by Alexei Sayle
The only person I knew in a city of ten million people was a sort of cousin of mine, who lived not in Lewisham but near it in a place that didn’t seem to have a name, who was not exactly an accountant but something near it. This place where he lived, to get there you had to take an overground train smelling like a wet dog from a big railway station then walk for miles through grey roads where the streetlights seemed to hose colour out of the night.
I used to get on the train to visit without checking whether my sort of cousin was in, because if he wasn’t in at least another empty evening had passed. On one blank winter) Tuesday I travelled over there to find no reply to my ringing on the bell (though the idea had begun to form that the not cousin had started hiding when he suspected it might be me at the door). Turning around, head drawn in, I shambled back towards the station. When I’d got off the overground train I’d bought and eaten four Yorkie bars at a newsagent’s in the adjacent parade of shops, but on my return there was only a Chinese takeaway open. I ordered a sweet and sour pork and sat on a plastic chair to wait for it to be ready.
When it came and I peeled back the cardboard lid of the foil container I realised I’d made a mistake. In Liverpool your Chinese food comes on a bed of chips or rice with a plastic fork for you to eat it with but in London it was all the pork stuff with no chips and no fork so that I was trying to eat this orange goo with my fingers, while standing in the street.
With a shudder I threw the food into the gutter and got on a train that was going to Victoria Station. I got off, walked round to the coach station where I bought a ticket on the overnight bus back to Liverpool and was in my dad’s house asleep in my old bed by 8 a.m. and in the pub that afternoon with Loyd and Colin.
In the saloon bar of the pub Colin said to me, ‘We couldn’t believe it when you said you were going to study in London. What the fuck did you want to go down to that shithole for?’
‘I don’t know now,’ I replied.
‘I’m not even going to move out of me mum and dad’s house for five years,’ said Loyd.
‘You didn’t say anything,’ I whined.
‘Kelvin, we thought you had a plan,’ said Loyd. ‘No plan,’ I said.
‘Let’s face it, you’re no Siggi,’ said Colin. ‘No Siggi,’ I said.
The year before, when we’d all been seventeen, Siggi had gone for an audition without telling anyone and then got a place at the Bristol Old Vic Drama School. We had a party to see her off and said we’d all visit but somehow didn’t, especially not me who was stuck in London. So the first time we saw her after her first term was in the pub at Christmas time. The only thing we noticed that seemed different was she had come back from drama school with a long ‘A’ so that she would say ‘barth’ where before she’d said ‘bath’ like the rest of us. This we all ignored; the only other thing they seemed to have taught her in Bristol was how to fall over. Every half-hour or so she’d punch herself in the chest and drop to the fag-end-strewn floor, then jump up again, but we pretty much ignored that too and after that a chasm seemed to grow between us until she stopped coming back for the holidays and stayed in Bristol.
Occasionally we got reports from her family that she was doing really well down there but families always say that. Even if she’d come back I wouldn’t have wanted to see her. I thought myself a failure at eighteen like some not quite good enough teenage footballer. Considering my future was over, I miserably took a job as a labourer at my uncle’s building firm. And there on the building sites I found everything I’d been expecting art school to be. In a pasteurised, safe world I found the sites to be the last refuge of the true individualist: the wild characters I met on the building made my fellow art students seem as distinctive from each other as sausages. I hadn’t known, behind those hoardings, how fucking clever and funny and kind everybody was. Everywhere I worked I encountered inarticulate men who could hardly write but whose thoughts were in such a profound form of 3D that they could solve the most complex problems without resorting to any kind of drawing or plan.
Then there is the work itself: think about it, what we builders do is nothing less than we reshape your world. Where you are now, where you are right now this minute, reading this, stop. Look around you — a builder made it. Wonderful men conspired to put it together: labourers you dismiss as thickos built it; guys you step over in the street now they’re old and fucked up solved all the problems you didn’t know were there; a developer you consider as only one step up from a maggot conceived of it, fought to get permission for it, destroyed rare archaeological artefacts, covered up dangerous chemical spoil to get it constructed on time. Now doesn’t that seem as profound as making cakky marks on squares of canvas? And what’s more the money is fucking fantastic. At first I was a general labourer. Those outside the building think the labourer is the lowest rank on the sites but it’s much more complex than that; the other trades, sparks, chippies, plumbers, come and go when their task is completed but the labourer is there right throughout the job from beginning to end so if he wants to, the labourer, he starts to take responsibility for things when the foreman isn’t around, deliveries, minor problems, that sort of thing. Then if he’s clever he starts to see the opportunities: with my wages I bought a derelict house in the South End of Liverpool, did it up and sold it, made a tiny profit. The next one I split into flats using guys I’d met on other jobs to do the work. The return I made on that place gave me a profile with the .bank, which meant they were happy to lend me some money. That money meant that the buildings I bought could be bigger, the risks greater, the profit larger.
Even before I’d gone to London I had learned to drive in my dad’s old 1973 Vanden Plas Princess 1300 and could soon afford my own car, a black Volkswagen Golf GTi I bought at a bankruptcy auction.
Colin said to me, ‘Kelvin mate, you should think yourself lucky you didn’t get a higher education. I mean studying for an English degree has put me off fucking books for life, but you, because you’re self-taught you love reading, man, you devour it all voraciously — classical literature, detective fiction, biographies, comic books, modern feminist writing — you don’t shove stuff in artificial boxes, you don’t worry whether its ‘good’ or not, you’re just wide open to new ideas, man.’ Patronising bastard.
One weekend in what I guess must have been towards the end of her third year, on a Saturday morning when I was supposed to be doing some repairs for an orphanage near Manchester, I instead stayed on the motorway and drove my black car to Bristol, having got Siggi’s address from Paula, with whom she still fitfully corresponded.
When I rang at the door of the grey terraced house which Siggi shared with two other girls from the drama school, it was answered by a pretty little redhead, still in her dressing-gown though it was the afternoon. She seemed recently to have been crying.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I was wondering if Siggi was in.’
‘She’s at a tap class,’ snuffled the girl. ‘She’ll be back in half an hour, wanna come in and wait?’
‘Sure, I guess.’
The girl showed me into the living room, which I noticed with a silent internal shudder was the usual student landfill site; in this case it was made even more untidy by the fact that there were pictures of movie stars torn from magazines and books strewn all over the floor and all over the ratty brokendown furniture. As soon as she got back in the room the girl started crying again. It struck me that there was already a gap between me and this girl, even though if she was in the same year as Siggi she must be more or less the same age as me. I felt like I was an adult and she was a child, albeit one with spectacular tits visible inside that dressing-gown. I stood there enjoying the feeling of being like a grown-up in my narrow dark blue trousers and my cream jumper bought from the Emporio Armani shop that had just opened in Manchester, spinning my car keys round my finger.
The girl continued to sniffle miserably as she made me a horrible cup of instant coffee.
‘Erm, is there something the matter?’ I
finally felt forced to enquire.
In response the girl stuck both her thumbs up at me, which seemed an oddly positive gesture for somebody who was sobbing wretchedly.
She quavered, ‘Do you see anything wrong with these?’
‘Your thumbs?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, they seem fine to me.’
‘Exactly, that’s what I thought. Well, we had a film workshop at college yesterday with Szigismond Wajeckej; he was the cameraman on The Laughter o f Larks. Did you see it?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘Well, anyway, he took one look at my thumbs and he said they were too broad for me ever to be a success in films. So I’ve been looking through all these pictures of movie stars and I can’t see any difference between their thumbs and mine. Do you want to have a look?’ she said, holding out a giant magnifying glass.
‘Er, sure.’
For the next twenty minutes I studied the thumbs of the highest grossing film stars of 1991: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, Chevy Chase. I could see no difference between their thumbs and those of the redhead. I told her this and she calmed down a little. As she said, ‘It’s not as if you can get plastic surgery on your thumbs. Not even in Ecuador. I’ve asked their embassy and they said definitely not. Honestly, the fucking criticism you have to put up with if you’re an actress; how are we supposed to live with stuff like that?’
Surprising myself, I found I could see her point, not entirely sure if it was simply because I wanted to fuck her or not but I felt I could understand how horrible and intimate and wounding such criticism must be. Where I worked, in the building game, if you were displeased with someone you might sometimes come up behind them with a length of pipe and smack them with it but there was nothing personal about your actions, it was simply one of a range of options that were open to everyone. But to have a go at a girl’s thumbs, now that did seem way too cruel.
Siggi came back from her dance class a little later looking sweaty and dishevelled. At first there was some awkwardness between us about what my motives were for being there, so we were forced to energetically send out signals to each other like ironclad battleships cutting through the grey sea on manoeuvres off Jutland Sound until we had sorted out what I was doing there. ‘I j-u-s-t c-a-m-e f-o-r a v-i-s-i-t i-n m-y c-o-o-l c-a-r, I’m n-o-t a-f-t-e-r a s-h-a-g o-f-f y-o-u h-o-n-e-s-t. T-h-o-u-g-h I m-a-y b-o-i-n-k y-o-u-r l-i-t-t-l-e f-r-i-e-n-d,’ the semaphore flags flapped.
The Aldis lamp clacked back: ‘S-h-e’s a r-a-n-d-y s-l-a-pp-e-r y-o-u c-a-n h-a-v-e h-e-r.’
‘Wow, Kelvin,’ said Siggi, standing back and taking in my new clothes. ‘You look like a drug dealer.’
That night I drove Siggi, the redhead and another girl from the drama school to a studenty-type pub. They told me excitedly that they had put together their own comedy group called the Hitler Sisters and that night they were putting on their own one-hour show in a room above the pub. Their show was called Am Misbebavin.
The redhead said, ‘Those stiffs who teach us at the Old Vic School think our dream is a lifetime of playing Titania or Cordelia in the theatre.’
‘If we’re lucky!’ said the other one.
‘Or third prostitute with weeping head wound in Casualty.’
‘Do you know we’ve spent the last two weeks making puppets out of fag packets?’
‘I mean what is that all about?’
‘They should be teaching us stand-up comedy not bloody fencing.’
‘There’s all these great comedy clubs opening now.’
‘And there’s all these great women comedians coming along.’
‘Nelly Shank, Beth Coil, Jenny LeBute, Mrs Patel—’
‘I think she’s a man.’
‘Still, it’s not a boy’s game any more.’
‘No way!’
‘Yes way!’
‘Party on, dude!’
The upstairs room of the pub where once earnest mechanics had studied The Communist Manifesto had now become the Giggle Room. Seated at small round tables, the audience were students and the young clerks who spent their days in the insurance offices around the city and needed an easy laugh when they went out for the night. I thought of all the great laughs we had on the sites and felt sorry for them; I didn’t have to pay for it.
I stood at the back leaning against the sweating wall. The lights dimmed and on to the spotlit stage came the three drama students. The third girl sat at a war-ravaged upright piano and while she played all three sang a song about Tampax and periods. Then the redhead did a routine about periods and boyfriends and Tampax, then Siggi sang a song about cakes and periods, then they performed a sketch about a boyfriend buying Tampax for his girlfriend who was having PMT because it was nearly her period, then there was another sketch about what a wimp your boyfriend is when he has a cold, then there was another song about Mrs Thatcher having her period, then Siggi read a poem about ‘The Disappeared’ of the fascist junta in Argentina, then they finished with a song and dance routine about Tampax.
Throughout the show I experienced a rising sense of discomfort. Not because I was disconcerted by the stuff they were doing: I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was funny or not but I’d laughed along with everybody else. No, what had caused me increasing trouble was Siggi.
From the moment she had stepped on to the shabby stage I had not been able to take my eyes off her. I’d always thought that phrase was just an expression that didn’t mean anything, like stuff people said about ravens in pies and plucking motes out of the eyes of Pharisees or whatever, but for me and for the rest of the audience it was a literal truth, we could look only at her. The entire crowd were joined in an unspoken conspiracy and the only ones who weren’t in on it were the other two girls on the stage. Indeed if anything the other two got more laughs than Siggi did and received more applause because we, the audience, felt awfully sorry for them, so they must have thought that they were doing better than she was and treated her with a certain patronising hauteur.
As the applause died down, after they’d left the stage, I said to the young guy in the overcoat tied with string who was promoting the show and who had been standing right at the back twitching as promoters have always done throughout history, ‘Mate, can you tell Siggi’
‘Which one’s she again?’ he interrupted. ‘The one with the talent.’
‘Oh yeah, her.’
‘Right, well, can you tell her I can’t stay like I thought I could and I’m sorry I’ve got to get back home because I’ve completely forgotten an important meeting I’ve got early tomorrow morning.’ Then I left.
Driving north along the empty motorways, I thought of how crystal clear this day had been, how every detail sparkled and glinted and was fixed in my memory for ever. If I’d had to, I knew that in six years’ time I would be able to tell some detectives which shelf the parmesan cheese had been on in the student girl’s fridge, how many buttons were missing from Siggi’s blue coat and what the soup of the day was in a cafe two doors down from the pub where the comedy show had been. A few years later Sage Pasquale won a competition in the Manchester Evening News for tickets to a special advance screening of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein; the little redhead had a small part in it playing a crone and funnily enough up there on the big screen her thumbs did seem to be too broad.
Just like me, Siggi didn’t finish her college course but in Siggi’s case it was a sign of success not failure. All the shows at drama school she’d been in during the preceding eighteen months, there’d been an agent or a casting director in the audience looking her over. She told me later they were usually middle-aged women who travelled in twos, the agent and a sidekick. They’d take her out for coffee or a drink afterwards, adeptly shaking off the other drama school girls who tried desperately to tagalong.
Siggi listened calmly to the plans they laid out for her, the exciting opportunities in theatre and TV that awaited, but it was only when Laurence Djaboff came that she got excited. Laurence Djaboff,
founder of the famous Laurence Djaboff theatre group, for whom she willingly abandoned her graduation show. He offered her the leading role opposite him in his new piece, Hard Wee Man, the play he’d written about his childhood in Aberdeen’s notorious South East End, as the son of the only Orthodox rabbi in the Highlands.
Suddenly interested in her again, the whole gang, apart from me, booked to see the play on its opening night when it came to Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. Apart from the odd phone call and a few brief meetings none of the others had seen much of Siggi in the last three years. They all said they were very excited that they knew someone who was starring in a play.
‘Hi, it’s Siggi, do you wanna meet for a drink?’
I was extremely surprised to get a call from her on my brand-new carphone. ‘Er … sure. Welcome back to Liverpool by the way,’ I said.
‘Yeah, right, come to the rehearsal rooms. Oh, and bring a sports bag with, like, running stuff in it, trainers and shorts.’
‘Why, are we going for a run?’