The Liar's Quartet

by Mark Thomas

  If someone called at our house after the telly had gone on and Dad had sat down you would hear two sounds.

  SFX: DOORBELL

  Followed by my dad, ‘Suppose I better put me trousers on.’

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP. LAUGHS Not a good image is it, darling?

  DAD: BUILDER’S LAMP LIGHTS UP. LAUGHS No, not really.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP He was a nightmare, wasn’t he?

  Nightmare … He was forever collecting bloody scrap metal.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Him and Mack could not pass a skip without him mooching into it to see if there was anything.

  He was a totter.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Yes, he was a totter.

  He did well for himself financially too and when I was eleven I plucked up courage to ask him, ‘Dad, are we middle class yet?’

  ‘No we are fucking not!’

  It offended him to be even asked.

  He was working class and his children were going to be educated but not so they could be middle class, he didn’t want us to be middle class he wanted us to be rich! Filthy fucking rich. I’ve been somewhat of a disappointment. On both counts.

  This is the big difference between middle class and the working class. Middle-class parents want their children to be like them, to have the same opportunities they had. Working-class parents want better for their kids, they wanted them to be improved, they want their kids to look down at them and to that extent my dad has been successful.

  I know some of you will say, ‘Oh Mark, you bang on about class but we are all middle class now’ – well tell your cleaner, I am sure she will be delighted.24

  If you are unsure what class you are, there is a simple test: if someone says, ‘Pass the olive oil’ and you say, ‘Which one?’ you’re middle class.

  If you use the word ‘distressed’ to describe relatives rather than furniture you’re working class. ‘Your table’s distressed? You should see my nan at the self-service checkout, that’s distressed.’

  I am resolutely middle class though I put myself in the bohemian bracket. Essentially if John Lewis had a tattoo parlour, I would be first in the queue, ‘I’d like crossed lemon zesters and a honeycomb please.’

  What my dad disliked about the middle classes was that he thought they were smug and pretentious but what he hated was their aversion to physical labour. Sure he would fix your house and he would fix it brilliantly too.

  MATT: ARK LIGHTS UP The man was amazing with a hammer and a fucking chisel.

  He was a craftsman.

  MATT: ARK LIGHTS UP He was beautiful with it.

  He would roll his sleeves up and get his hands dirty for you and make you something of beauty. And you could look down at him when he talked about Maggie and how great she was and he dropped his H’s and effed and blinded but he would earn more than you ever would.

  SFX: OPERA BURST

  In a way it was not that surprising that he should discover a love of opera.

  SFX: OPERA BURST

  The richest art form, the most elitist art form, the most exclusive art form, the most expensive one.

  SFX: OPERA CONTINUES TO PLAY

  UNDERNEATH

  It was in another language and it was simply not something for someone like him. Opera is the default culture setting for the ruling class. It is where they go instead of karaoke. It was simply something that was not in his life.

  He discovered opera partly through church music, as choral music often has a classical bent, but mainly through his belief in education. Education was not just for his children but himself, he believed in self-education and improvement. To that end every week my dad would get this …

  HOLDS UP COPY OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS

  … this is The Great Composers,25 a week by week guide to the great musicians and their music. It is a guide through classical music in alphabetical order starting with Bach and going through to Wagner. It cost thirteen pounds and ten shillings for a six-monthly subscription and you’d collect it from the local newsagent up the road. This is Mozart part five. Inside is a booklet like a theatre programme explaining the composer, contextualising the work, so we have articles on 1782–86 Hard Work of Mozart and Mozart and the Orchestra and here at the back is a sleeve and inside the sleeve is this.

  HOLDS ALOFT 10 INCH RECORD26

  SFX: OPERA BURST

  For the younger members of the audience … this … is vinyl and once upon a time we were very very fucking attached to it.27

  Once there was a time when every great piece of music started with this sound …

  SFX: SOUND OF NEEDLE GOING ON TO RECORD RUNNING INTO OPENING BARS OF DR FEELGOOD’S ‘ROXETTE’ (LIVE)

  The needle went through the grooves producing such a sound as would make us sway and tap and move our bodies in utter joy.

  MT DANCES UNTIL SFX OF NEEDLE BEING SCRATCHED OFF A RECORD

  Every week my dad would get his copy, put it on the record player, sit down and read the programme notes, forcing himself to listen to the music, forcing himself to be improved … with his trousers round his ankles.

  TURNS TO THE BOXES

  Do you remember the Great Composers, Classic series?

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP The Classic series yes … basically that is all we could afford at the time, wasn’t it.

  DAD: BUILDER’S LAMP LIGHTS UP Mostly classical music not a lot of opera but opera amongst it.

  Was this the first time you would have heard some of those composers?

  DAD: BUILDER’S LAMP LIGHTS UP Yes, a lot of times.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Probably it was.

  What were the bits that stood out for you?

  DAD: BUILDER’S LAMP LIGHTS UP Rossini …

  Rossini?

  DAD: BUILDER’S LAMP LIGHTS UP … and Verdi.

  Rossini and Verdi.

  Here is a man whose entire self-image is constructed around his masculinity, who defines the word machismo, who has no fear of violence and a love of hard labour, for whom the words ‘brute force’ are an accolade. Who falls in love with an art form inhabited by sprites and elves, magic flutes, star-crossed lovers, gypsies singing of bullfighters, men in antlers and evil dukes. It is as if he stumbled across the shattered wasteland of his emotional life and in the stunted debris and weeds of his feelings found a box marked OHHHW! It was as if he had found his inner camp.

  Opera left me cold. It was just panto for posh folk. Might as well put Christopher Biggins in a Pavarotti mask and shove him onstage. The worst thing about opera is if you go and see it you have to sit next to people who like it.

  My dad loved it and every Sunday when he would do the paperwork the house became full of the sound of sopranos and tenors and Rossini’s basses. Then he started to go to see it. Do you remember the first opera you saw?

  DAD: BUILDER’S LAMP LIGHTS UP Yeah, love, La Bohème.

  La Bohème. At Covent Garden. He got tickets in the slips so he had to stand. We said good job, because if he had a seat, he would sit down, hear the music and have to drop his trousers to get comfortable.

  He took my mum all over the place to see the opera. Royal Opera – very classy, English National at the Coliseum – better ’cos it was in English. Glyndebourne, pricey but worth it. My mum remembers the first time she went to Glyndebourne. She said, ‘I sent your father up to the bar to get a glass of iced coffee and all I can hear is his voice going “How much?!”’

  He knew his stuff too. He could tell you if he had seen a good opera or a bad one, unlike 80 per cent of the audience who are content just to pat themselves on the back for turning up. He loved the music but my mum said that was only half of it, what he really liked was dressing up, standing in his bow tie and cigar and a look on his face that said, ‘I’m as fucking good as you.’

  My dad would buy two sets of every opera, one would be the boxset in vinyl for home and the cassettes for work.28 I’ll say that again, cassettes for work. He took a tape recorder to work to
play opera. So in the summer we would stick up the scaffold, tie it in, strip the slates, felt and baton, insulate and re-slate.29 All the while my dad would be singing along to Rossini’s Barber of Seville – ‘Figaro’s Aria’. My dad sung with the gusto of a Welsh male voice choir and the precision of the carpet bombing of Cambodia. Across the skyline of south London. He didn’t know the words, so he would just improvise.

  SINGS FIGARO’S OPENING ARIA BADLY

  I am a sixteen-year-old punk. In an ‘Anarchy and Freedom’ t-shirt. To withstand that level of embarrassment you would need to be George Galloway.30

  But the blokes on the site didn’t take the piss. Only once did I see it. A friend of his called Mack, sitting downstairs for tea had heard the music all morning and said, ‘’kin’ hell. What you fucking got up there, you stuck some bird on a pole or something?’ My dad replied, ‘I’ll stick you on a pole in a minute, you uncultured prick.’ And thus the debate ended.

  Now at this point you might like my dad, think he is a character: a rough diamond, a wild card, a ruffian but with an inner heart of art and beauty, as he likes opera. In reality he was a cunt. He worked all hours, was rarely home so we hardly saw him and when he was, we were walking on eggshells least we did something to upset him. The fists that were quick to fly outside the home were just as quick to fly inside. Once one of the kids wrote the word ‘bum’ on the banister – which is the title of any future autobiography, Bum on the Banister by Mark Thomas and Noel Coward – so he lined us all up and hit all four of us until we cried and said, ‘The one that has done it has been punished.’

  MATT: ARK LIGHTS UP I know for a fact that once he lost it you didn’t want to be anywhere near him. He did have a temper on him.

  I don’t like talking about it because he is my dad and I love him … but he was a little bit punchy at times, weren’t he?

  There was a stage when we would have an annual reunion at the accident and emergency where my mum had ended up on the end of one of those quick fists.

  So when I say he was a cunt I am not saying it for effect. I mean it.

  But this is not a story of a father finding a son’s love, this is not a story of redemption, this is not a story of forgiveness. Those of us that have had cause to forgive him, forgave him a long time ago or we have learnt to live around it. I can’t speak for the rest of my family, if you want to know what they think you’ll have to go and see their shows, but for me this is a story about a gift.

  Children have a way of finding the cracks and weakness of their parents. I know a man who is a doctor, he sounds like he fought in World War II and he did.31 He was in the Navy. He runs a medical charity training doctors in the poorest parts of the world to the highest international standards. I like that. It means the poorest parts of the world get the best trained doctors. He phones up one afternoon and says,

  ‘Mark we are having a fund raiser and I wondered if you might come and do some after dinner speaking?’

  ‘Well I don’t really do after dinner speaking.’

  ‘Oh … oh never mind … We are raising funds for the burns unit in Gaza …’

  PAUSE

  ‘Look I’m sorry I can make something work. I’ll do something for you.’

  ‘Excellent. Thank you so much.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘The House of Lords.’

  I’ve done a gig in the House of Lords dining room. The only way to keep sane was to start by saying, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, my Lords and Ladies lovely to be here before we abolish you.’

  Now the invite said ‘Dress – casual lounge’ which I do not possess – and even if I did I wouldn’t admit it – but what I do posses is a Crombie – for lovers of youth culture of yesteryear you will know it is a long coat, nice velvet collar, red satin lining and a folding over for the buttons on the outside. Officially it is known as ‘tasty schmutter’. I’m wearing the Crombie, a button-down shirt, Sta Press trousers and loafers. I am looking good. I am looking a little bit This is England32 but I am looking good. I walk downstairs and my sixteen-year-old son says, ‘Wow you look like you are dressed for a funeral.’

  ‘Actually I am doing a gig at the House of Lords …’

  ‘A funeral for your own dignity, father.’

  Kids have a way of getting their own back on their parents. In my family, education and hard work were the most important weapons in the battle of aspiration. I was the first member of my family to go to university. To study drama.

  He was proud and crestfallen in equal measure. Often within nanoseconds of each other. It is not that he was unsupportive, it was that everyone he spoke to seemed to say, ‘Well it’s very hard to make a living in that game.’ And he was baffled as to why I should do so much studying for something with so little financial reward.

  I loved it. It was Brecht and drugs and rock and roll. I remember coming home after my first term and running around to see my dad at work.

  ‘Father, I have returned from university, come see, I have leg warmers. Father let me show you a Jacobean jig and round. Father, where are you going?’

  But ever since I was sixteen I wanted to be a stand-up comic. My mum and dad kept away from the gigs for the first two years, which was fine because a lot of material was about them. But I also kept them away. The fourth gig I ever did was at a place called the Tunnel,33 a notorious venue for open spots. I had done three gigs that had gone moderately well but I fancied myself a new Billy Connolly.

  I asked my brother-in-law and my sister to give me a lift to the gig where I was booed off. In the car park afterwards my brother in law said, ‘Never invite me to one of your gigs again.’34

  ‘Why not? It wasn’t you getting booed.’

  ‘No it was you they were shouting fuck off at. It was you they were chucking stuff at but it was your sister standing on a chair in the middle of the crowd shouting, “Shut up you slags, give him a fucking chance!” And it is not her they hit.’

  The first stand up show my parents saw me perform at was on a pub boat that ran a cabaret evening. After the show my mum came up to me and said, ‘Well you were better than the other two, they were shite.’

  They would come along from time to time. My first one-man show I walk onstage and at that time started the show by saying, ‘Look I never know how to start a gig these days.’

  From the back of the room a voice goes, ‘Get fucking on with it!’

  Followed by my mum’s voice hissing, ‘Colin.’

  And you have to explain to the audience, ‘That’s my dad. My mum and dad copulated twenty-seven years ago so they could arrive at this moment of hellish embarrassment.’

  Ten years ago my dad started to walk backwards.

  SFX: CLOCK TICKING

  His feet would shoot out from under him and propel him in the wrong direction. He would lean forward to try to count eract the momentum, then his arms would shoot out and he would cry, ‘OWWAY!’ and fall over.

  Over the months the falls got worse.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP He could fall up to ten times a day.

  Then he started to shake.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP That’s right. When that arm went he had a kind of tremor to it and that was when I sent him to the doctor.

  He was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy – PSP.35

  Progressive because it is degenerative and worsening condition, so now you know the Lib Dems use the word its medical sense. Supranuclear as it is a neuroglogical disorder and a palsy is a weakening of the muscles. Progressive supra-nuclear palsy – it is sometimes misdiagnosed as MS – there is no treatment for PSP.

  This is what happens. Movements start to slow down …

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Their balance is crap…

  … there are frequent falls, clumsiness …

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP He can’t swallow properly…

  … he can’t walk …

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP He can’t talk …

  … the muscle
s in his eyelids collapse …

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP he can’t see properly.

  Then there is the personality changes – irritation, grouchiness, memory loss, forgetfulness, apathy (indifference), slowed thinking, reasoning, planning, inappropriate laughing or crying – emotional incontinence with angry or aggressive outbursts.

  Dementia accompanies this so as his body wanes and the muscles collapse his mind caves in. Leaving him immobile with a head skewed.

  And the final indignity – my mum and dad move to Bournemouth. No, alright you’re dying but you don’t have to announce it to everyone. There are signs in the town with ‘Bournemouth twinned with ERRR’. There are passengers on the train to Bournemouth with a return ticket and you think, ‘That is optimistic.’

  It is a five-hour return journey to Bournemouth and I don’t get down there enough to see the day-to-day changes happening in my dad.

  My mum was born around the corner from my dad, she trained as a nurse and did her midwifery in Glasgow, came back and married my dad, had kids and once we were up and running she ran a Spar – a proper one with an ‘R’ at the end and not a ‘health’ at the front. It was called Booze and Food and was robbed twice.

  My mum refuses to put my dad in a home until she can no longer care for him. When I go to interview her about the changes in Dad she is twitchy.

  SITS ON END BOX AND TURNS TO HALF FACE THE WOODEN LAMP

  I ask her something like, ‘But he is still the same person?’

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Do you think he is?

  No but it’s not about what I think it is about what you think.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Do you think it is? When you come down and see him sitting there and he might nod or he might smile. I doubt it.36

  Sometimes she is evasive.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP Would you?

  Or just cross.

  MUM: ELEPHANT LAMP LIGHTS UP No that is a cop out.

  But she was a nurse and when I ask her a direct question she responses directly.

  Do you think you know what will kill dad?