Читать книгу I Owe You Nothing - Luke Goss - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI always feel weird when I see other identical twins. If they are very alike, they look to me like something from the twilight zone. Freaks. Clones. Then I wonder if people feel that about Matt and me. I hope they don’t, because I don’t think we go out of our way, like some twins do, to look and be spookily alike.
There was no single moment when I realized that I was different from other kids because I was a twin – I always knew it. There are pluses and minuses in being a twin, but on balance I think the minuses outweigh the pluses. It’s not that I don’t love having Matt as a brother: I wouldn’t have missed that for anything. There’s an indestructible bond between us. But we have both had to fight all our lives to be treated as individuals, and I expect all other identical twins will understand and recognize that problem.
As a twin and a young child, individuality is virtually impossible. You are regarded as being half of a whole: anyone who knows your brother assumes that you have an identical personality, simply because you look the same. At school you are both tarred with the same brush: if I was bad, Matt was assumed to be bad also, and vice versa. Children, in particular, ask you stupid questions – but you also get a fair amount from adults. When Matt broke his arm, all the other kids wanted to know why I didn’t have a plaster cast on mine, too. When he wore a brace on his teeth I was asked – even by adults – why I didn’t have one. And I got heartily fed up with well-meaning shop assistants and old ladies in the street asking us if our mother could tell us apart.
Mum did not deliberately dress us alike, but it is difficult to be creative with shopping when you are struggling around with two lively little boys in tow: it was easier to buy two of everything. When we got dressed in the mornings the clothes were all kept together, there was no clear sense of his and mine. When Tony moved in with us, he admits it took him a while to recognize us as individuals, and he asked Mum to make sure we were dressed differently.
Later on, when we were buying our own clothes, we guarded them jealously. When they were no longer new we would lend them to each other, but we both had certain things which were out of bounds to the other one. We respected the unwritten rules because the battle for even that much individuality had been hard won.
When we started at school we had to wear badges with our names on. Later on, at secondary school, when all the other kids were being called by their first names, we had to put up with being addressed as ‘Goss’ because teachers did not know who was who. I was constantly in trouble for saying ‘I have a name, sir’ to teachers. Like most twins, we hated being referred to as ‘the twins’ or ‘the Goss twins’, we were desperate from an early age to be treated as individuals.
The confusion between us probably cost me a GCE in maths. I was always much better at maths than Matt, but for some reason he was put into a higher set than me in our last year at school. When I protested to the teachers I was told that they would move me in a few weeks, but a few weeks later they claimed it was too late to switch me. I’m afraid I lost all interest in the subject under my new teacher. I continued doing Matt’s maths homework for him, which was more difficult than mine, but didn’t bother with my own. I’m not claiming that this put paid to a brilliant academic career – I couldn’t wait to leave school and I had no intention of doing any further studies – but it is an example of how little we were regarded as individuals.
We actually asked to be put into separate classes at school when we were thirteen; that was a very big step for us, because until then we had never been apart for such long hours on a regular basis. We both felt we needed more time away from each other, and we developed separate groups of friends for a while.
There is also a physical disadvantage in being twins: we knocked hell out of each other as kids. Because we were the same size and weight we were evenly matched in fights, and because we are equally pig-headed neither of us would ever give in, so we slugged each other as hard as we could for as long as we could. We both have scars on our bodies to prove it. Had one of us been a year or two older, we would perhaps still have fought, but never for so long or so hard. As we got older we agreed not to be so rough: our fights in recent years may have involved a bit of pushing, but we don’t hit each other any more.
The advantages in being a twin are obvious. From birth onwards I had a constant, close companion. There was always a friend of my own age to play with, someone to get into trouble with, an ally against the adult world. When we were unhappy, it was shared, and we could give each other support. I know that Matt and me have a means of communication that does not rely on speech. We feel things for each other even when we are thousands of miles apart, and when we are together we often only have to glance at the other to know what he’s thinking. My Mum will probably hate to read this, but I know that if I was in an aeroplane that was about to crash, the two people I would think about would be my girlfriend Shirley and my brother Matt.
It may sound a contradiction of everything I have said about the quest for individuality, but being a twin certainly gets you noticed. It gives you, from birth, a title. The new teacher will go home after her first day in front of the class with only a few pupils firmly fixed in her mind: the twins will always be among those she gets to know first. In other words, the struggle for individuality was between me and my twin, not between us and the rest of the kids. We were designated as special and different from birth, and we liked that.
We had the usual fun and games that twins enjoy. We used to deliberately confuse teachers, usually when they were trying to punish one of us. We would go out of the class to the toilet and when we came back in we would sit in each other’s chairs, that kind of silliness. It was always easier to get into trouble: when Matt suggested something wicked it was like suggesting it to myself, he was so much part of me, and because there were two of us we could always egg the other one on to mischief. But in a way we could get away with more – twins are expected to be ‘double trouble’. That expression and ‘as like as two peas in a pod’ are so familiar, you simply learn to put up with hearing them. I wouldn’t mind a tenner for each time they’ve been said about us.
Occasionally we could even confuse our mum, especially at night when we would change beds. But she always sussed us pretty quickly. Both Mum and Dad knew us apart automatically, not just by looks but by personality. We are very different people, however alike we look. I am much more practical, down-to-earth, self-sufficient than Matt. He is a dreamer, more relaxed than me. My family and friends tell me I’m deeper than he is: I think about things more. He takes what comes. We’re both impulsive and mad, but I’ve always been more sensible than he is. He’s likely to want to do really crazy things that could end in total disaster, and I have to restrain him. You can see the differences in our personalities when you look at the words we write for songs: his are more lyrical, more descriptive; mine are simpler, more direct.
I have always assumed the role of older brother. Studies of twins have shown that it is very common for one of them to take on a surrogate mother role with the other. It isn’t necessarily the one who was born first who does this, but in our case that’s the way it has worked. As a child I saw it as my job to look after Matt, to protect him. I was always, physically, ahead of him. Dad remembers us cycling down the road on our little bikes when we were four, the first two-wheelers we ever had, and I suddenly put my feet up on the handlebars. Three days later Matt did it. That was a pattern that would be repeated many times. I was also a bit ahead of him physically in another way: girls. We both had girlfriends from an early age, but I was the first to get into sexual relationships.
There is a deep underlying rivalry between us but it is softened and reduced by the great love we have for one another, which means that we genuinely both want only good things to happen for the other. In other words, neither of us wants to do well at the other’s expense, but we still want to do as well as each other. It was characterized in my early relationships with girls: whenever I went out with a girl I always had to ask her if she fancied my brother. I needed to know. We were, after all, alike to look at, so I felt that if she wanted me she probably also wanted him. I needed reassurance that it was something individual about me that she found attractive. Of course, in those early schoolboy – schoolgirl relationships that are over after a couple of days, looks are probably the most vital ingredient, and so it often happened that girlfriends were passed between us: I stole his girlfriends and he stole mine.
Having a twin who looks like you is not as hard to cope with as many people might think: and that’s because to us, and to those who are close to us, we don’t look alike at all. We are the same height now, six feet two inches, but Matt is more heavily built than me; he weighs a stone more than I do; he has a rounder face than mine: he looks more like our father and I look more like our mother.
Occasionally, looking at photographs, I realize how alike we are, but the rest of the time I see the differences rather than the similarities. I have always believed he is better looking than I am. At school I was the one with the skinny legs, and I was convinced girls would fancy him more than me.
Until we were twelve there was an easy way to tell us apart: I was the one with the sticking-out ears. I had serious jugs; I made Prince Charles look streamlined. I always had my hair long to cover my ears until eventually I had an operation to pin them back. At one school sports day I remember an older girl shouting out to me ‘Cheers, big ears’, which upset me so much that I ran off the track and all the way home. It was then that Mum agreed to fix up the operation privately, because I was so self-conscious about them, but in the nick of time we received an NHS appointment from the local hospital. They had to take cartilage out of my left ear to put in my right, which was the more prominent. Afterwards my ears were badly bruised and a lovely colour combination of yellow, mauve, brown and black for a few weeks.
Our singing voices are very different, but that owes more to the influences in our music than to nature. Matt has cultivated a higher voice because he admired Michael Jackson. I have always preferred a soul sound, deeper than his. But if our singing voices are different, our speaking voices are identical. Even our nearest and dearest have trouble recognizing which one of us is on the other end of the telephone. We used this to great advantage as teenagers, chatting up each other’s girlfriends shamelessly.
In the final analysis, I would not swap having Matt as a brother for anything. But I do not like being pigeonholed as ‘a twin’, and in my experience being a twin is jam-packed with insecurities.
I have Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal to thank for the year I spent living in Cheddar, in Somerset. The Good Life, a television series in which they played a married couple who gave up their nine-to-five existence to run a smallholding, was a great hit in our household, particularly with Mum. When Tony’s property maintenance business collapsed, she persuaded us all that we should opt out and move to the country. The attraction was to be self-sufficient, and it certainly looked fun on telly. I had always lived in or near to London, but I was only eleven at the time and the prospect of moving did not bother me: we’d already lived in quite a few different houses.
Mum and Tony took off for a week of house-hunting and, with a loan from Tony’s father, who was a chartered surveyor and insurance claims consultant, they bought a ‘cottage’ in Cheddar, the beautiful little village famous for the nearby Cheddar Gorge. I’m using the word cottage because ‘tumbledown wreck’ sounds a bit harsh, though it is probably a fairer description. Matt and I didn’t see it until the day we moved in.
I travelled from Cheshunt to Cheddar with Mum, in the Jag. Tony and Matt followed behind in a transit van containing some of our furniture, and with our caravan hitched on the back, stuffed full with a set of kitchen units for the new house.
Mum and I nearly didn’t make it. As we were travelling down the M4 in the middle lane, a woman in a white Mini suddenly pulled out of the inside lane in front of us. Mum swerved, slammed on the brakes, and our car went into a spin in a cloud of white smoke. We performed three complete circles, the last one on two wheels, and ended up broadside on across the motorway, with the engine cut out. Mum sat behind the wheel, transfixed. I broke the spell by saying ‘At least, Mum, we would have died together.’ She snapped into life and tried the engine. At the first turn of the key it would not start, but luckily at her second attempt it did. We were very close to a motorway service area and we pulled off for a cup of coffee to calm us down. After we parked and started to walk towards the café, a car passed quite close to me and I jumped in fright, my nerves shattered. Mum put her arm round me and we had a big hug.
If we had died on the motorway that day, it would not have been Mum’s fault. She is a good driver, and she was doing everything right. Even to this day I have a very firm idea of what I would like to do to the driver of that Mini, who pulled out without looking in her mirror and drove on, safe and sound, almost leaving death in her wake. We were lucky that no other cars were close enough to ram into us: if the motorway had been busier the consequences could have been appalling.
Despite the near-accident, we still arrived first at the house in Cheddar. I couldn’t believe it. There were no windows, the doors were hanging off, it was a dilapidated mess. ‘That’s not where we’re going to live, is it, Mummy? We can’t live there, it’s worse than a shed,’ I said, praying that she would say there was a mistake and we had pulled up outside the wrong house. But there was no mistake: this was our new home, Jasmine Cottage.
We were too frightened even to go inside. A woman was coming down the hill and Mum asked her if she would mind going in with us. She must have thought we were mad, but she was very kind and accompanied us. It was far worse than Mum had remembered it: local kids had been using it for all sorts of things, and it was full of used condoms, cigarette ends, matches and every other kind of litter. We pitched the caravan in a nearby farm field and lived there until the place was habitable. It was a good choice of field: the farmer had a son, Robert, who was the same age as us, and became one of our best friends down there.
Living in Cheddar did not work out for our family, but in many ways it was a great year, and I would not have missed it. Mum was able to get work easily: she worked as a secretary at the local electricity board, which was just up the lane from us. She made friends and loved the life there, as did our dog, a Yorkshire terrier called James, who came with us. To our dismay he was run over in our quiet little backwater – ironic after surviving life in London and Cheshunt. We buried him in the garden and replaced him with two mongrels called Bill and Ben. We also had a cat called Jessica, who had the quickest sex change in history when we discovered that she was a he and renamed her Jesse. The cat was the Madonna of the feline world, because he seemed to like nothing better than letting the dogs inflict pain on him.
We also bought a goat called Mary who attached herself romantically to Tony. I learned to milk the goat, and came to prefer chilled goat’s milk on my cornflakes to cow’s milk from a bottle. Unfortunately, Mary died giving birth and we had to bury her in the garden, too.
Matt and I used to go fishing in a private pond nearby, with a big No Fishing sign – it was poaching, to give it its correct name. We did not have expensive fishing tackle, just worms on the end of a line, but when my granddad came down to stay with us for a few days we caught the biggest trout he has ever eaten. It must have weighed three pounds and was probably the prize specimen in the pond.
We had a lot of fun and a very strong feeling of being up against the odds together: we all worked hard at getting the cottage straight and, although it was never completely finished, when we moved out it was a very attractive and picturesque home. We never really got to grips with the garden though: it was waist deep in nettles when we moved in, and then one day when I returned from school it had all been ploughed up. It looked like a muddy field, with deep furrows across it. It stayed like that until we left.
We went to Fairlands School, our first secondary school. We made friends and we were not unhappy, but we always felt we were outsiders. Our strong London accents made for a communication problem with the local kids, who had country accents as broad as ours. Some of them asked us if we were Australian! We had to learn a new language: ‘daps’ meant trainers, ‘scrap’ was a fight. Because we were already very interested in clothes and always believed in personal hygiene (Matt and I were using deodorants and anti-perspirants before most boys had heard of them), we tended to be more popular with the girls than the boys. That made us even less popular with the boys, but we were already tall and strong (five feet ten inches by the time we were eleven) and we defended ourselves pretty well in any punch-ups.
For a time I went out with a girl called Karen, who was a year older than me and the most popular girl in the school. One day her sister phoned up and said she didn’t want to go out with me any more, and I found out later that behind my back Matt had been round to her house and chatted her up. It didn’t always work that way, though: I took great delight one day in introducing him to my new girlfriend, a girl called Nicky: she’d been going out with him the previous week!
When we were told by Mum and Tony, a year after moving to Cheddar, that we were going back to London I had mixed emotions: I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend, a small, pretty blonde girl who I thought I was devoted to at the time, and, much worse, I did not want to be parted from our puppies, Bill and Ben, who had to be given away. But I did want to get back to the city.
It was Tony who had the worst time down there. He could not find work. The good life is great if you have lots of money: when you are trying to pay back a loan and support yourselves, it can be a nightmare. Tony travelled as far as South Wales to work, but could find only casual jobs. Village people don’t exactly open their arms to outsiders and he found it difficult to fit in. At times he had to hunt around the garden for firewood to keep us all warm.
He tried lots of schemes to make money, and we all trudged miles sticking leaflets through doors for him. We had great fun helping him to train as a double glazing salesman. He did a course, and then he practised knocking on our door and trying to sell to Mum or Matt or me. We loved it because it was an excuse to open the door and be rude to him, which most kids would enjoy. I know that whatever else becomes of me, I could always work as a trainer for door-to-door salesmen: I perfected all sorts of excuses for not buying from him. When he had to do it for real, the whole family went out in the car with him and literally pushed him up the first drive.
Mum and Tony protected us from the worst of it, but they were at a very low ebb during that year in Cheddar. They used up all their savings, they could not afford to pay Tony’s father the money they owed him, and Tony was so unhappy he was close to a breakdown. He’s definitely a city person; country life was not for him. Unknown to Tony at the time, and because she was desperate, Mum went to see his father and asked him to give Tony a job, which he did.
We sold the house in Cheddar and made sufficient profit to pay off the debt and put down the deposit on a house in Camberley. Mum chose the house by herself: Tony told her to get on with it. But there was a hiccup, and the purchase of the original house they were buying fell through at the last minute. Mum rushed around and found another, but we were unable to move in for a few weeks, so when we first moved back to London we were once again living in a caravan, this time on a site at Henley. I hate caravans and I cannot for the life of me imagine why people go on holiday in them.
Because we were enrolled at Collingwood School in Camberley, and because Mum did not want our education to be messed around any more by changing schools, she drove us to Camberley from Henley every morning in the rush hour, a round trip of one and a half hours, which she repeated every afternoon.
It was while we were in Cheddar that the relationship between Mum and Dad had gone through its most critical and unpleasant phase. There had been disputes between them before, over maintenance payments, and they both felt they had grievances. As I have already said, I love Dad and have a great relationship with him now, and I have also tried to understand why he behaved the way he did. But he admits himself he was way out of order in some of his actions, both to us and to Mum. Even today, with so much water under the bridge, I can feel a physical pain when I think about it.
Dad received a bad school report about us and was very angry. He assumed that we weren’t trying: we were, but we had moved about so much that our schooling had been disrupted. He wrote to us: it was a typed letter and it was a ‘harsh, dogmatic attack’; those are his own words to describe it and he accepts that he should never have sent it.
We each received identical letters and we were desperately upset. It was as formal as a letter to a bank manager, but much nastier. He even signed it ‘Alan Goss’. To me, it seemed like yet more proof that my father did not love me. A child does not understand about marriage breakdown: when one parent leaves, the child always imagines that in some way they are at fault, that the parent does not love them. Not enough was done to compensate for that; Dad never went out of his way to explain it to us, nor did he demonstrate his affection physically. So when we read the letter we were convinced that he did not love us. We were so upset that we did not go to school that day.
Mum went berserk and there was a loud slanging match down the phone. She said that she would not let us go to stay with Dad: he and his wife Margaret had recently moved to a house that was big enough for us to visit, and he wanted us to spend a week with him for the first time since he had left home. Dad retaliated by taking Mum to court, claiming that she was refusing him access to see us: this after he had been dissuaded from dropping out of our lives altogether a couple of years earlier. Mum explained to the court that she was not denying him the right to have his children stay with him, she simply wanted him and Margaret to build a closer relationship with us before we were taken off to stay with a woman we did not know in an unfamiliar house. The court agreed, and ordered Dad and Margaret to travel to Cheddar and see us at least three times before we could stay with them. They did it within ten days, and we went to stay with them for a week.
Margaret made a great effort to welcome us. She cooked our favourite foods, made me my favourite tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches, and we in turn behaved ourselves and the week passed very well. I remember being so nervous before we went there that I felt sick, but at the end of the week I had developed an affection for her. It was the only time that things worked out between her and us though, and I cannot really explain why. I suspect we were all trying too hard that week and in real life nobody can keep up that level of effort. Dad says we were cold, sullen and withdrawn on our next visit: we probably were. We were eleven years old and wracked with guilt about enjoying being with Dad; we felt it was a betrayal of Mum, even though she did not consciously impose that view on us, and I think we just put the shutters up on our relationship with Margaret.
Mum says, ‘Watching them going off to stay with another woman tore me apart. I tried hard not to let them know how I felt. I genuinely wanted them to get on well with their Dad because blood is thicker than water. But I’m sure they sensed how unhappy I was seeing them go.’
When we moved back to London, just before we went to the caravan, we stayed with my granddad; I have some lovely memories of that time. Granddad has been the most constant father figure in my life, always there for me whenever I needed him. While we were there, Dad did not know where we were living: he found out that we had left Cheddar by contacting the school, because in all the rush to get back to London nobody had given him our new address. He was livid, and applied to the court for care and control of us (he and Mum had been awarded joint custody at the time of the divorce).
He wanted us to go and live with him and Margaret, and he was claiming that Mum was an unfit mother. Mum received the letter from the court making these allegations when we were living in the caravan at Henley. That morning, driving us to school in Camberley, she hit a bus and wrecked the Jag. It was an old car by then, but she really loved it. The accident was totally her fault; she couldn’t concentrate on the driving because the words ‘unfit mother’ were pounding through her brain.
I detested my father at this point. It was bad enough as a family having to live in a caravan, but to have the added grief and pain of his court action was dreadful, and there were times when Mum and Matt and I all clung together, crying.
The court arranged for a welfare worker to visit us and assess whether or not we were being properly cared for. By the time she came, we had moved into the house in Camberley. Matt and I had chosen the colours for our bedrooms: his was red and white stripes and mine was green and white. The day the social worker came we dashed in from school as usual, and Mum didn’t tell us who the lady there was, although we soon guessed when we were asked to show her round the house. We were so obviously well-cared for, the social worker decided very quickly that the whole thing was a waste of court time.
My father’s point of view was that we were leading very unsettled lives and that our schooling was suffering. He thought the caravan was an unsuitable place for us to live and did not realize that it was only a temporary home. There were some very angry scenes between him and Mum at this time, and we were not sheltered from them. Our loyalty was with Mum, who had been there for us all our lives, and that partly accounts for why we became as difficult as we did with Margaret.
Living in the kind of jigsaw puzzle family in which we grew up is now very common: almost half of all school children in Britain today come from a broken family, and there are literally millions of kids struggling to come to terms with step-parents, half-brothers and -sisters, stepbrothers and stepsisters, several sets of grandparents and all the other baggage of multi marriages. Our situation was probably no better and no worse than the average, and I know that the other people involved – Mum, Tony, Dad, Margaret – were also in a lot of pain, but that didn’t make things any easier.
Looking back now, Dad accepts that he handled this stage of our lives badly.
‘My marriage to Margaret was good for me in many ways, so I shut my eyes to the fact that she had problems with my kids. She did talk to me about it once, and I understood it wasn’t easy for her to have a sort of part-time relationship with two boys who clearly resented her existence.
‘When Carol and I were together, we never argued about the way the children were being brought up: even now, after many years of being divorced from her, I think Carol did a remarkable job with them, and must take credit for the fact that they have turned into two caring, decent, honest young men. There were problems between Carol and me over the years, as is inevitable perhaps when there has been a rather bitter divorce, and there was a time when I was very worried about the conditions they were living in. But looking back, I think she did the best possible job in view of all the upheaval and moving.’
It was soon after we left Cheddar that Matt achieved a milestone in his life: he stopped wetting the bed. I wet the bed until I was about five and a half, then I stopped until I was seven when I became disturbed at Tony’s arrival in our lives, and I wet every night for another year. By the time I was eight I was dry at night, but it took Matt longer. The problem could be equated with the traumas in our lives: I expect that’s what the amateur psychologists would say. But I’m not so sure. I was old enough to be aware of it, and so was Matt. I came to the conclusion that Matt simply went into a very deep sleep every night, much deeper than most people. He is a very dreamy person even during the day: if you want to attract his attention you often have to say his name four or five times. I think he stopped wetting the bed when he reached an age where he may have started sleeping less deeply, because we were at secondary school by then, and had busy lives and more pressures than a small child has.
I’m not claiming to have any solution to the problem but I believe it should be talked about, because I’m sure there are lots of kids who are deeply embarrassed by it. It’s treated like a taboo although in reality it is probably very common. There are lots of parents, too, going through hell because of it, blaming themselves and getting angry with their children. I’d like to tell everyone to relax about it. It will eventually go away, and the less everyone gets on to the kid about it, the sooner it will happen.
Some parents think their kid is too lazy to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. Let me tell you, no kid is so lazy that he wouldn’t walk the twenty yards to the toilet when he knows what will happen the next morning if he wets the bed. Nobody does it through choice, nobody. You wake up in the morning and you lie still, and for a moment or two you can convince yourself that you haven’t done it, and then you roll over and hit that horrible cold wet patch. It’s disgusting. You hate yourself.
I’ve seen Matt work himself up into a terrible state, chanting to himself before bed to try to make himself wake up, and yet he still wet. He went through hell. Mum bought a device with a buzzer that sounded the minute even a drop of water touched the sheet: many a night I’ve woken up, in the next room, to hear Matt’s buzzer going off and he was still sound asleep. I’d have to go in to him to wake him. Then he might climb into bed with me – and sometimes, before morning, he’d wet again, in my bed. It made him so utterly miserable. I’ve seen that panicky, frightened look on his face so many mornings and I’ve hated it.
You can try all the tricks that people suggest, nothing works. You can go to the toilet ten times before you go to bed, you can stop drinking five hours before bed, your mother can get you up and take you to the toilet when she goes to bed. Nothing works. You could be in a desert, seriously dehydrated, and you’d still wet the bed. It is not something you can control.
Tony had the idea of putting a chart up on the wall in our kitchen, with ticks and crosses for when we were dry or wet. Gradually my crosses changed into ticks, but Matt’s stayed as crosses: I don’t think that helped him.
I understand what a terrific burden it is on a mother, having to wash sheets every day. But as soon as the kid is old enough, I think the parents should get him involved in washing his own sheets. They should try not to see it as such a big chore that they end up taking their anger out on the child, giving him an even bigger hang-up about it.
It caused problems for Matt right through his childhood. He could never go away on school trips or stay over at a friend’s house – and I never did, either. We always made a joint excuse. I would never have gone without him, I always felt his problem was mine, too.
