by Mike Gayle
‘No,’ said my mum, ‘Yvonne used to love sprouts. I think you must be thinking of Yvonne. She definitely had a thing for sprouts.’ Yvonne was the smartest member of our family, so it goes without saying that, like me, she didn’t like sprouts either.
‘Look,’I said, losing my patience, ‘Tony never liked sprouts, Yvonne never liked sprouts, Ed never liked sprouts, and I certainly don’t like sprouts. And I’m not eating these sprouts. Not now. Not in a little while. Not ever!’
eleven
With the benefit of hindsight it was easy enough to see that I wasn’t getting all weird about a few sprouts. I mean, I was twenty-nine, and if I really didn’t want to eat them it wasn’t as if my mum was in a position to ground me or stop my pocket money. The truth was, I was getting a bit wonky about the circumstances that had led to my life changing so dramatically. Only twenty-four hours earlier everything had been different. Okay, so it hadn’t been perfect but at least it had been near enough normal for someone at my stage in life. I’d had my own place and I’d had a crumbling relationship – the minimum lifestyle requirements of your basic turning-thirty-year-old, surely? But now what did I have? Nothing. I had no girlfriend, I had the promise of a smart job that wouldn’t be starting for quite a while and I was living at my parents’.
Entering the kitchen to deliver an apology I was assaulted by the sound of banging pots and pans emanating from the sink, where my mother was furiously distributing soap-suds in the air under the guise of washing up.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, closing the kitchen door behind me. ‘I shouldn’t have said what I said. I feel awful. It’s just that – well, I’ve got a lot on my mind, what with Elaine and everything and, well—’
‘It’s all right,’ she said, turning away from the sink to look at me. ‘I knew it had nothing to do with the sprouts. I just worry about you, that’s all.’ She disappeared into the living room and returned with my plate, which she put into the microwave. Three minutes, forty seconds and a ping later, she re-presented my dinner to me at the kitchen table with a flourish. ‘Here you go. Now, eat up before it goes cold again.’
The three of us spent the evening in front of the TV together, watching the best that British TV had on offer: Coronation Street, Des O’Connor Tonight, the Nine o’Clock News and the last half-hour of a made-for-TV movie about a mother with cancer trying to get her kids placed with new foster-families before she died. My mum cried, my dad channel-hopped in the ad breaks and I enjoyed the spectacle. This was how every evening used to be when I was a kid. Continuous telly from seven thirty until bedtime, cups of tea made during the ads and two bars of the gas fire on to take the chill off the room.
‘Right, then,’ said my mum, just after ten o’clock. ‘Your dad and I are off to bed, Matthew.’
‘Night, then,’ I said cheerfully, as I picked up the remote control and began flicking. My dad hadn’t let me anywhere near it all evening.
‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ asked my mum, when I hadn’t moved.
‘Nah,’ I said, still not picking up their hint. ‘I’m going to stay up for just a bit longer.’
‘Are you sure?’ said my dad, somewhat shocked. ‘Only it is quite late, Matthew.’
Finally it dawned on me that they wanted me to go to bed too. I was disturbing their routines, and if there’s one thing in the world my parents like it’s routine. Despite their insistence that I must be jet-lagged, cold, and/or tired of watching TV, I remained up and out of trouble until well after midnight absorbed in Lee Marvin’s performance in The Dirty Dozen. Turning off the TV as the credits rolled I made my way upstairs and into the bathroom. My mum had opened a new toothbrush just for me and left it next to the sink with a fresh towel. The whole scene made me laugh: when I was a kid she was forever telling me that our house wasn’t a hotel and all these years later she was paying attention to detail that would make the Ritz feel like a bedsit in Archway.
Lying in my single bed – How long had it been since I’d slept in a single bed? – I looked around the room I used to share with my two brothers. It was a large room and we had a corner each with the fourth left vacant to enable us to open the door. We’d tried to customise our own sections of the room and stamp our personality across them. My corner used to be covered in posters of pop bands and Tony’s had housed his collection of steam-train posters and paraphernalia, now lodged deep under his bed. As Ed had been only ten his corner was covered in his drawings of comic-book super-heroes and cars. When Tony and I moved out, Ed had had the room to himself. Now all four walls were covered with his personality – posters of his football team, clip frames housing snapshots of him and his mates at various European football matches, and posters of female kids’ TV presenters wearing nothing but their underwear and a sultry smile.
But lying there in my old bed, even without my posters adorning the walls, it still felt like home. This was my history. In this room I had grown into what I was and that made me feel good. I’ve chosen the right place, I told myself, just as I was free-falling into sleep. If I’m going to find an answer to anything then the best place to find it is at home.
twelve
To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
How?
Matt
How are you? How was your flight? How is Birmingham? How are your parents? Hooooooooooooowwwwwww?
I need to know!
love
Elaine xxx
PS After I left you at the airport I just cried and cried until I was a seething mass of saline solution and snot. Very attractive. When I got back to the apartment I was even worse. The place seemed so empty without you. I also have a confession. You know that black T-shirt you couldn’t find? I stole it. It’s under my pillow. It’s just so cheesy (my actions not the T-shirt) I just wanted something that smelt of you until everything stopped hurting. Anyway – that’s enough of that.
Bye!
PS Does anyone famous that I might’ve heard of come from Birmingham?
Just wondering. E.
thirteen
‘Morning, Matt,’ said my dad, from his position on the sofa.
It was one thirty in the afternoon the following day. I’d just got up and come into the living room dressed in the sky blue pyjamas my mother had thoughtfully left on my bed the night before. They had still been in the packet. Only my mum would have an emergency pack of men’s pyjamas.
I looked over to my dad and gave him a little wink to acknowledge the lack of subtlety in his particular brand of sarcasm. ‘All right, Dad?’ I replied, then proceeded to scratch a number of places that usually got a bit itchy when I’d spent so long in a nice, warm bed.
‘Yes, thanks, Matthew,’ he said pithily. ‘Your mother wanted to send out a search party to see if you were still alive. I told her not to bother as you were probably hibernating.’
‘Good one,’ I replied, I sniffed, coughed and rubbed my head in an attempt to wake myself up a bit. I picked up my dad’s copy of the Sun from the coffee table, sat down and had a quick glance through the first couple of pages. A quirky story on page three – next to the assets of Gina, 18, from Essex – caught my eye. A man from Cheltenham had been kicked out of the house he shared with his girlfriend because she was fed up with his collection of twelve thousand milk bottles. The last line of the story really made me laugh: ‘It goes to show she wasn’t the right girl for me. If she loved me she’d love my milk bottles.’
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked my dad. ‘Is it the milk-bottle bloke?’ I nodded. ‘You’ve got to admire a man like that. Those milk bottles must make him really happy.’
‘Really, really happy,’ I replied. It was a crap joke, really, but it amused me and my dad, and we sat there for a good few minutes passing asides about Milk-bottle Man until we’d exhausted every available pun. I was about to continue reading the paper, assuming that my dad was merely sitting down in his chair for
a moment’s rest from household maintenance – he was always fixing something – when he coughed and moved his shoulders about as if wanting to get down to business.
‘So?’ he said, in a manner that once again managed to be both a question and a statement of fact.
‘So?’ I replied, raising my eyebrows.
It suddenly dawned on me that my mum had sent him in on a mission to find out more about me and Elaine splitting up. I think the idea was supposed to be that because my dad was a man and I was now a man he was supposedly the perfect person for me to talk to about problems to do with life. I could tell just from looking at him that he wasn’t in total accord with this idea but it was clear, too, that my mum had promised to make his life hell if he didn’t comply with her wishes.
‘So?’ he repeated.
I scratched my head, closed the newspaper and looked at him expectantly. My mum had got it completely wrong if she thought sending him to talk to me was the way to find out how I was feeling. This was a genuine case of the blind leading the blind. My dad never talked about himself if he could help it and neither did I (well, not to them anyhow), and what she’d failed to see was that we liked it that way. I suppose when I was five or six we talked. I remember I’d tell him how I felt about school and my friends, speculating on what I might like to do when I grew up. And I remember he’d talk to me about how he felt about things too and we both seemed to get a lot of satisfaction from such a meeting of minds. But only a few years later, those sort of conversations dried up as my dad gave me the greatest gift known to mankind – silence. I like to think that he taught me you could communicate as much without words as with – that there were more ways to crack an egg than by talking to it. He taught me that sometimes the only thing you can do is just hold it all in until you reach a point where you can deal with it. I’m not saying it was a perfect philosophy – far from it – but it was a useful one to have when your only other option was to dive off the deep end. So this was why, for the majority of our lives, my dad and I had worked on a strictly need-to-know basis. In fact, over the past few years especially, we’d gone out of our way to give the impression that we weren’t even vaguely interested in the need-to-know stuff either. This, of course, was all lies and macho posturing because in phone calls home I’d ask my mum without fail how my dad was, and he always asked Elaine how I was when he spoke to her, which was more frequently than he spoke to me. It was a great system. We were both using the women in our lives to translate our silence and surliness into conversation. Of course, now that my translator and I had gone our separate ways my dad and I could both see the truth: he needed to know about me and I needed to know about him.
It was about time for another ‘So?’ from me, and I obliged as I still had no idea how we were going to get this talking thing going. His response was to pause and take a long, slow sip of his tea. That was another thing about my dad that I liked. All his movements were slow and considered. He’d always been this way. I don’t think I had ever seen him run. He wasn’t one of life’s runners: he was more of a sturdy walker. I, on the other hand, was one of life’s wobblers. I’d wobbled, tripped and slouched my way through life in an ungainly fashion, and my lack of cool worried me. I always got the feeling that when it came to the point at which my dad got to look back over his life for one last time he’d be able to say to himself, ‘No matter what I did, no matter whether I was right or wrong, I was always cool.’ When the time came for my big goodbye, however, I’d get to cower with embarrassment.
‘So,’ he began carefully, ‘how are you, Matt?’
‘I’m . . .’ I searched around for the right word. I didn’t want to lie to him now that he’d had the courage to get things going. ‘I’m . . . doing okay.’
He sighed and looked at the TV, which wasn’t even on. ‘It’s not easy, you know, life,’ he began.
‘Oh,’ I said, quietly.
‘But it’s worth it,’ he said, echoing himself.
I nodded. ‘Good.’
Then he joined the two sentences together and said, ‘It’s not easy but it’s worth it.’ He took another long, slow sip of his tea and waited – my cue, I presumed, to contribute to the conversation but I honestly couldn’t think of a single thing to say in response to his words of wisdom. I could see that he had a point, but that was about all.
‘Cheers, Dad,’ I said.
He looked up from his tea-cup. I suspect the laws of masculine exchange would say that I was supposed to look away when our eyes met but I didn’t, so we looked at each other uncomfortably for far too long, though it was probably only a few seconds. He wanted to talk. Strangely even I wanted to talk. I suppose if this had been a couple of million years ago and we’d been cavemen we could have hunted a brontosaurus or two to release the tension of this awkward situation, but as it wasn’t, the best alternative was TV.
‘I think there’ll be some news headlines on soon, Dad,’ I said. ‘Shall I turn the TV on so that we can catch them?’
He smiled, shrugged and said, ‘If you want.’ So I turned on the TV, handed him the remote and settled back in the armchair while we both pretended to watch the news.
fourteen
To:
[email protected]
From:
mailto:[email protected]
Subject:
Where are yooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuu?????
Dear Matt
Where are yooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuu?????
love
Elaine
fifteen
Friends.
I had some in New York.
I had a few living in Spain and a few more in France.
Closer to home I even had them in London, Cardiff and Glasgow.
Here in Birmingham, however, I had one friend, Gershwin Palmer, my oldest friend. There used to be a lot more old friends here, a whole group of us, in fact, who had gone to King’s Heath Comprehensive and had stayed friends through sixth-form and beyond. There was Ginny Pascoe, my ex-girlfriend/not girlfriend, tall, very attractive and the queen of bad decisions; Elliot Sykes, built like a rugby player, laughed like a drain, born with a curious ability always to land on his feet; Pete Sweeney, a man whose obsessions were science fiction, music and girls, in that order; Katrina Turner, the most attractive girl in our gang and also the one destined to be the most successful; and finally Bev Moore, the oddball, a Goth who never admitted to being a Goth, a sarky cow with a wicked sense of humour. With Gershwin and me, we formed the magnificent seven, a group of friends who drank together, got thrown out of nightclubs together and who, so rumour had it, got an education together.
We were friends for life. Or so we thought.
But, like friends for life eventually do, when we reached the eighteen–nineteen mark, we left Birmingham one by one and went our separate ways. Ginny went to Brighton to do an art course, because she wanted to be an artist; Elliot moved to London to live with his sister, because he wanted to get into advertising; Pete went to university in Loughborough to do sports science, because he didn’t know what else to do; Katrina went to university in Leeds to read media studies, because she wanted to be the next editor of Vogue; and Bev got a job in Miss Selfridge, because she wanted to get enough money together to go travelling for a few years. Quite soon the only time we all met up was on Christmas Eve, at the Kings Arms in Moseley, the pub that acted as the unofficial clubhouse for ex-King’s Heath Comprehensive pupils. However, as we graduated our way through to our mid-twenties, even Christmas in the Kings Arms fell by the wayside and before we knew it we’d all moved on so far with our lives that we literally didn’t know each other any more. All except Gershwin, that is. He didn’t move anywhere.
I’d known Gershwin – named after the great composer because his mum liked ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ – since my first day at secondary school, some eighteen years ago, and in all that time we’d never lost contact. When the majority of us went to university, Gershwin decided he’d had enough of education and got a job wo
rking for a local hospital trust. At the time we all thought he was making a huge mistake and told him so. After all, we thought, he’s missing out on being a mad student, getting up to all sorts of mad-student antics, and having mad-student fun. That was one way of looking at it. The other way was this: by the time we’d left university, Gershwin was a high-flying junior manager responsible for a budget of hundreds of thousands of pounds, while my highest-flying achievements included assistant deputy editorship of the university magazine’s arts page and an ability to watch the same episode of Neighbours twice a day and still find it fascinating. Because of this, Gershwin was the first of all of us to tick off all the big ones on the I’m-a-fully-formed-adult checklist. He was the first to have real money, spend real money and own a car that wasn’t held together by Sellotape and goodwill. He was the first to get a mortgage, break the elusive two-and-a-half-year barrier in a relationship – with Zoë, the love of his life whom he met in a nightclub – and, at twenty-four, was the first to get married.
The wedding – at which I was best man – was an event I’ll never forget. Not least because it was the last time all seven of us dragged ourselves from the various corners of the world to which we’d been flung and got together to party. While at the back of my mind there was the small worry that Gershwin was too young to be getting hitched, I also felt immense pride about it because this was my best mate getting married. When everyone I knew (myself included) was doing everything in their power to hang on to the vestiges of their former student lifestyles it felt like Gershwin, venturing into the world of marriages, mortgages, careers and – a year later – kids, was a pioneer – boldly going where none of my peer group had gone before. Even with this turning-thirty thing he was going to get there before me although our birthdays were only separated by a few weeks.
