The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  Then he chuckled. The old man never chuckled. ‘Back she came. Once in Gourock, even, the Craigburn Pavilion. I near fell off the stage when I saw her. Three cousins with her, giggling away.’

  It was extraordinary to think of my mother and father like this. That they could have been so happy.

  ‘I proposed and she said yes. But they ground her down. Her mother. Jees-oh, a face that could melt yer wellies. There’d be no marriage so long as I worked the stage. It was unbecoming of a lady. Your mother didn’t say a word. She forgot all those shows she’d sneaked out to. I got a job backstage at The Empire. Other folk got the laughs and I went home to your mother, three up in the tenement. Two wee rooms. Love, boys? What is love? Come on!’

  We both jumped.

  ‘Love is this song you’re hearing on the record player right this very minute. Mood Indigo. Your mother loved Duke Ellington too. It’s how you got your name, Dukey boy.’ He sat back heavily in the chair and opened his arms wide. ‘Dead easy, don’t you reckon? Love. I’ll drink to that.’ He knocked his whisky back and poured another. ‘But you know what else it is?’ He looked from Duke to me and back. ‘No idea? Well, I’ll tell you. Love is taking over this farm in the middle of bloody nowhere when your granda died and your granny went doolally. There’s love.’

  He stood up. Glimmer of the pouring bottle.

  ‘Duke. Up!’

  Again, we both gave a start. The chair scraped as Duke stood up. A quick glance down at me, nervous.

  ‘Away and get the coat stand.’

  ‘The coat stand?’

  ‘You deaf?’

  Duke hurried out of the kitchen and the old man turned to me.

  ‘You. Up.’

  I too got up quickly. Duke lifted the coat stand into the kitchen from the hall and set it beside the old man. It was a solid, old-fashioned wooden one, seven feet high with three curving legs at the bottom. God knows where it came from, probably an aspirational purchase by my mother, seen in the windows of Munro’s department store, just right for hanging up the Sunday best.

  The old man now threw his long raincoat at me. ‘Put it on and get up on the stand.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Don’t eh me. Just do it.’

  Still the short arse I would be until a growth spurt took me to my dizzying final height of five foot four, I pulled on the coat, which came down to my knees. Then I climbed onto the stand, pulling myself up by the hooks at the top and putting my feet on the circular wooden band that stuck out about a foot above the base, the place where you would keep umbrellas, if we had any.

  There followed a few minutes of shoving and pulling, my father closing the neck over the top of my head with safety pins so it didn’t pop out, until he was happy it looked like a bulky coat.

  ‘Right. Here’s how it works. Duke’ll walk past and when I go “now”, stick out a leg and kick him in the arse.’

  The old man banked the fire and that is what we did. Over and over again in the dancing firelight.

  ‘First rule of showbiz: everyone likes watching someone get kicked in the arse. Even your mother. We’ll work up a routine. Get it down pat, practice makes perfect and aw that pish.’

  That’s how it began. Death can be a freeing, I suppose. The old man’s passion was no longer an old story in The Clachan or a song belted out at shieling or shore, safely distant from his wife. Now it was shot through with new possibility. JJ and The Duke, he christened us, the surrogates of an ambition being rediscovered. Even though he wouldn’t perform, it would always be ‘we’.

  ‘We’ll get on the bill, boys.’

  The cartoon light bulbs lit up in Duke’s head and mine at the same time. We’d been groomed for this our whole lives, all the turns the old man had drummed into us. The ambition felt like our own. I suppose the triumph in someone else’s obsession is in convincing you it is actually yours.

  And then it is.

  Duke was a born performer. He was brilliant. I didn’t enjoy it half as much, I was far too gauche, although that had its own comic appeal. My interest lay behind the scenes. The writing and the staging. The old man wouldn’t have this. That was his job, to design and dictate. My best ideas he would first ignore then quietly reintroduce, changed slightly to prove they were his but thereby frustratingly less effective than my original concept.

  ‘You got a problem with something, son?’

  ‘No, Dad. It works well. I like it.’

  My passivity. It made everything he did an affirmation of his unerring correctness. His violence.

  * * *

  ‘Whadaya think, Jack?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Needs work, I know. But there’s talent there, eh.’

  ‘Aye . . . there’s something there.’

  This last with a lingering look towards the exit at the top of the auditorium. It had gone midday. Everyone knew that Fat Jack McVeigh, erstwhile owner, proprietor and manager of The Inveran Empire sat down at twelve, Monday to Friday, in the snug of the Queen’s hotel to a hauf and a hauf and whatever the lunch special might be, Fat Jack being a man who liked to live dangerously.

  Though not as dangerously as to put JJ and the Duke on, even at the bottom of the bill. ‘Coat Stand Surprise’ had gone well, ‘The Box’ less so. The old man had come up with the latter a week or so previously.

  Duke and I are two men in a pub, me the dopey one and Duke the wisecracker. There is a little wooden box on the table in front of us and I am telling Duke about my improbable world travels, how I went to Africa and bought a lion, which I keep in this box, and a giraffe as well. ‘In the same box?’ asks Duke. ‘Of course,’ says I. Duke now cranks up the ridicule, winking at the audience, more and more incredulous. Then I tell him I went on to India and was given an elephant.

  ‘I suppose that’s in the box too.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, you couldn’t fit an elephant in this box.’

  Except I kept forgetting the lines. No much wonder. This was my first time on an actual stage. This was the Empire, Variety’s Outpost, a sandstone colossus on Stevenson Street. I nearly didn’t make it past the sign jutting over the pavement like the prow of a ship. Empire – ten feet high, Art Deco letters on both sides of a V-shaped, neon sign. An unambiguous message.

  My brother lit up the empty theatre. I noticed that smile. I heard the rapturous applause of five hundred ghost punters. Empty or not, I was still too terrified to look out at those seats.

  Fat Jack lit a second Woodbine. The old man shifted in his chair. Something else everyone knew was that a second Woody during an audition was like Damocles being passed his sword . . .

  He was in a forgiving mood. ‘It needs . . . narrative.’

  ‘Narrtiv,’ said my father.

  ‘Story.’

  ‘I know what narrtiv is.’

  ‘And it needs star quality.’

  ‘Star quality?’

  ‘Everyone’s going to the pictures. The punters are drying up. When they come here they want Hollywood. See who’s top of the bill this week? Veronica the Voice. Songs from the big musicals. Singing in the Rain. An American in Paris. We’re booked out. It’s all about the silver screen.’

  ‘The silver screen.’

  ‘You got it, pops.’ This being Jack’s catchphrase. Because if you were going to be an eccentric impresario then you needed a catchphrase. ‘Come back anytime. I’ll always take a look.’ Because Jack was also a fair man. In fact, he got his start alongside our father at the Inveran Show.

  ‘Keep the coat stand though. I like that. You know the rule.’

  ‘Everyone likes watching someone get kicked in the arse,’ they parroted at the same time. This perhaps reassured my father, as he watched Jack hurry away through the stalls, that we still had a shot.

  * * *

  Duke and I were posted to The Ritz. Movies would become the core of the routine. If that’s what Jackie boy wants then that’s what the bugger will get. Hollywood was going to win us the bill.

  Film
after film. I lapped them all up. Loved Jack Palance in Shane, hated Richard Burton in The Robe, ogled at Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and had to cross my legs. The old man ordered an upping of the comedy intake: Abbott and Costello, Alastair Sim. He bought us season tickets for an Ealing Comedy retrospective. I must have seen the Lavender Hill Mob eight times. Research, research and never a word about school. I loved the near-empty matinees, the dust in the projector beam and the MGM lion, the lightning bolts around the RKO tower.

  Duke loved westerns. He decided he bore a resemblance to Dean Martin and maybe he did. That light the room smile and slow lope – perhaps he’d always been like that and we just hadn’t noticed.

  There was no-one I wanted to be. It’s hard to project when you look like Charles Hawtrey.

  ‘I’ll be the star,’ my brother said. ‘You can be the director.’ That was just fine with me. I became fixated by the camera. I’d walk home with two hands in front of my face and my fingers in a square, filming Duke with my imaginary lens as he recreated scenes from the film we’d just seen.

  It came together too slowly for the old man. I’d watch from the kitchen window as he stalked the yard, seeking the big idea with cigar in hand, cigars having now replaced cigarettes, a cheroot more in keeping with the persona of showbiz Svengali he had decided to cultivate. ‘What about this, boys?’

  I once suggested a song and dance routine that earned me a swift slap and a ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’ Yet that routine would become the core of our revamped act.

  I’d go over in my head, again and again, how I thought Howard Hawks would film it. In fact, that’s how I now remember the second audition with Fat Jack; a series of shots, cuts and close-ups.

  The Inveran Empire was softly lit, row after row of hundreds of empty seats. Beside the old man sat Fat Jack and those five hundred invisible but expectant punters. Jack looked bored, but at least he wasn’t hungry, our father having been careful to set up a post-lunch audition this time.

  Yet Fat Jack’s jaw did drop.

  He turned to my father. ‘Well, Mr Jackson, I do believe this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ Because Fat Jack was also a film buff. Some said he was thinking of buying The Ritz.

  * * *

  Saturday, 13th February 1954.

  The opening night of Fat Jack’s Empire latest: Laughing Room Only. Twice nightly performances, 6.30 and 8.30. A complete change of programme every two weeks. Lex McLean topped the bill, followed by Harry Gordon, Rita Cardle, the Moxon Girls . . . on down to JJ and the Duke.

  This was serious company. If Duke became an instant star, if only in his own head, I became an instant basket case. We had to stop the Morris on the way to Inveran so I could be sick.

  I was nearly sick again when I saw Lex McLean. The Variety legend shook our hands with true warmth as we waited in the wings. Then an arm round my shoulder. ‘Breathe deep, son. An again, that’s it . . . ’

  Then the orchestra was striking up, a few cheers from the audience as they recognised Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. The MC winked before I walked onstage, Duke coming on from the opposite wing. A chorus of wolf whistles greeted us, hundreds of faces beyond the footlights I was so glad I couldn’t actually make out. They laughed at the runt in Jane Russell drag, a ridiculous feathered head-dress, sparkly red mini-dress and runkled tights, the poor man’s panto dame to a voluptuous Duke as Marilyn Monroe. He shook his hips and blew kisses while I smiled a horrible smile complete with three blacked-out teeth and pushed up my huge sagging chest.

  The orchestra switched into Two Little Girls from Little Rock and we did our duet, working our way up and back down the flight of stairs set up at the back of the stage. Right on cue, one of my high heels flew into the stalls after a leg kick, forcing me into an over-exaggerated limp.

  Coat Stand Surprise was next and then The Big Sheep. Duke was Humphrey Bogle, and me as Wee Betty – a dumpy farmer’s wife – flirting with Duke and explaining that her prize ram had been rustled.

  ‘Ah said, “take me instead, take me, leave Roger”.’

  ‘Roger?’

  ‘The ram.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You see, Mr Bogle, I need a good Roger in . . . ’

  ‘Don’t look at me!’

  ‘ . . . the sheep field, to get them in the family way.’

  ‘But now he’s on the lamb, eh?’

  The sketch ended with Duke holding his door shut as I tried to batter it down.

  ‘Of all the joints in all the world she walks into mine. In the name of the wee man, why did she walk into mine!’

  Backstage, Lex McLean dropped to his knees and kowtowed, bunnet in hand. Fat Jack twirled and beamed like the lighthouse at Mckeever’s Point, stuffing a cigar down my fake cleavage, two cigars.

  The old man grunted well done as three Moxon Girls, dressed as majorettes in white heels, made a bee-line for Duke. A Star had been born, oozing the charisma that washed across the auditorium and brought another standing ovation in the second show. I saw the glitter in Duke’s eye, the deep need. Then later, at the aftershow party in The Empire bar, his anxiety.

  I saw that look other times, across the years. A catch of my eye and a quick, uncertain smile, like am I doing ok here? As if he always feared, no matter how famous he became, that he might get found out.

  Three

  Very quietly, I leave my seventy-fifth birthday party. Like a ninja, Duke, the same way I slipped away from life itself.

  ‘Take a right turn at every intersection.’

  Through the open partition Akira’s eyes glance up to the rear-view. He nods. The men in the security car will follow without reaction. They will not notice Tokyo, its stories spinning like autumn leaves.

  We exit the garage and take our first right. I pour a drink. I have just begun to ponder where the geometric determinism of each right turn will eventually take us when my phone rings. Erin. Her frowning face was the last thing I saw before the doors closed on the express lift to the ground floor.

  I let the call ring out then listen to the voicemail. Not without satisfaction I hear frustration in her voice.

  ‘I don’t know where you are . . . ’

  Except she does, the limo being fitted with a tracking device in case of an abduction attempt. A lone wolf, the ex-partner with a grudge? Maybe Isis, dousing me in petrol in a desert cage, Zippo for the drop unless an unholy ransom is paid to absolve my contributions to western decadence.

  ‘We need to talk, Jay. There’s the arrangements for the flight, the PR schedule and all the other . . . ’

  I stop listening to the message. What she really wants to say is, how dare you not bow to my will.

  I cut off the message. The sight of Akira through the partition is reassuring, even the back of his head. His eyes glance up to the rear-view. Gently questioning.

  ‘Take a left at every intersection,’ I say.

  It is, I feel, very Japanese. If you intend to indulge a whim or follow a mode of behaviour then do it with utter integrity.

  Japan is steeped in this way of being. It is the Zen way. If you are going to get drunk then get mystically drunk, like the stumbling, black-suited salary men I see from the limousine window; if you want sex then take it to the strangest extremes, sell used underwear in street-side vending machines.

  And if you are going to take a left at every single intersection then do it for hours and hours, until the action has exhausted itself of every possibility of meaning you may have initially intended and you are lost in a flood of people, sound and scenarios that would have been forever hidden had you not decided to indulge this whim and simply ordered your driver to take you . . .

  ‘Akira.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  Tokyo. The Occasional City. I like it because I can leave. I settle into the high-speed drive back to Shuzenji. It begins to rain. We move from asphalt and neon to buildings with progressively fewer storeys, here and there a
stonishing hints of the rural, patches of anonymous black which may be fields . . .

  It takes two hours to get home when it should take three. The darkness is utter, the rain seething. As I get out of the limousine my legs give way. Akira stops me falling with a strong arm.

  Gentle Akira.

  I study his face when the security light clicks on. He helps me inside and tries to remove my shoes. I shove him away roughly and struggle to undress, eventually managing to strip to my boxer shorts. I hear your laughter, Duke, so come stumble with me, room to room, our dancing shadows on the shōji screens as Akira quietly follows. I know he follows, concern in his eyes.

  He is so enduring he might already have been here when Anna and I moved in. Yet Akira came afterwards, one of the few things which did. I could call him my personal assistant but that’s not quite right. I don’t know why he stayed, given my once frequent exhortations to leave. I no longer say such things, grateful for a presence more permanent than Anna’s ever was.

  She found this place, an old wooden ryokan overlooking a long, tapering pond and surrounded by steep, cypress-covered hillsides. It’s the funniest thing, she said. I don’t feel like I’ve been here, I feel like I’ve never been away. A surge of affection brings a sudden wooze and I stagger into the tokonoma alcove in the living room. A vase is wobbling but it is me that falls, onto the sofa.

  I look down. A testicle has popped out and lies trapped between my boxer shorts and left thigh.

  It looks so forlorn.

  In time, I make it to the bedroom. The bamboo blinds are raised but the light barely reaches the veranda outside. The windows are floor to ceiling and fifteen metres long, here and there a sliding panel door. I prowl along the glass, a slight and skinny creature, bone-white skin that has seen too little light. Beyond the glass is the night, behind the glass is me. Trapped between both is the disembodied reflection of someone I never thought to become. I slide open a panel.