I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

house. Scott and I only bought it in the autumn of 2008, and although we love it, we do have plans to renovate in the future and add features that will make it even more our own. Until then, many of the quirks of the house remain. Like the fact that the bathroom can be locked from the inside and from the outside.

I locked the door. Check.

My dad and Scott were my fellow conspirators in this midnight game to terrify my sister and my mother. Insert Dick Dastardly laughter here. While I locked the bathroom door, my allies moved silently into position. Scott headed to the sliding doors at the rear of the house with the broom, a flashlight and my black hooded North Face ski jacket. My dad was a decoy in this plan, so he ducked into the bedroom that has become my parents’ room whenever they visit, and he quickly got his pyjamas on. He found his book and sat on top of the bed, looking as if he’d been reading for hours.

Positions. Check.

The five of us had just watched the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a silly, laugh-out-loud comedy in which Kevin James plays a slightly hopeless mall cop who tries to foil a gang of crooks from robbing the mall. Watching the film had made us all a bit squirrelly. Not that my family needed an excuse.1 Add to this collective state of mind that we are a very competitive family, we love to play games, and no one likes to lose. The words ‘surrender’ or ‘I give up’ rarely feature in my family’s vocabulary.

Our house in Sully is laid out a bit like an ‘I’, with two courtyards on either side of the main artery of the house, the entrance and a few other rooms along the top, and the widest living space running across the bottom, facing the lawn, the pool and the sea. The three bedrooms are on the side of the house with the smaller, more closed-in courtyard, and the bigger of the two courtyards has become the dogs’ area, because it’s the safe space that Jack, Charlie and Harris have access to via their doggy door in the laundry room when no one is home.

I’ve always loved it when my family can come and visit me, and now that I have a house and so much space to share, over the past year it’s been a busy abode. During the spring and summer of 2009, for about three-plus months, my parents lived with me. The main reason for their extended visit was so they could be part of my concert tour that spring, but they also decided that because they’re both in their later seventies, the trip across the Atlantic was only going to get more difficult in the coming years. They might as well travel while they still can. I seconded that.

Scott and I have always enjoyed my family’s visits and we never feel as if we have company when any of them are staying with us. In fact, sometimes we can forget we have company – or, should I say, for a few hours the company can occasionally think that we’ve forgotten about them.

A recent case in point: when Carole visits, she usually stays in the guest room directly next to our master suite. One night, she was startled awake by some very aggressive moaning, loud sighing and what sounded to her like chests being beaten and wild animals being skinned alive in our room. I was making the noises: I admit it. Of course, you can imagine what Carole was thinking …

She proceeded to scramble for her Bose headphones and switched on the noise reduction. She claimed it didn’t help. She cranked up the tunes on her iPod. The clamour persisted for about twenty-five minutes. Early the next morning, when our paths crossed in the hallway, she gave me this weird, eye-crinkling look.

I didn’t think anything of it. I was completely unaware of her annoyance.

‘I had the worst heartburn I have ever had last night,’ I told her over my shoulder, continuing on my way to the kitchen. ‘I seriously thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I was dying. Scott thought I was dying. At one point, I even had Scott punch my chest ’cause I thought my heart was stopping.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ she said, ‘I am so glad to hear you say that. I thought you’d forgotten I was next door and that racket was you two having rowdy sex.’

‘What do you mean, “thank God”?!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re okay with the idea that I might have been dying – just as long as I wasn’t having loud sex?’

‘Well … yeah,’ she said.

Luckily, that experience hasn’t put her off staying with us in Wales – nor the rest of my family. And it’s easy to see why. Along with more space in our Sully house than our London maisonette, there’s easy access to golf courses and shops, so my mum and dad, especially, have been visiting more often and staying longer. They are capable of entertaining themselves when I’m off working in London, and as long as my mum has her glass of sherry at 5 p.m. and my dad has his single malt, they are quite content to sit by the sea and enjoy my hospitality.2

They still have a good sense of humour, they still know how to have fun, and each of them takes on a couple of chores around the house when they’re here. As long as my dad was around, garbage never lingered and the dogs’ poo never sat for too long in the courtyard, which was a very good thing given my plan that Saturday night.

No shite in the courtyard. Check.

As soon as my mum and Carole tried in vain to get out of the bathroom, I knew and they knew that a game was in play.

‘The buggers have locked us in here,’ said my mum.

‘They’ll be hiding somewhere,’