by Mike Gayle
Regardless of my concern, I was actually so relieved to have a date fixed when I would be free of the four walls of my flat that I actually didn’t care where we went. All I knew was that once Sarah moved out of the flat for good my life would be as empty as my home. And so the idea of being somewhere in the sun – if only for a week – seemed tailor-made for the peculiarities of my situation. I could escape day-to-day reality and recharge my batteries at the same time. And whether Andy had booked us in for a week in the Canaries or at a Butlin’s in Minehead, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was being somewhere else.
During that week Andy set a plan of action in motion. Tom (who was based in Coventry) would get the train down to Brighton on the Saturday night before the flight and stay over at my flat. Andy (who lived with his girlfriend Lisa in Hove) would come round to mine on the Saturday evening and stay over too. Following a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast we would make our way to Gatwick and catch the plane to our mystery destination. It felt good having a plan. For the first time in a long while, it felt as though I was moving forwards.
SATURDAY
Born again
It was just after three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon and I was standing in my bedroom staring at the empty suitcase in front of me. In terms of symbolism (always useful when you’re looking for new and inventive ways to make yourself feel that little bit more unhappy) it was hard to find an object more fitting than an empty suitcase because my heart was empty and the flat itself was pretty empty too. Sarah and Oliver had been and gone while I’d been last-minute shopping for holiday stuff in town. In the time that elapsed between the two events they had managed to remove everything she owned. Now, given that when I’d bought the flat twelve years ago my furniture had consisted of a decrepit wardrobe, a musty-smelling chest of drawers and a sofa that I’d rescued from a skip; and given that the deal when Sarah had moved in two years later was that she would (with my blessing) systematically eradicate the flat of every single item of furniture and replace it with things that worked and looked nice (and hadn’t come from skips) the flat was now, inevitably, empty. Oh, she’d left a desk in the spare room (I’m guessing because the front of one of the drawers has come off), a bookshelf in the living room and a few other items as well but these were all things that, like me, either no longer worked or were no longer needed.
Back to the suitcase. I had always hated packing. Always. This was mainly because I don’t understand how it all worked. How was a person supposed to guess what they might need for every single occasion that might come up when visiting a foreign land? For instance, I have a band T-shirt that I bought when I was at college that says ‘Death To The Pixies’ on the front of it. Back in my college days I used to wear it all the time but now I don’t wear it that often. That said, however, there are still times when I wake up at the weekend and think to myself, ‘I really want to wear my “Death To The Pixies” T-shirt,’ and I’ll rummage through all the clothes in the ironing pile until I find it. And even though it’s now grey (where it once was black and is now much tighter than it used to be), frayed on the neck and with loose stitching underneath one armpit, I’ll put it on and wear it all day. And I’ll be happy. And at the end of the day when it has fulfilled its function, I’ll take it off and throw it in the dirty laundry basket where it will slowly make its way through the decommissioning process (dark wash clothes pile on kitchen floor to washing machine to tumble dryer to ironing pile in spare bedroom – where it will remain unironed until the next time I need it). Now, multiply the problem I have with my ‘Death To The Pixies’ T-shirt with a pair of favoured jeans, a white shirt that I think I look good in, trainers that are good for walking in (but not necessarily all that good to look at) and various assorted other clothes and accessories for which I feel various degrees of attachment and it becomes easy to imagine the problems I had with packing to go on holiday.
So how did I manage in the past? The quick answer is Sarah. She always did it. She’d get sick of me standing there slack-jawed with a ‘Death To The Pixies’ T-shirt in one hand and a pair of threadbare-in-the-crotch faded Levi’s in the other and she’d kick me out of the bedroom and sort it out herself. And the funny thing is, even though I hadn’t had anything to do with the packing of my suitcase, once we’d reached our holiday destination I would always (without fail) find absolutely everything that I needed for every occasion. The right shoes for the right kind of bar. The right shirt for the right kind of restaurant. The right shorts for the right kind of beach. Everything. And on the one occasion (a holiday to Turkey in year five of our relationship) when I needed the right T-shirt for a day of wandering round a local market I opened the case and there it was: ‘Death To The Pixies’ in all its faded glory, neatly ironed and folded right in front of me. Right there and then I took off my hat to her (she had packed that too). No one could pack a suitcase like Sarah. No one. I can’t really remember what I did about packing suitcases before Sarah came into my life. I suppose that back in those days I had a lot less stuff so it was an awful lot easier just to pile everything I owned into one suitcase and close the lid.
As the afternoon began to slip away from me and the suitcase remained empty I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do would be to leave packing until later in the day. Retiring to my now sofa-less living room I sat down on one of two old dining chairs Sarah had left behind and turned on the TV. An old episode of Murder She Wrote was on one of the cable channels but despite being drawn into the plot I switched it off after ten minutes because I was unable to adopt my usual slouching position. As I debated in my head whether it was too late to drive into town and order a new sofa from Argos (possibly something in black leather?) the phone rang. It was Tom. He was at the station and needed me to pick him up. As I put down the phone, picked up my car keys, grabbed my coat and locked the front door I remember quite clearly feeling happy for the first time in a long while. Tom’s arrival meant that my holiday plans were in motion. There was now an implied momentum to my life. I was no longer stationary. Instead I was hurtling towards the unknown.
At the station I spotted Tom instantly amongst the crowd of recently arrived travellers. Though we were roughly the same age, Tom had always looked a good few years older than me. It was his lack of hair that did it. Tom had begun losing his hair in his early twenties and now that he was in his thirties I barely registered his lack of hair. There’s something about men whose hair loss comes earlier in life that makes them cooler than the rest of us. It’s as if they’ve had an entire decade to come round to the idea that their hair has gone for good and so by the time they reach their third decade it’s quite clear that they patently don’t give a toss about what’s going on on top of their skulls. Possessing a full head of hair is no longer linked to their masculine identity. It’s just the way things are. And when women say that they find bald guys sexy (and there are quite a few out there) it’s this lot that they’re talking about and not the late arrivals who are always too panicked by their hair loss to do anything other than look mortified.
‘How long do you think we’re going for?’ I asked, staring at Tom’s hulking suitcase and marginally smaller rucksack as I helped him load his luggage into the back of my car. ‘We’re going for seven nights. Not seven years.’
‘And I bet you haven’t even packed yet,’ laughed Tom.
‘You know me too well. How are you, mate?’
‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Really good. And you?’
‘Me?’ I paused and thought about it for a few moments. Tom didn’t know that Sarah had gone because I hadn’t told him, although I reasoned that the situation would be pretty much self-explanatory once he saw the absence of furniture in the flat. ‘All the better for seeing you,’ I concluded.
In the past few years I must have seen Tom only a handful of times at best. This had more to do with conflicting timetables than a lack of desire. As far as I was concerned, even if I didn’t see him for an entire decade he would remain, alo
ng with Andy, one of my closest friends in the whole world.
One Saturday afternoon about six years ago, when we had both managed to get our schedules straightened out, we finally managed to set up a weekend to see each other. Sarah had gone away to see her parents in Norfolk so I’d driven up the M40 to Coventry to stay with Tom for the weekend. It had been a while since we’d had a proper chat on the phone and even longer since we’d seen each other in the flesh, so this trip was in a lot of ways long overdue. It was great to see him. We spent the afternoon visiting hifi shops because Tom was in the market for a new system and in the evening we’d gone for a drink at what I assumed was his local pub. Anyway, we’d been doing the catching-up thing over a couple of pints of bitter in front of a roaring log fire when Tom suddenly gave me this oddly solemn look and told me he had some important news.
‘I’ve become a born-again Christian,’ he told me sombrely. ‘I just thought you ought to know.’
He then took a sip of his bitter and looked at me expectantly, as though this was my cue to tell him my reaction. And if I’m honest I really didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t help thinking that it would’ve been easier if he’d told me he was gay, because at least then I could’ve given him a great big hug and thanked him for confiding in me. I could’ve shown him how accepting I was of this new ‘side’ to his personality by conjuring up a list of men that I reasoned I might be attracted to if I were that way inclined and had fun gauging whether there was any common ground in our ‘types’. But of course Tom wasn’t gay. He was a Christian, which though I tried hard not to, I admit I found disappointing.
I’d always found born-again Christian types to be little more than a walking cliché. I didn’t really much care about what they got up to in the privacy of their own churches but it bothered me greatly when it all came out into the open. I didn’t like them in the news trying to affect the laws of what is essentially a secular nation; I didn’t like them handing me leaflets proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was nigh; and I especially didn’t like them knocking on my front door trying to palm off their literature on me. In short if I were going to choose a group of people with whom I would genuinely like to have no contact at all, it would be born-again Christians. And now, much to my dismay, Tom was one of them.
Part of my surprise at Tom’s revelation was based on a key factor that I was sure excluded him from potential born-again Christianisation: at university he had been pretty much the king of casual sex and though I hadn’t kept track with his private life of late I was reasonably confident that little had changed. Over the course of the evening Tom proceeded to tell me how it had all happened. One evening a few months earlier he’d been out with a bunch of work colleagues when he’d got chatting to a woman sitting with her friends at the next table. He told me that much of what happened next was a blur of alcohol and sexual tension but the next thing he recalled was waking up the next morning in this woman’s bed. And although this sort of thing had been a semi-regular occurrence in his life what made this encounter distinct was that he didn’t know this woman’s name and never learned it. The guilt of the experience stayed with him for a long time. He told me that he realised that ever since his dad had died when he was nineteen, he’d felt he had a huge void in his life that he had desperately been trying to fill. A few weeks went by and then a chance conversation with a female colleague at work resulted in his accepting her invitation to attend an Easter service at her church. For the first time in his life, he’d found what he had been looking for.
My reaction was puzzlement. I was convinced that Tom was just going through a weird phase which he would eventually come out of. (Weird phases that had affected various college friends and associates in recent years had included interests in: militant veganism, druidism, Krishnaism, agoraphobia, burglary and suicide.) And so when he commented: ‘You think I’ve gone a bit mental don’t you?’ my reply, I have to admit, was: ‘Yes.’
Subsequently every time I saw Tom, I half expected him to have taken up dressing badly or I waited with bated breath for him to start trotting out stuff about God and Jesus in the middle of a conversation about transfer rumours at Chelsea. But he didn’t do any of these things. Instead, he was just the same as ever, only he seemed less, well, . . . restless . . . I suppose. Definitely less restless than me . . . or Andy . . . or any of the people I knew my age. He seemed as though he knew where he was going and why. As if everything was going to always be all right for him. And he didn’t start spouting Bible verses, singing hymns or being weird. He was simply less agitated.
A few months later Tom and Anne (the woman who had taken him to the Easter service) got together. A year after that they got engaged and the year after their wedding, Callum, their first kid, arrived swiftly followed by Katie, sixteen months later. And although I found it difficult over the years to stop thinking of him as being the victim of some sort of brainwashing conspiracy, over time that sort of stuff seemed less and less important and eventually I just went back to thinking of him as my friend Tom.
Every single day
Back at the flat Tom followed me inside and I offered to make him coffee. He asked if he could sit down and I said, ‘Yes, of course, make yourself at home,’ which was missing the point because I think what he was actually saying was, ‘Mate, why haven’t you got a sofa any more?’ I decided that it still wasn’t the right time to go into the Sarah thing and so disappeared to make his coffee. He didn’t follow me into the kitchen and instead sat down on one of the uncomfortable dining chairs to wait for me.
‘So how are tricks?’ I asked, handing over his coffee on my return to the living room. It was a repeat of my greeting at the station but I was hoping that this time it would elicit slightly deeper answers that might shed light on why he had agreed to come on holiday.
‘Good, thanks,’ replied Tom.
‘And Anne and the kids?’
‘Anne’s great . . . and the kids . . . as always they’re that odd combination of complete brilliance and nail-biting frustration. Katie’s three now, and Callum’s four and actually starts school in September – which really freaks me out. I mean, once they start school that’s it, they’re almost off your hands.’ Tom paused and looked pointedly around the room. ‘So is this what you trendy Brighton types call minimalist living?’
‘Do you like it?’ I replied. ‘My interior designer did it. She’s very good. I’d recommend her to anyone although I do think that living with her for ten years is part of the bargain.’
Tom sighed. ‘Has she gone for good?’
I nodded.
‘When did she go?’
‘A while ago but she only took the last of her stuff this morning.’
Tom shook his head sadly. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I thought Sarah was really good for you.’
‘Me too,’ I replied.
‘I suppose there’s no way you two could sort your problems out?’
I shrugged half-heartedly. ‘Not really. It’s not like it was a mutual decision.’
‘Oh.’ He paused and then asked: ‘But you’re all right?’
‘Me?’ I replied. ‘I’m a bit down obviously but it’s nothing that can’t be cured by a week in the sun.’
Tom nodded again and sighed as though drawing a line underneath the subject and then launched into a conversation about the flat which led to other conversations about mortgages, work promotions, getting older and getting fatter, old friends who seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet and policemen getting younger by the minute. The one thing we didn’t talk about was the one thing I wanted to know most of all. So in the end, rather than wait for him to bring up the subject, I just came out with it.
‘So, mate,’ I began carefully. ‘Not that I’m not glad you’re here but what made you agree to this holiday jaunt of Andy’s?’
‘I can always go home if you don’t want me cramping your style,’ replied Tom mockingly.
‘Of course I want you to come,’ I replied. ‘It’s just th
at . . . well when Andy came up with the idea I was pretty sure that you wouldn’t be into it, that’s all.’
‘Because?’
I shrugged awkwardly. ‘Because . . . you know . . .’
Tom laughed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said with a theatrical flourish, ‘presenting for your delight and delectation that world-renowned born-again Christian stereotype.’
‘Come on though,’ I said trying to dig myself out of the hole I’d just dug, ‘you must know what I mean – a week in wherever Andy has booked us – well it’s not exactly going to be Bible-friendly is it? I mean, I was pretty wary the second Andy called and my moral standards are pretty lax. I’m just wondering how he talked you round?’
‘He didn’t,’ replied Tom. ‘I wanted to come. The week before I’d been thinking to myself that I could do with a bit of a break and then Andy called and I thought, “Right, well that’s that sorted”.’
‘So you’re saying that Andy’s phone call was a message from God?’
Tom smiled. ‘All I know is that thanks to you guys I get a kid-free week off work in the sun . . . which is exactly what I need right now . . .’ He paused and looked around my empty living room, ‘. . . and I’m guessing it’s probably what you need too.’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ I conceded amiably. ‘Well, it’s good to have you on board because there’s absolutely no way I’d go on this holiday with just Andy.’
‘Nor me,’ he replied. ‘Although I’m guessing that it wasn’t his idea to invite me.’
‘That’s not exactly true,’ I replied, as I attempted to fudge the truth. ‘You and Andy are mates; it’s just the whole religion thing he’s not into.’
