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

my finger on what it was and then in a quiet yell try to convince Scott that this could not continue, I failed miserably.

Over the years, friends and family have posited their own views of the tarp and what it might represent: Scott’s need to keep the bathroom unfinished as a way of holding on to some part of himself, and the house he can control; my need to have the bathroom finished and not to be showering in a fucking building site.5

So, one of the reasons I was running so late that morning was because the blue tarp was torn, and I had to wash one-handed while holding up the tarp with my other hand. Scott had already left to take care of a problem at a construction site.6 I was midway through my ablutions when I heard a stray cat mewling outside the bedroom window.

I recognized the cat’s crying because Scott and I sleep with our window open and I can sometimes hear this cat mewing7 during the night. The bedrooms in our London flat are on the ground floor, so I grabbed a towel, went upstairs to the kitchen, filled a dish with milk, came back down, put it out on the ledge, and then I carried on with my morning routine. An hour later, the cat was perched on the sill, looking longingly inside. It had also started to rain.

I couldn’t leave the poor thing outside in the cold, could I?

I went out into the garden, tempted him with some chicken, and brought him inside. Our dogs at that time, Lewis, Tiger and Penny, were naturally not happy. The cat’s impression of the dogs was equally disdainful, and by now, Sean, my driver, keys in hand, was pacing in the hallway, reminding me how late we were going to be.

What to do? What to do?

I found an old blanket, spread it on the bed, opened the window a bit more for fresh air, and locked the cat in our bedroom. I figured he’d be safe from the dogs until Scott came home. What I didn’t know was that Scott would not return for the entire day.

Scott knew something was wrong as soon as he opened the front door. His first clue? The three dogs were apoplectic – especially Tiger, who was virtually folded in a knot against the bedroom door, thumping his behind against it. The second clue was the stench. Think about it. You’re a scared cat and you’ve been locked in a strange room for well over six hours with three very angry dogs barking and tearing at the door trying to get at you. You’d wet yourself too. More than once, I bet.

To this day, the memory of the moment when he unlocked the bedroom door and confronted the chaos in the room can start Scott shaking all over again. Thank God I’d hidden his sledgehammer.

But that wasn’t the worst part of the situation.

The worst part was that in my rush to leave the house, I’d forgotten to tell Scott anything about a rescued cat locked inside our bedroom. At some point in the day, the cat had actually squeezed itself out through the open window and fled for its life. When Scott unlocked the bedroom door, he and the dogs burst into a completely empty but totally destroyed bedroom, with initially no clue as to what had caused it.

Not only were the duvet and the pillows soaked in cat pee, but also the cat had clearly been so terrified that he’d torn at sections of the sheet and pissed through to the mattress. Books and clocks had been knocked off our bedside tables and the family pictures we have on our bedroom’s mantel were smashed on the floor. There were even scratch marks gouged into the plaster above the bed.8 It was as if the cat had circled the room at 90 miles an hour, banking the walls at every turn, while spraying shit out of its arse like exhaust fumes.

There are obviously a few lessons to be drawn from this story, not the least of which is that I am not Noah and our house is not the Ark, and animals should only be brought home under mutual agreement. The other, and more important, one is that in Scott and my relationship, sometimes our freedom and independence can get in the way of clear communication between us. Scott and I are used to a freedom of movement and a level of personal and financial independence that can sometimes result in minor amnesia about our responsibilities to each other as a couple.

We live in a world where there is a kind of accepted narrative for how non-gay couples should live and behave. Although that narrative may be full of stereotypes and clichés – notions like the wife is in charge of the house and children; the husband, the finances and the lawn – there’s a narrative nonetheless, and it’s one full of anecdotes and advice for guidance and support for straight couples. Women may be from Venus and men from Mars, but at least the heterosexual couple’s solar system has books and articles and talk shows and lots and lots of country songs to describe it.

They also have mums, and aunties, and grans, who have no qualms about taking a married son or daughter aside and giving them a verbal slap upside the head, telling them to shape up. For the families of many gay couples, they may be too busy coming to terms with the issue of their child being homosexual to be offering advice about whether or not their son (or his partner) is pulling his weight in the relationship. Plus, since many parents of gay men are themselves not gay, there’s a real fear of the unknown that makes these kinds of conversations even more difficult.

In my family, we’ve been lucky that from the beginning of my relationship with Scott, we have been as visible in our family’s life