Wayne broke up with his boyfriend on Thursday, so decided to come to London to in some way drown his sorrows. He’s doing ok in the unique way that Wayne deals with things – he just gets on with life. I admire him for that. He’s a rock in every sense of the word.
Anyway - it was Ollie’s birthday today so Wayne went with the other Scoobie’s to see The Barber of Seville in the afternoon, followed by dinner. The idea was that I would meet with them all afterwards, mainly so that I could see Wayne. Only Wayne calls me at about 8pm and says that he is feeling “old” (I quickly point out to him that he is in fact the same age as me) and is going home to bed. I think he misses Vince. I know how that feels, so I offer some words of encouragement and then we text each other for a bit afterwards.
So then of course, I was at a bit of a loose end. Earlier Jake had texted me and asked what I was doing. I was quite glad to have already made plans with Wayne, so that I could truly sound like I had a life beyond sitting at home waiting for sexy lawyers to call / text me. Except that now my plans had fallen through I began to devise means with which I could muscle in on what Jake was doing (entertaining friends at home.) So I sent a mournful text, explaining that my heartbroken friend had decided to turn in for the night and that I would now be at home lamenting the demise of a night at TooTooMuch by nursing a cheap bottle of Merlot.
It worked. Within two minutes he called me and ordered me round (like a pizza!) I offered to bring the bottle of Merlot, but he said that it was ok, cause he had loads of other wine. I have a sneaking suspicion that he was being a wine snob.
So within 24 hours of properly meeting Jake, I was now meeting his friends. It hasn’t escaped my attention that the seemingly consequential events in my life seem to have incredible inertia, propelling themselves forward at light speed! Or maybe I just move too fast. If you think about it, it’s kind of true – everything about me is fast…the way I move, speak, eat, drive. I’m kind of, um, “rapid-fire”. It’s an endearing quality, don’t you think?
Jake’s friends were Annie, a very attractive lesbian, and Jason, the guy I forgot I met at the Shadow Lounge. I still didn’t recall him upon re-meeting him, which was quite amusing to the three of them. Apparently it was the night of my birthday and I hadn’t seemed to them to be that drunk (although I know I was!) Anyway - Annie is the manager at Comme des Garcons (I was glad I changed into my Donna Karen shirt – I wanted to rectify the gym-disaster outfit I had been wearing previously) and Jason is a VP at Credit Suisse in Canary Wharf. And they were both super lovely and seemed to be very interested in me – I did seem to get a bit of a grilling when I arrived. Twenty questions. I got the distinct feeling that I had been “discussed” in some detail before I got there.
And so the evening went – the three of us stayed up talking and drinking until about 2ish, at which point Annie and Jason decided to share a cab home together. And after they left Jake and I carried on talking. This led to us going through his books and we discovered that he too is a big fan of Douglas Coupland (my favorite author.) This, in turn, led on to photo albums and I pretended to be really interested as he tried to find pictures he’d taken of Komodo Dragons in Indonesia.
In the morning we got up at a respectable hour and at Jake’s suggestion we went out together to get some breakfast things and some Sunday newspapers. He lives right next to the Millennium Bridge (the one that used to wobble) and I hadn’t walked over it before and was eager to find out if it still shook. So we walked across to the other side, decided that it definitely didn’t wobble, and walked back again. After we walked to the grocery store and got all the bits and pieces we sat down by the Tate garden so that I could have a cigarette (he doesn’t smoke in his apartment.) And we got to talking about our brothers.
I have never had a particularly close relationship with my brother. There was always this fragile age gap between us of two and a half years, where it was just impossible for us to find any middle ground where we be able to get on. There must have been some times when we were really young and we played together, but I can’t remember them. Mum does say that when my brother was born and he was bought home, I would try to hold him and would say that he was “my baby”. That makes me smile.
My brother and I are chalk and cheese. I think with my heart. He thinks with his head. I am good at communicating. He is good with his hands (he is a really skilled carpenter.) We are alike, however, in that we are always being told that we are very good looking boys, albeit in different ways. I’ve always thought that I’m cute in a kind of smiley, “grab his cheeks and squeeze them” kind of way, whereas my brother is just dark, moody and handsome!
The only times I remember between my brother and I are the times that we would fight. And it’s funny, because my brother is much stronger than I am, yet I would always win. This had a lot to do with my fighting dirty. Stephen would always go to punch me in the face. Meanwhile I had picked up the breadboard and was already prepared to bring it down on the top of his head. I don’t know to this day how I didn’t ever end up seriously hurting him. I remember this one time where he was annoying me by changing the TV channels, so I literally frisbeed a plate of food at him, cracking him sharply on the side of the head. And this was the other thing with Stephen. As children he was always the one who cried. I would never, ever cry. My Dad says that when I was really young they could smack me and shout at me but I would remain completely dry - although my bottom lip would sometimes tremble!
So anyway – Jake and I sat and recounted tales of our relationships with our brothers. It’s funny, because not only are we almost the same age (give or take three or four months) but our brothers are equidistant in terms of age to / from us (Jake’s brother is older than him.) And both of us have no functioning relationship with our brothers.
I told Jake something that I have always felt. “People always think that it’s strange that I don’t get on with my brother. I mean our relationship is limited to me asking him to put Mum on the phone - that’s pretty much it. I always get the impression that people think there is something dysfunctional in the way that I, as an adult, don’t communicate with my sibling.”
And Jake said something like, “But the thing is, you and I know that we’re not coldhearted. And those people who judge us didn’t have our relationships with our brothers. So they don’t know, do they? It’s like people don’t know about or 'get' a lot of things.”
And then he turns to me and says with real seriousness, "We kind of get each other, don't we?"
It felt that he had hit on something irreducible here and talking much beyond this point would have betrayed the moment. So I just smiled and nodded. So we got up and walked back to the apartment. We set out the breakfast stuff – muffins and croissants and juice – on the floor in the living area and we sat and read the papers. And for a couple of hours that was all we did. We just read and didn’t talk much.
And it was just two people who have acknowledged some random connection not feeling uncomfortable in the silence.
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