I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ in another way: girls. We both had girlfriends from an early age, but I was the first to get into sexual relationships.

      There is a deep underlying rivalry between us but it is softened and reduced by the great love we have for one another, which means that we genuinely both want only good things to happen for the other. In other words, neither of us wants to do well at the other’s expense, but we still want to do as well as each other. It was characterized in my early relationships with girls: whenever I went out with a girl I always had to ask her if she fancied my brother. I needed to know. We were, after all, alike to look at, so I felt that if she wanted me she probably also wanted him. I needed reassurance that it was something individual about me that she found attractive. Of course, in those early schoolboy – schoolgirl relationships that are over after a couple of days, looks are probably the most vital ingredient, and so it often happened that girlfriends were passed between us: I stole his girlfriends and he stole mine.

      Having a twin who looks like you is not as hard to cope with as many people might think: and that’s because to us, and to those who are close to us, we don’t look alike at all. We are the same height now, six feet two inches, but Matt is more heavily built than me; he weighs a stone more than I do; he has a rounder face than mine: he looks more like our father and I look more like our mother.

      Occasionally, looking at photographs, I realize how alike we are, but the rest of the time I see the differences rather than the similarities. I have always believed he is better looking than I am. At school I was the one with the skinny legs, and I was convinced girls would fancy him more than me.

      Until we were twelve there was an easy way to tell us apart: I was the one with the sticking-out ears. I had serious jugs; I made Prince Charles look streamlined. I always had my hair long to cover my ears until eventually I had an operation to pin them back. At one school sports day I remember an older girl shouting out to me ‘Cheers, big ears’, which upset me so much that I ran off the track and all the way home. It was then that Mum agreed to fix up the operation privately, because I was so self-conscious about them, but in the nick of time we received an NHS appointment from the local hospital. They had to take cartilage out of my left ear to put in my right, which was the more prominent. Afterwards my ears were badly bruised and a lovely colour combination of yellow, mauve, brown and black for a few weeks.

      Our singing voices are very different, but that owes more to the influences in our music than to nature. Matt has cultivated a higher voice because he admired Michael Jackson. I have always preferred a soul sound, deeper than his. But if our singing voices are different, our speaking voices are identical. Even our nearest and dearest have trouble recognizing which one of us is on the other end of the telephone. We used this to great advantage as teenagers, chatting up each other’s girlfriends shamelessly.

      In the final analysis, I would not swap having Matt as a brother for anything. But I do not like being pigeonholed as ‘a twin’, and in my experience being a twin is jam-packed with insecurities.

      I have Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal to thank for the year I spent living in Cheddar, in Somerset. The Good Life, a television series in which they played a married couple who gave up their nine-to-five existence to run a smallholding, was a great hit in our household, particularly with Mum. When Tony’s property maintenance business collapsed, she persuaded us all that we should opt out and move to the country. The attraction was to be self-sufficient, and it certainly looked fun on telly. I had always lived in or near to London, but I was only eleven at the time and the prospect of moving did not bother me: we’d already lived in quite a few different houses.

      Mum and Tony took off for a week of house-hunting and, with a loan from Tony’s father, who was a chartered surveyor and insurance claims consultant, they bought a ‘cottage’ in Cheddar, the beautiful little village famous for the nearby Cheddar Gorge. I’m using the word cottage because ‘tumbledown wreck’ sounds a bit harsh, though it is probably a fairer description. Matt and I didn’t see it until the day we moved in.

      I travelled from Cheshunt to Cheddar with Mum, in the Jag. Tony and Matt followed behind in a transit van containing some of our furniture, and with our caravan hitched on the back, stuffed full with a set of kitchen units for the new house.

      Mum and I nearly didn’t make it. As we were travelling down the M4 in the middle lane, a woman in a white Mini suddenly pulled out of the inside lane in front of us. Mum swerved, slammed on the brakes, and our car went into a spin in a cloud of white smoke. We performed three complete circles, the last one on two wheels, and ended up broadside on across the motorway, with the engine cut out. Mum sat behind the wheel, transfixed. I broke the spell by saying ‘At least, Mum, we would have died together.’ She snapped into life and tried the engine. At the first turn of the key it would not start, but luckily at her second attempt it did. We were very close to a motorway service area and we pulled off for a cup of coffee to calm us down. After we parked and started to walk towards the café, a car passed quite close to me and I jumped in fright, my nerves shattered. Mum put her arm round me and we had a big hug.

      If we had died on the motorway that day, it would not have been Mum’s fault. She is a good driver, and she was doing everything right. Even to this day I have a very firm idea of what I would like to do to the driver of that Mini, who pulled out without looking in her mirror and drove on, safe and sound, almost leaving death in her wake. We were lucky that no other cars were close enough to ram into us: if the motorway had been busier the consequences could have been appalling.

      Despite the near-accident, we still arrived first at the house in Cheddar. I couldn’t believe it. There were no windows, the doors were hanging off, it was a dilapidated mess. ‘That’s not where we’re going to live, is it, Mummy? We can’t live there, it’s worse than a shed,’ I said, praying that she would say there was a mistake and we had pulled up outside the wrong house. But there was no mistake: this was our new home, Jasmine Cottage.

      We were too frightened even to go inside. A woman was coming down the hill and Mum asked her if she would mind going in with us. She must have thought we were mad, but she was very kind and accompanied us. It was far worse than Mum had remembered it: local kids had been using it for all sorts of things, and it was full of used condoms, cigarette ends, matches and every other kind of litter. We pitched the caravan in a nearby farm field and lived there until the place was habitable. It was a good choice of field: the farmer had a son, Robert, who was the same age as us, and became one of our best friends down there.

      Living in Cheddar did not work out for our family, but in many ways it was a great year, and I would not have missed it. Mum was able to get work easily: she worked as a secretary at the local electricity board, which was just up the lane from us. She made friends and loved the life there, as did our dog, a Yorkshire terrier called James, who came with us. To our dismay he was run over in our quiet little backwater – ironic after surviving life in London and Cheshunt. We buried him in the garden and replaced him with two mongrels called Bill and Ben. We also had a cat called Jessica, who had the quickest sex change in history when we discovered that she was a he and renamed her Jesse. The cat was the Madonna of the feline world, because he seemed to like nothing better than letting the dogs inflict pain on him.

      We also bought a goat called Mary who attached herself romantically to Tony. I learned to milk the goat, and came to prefer chilled goat’s milk on my cornflakes to cow’s milk from a bottle. Unfortunately, Mary died giving birth and we had to bury her in the garden, too.

      Matt and I used to go fishing in a private pond nearby, with a big No Fishing sign – it was poaching, to give it its correct name. We did not have expensive fishing tackle, just worms on the end of a line, but when my granddad came down to stay with us for a few days we caught the biggest trout he has ever eaten. It must have weighed three pounds and was probably the prize specimen in the pond.

      We had a lot of fun and a very strong feeling of being up against the odds together: СКАЧАТЬ