Their Final Act

by Alex Walters

  All Jack Dimmock could do was take the punishment, keep going, and try to find some way to rebuild his life. He hadn't exactly succeeded in the last of those, but he'd done the first and was trying to do the second. His wife had left him as soon as he was convicted, but that was hardly a surprise. Most of his friends had magically melted away when the accusations were made public, but that wasn't really much of a shock either.

  It just meant that leaving prison had been a pretty bleak experience. He'd come out on licence and as a registered sex offender, so he hadn't even had much freedom of movement. He'd always been careful with his money and, unlike Jimmy, had a few quid stashed away from the glory days, and had even managed to keep some of that back from his lawyers and his ex-wife. What was left wouldn’t keep him in luxury, but it was enough to tide him over until he could work out how else to make ends meet.

  What he'd done in the end was go back to the writing. Jimmy wouldn't agree, but Jack had really always been the brains behind Dingwall and McGuire. Jimmy had been the funny one, sure, but most of the time he'd been working with lines Jack had written for him. Jack had written almost all of their material, even if they'd honed it and improved it together. Jack had been a writer before he became a stand-up, producing material for others on the circuit. One of Jimmy's many resentments about their act was that, even at the height of their success, Jack continued to have a lucrative sideline writing for others. 'Why the fuck are you writing for the competition?' Jimmy had asked. 'Why are you wasting your best jokes on those bastards, rather than saving them for us?'

  It didn't work like that, Jack had tried to explain. The jokes I write for them are different from the jokes I write for us. That was the trick of writing for stand-ups. You had to get yourself into the performer's head, imagine the kinds of things he or she might want to say. They were all different. Something you could imagine being hilarious delivered by one act would die a death if performed by another. So you wrote to suit their personality, the style of their humour, their delivery. Of course they'd tweak and refine the material further to suit themselves, but they were much more likely to buy it in the first place if they could see themselves saying it.

  He'd got himself a reputation, even before the double act took off, as the comedian's comedian. He was the one that they came to if they were going through a rough patch, if they were looking to boost their career, if they'd managed to secure that first appearance on a TV panel show.

  When the act took off, he cut back on the writing, not least to keep Jimmy happy. But he'd never stopped entirely. The work vanished as soon as he was sent down, of course. Even if he'd been in a position to continue, no one wanted to be associated with him. That had continued after he'd come out. But gradually he'd got in touch with former customers, former mates. They'd been wary of even talking to him at first, but he'd gradually persuaded them to listen.

  He'd always been discreet when writing for others. Stand-ups want to leave the audience with the impression that the act is all their own work, that this humour just spills out of them. That was true of many of them. But others recognised that, funny as they might be, they didn't have the creativity or discipline to churn out the material needed to keep their acts fresh. This was where Jack came in. He could produce the material, and the deal he offered was that no one would ever know. 'I keep my head down and my mouth shut,' he said to clients. 'As far the audience is concerned, this stuff is yours. I'm just a facilitator.'

  That had helped him gain work in the early days. More important, it helped him rebuild his business after he came out. 'I can understand why you don't want to be seen to be working with me,' he said. 'That's fine. But no one needs to know about me. I just send you the material, and you do what you want with it.'

  They all knew he was good, and after a while the commissions increased. Other comics began to trust him, recognising that he had no interest in claiming any glory for himself. All he wanted was to make a living. And he was succeeding in doing that, more or less.

  He'd moved back up here mainly to get away. There was nothing to keep him down south any more. He wasn't going to get back up on stage again – and, in truth, he'd never really enjoyed that even in the days when they were having a bit of success – and he could write anywhere. He still had one or two friends who'd stuck by him through everything, but no one close enough to keep him there. He wanted to put all that behind him, get on with the life he was living. Think about the future.

  He'd always been a solitary type even in the old days. Most stand-ups, even if they were more introverted offstage, at least wanted to be the centre of attention when performing. But he'd always hated it. That had been why he'd worked so well with Jimmy. It was the usual odd couple set up – his own awkward stage presence providing the perfect foil for Jimmy's confident wisecracking. They'd fallen into it almost by accident. The original plan had been for him simply to write the material Jimmy would deliver. But Jimmy had quickly realised that it worked better if he could use Jack as a foil. Jack's discomfort on stage became part of the joke.

  He wondered later if that had been one of the things that Jimmy resented. There was no question that Jimmy was the star of the show, the one with funny bones. The one who knew how to deliver a joke. But Jack's clumsy unease had been what made them distinctive. There were countless comics like Jimmy. There were few double acts like Dingwall and McGuire.

  Dingwall. That had been Jimmy's idea too. Admittedly, Dimmock and McGuire would have sounded like a firm of estate agents. Dingwall had been Jack's hometown. But he'd still hated it as a stage name. It just felt wrong, ill-fitting. Not him at all. But that had been part of the joke as well.

  At least, the stage name meant he really could put it all behind him. Now he was just Jack Dimmock, writer to the would-be stars, stuck in the back of beyond. That suited him fine.

  He couldn't exactly say he was happy here. He probably wouldn't be happy anywhere. But he was surviving. When he'd heard from some friend of a friend that the house was available for rent, he'd jumped at the chance. It was cheap, it was comfortable enough. It was close enough to where he grew up that he could feel at ease, but not so close he was likely to run into anyone who remembered him. Above all, it gave him the solitude he wanted.

  It was a beautiful spot too. Jack wasn't normally one for the scenery, but he had to admit that the sweep of the fields away to the firth was genuinely breathtaking. To the west, there were the mountains, still dotted with snow even this late in spring. From there, you could see the weather moving in – the grey haze of rain moving steadily across the hillside, the scudding low clouds, the morning haar that sometimes sat on the surface of the waters.

  He'd set up his desk at the far end of the sitting room, where the large window offered the best view out to the firth. He sat there in the afternoons, trying to get himself inside the head of whichever comedian he was writing for. Sometimes it just flowed. Sometimes it was harder, and he found himself striding up and down the small living room, searching for the jokes that he knew were there somewhere, deep in the recesses of his head, waiting to be uncovered.

  When it became really difficult, he'd take a walk outside and stand looking down at the firth, smoking one of his occasional cigarettes. It was extraordinarily silent up there. The only sound was the faint brush of the wind in the trees, the backdrop of birdsong.

  The house itself was part of an old steading, converted and updated a few years before. The main part of the building had been transformed into two self-contained houses, used as holiday lets in the summer. The third part, where he lived, was a separate annex, converted for the same purpose. But, because it was relatively small and cramped, it had proved difficult to let to holidaymakers. The owner, a neighbouring farmer, had been looking for a long-term tenant and had responded to Jack's approach with enthusiasm.

  For Jack, the place was ideal. He didn't want space, just somewhere he could lock himself away, get his head down and work. If he ever felt cooped up inside, he could just
walk out and find himself in more space than he'd ever imagined.

  He hadn't yet been there through the summer, but he assumed the place would have a different feel when the two adjacent houses were occupied. That didn't really matter. He had a small, separate garden overlooking the firth, and his own house was self-contained. If he wanted to avoid the holidaymakers, he could easily do so.

  It could have been an idyllic existence. The only problem, as it always had been, was the booze. He wasn't as bad as he used to be. There'd been a time, when their careers were just taking off, when he'd been a full-scale raging alcoholic. He'd never been out of control, or at least that was what he told himself. He'd kept it under control, more or less, on days when they were performing. They'd only rarely had to cancel a gig because he'd been incapable of going on stage, and he thought there'd been only a handful of occasions when it had affected his performance. The irony was that what drove him to drink initially was stage-fright. He'd felt so anxious at the prospect of stepping out under the lights that he had a drink to calm his nerves. One drink had become two. Two had become several, and there you were. He performed much more comfortably and easily with a few drinks inside him. But that, in turn, simply made the act less funny.

  Even so, he'd never thought it was a big deal. Jimmy thought it was holding them back, that word had got around that Jack was unreliable. If things weren't going well, Jimmy had the skills to hold it all together. But he didn't want to have to keep doing that just because Jack was fucking up. He'd told Jack that, repeatedly, in words of one syllable and four letters.

  Jack had thought the criticism unfair. He did most of his drinking at times that weren't going to affect the act; on the days when they weren't working, or late at night after the show. At those times, he really had been unreliable. He was a bad drunk, truth be told, capable of almost anything when under the influence. But that was rare. Just the times when he needed to go on a bender. Most of the time he controlled it, kept it separate from his work commitments.

  That was what he'd told himself. Looking back, he knew it was bollocks. If he'd ever had any control, it had been rapidly slipping away from him. There was too much from those days he simply wanted to forget. Too many embarrassments, too much damage.

  He supposed that was what had put him inside, though he could barely remember the circumstances. It had happened, and he'd done it, he assumed. Just like he'd done lots of other things Jimmy had covered up for him. At the time, he'd thought that Jimmy was a pal, looking after him like that. It was only later he realised that Jimmy had simply been storing up ammunition. A shedful of material that Jimmy was able to pull out when he'd finally needed a favour for himself.

  In that sense, being sent down was the best thing that could have happened, Jack supposed. It had forced him away from the drink, and he'd more or less sobered up.

  More or less.

  He'd never been through any kind of rehab process, probably because he was still reluctant to acknowledge the reality of his addiction. He told himself he despised all the AA twelve-step nonsense. He didn't need that. All he needed was willpower. That and a few years of prison discipline. There'd been alcohol available in prison, of course, if you wanted it – sometimes mysteriously smuggled in, mostly just home-made hooch brewed from fruit in a bucket by the radiator. But he'd never been that desperate. He'd kept his head down, followed the rules, and got himself out at the earliest opportunity.

  And he still drank. That was the reality. He no longer drank all day, and he didn't drink spirits. Those urges were long gone. But when it came to the evening, he still wanted to sit down and pull open a can of beer or pour himself a glass of wine. Nothing wrong with that, except that once again he found that one glass quickly became two, two became several, and he was back in the old routine. He never got completely stoshied like he used to, but he still drank too much, dragged himself into bed in the wee hours, and slept until it was much later than he'd intended. Then he despised himself for wasting the day, and fell back into the old cycle of anxiety and self-loathing.

  The result was that the promised novel was still firmly sitting on the back-burner. He managed to work effectively enough, but only on the material he was preparing for his clients, never on his own work. He had notebooks full of ideas for the novel, and he'd started the opening chapter more than once. He'd even wondered about returning to the idea of an autobiography. After all, his story now was considerably more interesting than when he'd just been the unfunny half of Dingwall and McGuire.

  But he'd missed that boat. If he'd ever had any real notoriety, it had only been in that period around the trial. By the time he'd come out, he'd already been largely forgotten. No publisher would have wanted to touch the story then anyway, even if there'd been a public interested in buying it.

  So here he was, spending his days writing crap for second-rate comics who allowed the world to believe they were producing this stuff themselves. And if they ever became successful, some idiot publisher would knock at their door to ask them to write a bloody novel of their own. Because that's what every stand-up does these days. And here was the poor sap who'd actually produced the bloody material for them, stuck up in a fucking hovel in the Highlands, making rapid progress towards nowhere.

  He was supposed to be producing some material for a young Scottish comedian at the moment. Some wet behind the ears type who'd adopted a camp persona which Jack presumed represented some kind of ironic commentary on the Larry Graysons or John Inmans Jack recalled from his own youth. Jack had never worked out why the same material, presented in a supposed spirit of irony, was seen as less offensive than what it claimed to be satirising. But that wasn't really his business. His business was to churn out the jokes that the youngster, buoyed by his initial success, was unable to come up with by himself.

  For some reason, Jack was finding this one hard going. He'd done what he usually did and sat through as much online footage as he could find of the comedian in performance. He hadn't found this one particularly amusing, but that was often the case. Jack knew the tricks. He could see the strings – the little techniques the act used to get the audience on his side, the way the stronger lines were used to skate over the weaker material, the obvious call-backs that flattered the audience into thinking they were party to some in-joke. This guy had got the stuff off pat. It was just that, like so many of them, he wasn't actually very funny.

  Jack didn't care much about that. His job was to get inside the guy's head, or at least into his stage persona. Work out the things he might say, the lines that would sound funny with this personality, this delivery, this tone.

  He'd get there eventually. It might not be his best work, but it would be okay. Better than most others could do. He just had to keep at it.

  When he'd finally dragged himself back into the land of the living, fortified by a bowl of cereal and some over-strong coffee, he sat down at his laptop and reread the work he'd completed the previous afternoon. As was always the way, it was better than he remembered. It wouldn't all survive till the final draft, but there were some decent lines in there. Some that could even make him laugh.

  As he always did, he started by revising the previous day's work. He'd found that was the best way of getting back into the right mood. He cut the obvious duds, refined and tightened the wording on some of the lines, added a few comments where he felt the material needed expanding or reworking more substantially. He'd leave that till the end, when he had a better sense of the whole routine and could decide what to keep or lose.

  He came to the end of the revisions, but for once found that didn't provide him with the impetus he needed to continue. Somehow, it wasn't gelling. There were ideas and thoughts buzzing about in the back of his brain, but he couldn't immediately find the means to make them cohere into something that might actually make people laugh.

  He tapped away in a desultory fashion for another ten minutes before finally acknowledging it wasn't working. Time for a break, he thought. A quick stroll arou
nd the garden, maybe a cigarette. Contemplate the views. Let his mind wander and wait for inspiration to strike.

  It was another decent day outside. They'd had a sustained stretch of good weather, with clear skies and warm temperatures for the last couple of weeks. It wouldn't last, obviously. It wouldn't be long before the rain clouds swept in across the firth. But for the moment the whole scene looked glorious – the sunlight glittering on the waters, the green hills dotted with patches of yellow gorse, the last winter snows lingering on the summits of the mountains.

  He lit a cigarette and sat drinking it all in, trying not to think too much about unfunny camp comedians. That was always the best way when it seemed not to be working. Think about something else. Anything else. The ideas would come.

  The only risk, he thought, was that he might end up thinking about the past. The things he'd done. The reasons he was here. The life he was trying to leave well behind. He'd fallen into that trap before, and had been dragged back to the edge of the depressions he'd experienced when he'd first come out. He'd found ways to handle that, more or less. But he knew it was never gone. The abyss was there, waiting to pull him under, and there might eventually be nothing he could do to prevent it.

  He was startled out of his reverie by the sound of the front doorbell from within the house. Who the hell could that be? This place was sufficiently remote that you didn't get passing callers. The only person he could think of who might visit without warning would be the landlord, and that was never likely to be good news.

  Wearily, he pulled himself to his feet and made his way back through the house to the front door. He unbolted the door and pulled it back, unsure what to expect.