I Owe You Nothing. Luke Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ we were envious of the way Tony could show affection for them more easily than he could for us. There were jealousies and suspicions all around, but children always find their own level and come to terms with each other better than they do with grown-ups. Tony himself says he measured the success of our relationship with Adam and Carolyn by the fact that before too long we had all dropped the word ‘step’ and referred to each other simply as brothers and sisters.

CHAPTER THREE

       Leave Me Alone

      I always feel weird when I see other identical twins. If they are very alike, they look to me like something from the twilight zone. Freaks. Clones. Then I wonder if people feel that about Matt and me. I hope they don’t, because I don’t think we go out of our way, like some twins do, to look and be spookily alike.

      There was no single moment when I realized that I was different from other kids because I was a twin – I always knew it. There are pluses and minuses in being a twin, but on balance I think the minuses outweigh the pluses. It’s not that I don’t love having Matt as a brother: I wouldn’t have missed that for anything. There’s an indestructible bond between us. But we have both had to fight all our lives to be treated as individuals, and I expect all other identical twins will understand and recognize that problem.

      As a twin and a young child, individuality is virtually impossible. You are regarded as being half of a whole: anyone who knows your brother assumes that you have an identical personality, simply because you look the same. At school you are both tarred with the same brush: if I was bad, Matt was assumed to be bad also, and vice versa. Children, in particular, ask you stupid questions – but you also get a fair amount from adults. When Matt broke his arm, all the other kids wanted to know why I didn’t have a plaster cast on mine, too. When he wore a brace on his teeth I was asked – even by adults – why I didn’t have one. And I got heartily fed up with well-meaning shop assistants and old ladies in the street asking us if our mother could tell us apart.

      Mum did not deliberately dress us alike, but it is difficult to be creative with shopping when you are struggling around with two lively little boys in tow: it was easier to buy two of everything. When we got dressed in the mornings the clothes were all kept together, there was no clear sense of his and mine. When Tony moved in with us, he admits it took him a while to recognize us as individuals, and he asked Mum to make sure we were dressed differently.

      Later on, when we were buying our own clothes, we guarded them jealously. When they were no longer new we would lend them to each other, but we both had certain things which were out of bounds to the other one. We respected the unwritten rules because the battle for even that much individuality had been hard won.

      When we started at school we had to wear badges with our names on. Later on, at secondary school, when all the other kids were being called by their first names, we had to put up with being addressed as ‘Goss’ because teachers did not know who was who. I was constantly in trouble for saying ‘I have a name, sir’ to teachers. Like most twins, we hated being referred to as ‘the twins’ or ‘the Goss twins’, we were desperate from an early age to be treated as individuals.

      The confusion between us probably cost me a GCE in maths. I was always much better at maths than Matt, but for some reason he was put into a higher set than me in our last year at school. When I protested to the teachers I was told that they would move me in a few weeks, but a few weeks later they claimed it was too late to switch me. I’m afraid I lost all interest in the subject under my new teacher. I continued doing Matt’s maths homework for him, which was more difficult than mine, but didn’t bother with my own. I’m not claiming that this put paid to a brilliant academic career – I couldn’t wait to leave school and I had no intention of doing any further studies – but it is an example of how little we were regarded as individuals.

      We actually asked to be put into separate classes at school when we were thirteen; that was a very big step for us, because until then we had never been apart for such long hours on a regular basis. We both felt we needed more time away from each other, and we developed separate groups of friends for a while.

      There is also a physical disadvantage in being twins: we knocked hell out of each other as kids. Because we were the same size and weight we were evenly matched in fights, and because we are equally pig-headed neither of us would ever give in, so we slugged each other as hard as we could for as long as we could. We both have scars on our bodies to prove it. Had one of us been a year or two older, we would perhaps still have fought, but never for so long or so hard. As we got older we agreed not to be so rough: our fights in recent years may have involved a bit of pushing, but we don’t hit each other any more.

      The advantages in being a twin are obvious. From birth onwards I had a constant, close companion. There was always a friend of my own age to play with, someone to get into trouble with, an ally against the adult world. When we were unhappy, it was shared, and we could give each other support. I know that Matt and me have a means of communication that does not rely on speech. We feel things for each other even when we are thousands of miles apart, and when we are together we often only have to glance at the other to know what he’s thinking. My Mum will probably hate to read this, but I know that if I was in an aeroplane that was about to crash, the two people I would think about would be my girlfriend Shirley and my brother Matt.

      It may sound a contradiction of everything I have said about the quest for individuality, but being a twin certainly gets you noticed. It gives you, from birth, a title. The new teacher will go home after her first day in front of the class with only a few pupils firmly fixed in her mind: the twins will always be among those she gets to know first. In other words, the struggle for individuality was between me and my twin, not between us and the rest of the kids. We were designated as special and different from birth, and we liked that.

      We had the usual fun and games that twins enjoy. We used to deliberately confuse teachers, usually when they were trying to punish one of us. We would go out of the class to the toilet and when we came back in we would sit in each other’s chairs, that kind of silliness. It was always easier to get into trouble: when Matt suggested something wicked it was like suggesting it to myself, he was so much part of me, and because there were two of us we could always egg the other one on to mischief. But in a way we could get away with more – twins are expected to be ‘double trouble’. That expression and ‘as like as two peas in a pod’ are so familiar, you simply learn to put up with hearing them. I wouldn’t mind a tenner for each time they’ve been said about us.

      Occasionally we could even confuse our mum, especially at night when we would change beds. But she always sussed us pretty quickly. Both Mum and Dad knew us apart automatically, not just by looks but by personality. We are very different people, however alike we look. I am much more practical, down-to-earth, self-sufficient than Matt. He is a dreamer, more relaxed than me. My family and friends tell me I’m deeper than he is: I think about things more. He takes what comes. We’re both impulsive and mad, but I’ve always been more sensible than he is. He’s likely to want to do really crazy things that could end in total disaster, and I have to restrain him. You can see the differences in our personalities when you look at the words we write for songs: his are more lyrical, more descriptive; mine are simpler, more direct.

      I have always assumed the role of older brother. Studies of twins have shown that it is very common for one of them to take on a surrogate mother role with the other. It isn’t necessarily the one who was born first who does this, but in our case that’s the way it has worked. As a child I saw it as my job to look after Matt, to protect him. I was always, physically, ahead of him. Dad remembers us cycling down the road on our little bikes when we were four, the first two-wheelers we ever had, and I suddenly put my feet up on the handlebars. Three days later Matt did it. That was a pattern that would СКАЧАТЬ