The chant leader is a plump young man wearing the red cap of his football club, where he is also cherished for the reach of his voice from the stands. His mother, a thin, dark-haired woman he stands beside, can be seen outside medical clinics at any rally opposing abortion, and at Parliament House opposing same-sex marriage. All in this group are Anglophile and deeply Christian. Their knowledge of the Holy Land is entirely drawn from the Bible. They sense that the name Ali Bashir is Middle Eastern and repugnant to their Christian beliefs, but will not suspect he was raised and educated in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

The charges that Ali Bashir will answer this morning are to be read out in the courtroom. He will feel the blood ebb from his face. First, that you did murder Trevor Bligh. Or second, that you did aid or assist Trevor Bligh in his suicide.

Trevor would have considered himself to be from the same cultural class as those protesting his death. His football team was not that of the young chant leader in the red cap, but it was in the same division. The two of them would have milled about in the same stadium, queued in the same line for a beer, ranted at the same umpire. The older, the younger, each usual for his time and his place.

Trevor Bligh’s family were also religious. He was born in Britain at the end of World War II to a Catholic family which had lost its patriarch in the Middle East with the Rats of Tobruk. He was named for his posthumously bemedalled father. A year after his birth he and his five siblings were brought to Australia by their mother, to the Parish of Concorde. The children were educated at St Bede’s School for Catholic Boys.

The widow took in washing and cleaned houses in a routine not unfamiliar to their neighbours; the oldest son worked part time to put himself through law school, his subsequent employment funding the younger children into professions, and the next paid for the following, seriatim down the family, except for young Trevor, who was unlucky enough to be preceded by a sister whose calling was to a nunnery, so the best he could hope for was a Certificate of Business Practice, dux of the class, good enough to attract the attention of his mother’s close friend, a woman in grim charge of Bookkeeping & Trade Accounts at Grace Bros. on Broadway, where she governed diligent rows of young women and men adding and multiplying and pencilling figures arranged in rows much as they were themselves, in a quiet hall where they must raise a hand for permission to go to the toilet, and make up the time later.

Escape from the hall of silent calculations was provided by his Certificate of Presentation and Design, an in-house honour, awarded at a tea-break ceremony by the young Mr Mick himself of the Grace family. The young Trevor had arrestingly white hair and teeth, and a quick smile developed under the Christian Brothers régime to deflect a teacher’s ready anger. He was memorable enough for Mr Mick to take him under his care and place him in House Style, a department charged with ensuring that all merchandise displays conformed to the Grace family’s requirements of modesty, propriety, and the nobility of the human form.

At the company’s Christmas picnic, harbourside in the Cremorne Point gardens, Trevor met a girl he had known from the bookkeeping hall, Molly. He asked to visit her, again and again, always in the ante-room of her parent’s small house, later at the picture hall if accompanied by her sister. Her membership of the Young Catholic League made her acceptable to his mother.

They were married a year later and blessed with twins. The boy lived only for a few minutes, and the complications of the birth so strained Molly that she was afterwards unable to conceive. The name they had chosen for a son was Christian, so they named the surviving daughter Christiana, to give the boy some presence in his sister’s life.

Their small family remained close to the larger and united families, celebrating births, christenings, anniversaries. Christiana, a teenager, became drawn to the large network of the bloodlines, and corresponded with cousins in Dublin. She often spoke of having a large family herself, which drew her toward teaching at primary school. Finishing her own schooling, she enrolled at Teachers’ College. The three-month interval between these provided time enough for travel before serious study began, and she persuaded her parents to send her to Dublin to lodge a month or two with the cousins.

The tone of her letters home had her parents guess she would cut her visit short; she spoke of poverty and homeless children, of families sleeping in packing cases under the flyovers, and the parents were right, she flew home early, but only to cancel her secular teaching course, pack her belongings, and join the teaching arm of the Little Companions of Mary, deep in the slumtowns of inner Sydney.

Christiana has inherited her father’s shining white hair, which she now cropped short. Her father noticed, with a sinking heart, that she had developed the severe smile of the truly good.

She had found her place in the world, she said. When she was asked about her aspirations to mother children of her own, she said in the family of Christ she would mother the children of all Christendom. Six months later she had transferred to Dublin.

She wrote home regularly and promised to visit soon. Over the years her parents became used to hearing the reasons for unavoidable delay. ‘The day Christiana comes home’ became their private synonym for ‘never’.

With a far smaller family than she was used to, and no prospect of grandchildren from her daughter, Molly immersed herself in the affairs of the children in the wider family and in-laws, but now the children had reached the stage of life where schools became their daytime carers. She sank again into the depression she was prone to, and showed no interest in Trevor’s suggestions of bridge clubs or book groups as paths to a life beyond housekeeping.

Trevor saw that her interest was sparked only by the activities of the St Bridget’s parish. Molly had long been responsible for arranging flower displays in the nave for funerals and christenings; she admired at close quarters how friendships formed here, and the way patronage worked among the devout. She explained the social advantages of this without embarrassment. Trevor was impressed by her display of a commercial insight he had never suspected in her.

With his modest savings they bought a street-corner florist as a declining but going concern. Molly provided flowers gratis for the church and enjoyed the publicity delivered each Sunday in the form of the monsignor’s thanks from the pulpit, after which service she stood at the door handing out her business cards to the well off of the congregation.

The business flourished on Molly’s energies. She began early and finished late. Trevor took over the cooking and engaged a local girl to do the cleaning. Molly seemed to have cornered the market in funeral bouquets, inaugurating the use of Bird of Paradise blooms as a centrepiece, which she thought a nice allusion to the afterlife, and crossing their beaks like lovebirds.

Trevor grew accustomed to her late appearance home and, one particularly late evening, as he called into the shop to coax her away, he found her on the floor, unconscious, and the blooms she held to her skirt, which first he took for flame flowers, were white petals running with her blood.

Gynaecologists thought it unlikely Molly contracted her uterine cancer as a result of the difficult birth thirty years earlier, but Trevor was convinced of it. The rapid progress of her disease shook the little Christianity he still harboured. God’s refusal to protect a woman so devoted to His Cause did not live up to the deity as she described him. She had demonstrated her devotion despite the calamitous birth of the twins by interpreting the Contraception Encyclical’s ban on sexual intercourse other than for procreation as applying equally to the barren as the recreational, so eschewed it ever after.

Christiana’s reply to the news was panicky, asking about the competence of specialists, suggesting possible dates for a visit home, advising meantime that the children to whom she was dedicated were needy, but promised she would find a temporary carer to take over her work as soon as she could.

The strain was showing on Trevor’s face. Molly had been moved from the hospital ward to her home bed and nursing arranged by the church was available only during commercial hours. He arranged compassionate leave from the emporium. Their plight and his own hopelessness depressed him so much he poured out his heart to Christiana during a midnight call. She was tearful but seemed unable to speak of anything but the plight of her children if she were absent. Trevor could imagine her brave and determined smile. He asked her if she understood that she had already seen her mother for the last time? Within seventy-two hours Christiana was home.

Molly slid into a coma, as if seeing Christiana was the last effort she needed to make in her lifetime. Trevor called the family doctor who stood by, but made it plain that this was the end. Christiana implored him to extend life for as long as possible, but all he could think of was to cover Molly’s panting head with a small oxygen tent. Christiana sat at the  bedside, her eyes closed, lips moving. She was praying for a miracle.  After the death rattles were long stilled the doctor reached to the oxygen bottle. Christiana tugged his arm away and prayed on. The doctor waited many minutes, then turned the oxygen off saying kindly that her mother had gone. Christiana raised her hand to strike him, but changed the gesture to make the sign of the Cross as if he had committed a sin, and Trevor led her away.

After the funeral, at which much was made of the beauty of the wreaths arranged to Molly’s own design, Trevor drove Christiana to the airport and waited at the rail to watch the aircraft climb away, conscious of both loss and relief. Molly’s family tried to distract him from his loneliness by the round of invitations to dinner, and weekends away from the city with Molly’s brothers and their children. His absence from the emporium had given him time to become familiar with the commercial techniques of the florist business, and he kept up the association with the parish congregation without maintaining Molly’s level of piety.

He found the evening meetings at the church, where widows and widowers were encouraged to mingle, awkward. More to his taste, now that he had become full time at the florist, were the flower shows and the gardening clubs, where social bonds promised a marketing direction unattached to churchliness. A few of the clubs offered a bohemianism he found adventurous, particularly an orchid farm in the Leura high country, owned by a cooperative of eight young men who, one long weekend, threw an extravaganza at which every guest was required to appear as a member of the plant kingdom. He appeared spikily as a Xanthurias, and was matched in a blind draw with a vermillion Strelitzia. After retiring to a designated shed together, blissful on fine red wine, he was later dreamily determined to make apologies somehow connected with relative virginity, and an unconscious attraction to the Bird of Paradise bloom, but in the morning the ravishing lad was gone.

His close relatives gradually relaxed their insistence on his weekly appearance at table, and interpreted his reticence as a preference for solitariness, rather than as a preference of a different nature, but he made the effort to join them on birthdays and the festive days of the Catholic calendar.

The Catholic calendar continued to provide the main flow for his flower sales, but his new friends’ network gave him the opportunity to broaden the business from simply blooms to include a range of the budding plants. This made the crucial decisions about stock-holding through the months of summer less of a worry for him, since blooms on plants were far more resilient a bio-culture over, say, a scorching long weekend.

Winter displays were as much a problem for him as for any florist outside the tropics, and he came to rely on supplies of African Violets to cover the coldest months. The best came from hillside Katoomba. Deliveries were made by a young man – late twenties so far as he could guess, tanned, dark eyes, slim moustache. His name was Ali, and he was from Beirut. His path to Sydney had been eased because immigration rules then allowed relative reunion, for which he was sponsored by an uncle in Melbourne. He had been wandering ever since.

Lunch together became a habit. Beneath his white overalls Ali wore well-pressed trousers, white T-shirts, and colourful socks. The younger man had seen more of the world than had the elder, but seemed to be searching for sage advice. Whether he should continue his education and, if so, in which direction and at which institution? And to improve his literacy? And, since he was interested in painting and sculpture, where should he go to best understand Australian aspects of these artistries?

Trevor was surprised at his own capacity to answer questions like these with such confidence in his own judgement. One night as they sat by the fire, Ali poured out his gratitude, explaining with nervous and downcast eyes how impossible it was for him to live in Beirut as a man who might fall in love with another man; how happy he was now, although he said this through tears, to find someone who might understand how trust, and open-heartedness and lust and love may all be rolled together into an emotion which set him trembling with hope as shamelessly as he was now.

And so, as Trevor would enjoy recounting when they had been a couple for many years, and so that was that.

Business thrived. They opened another two shops. Experiments with hybrids began to interest them. Trevor admired Ali’s new talent for phaleanopses in pastels. Ali recalled a family adage linking taste and judgement to the fine tuning of one’s heartstrings. Like everyone else, they tried for the blue rose. Ali remarked that perhaps gay couples were obsessed with breeding because they themselves could not.

Trevor and Christiana wrote frequently, spoke by telephone rarely. His new life had made him more secretive than in the past, and he withdrew from much family contact, but he could never be sure that someone wouldn’t alert his daughter to the presence of his young friend. Nothing in her letters suggested that anyone had done so yet. He went so far as to describe the expansion of the business and, in a later letter, announced he had taken in a business partner, then held his breath. She replied that, since the business had now grown beyond a hobby, no doubt it needed some professionalism. Trevor searched this terminology for guile, but found only innocence.

Trevor decided to come clean, because deception was always personally wounding, or maybe he wondered, in case someone else beat him to it, and wrote that she should also understand his business partner was now also his life’s partner. Her answer was as close to a scream as he had ever seen on paper. He hid with difficulty from Ali his sense that his child was now lost to him. But the following day brought an addendum: she wished that his condition in the eyes of God was not so, and prayed he would repent, but meantime this should not deprive him of her love. Ali attributed this to a retuning of her heartstrings.

Their correspondence dropped away to Christmases and birthdays. Trevor’s centred on questions about her and her work rather than on him and his work. Then he wrote, mid-year, that he had been unwell, a coordination problem, but was undergoing tests. Meanwhile he was working less hard, giving over more responsibility to Ali. She was surprised then to receive a letter from Ali. Apologising for the intrusion into family matters, he told her that her father had been in hospital, but had now returned home, and suggested she should visit.

She telephoned immediately. Ali answered. Her father had been keeping the seriousness of his malady from her, his motor neurone disease. He was now bedridden. Specialists were guarded about the span of life remaining to him, but were speaking of weeks, so he might not last to his sixtieth birthday, which was soon now. She said she would be there within a few days.

The house held as much greenery as a tropical forest. The temperature felt like a hothouse. But Trevor’s room had been transformed into a palliative ward. Her father lay in an articulated bed that he could control with switches. He was connected to a waste bag on one side and a morphine drip on the other. Ali had taken his own bed to the next room. The illness had wasted Trevor’s legs, palsied his arms, triggered incontinence, and slurred his words, but his intelligence remained intact. Ali cleaned away his soiling, washed and turned him, administered his medications, fed the drip. The family doctor, who visited infrequently now, admired his dedication.

Christiana did not. She asked Ali to leave them alone. She drew a chair close to the bedside and sat, holding his hand. Despite the years, Trevor would have recognised her anywhere, her pure and unsullied white hair, the terrifying smile of the truly good. With a handkerchief she dabbed the corner of his mouth where he had dribbled.

She began her monologue. Plainly he was celibate now, but this was not enough. He must repent. They would pray together twice a day. This would form a sound foundation for his recovery. She would prepare his food, administer his drugs, and clean him. Ali would leave, she would stay. She would make the preparations for his sixtieth birthday, now only a few days away. She would make an appointment to talk with the doctor, and liaise with him herself. Realising that Trevor was attempting to speak, she leaned toward him. His voice was weak. He was prepared to agree with anything she wanted, but Ali must stay to tend him overnights, just as he would once she had left them.

Christiana took a room at a boarding house within walking distance, and left her father only when Ali came in from work. She prayed over her father on her arrival, and before leaving, and chose to interpret the closing of his eyes as submission to the presence of the Almighty rather than resistance. She maintained a chatter even when elsewhere in the house, although he seldom had the strength to reply. The one topic which enlivened him was the festivities for his sixtieth birthday, set down for the Saturday of the coming weekend. From time to time throughout the day, Christiana allowed him to indicate where balloons might float or twists of tinsel twirl.

She dealt with the incompatibility of guests by proposing an evening session for her father’s mountainside friends, after the lunchtime one with Molly’s family and the grandchildren. On arrival the children hung back from the sickbed until Trevor charmed them with the novelty of its remote controls, with which they became quickly skilful. Then like a stage magician he uncovered a voice synthesiser, an instrument that Christiana had not seen before, which gave him a loud, metallic voice. The children laughed when he sang ‘Ring around the Rosie’, but Christiana saw a tear in Ali’s eye at the line ‘All Fall Down’. An hour of this entertainment was clearly draining her father, so Christiana shepherded them all outside. When she returned, Trevor had fallen asleep clutching a paper whistle and wearing his party hat.

For the evening session Trevor asked to be fitted into his Hawaiian shirt. Ali mixed him a weak whisky and lime in a child’s closed cup with a tube into which he blew bubbles and laughed.  He promised Christiana the party would finish before midnight. When the doorbell rang announcing the first arrivals, he made the effort to lift his head enough to kiss her brow as he did when she was a child. She guessed he was now remembering her as his little girl.

In her room she read a little, then fell asleep in her chair. She woke around midnight and phoned the house to check how her father had come through the ordeal. The sound of Ali’s breaking voice, and his phrase ‘At peace now’, had her run for the door. Had she missed the signs? His little girl? All fall down? Finished before midnight?

The doors were open. Her father was laid out on his bed fully clothed, arms across his chest. She felt for a pulse and found none. On the bedside table lay bottles of pills, some spilled. On her knees, cheek on her father’s chest, she was aware of Ali rising from a far chair and leaving the room. She tried to pray but could not order her thoughts. Later she would concede that her mind was a tumult of sorrow and rage that her father had so connived to be present at his own wake. She picked up the telephone and called the police. She would press her opinion that her father was too weak to have taken these doses unaided. It would never cross her mind that her prosecution of Ali rests upon his devotion to her father, a compliment she has never otherwise acknowledged.

Now, watching Ali turn through the wrought-iron gates of the courthouse, searching for the notice that will direct him to the courtroom in which he will confront the enmity of his lover’s family, but for the moment unnoticed by the protesters at roadside, you will wish him good fortune, or you will wish him ill, according to the fine tuning of your heartstrings.