Nine Lives

psychological factors was undermined somewhat by the ice that regularly formed on the inside of my bedroom window.

  Ruffling my hair she would say: ‘Sit by the fire. I’ll make you some soup.’

  Soup, with its poisonous levels of added salt and sugar, was indeed our great winter saviour, and I must have consumed gallons. But it did little in maintaining satisfactory health overall. My nose ran constantly and my ‘weak chest’ was a constant cause for concern. Though how a chest could be otherwise orientated, operating as it did in what amounted to a partially defrosted fridge was never adequately explained. I would have fared better, apparently, had I eaten my greens, which were more often than not over-boiled to the brink of disintegration. I could never fault my mother for effort in the kitchen, just preparation and results.

  At precisely six o’clock, like an actor awaiting his cue, my father returned home. His three decades of shift work were yet to begin, but his young life as a warehouse foreman was just as exacting. I remember the curious odour of work he carried in with him, which he would rid himself of by degrees as the evening unwound, leaving him almost clean by bedtime. What was harder to remove, I realised much later, was the stench of exploitation that no amount of union ballots could inoculate him against. ‘I work so others don’t have to,’ was how he described it in his more militant moments. But dissent never quite progressed into open rebellion. With the value of hindsight I realised how hard it must have been for him to pay me anything but the scantest attention. At the time, though, I was bitter and resentful that all he wanted to do in the evenings was watch television and fail to complete the day’s crossword. Most Saturdays he did overtime. Sundays he mostly slept between visits to the pub.

  So it could be argued I was too close to my mother, that the lack of a male role model with whom to bond influenced subsequent developments. But not everything in life has an explanation; and certainly not everything needs one. On a Saturday afternoon, where grey gloom prevailed without and frosty silence within, Dad grappled with his overtime, Mum with the weekend shopping. Alone and uninspired I found myself in my parents’ bedroom. In the chill before sunset their double bed bore me like a slab of rock on the shady side of an alpine mountain. When I coughed I sensed the warm cloud above me, but it was the coldness left within that truly terrified. Suddenly I saw my life stretching ahead like some unrelenting glacial sheet shrouded by a freezing fog. I stood up, coughing again, and wanting of purpose, opened my mother’s wardrobe.

  My parents were always saving and cutting back, both of them having quit smoking in their twenties. Mum liked to joke that she only bought a newspaper to have something to light the fire with. So I was not expecting such an array of clothing, especially when, to my knowledge, my parents seldom went out socially. So if not to wear outside, what purpose could this admirable collection serve?

  Intrigued, I reached for a coat with a flourish of grey fur around the neckline and slipped it innocently around my shoulders. Would things have turned out differently had I opened my father’s wardrobe instead? Of course - but not necessarily for the better. The fur trim brought an abrupt end to my coughing.

  A score of psychiatrists can proffer a dozen explanations as to why such behaviours become reinforced, transforming an innocent experiment into a psychosexual crossroads. They might all be wrong; they might all be right. What mattered was that my secret visits to the maternal wardrobe were right for me. And as long as your actions don’t hurt anyone else, is it really necessary to pathologise every aberration? But I couldn’t keep it a secret indefinitely, and of course it had to be him not her who caught me out.

  That my father did not always work overtime was a good thing, since it would have killed him first otherwise. On the next significant Saturday my parents had gone shopping together, leaving me alone in the house. Outside it was roasting, the sunshine searing the crop dust blowing in from the harvest. My experiments in dressing up were becoming both bolder and more frequent. I had now taken to posing in front of the mirror and even dancing on occasion. However, I had not transformed myself too far this time when I heard a sound coming from the hallway. Pensively I listened and again heard a distinct ‘click’. Someone was home. Quickly closing the wardrobe doors I tip-toed back towards the bedroom door, all the while dreading the sound of heavy feet on the stairs.

  The pumping of blood thundered in my ears, preparing me for flight. My only hope was a quick dash across the landing to my own room, and the clothes I had shed so excitedly not five minutes earlier.

  Drawing in a deep breath I took a preliminary peek down the stairway and was relieved to see it empty. But neither did I feel alone. To run was to advertise my guilt. My only ally, then, was bravado, for surely the stifling heat was enough to explain a young boy’s nakedness. With eyes staring fixedly ahead I strolled across the landing to the sanctuary of my own room. But that conviction of company would not leave me.

  When nervously I explored the ground floor two minutes later, I found myself once more alone. But that an intruder had invaded my secret world I was totally convinced of. I sniffed the air for the scent of his aftershave, and though I found it, could not be sure it had not been there from earlier.

  Visits to my mother’s wardrobe ceased immediately, but not because of trepidation or disgrace. Quite the contrary: I had resolved to start my own collection.

  My teenage years were dominated by a widening gap between father and son. (It isn’t difficult to imagine aged neo-Freudians nodding sagely at this point.) When we did talk it was technically shouting. More evidence of the shame my father held for his only son, I reasoned. Indeed, I felt his every glare and sniff was some veiled snipe at my questionable manhood. As if he had anything to boast about in that respect. With his double shifts and bad back, the creaking of the bed springs had long ceased on Friday nights.

  There was nothing otherwise remarkable about my adolescence. I got spots, developed an impressive tolerance for loud music and made the usual discovery that you don’t have to wait for an erotic dream to indulge the libido. Not being academically orientated, as the careers advisor put it, I left school at sixteen and got a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, enabling me to at least contribute to my upkeep.

  By seventeen I had my first girlfriend and waited for the look of surprise that it wasn’t another boy. Instead the surprise was mine, for I continued to indulge my ‘inclination’ even after my virginity was lost. I doubt my girlfriend back then would have been shocked had she known; her overindulgence in recreational drugs meant that most things went straight over her head, including the time of day. It thus remained my harmless secret, albeit one that weighed increasingly on my late night thoughts. What did it actually mean? Was it normal? Who was ‘I’ because of it? Questions I might well have asked of myself at that age anyway, but made all the more crucial given my father’s perceived condemnation. What I needed, I decided, were kindred spirits. Not to assuage any negative feelings, you understand, but simply to hear another red-blooded man my age say: ‘Yer, I do that too. Great, isn’t it?’

  That his name was Rupert would have been enough to set those same neo-Freudians nudging and winking with gusto. He was a clerk in the supermarket’s office whom I engaged in idle chat at the bus stop after work one evening. We quickly forged a friendship that was cemented at the pub along with our respective girlfriends and a love of lager. But it wasn’t Rupert that I was to confess to, but his shy and reticent friend, Mark. Because I perceived instantly that Mark was shy and reticent about something particularly sensitive.

  The strength of our enduring friendship is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I was best man at both his weddings and that he named his first child after me. It was Mark who took me to a meeting of the kindred spirits I sought, Mark who dismissed my darkest fears that only gay men could enjoy dressing up female, Mark who whispered with beery breath late one Saturday night: ‘Don’t worry. I do that too. Great, isn’t it?’

  I finally felt good about what I saw in
the mirror all, rather than just some of the time. And, more significantly, I felt warm inside. Suddenly it was my surroundings not my reflection that felt alien, the familiar landmarks on my life map that seemed anomalous and odd. The nest just wasn’t big enough anymore, but my wings were.

  ‘What do you mean, too soon?’ I asked, a forkful of spaghetti dangling before me.

  Mum was bent over the sink, pretending to wash soup suds down the plug hole. I was nineteen by then; taller than him, heavier than her.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Pleased?’ My father’s baritone voice rattled through the stacked crockery on the draining board. ‘Pleased!’

  ‘Barrie…’

  ‘Please, Collette. Let me handle this.’

  Handle what? I wondered. I was just a young man leaving home. It was a rite of passage not an escape attempt. And, yes, I genuinely thought the old man would be pleased. The only time we ever spoke nowadays was to ridicule and criticise each another. Mum looked constantly on edge and Dad as if he were on the verge of leaping to his feet to take a swing at me. I couldn’t believe he was obstructing my departure. Was it for the sake of his wife, because I