I had had my moments. I had at one stage started fancying Maria from the board game ‘Guess Who?’ That long hair, that green beret, that sexy smile – yes, she was a fox. One night in Panache I had kissed a girl called Ruth. A short girl with green eye shadow, yum! It was a retro night and she had drunkenly come up to me during ‘Come on Eileen’. I must admit I was tempted. Girls back then were like those big dippers you get at Alton Towers, terrifying but strangely alluring. The worrying thing was that once you actually got on the bloody ride you didn’t know whether you’d like it or not, all you knew was you were stuck on it for the next five minutes. Ruth approached me drunkenly across the dance-floor, and my body slipped into fight or flight mode. I fought, but with my tongue. Her tongue tasted of Woodpecker Cider, which wasn’t entirely unsatisfying. I lasted about twenty seconds, heard ‘Baggy Trousers’, made my excuses and left the dance-floor. I’d had a go, and you can’t say fairer than that.
I think I was a let-down to my brother in that respect. I remember him asking me conspiratorially in his bedroom, ‘How do you get a girl’s bra off?’
‘How would I know?’ I retorted imperiously. ‘Stanley knife?’
I think he realised there and then that we weren’t going to have one of those laddish relationships, talking about birds and fast cars. So whilst I felt like I was cursed, I wasn’t so self-centred as not to notice it affecting others in my family.
Although my brother and I are now the best of friends, the six-year difference between us made sure when we were growing up that we were never going to be bosom buddies. When I needed a friend to play with, he was a baby and technically useless, and when I reached adolescence the thought of hanging around with a seven-year-old made me go cold.
Like every teenager, the cry of ‘Take your brother with you!’ from your mother as you go to step out the house was the most depressing sound you could ever hear. How uncool was that? Hanging around with a seven-year-old. I would be well moody and offhand with him but he would get his own back in other ways. At fairgrounds I would have to accompany him on the baby rides only for him to start bawling halfway round and get taken off by my mother while I would have to stay on the stupid ride, going round and round looking like a simpleton.
There is a photo of me standing with the ‘real’ He-Man where Gary had chickened out and started bawling at the sight of He-Man’s plastic face. ‘Alan! You’ll have to have your photo taken with He-Man. I’m not queuing for nothing,’ Mum insisted, and there I am, standing next to an out-of-work actor in a He-Man outfit at Weston Favell Shopping Centre, both of us asking ourselves, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’
Just when my self-esteem was at an all-time low, I was dealt a body blow, and it was called ‘reality’. In Drama we had all been filmed on video performing various soliloquies and it was time to watch them back and get constructive criticism from our teacher. I sat down, all giggly, ready to watch myself with everyone, but I cannot tell you the shock that then shook my body.
That person on the screen wasn’t me, there’d been a mistake, it was a grotesquely camp boy with a screeching voice and the most over-the-top mannerisms. He was the gayest boy I’d ever seen. I looked around at my fellow Drama students, hoping they would be just as shocked at this terrible mistake. Nothing. They just smiled back at me. Yes, the boy looked like me, but I wasn’t like that, I didn’t sound like that. This boy was as camp as Christmas.
Why wasn’t anyone else phased by this ‘possession’? Why hadn’t anyone told me? I suppose they had, really. People hadn’t been shouting ‘Poof’, ‘Faggot’ and ‘Bender’ for the last five years out of politeness. Without me knowing, I had been harbouring the world’s worst secret. No urge for a girlfriend, Wonder Woman, wearing high heels to get an ice cream, fancying Face from the A-Team. Oh my God. It was staring me right in the face. Is this how I’ve been acting? Christ.
That horrible Drama video had a profound effect on me, and it left me feeling physically sick. I had looked myself in the eye and I didn’t like what I saw one bit. I had had that moment of realisation that we all get, where the handsome brute in our heads that we think we look like doesn’t actually match what’s reflected in the mirror. Some people try to replicate the image they have of themselves in their head by having a make-over, going to the gym, highlights. I chose to give up. Forcing myself to be someone else just wasn’t worth it, but I was furious nevertheless.
Typical! I had been the last person to know I was gay. What was my next move to be? I knew one thing for sure: there wasn’t going to be a big ‘outing’ surprise at the kitchen table. I had planned to get everyone to the table and tell them, I had it all worked out. Dad would shout angrily, ‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’ and my mother would be quietly sobbing in the corner, but my guess was, they had probably passed this stage a long time ago without me, so mentioning my feelings and worries felt a bit like closing the door after the horse had bolted.
In fact the question ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ had disappeared off the radar years back. Becoming a full-time gay with a capital G, all croptops and bleached hair, didn’t interest me one bit, so I was sort of left wondering what to say and what to do. I chose not to say anything in the end, and still to this day my sexuality has not been mentioned, but with my nonexistent love-life I think they’ve probably forgotten.
* * *
That summer a month didn’t go by when I wasn’t struck down with a migraine. We went to see the doctor, who said that it looked like I needed glasses. Relief spread across my mother’s face – she had thought it was a brain tumour. Yes, I was over the moon; I only had to endure an eye test and not brain surgery, but the thought of having to wear glasses wasn’t alleviating my body image crisis. To me, that was like sprinkling hundreds and thousands onto a dog turd.
My first pair of glasses were huge; the lenses were like two pub ashtrays welded onto a couple of pipe cleaners, and to make it worse the rims were bright red. The likeness to Christopher Biggins was uncanny. It broke my heart wearing glasses. I felt, not for the first time, that my body had betrayed me – don’t you think I’ve got enough to be getting on with, without this? I was terrified, and after the optician had done all his tests he informed me that I had ‘astigmatism’. I recoiled in horror. ‘The wounds of Christ? In my eyes? Jesus never wore glasses!’
The optician put my mind at rest and told me it was astigmatism not stigmata. He told me that astigmatism is caused by the fact that the eyeball is shaped like a rugby ball. Typical! Yet again something sports-related kicking me when I’m down. Although the glasses were horrible, they were still better than the series of headaches that had plagued the last year at school; and besides I could actually see what was written on the board, which has to be a bonus in anyone’s books.
I went by Weston Favell Upper School recently, and like most schools these days it resembles a prison. It’s got this awful metal fence all the way around the sprawling fields, which does little to lessen the formidable exterior. The fence was put up after someone drove a car into the computer block. Going back and seeing those fields felt to me like I was revisiting a crime scene – all the times I’d run around and around those fields, whether it was cross-country running or playing rounders, all that dread and worry and sweat.
But my mood lifted when I looked beyond the fields and to the back of the school, where the English department stands. Wednesday afternoon was my favourite time of the week, because we had double English. The English teachers at the school instilled this love of reading for which I will be forever grateful. I’d always read, and I think anyone who wants to be somewhere else in life either goes down the video game route or the book route. The fantasy and mystery that can be lacking in your immediate surroundings can be found there, and for such a troubled soul as myself things seemed to make more sense between the pages of a book. The world seemed fairer, the characters more rounded, and then at the end good won over evil every time. Surely you can see its appeal.
I started out reading Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which in turn made me want to be a detective. That’s laughable when you think what