Half-Normal
When Jack-Anakin-Gowron Smith was born, the man at the registry council office read the form back twice, apparently hoping that one of the two readings might reveal the situation to be a joke. It didn’t.
Veronica, the baby’s mother had reluctantly settled on “Jack” with “Anakin” as a middle name. His father, Bernard, had wanted “Anakin-Gowron”. Neither would back down, and so, in the manner of most disputes between two extremely stubborn people, both names went on the certificate, end to end, like a small pile-up nobody had ever bothered to clear from the road.
Jack-Anakin-Gowron Smith.
Even as a baby, his name amounted to a custody arrangement. The first third belonged to his mother. The middle two names belonged to his father. The surname was his mother’s, which had been part of the now-infamous name negotiations of this little boy.
Jack’s parents, Veronica and Bernard, had spent exactly one night together, nineteen years earlier, after an office Christmas party that neither of them had especially enjoyed. Veronica remembered it afterwards as a drunken mistake she’d had the good sense not to repeat. Bernard remembered it as the single most significant event of his adult life, a distinction he mentioned rather more often than Veronica was comfortable with, at the likes of parents’ evenings, hospital waiting rooms, and even Jack-Anakin-Gowron’s own eighth birthday party at Pizza Hut.
Veronica was an accountant. She liked dinner parties, walking holidays with couples she’d known since university, and diaries filled in six months ahead, first in pencil, then, once she was sure, in pen.
Bernard worked nights in a factory that manufactured, depending on which week you asked him, either industrial fixings or “components for a supply chain he had every reason to distrust”. Bernard liked science-fiction conventions, internet forums with names like TruthWatch and OpenSkiesUK, and explaining, unprompted and at length, precisely why the moon-landing footage didn’t add up to anyone with a brain.
They had nothing in common except their son, and even he was shared a little awkwardly, like a jumper that fit neither of them particularly well, but that both were too proud to admit didn’t ever suit them.
Veronica’s house sat on a cul-de-sac where every front garden looked uncannily like the one next to it, as though a single template had been quietly agreed upon at some residents’ meeting that nobody could quite remember attending. The neighbours knew one another’s names, and their children’s names, and roughly how much everybody’s extension had cost. Children rode bicycles in the road without incident. At Christmas, identical strings of white lights appeared along every roofline within forty-eight hours of one another. At Easter, everybody complained, like a perfect choir, about the traffic to the garden centre. At summer barbecues, the talk always turned, eventually and with a kind of tidal inevitability, to Greece.
Jack-Anakin-Gowron had been to Greece nine times. By sixteen, he could identify eight varieties of feta and had opinions, solicited or not, about most of the ferry companies there. His stepfather Tim considered this a valuable education.
Tim was also an accountant. Of course he was. At the wedding, more than one guest had described him, without any apparent unkindness, as: “the male version of Veronica”, and nobody in earshot had thought to disagree with this. Tim was patient, dependable, and read every instruction manual twice before assembling so much as a shelf. In thirteen years, he had never once tried to replace Bernard, which was fortunate, since replacing Bernard would have required tools that did not exist.
Bernard lived twenty miles away, above a betting shop, in a council bedsit with a carpet that had given up some years earlier and a television that had not. Every wall was crammed with shelves and bookcases of action figures, arranged according to a system Bernard referred to, with total seriousness, as “chronological rather than by release order”. This was a distinction that Jack learned the importance of at age eight, after mistaking a Clone Trooper for a Stormtrooper and receiving, in response, a forty-five-minute lecture involving two hand-drawn timelines and, at one point, a biro diagram of the entire Republic. The bedsit smelled of instant coffee, stale sweat, and warm electronics. Whenever Jack stayed over, Bernard slept on the sofa without discussion, every single time, no matter how firmly his son protested or how old he got. Bernard never explained this. To him, it required no explanation.
When Jack-Anakin-Gowron was eight, his teacher asked the class to draw their families. Most children produced houses, stick figures, a dog, and a sun in the corner with a face on it. Jack-Anakin-Gowron stared at the paper for the better part of ten minutes. Then he drew two planets, side by side, connected by nothing at all. One was neat, its surface ruled into orderly little sections. The other was chaotic, crowded with tiny spacecraft, several of which appeared to be on fire. His teacher rang Veronica that afternoon, gently concerned that the drawing suggested some emotional distress at home.
It didn’t. It was, if anything, admirably precise.
That same year, Bernard came to his school’s autumn fair dressed, without being asked to, as an X-wing pilot from Star Wars, on the grounds that “somebody ought to make the raffle interesting”. He stood by the tombola in full orange flight suit while other fathers milled around in fleeces discussing loft conversions. Most of the children thought this was the best thing that had ever happened at a fair. Several parents did not know where to look. Jack-Anakin-Gowron, aged eight, experienced both emotions simultaneously, in roughly equal measure, and would go on experiencing that exact combination for the following decade.
The older he got, the more clearly Jack-Anakin-Gowron could see the social, cultural, and economic gap between his parents, and the more precisely he understood which side of it he was expected to stand on for any given hour of the day.
His mother understood conversation in the way that other people understood breathing. She knew when someone was joking, when they were quietly furious, when they wanted comfort rather than advice. She moved through a room like a woman reading from a script everyone else had apparently been issued at birth. She was socially perfect.
Bernard, however, approached social situations the way a nervous man approaches a level crossing: slowly, with great caution, and usually just badly enough to make things worse. At restaurants, he answered rhetorical questions literally. At parents’ evenings, he stood near the exits, as though anticipating a fire. At football matches, he ignored the game and analysed the referee’s positioning with the grim focus of a man building a case for appeal. People found him odd. Some found him exhausting. A handful, mostly other people’s dads, found him quietly, helplessly funny. Almost nobody found him easy. Except, somehow, against all apparent logic, his only child Jack-Anakin-Gowron.
The redundancy came six months before university. Bernard had worked at the factory for fourteen years, and when they finally sacked him, nobody was surprised, least of all Bernard.
“Apparently,” he told his son, over the phone, in the tone of a man reporting minor traffic delays, “they took issue with me raising evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“The evidence.” Bernard said this the way other people said “obviously”.
“Evidence of what?”
There was a pause, as though the question itself were faintly insulting.
“Asbestos. Surveillance. The pharmaceutical companies. What the banks actually do with your money once it leaves the building.”
“Right,” said Jack-Anakin-Gowron, knowing better than to sigh.
“The truth upsets people, son.”
“I don’t think that was quite it, Dad.”
Bernard frowned; Jack-Anakin-Gowron couldn’t see it, but he could hear it happening, the particular silence of a man encountering reality behaving unreasonably, which was often.
Money tightened after that. Bernard stopped buying takeaways, rarely replaced worn clothes, and kept the heating off except on the very worst nights. And yet, somehow, he still made it to every convention, every comic con, every collectors’ fair, every draughty leisure centre in the country hosting a weekend of people dressed as other people. It was, Jack-Anakin-Gowron eventually understood, the one place where his father ever looked entirely at ease: surrounded by strangers who also owned three different versions of the same lightsaber, and saw nothing at all strange in that.
The name became a genuine problem shortly after Jack-Anakin-Gowron’s eighteenth birthday. It wasn’t that he’d only just started hating it (he’d hated it quietly and consistently since roughly Year Four), but that, at eighteen, hating it stopped being the end of the conversation and became, for the first time, the beginning of one.
The university paperwork arrived in March. Every form was printed with the same unbroken line: Jack-Anakin-Gowron Smith. Looking at it laid out formally, in an official font, for an official purpose, something in him gave way quietly, like a seam finally admitting it had never really held.
He raised it at dinner that evening. Veronica looked relieved, in the manner of someone who has been waiting patiently for a decision she considers obvious. Tim looked entirely unsurprised and continued seasoning his potatoes.
“Honestly,” Veronica said, “I did wonder when you’d finally say something.”
“You don’t mind?”
“You’re eighteen. You’re an adult now.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters. It’s your name. You get to decide what it is.”
The simplicity of it was almost disorienting. Of course she understood. That was how Veronica’s world worked: things were named, agreed, filed, and finished.
Bernard’s reaction was, predictably, less tidy.
“You want to drop Anakin and Gowron?”
“Yes.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes, Dad. Both of them.”
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“Why?”
Because it’s mortifying, Jack-Anakin-Gowron wanted to say. Because substitute teachers pause on it and smile in a way that makes the whole class turn round and grin. Because at least thirty separate strangers have made a lightsaber noise at me in my life.
“I just want to be normal, Dad.” He finally settled on.
Bernard looked at him for a long moment, the particular look he reserved for statements that offended him on a nearly philosophical level.
“Normal,” he said, “is a setting on a washing machine. Not a little boy.”
The real argument happened three weeks before Jack-Anakin-Gowron left for university, on a wet Tuesday evening in the bedsit, while Bernard rearranged a shelf of action figures that did not, as far as his son could tell, need rearranging.
“Are you ashamed of me?” Bernard asked, without turning round.
“Of course not, dad.”
“You’ve thought it for years.”
Jack-Anakin-Gowron said nothing, which was, in itself, an answer, and they both knew it.
“You’ve never once brought a friend here. Not one, in eighteen years.” Bernard continued.
“Dad…”
“You tell people you hate your name.” Bernard said it lightly, almost fondly, which somehow made it worse. “I’ve heard you do it. At the school gates. Your mate Ollie’s birthday bash. You’ve got a whole little script.”
There was nowhere left to put the silence, so Jack-Anakin-Gowron finally sat down on the arm of the sofa his father slept on every single time he visited.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of being two different people. Of switching it on and off depending on which house I’m in. I’m too weird for Mum’s world and too normal for yours, and I’ve spent my whole life translating between the two of you, and I just don’t want to do it anymore. I want to be one person.”
Bernard didn’t answer straightaway. He set down the figure he was holding, carefully, as he set down everything, and lowered himself into the single armchair, which groaned in a way that suggested it had heard all of this before, from a different angle.
“I spent forty-eight years wishing I was normal,” he said eventually.
Jack-Anakin-Gowron blinked. His father almost never talked about himself. He talked about evidence, timelines, and things other people had got wrong, but almost never about the actual shape of his own life.
“I thought that if I just learned the rules properly, I’d fit in somewhere.” Bernard almost laughed. “Turns out everybody else got given a handbook I never saw. I’ve been improvising the whole way through.”
The room felt suddenly smaller, and much less full of plastic than it had a moment before.
“I wanted you to have something different,” Bernard said.
“Anakin-Gowron?”
“Not the name. Not really.” He looked down at his hands, then back up, and for once didn’t reach for a diagram. “When your mum told me she was pregnant, I knew exactly how it was going to go. I knew you’d grow up mostly in her world. Nice house, nice garden, Greece every summer. I knew I’d be the bit you visited. The bit you slept over at, twice a month, surrounded by what others call junk.” He said it without self-pity, which was somehow harder to hear than if he had. “So I picked a name that meant you’d never fully belong to either side. Not without a fight, anyway.”
“That’s a horrible reason to give a baby a stupid name, Dad.”
“Probably,” Bernard agreed with a shrug, before returning to the shelf of action figures that he was organising.
The deed poll paperwork went in a week later, just in time, for his university registration to read simply: Jack Smith.
It was clean, simple, and ordinary, in the way he’d been asking for since he was old enough to spell his own name, which had, admittedly, taken rather longer than for most children.
For the first fortnight of term, the new normal name felt like relief. Then, without warning, it started to feel like something closer to loss, the particular hollowness of a room after a piece of furniture you never liked has finally been removed, and you find yourself looking, out of habit, at the space where it used to be.
Filling out a society membership form in his third week, Film Society, as it happened, he reached the line marked “Preferred Name”, and, without deciding to, wrote:
JAGS
Nobody here needed to know it, but it was an acronym of his former name.
He looked at it for a while. Then he smiled, not because it was perfect, but because it wasn’t, and because neither half of his life had ever been perfect either, and he no longer saw much point pretending otherwise.
Someone at the sign-up table glanced at the form and then looked up at Jack Smith.
“Jags?” she asked him. “That’s an unusual name!”
“It’s mostly from my dad,” Jags replied with a genuine smile.
Photo Credits
Photo 1 by Luma Pimentel on Unsplash
Photo 2 by Daniel Miksha on Unsplash
Photo 3 by Lucy Davis on Unsplash
Photo 4 by Vika Fleysher on Unsplash
Photo 5 by Montironi Valentino on Unsplash
Photo 6 by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash
Photo 7 by Tom Radetzki on Unsplash
Photo 8 by R.D. Smith on Unsplash
Photo 9 by Andrew Amelianovich on Unsplash
Photo 10 by Daniel Ali on Unsplash
Photo 11 by Yazid N on Unsplash
Photo 12 by Agnieszka Stankiewicz on Unsplash
Photo 13 by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash
