So Me (24 page)

Whenever people I knew had a death in the family I was always faintly embarrassed and gave them a wide berth, assuming that they would want to be left alone. In a small town in Ireland that isn’t an option. Almost as soon as we
got back from the nursing home the doorbell started to ring. Neighbours who had heard the news came to pay their respects. They brought cakes, they brought bottles of whiskey, but mostly they brought their memories of my father. Far from being intrusive or insensitive, as I thought such visits would be, they were wonderfully comforting. We realised that all we wanted to do was talk about the man who had left the room. Nearly every visit ended up with us all laughing at something my father had done or one of his stories being retold. That sense of community and support brought me a whole new respect and affection for Ireland. All the things that I had thought were there to hold me back I now found were there to hold me up.

The funeral was perfect. A hot sunny day in May and a church full of people from all over the country. I knew my father was well liked, but to see the people all standing in rows with their heads bowed made it so real. Afterwards we stood and people walked by, pausing to shake our hands. ‘Sorry for your loss’, ‘Sorry for your loss’. The words start to lose all meaning and yet they meant so much. All the rituals of death came together and made perfect sense. Of course not everything was perfect. The choir sang one hymn to the wrong tune – my mother quite liked that because it gave her something to criticise – and then the editor of the local paper asked me if I would consider doing an interview just as the hearse drove off taking my father to the crematorium. That took my breath away.

Back at the house we had the happiest, biggest party I can ever remember having there. I topped up glasses and chatted to people I hadn’t seen for years, and all the talk was of my father. A small army of ladies fell easily into
separate troops of buttering and slicing and then later washing and drying.

After everyone was gone it was just Rhoda, Paula and Graham. I’m sure my father left many legacies, but the one that means most to me is how much closer I’ve become to my mother and sister. We had never been distant, but somehow sharing that time of raw grief helped us open ourselves up and see to the very core of each other.

Later that same week I stood on the stage at the Grosvenor House and held a BAFTA. I held it up and, looking into the camera, thought about my mother sitting in her bungalow watching the television.

‘I’d like to dedicate this to Billy Walker,’ I said.

13

Housekeeping

S
COTT AND I FINALLY SPLIT
up. I think my father’s death made me realise that life is too short to waste time in a situation that is making you unhappy.

Trying to describe why a relationship fails is in itself doomed to failure. Oh, sometimes a used condom found under the sofa might do it, or an argument that ends up with pieces of furniture in the street could help finish one off, but for the most part it is an endless accumulation of little things. The bold facts were that Scott and I were madly in love at the beginning and then I was too busy for him, but this must have happened to other couples who have survived such things. There is no denying that the fact that I was busy on television did nothing to help. I hate to describe myself as a celebrity, but as far as Scott was concerned I was one, and going out with a celebrity was hell. The moment you leave your front door with your famous friend it ceases to be about you, and the awful truth is that it isn’t anything to do with self-esteem or paranoia – it actually isn’t about you.

Scott was always cast as bad cop whenever we went out for a drink or a meal. The one who got rid of the person who was chatting to me while I smiled and nodded. Usually I was pleased, but sometimes Scott did his job with such
zeal that even I was a little embarrassed. Who could blame him? I lost count of the number of times people just started speaking to me without saying excuse me and stood with their back to Scott. If they did speak to him it was usually because they wanted to speak to me. Again, he wasn’t being oversensitive – that was what was happening.

Now when I date people it is funny to see how quickly they become disenchanted with what at first must have been the main attraction – going out with someone off the telly. Somehow they think that some of the attention will rub off on them, but unless you can get your tits out at premieres it really doesn’t.

What was doubly hard on Scott was that when he met me I wasn’t well known at all. The fame thing happened very quickly, and even I found it hard to deal with, but at least it was happening to me.

I suppose that was why I hated the counselling so much, because it was very hard to defend myself; but also I just kept asking myself, why would he want to stay in a relationship that was making him so unhappy? Surely he would leave me?

Scott had finally been granted his residency and was given his passport back. The first thing he wanted to do was go back to visit his family. This was fine by me. I had bought a house, but I was having the bathrooms redone so I was renting a flat in Soho. No Scott plus apartment slap in the heart of London’s gay village equalled big fun as far as I was concerned. By then, I really didn’t care any more. This sounds harsh, but the relationship had gone so wrong that I didn’t have it in me to be nice. Nor could I be sensitive to his needs. How Scott continued to put up with me is a mystery.

When he got back and started making noises about more counselling, I told him that I didn’t want to go back to the same one. He agreed that she’d been useless and he began to search for someone better. Now, I don’t quite know how I got the wrong end of the stick, but I thought when he came up with the name of some new counsellor that we were just going to go for one big last hurrah session where we would finally split up but in a controlled environment. I practically skipped to the man’s door. When he asked me how I saw the relationship, I began with a breezy, ‘Well, it’s over.’ I could tell at once from the expression on Scott’s face that in fact that wasn’t what he’d been expecting to hear. Even the counsellor looked slightly surprised. However, it was done. I had said it and there was no going back. Scott and Graham were no more.

I am still genuinely fond of Scott, and I know that at one time I was deeply in love with him, but in the last couple of months it had been hell. The day he moved out was very awkward and uncomfortable. He handed me the keys and headed off to his new flat about half a mile away. I shut the door, and for the first time in five and a half years felt truly alone. I knew that in time I would miss him, but in that moment it was like a great weight being lifted.

I had no intention of dating anyone very soon, but happily the gay world provides for all sorts of loose definitions of what exactly dating might be.

Most Wednesday nights a few of the gay men who worked on the show and I would end up at the White Swan for what is called ‘Amateur strip night’. Like most things, this sounds a lot sexier than it actually is. Before I went I always imagined it as full of hunky regular guys stripping in front
of other people because it turned them on or because . . . well, I’d never thought too long about why they would do it. In fact, nobody thinks too long about why they do it, which is the problem. Some of them think they might have a chance as a professional stripper – they’re wrong: think of the first round of
Pop Idol
auditions without pants – but the vast majority do it because they are drunk beyond reason or shame and think that the £10 you get for entering will do nicely for a few more drinks and the night bus home.

A lot of the people who go are regulars, and we normally ended up standing at the same place in the bar and having a drunken laugh at the expense of the poor unfortunates on stage. There was one guy I thought was very cute who was often there, and I kept chatting to him. One night I guess we had both had one drink too many and started kissing. He ended up coming back to my house. We had a few more drinks and finally stumbled up the stairs to the bedroom and the bliss that was sure to follow.

I woke up and blinked at the world like an albino piglet with an eye disease. I seemed to be alone. I looked around the house, but sure enough the man was gone. In the kitchen, as I stood staring at the kettle trying to remember how it worked, I found a note.

‘Dear Graham, thanks for last night. I’ve never had someone fall asleep on me before. Call me.’

The shame of it all. I can’t pretend this was the first or indeed last time that this has happened to me. Drink has a way of making me take some quite snap and final decisions. ‘I want to fuck him, no, wait, I’d prefer to pass out.’ I felt so sorry for this poor man lying there with me, head rolled back and drool trickling on to the pillow, and yet there was
the small ‘call me’ at the end of the note. Embarrassed and frustrated because I hadn’t got what I had wanted, I phoned him. He was charming and understanding. We arranged to meet in a club on the Sunday night.

When I saw him again I was fairly sober and pleased to see that he was as cute as I’d thought he was when I was out of my mind. We were chatting, but he kept looking at his watch.

‘Anything wrong?’ I asked.

‘No, sorry. It’s just that at midnight it’ll be my birthday.’

‘Really! How old will you be?’

Now, I hadn’t really thought very much about his age. I’d assumed he was late twenties, early thirties. He finished his Smirnoff ice.

‘Twenty.’

It was as if scales fell from my eyes. Of course he was! How could I have been so blind? I was looking into the face of a child.
Going
to be twenty? Only drink had stopped me from having sex with an actual teenager! Later, drink also meant that I did have sex with an actual twenty-year-old.

Since Scott I have found myself with many inappropriate sleeping partners – guys who I know are too good-looking or young for me, but then again it’s not as if I have pursued them. I suppose the problem is that a mature, sensible man would never be impressed enough to sleep with someone just because they were on TV.

Another reason I think I ended up having sex with younger, cuter guys is because I was feeling much more confident about my body than ever before. Around the end of series two I was finding it quite hard to look at myself on screen. If I hadn’t been working on television I probably
would have been happy enough. I was in my late thirties and in a stable relationship, the perfect time to let yourself go, but TV is the cruellest mirror on earth. At home you can tuck your shirt in just so, check yourself in the bathroom from a certain angle and leave the house thinking that that is how you look all day. The camera catches you from every angle – the folds of flesh under your ears, the pouches of flab draping over your waistband, the weird lumps of fat sticking out of the back of your suit jacket. It is completely unforgiving. I decided to do something about it.

I developed my own fairly eccentric diet plan where I could only eat things that were green or white. To begin with this meant a fairly strict regime of fish with peas, spinach or a little rice. Over time I included chicken without skin and potatoes without butter. The clever thing about my diet was that you could drink as much as you liked, but only things you could see through. So no more lager or red wine, but endless white wine, vodka, gin and champagne. As unscientific as this was, it began to work.

In addition to thinking about what I ate, I also began my hate/hate relationship with the gym. I began working out in late 1999, and I still find it just as hard to make myself go now. Although I feel great afterwards, there is something so monumentally futile about working out in itself. You run, but you are going nowhere. You lift heavy things, but everything ends up where it started. You work out, but you still end up as old and fat as the people who didn’t bother. I’m by no means skinny, but as I climb fifty flights of imaginary stairs or run for three miles towards a CNN newsreader or some MTV video, I try to imagine what sort of life I would have to lead to maintain my weight without going to the
gym: tiny salads and not a drink in sight. In the end it makes more sense for me to be miserable for an hour three or four times a week than to be deeply unhappy all the time. It has to be said that occasionally the alternative of eating anything I want and spending my savings on rent boys seems very tempting indeed.

After Scott left, I started going back to Ireland more and more. If I hadn’t spent enough time with my father, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with my mother. Every time I said I was coming home, my mother would threaten that we’d spread my father’s ashes. This was a task that none of us wanted to do and, what’s more, we had no idea where to do it. There was the beach at Dunworley where we had spent our summers, but we all agreed that dumping your father into the ocean was more like throwing him out than spreading him. We needed land, and, while the garden was tempting, it did seem a bit lazy. It was decided that we would drive up to the small village in Wicklow where he grew up, and once we got there we would find a nice spot.

My sister drove the car, and just like the day of my father’s funeral the weather was glorious. Carnew is a funny little place. The wide main street makes you think that once upon a time there were great plans for it but in the end nothing happened. A few shops and pubs line the grand thoroughfare, and then suddenly on one side of the street it all stops for a high wall. Carnew Castle. Across the road there is the church where my grandparents are buried, then the old school where my father went, and around the corner the house he was raised in. It seemed right to bring him home.

My mother had remembered a field that Dad had often talked about ploughing with horses when he was a boy. It
is up a long hill out of the village and looks out over half the county. It sounded perfect, and we could all imagine my father spending eternity there. Now we just had to find it.

We found the road it was on fairly easily, but the actual field was slightly trickier. Presumably boundaries had changed over the years, so the exact spot where my father had followed the horses up and down was really just guesswork. Paula and I looked to Mum for a decision. After two or three runs up and down the hill, she convinced herself about the spot.