by Nick Frost
One day Mum bought some false fingernails and couldn’t work out how to secure them to her existing nails. Under the influence, she finds superglue and bonds them onto her fingers. A few hours later she comes into my bedroom – we still live in Babbacombe Gardens at this point – the same house where Mum would let me and all my friends sit up in my bedroom smoking at lunchtime. The door would kick open and a chorus of ‘Hello, Mrs Frost’ would ring out, she’d bring us all cake and sandwiches, mugs of hot sweet tea. Her rationale? She’d rather us be safe and warm at home where she could keep an eye on us than out on the street. Cool.
Anyhoo, she knocks and comes in, she is in pain and crying. The ends of her fingers have swollen around the plastic nails and the superglue means she cannot get them off. Pleading with me to help her, my thirteen-year-old self now has to perform a kind of light home surgery. I think about the task in hand and settle upon three different-sized needles and a slim steak knife. I sit Mum down and put her massive red hands on a soft pillow. I put two bags of frozen peas on her hands and leave her for a bit.
After a while we begin. I start with the smallest needle and I try and push it between the falsie and her existing nail. (As an aside my mum always had lovely hands and nails, and had no need to use false nails.) Anyway, after much shrieking and tears I get the needle down there. I waggle it about until the small needle moves freely, I then put the bigger needle under and do the same, then the biggest needle and finally the steak knife, which I use to prise the nail up and off. Mum’s relief is palpable. I repeat this ten times in total. What a palaver. It does however give me a taste for home surgery. Something I still do to this very day. If any of you ever need a skin tag or in-grown toenail removed give me a bell.
Finally, the big one . . . Death. She died. I think for a long while I couldn’t shake the feeling that she killed herself. I was so cross. I was so cross for years and years. Being angry at a dead parent is such a destructive thing it will eat you up and eventually end you too.
I’d hate for you to read this and just imagine my mum being some horrible drunk monster. I’d also like to point out that for everything she did, everything that happened to her, and us, she was the only mum I had and I loved her and still love her with all of my heart. She was a good woman who had a very hard life and in the end just couldn’t go on.
Before you judge a person it’s important to realise and understand what may have happened in their life to make them become what they eventually become.
My mum was one of many from a very poor family. The older girls were expected to look after the younger ones – I think sometimes at the expense of their own liberty and education. Mum told me it was a hard life. Gran and Grampie were strict but they knew nothing else and that’s what they had, in that cold house up on Hazel Grove.
When she was still just a girl my mum left home and married a man who was older than her. I think she must’ve thought she was being saved from her life as it was. She was wrong. Isolated high up in the hilltop farm in the tiny Pembrokeshire village of Maenclochog, she was trapped and isolated. That’s when her punishment began. She quickly had three children, Marc, Ian and Debbie. My half-siblings. My mum was strong and opinionated and feisty, cheeky, mouthy, she didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t ever back down. These traits are sadly a red rag to a bull when you’re living with a violent alcoholic. He beat the shit out of that girl time and time again. Along the way my mum lost all her teeth. He’d knocked them all out. He knocked them all out! This is the reason my blood boils when I hear about a man hitting a woman.
One day when Mum was in her twenties the police parked outside the house. They waited for him to leave, came in, told her to pack a bag and they took her away, frightened that her husband would kill her. The police put Mum on a train to London. So after years of physical and mental abuse she had escaped. But at what cost?
She’d been forced to abandon the children she loved. She had to take what she could carry and go. Having a child myself I can only imagine how heartbreaking that must have been. It must be a million times harder for a mother. It was one of the things that changed her for ever. I don’t think she really ever got over it. How could she? How could anyone? That’s why drunk Mum was so overly protective, so overly affectionate. I hated it.
She clung on to me so tightly and in the end she lost me too. I found it hard to forgive myself for a long time. I couldn’t help it though, that drinking of hers. I couldn’t watch her kill herself and there was nothing I could do to help her. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, watch her die. Maybe a better person would’ve tried harder?
I was on the Shaun of the Dead DVD tour in Los Angeles in 2005 when my mum died. It was the night I’d met Tarantino for the first time. Edgar, Simon, QT, our beautiful friend Greg Nicotero and me. I think a few others popped in along the way too and it would get most raucous.
We met in a little Thai place on Sunset, opposite El Compadre, for me the best Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood. Steer clear – or not – of their giant strawberry margaritas. The weather was terrible – torrential rain, Angelinos are shit drivers in the rain. I heard that there were six hundred crashes on the highway that night.
I call my mum and dad that morning, Mum is drunk. She sounds hammered, slurring, stammering – fuck, I was angry with her. Short, curt, I wanted to wrap her quickly and talk to Dad. I was angry with him too for letting this happen. As I tried to sign off from her she said the last words I’d ever hear her speak.
‘You’d love it here, Nins. It’s snowing in the kitchen.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s snowing in the kitchen.’
Lunacy. I was cross.
‘What are you talking about? Put Dad on.’
Dad came on the phone.
‘Is Mum okay?’
‘Yeah, she’s all right.’
‘Is she pissed?’
‘No.’
‘Right, I only ask because she just told me it was snowing in the kitchen.’
There’s a pause.
‘Oh, right, okay.’
‘I got to go, Dad. Love you.’
‘I love you too.’
And that was the last time I ever spoke to my lovely, troubled, anguished, beautiful, passionate, funny, angry mum. I had a phone call from Dad while we were at dinner; I was relieved in a way because it meant I could excuse myself from Edgar and QT’s baffling conversation about obscure Japanese cinema. I feared they’d unmask me as a fraud and I’d be banished from the table. Don’t get me wrong, I like films, I really like films, but they LOVE cinema. They are true cinephiles. I can hold my own with any movie geek or film buff but they are something else. It’s baffling to listen to, like mathematicians talking about triangles. I excuse myself and take the call. Dad’s voice trembles.
‘Mum’s sick.’
I feel my heart beating in my mouth.
‘How sick?’
‘She’s really sick, Nins.’ Nins is what they called me.
I paused. There’s a long silence. I take this information with a pinch of salt. Her drinking had put her in hospital many times. A couple of years before, I was told to prepare for the worst, an artery had ruptured in her throat after a coughing fit and they couldn’t stop it bleeding. Doctors believed that she would bleed out right there and then. She didn’t. They saved her. I think my parents went to hospital a lot without me knowing, without wanting to worry me.
With all this in mind I tell Dad I love him, tell him to keep me informed, I hang up and go back to the table. It takes me a while to shake off the call. Simon notices, of course, and quietly asks what’s wrong. I tell him but he’s been through it all with me before so he does his best to tell me it’ll be cool. I relax, the night I was about to have with the boys and QT would do its best to erase the call pretty good.
Being there on Universal’s dime doing press for the DVD’s release meant we had a driver for the night. It’s a lovely thing having a driver. It doesn’t happen that often but when it does it’s
a real treat. It means you can really tie one on and not worry about cabs or distance or time. This is exactly what happened.
We finished dinner and nipped next door to a ‘British’ pub for a few pints; it was packed and people went crazy for QT and, by association, the Shaun of the Dead guys too. It was crazy, we decide to bail, and someone suggests we head to a strip club that QT knows. We bundle into the SUV and head to East LA.
After a while cruising through the city the car pulls into the parking lot of a rough-looking shit hole. Nervously we step from our fancy, chauffeur-driven car and are immediately eye-fucked to death by a gang of fearsome-looking Cholos hanging around a low rider. (This cliché may or may not have actually happened.)
The tension eases slightly when QT jumps out. The Latino community love QT. The owner bustles out and we are greeted like family. Hugs, hands shaken, slaps on the back etc.
This does nothing to calm me. I feel fucking queasy. I’ve always had a great trouble detector, often leaving a pub or club moments before it kicks off. My ‘danger – you may be killed by men’ alarm is screaming, I can’t silence its buzzing. I stop sweating and my hands and feet become ice cold, my body is preparing itself for battle. If I think the alarm was loud outside it was nothing compared to when we went inside. My danger alarm explodes.
There are close to four hundred of what I guess I’d have to call, reluctantly and not wanting to play to an obvious cultural stereotype, Gang Bangers. They have face tats, hair nets, and gang signs are being flicked all over the place. Latino machismo is literally being squirted all over me.
We are stuffed, stuffed, into this large, low-ceilinged, red-walled strip club. In the middle of the place was a raised runway packed with attractively chubby Mexican strippers. Along the back wall runs a very long bar packed with one-eyed lunatics. It is, without doubt, one of the top five roughest places I’ve ever been in.
It’s about to get a lot rougher as the owner decides to shut the club early and turf out four hundred drunk, dangerous, very horny vatos, so we can have this deep-red hell all to ourselves! For a moment I’m slightly concerned we might get shot. I glance across at Edgar who looks pale and weak. Simon and I hold hands secretly for comfort.
We relax now it’s just us and realise just how big the place is. Friends of friends have joined and all in all there are probably twenty of us. It’s a good gang of blokes and we have a great laugh.
At one point QT sticks a big roll of dollar bills into my paw and assures me I’m going to need it. He smiles and waggles his brows suggestively. I smile. It begins. I spend two hours stuffing George Washingtons into the knickers of sexy brown girls. Much tequila is drunk, we laugh like idiots. My dinnertime phone call ebbs away from my memory with every dollar bill I twang into a G.
The MC brings us to attention, a show is about to begin. We gather around the stage and he announces the next girl, she is small, chubby and sexy. Music kicks in, it’s a song I know, I’ve heard it before, it’s a track on the From Dusk till Dawn soundtrack. If you’ve ever seen From Dusk till Dawn you’ll know there’s a scene where our heroes, now unwittingly trapped in the Titty Twister, sit up at the runway watching Salma Hayek do a horny snake dance. The thrilling denouement sees the sexy Vampire Queen Hayek sticking her foot into QT’s mouth and pouring whisky down her leg straight into his gob. It’s a sexy scene. It’s also a scene that is now getting a twenty-five-cent re-creation right in front of me. I exchange looks with Simon and Edgar. We all laugh so hard.
At the height of the dance the chubby girl in the yellow bikini sticks her foot in QT’s mouth and instead of pouring whisky down her hairy leg she opens a can of Tecate beer. It was amazing. I felt honoured to have witnessed this. I’m happy and for the first time actually begin to like the Hollywood thing. I like QT a lot. He’s always been really good to me.
We leave this beautiful hell as the sun is beginning to rise. By the time I get back to The Standard I’m glowing and hammered. I get into my room, collapse on my bed and sleep.
I’m asleep a couple of hours before the high-pitched vibrations of my silenced phone wake me up. It’s Dad with an update no doubt.
‘Hello?’ Nothing.
‘Dad?’ Silence. I get the feeling ringing in my ears. An orange flash that begins at my feet and moves north at the speed of light.
‘Dad?’ He breaks the silence.
‘Mum died, Nins.’
‘When?’
‘Just now.’
It’s my turn to be silent. I listen to the sound of my world collapsing in on itself.
After Debbie died I had counselling for a while although it didn’t last long. I was smarter than the therapist and he offered me nothing new by way of personal insight. Although he did ask me what I’d like to happen, what I’d like to happen to Mum, to Dad, to me, to us. At the time, Mum was really sick and I loved Dad so much, it was hard seeing him having to care for this old woman. He was a remarkably selfless person. I thought about the therapist’s question and I answered honestly. I told him that I wished my mum were dead. It was an answer that has haunted me ever since I heard Dad tell me that she was dead. I didn’t mean it.
‘I’ll have to call you back, Dad. I love you.’
‘I love you.’
My hands shake. My ears ring. I let out a noise. It is primal, it is guttural, I heave grief all over the floor, all over the toilet.
I can’t believe it. I stand blinking, naked in the middle of that room, trying to talk, jabbering, jabbering, turning around in a circle, my computer is misfiring badly. I need someone, I need Simon, I have to call Simon. I dial his room. Please be awake. He answers. He’s groggy.
‘Hello?’
I can’t talk. I know exactly what’s going to happen when I hear my boy’s voice. I knew it would send me over the edge. I make a noise, the noise sounds like a gorilla punching me in the solar plexus. He knows. There’s a level of instant knowing at the sound of a person who’s lost someone close, really close, one of the big seven, Brother, Sister, Mother, Father, Husband, Wife, Child.
I drop the phone and slump to the floor. Simon couldn’t have been more than two minutes but it was a fucking long, lonely two minutes.
I’d already lost two half-sisters and a half-brother at this point so I thought I was getting good at this grief thing. I was so fucking wrong.
Grief, like strong LSD, comes in waves. There are moans, weeping, tears, laughter, silence, random thought processes I have no way of controlling. I have no control. Simon grabs the situation by the balls and phone calls are made. Arrangements. Flights changed. Meetings are cancelled. The Shaun of the Dead press tour is over. My sense of responsibility and work ethic means I’m sad it’s over but I can’t go on. I can’t do it. Nothing matters to me anymore except being with my dad.
Simon and me are on a BA flight that night. Sitting at the gate people ask us for photos. It’s hard to say no to a fan especially if it’s a kid, we had photos. I’d hate to see those pictures.
We board the 747 and sit upstairs in Business Class. While waiting for the doors to close a funny thing happens. A man, young, English, early thirties maybe, is also sitting up in Business Class, and he’s what cockneys might call a Proper Cunt. My backstory for him – I create a backstory for almost everyone I meet – was this: he’s the young up-and-coming director of promos, ad campaigns, that sort of thing. He’s arrogant and thinks he’s entitled because he has a bit of money. That said, there’s no way he paid for his own ticket. No way. People up in First and Business hardly ever do.
He’s with an American girl, tall and very beautiful, catwalk model beautiful. A fit girl like this will always multiply the arrogance of a proper arsehole. He’ll always feel like he needs to be edgier, more outspoken, more opinionated than anyone else because deep down he knows that she may jump ship at any second.
They were both being very loud, complaining noisily. They’d been denied an upgrade and now he finds his shitty, wide, tons of legroom seat has a tiny smudg
e of melted chocolate on it, he wants – no, demands – to be moved. The attendant sighs, she doesn’t need this shit. Model girl still wants an upgrade but there are no seats. The flight is still full! The attendant, calm, professional, quietly spoken offers to put a blanket on his seat. It is literally all she can do unless he wants a downgrade? Model is starting to blame Dickhead for this terribly unfair business. He needs to save face and fast. He stands. This is going to be good. I forget my woes for a moment and look at Simon who gives me a ‘this is going to be good’ look. Dickhead looks around, takes a breath and declares . . .
‘Fuck this. We’re getting off.’
Wow. Big move. Big statement. She’ll love that, I bet she has a wide-on. The Model agrees. After a lot of ‘look at me’-style kerfuffle, they leave accompanied by some light applause.
We are now forced to sit at the gate for a further forty minutes waiting for their bags to be offloaded. Finally the doors are closed; we push back and take off. I’m going home. I’m frightened. The ding noise dings and the seatbelt signs go off. We are now free to walk about the cabin.
Two minutes later the lovely stewardess who had been through so much shit with that pair of pricks swings by and reveals two passports! One British, one American. What she is showing us are their passports that he’d shoved down the side of the seat! In the rush to get off the plane they’d left their fucking documents on board! Karma right there! BOOM! My mum died, fuck you, you Chocolate-Seat Helmets.