There is this boy - My twin Garth

Garth Barclay was my first platonic boyfriend, in grade 6. He had dark, curly hair, as I did. He had good looks, he was popular. He needed to shave, in grade 6. (I'm not sure boys ever shaved in 6th grade, but that is my mental picture of him)

He looked like me and I looked like him, amazingly so from all reports. He was my first, and only, twin experience thus far. (Well, not exactly, but we’ll get to that much later) We used to drive the teachers nuts. They couldn't tell us a part. “Garth, Christian? Christian, Garth?”

"Which one are you? Christian or Garth?" asked the library teacher. "I can never tell you two a part. I wish you’d stop coming in together."

It would make us both smile.

We both liked it. We used to find each other to stand in line together.  I remember us holding hands, but that is probably me and we probably didn't. (Then again, in grade 6?) We were inseparable all year. We had the twin thing going on there for a while.

Garth was boistrous, he played football at lunch times. He always came in for the afternoon with his shirt tail hanging out. But he was sweet to me, as I was sweet to him. (sweet on him) We had our own thing going on. We always sat together, we wanted to be bookends. Old Dickson used to get furious.

Albert Dickson was our 6^th grade teacher and my nemesis. He was cruel and vindictive.

"If you dear boys do insist on sitting together," he'd whine like Bernard King. "Although, why a thoroughly nice boy like Garth wants to sit next to a thoroughly horrible boy like Christian – the old bastard hated me - "I will never understand." I think he could sniff a younger, cuter, smarter gay boy present and used to think, I have to tear him down, for my own preservation – "You will have to wear name tags."

"If one of us is thoroughly horrible and one of us is thoroughly nice," I would ask cheekily. "Why do we have to wear name tags?"

"Thank you Christian," he'd spit back. "I can pick horrible, when I hear it."

Garth would rub my back when Dickson was mean to me, Garth was my hero, he'd always find me, we'd always hang together.

I got shingles that year, from being forced to spar beyond my years, by a biter old homophobe, married forty years with children – in his polyester suits and cravats and his coiffured grey hair. (The man was the biggest closet homo, I don't know how people couldn't see it?).

Both our mothers picked the wrong one of us as their son, in the school photo. It was a set-up. We asked them pointedly. I was amazed when Garth told me.

"My mum picked you, saying it was me." I was taken aback when my mum did the same thing, even if Lottie only hesitated over Garth and then picked me. After which, I remember I sighed in relief.

Garth went to a high school from year 7. His parents could no longer afford the fees, or something, I can't really remember now. All I heard was that he was leaving. We were both devastated. We said, "Twins forever," the day he left. We shazambed! our knuckles afterwards, in silence. We gazed at each other for the longest time, our last time together, before Garth's mother pulled him away by the hand. I watched him go, as he did me.

I've never had another twin – everyone would say years later that David Sweetman looked like my brother, but never another twin. I wonder if Garth still remembers? I wonder if he still looks like me?