I Am What I Am

by John Barrowman

  Suddenly, I glanced into one bedroom and then the other – and discovered they were both empty. No dad, no mum and no sister. Shit. I sent Scott around to the back of the house while I ran to the front. He met up with me back in the courtyard.

  ‘All the doors are locked.’

  Through the bedroom window, I could see the three of them in the hallway, laughing – including my dad, the traitor. Later, my mum told me she’d spotted the glowing tag on my jacket through the window.

  Oh, well played. Well, played. But not well enough. I darted to the other side of the house and cut off the power. First the pool lights went out, then the outside lights, and then all the electricity inside the house. Everything went dark.

  ‘You bastard!’ Carole yelled.

  The only way inside, as far as I could figure at that point in the siege, was to crawl across the dogs’ courtyard in the hope that my mum and Carole had forgotten to lock the sliding door that opens onto the main hallway that runs the length of the ‘I’. I took off my white T-shirt so I wouldn’t have any reflection from the moon. I stretched out flat on the ground and inched my way across the courtyard like I was in a James Bond movie, or maybe a taller Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, or maybe just John Barrowman, entertainer and nutcase.4

  I could see my mum and Carole standing in the dark hall – giggling, yet scared enough that they were still holding my dad in front of them as if he were a shield.

  I almost made it to the sliding door. I was so close, but Carole spotted me and immediately leapt across the hall and locked the sliding door. I heard my mum laughing and saying, ‘This is like that Bruce Willis movie where the family is taken hostage.’

  ‘By a couple of clowns,’ my dad chuckled.

  Ten minutes later, I found my way into the house – how, I will never reveal, because this game may not be over. I dropped down onto the bathroom floor, and crawled towards Carole and my mum, who had climbed into the whirlpool bathtub to limit their exposure on three sides, in a vain attempt to stop me from sneaking up behind them. When I did finally leap out at them, even though they had to know I’d been coming – stealth is not my middle name5 – they still screamed like maniacs and pounced on me.

  When we finally turned the power back on, and settled into our respective bedrooms,6 I had gravel burn on my chest from crawling across the courtyard, dirt and grime on my shorts and my knees, and scratches on my hands from climbing through a window, but I won – and that’s all that counts.

  Scare the hell out of sister and mum. Check.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I KNOW HIM SO WELL’

  ★

  ‘If I had a hammer …’

  Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, ‘If I Had a Hammer’

  Seven things I’ve learned from Scott

  1 How to cook fish sticks (in the event I’m a survivor of the apocalypse and that’s all there is to eat).

  2 How to rewire a phone (especially one chewed through by a certain dog when a certain partner was not paying attention to that certain dog’s actions).

  3 That saying too much is usually better than saying too little.

  4 That you could have a very serious ailment and not even know you have a very serious ailment and your highly trained doctor may not even know you have a very serious ailment, but whining and worrying about this very serious (and non-existent) ailment can make you feel much better.

  5 That a new furnace can be a beautiful thing (it’s not a classic Mercedes, but I do like to be warm in winter).

  6 That two men are always better than one (I mean as partners … um, as a couple … oh, never mind, just read on).

  7 That I couldn’t live without him.

  In the mid thirties, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, hung out in what is now our guest bedroom in London. At that time, Thomas was in his twenties and in the infancy of his career. If you know anything of his reputation, you’ll know it’s likely Thomas spent more time in the nearby pubs than he spent penning poems in our front room, but inebriated or not, Scott and I have been told that Thomas’s blithe spirit on occasion returns to the house.

  Generally, my family is quite accommodating to spirits, ghosties, ghoulies and any beings hanging out from the other side. My gran, Murn, would regularly have a ‘wee blether’ with her husband, Andy, after he died. In fact, one night, when I was having a wee coorie1 with her on the couch, she suddenly whipped her head to the side and told my papa not to interrupt the ‘wean’; she’d be with him in a minute. So the fact that Dylan Thomas’s spirit has a kip in our front room has never really bothered me.

  My mettle was tested, though, one night not too long ago, when I heard this strange, supernatural noise in our bedroom. At first, it didn’t really register that it was not a normal sound, but after ten minutes or so, the darkness got the better of my imagination and I roused myself from my sleep to listen more carefully.

  The dogs were clearly not bothered by it: all three remained prone at the foot of the bed. I noted that somewhere under the fourteen pillows and the large mound of duvet, Scott slept. The noise seemed to emanate from behind the wall and it had a vaguely animalistic tone to it – as if a cat was in the wall, clawing to get out. You may smile at the reach of my comparison, but I want you to know, readers, that a cat stuck in the wall is a distinct possibility in the Barrowman–Gill home.

  It’s no secret that I love animals and as anyone close to me will tell you, I’m a sucker for a stray. One morning, I was running late for my return trip to Cardiff to begin filming the third series of Torchwood. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was late.2 In our flat in London, until only recently, Scott and I have been living with what can only be described as a ‘porcelain disaster’. When we first bought the flat together, we (and when I say ‘we’, I mean Scott) immediately wielded his sledgehammer – no, this is not a metaphor – and took out a number of walls. Some I wanted brought down, others not so much. I have to tell you that over the years, this is the first thing Scott usually does when we move into a new home. He demolishes something.

  Shortly before Scott and I met, I bought my first flat, in Bow, east London. One night, when our relationship was in its infancy, I returned from matinee and evening performances of Sunset Boulevard to find Scott had knocked down a wall dividing the living room from the entryway – and he almost took out our fledgling relationship in the process. I liked that wall. I had no intention of renovating. Plus, here was a grand building that used to be the Bryant and May match factory, a building whose walls had withstood more than a century of strife – witnessed the London Matchgirls Strike of 1888, and likely even come close to burning down once or twice – until Scott Gill came along with his bloody great hammer.

  By the time I really noticed the sledgehammering pattern, Scott had knocked down as many walls as we had cars or dogs or nieces and nephews, and I already loved him madly, so it was too late to do anything about this strange, destructive side to his nature. The problem is not so much that he knocks the wall down; it’s more that he does not always repair the hole in a reasonable time frame.

  The worst example of this tendency was the bathroom in our flat in London. We moved in. Sledgehammer out. Walls came down in biblical proportion. In Scott’s defence, none of them were ever weight-bearing and most of them were redesigned eventually and their holes filled3 – except for our en-suite bathroom. It remained stripped to its timbers, bare to its bones, as unfettered as the day Scott went charging in there. In order for us to use the shower, we had to drape the walls with blue construction tarpaulins. Over the years,4 when the blue tarp got torn, or the strange creatures growing on it started to apply for NICE or FDA approval, Scott would enclose the entire space with new blue tarpaulin walls.

  The bathroom became a battle between his stubbornness and my, okay, stubbornness – a game of chicken between two grown men. Who would break first and demand tile? Who would give in and apply the grout?

  I realize you may be thinking that this blue-tarped bathroom was a
ctually a symbol of something deeper than this, perhaps something still under construction in our relationship, maybe even something that has to do with marking territory when everything else is shared. I would agree; however, every time I’d try to put my finger on what it was and then in a quiet yell try to convince Scott that this could not continue, I failed miserably.

  Over the years, friends and family have posited their own views of the tarp and what it might represent: Scott’s need to keep the bathroom unfinished as a way of holding on to some part of himself, and the house he can control; my need to have the bathroom finished and not to be showering in a fucking building site.5

  So, one of the reasons I was running so late that morning was because the blue tarp was torn, and I had to wash one-handed while holding up the tarp with my other hand. Scott had already left to take care of a problem at a construction site.6 I was midway through my ablutions when I heard a stray cat mewling outside the bedroom window.

  I recognized the cat’s crying because Scott and I sleep with our window open and I can sometimes hear this cat mewing7 during the night. The bedrooms in our London flat are on the ground floor, so I grabbed a towel, went upstairs to the kitchen, filled a dish with milk, came back down, put it out on the ledge, and then I carried on with my morning routine. An hour later, the cat was perched on the sill, looking longingly inside. It had also started to rain.

  I couldn’t leave the poor thing outside in the cold, could I?

  I went out into the garden, tempted him with some chicken, and brought him inside. Our dogs at that time, Lewis, Tiger and Penny, were naturally not happy. The cat’s impression of the dogs was equally disdainful, and by now, Sean, my driver, keys in hand, was pacing in the hallway, reminding me how late we were going to be.

  What to do? What to do?

  I found an old blanket, spread it on the bed, opened the window a bit more for fresh air, and locked the cat in our bedroom. I figured he’d be safe from the dogs until Scott came home. What I didn’t know was that Scott would not return for the entire day.

  Scott knew something was wrong as soon as he opened the front door. His first clue? The three dogs were apoplectic – especially Tiger, who was virtually folded in a knot against the bedroom door, thumping his behind against it. The second clue was the stench. Think about it. You’re a scared cat and you’ve been locked in a strange room for well over six hours with three very angry dogs barking and tearing at the door trying to get at you. You’d wet yourself too. More than once, I bet.

  To this day, the memory of the moment when he unlocked the bedroom door and confronted the chaos in the room can start Scott shaking all over again. Thank God I’d hidden his sledgehammer.

  But that wasn’t the worst part of the situation.

  The worst part was that in my rush to leave the house, I’d forgotten to tell Scott anything about a rescued cat locked inside our bedroom. At some point in the day, the cat had actually squeezed itself out through the open window and fled for its life. When Scott unlocked the bedroom door, he and the dogs burst into a completely empty but totally destroyed bedroom, with initially no clue as to what had caused it.

  Not only were the duvet and the pillows soaked in cat pee, but also the cat had clearly been so terrified that he’d torn at sections of the sheet and pissed through to the mattress. Books and clocks had been knocked off our bedside tables and the family pictures we have on our bedroom’s mantel were smashed on the floor. There were even scratch marks gouged into the plaster above the bed.8 It was as if the cat had circled the room at 90 miles an hour, banking the walls at every turn, while spraying shit out of its arse like exhaust fumes.

  There are obviously a few lessons to be drawn from this story, not the least of which is that I am not Noah and our house is not the Ark, and animals should only be brought home under mutual agreement. The other, and more important, one is that in Scott and my relationship, sometimes our freedom and independence can get in the way of clear communication between us. Scott and I are used to a freedom of movement and a level of personal and financial independence that can sometimes result in minor amnesia about our responsibilities to each other as a couple.

  We live in a world where there is a kind of accepted narrative for how non-gay couples should live and behave. Although that narrative may be full of stereotypes and clichés – notions like the wife is in charge of the house and children; the husband, the finances and the lawn – there’s a narrative nonetheless, and it’s one full of anecdotes and advice for guidance and support for straight couples. Women may be from Venus and men from Mars, but at least the heterosexual couple’s solar system has books and articles and talk shows and lots and lots of country songs to describe it.

  They also have mums, and aunties, and grans, who have no qualms about taking a married son or daughter aside and giving them a verbal slap upside the head, telling them to shape up. For the families of many gay couples, they may be too busy coming to terms with the issue of their child being homosexual to be offering advice about whether or not their son (or his partner) is pulling his weight in the relationship. Plus, since many parents of gay men are themselves not gay, there’s a real fear of the unknown that makes these kinds of conversations even more difficult.

  In my family, we’ve been lucky that from the beginning of my relationship with Scott, we have been as visible in our family’s life as any of my siblings and their partners. This has meant, for example, that for most of Clare and Turner’s lives, they have grown up knowing Uncle John and Uncle Scott as a couple and they see few fundamental differences between us in that role and their parents. They’ve seen us argue and squabble, yell and scream, laugh and kiss and make up. They can tell you which one of us has more patience than the other.9 They can tell you which one of us is aggressive-aggressive and which one of us is passive-aggressive. They can tell you which one of us talks in specifics and is very pragmatic, and which one is more vague and much less decisive. They know which one remembers every birthday and anniversary because of a nudge from the other one. They know which one is more likely to take them to the museum and which one to the mall. They know which one loves to cook and which one is always willing to clean up after. They know which one is rarely late and which one needs backup alarms. They know which one takes ten minutes in the shower and which one takes an hour. They know which one can scarf down five bags of Frazzles until he’s frazzled,10 and, most importantly, they know how much we love each one of them, and how much we love each other.

  Carole and Kevin, Andrew and Dot, Scott and I, and my mum and dad are all as different as couples in any family can be, and we’re also exactly the same. In each coupling, we’re continually working out the balance and the choices that make the relationship work.

  Only a few chapters in the public narrative for gay men and women have been written, and I’ve made a conscious decision as a gay man that I want to be part of shaping it. Given my visibility in the media and in the arts, I believe I have a responsibility to help other gay men see what’s possible in their own lives or even what’s possible for the lives of their brothers and sons. Our rules of engagement may not always be as clear as we’d like them to be, but whose really are when you get past the surface stereotypes and false perceptions of what it means to be in a relationship – gay or not?

  That said, though, there is one big difference between Scott and me and, say, Carole and Kevin. Scott and I are a couple made up of two males of the species. This means that not only do we love differently, but also there’s a different emotional balance in our relationship. For the most part, on any given day, Scott and I are on the same wavelength. Our hormone levels tend to run on a similar monthly path. With two men in a hurry in a relationship, it’s not surprising that one might find a demented cat has trashed the bedroom.

  In the middle of the night, the odd noises continued, and, for a second, I thought the aforementioned stray cat may have crawled back in through the open window and got caught under our bed,11 or, in my h
alf-asleep head, that Dylan Thomas’s ghost was refusing to go quietly into the good night.

  I turned onto my side, trying hard to ignore the hacking sound that was now accompanying the moaning and the weird tapping, which, in fact, was suddenly much louder.

  ‘John, wake up!’

  ‘What?’

  Scott was standing naked in front of me – and not buried deep in the duvet as I’d first thought.

  ‘I think I have Lyme disease,’ he said.

  Oh, dear God, it wasn’t a cat or a poet, there was actually a monster in the room: the Gillus hypochondriacus. This creature is a beast – albeit a strikingly handsome one and in the middle of the night usually a naked one – but a monster nonetheless. The Gillus hypochondriacus suffers from multiple ailments, physical and psychological: all the result of way too much self-taught medical knowledge. Yet this beast insists on self-medicating and generally avoiding anything with the label ‘organic’, ‘for your health’ or even ‘may be just a little bit good for you if you’ll go ahead and try it’.

  Not me. I’ll happily take a pill if the pain demands it and I’m thoroughly convinced of the benefits of massive doses of vitamin B, C and broccoli.

  ‘Say again?’ I faced him, realizing that not to could result in prolonging my torment.

  ‘I think I have Lyme disease.’

  ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

  ‘Definitely Lyme disease.’

  ‘You had one vodka tonic last night and it was with a lemon.’

  ‘I ache all over.’

  ‘Take two Nurofen and talk to me in the morning.’

  I burrowed deeper under the duvet.

  The moaning continued.

  ‘Please, stop that noise. Trust me. You can only get Lyme disease from an infected tic bite and only deer carry infected tics. Where the hell did you encounter a deer in the middle of Chelsea?’