Free Turning Forty by Mike Gayle Page A

It scares me to think that Dad’s this concerned because my dad doesn’t tend to worry about anything. He pretty much takes everything in his stride. If the man who’d sooner stand and watch than get involved has felt the need to speak to me it can only mean that my life (from the outside at least) is looking a lot worse than I thought.
    I look over at the rook or whatever it is. It pecks the ground a few times before taking to the air. ‘Yes, tell her I’ve got a plan. Tell her everything’s in order.’
    My dad nods but I can see that he’s not convinced.
     
    For the next few days not a great deal happens. I eat, sleep, catch a cold and watch a lot of needlessly gory US police procedurals with my parents but without Ginny to think about, life has no focus. Just as I’m feeling at my lowest however I get some post forwarded by Lauren, and although most of it is useless junk mail there’s one that brightens my day immensely.
    ‘You look like you’ve won the lottery,’ says Mum, as she passes me in the hallway. ‘Good news?’
    ‘Great news. It’s a cheque for five hundred and eighty-six pounds. Apparently I overpaid on my tax last year and this is the amount plus interest.’
    My mum peers at the cheque. ‘You should spend it,’ she says, ‘before they tell you it was a mistake and try and take it back off you!’
    I hand her the cheque. ‘You take it and we’ll call it rent money.’
    ‘I’ll do no such thing!’ she says, affronted. ‘I don’t want your money, thank you very much.’ She shoves the cheque back in my hand. ‘If you want to make me happy, burn those tracksuit bottoms you’ve been living in these past few days, go into town, buy yourself some new clothes and smarten yourself up. You’re nearly forty, Matthew, and you need to start dressing like it!’

12
    Heading towards the architectural wonder that is Selfridges in the Bullring, admiring its bulging bug-like compound-eye exterior, I marvel once again how much the city I love has changed. All the landmarks I once used to get my bearings have been moved, revamped or bulldozed. The old rundown grade-two listed Moor Street Station has been renovated to look like the location for a cosy BBC Sunday night Agatha Christie adaptation, the Rotunda has been transformed from a tatty office block to a designer apartment building, and the old fruit and veg market down where Don Christie’s record shop used to be is now a huge space-age shopping centre. Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that people, like cities, are in need of an overhaul from time to time if they are going to keep pace with the modern age? Could a sartorial revamp be the first step in turning me from a tired rundown thirtysomething into a gleaming example of twenty-first-century manliness?
    Despite my mother’s input, clothes have in fact been on my mind for some time. Now that I am turning forty there are some items of clothing in my wardrobe that I will no longer be able to pull off. Take for example my T-shirt collection. I have jokey ones (e.g. a drawing of a huge thumb gesturing to the left of me with the words: Who’s this jerk? above it), I have designer ones with fashionable logos on the front that make me feel like a walking advert and I have a few cool ones with abstract images that used to look quite good underneath a suit jacket, not to mention the obligatory band T-shirts from my twenties that I haven’t the heart to throw away.
    There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these. In fact I’m sure that at least one of my brothers might leap at the chance to own a few of them. But this is the end of the road for me because one of the rules of turning forty is that the logoed T-shirt is the T-shirt of youth. It says: Look at me being needlessly casual, look at what the words and images on my clothing say about me. And while that might be fine if you’re twenty-one with a body as lithe as a snake’s, when you’re forty and daily fighting