Wish You Were Here Read Free Page B

new ‘side’ to his personality by conjuring up a list of men that I reasoned I might be attracted to if I were that way inclined and had fun gauging whether there was any common ground in our ‘types’. But of course Tom wasn’t gay. He was a Christian, which though I tried hard not to, I admit I found disappointing.
    I’d always found born-again Christian types to be little more than a walking cliché. I didn’t really much care about what they got up to in the privacy of their own churches but it bothered me greatly when it all came out into the open. I didn’t like them in the news trying to affect the laws of what is essentially a secular nation; I didn’t like them handing me leaflets proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was nigh; and I especially didn’t like them knocking on my front door trying to palm off their literature on me. In short if I were going to choose a group of people with whom I would genuinely like to have no contact at all, it would be born-again Christians. And now, much to my dismay, Tom was one of them.
    Part of my surprise at Tom’s revelation was based on a key factor that I was sure excluded him from potential born-again Christianisation: at university he had been pretty much the king of casual sex and though I hadn’t kept track with his private life of late I was reasonably confident that little had changed. Over the course of the evening Tom proceeded to tell me how it had all happened. One evening a few months earlier he’d been out with a bunch of work colleagues when he’d got chatting to a woman sitting with her friends at the next table. He told me that much of what happened next was a blur of alcohol and sexual tension but the next thing he recalled was waking up the next morning in this woman’s bed. And although this sort of thing had been a semi-regular occurrence in his life what made this encounter distinct was that he didn’t know this woman’s name and never learned it. The guilt of the experience stayed with him for a long time. He told me that he realised that ever since his dad had died when he was nineteen, he’d felt he had a huge void in his life that he had desperately been trying to fill. A few weeks went by and then a chance conversation with a female colleague at work resulted in his accepting her invitation to attend an Easter service at her church. For the first time in his life, he’d found what he had been looking for.
    My reaction was puzzlement. I was convinced that Tom was just going through a weird phase which he would eventually come out of. (Weird phases that had affected various college friends and associates in recent years had included interests in: militant veganism, druidism, Krishnaism, agoraphobia, burglary and suicide.) And so when he commented: ‘You think I’ve gone a bit mental don’t you?’ my reply, I have to admit, was: ‘Yes.’
    Subsequently every time I saw Tom, I half expected him to have taken up dressing badly or I waited with bated breath for him to start trotting out stuff about God and Jesus in the middle of a conversation about transfer rumours at Chelsea. But he didn’t do any of these things. Instead, he was just the same as ever, only he seemed less, well, . . . restless . . . I suppose. Definitely less restless than me . . . or Andy . . . or any of the people I knew my age. He seemed as though he knew where he was going and why. As if everything was going to always be all right for him. And he didn’t start spouting Bible verses, singing hymns or being weird. He was simply less agitated.
    A few months later Tom and Anne (the woman who had taken him to the Easter service) got together. A year after that they got engaged and the year after their wedding, Callum, their first kid, arrived swiftly followed by Katie, sixteen months later. And although I found it difficult over the years to stop