by Robert Lock
But as he bawled and hollered his jokes and observations, Hawaiian shirt flapping around him like some flag of acrimony, Sammy knew that Georgie and Hannah were beside him, and when he returned to his dressing room he checked, the moment the door was closed, that the booklet had been taken from the wastepaper basket. Yet still he heard them, whispering entreaties of redemption and release. The answer to their pleas, however, was to come from a most unlikely of sources.
… And A Little Older Than My Teeth
Sammy had been leaning on the railing at the pier’s end for almost half an hour, gazing out to sea as his mind danced between fractured glimpses of Amanda’s perfect symmetry, the photo depicting what his hands had wrought on the prostitute’s face, and the letter that had been waiting for him at the stage door. The plain white envelope bearing his name, printed in an austere lower case and containing a letter on EuroEnts-headed paper from Julian J Walker ordering… ordering!… him to attend a meeting the day after tomorrow. One short paragraph, strangely lacking in the kind of management-speak that Julian usually employed; it was this clarity that alarmed Samuels the most, and which spoke far more eloquently than any of the carefully phrased sentences. The managing director was sending him a message through the letter’s restraint, a message that, so the comedian concluded, was unequivocal and signalled the end of his career.
And so he stared, smoking one cigarette after another, hypnotised by a flickering orange flame on the horizon, a will o’ the wisp that danced so prettily on the boundary between the steel-blue sea and mauve sky, until a wooden clatter behind him made him jump and turn to see what had caused it. A white-haired old man was bent over a jumbled pile of deckchairs, clearly having just dropped his load, which flapped at his feet as though in its death throes.
The comedian flicked his cigarette into the sea and walked over to the old man, who had begun to mutter to himself as, stiff-limbed, he attempted to untangle the chairs. “They fighting back, Pop?”
The old man looked up in surprise. “I dropped them,” he said by way of explanation.
Sammy took in the white hair, thick-lensed glasses and arthritic demeanour and shook his head. He vaguely remembered seeing this hermit-like character on and around the pier ever since his first visit in the early sixties, but he had always felt uncomfortable dealing with either physical or mental disability and had therefore never even spoken to him before. What struck the comedian most forcefully now was a surprising feeling of sympathy for the old man, whose loyalty was obviously being callously exploited by EuroEnts. Continuing to employ this relic, presumably on some piddling retainer that the poor guy needed to supplement his pension, for a job which was clearly too physically demanding for him, summed up for Samuels everything that was wrong with the company. “Jesus, Julian, I thought I was a bastard,” he muttered, before continuing in a louder voice, “you shouldn’t be doing this, not at your age. Come on, I’ll give you a hand. I’m Sammy Samuels, by the way.”
The old man stuck out his hand in greeting, his broad smile revealing a lustrous set of false teeth which appeared slightly too large for the mouth in which they resided. “You’re on the posters!”
“I am.” Samuels struck his child’s-gun pose, pointing straight at the old man’s forehead, and even as he moved his hand into position the comedian felt astonished, and slightly puzzled, by how much he wanted to impress this antiquated deckchair attendant.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Mickey Braithwaite.”
“Well, Mickey,” Sammy said, “let me give you a hand.” He knelt, separated two of the deckchairs and picked them up. “Where were you going with them?”
“Over here.” Mickey led him to a large wooden door set into the back of the theatre. He fumbled in his pocket, brought out a bunch of keys and worked his way methodically through them until, selecting one, he unlocked the padlock. The deckchair attendant then lifted the padlock out of its hasp and swung open the door to reveal a large storage room piled high with deckchairs, cardboard boxes and tins of paint.
“In we go!”
Samuels followed Mickey into the room. “I’ve always wondered what was in here. Where do you want these putting?”
Mickey patted a low stack of deckchairs, so the comedian placed his two on top and stood up, only to watch, more in amusement than irritation, as the old man carefully manoeuvred each deckchair until it was perfectly aligned with those below. “Perfectionist, eh? A regular Rain Man, aren’t you? Away with the fairies. No wonder you’re still working.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind. I’ll get the other deckchairs, you wait here.”
“Pardon?”
“You… wait… here.”
Sammy stepped back out into the gathering twilight. He noticed a second gas platform flare now flickering out at sea, but as he looked, more and more sparked into life, until the entire horizon was a solid shimmering line of yellow. He imagined the sea brushing against the pier stanchions, leaving them gilded in its wake. Sammy no longer cared whether these hallucinations were a result of his prolonged drug abuse, not when they could produce something as disarmingly beautiful as this. In fact he welcomed them, welcomed them as a means of escape from the moribund reality he found himself in.
He gathered up the rest of the deckchairs and carried them into the storeroom, where again Mickey ensured their exact arrangement. Satisfied at last with the neatness of his work, the deckchair attendant straightened with a slight grunt and smiled his disconcerting smile. “Finished! All shipshape and Bristol fashion.”
“Why are you still working?” Sammy enquired. “Don’t you find it hard at your age?”
“Norman said that fresh air and hard work never killed anyone.”
Sammy emitted a sceptical snort. He wondered if Mickey spoke entirely in random phrases picked up on the pier. “Did he now? Is Norman your boss?”
Mickey shook his head. “Not any more. Not after the Observer Corps finished. Once we’d sorted Fucking Adolf out we didn’t need to look for the bombers any more.”
“Fucking Adolf! I like that. That’s like something my grandad would have said.”
“Was he in the war?”
“Both,” Sammy replied. He was unsure how the conversation had turned, but it felt both natural and comforting to be able to relate a little of what he remembered about his grandfather. “He fought in the First World War, where he was gassed, which knackered his lungs, but he managed to hide that and joined the Home Guard during the Second World War and ended up with the Defence Medal for doing three years. He was a tough old bastard.”
Mickey’s spectacles winked and flashed in the gloom of the storeroom. “I’ve got my dad’s medals from the first war. They’re like rainbows, apart from his silver one with a stripy ribbon. He got that for being brave, but a sniper shot him in the throat and turned all the mud red.”
“We have no idea, do we?” Sammy said, shaking his head. A thought occurred to him. “Hang on… you say your dad was in the First World War? And if he was killed that means you would have to have been born before 1918, so you must be at least ninety! Are you sure it wasn’t the Second World War? I can’t believe you’re that old.”
“As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”
“Yes, very good, but… ” The comedian tried to think of another way of phrasing his question. “Your birthday. Can you remember the number on your cards?”
“It’s time for you to go now,” Mickey said. The sing-song timbre of his voice had altered, flattening out and becoming unusually business-like. “Time for the show.”
Sammy glanced at his watch. “Shit, you’re right. Well, it was good talking to you, Mickey, you take it easy, okay?”
The two men inched round the stacks of deckchairs and stepped back out onto the pier. Sammy began to move towards the door with the intention of swinging it shut for the deckchair attendant, but Mickey held up one hand and reached out for it himself.
“No, n
o, it has to be me,” he explained. “Got to make sure it’s all locked up safe and sound. All that wood and paint and stuff. It’s a fire hazard, you see. I have to make sure the door is locked so nobody can get in and set it on fire.” Mickey closed the hasp, re-attached the padlock and fastened it in place, then tugged at it to make sure it was securely locked. “There. All safe and sound.” He dropped the bunch of keys back into his coat pocket and thrust out a hand. “Thank you for helping me, Mr Samuels.”
“Don’t mention it,” Sammy replied, shaking the proferred hand, which he was astonished to find almost weightless, like gripping a model constructed out of tissue paper. “Any time.”
Having checked his dressing room door was securely locked, Sammy scrabbled through the jumbled contents of a drawer, found the tin of barley sugar sweets and extracted the sealed plastic bag hidden under a layer of confectionery. Tapping out a quarter of the bag’s contents, the comedian proceeded to shape the cocaine into two lines with one of his business cards, cut a length of drinking straw and snorted both lines, one for each nostril. A cold, tingling sensation expanded into his skull from some acute point behind his nose, and within seconds Sammy could feel his heart rate accelerate, his fingertips tingle. Thoughts and images and sensations cascaded through his mind, clamouring for pre-eminence until they merged, absorbed one into the other, a daunting fusion: the craving in Hannah Goodwin’s eyes lit by the coruscation of an ocean aflame which was also the sudden extinguishing of sunlight erasing the lines in the palm of his hand as it was softly cupped by the fortune-teller whose gold rings branded their lies into his flesh but were pacified by the gossamer touch of Mickey Braithwaite who was not Mickey Braithwaite but his grandfather lying dead in the garden with birdshit on his face, that cream-and-black birthmark of humiliation so kindly assimilated by Mickey as though he possessed the capacity to atone for all the sin in the world, including the impenetrable violence of George Parr with which Sammy’s bones ached in concord…
“Yes,” the comedian said. He knew exactly what he had to do, and who would take the blame for his actions.
Destiny’s Alembic
Sammy found it difficult to contain the almost hysterical glee bubbling inside him as he lolled on the microphone stand that night, knowing that it would be the last time he stood on these boards and barked his sour jokes and observations at an audience he detested. But if the prospect of escape from this joyless existence made maintaining his customary deadpan delivery difficult, what made it even worse was the wonderfully gratifying and recurring mental image of Julian J Walker watching one of his key assets go up in flames without being able to do a damned thing about it. Sammy could not wait to turn up for his meeting tomorrow afternoon, look into that smug bastard’s eye and point out the clause in his contract which stated that he could only be dismissed if EuroEnts as a company was brought into disrepute by his actions rather than any personal reputation. Then he could draw his attention to the smouldering wreck, the smoke from which would hopefully have permeated Julian’s office, and by this time next week he would be sunning himself on the Costa Brava with some cute señorita’s mouth round his cock.
His plan was simple, and its simplicity reassured him, not only of its likelihood of success but also its righteousness. What, for example, had been his chance encounter with Mickey Braithwaite if not a sign that destiny was on his side, guiding each cog in retribution’s machine into place? How straightforward had it been to seek out the deckchair attendant earlier that afternoon, persuade him that he looked tired and offer to put away the deckchairs, pretend to have forgotten about the locked storeroom and then accept the bunch of keys needed, calming Mickey’s reservations with a promise to return them the next day? And how hilariously ironic was it that he had found the crazy old fool locking the former fortune-teller’s booth with that same bunch of keys, giving him not only access to the storeroom but also an ideal hiding place in which to wait for the pier to empty and be locked for the night? Who, in all honesty, would believe Mickey’s story? Everyone knew he lived in his own little world; any explanation that included an act of kindness from Sammy Samuels would only reinforce that view, and provide the comedian with the perfect scapegoat.
With the show safely negotiated, Sammy returned to his dressing room, aware that it was important not to deviate from his normal routine. Fortunately most of the backstage staff had heard, or helped to disseminate, the gossip regarding his imminent meeting with Julian, allowing Sammy to be seen but not delayed. Once back in his room he collected together the few possessions he wanted to save and stuffed them into a rucksack, piling them on top of the green plastic petrol container he had purchased and filled at a garage thirty miles from the resort. His preparations complete, the comedian switched off the main light, sat down at his dressing table and lit a cigarette. The metallic click of his Zippo lighter, its brief flare reflected in the mirror’s blackness, took on huge significance in his mind, like the opening bars in a symphony, where its recurring melodic theme is established. He flipped open the lighter again, flicked its flint wheel and brought the flame close to the side of his face, close enough to feel its heat. Sammy stared at his reflection, which seemed to him more like a few discrete patches of yellow skin separated by oozing shadows encroaching from the greater darkness surrounding him, as though he was being slowly absorbed by it. The lighter was getting hot, but he continued to stare, hoping to watch the last recognisable remnants of his face vanish.
“I’m a firestarter,” he sang quietly to himself, “twisted firestarter… shit!” Sammy dropped the lighter and blew on his burned fingertips. “Shit shit shit.” He retrieved the lighter, which had fortunately closed on impact with the floor. “Pull yourself together, you dickhead,” he chided. “Don’t set your fucking self on fire.”
There was a peculiar sense of deja vu in actually performing the sequence of events he had mentally rehearsed so many times; closing his dressing room door, saying goodnight to Ivan to ensure the stage door manager had registered his leaving, walking down the pier as far as the booth and quickly unlocking it whilst making sure he was not observed, then slipping inside and locking the door behind him in case Ivan should try it in passing. Every phase of his plan had so far correlated perfectly with its imagined version, so much so that Samuels, safely shrouded in the booth’s gloomy interior, afforded himself a few minutes of smug reflection on the decades which had passed since he had last been in this exact position.
The serendipity of his return to the booth, which he had always acknowledged was where his career began, struck Sammy as hilarious. It was like a hugely prolonged joke, over forty years in the telling, related by a most patient of narrators, a jester who understood the perversity of life and possessed the skill to bring the rambling anecdote of his existence full circle, finishing it with a suitably trenchant punchline. The joke had started the moment that con artist of a fortune-teller had snapped ‘You should be on the stage’, and would finish when he destroyed that stage, taking with it the theatre and pier which had become symbols of all his frustrations and disappointment. Only once they had been eradicated could he move on, cleansed in the flames he would soon ignite.
Bet you didn’t see this coming, did you he thought, silently castigating the woman who had somehow conjured a living out of flattery and bullshit from this very booth. You didn’t see anything coming, did you, you just poisoned us all with your lies. He held up his hand, palm facing out into the darkened booth. It doesn’t mean a thing, you stupid cow. Not a fucking thing. We’re just here and then we’re not, and that’s all there is to it.
Satisfied with his adjudication, the comedian pushed his rucksack into a corner, leaned against it and rested his head on the wall. Closing his eyes, Sammy took a deep breath; maybe, many years ago when he was young, when an impetuous Samuel Rosenberg had glimpsed the pier through the rain-blurred windscreen of his brother’s Triumph TR4, when the wipers swept across the glass to reveal its steadfast form like a moment of clarity in
a world of equivocation, when he opened the door as they stopped at a red light and ran off into the storm without even shutting the car door behind him because he wanted to cause the maximum inconvenience for his brother, maybe then, given the same circumstance, he would have sensed a lingering perfume in the booth’s black air, or heard the echo of a cat’s deep purr. Now, however, there was only silence and dust.
Not long after he heard footsteps approaching. Sammy pressed himself as tightly into the corner as he could, fighting down an impulse to burst out of the booth and give the stage door manager the fright of his life. The footsteps grew louder, until accompanying each one he felt a slight vibration carried through the pier’s planking into his buttocks, then the vibrations receded, the footsteps heading towards the promenade.
“That’s it, fuck off, Ivan,” Sammy said silently. “I’m doing you a favour, anyway, sunshine. It’s about time you retired.”
He closed his eyes again. He was the only person left on the pier… the last person, in fact. Its history did not interest him, however, and his own memories of the structure consisted of little more than a parade of banalities, so Sammy felt no guilt or sense of impending loss regarding the pier’s destruction. Other piers had burnt down and were never rebuilt because, despite all the bleatings from civic societies and historians like that crazy fat bastard who had more or less accused him of planning to murder one of the town’s whores, most people recognised them for the anachronisms they were. The resort was on its arse anyway. All the pier was good for now was to keep the rain off a quick blow-job, and there were plenty more places like that in the town.
Madame Kaminska! That was her name. How did these buried fragments worm their way to the surface? Yes, Madame Kaminska. He remembered her plump face and tiny eyes. What had happened to her? Sammy wondered. He’d never seen her again after the pier’s centenary celebrations. He had found an agent, embarked on a punishing tour of working men’s clubs, managed to grab a slot at Batley Variety Club, which in turn led to his appearance on the Royal Variety Show and a summer season at the resort, so by the time he returned to the pier the booth had become a fudge and toffee stall, and when he mentioned the fortune-teller the vacuous young girl behind the counter had simply shrugged.