“It doesn’t matter.”
The old ham rolls his eyes. “I tell you what, Anna, I’d be more than happy to take you through your lines. After twenty years in the theatre, I do know a couple of tricks of the trade.”
“Thanks,” she says, shooting me a glance and mouthing the word ‘help’. “I might take you up on that.”
“Yeah, cheers, Tim,” I say, “but Anna and me are going to walk back to college and run a couple of scenes together.”
“And I suppose you want me to sit in?”
“No!” says Anna. “Erm, I mean, it would be a criminal waste of your experience at the moment – maybe in a couple of weeks’ time?”
This seems to pacify him. “As you wish. I was planning on taking a little liquid refreshment anyway.”
“Take as long as you like, Timothy. I’m sure Anna won’t mind hitching me up to my computer.”
“Thank you kindly, young master,” says De Niro, touching his baseball cap like a comedy servant, “but have no fear, I’ll be back for bedtime. Toodle-pip.”
The Actor
A rather wicked thought flickers across my mind as I watch the odd couple disappear up Walton Street. I don’t want to put anyone off their cornflakes, but just now I need a good chuckle, so what the hell? Is this love’s young dream that I see before me? In a Channel 4 film perhaps; that gritty, fantasy world, where plucky northern housewives transform their lives, where unemployed miners regain their self-respect in feel-good strip cabals, and the quadriplegic always gets the girl. Sorry, that was in frightfully bad taste. Someone told me that this part of town, to which I am strangely drawn, is where Jude (the Obscure) was supposed to have lived. With which literary character do you most identify? Juliet? Starsky and Hutch? It’s full of Victorian terraces, rather grim, in as much as anything can look grim in Oxford. There’s the occasional student coffee bar (checked tablecloths and pastel shades) but, on the whole, it has an empty quality, far removed from all that bloody architecture and the endless swarms of cocksure, middle-class kids with better A level results than me. By the way, there’s only one place in Oxford where you can get a decent cappuccino. But if you think I’m going to tell you where it is, so you can muscle in on my favourite window seat, you can go and take a flying fuck.
“Oh, bollocks, what does she want now?” If it wasn’t essential that my agent (Bunny Michelmore at Bunny Michelmore Management) be able to contact me 24⁄7, I’d have thrown this bloody mobile in the Cherwell weeks ago.
“Hello, Mrs Owen. I assume you’re enquiring after Michael.”
I always get the feeling she’s expecting me to tell her I’ve accidentally left him stranded on the hard shoulder of the M4 or something.
“How is he?”
“He’s fine.”
“What about his bowel management, how’s he doing?”
Given that all Michael has to do is shit and piss himself, I should have thought that question was more properly addressed to the chief cook and bottle washer. “As I said this morning, everything’s under control.”
“Good, good. I do worry about him, you know.”
Oh, really, I would never have guessed. “I am doing my best, Mrs Owen.”
“Oh, yes, yes, please don’t think that…You’re doing a wonderful job, Timothy. Michael’s very lucky to have you, it’s just that he’s my little boy and I wish I was still looking after him.”
Now there’s something we both agree on. “You ought to get out more.”
She laughs hysterically. “I haven’t been out for the last seven years – apart from church, of course. What on earth would I do?”
I was faced with the same dilemma when I left SOWINS, but I’m not about to suggest that she commandeers the female equivalent of the Purrfect Pussy. “How about ballroom dancing? Or tiddlywinks, perhaps?”
“Michael said you were a funny person. Can I speak to him, by the way?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Owen, he’s with a lady friend.”
“He’s what?” she says, sounding like it’s a sure-fire sign that Armageddon is imminent.
“I told you about that ridiculous business with the play? Well, he’s having a private rehearsal with Ophelia.”
“I’m sure he’s got time for a quick word with his mother.”
“No can do, I’m afraid. I thought I should leave them to it, so I’ve popped out to the…that is, I felt I needed some space, so I’m taking a brief constitutional.”
I can almost hear her nodding sagely. “Starting to get you down, is it?”
“Well, I…”
“I’m so sorry. I should have warned you about that. Caring for Michael can be a great joy, of course, but sometimes you just want to…” She sounds like a lapdog yelping. “How are you, Timothy? Are you coping all right?”
It’s been so long since anyone enquired after my mental state that I’m lost for words. If I allow myself to give the question some serious consideration, I could be struggling here. “Well, I…”
“I’ll pray for you.”
And when I turn the corner, there in front of me is the answer to a youngish man’s prayers. The Fatted Calf is my refuge in a drab and unforgiving world. It’s like Stars in Their Eyes; I’ll walk into that pub a nobody, and after three or four pints, I’ll emerge from the cigarette smoke feeling like Marlon Brando in Streetcar…
“Sorry, Mrs Owen, you’re breaking up. Let’s talk again tomorrow.”
The Quadriplegic
“I loved you not.”
“I was the more deceived. He points to the what? Faldstool? Any ideas, Michael?”
“You’d better have a look in the glossary.”
I thought the whole private rehearsal thing was just a ruse to get rid of De Niro. I couldn’t believe she actually wanted to go through with it. So here I am, with a real girl not two feet away from me; close enough to feel her breath on my face, close enough to see the pinky whites of her eyes.
“Faculty, false fire… no, doesn’t say anything about faldstools.”
The strap of a white cotton undergarment has appeared in the V of Anna’s black fluffy jumper. Perhaps if I was a real boy she’d self-consciously try to push it back in again, but with me she feels safe enough to let everything hang out. This is probably the nearest I’m ever going to get to first base. Why couldn’t God – in his divine mercy – have seen to it that my fantasy life was as erotically challenged as the rest of me?
“Perhaps our director could enlighten us.”
“Oh, him,” says Anna, sinking slowly onto the sofa and hugging herself like she’s wearing a straitjacket. “I doubt very much he’d be able to help.”
I’ve been trying to get round to this since we started. Every time Philip is mentioned, she goes all weird on me. What’s the story, I wonder? “Is there something you want to talk about, Anna?”
“Not really, I mean…you don’t want to hear about my…do you?”
God knows why, but – along with dogs and homosexuals – women tend to regard quadriplegics as excellent confidantes. It could be because we’re the ultimate captive audience, although I have a feeling that, despite the ‘remarkable courage’ wank-fest that people come out with from time to time, it’s because all elements of competition go out of the window when you’re wheel to wheel with a spaz. You might not want to admit to your next-door neighbour that your husband can’t quite cut it any more, but I’ve had complete strangers giving me blow-by-blow accounts of their divorce proceedings.
“Come on, Anna. I won’t bite, you know. Actually, biting’s one of the things I’m quite good at.”
She picks up the Chelsea FC cushion that Dad sent me for my thirteenth birthday and clutches it tight to her stomach. “I dunno, you’ll probably think I’m a headcase.”
I puff into my controller and move a few inches closer. “Try me.”
“I think what first attracted me to Philip was his incredible self-confidence.”
“It wasn’t his natural modesty, then?”
> She smiles, places the cushion on her knees and drums on it like a tom-tom. “He can talk about anything. George Eliot, Wittgenstein…Home and Away.”
“What about Neighbours?”
“You must have known we’ve been seeing each other.”
“Yeah, course,” I say, nonchalantly; grateful, for the first time in my life, that my body language can’t betray me. “Everyone knows you and Philip are an item.”
“Hardly,” she says, “at least not after tonight.”
My broad smile on the other hand is a dead giveaway. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I just want to know where I stand with the guy. I mean, I know we’re not Romeo and Juliet or anything, but I thought we were a little bit more than just good friends.”
On my first day in college, there was a glossy brochure waiting for me called Advice for Students. De Niro took great pleasure in quoting from it at length and holding up the ‘delightful’ full-colour illustrations. It was packed with useful tips like how to procure an abortion, the correct way to insert a Dutch cap, helpline numbers for every variety of deviant, and a failsafe method for identifying syphilitic penises. If that wasn’t enough to bring home to me how well and truly ‘special needs’ I am, then watching Anna sniffing into her sleeve and not being able to extend a consoling arm really rubs my nose in it. “Oh, come on, Anna. It’s not that bad.”
“All he wants is a bloody shag.”
Judging by Advice for Students that’s pretty well par for the course. “And you don’t?”
“Yes…no…look, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Because I’m a crip, you mean?”
“Because you’re a bloke.”
It’s probably the nicest thing that anyone’s ever said to me. “Cheers, Anna.”
She twists a lock of hair around her index finger. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m a…I mean, I haven’t…not because I’m religious or anything, I just…”
And finally the penny drops. “Oh, right…I see.”
Her bottom lip is trembling again. “I told you you’d think I was a headcase.”
“Course I don’t.”
“Well, Philip does. When I said that…God, it makes me sound like a silly schoolgirl…”
“What does?”
“That I wasn’t ready. That I wanted the…”
“First time?”
“Yep, wanted it to be, you know…special. He thought I was joking. Now he calls me ‘the last virgin in Oxford’. Says it’s why he cast me as Ophelia.”
Speaking as someone who will never have a first time, even an abusatory one, it’s quite hard for me to be completely sympathetic, but I manage to put on my best caring-profession face – fuck knows I’ve seen enough of them. “That’s terrible.”
“Now he keeps trying to rub it in. Why do you think he made us do that improvisation about the prostitute? It makes me feel like going out and sleeping with someone just to get him off my back.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Anna.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not the last virgin in Oxford. In ten years’ time you’ll probably have six kids or something, but I’m never going to get my end away.”
She thinks for a moment. “Yes, but that’s because you’re a…sorry, shall we press on?”
“Get thee to a nunnery: why ivouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent… Anna, are you OK?” Her hysterical laughter stops me mid-iambic and I seriously wonder if she might not be a headcase after all. “What’s the matter?”
“That wallpaper, I’ve only just noticed it. How can you live with that?”
“They say you can get used to anything if you live with it long enough.”
“Sorry, Michael, I didn’t mean to…” She leans towards me, her elbows on her knees. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you always been – they don’t call it disabled any more, do they – but have you always been, you know?”
“No, it just seems that way.”
“Then how…?”
Whenever anyone asks me that question, I feel like a celebrity on an endless round of chat shows. Only I haven’t got a new movie to promote, so rather than polish up the anecdote for Parky (the bastard lifeguard who just had to play the hero; the genius psychiatrist who pronounced that I ‘might’ get a bit depressed), I try to get it over with as quickly as possible. “I was nine years old. It was an accident – chance in a million and all that. They said at the hospital I was lucky to be alive.”
This is the point at which most people get tongue-tied or start reminiscing about ‘quadriplegics I have known’. Not Anna, unfortunately.
“Can you feel anything?”
“Anger, bitterness – a soupçon of despair now and then.”
“You know what I mean.”
I read on a website somewhere that it’s best to be upfront at the beginning of any relationship. I can see that it probably makes sense to come clean about your love child, or 99 per cent of your sexually transmitted diseases, but there are certain skeletons that should always stay in the cupboard. “I can’t feel anything from my neck down.”
“Yes,” she says, stroking her cheek with the back of her hand, “that’s what I thought.”
There’s a photograph, at home, of the three of us on Littlehampton beach. Whenever I pass it, I feel like I’ve seen a ghost. Dad lies buried up to his neck in the sand and I’m standing over him with a green plastic bucketful of sea-water in my hand and an enormous grin on my face. Mum (who looks pretty damned good in her flowery bikini) is kneeling in the background, offering up a Tupperware container of ham sandwiches, like one of the three kings.
“So, what do you think, Michael,” says Anna, a bit more chirpily. “Did Hamlet sleep with Ophelia?”
∨ The Opposite Bastard ∧
6
Spirit of Health or Goblin Damned?
The Actor
The Fatted Calf is my kind of pub. I discovered it, quite by chance, the first week I was here. No log fires, no carefully selected secondhand books, and no bloody board games. No friendly joker of a landlord, no real ale, and above all no cast of eccentric regulars to brighten up my evenings with their autobiographical meanderings and homespun wit. Neither is it full of grunting louts in overpriced replica football shirts, but a disparate band of loners, cradling their drinks and peanuts, engrossed in the action like perverts at a peep show.
I’ve given up trying to ingratiate myself with the barmaid. “Pint of Guinness and a packet of salt and vinegar, please.”
A jaded forty-something, she has the permanent look of a woman who’s just tasted her first mouthful of sperm but can’t find anywhere to spit it out. “Hang on a minute. You’re not Timothy Salt, are you?”
This is somewhat unnerving. She doesn’t strike me as a person with a passion for regional theatre, and if she’d caught my Reverend Timms, surely she would have mentioned it weeks ago. “I might be.”
She gestured towards the Gents. “Someone over there wants a word with you.”
Who in God’s name can it be: a hitman, hired by one of the many women I have wronged, an undercover agent from the Inland Revenue? As you will have gathered, I am not one of nature’s optimists. I know it’s not SOWINS in search of a rapprochement, or Tom Champagne come to tell me I’ve won the Readers Digest draw.
“Hi, I’m Nikki, Nikki Hardbody.”
My mouth opens, but I am reminded of Jacobi’s magnificent tour de force in J, Claudius. “H-H-H-H-H-H…”
She proffers a slim and perfectly manicured hand. “It’s great to meet you.”
“Hello there. C-C-C-Can I help you at all?”
“I do hope so,” she purrs, shooting a glance, if I am not very much mistaken, at the crotch of my chinos. “I’m from Wellard Films.”
“Aaah.”
This is not how I imagined it. In my version it’s Bunny Michelmore who calls:
“
I think you’d better sit down, darling. You remember your Mr Scully [man in shop, episode 1,907] who witnessed the racist attack?” [‘There were two of them, white, must have been in their late…twenties. I didn’t get a proper look cos there was a milk float in the way.’] “The producers liked him so much that they want to make him a regular.”
Even in what SOWINS referred to as my ‘pathetic adolescent fantasies’, the architect of my good fortune was never a drop-dead gorgeous thirty-something in a beautifully cut business suit with a black lacy T-shirt that allowed you a tantalizing glimpse of her jugs. “You are Tim, aren’t you?”
It’s one of those moments of validation that I want to savour. If only Mum and Dad could be here. I hope at least that the barmaid is listening. “Yes, I’m Timothy. But how on earth did you find me?”
“Everyone I asked said you’d be in the pub. Now, let me get you another one of those, and then we’ll find a nice quiet corner and have a proper chat.”
♦
When I was a very young actor, I made it a rule of thumb never to sleep with the director. This was largely to avoid unnecessary confusion with gentlemen of a certain age. In Nikki Hardbody’s case, however, I might be prepared to make an exception.
“You’re the guy that looks after Michael, right?”
“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. But you needn’t worry, it wouldn’t be a problem. There are plenty of carers out there.”
I don’t generally approve of women smoking, but with Nikki it’s like watching a master class in fellatio. “Michael’s a pretty amazing young man, isn’t he?”
“What…well, I suppose…”
“Did you know he has an IQ of 176?”
This doesn’t feel quite right. It’s like making love to a woman who keeps getting your name wrong. “His mother might have mentioned it. I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
She sips at her sparkling mineral water, leaving a crimson stain on the rim of her tumbler. “I dug up the story in the Croydon Advertiser.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
The Opposite Bastard Page 6