Boracic Lint

by Martin Bryce

What readers are saying about Boracic Lint

  This is one of the most downright enjoyable pieces of writing I have seen. It is just hilarious. There is also an elegance to your writing that gives an addictive quality that the reader is transfixed with. This is both belly laugh humour and extremely subtle and I salute you. Carl.Martin,

  It's funny that you use the word Dickensian to describe the agent, because that's how I feel about your book. It could be a modern Pickwick Papers with a host of mad characters , humour and vibrancy. This is so very much my sort of book but I thought they didn't write them like this anymore. Lynn

  This is absolutely hysterical - so well written and so easy to read! You have a true gift for characterisation - so much so that I was imagining stars in the movie version! Liz

  It gives me a new take on the man behind the suit. All in all, this reminds me of Confederacy of Dunces. Your protagonist has a little bit of Ignatius J. Reilly in him. The people he confronts during the job fit the scene so well. This is a hoot. I love it. Pete Williams

  Boracic Lint

  by

  Martin Bryce

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Boracic Lint

  Copyright © 2010 by Martin Bryce

  ISBN 978-0-9805722-1-6

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction.

  To Julia

  for her patience, understanding and love.

  To Jenny, Ian and Robin

  because I love them.

  The Bull to Jove.

  Other People’s WISDOM

  Back in the first century Seneca wrote of audiences, It’s the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the insanities we commit.

  Of actors, well actresses really, Ethel Barrymore is quoted as saying, in the twentieth century, For an actress to be successful she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno and the hide of a rhinoceros.

  PROLOGUE

  In the two years since leaving RADA, the best my agent had found for me was a part as a Sikh in a play in Bradford, of all places! And a walk-on, or rather carry-off role as a corpse covered in a sheet in a pilot episode of a second rate cop show for Cuba.

  To be fair he had found me other things; the commercial for suppositories for French television being the highlight. And he’d told me of several calls for film extras, but always he’d left me to do the leg work and always he’d taken his forty percent. I was still waiting to hear from the RSC about my audition. A formality really, but every time I tried to pin him down about it he was either off to a vital business lunch, or busy finalising the details of an important contract for one of the many lesser talents on his books.

  While it was not exactly what I had had in mind for a Christmas engagement, a pantomime wouldn’t have been too much to ask, the unpalatable truth was I was skint. That’s why I accepted the part. And what a pantomime it turned out to be.

  So, there I was playing Father Christmas in Harridge’s Grotto. I hadn’t met any of the other applicants at the so-called audition, really just a short interview at the Job Centre with Sharon, but I imagined the competition had been pretty stiff and I felt relieved to have been offered the part. It wasn’t long before I was really beginning to look forward to seeing the joy and wonder in the eyes of the little children as they saw me, or rather Santa, for the first time at the end of the magical Grotto. What follows is what happened, as it happened.

  SCENE 1

  The athlete’s foot was back. I’d had it, on and off, ever since catching it in the terminally bleak Victorian showers at St Onan’s College for sons of the Clergy. Although none of my male forebears had been called to the cloth, I was eligible for entry on the grounds that mother had trained as a High Priestess in the Temple of Isis as a way of beating the post-natal depression caused by me being born. Onan’s, like many other boys’ boarding schools, was world famous for upholding the three pillars of wisdom - thuggery, buggery and skulduggery - which underpinned an English private education. Inevitably, during a particularly intense era of political correctness, it was closed down after a joint operation comprising the, the Fraud, Vice and drug Squads, NATO the RSPCA, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Department of Education.

  My father’s recommended treatment for T. interdigitale, which he learned in the Navy, was to soak the feet in bowls of super-saturated brine and methylated spirits alternately. He said it would make them as tough as boot leather, which it did. So, it was goodbye to Terpsichore and I still had the toe rot, on and off.

  I had a letter from him soon after I landed the part.

  Chatham House

  Victory Park

  Little Shipton

  Devon

  Dear Wretch,

  I understand from your damned mother that you’ve excelled yourself again. She thinks it all rather jolly, you poncing around playing Father bloody Christmas at Claridges, or whatever the name of the blasted place is.

  Let me make it quite clear that as far as I’m concerned you’re beneath contempt and your already minuscule share of the estate diminishes further with each pathetic item of news about you that I am forced to listen to. Let me remind you that you once had a promising naval career, but no, you had to let that poisonous little trollop addle your brain with ideas. Half-witted little bugger.

  Your younger brother, who I’m sorely tempted to acknowledge as my only son, is to take his first command next month - a minesweeper. He’s being sent to the Gulf to knock some bloody sense into those blasted ragheads. Before that he’ll be home for Christmas and your bloody mother hopes you’ll come, too. Why she should want you here is beyond me.

  She sends you a cheque for Christmas; I’ve deducted the amount from your inheritance.

  The dogs are well.

  The Admiral

  I don’t suppose you could expect anything else from a man who had spent his entire working life having ships sunk under him. The last one was my old dinghy, which he managed to stack into a rock at Methoni, off the Peloponnese coast. Too much ouzo, probably, although the official account raved on about dragons’ teeth and sirens, golden fleeces and voluptuous Lesbian warriors. And there was the inevitable salt-in-the-wounds experience, for an English Admiral, of being rescued by a ‘bloody chimpanzee of a Greek; probably one of Phil’s bloody cousins to boot!’

  Good news about the dogs though.

  That same day, on a visit to the library, I bumped into Tanya Hall or rather she bumped into me. Nicknamed ‘Tandem’ for her ability to multitask in an interesting way, she was an awesome piece of paintwork. She also used perfume in industrial quantities figuring, I suppose, that if she used a week’s worth of the stuff at once, it would last a week. Someone needed to have a word with her, but it wasn’t going to be me.

  I knew her as secretary of the local Amdram club where I’d delivered acting workshops. Pinioned between her boobs and a stack of books on the supernatural, an appropriate juxtaposition, I was forced into polite conversation, although even my extensive acting skills were scrambling to cope with the rapacious flirt who was coming onto me like a scramjet on heat. In short, I let slip
that I was ‘resting’.

  ‘Ooh, really!’ She cooed, fingering my chest. ‘You wouldn’t like to…’

  ‘No!’ I blurted, fearing the worst.

  ‘But you didn’t let me finish, you naughty boy,’ she exhaled a balloon of tobacco-breath and pinched my left nipple.

  ‘Ow! That hurt!’ I protested, drawing the attention of innocent children and their parents stocking up on merry literature for the holiday.

  ‘I’ve written a play,’ she announced, groping in her backpack. ‘The Company have made it their next production.’

  ‘How nice,’ I said, trying to ignore the top of her head which was thrust into my groin as she searched her bag.

  ‘Of course, we need a Director,’ she said, ‘and I immediately thought of you.’

  ‘Why? What have I done?’ I croaked, the first glimmerings of panic rising in my mind.

  ‘There,’ she said decisively, thrusting the script into my stomach. ‘It’s a farce.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ I replied, weighing the thing in my hands with heavy heart.

  ‘So, you will do it, yes?’

  ‘Er, well… that is…’ Beads of sweat were breaking out on my forehead; I could feel mild palpitations in my chest.

  ‘Oh you poor boy. You’re poorly.’ She dug in her handbag, retrieved a lipstick stained tissue and dabbed my brow with it.

  ‘No really, I’m fine,’ I gasped. ‘Just a bit close in here, you know,’ I added trying to crab sideways out of the pneumatic clamp.

  ‘I should never have asked,’ she declared with a smirk.

  ‘No really, it’s quite alright.’ Big mistake; she pounced.

  ‘Oh I knew it,’ she said with glee. ‘I knew you’d agree. I knew a real pro like you could never refuse an opportunity like this!’ I may have been a real pro, but I’d just been shanghaied by an older one.

  That afternoon I checked my make-up box and found it all but empty, so I took a trip to Aladdin’s Cave - Madam Moineau’s theatrical supplies emporium. There was everything, from foundation make-up to a suit of lights, from an on-stage nursery to a mediaeval armoury. It was thespian heaven and I was instantly transported, as I always was at Madam M’s, from the grim, grey reality of London’s winter streets, to the glitter and excitement of the traffic of the stage. I stocked up with several products from the Justin Knight range. I was tempted to buy a pair of ‘Santa’ boots, but smart as they were, my funds didn’t run to it. And anyway, Harridges had said that they’d provide everything necessary.

  Back at my lodgings, I found Mr Higginbottom, my humourless landlord, in terse mood. A northerner, his passion was a whippet called Cnut, a passion which was only equalled by his hatred of cats.

  My cat was called Cloudesley and was suffering a bit of a veterinary condition at the time. Unable to leave the squalid little two-up, two-down that the northerners and I called home, he had dumped a load in the hallway just after lunch. Despite pleas from his feeble-minded wife, Higginbottom the Sour had spent the entire afternoon skirting round the foetid pile refusing to clean it up on the grounds that it was my cat that did it and I, therefore, had to be taught a lesson. Northern rectitude at its rectal best provided a shitty end to a mixed day.

  I climbed the gloomy stairs to my tiny, cold, damp room. I lay on the bed and turned to the first page of Tandem’s script; it’s a challenge, I thought, like cave diving for claustrophobes. Within seconds I was in clinical shock. My stomach was churning, my spirits, already sinking, plummeted. She’s Got His Scent was, indeed, a farce. One of those asinine, Gilbertian situations where everyone gets their brains shagged out, except, of course, for the brainless Vicar. He, predictably, loses his trousers in a crappily contrived situation involving a futon