Life and Laughing: My Story (10 page)

One of my friends, Barnaby, accidentally punched the wrong builder in the stomach – ‘Oi! Fuck off, you little shit.’ Barnaby burst into tears and didn’t come round again.

The house itself soon started to take shape and began to be decorated. Because it was the mid-eighties, my mother settled upon a theme for her lovely new home. Hideous. An expression I heard a lot when growing up and, thankfully never again, was ‘rag-rolling’. ‘Rag-rolling’ is when you take a painted wall and ruin it. I can only imagine it was invented by mistake. Someone in the eighties must have leant on a wall without realizing it was newly painted and in the process not only invented ‘rag-rolling’, but also the equally tasteless paint splattered shirt which was all the rage at the time. What was wrong with people in the 1980s? I think the singer Sade was the only person who looked good.

My mother was looking less like
Bananarama
and more like
Krystle Carrington
every day. Her shoulder pads were so large she was once late picking me up from school because one of them wedged in the door of her new BMW 3-Series. The builders had to widen the doorways so she could get around her own home. She used every fad going to create what in the eighties was a dream home, but in hindsight was the stuff of nightmares. Looking back, I’d rather have lived in my father’s fictional ‘House of Death’. Loud bright colours were the order of the day. The out-of-bounds dark living room now had sky-blue rag-rolled walls and custard yellow carpets. Even though I was now allowed in, I banned myself from entering. The kitchen walls were Barbara Cartland pink with white stripes. Upstairs was worse. My mum employed more painting techniques of the era. There was a lot of ‘stencilling’ in the bedrooms and ‘marbling’ in the bathrooms. Marbling was painting made to look like marble. The results were criminal. A couple of the bedrooms were stencilled with swirls that were so disorientating it was difficult to keep your balance.

The fittings and fixtures were even more offensive. We had white cowboy doors between the pink kitchen and peach dining room. It was like a scene from the alternative ending of
Brokeback Mountain
, the version where they live happily ever after. The pièce de résistance of our new Hampstead house of horrors was undoubtedly the master bathroom. The bath had golden taps beside a spout in the shape of a swan’s neck and head. The water would shoot out of the swan’s mouth, like it was vomiting. The black loo was so over-stylized that it was actually unusable. The loo seat was angled in such a way that it pushed one’s bottom cheeks together, thus blocking nature’s course. It was difficult enough to poo with a vomiting gold swan staring at you, but the design fault made it physically impossible. It became a ‘show loo’, just for decoration. The whole house was a bit like that.

I don’t remember my father being around while the work was being done. He must have been making or editing his film. I know that he was also travelling to America a lot as he was putting together the sketch show
Assaulted Nuts
, which was co-produced by the US cable network HBO.

What I do remember is sitting in our newly converted loft playing with excess rolls of carpet and coming across my mother’s Filofax (an eighties must-have) and seeing a note to her from Steve, the builder with an iron chest. ‘I love you,’ it read. Why would Steve the builder love my mum? I was shocked. At this moment, my mother walked in. ‘Have you seen my Filofax, darling?’ She saw me sitting on the fluffy new carpet, the blood drained from my young face. ‘Are you all right, Michael?’

‘No,’ I said, barely audible. ‘The room is spinning.’

‘I know, Michael, that’s the stencilling. That’s the effect I’m going for. You’ll get used to it, it’s very trendy.’

I showed her the Filofax. ‘What’s that mean?’ I asked fearfully. Unfortunately, it had flicked to another page, 21 June.

‘The summer solstice,’ she explained. ‘That’s the first day of summer, I think.’

‘No,’ I said, riffling through the Filofax to find the incriminating page. ‘That. What does that mean?’

I thought confronting my mother with evidence of her adultery would be dramatic, but it was nothing of the sort. ‘I love Steve, we love each other. I thought you knew that.’

I genuinely couldn’t believe how blasé she was being. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘We’ve been together for a while. Why do you think he’s always here?’

‘To decorate,’ I said truthfully.

I’m so glad we dug up this photo. Here is Steve, rag-rolling his way into my mother’s heart.

My mum chose to downplay the gravity of the situation. Either that or she was so in love with the builder that she was blissfully unaware that she was married with two kids. I thought for a moment that maybe these avant-garde painting techniques were responsible for my mother’s seduction. She did seem to be in a trance-like state. Maybe she was just Steve’s latest victim, and he was some kind of decorating Derren Brown using a combination of rag-rolling, stencilling and marbling in a series of gaudy colours to hypnotize housewives.

My memories of our final days in Hampstead are not only hazy, but also confused by the fact that a lot was kept from Lucy and me to ‘protect’ us. This was a messy divorce with kids involved, and I was one of the kids. My dad came back from America to a strange and hostile environment. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my father. A man’s first instinct when he learns his wife is cheating on him is to attack the other man. ‘Who is it? Where is he?’ Unfortunately in this instance, it was Steve, the iron-chested builder. My dad could have punched Steve repeatedly in the stomach, and Steve wouldn’t have even noticed – he would have just carried on rag-rolling while listening to his Sony Walkman. Your partner cheating on you is bad enough. If she cheats on you with a bigger man, it’s the worst-case scenario. What are you supposed to do when you catch them together? ‘Hey, that’s my wife. Get off her or I’ll hit you, and then you’ll hit me and I’ll be hospitalized.’

What if your partner cheats on you with a hero of yours? At the time of writing John Terry has just lost his England captaincy for alleged adultery. But what if he was sleeping with the wife of a Chelsea season ticket holder who proudly wears a John Terry replica shirt, and it’s days before the European Cup Final? What would be the husband’s reaction then? Initially he would be shocked and angered by the infidelity of his wife before noticing his idol in his bed. ‘How could you do it this to me, you fu— There’s only one John Terry, one John Teeeeery, there’s only one John Terry. Look who it is, love, it’s JT!’

‘I know, I’m having sex with him.’

‘You all right, JT? Can I get you some water or something? He’s got the final on Wednesday night, so you should go on top, love. He’s got to save his energy. Careful, darling, mind his metatarsal, that’s six weeks out, that is.’

The marriage was over. They weren’t happy. My dad was working hard, my mum was playing hard, and when they were together they were arguing hard. They were from different generations and the gap was never going to close. A friend of my mum said to her at the time of the separation, ‘Children grow up and leave home, and that’s all you’re doing.’

My grandmother was thrilled to learn that the marriage was over and swigged from a glass of fine champagne. ‘Daarling, you are doing the right thing, he vas no gud for you. Start egen, I vill help you vith money.’ Then my mum told her about Steve. She choked, vintage champagne spluttered from her mouth and through her nose ‘Vot? The builder? I’m feeling faint, Jim, Jim, get my pills …’

I haven’t really gone into much detail about Grandma’s rich husband Jim. For all his business prowess and swollen bank account, he was very much a secondary figure in my grandmother’s home. He acted and looked like a butler, very English, very proper, very upright. He occasionally smirked or scowled, hinting towards true feelings that he never voiced. He fetched my grandma’s pills. ‘You’re telling me you are in luv with the rag-rohleeer?’ she continued. ‘Vell, you vont get a bean out of me. He is after the money, and he’s not getting any.’ My grandmother believed everybody was after her money.

In hindsight, I think my parents’ marriage breakdown was inevitable. I’ve met them both, and they genuinely had nothing in common. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Although my mum was spending a lot of time with Kenny and his friends, it was only a matter of time before she met a heterosexual man. People who are single are often encouraged to ‘get out there, don’t just wait for Mr Right to come knocking on your door’. Well, in my mother’s case, Mr Right smashed the door down, installed a new one, then painted and rag-rolled it. They were in love and determined to start a life together, a life with Lucy and me. My home was broken. The Hampstead house was put on the market.

Let’s just put the divorce to one side for a moment. Park the divorce. I want to talk about house prices. It was 1983 and we owned a substantial house in Hampstead. I also want you to put the décor of the house to one side. Park the décor. Park it next to the divorce.

Because of a wonderful website, with which I became obsessed when I was house hunting called
houseprices.co.uk
, you can now find out the price of homes sold anywhere in the UK. We sold our Hampstead house in 1983 for £330,000, a substantial amount of money at the time, even today. At the peak of the market in 2007, the same house was sold for £4.2 million. Here’s a question: why the fuck didn’t the Tarot card reader mention that? The house increased in value by £160,000 a year. Would this knowledge have saved my parents’ marriage? (I’ve just un-parked the divorce.) I don’t think so. But maybe it would have prevented them from selling their goldmine with hideous interior. (I’ve just un-parked the décor.) For that kind of money, Steve could have built a dividing wall and they could have split the house. Lucy and I would still live with both our parents, and in twenty-five years we would all walk away millionaires.

It wasn’t to be. The house was sold, bizarrely, to the Osbournes. Any relation? Yes, it was them, the actual Osbournes. Sharon and Ozzy and little baby Jack. Kelly Osbourne had just been born at the time. This is from Sharon’s autobiography: ‘Ozzy arrived for the birth and I took him to see somewhere I found in Hampstead. It was Victorian, semi-detached with a garden, not enormous but somewhere to put the pram … It needed a lot doing to it, but the price was good and it had great potential.’

This is an historic moment: the overlapping of two celebrity autobiographies. It’s interesting, the different perspectives. For Sharon, the house was ‘not enormous’; for me, it was ‘enormous’. Sharon felt it ‘needed a lot doing to it’; for me, it was ‘hideous’. It also said in her book that it was the first place that felt like a family home. The house certainly had the potential to be one; unfortunately, we were the wrong family. I doubt that when my father bought all the different flats and sat down with his architect, he said, ‘I want to create the perfect family home, for the Prince of Darkness.’

I had obviously never heard of Ozzy Osbourne. It may not come as a shock to you to learn that I never went through a ‘heavy metal’ phase. For all I knew, Black Sabbath was just another date in my mum’s Filofax. Before the MTV television series that endeared Ozzy and his family to the world, he was primarily known for eating the head of a bat. When my mother told me to tidy my room ‘because a man who bites the heads off bats is coming round to look at it’, I thought it was a threat. I’ve never cleaned my room so well in my life. Inspired by my mother’s Capri cleaning, I usually just threw rubbish out of the window, but this time I had the place immaculate. ‘All right, I’ll do it! Please don’t let the man bite my head off.’

The proceeds of the house sale were divided equally between my parents so each could start a new life. My father rented a house belonging to friends in Hertfordshire, and my mum, Steve, Lucy and I bought a house in Golders Green. So that was it, a new chapter in my life was beginning. Annoyingly, this is my autobiography and I haven’t actually reached the end of the chapter – bad planning on my part. I feel I need to introduce Steve to you properly, as he now looks all set to become my stepfather. No, maybe I should end the chapter here.

I think I will.

7

A new chapter in my life had begun. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was Chapter 7. There was a new man in my mother’s life, and because I was only seven years old and Lucy five, there was a new man in ours as well. We were the baggage that my mother came with.

Steve was pretty much the same age as my mum and looked almost identical to Patrick Swayze. Much to his embarrassment, his mother entered him into a Patrick Swayze look-alike contest by sending in a photo. He came second. I genuinely don’t know how he didn’t win; either it was rigged or the real Patrick Swayze entered. Steve was often mistaken for the Hollywood star in the most unlikely locations. ‘Oh my God, are you Patrick Swayze?’

‘No, do you really think Patrick Swayze would be buying paint in Wickes on the North Circular? Oh, look over there! It’s Tom Selleck looking at drills.’