we had not finished the wine at the restaurant. i decided tocompensate for the resulting alcohol deficit and poured atumbler of tequila. i turned on the television screen andcomputer and fast-forwarded casablanca for one last try. iwatched as humphrey bogart’s character used beans as ametaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world ofhis relationship with ingrid bergman’s character, and chose logicand decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires.

the quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossingfilm. but this was not what people cried about. they were inlove and could never be together. i repeated this statementto myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. i couldn’t. ididn’t care. i had enough problems of my own.

the doorbell buzzed, and i immediately thought rosie, butwhen i pushed the cctv button, it was claudia’s face thatappeared.

‘don, are you okay?’ she said. ‘can we come up?’

‘it’s too late.’

claudia sounded panicked. ‘what have you done? don?’

268/290‘it’s 10.31,’ i said. ‘too late for visitors.’

‘are you okay?’ said claudia, again.

‘i’m fine. the experience has been highly useful. new socialskills.

and final resolution of the wife problem. clear evidence thati’m incompatible with women.’

gene’s face appeared on the screen. ‘don. can we come upfor a drink?’

‘alcohol would be a bad idea.’ i still had a half-glass of tequilain my hand. i was telling a polite lie to avoid social contact. iturned off the intercom.

the message light on my home phone was flashing. it was myparents and brother wishing me a happy birthday. i hadalready spoken to my mother two days earlier when she madeher regular sunday evening call. these past three weeks, i hadbeen attempting to provide some news in return, but had notmentioned rosie. they were utilising the speaker-phonefunction, and collectively sang the birthday song – or at leastmy mother did, strongly encouraging my other two relatives toparticipate.

‘ring back if you’re home before 10.30,’ my mother said. itwas 10.38, but i decided not to be pedantic.

‘it’s 10.39,’ said my mother. ‘i’m surprised you rang back.’

clearly she had expected me to be pedantic, which wasreasonable given my history, but she sounded pleased.

‘hey,’ said my brother. ‘gary parkinson’s sister saw you onfacebook. who’s the redhead?’

‘just a girl i was dating.’

‘pull the other leg,’ said my brother.

the words had sounded strange to me too, but i had notbeen joking.

‘i’m not seeing her any more.’

‘i thought you might say that.’ he laughed.

269/290my mother interrupted. ‘stop it, trevor. donald, you didn’t tellus you were seeing someone. you know you’re always welcome–’

‘mum, he was having a lend of you,’ said my brother.

‘i said,’ said my mother, ‘that any time you want to bringanyone to meet us, whoever she or he –’

‘leave him alone, both of you,’ said my father.

there was a pause, and some conversation in the background.

then my brother said, ‘sorry, mate. i was just having a go. iknow you think i’m some sort of redneck, but i’m okay withwho you are. i’d hate you to get to this age and think i stillhad a problem with it.’

so, to add to a momentous day, i corrected a misconceptionthat my family had held for at least fifteen years and came outto them as straight.

the conversations with gene, phil and my family had beensurprisingly therapeutic. i did not need to use the edinburghpostnatal depression scale to know that i was feeling sad, buti was back from the edge of the pit. i would need to do somedisciplined thinking in the near future to be certain ofremaining safe, but for the moment i did not need to shutdown the emotional part of my brain entirely. i wanted a littletime to observe how i felt about recent events.

it was cold and the rain was pouring, but my balcony wasunder shelter. i took a chair and my glass outside, then wentback inside, put on the greasy wool jumper that my motherhad knitted for a much earlier birthday and collected thetequila bottle.

i was forty years old. my father used to play a song writtenby john sebastian. i remember that it was by john sebastianbecause noddy holder announced prior to singing it, ‘we’regoing to do a song by john sebastian. are there any johnsebastian fans here?’ apparently there were because there wasloud and raucous applause before he started singing.

270/290i decided that tonight i was also a john sebastian fan andthat i wanted to hear the song. this was the first time in mylife that i could recall a desire to hear a particular piece ofmusic. i had the technology.

or used to. i went to pull out my mobile phone and realised ithad been in the jacket i had discarded. i went inside, bootedmy laptop, registered for itunes, and downloaded ‘darling behome soon’ from slade alive! , 1972. i added ‘satisfaction’,thus doubling the size of my popular music collection. iretrieved my earphones from their box and returned to thebalcony, poured another tequila and listened to a voice frommy childhood singing that it had taken a quarter of his lifebefore he could begin to see himself.

at eighteen, just before i left home to go to university,statistically approaching a quarter of my life, i had listened tothese words and been reminded that i had very littleunderstanding of who i was. it had taken me until tonight,approximately halfway, to see myself reasonably clearly. i hadrosie, and the rosie project to thank for that.

now it was over, what had i learned?

1. i need not be visibly odd. i could engage in the protocolsthat others followed and move undetected among them.

and how could i be sure that other people were not doing thesame – playing the game to be accepted but suspecting all thetime that they were different?

2. i had skills that others didn’t. my memory and ability tofocus had given me an advantage in baseball statistics,cocktail-making and genetics. people had valued these skills, notmocked them.

3. i could enjoy friendship and good times. it was my lack ofskills, not lack of motivation that had held me back.

now i was competent enough socially to open my life to271/290a wider range of people. i could have more friends. dave thebaseball fan could be the first of many.

4. i had told gene and claudia that i was incompatible withwomen. this was an exaggeration. i could enjoy their company,as proven by my joint activities with rosie and daphne.

realistically, it was possible that i could have a partnership witha woman.

5. the idea behind the wife project was still sound. in manycultures a matchmaker would have routinely done what i did,with less technology, reach and rigour, but the sameassumption – that compatibility was as viable a foundation formarriage as love.

6. i was not wired to feel love. and faking it was notacceptable. not to me. i had feared that rosie would not loveme. instead, it was i who could not love rosie.

7. i had a great deal of valuable knowledge – about genetics,computers, aikido, karate, hardware, chess, wine, cocktails,dancing, sexual positions, social protocols and the probability ofa fifty-six-game hitting streak occurring in the history ofbaseball. i knew so much shit and i still couldn’t fix myself.

as the shuffle setting on my media player selected the sametwo songs over and over, i realised that my thinking was alsobeginning to go in circles and that, despite the tidy formulation,there was some flaw in my logic. i decided it was myunhappiness with the night’s outcome breaking through, mywish that it could be different.

i watched the rain falling over the city and poured the last ofthe tequila.