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Gary had always been proud of his patience. It was the quality that had helped him make it through the wilderness years, waiting in the US for the UK to accept him again, and then through the early years of the reunion where he waited for all the pieces to fall together. Heck, it was completely fitting that the single that brought them back was called “Patience”.
But no one in his life, from his kids to the most rabid of fans to even Simon Cowell, had ever tried his patience as much as the man standing before him, giving him the five millionth excuse why he wasn’t up to another writing session.
“Gaz, I haven’t slept a wink in 72 hours,” Rob said, shifting from foot to foot but seemingly more annoyed at having to explain himself than sorry that he’d let Gary down. “My insomnia has gotten awful again, and you know I can’t take anything for it.”
“And it has nothing to do with getting a copy of FIFA 2013 three days ago, right?” Gary tried not to betray his annoyance, but his words had a distinct bite to them.
“The only thing that calms my mind is to get lost in the game,” Rob said. “I have to do something.”
“Funny, when I need my mind calmed it’s the music that soothes me,” Gary commented dryly.
“That’s because you’re obsessed,” Rob rejoined. “You never shut yourself off. It’s fucking annoying sometimes.”
The remaining bits of Gary’s self control began to tatter.
“You know what, Rob?” he spat out. “I’ve been here four days. I came in the middle of the X Factor live rounds just because you said you had stuff ready to go and a ton of ideas. And in four days, I’ve gotten a tan and bought suits for the rest of the series, but not a single song worked on. But somehow I’m the one who’s fucking annoying?”
“Well excuse me for thinking you’d like to see me,” Rob replied with a mixture of anger and hurt. “I didn’t realize that everything was only about writing fucking songs.”
“It’s not all about writing songs, but I’m not at your beck and call like the rest of your entourage,” Gary said. “I have a life. I have a family who miss me. I have people I’m mentoring on a show who had to talk to me via Skype instead of in person. For all I know they’ll be completely shit tomorrow night, because I haven’t seen their production at all.”
“I know, I know, you’re big and important and I’m just another fuckup you have to get in line,” Rob said heatedly. “I don’t know why you even bother, frankly.”
Gary stood up and picked up his leather messenger bag angrily.
“You know, I don’t either,” he said. “You talk a big game about changing, even how I changed you. But you don’t really walk the walk, Rob. And you have no fucking idea how hard it is to be me when I have to deal with everything and you add your shit.”
“Well, you have no clue how hard it is to be me and know that I am never going to be good enough for you,” Rob responded, turning his back from Gary on the patio towards the Los Angeles horizon. “I can’t live up to the standards of Sir Gary Barlow, the king of everything. Same as it was in the 90s and even more insufferable now.”
Gary shoved his chair forward, scraping the concrete with a ferocity that belied the anger boiling in his belly. He walked toward the door.
“Whatever, Rob,” he said. “I know you can’t be bothered to get me to the airport, so I’ll show myself out.”
Gary stormed out as Rob continued to glare at the horizon.
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Eight hours later, Gary was negotiating his way into a first-class cabin for the second leg of his flight back to London. Things had not gone any better for him since his fight with Rob. He had managed to get to LAX with the help of Josie, who had apparently been lurking during the argument and had quietly arranged for a driver to load his bags and get him to the airport. But thanks to a ridiculously long line at security and a slightly intrusive search of his baggage, he barely made his first flight. Instead of flying to New York for his Heathrow transfer, he was forced to go to Atlanta, an airport he was unused to and which had the most confusing terminal system in the universe. He got on the wrong tram to the wrong terminal and almost routed himself to Fargo, North Dakota instead of London, meaning he once again nearly missed his flight.
He plopped tiredly into his seat, thankful that for this trip he had no assistant or family or band members sitting next to him, forcing him to be social. Rob was not the only one who had trouble sleeping recently - the main problem with a short London-to-LA trip is that the jet lag never really went away. At noon it felt like midnight, and he knew the next day back home would be hellish. Especially since he was going straight from Heathrow to the ITV Studios for the live X Factor show. He rubbed his temples wearily at the thought.
Thirty minutes later the plane had reached cruising altitude, Gary had a Jack and Coke in hand and life didn’t seem quite so bad. But it was still time for him to put an early end to a shit day ending a shit week in LA. He put on his Bose headphones, turned on his favourite relaxing playlist on Spotify on his iPhone, and strapped the silk eyeshade over his eyes, reclining his seat back as far as it would go. He hoped that no fans decided that this would be a great time for an autograph and that he’d sleep straight through to Heathrow. And as he drifted off, he thought that Rob really did have no clue how hard it was to be Gary Barlow sometimes.
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Back in Los Angeles, Rob laid sprawled on his bed. Ayda was next to him, sound asleep despite the relatively early hour. Teddy was teething and fussy, and despite the nanny she insisted on being up with her as much as she could when she woke up crying in pain. Rob didn’t feel quite the necessity to be with his crying daughter, but he realized that was yet another thing wrong with him. He was not only a shit songwriter and a shit collaborator, but a shit father and husband, apparently.
Since Gary had left earlier, both Ayda and Josie had tried to talk him out of his black mood. Ayda was truthfully just about as annoyed as Gary was by Rob’s latest computer game, seeing as it was impossible to have any sort of family or couple time with him when he was engrossed, but she also knew that Rob’s obsessions were part of him, a needed escape from all the other things that could occupy his brain and drive him to even darker habits. So mostly she tried to just listen to him rant and occasionally point out that no, Gary was actually on his side, only dealing with a lot on his own. That only lead to a detailed history from Rob of all of the times Gary had put his ambition over his friendships and had put work over fun.
Josie, having heard this history from Rob regularly since the late ‘90s, was more direct - he didn’t need to let all that crap they put in the past come back out as ammunition. She knew enough to know that when he was on the outs with Gary, he just had no joy in doing anything remotely productive. It was ironic that the man who had largely been blamed for all of Rob’s anxieties in the ‘00s had also been one of the main reasons Rob had moved past the stage fright and started enjoying his work again. She didn’t want to lose that.
But Rob couldn’t be talked out of his anger this time, and eventually the women decided that at least for now repairing the Gary/Rob friendship was a lost cause. One last effort to cheer Rob up via a nice sushi spread was unsuccessful, so Josie went home, Ayda went to sleep and Rob laid next to her, flipping through his special UK television setup and finding that even watching Manchester City lose a match miserably was small comfort.
Rob finally closed his eyes. He normally stayed up most of the night, but after four days of no sleep the universe gave him a solid. His last thought as he went to sleep is that he wished Gary knew, just once, what it was like to be him.
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When Gary woke up several hours later, he anticipated seeing the muted lighting of the British Airlines cabin, the bland leather seat in front of him, and the remains of the Jack and Coke on the stand before him. He expected to still hear the drone of the plane engine as it continued its journey across the Atlantic.
Instead, he saw a dark room with a king sized bed. The only light was coming from a gigantic projection television, droning mindless teleshopping ads he recognized from late-night telly back home. And as he turned his head, he saw a blonde head on the pillow beside him. But instead of Dawn’s light blonde, shoulder length hair, he saw darker blonde curls spilling over onto the bed.
Suddenly he realized that instead of being on a plane, he was in Rob’s bedroom back in Los Angeles. In bed with Ayda.
He jumped out of the bed, thinking that surely something must have happened he didn’t remember. He must have missed his plane, or maybe that whole horrible day was just a dream. Maybe he had sleepwalked from his usual attic room to Rob’s room and accidentally went to bed in Rob’s bed. Maybe this was a dream. Yeah, that’s it.
He ran into Rob’s bathroom and flipped on the light.
Ayda had been sleeping soundly, used to Rob’s nocturnal tossing and turning and not even noticing when he woke up. But suddenly a loud cry from the bathroom jolted her to sleep. Scared out of her wits, she ran into the bathroom and saw her husband staring at himself in horror in the mirror.
“Rob, what happened?” she asked. “Are you alright? Is Teddy okay?”
The man turned and looked at her, and she realized whilst he had Rob’s dark hair, hairy chest and all the tattoos, something was distinctly different about him. His normal bottle green eyes were much lighter in colour. They looked like Gary’s eyes.
“I’m not Rob!” he said in a different voice from Rob’s usual musical tones. “What the fuck has happened to me?”
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Around the same time, Rob woke up and found himself slumped in a first-class seat on a darkened plane. He blinked repeatedly, trying to remember if he had lost track of time and was taking a trip somewhere that he didn’t remember. He looked over next to him for Ayda or Josie and saw no one. Everyone around him was asleep.
He looked down at his clothes. Instead of his usual plane attire of sweats and trainers, he was wearing skinny jeans and a polo. And what the fuck had happened to his tattoos?
He jumped up and went to the toilet. If anyone had been awake to witness it, they would have heard a distinct squeak coming from the other side of the door as Rob looked at himself in the mirror. Because suddenly Rob had blonde hair, a beard and was several inches shorter. The only thing about him that wasn’t Gary was his eyes, which were Rob’s distinctive green.
Rob stared at himself in the mirror for several more minutes and started examining himself, even making sure that all his “male parts” were intact (he was actually kind of impressed with what he found.) Finally, he just started laughing.
For years, Rob had wondered what he would do if he were Gary. If he were loved and adored by everyone, the darling of the nation, he was the leader of the band. But also what it would be like if Gary weren’t so rigid, so controlling, had so many sticks up his arse.
It looked like he was going to actually find out.