Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [59]
‘I’m coming home. I set sail tomorrow. Lock up your daughters!’
In retrospect, I think saying this out loud was disrespectful.
12
My main priority on my return home was not to lose my tan. I was a tanned, sexually active man, and I wanted it to stay that way. Nature dictated that my tan would gradually fade. Every day I was becoming paler, and my spots were returning. My newfound power to attract girls who make shrines to me in their bedroom was leaving me. However, I was determined to fight nature and purchased some Clarins fake tan. I now had a fake tan and fake ID. I was the real deal. Unfortunately, my application of the Clarins fake tan was far from expert and, in my haste to darken my face, I forgot about my neck. This was OK while I still had the remnants of my real tan, but when that disappeared, I had a face that looked like it had just got back from two weeks in the Caribbean and a neck that looked like it had just got back from two weeks in Glasgow. To say that I was teased about this at Merchant Taylors’ would be an understatement. I claimed that I fell asleep sunbathing in a polo neck, but nobody believed me, and I was soon forced to admit that my bronzing was fraudulent. I then seemed to have even fewer friends there than the zero that I had before.
I look quite good here with Lucy. I’m thin, I have a tan, but of course I have to ruin it with those glasses and that ‘I’m on my gap year’ necklace.
Unbeknownst to me, my days at Merchant Taylors’ were numbered. I was in my first year of A-Levels and, despite my failure to connect socially with anybody there, I was settled. I had worked hard and done well in my GCSEs (five As and four Bs) and was studying Biology, Chemistry and Geography for my A-Levels. I didn’t particularly enjoy these subjects, but I was pretty good at them. They weren’t vocational; I didn’t plan on becoming a doctor or a weatherman. I opened the batting for the cricket team and was top scorer in the hockey team. I had less than two years remaining, and then I suppose I planned on going to university like everyone else. But then, totally out of the blue, in the middle of term, in the middle of the week, my father telephoned. We normally spoke on Sundays, so his phoning was irregular.
‘Hi, Dad, what’s up?’
‘Are you sitting down?’ my dad said, seriously.
It seemed like such an odd question. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. He was going to tell me something that could potentially make me fall over. What could this collapse-worthy news be? Anyway, I wasn’t sitting down.
‘No, I’m not, I’m not sitting down. Shall I sit down?’ I was intrigued by this whole sitting-down thing.
‘I think you should,’ my dad confirmed, keeping the same serious tone.
I was speaking on the frog phone in the hall. There was nowhere to sit.
‘There’s no chair here. Shall I sit on the floor?’ This conversation was getting weirder and weirder.
‘If you want, Michael, sit on the floor,’ my dad agreed.
I sat cross-legged on the carpet.
‘OK, I’m on the floor now, Dad, I’m sitting on the floor. What is it?’
‘Michael, I’m very sorry but you have to leave your school. I’m in serious financial trouble, and I simply can’t afford to pay the fees any longer. I’m so very sorry, I know you’re happy there. I’ve tried very hard to find a solution, but I can’t.’
When my parents split up my father had agreed to pay school fees for Lucy and me. Lucy went to Henrietta Barnet, one of the best state schools in the country that was conveniently located less than a mile from our home, but my dad still had to fork out a small fortune to send me to a school nowhere near my home so that I could be surrounded by characterless, suburban twats and one suspected paedophile.
At this point my dad had been in America for about five years. His explanation for things not working out was that in England he was a big fish in a small pond but in the States he was a small fish in a big pond. When you also consider he had to cross the