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

But I knew they would come out – because not to come out would be to admit defeat. That never happened in our games.

Quickly, I unlocked their door, dropped the key, dashed out through the patio doors and took my position with Scott in the smaller courtyard outside my parents’ bedroom, where I put together my home-made Scarecrow Man with the broom and my North Face jacket.

Meanwhile, inside the house, I could hear my sister and my mum come out of the bathroom and quickly dart into my parents’ bedroom, where they were surprised to see my dad.

Remember, I was hiding in the courtyard directly outside my mum and dad’s bedroom.

‘Where is he?’ asked my mum.

‘He’s not in here,’ answered my dad, who is the master of deception and the king of hide-and-seek in our family, and lies through his teeth in these situations. Last Christmas – yes, last Christmas, when he was seventy-six – he fell behind the washer and the dryer during a game. Also, when I was home on a break from filming Titans for CBS, and I was visiting Clare and Turner in Milwaukee, I was playing hide-and-seek outside with them and their friends. My dad encouraged me to climb onto their low-hanging garage roof and stay flat and still. The kids, he said, would never find me. He was right. The kids eventually gave up and went inside to bed – and my dad had to come out and help get me down.

Needless to say, my sister and my mum were sceptical of my dad.

‘Get up, so we can check,’ Carole insisted. ‘You’re in on this with them.’

They then made my dad stand in front of them while they whipped open the closet doors, pulled back the duvet and checked underneath the bed for me. Once they’d decided I was not in the room, they figured there was a good chance I’d be in the other bedroom. The two of them then proceeded to march my dad into the next room, where they forced him to carry out a similar search.

I was, of course, watching all of this from outside in the dark courtyard, waiting for as long as it would take until my mum and Carole would give up and get into their beds. My dad was our inside man to ensure that Scarecrow Man could exact his wrath as soon as they went to bed.3

But things did not go according to my best-laid plans. First of all, I forgot that the jacket I’d grabbed had a fluorescent tag on the zipper, and, second of all, I completely underestimated my opponents.

Suddenly, I glanced into one bedroom and then the other – and discovered they were both empty. No dad, no mum and no sister. Shit. I sent Scott around to the back of the house while I ran to the front. He met up with me back in the courtyard.

‘All the doors are locked.’

Through the bedroom window, I could see the three of them in the hallway, laughing – including my dad, the traitor. Later, my mum told me she’d spotted the glowing tag on my jacket through the window.

Oh, well played. Well, played. But not well enough. I darted to the other side of the house and cut off the power. First the pool lights went out, then the outside lights, and then all the electricity inside the house. Everything went dark.

‘You bastard!’ Carole yelled.

The only way inside, as far as I could figure at that point in the siege, was to crawl across the dogs’ courtyard in the hope that my mum and Carole had forgotten to lock the sliding door that opens onto the main hallway that runs the length of the ‘I’. I took off my white T-shirt so I wouldn’t have any reflection from the moon. I stretched out flat on the ground and inched my way across the courtyard like I was in a James Bond movie, or maybe a taller Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, or maybe just John Barrowman, entertainer and nutcase.4

I could see my mum and Carole standing in the dark hall – giggling, yet scared enough that they were still holding my dad in front of them as if he were a shield.

I almost made it to the sliding door. I was so close, but Carole spotted me and immediately leapt across the hall and locked the sliding door. I heard my mum laughing and saying, ‘This is like that Bruce Willis movie where the family is taken hostage.’

‘By a couple of clowns,’ my dad chuckled.

Ten minutes later, I found my way into the house – how, I will never reveal, because this game may not be over. I dropped down onto the bathroom floor, and crawled towards Carole and my mum, who had climbed into the whirlpool bathtub to limit their exposure on three sides, in a vain attempt to stop me from sneaking up behind them. When I did finally leap out at them, even though they had to know I’d been coming – stealth is not my middle name5 – they still screamed like maniacs and pounced on me.

When we finally turned the power back on, and settled into our respective bedrooms,6 I had gravel burn on my chest from crawling across the courtyard, dirt and grime on my shorts and my knees, and scratches on my hands from climbing through a window, but I won – and that’s all that counts.

Scare the hell out of sister and mum. Check.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I KNOW HIM SO WELL’

★

‘If I had a hammer …’

Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, ‘If I Had a Hammer’

Seven things I’ve learned from Scott

1 How to cook fish sticks (in the event I’m a survivor of the apocalypse and that’s all there is to eat).

2 How to rewire a phone (especially one chewed through by a certain dog when a certain partner was not paying attention to that certain dog’s