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 modern-day policemen have to put up with – Miss Marple would shit herself. To think that I would walk over to a machete-wielding burglar with a crack pipe in his mouth.
‘The slight indentation on your index finger shows you’ve had a stolen DVD in your hand over the last twenty-four hours. You’re nicked.’
‘It’s a fair cop, guv’nor.’
I smile contentedly as he pops the machete down and hands himself over. No, I think Detective Inspector Carr would be horrified with what a real detective does.
I would always be reading and I’d always get an Agatha Christie for Christmas, ripping open the wrapping paper squealing with joy and running past the just-opened shin pads and football boots to start reading Murder in the Vicarage without delay.
I hope my literary tastes are more superior and highbrow now. Some of the books on the A-level curriculum are still up there on my list of favourite books, Brighton Rock and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for instance. Graham Greene is still one of my favourite authors. I loved reading, but the one thing I loved more than reading was reading out loud.
When the teacher would say, ‘Today is Shakespeare. Would anyone like to read out loud?’ while all the other kids in the class would all of a sudden find something totally fascinating to stare at on the floor, my hand would shoot up. My arm would ache in the socket hoping desperately to be the chosen one. But who did she pick? Philip Fucking Granger. Christ! He couldn’t even read. Why choose him? I had a much better reading out loud voice. I could conjure up worlds and emotions with my voice alone. I would actually inhabit the characters on the page, bringing them to life. It was so unfair.
So we would have to sit there while Philip butchered the dialogue and spluttered over some of the easiest words in the English language. He might as well have done a shit on Hamlet’s head. It was appalling. I had some satisfaction in hearing his boring voice drone on, though. On the playing fields he was always picked first and would never pick me, and here he was tripping up, getting disorientated, feeling self-conscious. English was my playing field and he’d just pulled a muscle.
One lesson I tried so hard to be good at was Art and Design. I loved performing in the school plays, I loved reading books, so to make up the trio and be a true creative force to be reckoned with I had to be able to paint well, sculpt well, create beautiful things. In other words be an artiste. Teachers would act differently to my scholarly shortcomings. Mrs O’Flaherty would sneer, Ms Dando would pity me, Mrs Wilson would be a bit more proactive with her criticism, particularly in my pottery lessons. With a cry of ‘Start again!’ she would violently bring her rolling pin down on my vase, my ash tray, my clown figurine, my tree, my mask – anything really that I’d made that lesson out of clay. They were shit, but aren’t teachers meant to guide you and nurture you and not demolish your whole lesson’s efforts with the swoop of a rolling pin in front of your peers?
What really got me was the way she never hid the fact that my work was shit. I remember her genuine disappointment when she opened the kiln to find Kelly Hubbert’s sculpture, a beautiful, thought-provoking piece, cracked in a heap and my ‘mouse in a shoe’ monstrosity intact next to it.
‘Why
