This Is Your Life (14 page)

The next day I resolved to be strict with myself and work really hard on writing this stand-up set. I paid Nancy's daughter Tamsin to walk Betty for me. Tamsin was only fourteen but her face lacked the fresh innocence of most girls that age. Well, those parts of her face you could still see behind all the bits of metal sticking out of it. It had started with matching studs through her nose and navel; maybe Tamsin had been given a pair of earrings and had carelessly stuck them on her body without reading the instructions properly. But after that her mother had been unable to dissuade Tamsin from having her lip, septum, tongue and eyebrows seemingly attacked with a nail gun. In fact, what with the tattoos, piercings and love bites, there was very little of her visible skin that was not mutilated in one way or another Thanks to Tamsin's face, the jobs of British steel workers were safe for another few years.

My dog was one of the few creatures in Seaford that did not recoil on seeing her, and soon they were out on the beach and I had gained an hour's time in which to try to write. I stared interminably at the page, scribbling down half thoughts and then crossing them out again. But then, finally, a bite! To my astonishment, I actually thought of a fish joke! Quick! It's hooked, reel the joke in, careful now, draw it into the keep-net . . . Then the doorbell went and the thought escaped.

Tamsin was back and she wanted to talk. I don't know why but she always chose to talk about her problems when she was round at my house. Nancy had suggested that I was something
of a father substitute, but from what I knew about fourteen-year-old girls they didn't really talk to their dads and I'm not sure I particularly wanted Tamsin shouting ‘I hate you!' and running up the stairs and slamming my bathroom door. In any case, she didn't talk directly to me. She got round her embarrassment by pretending she was confiding in Betty while I happened to be in the room.

‘Oh, Betty, what am I going to do?' she said as she tickled the dog's tummy. ‘I think Kelvin's going to chuck me.'

‘Look, Tamsin, thanks for walking the dog and everything, but I've got some work to get on with so I can't chat, I'm afraid.'

‘That's OK. I won't disturb you, will I, Betty? Good dog!'

I had to be strong. This time I couldn't cave in.

‘I'm sorry, but I really need the house to myself'

Tamsin started crying. ‘Betty! Kelvin is going to chuck me,' she sobbed. The tears ran down her face and over the metal studs and lip rings and I couldn't just leave her there to rust.

‘Oh dear,' I lied.

Kelvin had not been good news for Tamsin. Although he was supposed to be her boyfriend, Nancy said the only time they'd spent an entire evening in each other's company was when their facial piercings got snagged together.

‘So has Kelvin said as much then?'

She told the dog that he hadn't but she could just tell he was planning it. Betty wagged her tail at this development.

‘Maybe he's just not very good about expressing his emotions . . .' I suggested to the girl who was communicating her own feelings via a border collie. I made more sympathetic noises and a cup of tea but eventually I told her I had to get on with some work now. She seemed embarrassed, as if she was holding something back and asked if she could just stay and play with Betty.

‘I'm really sorry, Tamsin, but I can't work with you here talking to the dog.'

‘But she's the only one who understands, and it's important. . .'

‘Tamsin, I'm afraid nothing you could possibly say could be so urgent as to prevent me from working right now.'

There was a long silence.

‘Betty, do you think it would stop him from leaving me if I got pregnant?'

About an hour later I finished listing the reasons why I thought this was not a very good plan. I found it faulty on many different fronts. Indeed, though I pride myself on usually seeing both sides of any issue, I struggled to spot a single merit to young Tamsin's idea.

‘Where did you get such a stupid idea from?'

‘It's not stupid. It was on
ER.'

I must admit I was naïve enough to be shocked that sex should even be on the agenda for a fourteen-year-old girl. It was too young, it was wrong, it was immoral. And more to the point, if I'd had to wait till I was nineteen, why shouldn't the teenagers of today? Finally I was confident that she was dissuaded from this course of action, for the time being at least.

‘Tamsin, you don't need Kelvin to tell you you're special, you are special,' I said. ‘People notice you already.'

This was actually true. There was so much metal on her face that passing ships lost track of true magnetic north.

‘A baby won't make you someone special. In fact, in this town it might make you pretty average. You're somebody special already, Tamsin. If Kelvin doesn't understand that, well, then he doesn't deserve you,' I concluded, feeling like the agony aunt in
Jackie
magazine.

Tamsin felt better after that and thanked the dog for
listening to her. It was all sorted. Then I realized I would have to tell her mother about the conversation and when I mentioned this, Tamsin got upset again and begged me not to and we talked for another half an hour. She said if I told her mum she would run away with Kelvin and have his babies and they'd make a living in London busking and juggling and stuff. The addition of the words ‘and stuff made me suspicious that this might be another plan that had not been fully thought through.

‘Your mum is one of my best friends. I have to be completely honest with her.'

‘Are you going to go back out with her?' she asked me directly.

‘Don't change the subject.'

‘I'm not, but if I wasn't around, she might find a boyfriend. So I thought if I ran away with Kelvin. . .'

‘Tamsin, can you stop coming up with so many completely stupid ideas!'

Against my better judgement I promised not to tell her mum, and finally she was gone and I was free to do some work. At which point I opened a beer and collapsed exhausted on the sofa.

The idea of getting up on a stage had seemed like a logical solution when it had been an unimaginable ten days away. But now that D-Day was imminent it struck me as an absolutely insane concept. The early Christians didn't turn up at the Colosseum hoping they might be able to get an open spot with the lions.

‘So you say you've never seen the lions and Christians show?'

‘No, but I've heard it's very popular and I'm sure I'll pick it up as I go along.'

‘Oh yeah, don't worry – the lions tend to lead and you'll find your role then comes to you quite naturally.'

And yet here I was, willingly volunteering myself to be sacrificed for the entertainment of the modern-day mob. I wanted to put it out of my head, but found myself thinking about it every moment of the day

I wanted experience, but I wanted it now. I wanted instant experience: just-add-water-microwaved-experience-to-go. Already I was discovering the downside of celebrity. I had liked the idea of everybody admiring me, of people giving me free tickets and inviting me to exciting parties and paying me lots of money and making me feel really special wherever I was. I just didn't like the ‘working-very-hard-at-something-it's-very-difficult-to-be-good-at' side of the deal.

Arabella rang my mobile the day before to check a couple of ‘facts' for her piece and added, ‘See you tomorrow' just when I was hoping she'd say she didn't think she'd be able to slip away from her friend's dinner party. With so many distractions I'd barely written ten minutes of material – not really enough for a proper set, but possibly enough for someone pretending to do an open spot. But it was great stuff, I kept telling myself. I was going to be fantastic. I was going to blow everyone off the stage. I was so funny, I was so hilarious that nothing could possibly go wrong. It was a deliberate self-conscious survival tactic; Mike Tyson didn't go into the ring thinking, ‘Actually I'm a big sissy, me. I'll probably lose, but it's the taking part that counts.'

The comedy club was above a pub in Camden and the open spots were after the interval at around 10 p.m. I looked at my watch at quarter to ten and began my second pint. Three young lager-drinkers were huddled around a quiz machine, endlessly feeding it pound coins for the shallow gratification of
being able to answer pitifully easy general-knowledge questions. ‘How smart are you?' flashed the message across the top of the machine. ‘Not very' must surely be the answer for anyone who fell for that one. The pub in which I was sitting managed to be noisy and smoky without having very many people in it. Oh, and it was also about eighty miles from Camden.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the decision not to go through with my plan passed from my subconscious to the conscious. That very morning I had even checked the times of trains from Brighton to London, still blithely pretending to myself that I was going to proceed with this foolhardy personal dare. Despite all the hours spent writing jokes and practising my delivery and working myself up into a state of phoney self-confidence, I wonder if deep down I ever truly believed I was going to go through with it. But by now it was a physical impossibility. I was sitting in the Red Lion in Seaford, having an ordinary night's drinking with the usual crowd. I tried to picture Arabella miles away in a London comedy club, settling down in a seat with a clear view, her notebook on her lap, smug in the knowledge that she alone was privy to the wonderful secret that there would be an extra performer on stage that night. And not just some scrofulous hopeful, but a real master of his craft, one of the greats, but as yet undiscovered by British audiences. Had she brought any friends along with her, promising them that they wouldn't regret it? Was she glancing around the room right now, hoping to give me a conspiratorial wink before I went on stage?

‘Of course a football is round! Dave, how can you possibly say a football isn't round?' exclaimed an outraged Norman. I was unfortunate enough to be sitting downwind of Norman. Panda wasn't with him this evening; they'd had a row. She'd said you should always mount a motorbike from the left and
he'd said, ‘Why don't you have the bike today? You can take it bloody foxhunting!'

Now Dave was engaging him in an even more pointless argument.

‘Sure, to us a football might be round. That's just the way we perceive it. It doesn't make footballs round from an objective point of view. To a Martian it might be square.'

‘No, footballs are definitely round . . .' pondered Chris, perhaps a bit out of his depth discussing abstract philosophy. ‘You can see them roll.' Chris was not the intellectual of the group. He was once asked to name his favourite opera. He thought about this for a while and then said, ‘Winfrey.'

‘Yes, to us they're round,' repeated Dave. ‘But to a Martian they might be round.'

‘There, you said round. There that proves it. You said to a Martian they might be round,' said Chris.

‘I said square.'

‘No, not second time. You said round, you said, “To a Martian they might be round.” Here, Jimmy, didn't he say that footballs are round?'

‘Footballs?' I said, my mind elsewhere. ‘Oh yeah. They're definitely round all right.'

And Chris put his fingers in his ears to stop Dave even replying and eventually Dave got up to buy another square of drinks.

‘You're quiet tonight, Jimmy,' said Nancy, bringing me back to reality.

‘Hmmm? Oh yeah, bit tired. Couldn't get to sleep last night.'

‘Are you worried about something?'

‘Me worried? Nah! Well, you know, only the usual trivial things: whether the AIDS virus will mutate and become airborne . . .'

‘Really?' she said anxiously.

‘No, sorry, I just made that up.'

‘Just for a change. I've found out something else you made up.'

‘What?' I said anxiously.

‘What you were saying the other day. Well, I took the trouble to check, Jimmy Conway. And they haven't taken the word “gullible” out of the dictionary. You were having me on, weren't you?'

‘No no, it's still in Collins and everything. But it's been taken out of the new OED they've just published.'

‘Really!' she said, amazed once more.

I had been chided by my friends for repeatedly looking at my watch as if I wanted to be somewhere else and so now I threw a furtive glance at the clock behind the bar. It was half past ten and now Arabella would surely be confused that I'd not appeared. Perhaps she might attempt to rationalize my non-appearance, explaining to her friends that the club's manager had been so delighted to have me there that he'd moved me to the top of the bill and I would probably be closing the show if they sat tight and waited.

It was not until I was finally inside my front door that I turned on my mobile to see if there were any messages. There were none. And no missed calls either. She had been too disgusted to want even to speak to me. Not only had I blown out her feature, probably forcing her to work on Saturday to cobble together something else, I had made her leave her friend's birthday dinner early and probably humiliated her in front of those friends as well. I considered ringing her office number and leaving some elaborate excuse on her voicemail but decided that it would be far better to do the decent thing and hide. Having never given her any contact details other
than my mobile phone number, I made myself incommunicado for a few days by courageously switching off the phone until after the paper was published.

And on Saturday night at around midnight I drove into Brighton where you could get first editions of the Sunday papers the night before. I bought a copy of the
Sunday Times
and slipped into a café to see what Arabella had filled the space with. The review section fell out and there was my face on the front cover. I could feel myself starting to shake. There I was with Billy Crystal and Steve Martin under the headline, ‘He's having a laugh'.