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

3 That saying too much is usually better than saying too little.

4 That you could have a very serious ailment and not even know you have a very serious ailment and your highly trained doctor may not even know you have a very serious ailment, but whining and worrying about this very serious (and non-existent) ailment can make you feel much better.

5 That a new furnace can be a beautiful thing (it’s not a classic Mercedes, but I do like to be warm in winter).

6 That two men are always better than one (I mean as partners … um, as a couple … oh, never mind, just read on).

7 That I couldn’t live without him.

In the mid thirties, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, hung out in what is now our guest bedroom in London. At that time, Thomas was in his twenties and in the infancy of his career. If you know anything of his reputation, you’ll know it’s likely Thomas spent more time in the nearby pubs than he spent penning poems in our front room, but inebriated or not, Scott and I have been told that Thomas’s blithe spirit on occasion returns to the house.

Generally, my family is quite accommodating to spirits, ghosties, ghoulies and any beings hanging out from the other side. My gran, Murn, would regularly have a ‘wee blether’ with her husband, Andy, after he died. In fact, one night, when I was having a wee coorie1 with her on the couch, she suddenly whipped her head to the side and told my papa not to interrupt the ‘wean’; she’d be with him in a minute. So the fact that Dylan Thomas’s spirit has a kip in our front room has never really bothered me.

My mettle was tested, though, one night not too long ago, when I heard this strange, supernatural noise in our bedroom. At first, it didn’t really register that it was not a normal sound, but after ten minutes or so, the darkness got the better of my imagination and I roused myself from my sleep to listen more carefully.

The dogs were clearly not bothered by it: all three remained prone at the foot of the bed. I noted that somewhere under the fourteen pillows and the large mound of duvet, Scott slept. The noise seemed to emanate from behind the wall and it had a vaguely animalistic tone to it – as if a cat was in the wall, clawing to get out. You may smile at the reach of my comparison, but I want you to know, readers, that a cat stuck in the wall is a distinct possibility in the Barrowman–Gill home.

It’s no secret that I love animals and as anyone close to me will tell you, I’m a sucker for a stray. One morning, I was running late for my return trip to Cardiff to begin filming the third series of Torchwood. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was late.2 In our flat in London, until only recently, Scott and I have been living with what can only be described as a ‘porcelain disaster’. When we first bought the flat together, we (and when I say ‘we’, I mean Scott) immediately wielded his sledgehammer – no, this is not a metaphor – and took out a number of walls. Some I wanted brought down, others not so much. I have to tell you that over the years, this is the first thing Scott usually does when we move into a new home. He demolishes something.

Shortly before Scott and I met, I bought my first flat, in Bow, east London. One night, when our relationship was in its infancy, I returned from matinee and evening performances of Sunset Boulevard to find Scott had knocked down a wall dividing the living room from the entryway – and he almost took out our fledgling relationship in the process. I liked that wall. I had no intention of renovating. Plus, here was a grand building that used to be the Bryant and May match factory, a building whose walls had withstood more than a century of strife – witnessed the London Matchgirls Strike of 1888, and likely even come close to burning down once or twice – until Scott Gill came along with his bloody great hammer.

By the time I really noticed the sledgehammering pattern, Scott had knocked down as many walls as we had cars or dogs or nieces and nephews, and I already loved him madly, so it was too late to do anything about this strange, destructive side to his nature. The problem is not so much that he knocks the wall down; it’s more that he does not always repair the hole in a reasonable time frame.

The worst example of this tendency was the bathroom in our flat in London. We moved in. Sledgehammer out. Walls came down in biblical proportion. In Scott’s defence, none of them were ever weight-bearing and most of them were redesigned eventually and their holes filled3 – except for our en-suite bathroom. It remained stripped to its timbers, bare to its bones, as unfettered as the day Scott went charging in there. In order for us to use the shower, we had to drape the walls with blue construction tarpaulins. Over the years,4 when the blue tarp got torn, or the strange creatures growing on it started to apply for NICE or FDA approval, Scott would enclose the entire space with new blue tarpaulin walls.

The bathroom became a battle between his stubbornness and my, okay, stubbornness – a game of chicken between two grown men. Who would break first and demand tile? Who would give in and apply the grout?

I realize you may be thinking that this blue-tarped bathroom was actually a symbol of something deeper than this, perhaps something still under construction in our relationship, maybe even something that has to do with marking territory when everything else is shared. I would agree; however, every time I’d try to put