This Is Your Life (6 page)

For some reason this last detail triggered another huge explosion of laughter. Norman convulsed so much that he fell off his stool, while I merely smiled and nodded and attempted a long-suffering tut at my own adolescent foolishness. For a second I had hoped that Norman's drunken backwards lunge might deflect the attention away from myself, but this pack of hyenas had already selected their victim and were shrieking and howling for more blood.

‘“However, it might be advisable to have tinted windows fitted to the Austin Princess in order that you are not repeatedly recognized off the television as you try to go about your everyday business without being constantly mobbed by your fans.”'

The laughter was out of control now; it had tipped over into frenzied hysteria.

‘“The important thing is not to look down upon ordinary unfamous people just because they seem to have such dull and uninteresting lives. Many of them, especially vets and people like that, do good and important work, and though it may not
seem very glamorous to you, if it wasn't for all of them being so ordinary, it would be impossible for you to be so special.”'

‘Don't look so miserable, Jimmy,' said Nancy. ‘You're not a bit like that now.'

‘What, millionaire superstar?' said Nicholas. ‘You can say that again!'

It was then that a terrible thought struck me. It wasn't what I'd written that embarrassed me, it was the obvious and enormous gulf between what I'd hoped to become and who I now was that made me feel so humiliated. The letters included the imagined script for my appearance on
This Is Your Life.
But with all the details of a showbiz success story that was not to be, these predictions were more like my own personal ‘This Isn't Your Life'.

Further lines were read, but I was no longer listening; instead I was staring at the scene of myself surrounded by friends and family all shrieking and banging the table and drunkenly braying for more. Pretending that it was still all in good fun, I eventually managed to snatch the remaining letter off Nicholas and quickly placed it inside the box. I answered a few serious questions about whether I remembered writing them and what I was going to do with them now. Perhaps Carol could see from the expression on my face that her husband had gone too far in front of all my cackling friends and so she rather belatedly attempted to come to the rescue.

‘Well, you never know, this time next year he might be famous. He is writing a screenplay, aren't you, Jimmy?'

‘Are you really?' said Nancy. ‘What about?'

‘Oh, it's early days at the moment. I'd rather not say.'

‘Come on, Jimmy, you can tell us,' pleaded Norman.

‘You'll only take the piss.'

‘No we won't, go on, what's it about?”

‘Umm, no, really, I don't want to risk somebody else stealing my idea.'

‘We won't tell anyone, honestly,' whispered Nancy.

‘You've got to practise telling the story, Jimmy – pitching your idea is one of the basic skills of the screenwriter,' said my brother.

Nicholas was right, and having been made to feel such a failure, now I was desperate to do anything to restore my pride. The glass slipper had been produced – once they all saw how well it fitted I'd be the one who was laughing.

‘OK. It's just that the whole thing is reliant on the idea, really. It's a comedy but it's a sort of thriller as well.'

‘OK, buster, you've got two minutes!' said Nicholas, miming a cigar in an unconvincing impression of a Hollywood movie mogul.

‘Right, imagine this: a millionaire tycoon decides he is going to murder his wife. But when he goes home to kill her, he discovers his wife has been kidnapped!' There was a buzz of impressed interest around the table and I continued. ‘Everyone is saying, “Pay the ransom!” but this guy refuses. He says, “No, we've got to stand up to these bullies!” Only we, the audience, know that really he's hoping that the kidnappers will do the evil deed for him!'

I held my hands out ready to accept a little round of applause but my brother just unleashed the four devastating words: ‘What, like
Ruthless People?'

‘Er – I never saw that. What happens in that?'

‘A rich man comes home early to murder his wife and discovers she's been kidnapped.'

‘Stop it, that's not funny'

‘And everyone says, “Pay the ransom,” but he says, “No, we've got to stand up to these people.”'

‘Oh yes, I remember that,' chipped in Nancy. ‘Danny de Vito, Bette Midler. It was quite good.”

I tried to salvage my precious project from this devastating revelation. ‘Yeah, but in my story the joke is that the kidnappers are the ones who are desperate, because they're stuck with this really unbearable hostage, so they keep lowering their ransom demand to try and get rid of her, but the husband won't pay a penny.'

‘Yes, that's it, that's what happens, it's all coming back now,' said Carol.

‘Oh yes, I think I rented that once,' Dave added, unhelpfully.

I'm not sure if I said anything else for the rest of the evening. Oh no, that's right, about an hour later I distinctly remember mumbling ‘Sure' when Nancy whispered, ‘Are you all right, Jimmy?' I sipped my pint from time to time, feeling the laughter and chatter becoming separate and distant, like the echoey shouts inside a municipal swimming pool. I didn't want to be there any more. Just before closing time a big cake was produced and everyone sang ‘Happy birthday' and I blew out the solitary candle. Yet another year effortlessly extinguished. Yeah, happy bloody birthday, Jimmy. Bloody Danny de Vito. He bloody nicked my idea, the bastard. When I eventually staggered home I read a few more of my teenage letters, describing a wonderful life of fame and success and money and adoration. And then I went to the bookshelf and looked up the offending film in my movie guide. There was an exact summary of the plot on which I had been pinning all my hopes.
Ruthless People.
Four stars. See, I knew it was a good idea.

And then I tossed my screenplay into the dustbin.

27 Elms Crescent,
East Grinstead,
West Sussex,
England

Dear James,

I know it is only two days since I last wrote but I was just sitting down to start my project on the Tudors and I thought I'd quickly write another letter to you before I start. No doubt most of my class will leave their projects right until the beginning of September but I think it is far better to get it out of the way early on rather than have it hanging over you all summer and then rushing it all at the end.

I don't know where you will be going on your summer holidays but I imagine it is somewhere really hot with a fantastic apartment that leads straight out onto the palm-fringed beach, but there is also a lot of very interesting culture and history there as well in case it rains. I'm sure
you are certainly not the sort of person who'd make your kids spend two weeks at their grandparents' and call that a summer holiday. Also, because you are not a male chauvinist pig, you sometimes let your wife choose what she would like to do on some days, so the two of you do not spend the entire holiday arguing. You treat her very much as an equal but fortunately she likes to do exactly the same things that you do anyway. Your wife is like a feminist, but beautiful as well. But not beautiful in a tarty way. In fact, she is actually very intelligent and it would even be all right if she wore glasses like Felicity Kendall did occasionally in The Good Life.

Your children are much more like you were. They are not all bossy like your brother Nicholas. You are a good parent who realizes that your children are more mature than you give them credit for and they are allowed to watch programmes that may offend some viewers, especially those watching in family groups. Your wife would never take your son to get his hair cut at a woman's hairdressers where his French teacher was having her hair done at the next mirror.

I suppose the trouble with your level of fame is that it seems like there is nowhere you can go where people don't recognize you! Some people will probably envy your wealth and fame but it's hard for them to understand that the grass always seems greener on the other side. From where they are it might seem much nicer being really rich and having a huge house and being able to buy whatever you want and having everyone love you and giving you whatever you want all the time. From where they are that must seem like a really attractive lifestyle. But they're only looking at the positive side of all that, they don't think about the downside, like having to give autographs sometimes.

There are pros and cons to every lifestyle, I'll write again soon.

Mine sincerely,
Jimmy

The depression I felt on the night after my birthday was no doubt deepened by the realization that the teenage Jimmy had had such high hopes for me. The more I read of these hubristic letters, the more I sensed that I must be a terrible disappointment to myself. I suppose if you are going to attempt to predict the future, there's no point in prophesying the mundane. Nobody would have been very interested in Nostradamus if he'd written: ‘And in the land of the Angles, there will be much drizzle, And a great nuisance shall be felt, when no buses come for ages and then three come along at once.' When we watch toddlers playing with Lego we say: ‘Oh look, he's going to be a great architect when he grows up.' Not: ‘He's going to work for a building company, but be mainly based in the office, sorting out everyday software problems on their integrated network system.' So I understood why I had foreseen such an exciting life ahead of me – it must have been more fun to write about. And now I was supposed to smile at my naïve fantasies and think, Well, thank goodness none of that came true, thank goodness I'm where I am now. Except I didn't feel like that at all. I still would have loved to appear on
This Is Your Life
and listen to a catalogue of my successes and pretend to blush as it was revealed how much tireless charity work I had put in to help the otter sanctuary. I still desperately yearned to be someone. Here was Jimmy Conway's success story, and that was all it was: a story.

I wonder if in the old days ploughmen ever felt they were stuck in a bit of a rut? It was now 3 a.m. on the third Sunday in September in the wet and windy seaside town of Seaford. All night the wind had whistled like a
Scooby Doo
soundtrack, banging wooden gates and spinning polythene bags along the seafront. Betty was sitting beside the bed staring at me expectantly, shaking with excitement as to what I might do next.

‘Go to bed, Betty,' I mumbled, and she reluctantly slunk off to her beanbag. Before she finally lay down she liked to walk around in little circles a few hundred times, endlessly scrunching the squeaky polystyrene gravel inside like some ancient Chinese torture for irritable insomniacs.

Just as football matches generally start at 3 p.m. and school always began at 9 a.m., three o'clock in the morning is the long-established kick-off time for the traditional ‘where did my life go wrong?' meditation. There is no better moment than the low-energy loneliness of the small hours to enter that innermost cavern of self-pity and regret. They ought to market special negative-thinking tapes that you could play to yourself when you wake up in the middle of the night, just in case you weren't convinced of your own worthlessness. To the echoey background music of distant panpipes and mysterious tubular chiming, a Californian with a gentle but authoritative voice could assert, ‘You are a worthless piece of shit. You have achieved nothing. Your life is a mess and it's all
your
fault.' Apparently over 50 per cent of suicides happen in the small hours of the night. I'm sure with my negative-thinking-tape idea they could get that figure up another 10 per cent or so.

As you grow older, you gradually realize that the gulf between where you are now and where you had hoped to be is never going to be bridged. In your daily life you pretend that you will catch up, make up all that lost ground and suddenly be catapulted to that elusive magical place called ‘Success'. But slowly it starts to seep through from your subconscious to the conscious: this is your fate, this is who you are,
this
is your life. I seemed to live permanently with that feeling you have when you're lost on a car journey and you just keep on driving further and further in the wrong direction hoping there'll be a turning or signpost somewhere up ahead.

Maybe everyone experiences this sense of creeping disappointment. When Alexander the Great was still in his twenties he had conquered most of the known world. Did he lie awake at three in the morning thinking, ‘I dunno. I just always imagined I'd have done so much more by now . . .' Did Michelangelo feel the Renaissance had sort of passed him by? This theory failed to cheer me up since there was no escaping the fact that, unlike these rather poorly chosen examples, I had neither conquered Persia nor painted the Sistine Chapel; most days the sum total of my achievements was walking the dog and maybe hoovering the stairs. Youth is like the mornings: if you don't make a good start before lunch, you're in danger of wasting the whole day. Well, I must have spent my entire twenties clearing up the breakfast things and reading the paper and then having another cup of tea and suddenly it was the lunchtime of my life and I really should have made a start on something by now.

How did those famous people originally know in which area they should apply themselves? Does having a gift for something automatically impel you towards that outlet for your talent? Or was it just good luck that matched great people with the means to achieve their greatness? If Beethoven's dad had sent him to martial arts classes instead of piano lessons, would young Ludwig have developed into a rather disappointing sumo wrestler? If Kasparov had been given some other game instead of a chess set, would he have eventually found his true gift or struggled to become a grand master at Buckaroo? Perhaps the thing that I was great at hadn't been discovered yet. What did great goal-scorers do before the invention of football? It seems a bit unfair that Mary, Queen of Scots got her head chopped off for being a failed monarch; for all we know, her real talent might have been as the greatest female
goalkeeper of her generation. If the rules of Association Football had been drawn up four hundred years earlier, she could have represented her country at the Women's Soccer World Cup finals and become the heroine of all Scotland after stopping the ball three times in the penalty shootout that settled the 1566 final against the Holy Roman Empire.