Look who it is!

by Alan Carr

  Although my brother and I are now the best of friends, the six-year difference between us made sure when we were growing up that we were never going to be bosom buddies. When I needed a friend to play with, he was a baby and technically useless, and when I reached adolescence the thought of hanging around with a seven-year-old made me go cold.

  Like every teenager, the cry of ‘Take your brother with you!’ from your mother as you go to step out the house was the most depressing sound you could ever hear. How uncool was that? Hanging around with a seven-year-old. I would be well moody and offhand with him but he would get his own back in other ways. At fairgrounds I would have to accompany him on the baby rides only for him to start bawling halfway round and get taken off by my mother while I would have to stay on the stupid ride, going round and round looking like a simpleton.

  There is a photo of me standing with the ‘real’ He-Man where Gary had chickened out and started bawling at the sight of He-Man’s plastic face. ‘Alan! You’ll have to have your photo taken with He-Man. I’m not queuing for nothing,’ Mum insisted, and there I am, standing next to an out-of-work actor in a He-Man outfit at Weston Favell Shopping Centre, both of us asking ourselves, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’

  Just when my self-esteem was at an all-time low, I was dealt a body blow, and it was called ‘reality’. In Drama we had all been filmed on video performing various soliloquies and it was time to watch them back and get constructive criticism from our teacher. I sat down, all giggly, ready to watch myself with everyone, but I cannot tell you the shock that then shook my body.

  That person on the screen wasn’t me, there’d been a mistake, it was a grotesquely camp boy with a screeching voice and the most over-the-top mannerisms. He was the gayest boy I’d ever seen. I looked around at my fellow Drama students, hoping they would be just as shocked at this terrible mistake. Nothing. They just smiled back at me. Yes, the boy looked like me, but I wasn’t like that, I didn’t sound like that. This boy was as camp as Christmas.

  Why wasn’t anyone else phased by this ‘possession’? Why hadn’t anyone told me? I suppose they had, really. People 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 th
e 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 wasn’t it yours?’ she cried, with genuine grief, staring at me with accusatory eyes as if I’d tunnelled into the kiln personally and smashed up Kelly’s masterpiece.

  Despite this, I did like Mrs Wilson. She was a hippy with flame hair and would wear long flowing dresses and scarves and let us listen to music while we ‘created’. She was a good person with a good heart, not like Mrs O’Flaherty who didn’t have a heart, or feelings. They’d been cruelly removed when she’d had that dreadful bowl cut inflicted on her. Mrs Wilson had given up on my art, which frustrated me because I really wanted to be good at it, but some things you have to let go.

  In Art and Design and PE, I became one of those kids that parents of the good pupils say ‘holds the others back’. Artistically, I didn’t have IT, whatever IT is. Yes, I was disappointed, but I was also realistic. Yes, they may be able to paint beautiful pictures and sculpt statues, but can they recite verses of Shakespeare and Keats off the top of their heads? I can’t do that either, but you get my point. I was never jealous of the Kelly Hubberts in my class – though someone must have been because a few days before her deadline she had her artwork stolen from the class.

  ‘There are some sick people out there,’ Mrs Wilson told us. ‘Now if they’d taken Alan’s they would have been really sick in the head.’

  I rest my case.

  * * *

  Dad’s success as manager of Northampton Town Football Club had meant that we could move from the Moulton Leys Estate to the village of Overstone which, although quaint, was miles away from the school and didn’t do much to assuage my feelings of separation. What friends I did make at school all lived miles away, and like every other teenager I always imagined that everyone else was having an amazing time and throwing wild parties while I was stuck in a shitty little village where the only exciting things to do were to water your hanging baskets and moan about ramblers. My parents totally understood this need to feel more integrated, and whenever there was a party at ‘The Farm’, they would faithfully drive me there. I must have had some friends because in my memory between the ages of 14 and 16 I always seemed to be going to parties, but then again there is a big difference between being lonely and feeling lonely.

  The Farm was an outbuilding near Weston Favell Upper School that people would hire if they were having a party. From the age of 14 to 16, it seemed every Friday someone would be celebrating something, and so we’d put on our chinos and waistcoats and head on down to sip on a soft drink and listen to the sound of Yazz. The dance-floor was so uneven that when you jumped up as you did during ‘The Only Way is Up’, the floor would jolt, causing the stylus to veer off Yazz onto Big Fun. I don’t think I ever got to hear the ending of that song.

  Every parent booked The Farm apart from Michelle Douglas’s, who booked out Danes Camp, which was a leisure centre with a swimming pool – as it said on the invite, it was going to be ‘A Pool Party’. Everyone was so excited. Michelle told us that there would be a buffet near the pool, but if any food went in the pool it would have to be cleaned out, costing her parents an extra £200. As kids, we don’t know we’re born. The Farm was so tedious, week in – week out, and here we were being offered an amazing pool party with food, so how did we repay Michelle Douglas’s parents? We grabbed armfuls of sausage rolls, cocktail sausages, those cheese and pineapple things and jumped in the pool – ensuring that the Douglases were in fact £200 out of pocket. Baps, sausage rolls, hot dogs, all bobbed past as we frolicked in the water. It was like swimming in an underwater Greggs.

  Obviously, word got round the other parents about the Douglases pool/food fight party, and within weeks we were all back at The Farm. There was a menace there. It wasn’t drink or cigarettes, and it definitely wasn’t drugs, it was … the Bushwhackers. The Bushwhackers would bang on the windows while we were in there, and make threatening gestures and swear at us. Rumours that it was Michelle Douglas’s parents furious about their daughter’s pool party were quickly dispelled.

  Only a few details were known about the Bushwhackers. They were allegedly from Northampton School for Boys, they had weapons and they could hide for hours in the long grass waiting for someone to come out of The Farm doors. They used to terrify us. Just one bang on the window with a stick would have had us all fleeing to the other end of the room, girls wailing and boys shouting whilst still running in the opposite direction. ‘Come on then, I’ll take you on.’ I’m sure that whoever it was found it all terribly hilarious.

  At one party they abducted Stacey Higgins. Everyone was in tears. Should we call the police? Should we venture outside and try to find her ourselves? We all waited by the window eagerly hoping to see what the Bushwhackers would do with this innocent girl’s body. Then we spotted her – getting off with a spotty lad behind a wheelie bin. Stacey had used the Bushwhackers as a ruse to sneak out of The Farm and get a groping and a bit of tongue action. We were outraged at her defection.

  The attacks by the Bushwhackers, although harrowing at the time, proved a timely distraction for me especially as the sounds of Stock, Aitken and Waterman began to slow and morph into power ballads, and everyone around me paired off to start dancing together. This to me was the death knell of the evening, the excruciating part. Why couldn’t we just dance, dance, dance? I didn’t really want to dance with the girls, but then I didn’t really want to dance with the boys either, so it would leave me at a bit of a loose end, holding my coat at the edge of the dance-floor listening to the sounds of Richard Marx’s ‘Right Here Waiting’.

  They never played Gloria Estefan’s ‘Don’t Want to Lose You Now’. That song was so romantic and beautiful – I was such a big Gloria fan. I loved the Cuts Both Ways album and used to really crank up the dial when ‘Oy Mi Canto’ came on. I learnt that in English it means ‘Hear My Voice’ and I remember thinking, ‘What a talent! There’s not many pop stars these days who could sing so beautifully in two different languages.’ I went off Gloria when she suffered spinal injuries in that coach crash, not because she was nearly crippled or anything, it’s because I realised she was shit.

  It wasn�
�t just our Gloria pumping out of my stereo, I was also a huge Prince fan. I bought everything, every biography about him, every album, even every awful film that he starred in, I was there on the day of release outside Our Price, full of excitement.

  Let’s get this clear, though. I never dressed up as him. I know some Prince fans go the whole hog and impersonate their idol, but I was getting enough stick at school without turning up on Mufti Day in a purple lace all-in-one body-stocking. I was mesmerised by Prince, the amount of times Mum would catch me miming to his songs and practising that bit where he jumps up and does the splits during ‘Housequake’.

  My father must have been beside himself: me, football-phobic, girlfriendless, camp and now the final insult – I choose to have a 5-foot transvestite as my Pop Idol. How could he not ‘get’ Prince? Well anyway he just didn’t, and Prince was banned from the car even though I’d created a parent-friendly cassette of Prince’s classic hits. My efforts were futile and instead we had to endure Chris Rea’s Road to Hell on every journey, well, until he brought out Auberge. Whoopee-doo!

  Ever since Dad had got Northampton promoted up from Division Four with a club record of 99 points and 103 goals and then to the heady climes of number six in Division Three, we as a family could afford to leave England and holiday abroad. Naturally, the chance of flying on a plane was so much more fantastic than the five-hour car journey behind a string of caravans to Beverley Park in Torquay.

  Flying by plane meant you’d arrived, and in class you’d drop it into conversation that you would be going abroad, on a plane – yes, you heard – on a plane to Spain. The Spain that I had in my head was not the Spain that greeted my eyes when we pulled up at Fuengirola. I’m sure when it was finished being built it would look wonderful. It was to me a bit like Northampton-sur-Mer. Any Spanish culture had been trampled on by English bars promising ‘English food’ and ‘English-speaking staff’ for English customers. Of course this is the snob in me looking back with my fancy ways after sampling the cultural highlights of Barcelona and Madrid. Back then it was amazing. You got proper fish fingers and chips, and you could watch Del Boy on the telly – oh, this was so much better than Torquay.