by John Challis
Once I’d got to Benalmadena, I found Inge at first quite wary and putting on an unmistakable show of Nordic feminine independence.
‘You can’t just come down here and think you can have whoever you want,’ she told me.
I’d already sensed that there was strong defensive streak in her, as if she were determined to resist being ‘exploited’. So we circled one another for a few days, testing the air, sensing the vibrations between us. I knew I had to get back to London again in a few days for a voiceover and the sexual tension mounted until, the day before I left, when Inge and I went to a flamenco bar which, with lamentable lack of judgement, encouraged the punters to have a go too. I’d already been spotted for my Boycie persona and was vigorously urged to get up and participate.
It must have been a pretty horrible sight, my attempts at heel tapping, hand-clapping, foot-stamping, arm-waving, pit-sweating flamenco dancing but at least on the way back, Inge slipped her muscular little arm through mine. ‘I suppose I can let you sleep in my bed tonight,’ she whispered huskily.
Inge lived in a small flat a little into the foothills just north of the town, where I was to spend a lot of time, on and off, over the next few months. The extraordinary thing about her was that the difficult, spiky aspects of her character would in anyone else have really put me off but in her case, and perhaps because of my own insecurities and low self-esteem, I found it gave her a grisly fascination, as a constantly renewing challenge, and I was somehow ensnared by her unrelenting trickiness. However, I still had to make a living and the voice-over work was consistently providing that between bigger jobs. Inge was disgusted that I should be employed in such a fatuous way.
‘Nobody ever paid me for anything I said,’ she complained and her resentment suggested that she thought my frequent trips back to England were a mere self-indulgence on my part.
Despite the regular bursts of hostility between Inge and me, there was also a great physical chemistry, which I’ve often found rather dangerously overcomes any rational considerations in a relationship.
We also shared a slightly perverse taste for exploration and adventure. We loved getting around, clambering up inaccessible gullies and tracks, as well as seeking out bars, ice-cream parlours, obscure al fresco eating places and, most importantly, identifying and mapping servicios of an acceptable standard in our neck of Andalusia.
A decent hygienic ‘facility’ was hard to find, especially inland. Although fastidious British tourists had been invading that part of Spain for thirty years, what was deemed adequate by the natives was usually out of the question for more prissy Northern Europeans. Very often all that was on offer was a hole in the ground, surrounded, if you were lucky, by cracked, discoloured porcelain, although more usually by a slab of local stone. While most of the time a chap could cope, for the ladies squatting over these things, with a handbag held swinging between gritted teeth was a gruesome form of hell. Add to that the usual absence of paper and the nightmare was total. Inevitably, as Inge and I sought out superior suitable facilities, she vigorously expressed an independent Danish woman’s resentment at a male’s ability to deal with emergencies simply by stepping behind a rock, a cactus or a growth of broom.
More positively, we had a wonderful trip to the great Alhambra Palace on the hills above Granada. We revelled in the tranquillity and beauty of the Moorish architecture and soothing atmosphere of the water gardens, which seemed to bring us closer together.
I loved the history of Southern Spain which had for centuries been an outpost of Islamic civilization and, curiously in the light of more recent events emanating from the Moslem world, far more advanced in urban sophistication than the rest of Europe at that time. The cities of what is now Andalusia were places of learning, with street lighting and proper sanitation, when London was still a warren of dark, stinking alleys and open sewers.
Despite the closeness brought on by occasional bursts of emotion shared with Inge, at the back of my mind I knew – although I wouldn’t admit it to myself – that I was rebounding from the Sabina debacle like a squash ball hit in fury, with a bit of top spin so you never knew where it would land. However, I couldn’t stop myself coming back to Spain again and again. I guess I needed the uncertainty of Inge’s feisty company to keep me on edge and for the adrenalin rush it gave me. But my frequent absences led to even greater tension between usand when Inge had had just a couple of glasses of Pinot Grigio, she could become a wild beast at any perceived infringement of her right to Scandinavian-style gender equality and would fight viciously to make her point.
A regular mantra of hers was that people should have the guts to stand up and tell others what they really were. This didn’t work for me, of course. I told her I was an actor precisely because I had no idea what the real me was!
She didn’t like that and tried to explain what she meant by using as an example a female Swedish rock star – married with two beautiful kids – who had suddenly recognized a fundamental truth about herself, and announced to a stadium full of fifty thousand people that from then on, she was going to dance at the other end of the ballroom, so to speak.
I wondered how this had affected her husband and lovely children.
‘Surely,’ I suggested, ‘some things are best left hidden, to protect the people you love?’
This provoked a tirade, a full-frontal attack on me, my profession, my personal integrity, and, indeed, my manhood.
‘You are just in love,’ she hissed through her teeth, ‘with the glitter, the false posturing, egocentric world of the preening exhibitionist. Look at you – colourful showy clothes, always projecting your voice, winking at men.’
‘Winking at men?’ I protested. ‘All the other stuff maybe, but not that!’
‘You do it. I’ve seen you. You don’t even know that you’re doing it, do you?’
I certainly didn’t know that I was winking indiscriminately at other men but I vowed to her that I wouldn’t do it again. She refused to take this seriously, mainly because at this stage in her rant she seemed to have lost all contact with reason and I started laughing. Her perspective was so preposterous and so unfair. In any case, even if she really thought these things, it was totally unreasonable to dish them up all at once. As I had just told her, some things are sometimes – indeed often – better left unsaid.
These extraordinary tirades could erupt frequently and without warning. But between them it was exciting and edgy and this made me want to go on working on our relationship, such as it was. In a sense I believe I was suffering an addiction to the drama and the adrenalin it kept pumping into my system.
Coming back from London one time, I drove all the way across France, to reach the border at Perpignan and take the road south along the Mediterranean, taking three days to reach Benalmadena from London.
By the time I arrived, Inge was spitting with fury. ‘Didn’t you think of the danger? Didn’t you think how worried I would be?’
It didn’t do any good telling her that I was a forty-six year old man, in tolerably good health, who could read a map. I suggested, not entirely convincingly, that what I had done was a kind of gesture, like the Swedish rock chick coming out as a lesbian in front of fifty thousand of her fans.
She retorted that at nearly fifty, I was displaying the immature reactions of a child of seven. But if I walked out after one of these knackering broadsides, she would beg me to return and when I did, she would greet me with an angry scowl. ‘I never wanted this, you know – it’s just stupid!’
I left again, and this time drove halfway across Spain to Toledo.
That evening as the sun went down I sat in the Plaza Mayor. The day had been bone dry and dusty; the cerveza was cool and golden. It was time for reflection.
I rang Inge. After a brief conversation, I was on my way back to Benalmadena.
Once I was there, for a brief interlude, all the absurd accusations were forgotten again in an intense, seemingly profound coming together, until the after-love drinks came
into play and the first bottles were empty.
I was treading on eggshells again: worse than that – eggshells on a mined Normandy beach!
I saw the danger signs as her top lip began to curl. ‘You cannot be a serious person,’ she growled. ‘In any case, a person of your age should not be pretending to be other people. Who are you, for God’s sake? I don’t even know who you are! Maybe you don’t!’
I didn’t answer. This was well-ploughed land. I sighed, gathered up my stuff and left again.
This time I drove all the way to Santander in the north west of Spain and got myself onto the Plymouth ferry before I could change my mind or make any ill-judged phone calls.
Back in England at two in the morning, I got turned over by the customs so thoroughly I thought they must have had some tip-off.
They took the car apart – and it was a modest Ford, not a drug runner’s Range Rover. They went through my luggage in minute detail, took away all my videotapes – presumably to look for porn – and put the sniffer dogs into the car, where they found nothing but an old congealed chocolate bar and an entrance ticket to the Alhambra in Granada, which I thought I’d lost.
I guess I must have looked pretty odd by then and a prime suspect for trafficking anything dodgy – a long-haired face off the telly, driving his mother’s old car off a ferry at two in the morning. After finding nothing, they had the good manners to apologise and make their excuses.
‘We can’t be too careful, you see. Just last week we had a couple, in their seventies driving a battered old Triumph Herald. We found 500 vinyl LPs in their luggage in the back. Each one had been split, filled with cocaine and stuck back together again. We only stopped them because they seemed to be smiling and waving a bit too much.’
‘I wasn’t smiling and waving,’ I protested.
‘No sure, you weren’t.’
I certainly didn’t feel like smiling and waving now. I was utterly drained physically and mentally, almost quivering with the tension I’d been under since leaving Inge’s apartment and I fell into the Holiday Inn (where I’d stayed when I was touring with Sabina in the Rivals), collapsed and slept for the next fifteen hours.
That evening I arrived back at Keith Washington’s little oasis of tranquillity and comparative sanity in the quiet streets of Mortlake. It wasn’t long before Inge’s phone calls started. I was badly torn.
A lot of me, especially the irrational, corporeal aspects of my persona missed her massively. On occasion the physical solace she had given me had been intense and overwhelming. But her negative, destructive side was so intolerable now as to cancel out all the good she could do. I went to bed that night and for the next few nights determined not to give in.
On the fourth day back, on a routine call to Tim Combe, my agent, I was told I’d been offered the lead in a new production of Willy Russell’s play, One for the Road.
The role was that of a youngish man, apparently happily married but at his wits’ end about his safe steady, suburban existence. He was a man on the edge, trying to foment a mini-revolution, protesting angrily against the straitjacket in which society and ‘the system’ were constraining him – a character very well matched to my own circumstances. I also liked that it was a long way from the increasingly popular and potentially stifling figure of Boycie, with the added attraction that it was to play in Gothenburg, Sweden, alongside a Swedish version of the same play. I was told that most Swedes learn English thoroughly at school and liked to see the two versions of a play side by side. I said I’d take the job, suddenly very relieved that it precluded me from opting to go back to the Dangerous Dane in Spain.
In the interlude before going off to Sweden, I occupied myself with my father, who was still living on his own in Epsom. I made frequent trips down there, to try and sort him out. He was getting worse at coping and seemed to lack the will to help himself. I bought him an electric kettle so that he could make himself a hot drink or soup or at least boil an egg between his regular visits from social services. I showed him how to use it but even this seemed beyond him. He put it on the gas stove and it finished up as a blob of melted plastic, like a fake blancmange in an art deco kitchen.
‘I tell you what, Dad,’ I said, trying to think positively. ‘Why don’t I arrange for you to have meals on wheels?’
‘How am I going to catch ’em, if they’re on wheels?’ he asked mischievously.
‘No, no, Dad. It just means that someone brings them around in a van.’
‘I’m not going to sit here and have my meals with someone I’ve never met,’ he protested. ‘And where’s your mother, by the way?’
‘Dad, she died a couple of years ago.’
‘Oh yes, so she did,’ he admitted. ‘How insensitive of me.’
It was sad of course, but funny too, because he was so determined to be as independent as possible. I spoke to social services, telling them that I wanted to keep him out of care but I also needed to go away and earn a living.
They thought they could manage him, with the help of his next door neighbour. I wanted to believe them.
We had already started rehearsals for One for the Road in London and had a couple of days in Gothenburg before we opened at the Lorensberg Theatre. Swedes have a wider appreciation of theatre than the British, and they made good, intelligent audiences. I loved doing the play. It was a great role but I was still shot to bits inside.
I was worried about my father, I was concerned that I didn’t have a place of my own in London – I couldn’t go on squatting at Keith’s indefinitely, but Observatory Road had not been sold. On top of that, I’d had a long conciliatory letter from Inge, regretting all she’d said, apologizing for her crazy behaviour. She explained that she hadn’t realized how much I meant to her and could she come and see me in Sweden?
I didn’t know how to react. I hadn’t expected anything like this from her. I had carelessly told her which theatre I was working in because she said she’d like to send a good-luck card.
She went on to say that she was coming back from Spain to see her sister and parents in Copenhagen and she would finish that with a trip to Gothenburg.
This presented me with a conundrum I wasn’t equipped to handle.
The idea of a few days with the Dane was tempting – on one level at least. But would it solve anything in the long term? Was it likely that she could alter her position to that extent for any length of time?
Frankly, I guessed not. I told her I’d see her in Gothenburg.
I was enjoying my first visit to Sweden, sharing a house with David Delves, the other male cast member but the house was quite a long way from the theatre and I was getting sick of sitting on trams. I decided to move into a serviceable apartment nearer the centre. I was intrigued by the slightly repressed coolness of Swedish life. Alcohol was strictly controlled and never advertized. If you wanted to drink outside your own home or place of work, you had to do it in a specially licensed premises, of which there appeared to be very few. Actors, of course, are notoriously good at finding such places and our Swedish counterparts (and especially our Danish director) were not slow in introducing them to us. The rest of my English colleagues were less keen on this recreation and I was left to fly the flag for Britain in the lager-and-schnapps-chaser stakes.
When Inge was due, I hired a Saab and drove to Helsingborg to meet the ferry from Denmark.
For the three days she was in Sweden with me, we took a few drives out of town and we went to galleries but most of the time, when I wasn’t at the theatre, we spent in bed together.
She was seeing me at work for the first time and watched with horrified fascination as I put on my make-up and scampered around the stage with a John Denver LP sleeve on my head. (My character expressed a strong hatred for John Denver, whose songs and persona, he thought, embodied the trite mundanity of human existence.)
When Inge left, we were on incomparably better terms than our last parting, although I was doubtful that would last. But we wrote to each other a few
times during the remainder of the play’s eight-week run in Gothenburg, until it closed and I had to return to England to check on Dad.
Dad’s mind was wandering still but he didn’t seem any worse. The social services were coping with help from George next door, who had kindly agreed to keep an eye on him. I thought it would be a good idea if I taught him how to leave messages on my answer-phone, in case of emergency. This wasn’t a success. I would come home to find among the crisp messages from agents and producers, my father speaking testily: ‘Hello? Hello? (pause...) Hello?’ followed by a heavy sigh of resignation and, ‘Oh, bloody hell!’ and the slamming down of the phone.
When I phoned back, he protested. ‘What happened? I heard you, then you weren’t there. Where the bloody hell did you go? How can you be there and not there at the same time?’
He was truly baffled, so I gave up. A friendly, businesslike woman from social services confirmed what I’d thought for some time, that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and said that I should be prepared for it to get progressively worse.
It’s a frightening process, watching a formerly articulate and clever person sinking into confusion and speaking gibberish.
After a few exhausting months of failing to reverse Dad’s inevitable decline, I needed a break, and decided it was time to go back to Portugal to see how the aloe vera was performing. I rang Slater and told him I was coming. I also rang Inge in Benalmadena and she agreed to get over there too and meet me. I would then drive her back to Spain. Slater arranged for me to buy a small but roomy left-hand drive Citroen AX in Portugal for the purpose.
I flew out with Alison after a long dreary delay at Gatwick. When we arrived at Faro, Mike wasn’t there to meet his wife, or me. He’d overslept, he later claimed. We had to take a taxi to the bodega and Inge was waiting there for me. I immediately got a bollocking for not phoning to check that she’d arrived safely.