Sottopassaggio Read Free Page A

like when I took acid.
    The colours are brighter, the sounds more distinct, and the floating dust strikes me as a little more beautiful than usual, perhaps a little less usual than usual. I yawn, stretch, then sit and scratch my head.
    Owen looks up from his paperwork. “Nice sleep?” he asks.
    I cough. “Yep,” I say standing and heading for the door. “It was good.”

Spinning Free
    A grey Saturday morning, Owen and I alight at Victoria and trundle through the London underground with his suitcase.
    We are talking about which museums I should visit after his departure and are completely unprepared when suddenly, mid-phrase, the moment is upon us; Owen must take the right hand path, I must take the left hand one. This suddenly is where the lives split. It’s obvious and natural but we’re not ready.
    Owen looks at me shiny-eyed. “Um, I have to go this way,” he says.
    It’s a strange moment, and the simple division of the tunnel belies the profundity of the moment.
    We were born from the same womb, shared a house, toys, and even at times a bedroom. From that simple accident our lives will forever be intertwined. We will be together, then apart, then together again, as chance and need dictate, and right now, right here, one path leads to the Piccadilly line, Heathrow airport, then Singapore and Melbourne, and the other to the Northern line, to something called, “Life in Brighton.”
    It’s arbitrary that I have decided to go back to Brighton, to live in Owen’s house rather than return to Nice. It would seem more logical if Owen went back to his old house in Brighton, but bizarrely that life fits me too. I’m perfectly at home lying on his sofa in his lounge listening to his records.
    In fact, it strikes me that any of these lives, inNice, Brighton or Australia would suit either of us, and I have the strangest notion that in some way our lives are not only entwined, but almost interchangeable. We are in some profound way the same thing; we are at some level a single set of desires.
    We are the lives our parents accustomed us to; we are their preferences for seaside towns, their love of France, their unrealised dreams of cross continental camping trips. We are the dreams they built for themselves and also, maybe more so, we are the dreams they didn’t managed to realise, the ones they saved for us, passed on through their angst as the only route to true happiness, to true self realisation. We are that vision of a shiny camper van waiting to go somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere happier.
    I swallow hard. I feel shaky and scared but I bluff through it. “Yeah,” I say, “I know.”
    Owen and I hug rigidly. “You look after yourself,” he says.
    I nod. “You too!” and aware of a tidal wave of emotion swelling suddenly from a distant undersea tremor, I whack him on the back, force a grin, and head off down my tunnel.
    I don’t look back until I hear his suitcase trundle into the echoing distance.
    Slightly dazed, I wander along the tunnel towards the Circle Line.
    I think about Owen heading off at a different vector, being pulled back towards his wife, his projects, his camper-van, and I think, not for the first time, how amazingly centred heterosexual lives are when compared to mine; just how many ties and stays – mortgages, dinner parties and schools – straightfamilies have holding them centred, bang in the middle of their lives.
    My own life seems so fragmented, so un-tied to anyone or any one place, that spinning like a top, or perhaps circling like an electron, the slightest nudge and I could oscillate out of control and spin off into space. I could end up just about anywhere. The possibilities are infinite, terrifying.
    The greatest tie for most is the responsibility to feed and clothe and educate. It’s something I will never have, and something I will never have to worry about either. My straight