Free Turning Thirty by Mike Gayle Page A

enough.’

sixteen

To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
Home

    Hi Elaine
    Sorry I’ve taken so long to e-mail you. Everything is fine here. Flight was fine. Mum and Dad have been asking about you a lot. I’ve told them we’ve split up and though they were disappointed they seem to be fine about it. Also – it’s okay about the T-shirt. I have a confession too – I stole some of your underwear. It’s draped over the radiator in my bedroom as I speak. (I lie.) What I actually did take was a tape of music I made you – the one you entitled
Music For Losers
, vol. II. I don’t know why I took it. I suppose I just wanted a souvenir of us.
    I’ll talk more soon.

    love Matt.

    PS For the record, you loon, all of the following world-famous people are from Birmingham:
    1) John Taylor from Duran Duran (the only one from the band anyone can remember who wasn’t Simon Le Bon).
    2) Joan Armatrading (female singer/songwriter. Had a hit in 1976 with ‘Love and Affection’).
    3) Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin (technically he’s from Stourbridge, just outside Birmingham, but that’s near enough).
    4) Kenny Baker – the guy who played R2D2 in
Star Wars
.
    5) Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath.
    6) At a push I’d include ‘cod reggae’ band UB40 but I prefer to keep that kind of regional shame to myself.

seventeen
    Finding myself at a loose end the day after meeting up with Gershwin, I decided to do something about my clothing situation. The majority of my belongings had been shipped back to England and wouldn’t arrive for several weeks. Also the clothes I’d brought with me were dirty because I’d suffered a mental block about using the laundry room in the basement of our apartment in New York, and the idea of bringing a load of washing home for my mum to do seemed strangely comforting.
    As I was sorting out the few clean items of clothing I had that morning, it had occurred to me that perhaps my wardrobe was in need of modernisation. Currently my division-one attire (as opposed to division-two attire: Frankie Says No to War T-shirts, jeans that no longer fitted me and things to wear while decorating) consisted of the usual shirts, trousers, T-shirts and jumpers, and the one thing they had in common was that they were all dark blue or black. This was part of the problem I had been trying to explain to Gershwin about my increasing inflexibility. My liking for such clothing had developed in my twenties as a genuine affection for the darker end of the colour spectrum but had gradually metamorphosed into a pathological habit I couldn’t break. Just before Christmas, Elaine and I were shopping on the Upper West Side when she tried to persuade me to buy a pair of light grey trousers she had seen in a Banana Republic window. They weren’t hideous. They weren’t too trendy for a guy like me. There was nothing wrong with them at all. But I couldn’t even bring myself to go into the shop, let alone try on the trousers. It wasn’t my fault. I was built this way.
    It was as if from the day I turned nineteen I’d been filling in a mammoth opinion survey on life and sometime after my twenty-seventh birthday the results came in. Suddenly everything fell into place and life wasn’t so complicated any more. Finally I understood what I liked and didn’t like and I stuck by it rigidly. Favourite Indian meal: Chicken Tikka Masala. Favourite TV programmes: news, sci-fi stuff, sitcoms and reruns of anything I used to watch in the seventies and eighties. Favourite music: female singer-songwriter stuff, seventies and eighties stuff and anything I listened to when I was a student. I’d had exactly the same haircut for the last six years (short all over) and I had three pairs of exactly the same jeans because I was scared that at some point in the future Levi’s might stop making them. I knew myself, I knew