‘Donalbain,’ she laughed. ‘Isn’t that part normally cut?’
More laughter. Ned explained that the person who had played the role in her production at Central was sitting at the table. A panicked expression came over her face and her eyes darted around the group. She turned to the man on her right. ‘Of course, how . . .’
‘Not him!’ barked Ned.
It took her three guesses before she stumbled upon me. I like to think that had he asked about the Second Murderer, she would have immediately remembered me.
The biggest lesson I learnt during that final year was that I couldn’t play a serious role. Try as I might, through no choice of my own, people only saw me as a clown. I remember once while rehearsing Ibsen’s Ghosts, the director was putting me through my paces as Oswald. I was supposed to be positioning someone so I could draw their portrait. I was fully into the part as I tilted the woman’s face towards the light. I grabbed an imaginary brush. Suddenly I was wrenched back to the harsh reality of the classroom. The director exploded, ‘You’re supposed to be an artist, not a fucking window dresser!’ At first I was crushed that I couldn’t do heavyweight, but then I noticed that the light, silly roles that I found relatively easy some people couldn’t do at all. I had always been the funny one at work in the restaurant or at home, so it made sense.
In the summer of 1989, as we said farewell to Central, it would have been a brave bookie to take odds on who would become successful. A remarkable number of us are still working, and even more remarkably are still friends, but very few of us have names that the average reader would recognise. Perhaps that is no bad thing; perhaps it is just shallow me who judges success in terms of fame.
The really lucky ones left with jobs already lined up. Sadly, that didn’t include me, but I was still relatively confident because at least I had managed to get an agent. Barry Brown was the perfect agent: loud, brash and very pragmatic. I had a meeting in his house and was suitably impressed by the furniture and paintings on the wall. If he was this rich on ten percent, imagine being the person who held on to the ninety percent. I sat back and waited for the auditions and the money to come flooding in.
There is a lot of talk in drama schools about agents and what role they play in an actor’s career. ‘When you get one, don’t forget that they are working for you – you are calling the shots,’ is what you usually hear. Of course the reality is very different and you soon realise that as a client they are doing you a favour by representing you. I quickly learnt this and stopped expecting the phone to ring. In fairness to Barry, I did get my first job quite quickly. In September I was temporarily rescued from waiting tables and whisked off to, if not exactly star in, appear in Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey at the Liverpool Playhouse. I was thrilled. I would be playing the parts of Tommy and of an English soldier. Thanks to Equity, the actor’s union that said that no two members could have the same name, Graham Walker was no more. From now on, I was Graham Norton, working actor.
I read the play, I marked my lines, I worked on the text. No matter that these were tiny parts – they would be perfectly performed. I got on the train full of shock and excitement that I was going to be earning money doing the one thing I had always wanted to do. When I got there, I found that a couple of other actors were nearly as inexperienced as me, but that for the most part the all-Irish cast were old hands who took it all in their stride. I quickly discovered that my new friend in the cast would be a man called Desmond Jordan. Funny and handsome, with a heart that contained just the right-sized streak of mean, he was exactly the sort of man I would fall in love with. The slight complication was that he was in his early seventies. Still, I had a new friend and it gave my heart hope that there were other people out there who could be just as nice and interested as Ashley had been before his transformation.
Home was a big boarding house near the cathedral. The other people staying there seemed to be mostly unhappy women who ate nothing but toast and silent young men who never did laundry. Also in residence was the city’s mice population. Tiny furry friends were everywhere you looked: on top of the TV, jumping out of the grill when you turned it on to make toast . . . Once there was even one floating whiskers down in someone’s bath water.
I spent time in the few gay bars the city had at the time – really just dimly lit rooms with mysteriously sticky carpets that smelt of poppers and aftershave. The only man I met was very beautiful but had a chronic problem with premature ejaculation. By a bizarre coincidence, a friend of mine has slept with him since and apparently his problem was all to do with a tight foreskin, but thanks to a circumcision later in life, my friend assures me that the situation is much improved. A nation rejoices.
I spent two months in Liverpool and had a great time – that much I know. How, is the mystery. The play was fine but hardly changed the world, and while my Tommy was a triumph, my English soldier left quite a bit to be desired. Night after night he would burst angrily on to the stage and kick over a chair. Night after night an audience would suppress a giggle. Now I was not just a window dresser, I was an irate one. If the English army had contained many soldiers like this one I think Ireland might have achieved independence quite a bit sooner.
Back in London, it was back to working in the catering asylum that was Melange and to waiting for my agent (how grand it still sounded!) to phone me. In between carrying plates, I managed to squeeze in a BT training film where I played a corpse. For any actor this is humiliating enough, but they made me audition. Mind you, at least I got the part; imagine being the poor creature who was rejected. Now I could add to my list of roles: dead window dresser. I also got a small part in a Fay Weldon television series called Growing Rich through Caroline Harker, a brilliant actress and friend who was playing the lead. I played Henry who, and this may surprise you, was not a window dresser – no, he was a waiter.
Something, however, didn’t feel quite right in my life. Drama school had been great fun, but I was beginning to wonder whether I really wanted to do acting as a career after all. I kept plugging away, doing all the things I was supposed to do – writing to casting directors, sending CVs to regional theatres – but the truth was my heart wasn’t really in it. I hated the lack of control, waiting for the phone to ring, being grateful for being allowed to work. It seems to me that the main difference between a successful actor and an aspiring one, as I was, isn’t so much to do with talent as with patience, and no amount of training at drama school can give you that.
Frustrated by both life and career, I was spending more and more time alone. Part of this was self-inflicted. The idea of dating anyone after what had happened with Ashley wasn’t very appealing, but also lack of money was another big factor in my finding myself sitting hunched over a small black and white television nursing a glass of red wine. More and more I had the house in Brixton all to myself, because Henry had got several jobs with opera companies abroad.
Although I never felt particularly unsafe in the house, while I lived there we were broken into twice. The first time they took the small black and white television. The second time they didn’t take anything – presumably they just went, ‘These poor shits have less than we do.’ But what really freaked me out was what happened to me one night after I had gone to bed in my room, which was at the top of the house. It was a very hot night and I lay naked on top of the duvet. I went to sleep. About two or three in the morning I suddenly woke up. An old woman with grey hair was standing at the foot of my bed. She was wearing what looked like a shapeless nightie and seemed to be rubbing her eyes. I remembered I was naked and pulled the duvet over myself. In a quick-fire round of deduction, I worked out that this must be the woman from next door who had been given an extra set of keys by Henry in case of emergencies, and I assumed she was most probably sleepwalking.
‘Hello,’ I ventured quietly.
Nothing. Still she rubbed her eyes.
‘Hello,’ I said, a little louder.
Again she failed to react. I began to dou
bt myself. I looked away and looked back. She was still there. Without making a sound she moved away from the bed towards a chair by the door. She began to sit down, but she did so just to the right of the chair, as if it had a ghost replica of itself by its side. Odd. Then, just as she reached the level of the seat, like a switch being turned off she disappeared. I was thrown into a state of terror and covered my head with my duvet. If she had evaporated like a shifting mist I might have convinced myself that she had never been there, but her sudden disappearance made it clear to me that I had seen a ghost.
Telling this story is a bit like me talking about having had sex with women – I know it happened but I still find it hard to believe. I have told very few people about it because it makes me feel like such a fat daytime television loser, but it did happen. Strangely, when Henry came back he was talking to this woman who lived next door and discovered that on the night of my visitation she had been seriously ill. Perhaps, and I know I’m sounding like Shirley MacLaine here, it wasn’t a visit from beyond the grave, but instead some sort of transferred energy from next door. Or perhaps I should drink less. Ah, wine! The truth is in there.
As a result of spending all this time on my own, my love life was uneventful. Although Ashley had left my heart squashed like romantic road kill, I still hoped that the man of my dreams would come along. I would look at men on the tube wondering, à la Sleepless in Seattle, if they were the one. There was a dark-haired boy I saw a few times on the Northern Line who always returned my glance. Then, one night I was having dinner in Melange and he was at another table with a large group of friends. We stared at each other for most of the evening, but neither of us did anything about it.
A few nights later I was in a South London gay bar called the Two Brewers. It was late and the dance floor was heaving to a disco remix of ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ (I have cancer, let’s dance!) when I saw him again. This time something had to happen. We walked towards each other, eyes locked, and within minutes we were kissing, within hours we were in bed, and by morning we were going out with each other.
A week of my new romance went by. I had met his flatmates, he’d stayed over at mine, and on Saturday night I took the rather big step of taking him with me to a friend’s party. This was the unveiling of ‘Graham’s new boyfriend’. All was going well and we were standing in one of those party circles, chatting. The new boy – who, you must have guessed by now, does have a name, it’s just that I can’t remember it – took it upon himself to start up a new strand of conversation:
‘What’s your favourite film?’
People who ask questions like this tend not to be actually interested in anyone else’s answer, they simply want to tell the group what their favourite film is. I was appalled that when it came time for him to do just that, the words The Color Purple fell out of his mouth. It’s one thing to be forced to admit to such an appalling lack of taste, but to actively want to share it with others seemed completely unacceptable to me. My ‘new boyfriend’ was rapidly becoming ‘some man I know’.
He then volunteered to the group that on the following Monday he was going to have a tattoo done. What? I had been going out with him for nearly a week and he hadn’t mentioned anything about this. Where was he going to have his tattoo? On his arse. Hmm. What was he going to have done? A picture of Winnie the Pooh holding a balloon. ‘Some man I know’ had just become ‘some man’.
A couple of years later, a friend who had been at the party bumped into him in a bar and asked him about the tattoo. Apparently on the Monday he had gone in to have it done, but it had hurt so much that he made them abandon the whole thing. Now, when he gets lucky and goes home with someone, he takes off his underpants to reveal the tattooed outline of a balloon. Presumably to avoid embarrassment he tells people it’s ringworm or a rare form of scabies.
All of my friends seemed to be moving on with their lives. People from Central were getting jobs and starting careers, my friend Helen had split up with Mike and then moved to Paris to be with her new boyfriend Remy, Nicola was going back to College . . . In comparison, I was just treading water.
I was still seeing lots of Syd. I loved being his friend and we had become close when I had stayed with him for a couple of weeks. His flat was on a large, bleak council estate in Peckham: taxis would drop visitors on the main road and they would make their way past abandoned shopping trolleys, broken glass and burnt-out cars towards Syd’s front door. Once inside it was like a tasteful monastery in its simplicity. Slowly Syd came to trust me as a friend and began to share the secrets of his past. To me, the life of a beautiful person seems so straightforward, but for Syd it had led to all sorts of complications and conflicts. His father was a truck driver, his mother his defender, he had run away from home (Canada) to live in Hawaii, he had worked as a model, he had played around the edges of prostitution. He was a very special man, a sexual angel – pure and debauched, sexy and sweet, all at the same time. He was loved by everyone, and I’m terrified that mutual friends who read this will think that somehow I’ve let him down.
During the couple of weeks we lived together, I noticed that he’d stopped drinking, and that he’d become very careful about what he ate. He became obsessed with bulking up. He would drink cans of condensed milk and then creep to bed very slowly and carefully to prevent vomiting. None of this was particularly remarkable to me – he looked great; of course he took care of himself. Then one day he announced that he was going back to Canada to visit his family. Fair enough. We bade farewell and I presumed I’d see him again in a few weeks.
One Saturday, while Syd was away, Sandy and David, two Canadian friends who knew Syd from Vancouver, arranged to have lunch with Rebecca, another good friend of Syd’s, and me. We met in a restaurant on St Martin’s Lane and chatted about where we had been, who we had seen, who was earning what, which clubs were good and which were crap. It was coffee time before David and Sandy went serious, and after many awful, awkward silences, reluctantly told Rebecca and me in the best way they could that Syd, special, sweet, sexy Syd, had AIDS and had gone back to Canada to be cared for by his parents.
Apparently he had written to his parents to tell them about his condition, had posted the letter and then had a dramatic change of heart. He had waited for hours by the postbox to get his envelope back, but the postman, the poor man, had to explain to a sobbing, pleading Syd that once posted, all mail became the property of the post office and couldn’t be returned. Once his mother knew the truth there was no resistance – he had to go home.
There was a lot of crying, and the waiters must have wondered what weird love pact at the table had just gone hideously wrong. Suddenly a lot of things and nothing made sense. We coped with the news as best we could over the next couple of weeks. At Melange the phone would ring late at night. Sweet, drug-fucked Syd would be calling from the hospital to tell us that he loved us. We’d hurriedly shout down the phone that we loved him too. Then his money would run out and, red-eyed, we’d have to deal with some customer who didn’t think their white wine was cold enough.
It was maybe a couple of months later when David phoned me with the news. ‘Syd’s gone.’ All across London I swear a thousand hearts were breaking.
Thousands of miles away, somewhere on the outskirts of Vancouver, a heartbroken mother couldn’t fulfil her son’s dying wish to be cremated. She couldn’t bear it, she had to keep him for as long as she could, so now there is a gravestone with Syd’s name on it. During all my crying, I had decided one thing – if God did exist, he wasn’t a very nice person.
7
I’m So Hungry I Could Eat the Hind Leg of the Lamb of God
SYD’S DEATH FORCED ME TO reassess things. I was working hard and making good money, but somehow I always managed to spend most of it on the way home. Life was fun sometimes, and the people I worked with were great, but on the whole I wasn’t enjoying it, or at the very least wasn’t enjoying the person it was turning me into. Every restaurant has a bitter old queen work
ing in it, and somehow, without me noticing and against my will, I had become that person. When I had started work at Smiths there had been waiters who were twenty-seven, and I remember looking at them with pity and wondering where their lives had gone wrong. Now here I was, nearly thirty, with no end of my catering career in sight.
I was approached for a part, and I decided to have another proper go at acting. In fact, I welcomed the distraction. I think it will tell you how low I had sunk when you learn how delighted and overjoyed I was to learn that I had been cast in the Harrogate Theatre’s production of Puss in Boots.
Harrogate, I have been known to say on occasion, is where they invented the lace doily. It is the capital of twee. It has endless shops – or should that be ‘Ye Oldye Shoppes’ – selling pot-pourri and stencils, but try buying a Fray Bentos pie or a packet of Smash instant potato. Before I got there everyone gushed on to me about a tea shop there and how wonderful it was. When I arrived I found overpriced tea being served on a bad BBC set for some low-rent Miss Marple.
The only highlight of the town as far as I was concerned was the Victorian Turkish baths: vast steamy halls covered in beautiful intricate tile and mosaic and full of towel-clad men of various degrees of attractiveness. Most men in there I presumed were straight, and of the obvious gay ones, there was only one elderly local man who was overt or aggressive about it, and he was only tolerated because of his age. If he did take a fancy to you, you simply walked to the pool at the other end of the room and it took him so long to follow you that by the time he arrived you were ready to move on to the next bath. I did speak to one man, though, who hadn’t seen this plan through properly. He had gone upstairs to the chill-out room to get away from the old man; however, he had made the fatal mistake of falling asleep on one of the mattresses there. He awoke to find a mysterious liquid deposit on his chest and saw the old man shuffling away with what might have been the slightest hint of a spring in his step. Turkish delight.
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