So Me

by Graham Norton

  ‘I’d like to dedicate this to Billy Walker,’ I said.

  13

  Housekeeping

  SCOTT AND I FINALLY SPLIT up. I think my father’s death made me realise that life is too short to waste time in a situation that is making you unhappy.

  Trying to describe why a relationship fails is in itself doomed to failure. Oh, sometimes a used condom found under the sofa might do it, or an argument that ends up with pieces of furniture in the street could help finish one off, but for the most part it is an endless accumulation of little things. The bold facts were that Scott and I were madly in love at the beginning and then I was too busy for him, but this must have happened to other couples who have survived such things. There is no denying that the fact that I was busy on television did nothing to help. I hate to describe myself as a celebrity, but as far as Scott was concerned I was one, and going out with a celebrity was hell. The moment you leave your front door with your famous friend it ceases to be about you, and the awful truth is that it isn’t anything to do with self-esteem or paranoia – it actually isn’t about you.

  Scott was always cast as bad cop whenever we went out for a drink or a meal. The one who got rid of the person who was chatting to me while I smiled and nodded. Usually I was pleased, but sometimes Scott did his job with such zeal that even I was a little embarrassed. Who could blame him? I lost count of the number of times people just started speaking to me without saying excuse me and stood with their back to Scott. If they did speak to him it was usually because they wanted to speak to me. Again, he wasn’t being oversensitive – that was what was happening.

  Now when I date people it is funny to see how quickly they become disenchanted with what at first must have been the main attraction – going out with someone off the telly. Somehow they think that some of the attention will rub off on them, but unless you can get your tits out at premieres it really doesn’t.

  What was doubly hard on Scott was that when he met me I wasn’t well known at all. The fame thing happened very quickly, and even I found it hard to deal with, but at least it was happening to me.

  I suppose that was why I hated the counselling so much, because it was very hard to defend myself; but also I just kept asking myself, why would he want to stay in a relationship that was making him so unhappy? Surely he would leave me?

  Scott had finally been granted his residency and was given his passport back. The first thing he wanted to do was go back to visit his family. This was fine by me. I had bought a house, but I was having the bathrooms redone so I was renting a flat in Soho. No Scott plus apartment slap in the heart of London’s gay village equalled big fun as far as I was concerned. By then, I really didn’t care any more. This sounds harsh, but the relationship had gone so wrong that I didn’t have it in me to be nice. Nor could I be sensitive to his needs. How Scott continued to put up with me is a mystery.

  When he got back and started making noises about more counselling, I told him that I didn’t want to go back to the same one. He agreed that she’d been useless and he began to search for someone better. Now, I don’t quite know how I got the wrong end of the stick, but I thought when he came up with the name of some new counsellor that we were just going to go for one big last hurrah session where we would finally split up but in a controlled environment. I practically skipped to the man’s door. When he asked me how I saw the relationship, I began with a breezy, ‘Well, it’s over.’ I could tell at once from the expression on Scott’s face that in fact that wasn’t what he’d been expecting to hear. Even the counsellor looked slightly surprised. However, it was done. I had said it and there was no going back. Scott and Graham were no more.

  I am still genuinely fond of Scott, and I know that at one time I was deeply in love with him, but in the last couple of months it had been hell. The day he moved out was very awkward and uncomfortable. He handed me the keys and headed off to his new flat about half a mile away. I shut the door, and for the first time in five and a half years felt truly alone. I knew that in time I would miss him, but in that moment it was like a great weight being lifted.

  I had no intention of dating anyone very soon, but happily the gay world provides for all sorts of loose definitions of what exactly dating might be.

  Most Wednesday nights a few of the gay men who worked on the show and I would end up at the White Swan for what is called ‘Amateur strip night’. Like most things, this sounds a lot sexier than it actually is. Before I went I always imagined it as full of hunky regular guys stripping in front of other people because it turned them on or because . . . well, I’d never thought too long about why they would do it. In fact, nobody thinks too long about why they do it, which is the problem. Some of them think they might have a chance as a professional stripper – they’re wrong: think of the first round of Pop Idol auditions without pants – but the vast majority do it because they are drunk beyond reason or shame and think that the £10 you get for entering will do nicely for a few more drinks and the night bus home.

  A lot of the people who go are regulars, and we normally ended up standing at the same place in the bar and having a drunken laugh at the expense of the poor unfortunates on stage. There was one guy I thought was very cute who was often there, and I kept chatting to him. One night I guess we had both had one drink too many and started kissing. He ended up coming back to my house. We had a few more drinks and finally stumbled up the stairs to the bedroom and the bliss that was sure to follow.

  I woke up and blinked at the world like an albino piglet with an eye disease. I seemed to be alone. I looked around the house, but sure enough the man was gone. In the kitchen, as I stood staring at the kettle trying to remember how it worked, I found a note.

  ‘Dear Graham, thanks for last night. I’ve never had someone fall asleep on me before. Call me.’

  The shame of it all. I can’t pretend this was the first or indeed last time that this has happened to me. Drink has a way of making me take some quite snap and final decisions. ‘I want to fuck him, no, wait, I’d prefer to pass out.’ I felt so sorry for this poor man lying there with me, head rolled back and drool trickling on to the pillow, and yet there was the small ‘call me’ at the end of the note. Embarrassed and frustrated because I hadn’t got what I had wanted, I phoned him. He was charming and understanding. We arranged to meet in a club on the Sunday night.

  When I saw him again I was fairly sober and pleased to see that he was as cute as I’d thought he was when I was out of my mind. We were chatting, but he kept looking at his watch.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sorry. It’s just that at midnight it’ll be my birthday.’

  ‘Really! How old will you be?’

  Now, I hadn’t really thought very much about his age. I’d assumed he was late twenties, early thirties. He finished his Smirnoff ice.

  ‘Twenty.’

  It was as if scales fell from my eyes. Of course he was! How could I have been so blind? I was looking into the face of a child. Going to be twenty? Only drink had stopped me from having sex with an actual teenager! Later, drink also meant that I did have sex with an actual twenty-year-old.

  Since Scott I have found myself with many inappropriate sleeping partners – guys who I know are too good-looking or young for me, but then again it’s not as if I have pursued them. I suppose the problem is that a mature, sensible man would never be impressed enough to sleep with someone just because they were on TV.

  Another reason I think I ended up having sex with younger, cuter guys is because I was feeling much more confident about my body than ever before. Around the end of series two I was finding it quite hard to look at myself on screen. If I hadn’t been working on television I probably would have been happy enough. I was in my late thirties and in a stable relationship, the perfect time to let yourself go, but TV is the cruellest mirror on earth. At home you can tuck your shirt in just so, check yourself in the bathroom from a certain angle and leave the house thinking that that is how you l
ook all day. The camera catches you from every angle – the folds of flesh under your ears, the pouches of flab draping over your waistband, the weird lumps of fat sticking out of the back of your suit jacket. It is completely unforgiving. I decided to do something about it.

  I developed my own fairly eccentric diet plan where I could only eat things that were green or white. To begin with this meant a fairly strict regime of fish with peas, spinach or a little rice. Over time I included chicken without skin and potatoes without butter. The clever thing about my diet was that you could drink as much as you liked, but only things you could see through. So no more lager or red wine, but endless white wine, vodka, gin and champagne. As unscientific as this was, it began to work.

  In addition to thinking about what I ate, I also began my hate/hate relationship with the gym. I began working out in late 1999, and I still find it just as hard to make myself go now. Although I feel great afterwards, there is something so monumentally futile about working out in itself. You run, but you are going nowhere. You lift heavy things, but everything ends up where it started. You work out, but you still end up as old and fat as the people who didn’t bother. I’m by no means skinny, but as I climb fifty flights of imaginary stairs or run for three miles towards a CNN newsreader or some MTV video, I try to imagine what sort of life I would have to lead to maintain my weight without going to the gym: tiny salads and not a drink in sight. In the end it makes more sense for me to be miserable for an hour three or four times a week than to be deeply unhappy all the time. It has to be said that occasionally the alternative of eating anything I want and spending my savings on rent boys seems very tempting indeed.

  After Scott left, I started going back to Ireland more and more. If I hadn’t spent enough time with my father, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with my mother. Every time I said I was coming home, my mother would threaten that we’d spread my father’s ashes. This was a task that none of us wanted to do and, what’s more, we had no idea where to do it. There was the beach at Dunworley where we had spent our summers, but we all agreed that dumping your father into the ocean was more like throwing him out than spreading him. We needed land, and, while the garden was tempting, it did seem a bit lazy. It was decided that we would drive up to the small village in Wicklow where he grew up, and once we got there we would find a nice spot.

  My sister drove the car, and just like the day of my father’s funeral the weather was glorious. Carnew is a funny little place. The wide main street makes you think that once upon a time there were great plans for it but in the end nothing happened. A few shops and pubs line the grand thoroughfare, and then suddenly on one side of the street it all stops for a high wall. Carnew Castle. Across the road there is the church where my grandparents are buried, then the old school where my father went, and around the corner the house he was raised in. It seemed right to bring him home.

  My mother had remembered a field that Dad had often talked about ploughing with horses when he was a boy. It is up a long hill out of the village and looks out over half the county. It sounded perfect, and we could all imagine my father spending eternity there. Now we just had to find it.

  We found the road it was on fairly easily, but the actual field was slightly trickier. Presumably boundaries had changed over the years, so the exact spot where my father had followed the horses up and down was really just guesswork. Paula and I looked to Mum for a decision. After two or three runs up and down the hill, she convinced herself about the spot.

  ‘Here! This is it, stop the car.’

  Paula pulled into the side of the road and we all got out. There was a farmhouse with cars outside it about one hundred yards away. We tried not to look too suspicious as we took my father in his temporary plastic home out of the boot of the car.

  We went up to the gate, but it really wasn’t how I remembered gates being when I was growing up in the country. This thing was about six feet high. I climbed up and over and Paula passed Dad to me through the railings. My mother, not known for her agility, began the climb. Using some words I never thought I’d hear my mother say aloud, she slowly got herself to the top. Here she stalled. My sister helped her get one leg over and I was there to catch it. Like Annie Oakley astride a very thin metal horse, Rhoda was majestic and triumphant. Now we just needed to get the other leg over. After a couple of tentative attempts, the sudden realisation that she was six feet off the ground with nothing to hold on to hit her. She began to shriek, ‘Get me down! Get me down!’ With very little help from Paula or myself she quickly transformed into a monkey in a headscarf and headed for firm ground. We paused to get our breath and then Paula noticed something. The huge, insurmountable gate wasn’t actually locked.

  Once in the field, we stood together, and the seriousness of what we were doing came back to us. We walked away from the gate till we found a place beneath a tree that had an uninterrupted panorama of the countryside. My mother said a prayer and then unscrewed the lid of the jar. Taking it in turns, we took handfuls of the ashes and scattered them into the wind. We said goodbye and all of us started to cry. Handful after handful we flung the ashes into the air, but there seemed to be no end to the man. Also, the slight breeze had become a bit stronger so that after each throw, we had to dodge the ashes coming back at us. From a distance we must have looked like three people dancing to unheard music in a field. Although we were all still crying, we had also started to laugh – even my mother. It’s one of my happiest memories that day, the three of us dancing around in the sun and the wind, laughing and crying and releasing my father for ever.

  We all knew that the first Christmas without Dad was going to be hard, especially for my mother, so I came up with a plan. She would spend Christmas with me in London and then we would head off to San Francisco for New Year. Because I couldn’t drive at the time, trying to choose a place to visit was quite hard. We had to be able get around, but it couldn’t be too hot or too cold and there had to be enough things to interest my mother. At the same time, I wasn’t completely selfless – I wanted a bit of nightlife too. Previously I had taken my mother for long weekends to Seville, Venice and Paris. These were no-expense-spared affairs and I really enjoyed being able to do it for her. I think Venice was her favourite, though I felt a little awkward. It was such a romantic city and all the other tourists seemed to be in couples, so when I walked into a restaurant with my mother I could sense people looking at us and silently thinking, ‘Christ! He’s fucking her?’ I never mentioned it to my mother.

  I was really looking forward to seeing San Francisco again after so many years and I thought my mother would enjoy it too. My only worry was the hills. Visiting the city requires quite a bit of walking, and when people talk about the ‘hills’, in some cases words like ‘mountain’ or ‘cliff’ would perhaps be a little more accurate. In the event I needn’t have worried about my mother. I had done something to my back trying to sleep on the plane, and I hobbled up the steep slopes while Rhoda the mountain goat scampered along beside me.

  Since meeting Carrie Fisher on Ruby Wax’s late-night round-table talk show, we had become good friends. She’d sent me hundreds of emails and we’d forwarded to each other all the filthiest, weirdest stuff that the web had to offer. Carrie lives in Los Angeles, but when she heard that I was visiting San Francisco she began trying to arrange for myself and my mother to visit George Lucas’s Skywalker ranch. This was very sweet and kind of her, but of course it was hard to explain to her that my mother had never seen and barely heard of Star Wars, so for her this ü bertreat would really just be some strange day out. As it happens, Carrie’s kindness was thwarted by the holiday season. It seemed no one was at the ranch. I told her not to worry about it, we were having a great time, and we were.

  Alcatraz, the cable cars, Fisherman’s Wharf, we did all the touristy things. On New Year’s Eve we went to see the wonderful singer Barbara Cook in concert. She has a beautiful voice and has been around for ever, appearing in countless Broadway shows and revues. In te
rms of gayness, taking your mother to see Barbara Cook in concert on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco sort of takes you off the scale. My mother and I sat with a few hundred gay men beneath an almost visible cloud of cologne and waited for the concert to begin. The lights dimmed, out walked Barbara, much screaming and clapping, and then she opened her mouth to sing. Nothing. She couldn’t remember the words to the song. Then it turned out that she couldn’t remember the words to any songs. She apologised profusely. The audience did a lot of ‘We love you, Barbara’ shouting and the pianist gave her a pep talk. It was every performer’s nightmare actually happening. Barbara somehow managed to get through the show with a great deal of charm, good grace and looking over the pianist’s shoulder.

  When we got back to the hotel there was a message from Carrie. ‘You are going to get a call from my friend Sharon Stone inviting you to a brunch.’ This information had barely sunk in when the next message began to play. ‘Hello, this is Sharon Stone.’ Sure enough she was inviting me and my mother to her house for a small New Year’s Day brunch. I went next door to break the news to Rhoda. ‘Oh. Well, you go.’ I knew how she felt. I didn’t particularly want to go either, but I explained that we could not go home and tell people that we had turned down the opportunity to go to Sharon Stone’s house for brunch. And so that is how the next day I found myself looking at my mother in her purple woollen suit standing beside Robin Williams while he did improv about the recent election. The fixed grin on my mother’s face seemed to suggest that he had not found a new fan in her. Perhaps sensing that he was losing his audience, he picked up someone’s handbag and pretended to make it talk, and then improved off to delight some other brunchers. Sharon, truly a natural beauty, even up close, was charm personified and didn’t even punch my mother when she told her that her new baby’s name, Roan, wasn’t really Irish, just a modern made-up one to sound Irish. I admired the view, the bagels, my feet, the nerve of the woman.