsing the teapot with hot water when Bodie made a pleased noise.

 "Here it is!"

 Doyle dropped a couple of teabags into the pot and poured on the boiling
water. When he turned around, he found Bodie waiting with a grin. He held
up a colour photo.

 "See this one? Name's Akins. He's got no dad." Bodie handed the photo to
Doyle. "But actually the bastard who abandoned him might as easily have
been me."

 Doyle examined the picture. "He's black!"

 "So's his mum!"

 "I mean, he's really black," said Doyle. The smiling boy in the photo had
skin so dark it was almost blue. "I don't think that kid's had a drop of
white blood in his ancestry for two thousand years. Probably never."

 "Yeah, maybe," conceded Bodie. "But what about that new one? He's a
lighter shade of brown."

 "Bo-die!"

 Bodie shrugged. "See the thing is, I don't know how many of the little
buggers over there might be mine. And I can't exactly send their mums
maintenance."

 "What?" asked Doyle. "You mean you never took precautions?" He sat down
across from Bodie and took another look at the photo. The kid appeared
surprisingly healthy considering his circumstances, but a bloke would have
to be daft to think he was any relation of Bodie's.

 "Rubbers were like gold. You didn't waste them on sex." Bodie paused, and
then added, "Penicillin was a lot cheaper, and we didn't really think
about the other at the time."

 "What the hell *did* you use condoms for, then?"

 "Traded 'em. Weapons, ammunition, food, sex... Whatever was needed."
Bodie's lip curled. "Rubber doesn't last well in the heat. Damn things
broke half the time anyway." 

 Somewhere along the line, Doyle had lost control of the conversation.
Trying to get Bodie to open up about his mercenary days was a favourite
pastime, but this wasn't what Doyle had had in mind. "I don't need to know
about the underground condom market in deepest darkest Africa."

 *Or about Bodie leaving a trail of pregnant birds across the continent.*

 Bodie leant forward on his elbow, one eyebrow quirked. "The younger the
better," he said, smirking. "But never too young, of course. I'm not a
practice dummy. Any bird I bed's got to know what she's doing. Oh, since I
didn't care to be on penicillin *all* the time, she had to be healthy. So,
a good *close inspection*... smell's a good way to tell."

 "You-." Doyle caught himself on the verge of exploding angrily. Something
wasn't ringing true.

 Bodie was watching him expectantly.

 Doyle shook his head in reluctant admiration. "You bastard."

 Bodie's tongue caught between his teeth. His eyes were sparkling, as he
said, "Why don't you pour us some tea?"

 "I don't believe it," said Doyle. "You're not going to convince me that
you're fostering... how many?"

 "Four," said Bodie.

 "Four African children, because you think there's a chance you might be
the father!"

 "Okay," said Bodie, agreeably. "Then I got into it because there was this
bird who was keen on it, see, and..."

 "Yeah, if you'd told me that first, I might have believed you," said
Doyle. He drummed his fingers on the table as he considered the evidence.
"I'm right. You feel guilty!"

 Bodie looked offended. "Bollocks! I'm the cool, sophisticated one. You're
the bloke who goes about with all the world's troubles on his shoulders.
Guilt is your game, not mine."

 Doyle got up and found the last two clean mugs in the cupboard. As he
poured the tea, he said, "You're pretty cagey about your past. I think
getting stabbed last year, and spending that time in hospital, gave you an
opportunity to think about what you've done. And you didn't like what you
saw."

 "Africa was A Boy's Own Adventure Tale, don't you know? I loved every
minute of it." said Bodie.

 Doyle put the mugs down on the table, and sat back down. "If I'm to
believe any of what you told me, it was more like A Boy's Own Dirty
Weekend."

 Bodie sipped his tea, looking at him over the top of his mug. "Well, now
that you've worked it out, you can stop twitching your nose at me. You're
off the scent."

 "I still think there are better ways you can give away your money," said
Doyle, doggedly. "Individual sponsorships are bad for communities. They
create two classes of people, the ones who get money and the ones who
don't."

 "Christ, Doyle! What do you expect me to do? Tell the little buggers,
sorry mates, I'm cutting you off in order not to perpetuate the class
system?"

 "Well...," Doyle unexpectedly found himself boxed into a logical corner.
Trying to cover his confusion, he examined the interior of his mug.

 "Right," said Bodie. "You look after your kids, I'll look after mine."

 Despite himself, Doyle grinned. "That hard exterior and all you are is
mush inside." He picked up the first letter, the one that had started
everything, and looked at it again. "Christ, did this kid really carry his
little brother to the aid station all by himself? With third degree burns
on his back?"

 "You could sponsor him," said Bodie. "It'd be easy enough to arrange."

 "I'm not going to sponsor an African child!"

 "I've got an extra application form here," said Bodie, digging through
the papers heaped on the kitchen table.

 "No!"

 "You can try to fight it, but you know that face is going to stay with
you. You'll be lying awake in bed thinking about little..." Bodie paused
and tugged the top of the letter in Doyle's hand down until he could read
the name. "Kofi. You'll be wondering whether he's got food to eat, shoes
on his feet, or a roof to sleep under. Makes your underprivileged inner
city kids look like spoiled little brats, doesn't he?"

 "You're an arsehole, Bodie." Kofi's dark eyes seemed to be staring
straight at Doyle. He turned the letter over.

 "I could tell you about this other kid, Banga..."

 "No!"

 ******

By midnight, Doyle was lying awake in bed and cursing Bodie.

 It was one thing to stand on principle, it was another to think that your
principles might be standing in the way of some kid getting shoes. Or
clean water.

 The faces of ragged, hungry children stared at him accusingly every time
he closed his eyes. Where were the ugly children? Did that damn charity
only offer sponsorship to the good-looking ones? Censored all their
letters, no doubt, if it didn't outright dictate them...

 On the other hand, he'd learned something new about Bodie, hadn't he? A
year ago, Bodie had apologised to that black doctor, and made an effort to
clean up his language, but he still got stiff around Africans who had
money and power. And the dozy git actually seemed to think that going out
with one black nurse made him less of a racist.

 But apparently he had felt bad enough about his behaviour during that op
that he'd gone out and found four African children to foster.

 It was endearing, somehow.

 Doyle smiled, turned over and closed his eyes.

 -- THE END --

 *March 2007*

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