by Alexei Sayle
‘No,’ she said like I was daft.
I got to the dance studio where the Laurence Djaboff Company were rehearsing Hard Wee Man half an hour early and watched through a glass panel set in the wall as they soundlessly went through their play like underwater performing fish. Even through a plate of greasy glass the raw power of Laurence Djaboff burned like the heat off a pizza oven. At that time he was at his peak, thirty-five years old, a good ten years more than the majority of his troupe apart from one old bloke who must have been in his seventies. Laurence was a compact bundle of windmilling energy dressed in a sharp-looking Hugo Boss suit, cream silk shirt and highly polished American Florsheim Oxfords.
Right on one o’clock the action stopped and the actors and actresses began to file out of the studio. I edged past them, smiling in a vague way and went inside; only Siggi and Laurence Djaboff remained.
I’d had thirty minutes to adjust to the change in her appearance. In later life people would come and go in my life and would mutate while outside my gaze, but since I saw my friends more or less every day we were changing in ways that were imperceptible to each of us. Siggi was the first person I was close to who had dropped out of my sight for a lengthy period. I was shocked by the fact that she was the same but different: it was sort of like watching Terminator 2 — the cast were more or less the same as the original film but older, glossier and with more muscles.
‘Let me introduce you to Laurence,’ she said. While me and Siggi had been saying hello to each other the great actor had been changing out —of the Hugo Boss suit which was his character’s costume and into his own clothes. Out of the corner of my eye I’d watched as he’d put on baggy harem pants in striped moiré silk, blue suede pixie boots, a blue linen collarless peasant blouse over which he put a brown leather Sam Browne belt with a suede purse where an army officer would have worn his revolver; on top of all this he wrapped a brown mohair cloak and on his head he put a black woollen astrakhan hat which he arranged in one of the floor-length mirrors at a precise tilted angle.
‘Laurence, this is my friend Kelvin.’
‘Hi,’ said Laurence Djaboff. ‘Is this the guy you’re going for a run with?’
‘That’s right.’
He turned to me. ‘I’ve told her I want her to go for a run to prepare for the show tonight. I’ve sent two of the others to a cemetery, Miles [the seventy-year-old] has got to have sex with a sailor and my female co-star I’ve sent to the bus station to dance for money. I myself am off to see if I can get into a fight at the airport.’
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ I said.
‘Would you like a fight?’ said the actor suddenly, in a reasonable, friendly manner. ‘Would you like to go to the airport with me to have a fight? I’ll pay for the taxi.’
I said, ‘That’s very kind of you but no, I have to go for a run with Siggi.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, pretty sure.’
‘Yes, of course. Well, please yourself.’ And with a flick of his cloak he left.
As we slipped into the Victorian pub across from the theatre Siggi said, ‘Mad cunt that he is.’
We sat in one of the side rooms, afternoon light ricocheting off the bevelled glass as I went to get us both drinks. When I returned and sat down she said, ‘I can’t remember it.’
I said, ‘What?’
‘The play, I can’t remember my lines in the play.’
‘But haven’t you’ve been touring all over the country, performing night after night?’
‘Yeah … well, mostly,’ she said. ‘Well, always. I do remember my lines but I’m becoming terrified that at some point I won’t, that I’ll be standing there one night not knowing what to say.’
‘But why would that happen? I bet you’re really good at remembering your lines. You’re really talented.’
‘See, yeah,’ she said, becoming nervously animated, ‘that’s the problem, how talented I am.’
‘How can you being talented be a problem?’ I asked. ‘I’m supposed to be so fucking great, aren’t I? There’s been all these women casting directors coming down with their witchy wizened little sidekicks saying I’m going to do this or I’m going to be that, but then I started thinking that, well, okay, but it’s basic to be. able to remember your lines or stand up or not be sick on the stage and if I couldn’t do any of those things then I was no better than the crappest actress.’
‘But why should you be sick on stage or forget your lines?’
‘I don’t know, but what if I did?’
‘That’s crazy; it’s like worrying if you’re going to be gored by a bull on stage or if your shoes will catch fire.’
Sweat burst on to her forehead and her eyes grew big. ‘Has that happened?’ she squeaked.
Siggi had five more double gin and tonics before going back to the Everyman. I suggested drinking so much might not be a good idea before performing a play but she said in that case I didn’t know anything about the theatre. After lunch, feeling really quite drunk myself, I rang Loyd and asked if it was too late to get a ticket for the play that night.
‘I thought you said you didn’t wanna see the play?’ Loyd said suspiciously.
‘I don’t remember saying that,’ I replied. ‘I just thought I’d be busy at a meeting but as it turns out I’m free to see Siggi in her play.’
On the opening night of Hard Wee Man in her home town, Siggi, with the whole gang watching, didn’t exactly forget her lines, instead she made up some different ones. I can’t remember any of what she said now but it was great dialogue, real poetry, majestic, fluid, vivid, and her performance was one of luminous, twitchy energy; the audience’s eyes followed her about as if she were a tennis ball: it’s just that none of the others in the cast knew what to say in reply.
After the interval Laurence Djaboff came on stage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see one of our cast has been having problems so I am afraid tonight’s performance is cancelled. If you wish …’
He told us if we applied to the box office the audience could get their money back. So we found ourselves on the street two hours earlier than expected; it wasn’t even dark yet. Sage Pasquale and Paula went round to the stage door to find out if Siggi was okay but they were told an ambulance had already taken her to a hospital.
A few months later when Siggi came out of the mental home she took a place on a training course that taught you how to be a further education lecturer; this lasted for a year and then straight out of that college she got a job in the burgeoning field of media studies at one of the many educational institutions that seemed to be opening up in our little Lancashire town and again she became one of the gang as if she’d never been away.
Siggi had once told me that there was an actors Equity rule that if there were more actors on the stage than there were people in the audience then they didn’t have to do the play, they could go home, the show didn’t have to perform. Well here, I thought, there was one actor still yabbering and flapping and gimping about on the empty stage but there was absolutely nobody in the audience. Yet the show seemed to be grinding on regardless, though what the point now was I couldn’t say.
4
The only possessions belonging to Loyd, Colin and Siggi which their relatives fought violently over were their season tickets to Liverpool FC. I had not felt like going to a match since the crash but this was the last game of the season and I thought I might as well use my own season ticket one last time. It would be terribly painful, almost beyond bearing, that I would no longer be sitting amongst my friends and I’d readied myself for that, but when I got to my own seat, which I naturally expected to be empty, I found an old man I didn’t know sitting in it.
‘Oohr you?’ I said.
‘Oohr you?’ replied the pugnacious little old man angrily, stretching up his sinewy bantam neck.
‘You’re in my seat,’ I said.
‘Fuck off. This is my seat,’ retorted the old man. Looking around in confusion, ri
ght then Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband came down the concrete steps with a hamburger in his hand: when he saw the two of us facing off a faint look of embarrassment crossed his face.
‘Oh hi, Kelvin,’ Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband said and took me in an awkward hug without putting his burger down. Releasing me he continued, ‘Ah, oh, we, ah, didn’t know you was coming today, we, erm … this is Oswald,’ he said, indicating the little old man who still sat bristling in my seat. ‘We been letting Oswald sit in your seat ‘cos he’s been supporting the Reds for fifty years, you know, but his seat is right up the back, you know and you wasn’t around to …’
‘That’s right, fifty years,’ said Oswald. ‘Billy Liddle … Ronny Yeats and “the Saint” … Shankly’s boot room.’
I leaned forward. ‘Well, that’s great, Oswald,’ I said, ‘but I’d like my seat back now.’
‘Ian Rush, Kenny Dalglish, Hysel Stadium, Hillsborough,’ said Oswald, showing no sign of moving.
‘Look, I don’t have time for this. just fuck off up the back, you scrawny old cunt,’ I heard someone say in a voice full of genuine menace. Looking around I realised it was me who’d spoken.
‘There was no call for that,’ said Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband’s best mate who’d arrived just as Oswald was angrily shuffling off up to the back of the stand muttering under his breath about the ‘86 cup final. ‘He’s been coming here for fifty years.’
At first, still shaken at my sudden eruption, his words didn’t go in. I remembered that once, a long time ago, I had had quite a temper but over the years Sage Pasquale’s fear of confrontation had meant it had been gradually suppressed, but now I thought, with a familiar clenching of the guts, Sage Pasquale wasn’t around so it didn’t matter any more. At that thought I abruptly felt like my head was full of popping corn.
Turning to Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband’s best mate I said simply, ‘And you shut it too,’ in a way that made the man go white. Then I stared hard at the battered, muddy, end-of-season pitch.
As the game began, squeezed uneasily between Colin’s cousin, Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband and Sage Pasquale’s sister’s husband’s best mate, I felt confused; I hadn’t expected to sense the old joy, of course that would be ridiculous, but I was still surprised by the extreme feeling of contempt that swept over me, not for the players — they just seemed silly, jumping and running and falling over — no, it was the crowd who made me feel sick with disdain. Around me the fans seemed to cycle rapidly through a range of emotions, all of them entirely fake; one second they would be engulfed in operatic ecstasy over some shot sailing wide of the goal and the very next they would be vomiting rage at an opposition player they’d taken a dislike to. Actually, I thought as the mob howled with relish as one of their defenders prematurely ended the career of a promising opposing youngster, it’s only the ecstasy that seems false, the rage appears to be real enough. That I should want to submerge myself into these awful people seemed completely ridiculous. I was reminded of footage I’d seen of Hindu pilgrims submerging themselves in sacred rivers bobbing with sacred corpses, sacred raw sewage and sacred containers of nuclear waste.
Abruptly I got up from my seat, edged my way past all the fans too engrossed in the game to pay me any attention; eventually I got to the concrete steps, slowly climbing them till I reached the dark exit where I stopped and turned to take one last look at the muddy grass where the little men ran and jumped. As I wheeled to descend into the cool gloom of the interior I saw Oswald rise from his seat against the very back wall and crouch low on the steps like a spider. The old man’s eyes stared hard into mine, and as I began to descend towards the turnstiled my final image was of Oswald scuttling down the steps towards my vacated seat. Stumbling towards the grey river and the electric rail line that would take me home, the roaring of the crowd pursued me like a mugger whispering vile threats in my ear.
Since the accident, I’d not been able to bring myself to drive a car but the town in Lancashire where I lived was connected to Liverpool by the Mersey Link electric railway. The station we had always used to get to Anfield, amusingly called Sandhills, was in a district of refineries, large areas of rubble, car dealerships and abandoned warehouses that ran down to the river.
Above it on a plateau were the red-brick terraced houses amongst which Liverpool’s football ground squatted. In a couple more years it was rumoured the club would be moving to a new stadium hacked out of a Victorian park a few hundred metres away.
My route to the railway line took me, first of all, past my dad’s old cafe, my former home now a Chinese chippy, then through a few streets of terraced homes that ran along the edge of the plateau balanced above the steep drop to the distant river. All these dwellings in a grid pattern of six streets were empty and neatly sealed up with perforated steel grilles. The Trotskyist town council which had run Liverpool in the 1980s had bought them all up with plans to build a museum of revolutionary feminism but my Dad said the councillors had spent all the money on trips to Cuba and smart suits instead so the houses had stood empty for over twenty years. From the silent streets I could see clear across to the bilingual hills of North Wales.
A sudden terrible fatigue seized me, memories of all the times I had passed through these streets with my friends and I sank to my knees in weariness and misery.
There it was in those streets that I found my Thebes. The Greek hero Cadmus searching for his sister Europa in desperation consulted the oracle at Delphi. The oracle ordered Cadmus to drive a cow across the age-old lands into the province of Boeotia. Cadmus should mercilessly impel the poor beast forward, never allowing it to rest for a second, and at the spot where the creature finally collapsed from exhaustion there he should found his mighty. city of Thebes. I don’t know what that had to do with finding his sister but I suppose you had to do what the oracle said if it bothered to speak to you. Anyway I was both Cadmus and my own cow.
Slumped against a wall, I began to idly speculate on how little these houses would cost to buy from the desperate cash-famished council; the whole network of streets could be mine for the price of a couple of Porsches but then I thought, Where would the profit be? Terraced streets all over the north could be had for nothing because people with money didn’t want to live in terraced streets. The ordinary ones dreamed of E-fit houses in the suburbs and the out-of-the-ordinary ones wanted lofts. Sure, everybody was looking for the new loft, but lofts offered big open minimalist spaces, not the front parlours, kitchens, sculleries and back boxrooms of these tight little terraces. More importantly, the big converted warehouses with their solid entrances promised security from the wolves that roamed outside. I’d always imagined it was impossible to make a street secure: suddenly I thought, Is it?
Now I was not one of the big national companies in the developing game but I was doing better than okay. For a start, all the pointless digging up and the crane parking that I was doing meant that my firm’s logo was all over the place; this in turn meant everybody in the construction industry imagined I was making a fantastic profit, thus advantageous projects came to me first and I never had a problem financing them since the bank rang me more or less daily offering to give me your money to do what the fuck I wanted with it. I’d always had an edge when finding development sites: the way I did it was partly by having a small regiment of runners, estate agents, commercial agents, people like that, who were constantly on the lookout for properties for me to develop; they got a 2 percent fee if the deal went ahead. Besides which I bribed a couple of local government workers in the council’s Valuers Department with cars and holidays, women and drugs to let me know about the many fine buildings the council had forgotten they owned; it also helped that my stooges were able to fix the price at which the council sold these buildings to me.
Yet nobody had told me about these streets: they didn’t think even I’d be interested in terraces. No one was interested in terraces.
But why not? Seeing as you would be able to b
uy the network of streets entire it would be possible, I calculated, to wall off certain access points topped with historically correct spikes and on others you could install gates, perhaps modelled on those of famous Princes Park, all of it surveyed by CCTV cameras and rapid-response rentabizzies always on call. Then I thought, Seeing as they would be so cheap, why restrict each buyer to one house? Why not take, say, three houses and knock them into one big space, like where the Beatles lived in the film Help!. At the ends of several of the streets were empty shops and on the corner of one I could see there was a huge four-storey abandoned pub. I got unsteadily to my feet and hobbled towards it. It was a marvel, built in the Gothic revival style with etched glass windows for the four separate bars on the ground floor, above that large rooms for billiards, meetings and perhaps a restaurant, the third floor was staff quarters and above them attic rooms and cupolaed towers that must give fantastic views south to Wales and west into Liverpool Bay. With the new football stadium being built, I thought excitedly, there would be plenty of wealthy buyers, fans from outside the area, who, rather than endure Liverpool’s appalling hotels with their surly staff and shabby surroundings, would be eager to buy a luxury apartment in a secure neighbourhood with its own restaurant housed in a refurbished pub and if they didn’t want to eat out maybe the restaurant would deliver. The development could have its own delis and clothes shops, all of it within walking distance of the football ground. Maybe I could sell timeshares there, who knew?
My head full of thoughts, I left the silent streets and walked to the railway station. At first on the rocking train I had four seats to myself but a few stops further down the line a thin blonde woman in a beige raincoat boarded and without seeming to look came and sat on the seats facing me, her knees interlocked with mine, and said in a flat, dull voice, “Ee keeps punching me in the stomach, so of course I lost deh baby. Mind you it was probably for the best because it wasn’t ‘is …’