I'm the Only One - 1

She was my sister and she was sleeping late. She's a lot older than me and at the time she was about to break into films, directing them, so everybody was indulging（沉迷） her. She was the only girl, too. If something didn't work out in her life and she had to come home for a while, it was a big deal. It mattered more than if I fucked up in one way or another. When Kelly was at home you had to creep around the house and keep your voice down even if it was in the middle of the afternoon. Our mother's Canadian - I don't know why I say that, except maybe it helps explain her opinion about Kel: Smarts Needs Special. It was this crappy little phrase that she had made up and it meant that clever people. People with special talents, need special treatment. Like they have a disease. You have to meet the Canadian side of our family to understand how cute she thinks that phrase is. I remember thinking that it was bullshit when I was fourteen and it still smells bad now. But to my mother, Kelly was this asteroid（小行星） that had landed in our lives and no one knew how she got there or what size hole she was going to leave. I've never been very good at school, and Pete, our older brother, is the same. Then along comes Kelly. So my mother has us all pussy-footing around like a family mime troupe, waving our hands, taking our shoes off.

I'm thinking of a particular morning, I was creeping around trying to make a silent breakfast, opening cupboards quietly, acting like I didn't exist. I'd been doing it for a couple of weeks since Kelly got back. It felt like I'd been doing it my whole life. The situation came about because earlier in the year Kelly had moved in with this guy called Aidan. They bought furniture, the whole works. Then she cheated on him and he left her. Apart from Kelly being back in our house, it was also a shame because Aidan was the only man she ever went out with, before or since, whom I've had any time for whatsoever（无论什么） . Aidan was a top man, a good guy. The thing I like about him was that he was smart, but he didn't need much of this special treatment. He was Irish, from Dublin, and he could be funny, he could talk football and he liked to see other people's mouths open and close besides his own. It was good knowing someone like him. I needed it; what with dad not being around, Pete married and gone; and me in a house full of women. That was the year I was praying for a few more inches on my height and shaving the bare space under my nose hoping that something might turn up. So it was good to know Aidan, six foot three and hairy as a bear. He was hairy back and front and Kelly would tease（取笑） him about it, and he would laugh her off or tell her she could do with losing a few pounds which, between you and me, was nothing but the truth. She was a fat little thing back then. And he went and told her, straight-up; didn't care that she was almost, sort of, famous. He told it how it was. That was the way he loved her. She never appreciated it, though, and then she had this fling with some pretty boy in the film industry. But you could see she realised what she'd lost when he left her because she slunk back home and holed herself up in Pete's old room that I'd been using for weights. She took it over and lay in there all day in the dark curled up in a stinking duvet watching old black-and-white films. I remember asking her, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom?' She had a small bedroom upstairs that used to be covered wall to wall in her school friends' graffiti（涂鸦） until she went off to university and mum whitewashed（掩饰） the whole thing. I asked her again, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom, that's what it's there for.' She said, 'I can't sleep and work in the same room. I need a study.' She said it as if a study is one of those things you can't do without, like clean water. I said, 'But I need to exercise.' She said, 'You're fourteen. Your body isn't even developed. The only thing you need to do is stop beating the bishop before you go blind.' This was classic Kelly. She always knew how to make you feel four inches long in every direction.

So she came back, and I had to move out all my weights and spread them around the house wherever there was space. I put the bench press in my room along with the free weights. I put the Abdominizer in the lounge（休息室） . I stuck the chin-up bar at the top of the stairs which lead down to the front door. And even though I was pissed off with Kelly for taking the spare room, having the weights all over the place did make it more like circuit training and doing circuits made me feel like I was Rocky. It's what they do in the middle of Rocky movies; a two-minute sequence to show that over a number of months he got fit and pumped up. You pray for that kind of speedy, magic-time when you're working out, the same way you wish your adolescence would pass like it does in a TV serial: a school scene, a sex scene and graduation. It's slower and faster than that. And some events become still and solid, and turn into a thing in your life, an object like a lampshade or an ironing board. They hang around; you could reach out and touch them. This day I'm trying to tell you about is like that.