The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  I take a drink from the flask. Dark outskirts become the shiny orange of wet streets. Still the snow is falling. We take several turns and my bearings falter. Then, with a surge of recognition, I realise we’re in Campbell Street. There, there she is, Duke, tough love in a long black coat . . .

  Just get on with it.

  I will have another drink.

  Only one more, I am not a vulgar man. It’s not as if the car door has suddenly opened, spilling me onto the ground, the smile on the face of the head teacher become a horrified gawk and a hurried shooing of the children, who peer like amused little animals at the old man with the bandy legs who’s sprawled in the wet and laughing so hard he might die. How was school today, wee Jimmy? Well, the famous man smelled of medicine and was sick on the pavement . . .

  Instead, I will offer dignity.

  The car sweeps in the gates of Stevenson’s Primary and I step out with a smile, with bonhomie, warmly shaking the hand offered by an impossibly young male teacher in plimsolls and over-tight jeans.

  At times like these I yearn for my father’s charm. The most I can offer is a one-liner followed by awkward silence. Today, there is only silence. The teacher waits a few excruciating moments too long for some kind of engagement before we’re rescued by a photographer.

  ‘Everything ok?’ whispers Erin.

  ‘Good as it’s going to get.’

  ‘Nope.’ She puts a hand on my shoulder and rests her head against it, beaming for the camera.

  I hold my face in a strained grimace and listen to the rapid series of shutter clicks. ‘I’m not following.’

  ‘I mean, Jay . . . ’ She waves the photographer away. ‘That you need to pull your finger out of your arse.’

  She smiles again, showing her teeth. She really has immaculate teeth. I wonder if she sharpens them.

  The school was a Victorian crumble even in my day. I’m surprised it is still standing. Perhaps it is a Listed Building, protected by councillors who were once pupils, who ignore the strap and other cruelties and believe, with the forgiveness of time, that it is fondness they feel for this place.

  It is instantly familiar, the upside-down T of corridors as you enter, classrooms to the left and right and some steps directly ahead. This leads to another corridor, the school office on the right and the canteen and the assembly hall on the left, from where pandemonium is spilling.

  ‘Here we are,’ says the teacher. ‘The children are so excited, they’ve been waiting all day. Are you ready?’

  ‘Is this a Listed Building?’ I ask.

  He looks confused, poor fellow, as he pushes open the double doors to the hall. I am greeted by an overwhelming cheer. They’re lined up in the same rows, Duke, where we sat for assembly, where they would nip me, punch me, give me Chinese burns, and you never stopped them.

  I back away . . .

  I see myself running along the corridor and around the corner into the toilets, the same fishy toilets, everything still everything in this place, down on my knees in a cubicle, puking my guts up, but no running feet coming closer, no bullies or security or Erin, just a steady dripping from the cistern above my head and a smell of disinfectant at once comforting and repellent.

  ‘Are you ok, mister?’

  A little boy in glasses. He looks a bit like Charles Hawtrey. He’s wearing grey shorts and a green jumper.

  ‘Are ye no feeling well?’

  I nod my head.

  ‘We had custard the day. It wis lumpy an everythin’. Ah didn’t feel too good either. Didnae boke tho.’

  I get off my knees and sit on the toilet seat.

  ‘You want to see something?’ he says.

  With great solemnity, he produces a yoyo from the pocket of his shorts. He steps back and flicks it a few times, doing a simple up and down. Then with a quiet watch this, he flicks it out in front of him, the yoyo landing on the floor and briefly rolling along before he zips it back in again.

  ‘Walkin’ the dug,’ he declares.

  I remember that I could do that, once.

  As I struggle to my feet the boy holds out a warm and sticky hand. Again, he looks suddenly serious.

  ‘Don’t mind them, mister. Them back there. Ma brother’s gonna sort them out one day, sure he will.’

  He leads me out of the toilet and, holding my hand, guides me back along the corridor to the assembly hall.

  I step into the great cheer . . .

  I make them laugh by pretending to trip over my feet. I clap with genuine delight as a girl in a monkey costume and a boy in a tux do the mirror scene from the Monkey and the Showgirl. I offer my best theatrical bow after another recreation, the dream sequence from A Man’s a Man, a boy reciting Green Grow the Rashes while a group of girls dance delightfully behind him.

  Afterwards, there are more photographs. The pupils are arranged behind me on the stage, teachers at the sides. I stand on the floor below and in front, arms outstretched in the usual showbiz ta-daa. We all smile for the birdy, except Erin, who stands off to the left looking wary and uncomfortable.

  The little boy in the shorts and green jumper standing beside me, do you remember him, Duke?

  This is my return, see?

  I smell the after-fug of a million school dinners and marvel at the tiny chairs. I hear hymns once sung and the tears cried. I remember occasional delight, like the girl in the monkey costume over by the piano, playing happily all by herself, skipping and singing. She too will remember, in time. So be kind to the little boy, Duke. Remember, you were still alive back then, long before the Shinigami struck. I wonder what my emailer might have to say about you?

  Ten

  Have you heard the one about the old man, the pervert and the chump? No? C’mon, you must have. Well, when I stop laughing you’re in for a treat. And yes, that’s chump, not chimp, though there was also a chimp, but not in the joke. A joke can have a maximum of three protagonists.

  That’s just how it works.

  I am dressed in coarse brown trousers, blue cotton shirt with black waistcoat and slip-on black pumps. On my head is a conical straw hat. Leo sits beside me in his civvies and together we watch Charlie, who is standing in the middle of a large, round varnished table, hopping from leg to leg.

  It is midnight of some summer day in 1964. In the half-light cast from six hanging lanterns I can only feel as if an ending has been reached.

  ‘This is what it has come to,’ I say.

  ‘Indeed,’ he answers.

  Leo that is, not Charlie, although the chimp stops dancing and looks across at us, as if he too knows the finale has been reached. Then he blows a raspberry and sticks up a middle finger.

  This is Peking Chimp.

  The final film in the Breda Boys contract. A slapstick classic, ’tis said by some. Duke and I are acrobats in a travelling circus in medieval China who get embroiled in a plot to kidnap a princess.

  Duke was right.

  I wouldn’t be directing any more Breda films. Fotheringham was back. In fact, I wouldn’t be directing any more films for Rank at all. Earl St. John’s loathing for Wrecking Ball had ensured that.

  With our contract up, the old man was sweet-talking a renewal. I wasn’t doing us any favours. Directing had simply underlined my dislike for acting. I started to freeze mid-shot. Duke would stride off the set in frustration. The reason that we were still in Pinewood at midnight was that we’d only just finished filming for the day. Thirty-two takes for a twenty-second scene.

  Although it was surprising we were still filming at all. The old man was also working a more troubling schmooze. The fifteen-year-old daughter of the assistant director had visited the set. A big fan of The Duke, she asked for an autograph and got a hand up her skirt. The old man fawned for the executives and managed to persuade Hardwick the AD not to go to the police.

  ‘There’s fifteen goin’ on twenty and fifteen going on ten,’ he told me. ‘She’s the latter and your brother’s got problems.’

  Yet Duke got the second cont
ract and I got canned. It was the day we wrapped, a suit I had never met telling me, ‘The Breda Boys films will be remembered forever and you played no small part.’

  ‘I know you,’ said the taxi driver who picked me up from the studio. ‘You’re the one with the chimp!’

  That taxi took me to Soho’s Beak Street, a gloomy basement bar just along from The Sun and 13 Cantons. The old man was sitting in a leather seat at a round, zinc table. Twelve of these filled the space between the bar and the low stage, set in an arched brick alcove lit with red and white spots.

  ‘I take it you knew,’ I asked. ‘About the contract with Duke?’

  He waved to the three workmen fitting the granite tops of the half-moon-shaped bar behind him. As they trotted off he rested his hands on the top of his cane and pointed with his chin. ‘Like the name?’

  I followed his eyes to the neon sign hanging above the stage. The Cannonball Club in scrolling red letters.

  ‘Cannonball Adderley, one—’

  ‘When you were going to tell me?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Course it matters!’

  ‘Aye, well.’

  ‘Aye, well?’

  ‘They wanted Duke. They want to put him in romantic comedies. Reckon he’s the new Dirk Bogarde. There’s no place for you, son. You’re the monkey man. When people see you, they see a chimp.’

  I tried to muster one last shot but the anger had gone. I sat down and stared at the flickering neon.

  ‘You like it?’ he asked.

  The half-finished Cannonball was already the old man’s new HQ. The place of his dreams, at last. Martinis and jazz, candles in wine bottles, dried wax down the sides – it wasn’t naff back then.

  ‘A place of good music,’ he said. ‘Good booze and . . . ’He searched for the elusive word with a hand in the air, rubbing thumb and forefinger together. ‘Refinement.’ It hung there oddly, both of us aware that the old man and refinement went together like Dom Pérignon and spam.

  As I stood up to leave he grabbed my arm. ‘It’s not a bad thing, you know. Monkey No See and all the rest. It’s all about that monkey.’ His other swung arm around the room. ‘No monkey, none of this. You were bang on, son. I am nothing if not someone knows when to offer praise.’

  * * *

  In truth, I wasn’t that angry. I had been liberated, my days my own for the first time in years. I occupied myself with the growing Breda Empire. The property business had taken off, a cash flow for film production. We had a couple of projects and one was my own, Journey to the End of the Night, with a possible investment angle brokered through Richmond ‘Fatty’ Ashcroft.

  Fatty was another of the old man’s Soho cronies and a partner in The Cannonball. Minor aristocracy with some pile in the West Country, Fatty had access to both cash and an old public-school friend on the MGM-British board. I brought him into the Breda Pictures fold and made an unexpected discovery: Fatty wasn’t a movie man but somehow had a gimlet eye for box-office gold.

  Our run of hits in the late seventies would be pretty much down to him. Charm with a razor’s edge, that was Fatty Ashcroft. You’d be halfway home before you realised you were bleeding.

  I’d discover that myself, in time.

  Anna phoned me in Kilburn a few times. ‘Are you all right? Are you sure you’re not too disappointed about . . . ’

  Being dropped, she wanted to say.

  I’d bat back banalities neither of us believed, like it was an opportunity in disguise. A loaded silence usually followed, heavy with all kinds of things that I couldn’t bring myself to say.

  The lightness vanished. I stopped answering the phone. I walked autumn London. I spent a week riding the Bakerloo from Stanmore to Elephant and Castle and was accosted by a kinetic young woman with troubled eyes who had seen me a few times and urged me to keep travelling.

  With December rain came a pouring guilt.

  I would stand at the kitchen window in the glum dusk, listening to the rattle of trains coming closer, then the flash of brightly lit carriages through the skeleton branches of the trees between the houses and the track. That rat-at, rat-at aftersound, it was like memory’s pulse, taking me back to my first days in London, when novelty obscured the city’s indifference and made it easy to forget a past and place now rushing back towards me like the tide at Esha Bay.

  In the hallway the telephone was a regular insistence. Talk to me, talk to me, and I knew who was asking.

  Eventually, Anna appeared in person. A surge of seasonal enthusiasm had taken me to O’Shaugnessy’s Meats, instantly evaporating with the butcher’s amused stare, as if I was the turkey for expecting there to be any left two days before Christmas. When I returned empty-handed she was sitting on the front step in a green Astrakhan coat, cheerfully waving a bottle of whisky. The light was fading, her smile a secret. It should have started snowing, just then.

  ‘Old Mrs Kelly across the street, she’ll be keeking out from the nets.’

  ‘Probably thinks I’m a prostitute. Let’s give her something to talk about.’ She jumped up and threw her arms around me, lifting her feet off the ground as she did and sending me stumbling backwards.

  ‘Sorry,’ she giggled. ‘I may have had one or two already. Where have you been anyway?’

  ‘I went to buy a turkey,’ I said.

  ‘On December 23rd?’

  ‘Aye, they’ve all been gobbled up.’

  ‘Boom, boom!’

  ‘You wonder why they didn’t renew my contract?’

  We drank a first and a second. Sitting in the living room at opposite ends of the sofa. Three panels of the gas fire.

  We started with Duke.

  ‘He was so drunk they wouldn’t let him into the premiere of Goldfinger. Did you not see the papers?’

  ‘Can’t say I did. I’m not exactly a dedicated follower of the Duke.’

  ‘See. I knew it! You are annoyed about that contract. Why can’t you just admit it? There’s no shame in it.’

  And back and fore like that for a while, through another fast glass and then her warm hand on mine.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Jay. No-one’s seen you for weeks. What have you been doing with yourself?’

  ‘I dunno. Reading? Walking, been out with the camera. Watching the trains.’

  ‘The trains?’

  ‘The line out the back. In fact,’ I checked my watch. ‘Quick, I’ll show you.’

  She hurried after me, through to the kitchen. Full dark now. We stood at the sink with me behind her.

  ‘Trust me?’

  ‘Maybe!’

  I put my hands over her eyes and said listen. Moments later we heard it. A rising roar moving left to right, rattling the windows and the crockery on the draining board. When it was directly ahead I took my hands from her eyes and let her watch the bright carriages pass in the darkness.

  ‘I’ve always liked trains,’ she said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I can remember the journey down here, when I left. Clear as day but it seems like a lifetime ago.’

  ‘I know. I was so excited, but the funny thing is I don’t think I wanted to leave in the first place. It just seemed to happen.’

  ‘I was going to write at the Courier and that would be that.’

  ‘Come on, you were too talented to be stuck there. Those Breda Boys features. They were fantastic. Art.’

  ‘There’s no need to take the mickey, Johnny.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Really . . . Well, I’m some artist, celebrity tittle-tattle, who’s screwing who. Whoops, can’t just say that.’

  ‘Everybody knows anyway.’

  ‘Exactly. What is it with folk?’ She looked at me very carefully. ‘Why can’t we just say what we mean?’

  Three whiskies down, I almost did. She was right. What do we wait for? So of course, I kept waiting.

  ‘You know what puts me off going back?’ I said. ‘The thought of people thinking I’ve failed. I remember the lea
ving do at The Clachan. All those people who envy you but secretly want you to fail.’

  ‘You haven’t failed. I’m the one who’s failed.’

  ‘Rubbish. You’ve got a national newspaper column. I’m the monkey man who made a weird film no-one saw.’

  ‘I’m a gossip-monger.’

  ‘I’m a has-been that never was. Over the hill at twenty-five.’

  ‘Enough! Come with me.’ She grabbed my hand and led me back to the living room. ‘My turn. Do you trust me?’

  ‘Sure.’ She stepped behind me and put her hands over my eyes, guiding me forward with her hips.

  ‘Open them!’

  When I did I was looking in the mirror above the sideboard. A pale, pinched face frowned back.

  ‘Repeat after me.’

  ‘C’mon, Anna, I—’

  ‘Here and now I do solemnly swear.’

  ‘Here and now I do solemnly swear.’

  ‘To stop moping around like a plum and, em . . . get back in the saddle.’

  ‘The saddle?’

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘To stop moping around like a plum and get back in the saddle.’

  ‘There.’ She turned me round to face her. ‘Better?’

  ‘Well, I’m smiling.’

  ‘Me too.’ She suddenly leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Briefly, but a beat too long.

  ‘How on earth did we get here?’ she added softly.

  My rationality scattered, ricocheting off those three whiskies. ‘How’s that?’ It was all I could manage.

  ‘London,’ she stated.

  ‘London? Right. Sure . . . ’

  She sat down on the sofa. ‘One for the road?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I saluted for some peculiar reason and sat down beside her, reaching for the bottle.

  ‘I know about Duke and the girl, by the way.’

  I stopped mid-pour.

  ‘There’s a sanatorium I’ve heard about, down in Devon. A drying-out place. You can imagine what he said. I asked if he’d prefer Wormwood Scrubs. I should shake your father’s hand for heading that off.’