I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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      ‘Then one Tuesday Tony came round and Luke and Matthew were still awake, in bed. He asked if he could go up and see them. I was very possessive about them, and very reluctant, but eventually I agreed.’

      I can remember clearly the night Tony first walked into our bedroom. He’s not very tall and he has a very slight limp caused by the arthritis he has suffered with all his life. He didn’t talk down to us or try to buy our affection. He simply said ‘hello’, and then told us a story about a little bird, which he made up as he went along. The bird lost all its feathers, but found some new ones to stick on. Unfortunately, it was only a little bird and the new feathers were from an eagle. Tony said that if we ever saw a bird flying around faster than Concorde we’d know it was our bird from the story. We took to him straight away.

      But we were only seven years old at the time and very used to being on our own with our mother: I don’t think we made life easy for Tony when he moved in, despite such a good start.

      Looking back, I can see that Mum didn’t help the situation either. She didn’t give him enough authority over us, she never allowed him to make decisions about us or to exercise discipline. Tony can be philosophical about it now, but I think he’s looking back through rose-tinted spectacles: at the time I’m sure he thought we were a couple of spoiled little brats, and I don’t think he liked us at all.

      Tony now says: ‘I learned quickly that Carol’s relationship with the boys was the number one relationship, I couldn’t compete. They had created a very close bond, which overruled everything else, an even closer mother-son bond than normal. So I learned to keep quiet and just get on with things. After all, I was courting their mother, so I didn’t want to fall out with them. There was certainly friction and I know Luke took it personally. But I only got involved in confrontation with them when I felt they needed it, in the same way that all children do from time to time: it wasn’t personal for me at all.’

      Tony, who is a year older than Mum, has led an interesting life. He was involved in the 1970s’ property boom, but the boom collapsed into a slump and cost him a lot of money. At the time Mum met him he had a garage in Holborn, but when the council put double yellow lines in front of it business was wiped out. Since then, he’s done a great variety of different jobs, almost always being self-employed. He’s not a nine-to-five person, and he’s not a person who ever lets life get on top of him for long: he always finds another scheme to keep himself going.

      He is very different from Dad. At times I have felt Tony to be very cold, because he is not a demonstrative person who shows his feelings. Mum says this does not mean that he does not feel anything: he is just more restrained than the rest of the family – we are all the sort of people who hug and kiss and say ‘I love you’ all the time. Tony knows that our nickname for him in the family is ‘the robot’.

      We’ve had our problems, but I have a lot of love and respect for him. I’ve seen him go through tremendous business problems, and I’ve seen him cope bravely with the pain from his arthritis. I’ve learned a lot from Tony, and I like him as well as love him.

      Shortly after Tony moved in we were threatened with eviction from the police house. From the moment Dad left us we were not really entitled to go on living there, but we had nowhere else to go, and it took quite a while for the police force to catch up with the fact that Dad had gone. Mum tried to get the council to re-house us, but they had a very long waiting list, so she and Tony scraped together a deposit, arranged a mortgage and bought a small end-of-terrace modern house on an estate in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. They married a year after we had first met Tony.

      We transferred to another school, St Clement’s, in Cheshunt, and while living there we joined swimming and karate clubs. We settled down quite well, singing in the school choir and playing football for the school. I was the more active of the two of us: Mum says I have always been hyperactive. Even when I’m supposed to be sitting still I tend to fidget and from a very early age I was forever drumming with my fingers on the arm of a chair or a table. It drove the grown-ups wild at times.

      It was at Cheshunt that I had my first taste of rejection in love, when I was ten years old. The object of my affections was a girl called Tina, who was two years older than me and not remotely interested. I used to race out of school so that I could be sitting on the wall when she walked past. Up to that point, you could guarantee that Matt and I would be the last out of school, always larking about in the cloakrooms, but Tina changed all that for me. It must have been infectious, because Matt then decided he was in love with her, too, and we had our first rivalry over a woman. It didn’t really matter, because to Tina we were both too young to even be considered as boyfriends.

      While we were living at Mitcham, my parents had a very angry showdown. Dad wrote to say that he had now decided not to see us any more: he said he had been advised by our teachers and a doctor and social worker who he had consulted that it would be better for us to have a clean break from him, at least until we were older. When Mum told us, we were desperately upset: I can remember crying my eyes out. We never got used to the idea of not seeing Dad and eventually Tony got very angry, the angriest I have ever seen him. He picked up the phone and rang Dad, and held the receiver out so that Dad could hear us crying. ‘That’s your sons,’ he said. Tony handed the phone to me and Dad just said, ‘Hello, son.’ The word ‘son’ was enough to choke me with tears, I couldn’t talk to him for crying.

      Dad accepted that we needed him and started to come and see us again. But it was a very bad time for our relationship with him and both Matt and I got through by camouflaging our feelings, putting him out of our minds as much as we could. That year he actually left our Christmas presents on the doorstep on Christmas Day. I could not believe it: I thought it was a joke, and that he was hiding round the corner and would jump out to wish us a Merry Christmas. It was devastating to think that he had been so near to us and had not seen us. On another occasion, when I was about nine or ten, I called him ‘Daddy’ and he told me I was a bit old for that, and should call him ‘Dad’ in the future. Perhaps if I’d been seeing him frequently the change to ‘Dad’ would have occurred naturally by then, but I still clung to the name I had called him by when we were little and he lived with us. I was hurt that he had to say that to me.

      Our new life in Cheshunt did not just entail a new house, a new school and a new stepfather. We also acquired a new stepsister and stepbrother, Tony’s children Carolyn and Adam. Carolyn was a year younger than us, Adam three years younger. They lived with Tony’s ex-wife, but visited us at weekends. We were determined to hate them from the word go, but the first time we actually saw them they were in the bath – how can you be standoffish with two kids who are in the bath?

      Every weekend when they came to our house we would start out dreading it, not wanting them to come. And every weekend when it was time for them to go home all four of us would be pleading to stay together. Matt and I enjoyed horse riding, and they would come with us to the stables. Sometimes we would all pile into the car – Mum and Tony had an E-type Jag, a leftover from his prosperous days – and drive out to Billing Aquadrome with the caravan in tow. We’d spend the whole weekend fooling around in inflatable dinghies, fishing, making dens in the woods. There was a permanent fairground nearby and we spent all our pocket money there.

      I can see now how hard it was for everyone. Broken families are an equation and different people solve it differently: Tony and his ex-wife Pauline got on better than Mum and Dad, for instance; Mum had plenty of troublesome times with Carolyn and Adam; we were not exactly pleasant to Dad’s wife Margaret and we gave Tony a few problems. On the other hand, the adults were not always as sensitive as they might have been in handling us, and at times their behaviour was downright unforgivable.

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