This Is Your Life (9 page)

It was about this time that I wondered if it might be a thoughtful gesture to send a letter of condolence to Billy Scrivens's wife. Just a few words to say that my thoughts were with her at this difficult time and perhaps mentioning how Billy had seemed in such good form when we'd chatted the day before he died. I thought in order to explain who I was I should say that although she and I had never met, I was the one on the lunchtime news given the dubious title of ‘Billy's
jogging partner'! And then I thought twice about the poor taste of this and removed the exclamation mark. Before I could change my mind, I dropped the letter in by hand to the big empty cottage in Cuckmere Haven that had been their holiday home and then went back to listen to all the excited messages on my answerphone.

Four days later I received a black-edged card inviting me to Billy Scrivens's funeral. ‘Yes! I'm going to the funeral!' I exclaimed to my excited dog. ‘What a result, way to go, Jimmy! Oh joy! Oh happy day!' I couldn't remember ever being so delighted.

27 Elms Crescent,
East Grinstead,
West Sussex,
England

Dear James,

Fame is a two-edged sword. But they're not both good edges, one of them is a bad edge. And the trouble with being the major celebrity that you are is that there are some pretty weird people out there who will probably stop at nothing to get close to you. Most will probably just want a brief taste of your exciting world, but others may have more sinister intentions. I don't want to spoil all the fun of being rich and famous or anything but I feel I should warn you that there is a chance that you'll be gunned down in the street by a crazed psychopath.

It is now eight months since John Lennon came to the end of
his ‘Long and Winding Road', except it wasn't as long as it should have been, it was more of a short and winding road,, well he was forty, so it was medium length, I suppose, but anyway certainly not as long a winding road as it should have been after his life was tragically ended by a crazed fan. Actually, I don't call people like that fans, they're not real fans, they're
murderers.
That's the only word for them. The point is that if John Lennon had never been famous he would probably still be alive. His music gave pleasure to millions, including pensioners. But then one
so-called
‘fan' went and killed him. As usual, it's always a small minority who have to go and spoil things for everyone else.

So, James, I am writing to advise you that perhaps you too should take a few precautions. Don't give autographs to people pointing guns at you. No, on second thoughts,
do
give them autographs. It's probably advisable to do whatever they want. But if, say, a scary-looking man with lots of handguns and grenades and a dagger in his mouth climbs up the side of your house and wants to come in the bedroom window, then don't let him in. He could be dangerous.

Of course, when you become famous, a certain amount of constructive criticism is to be expected. You've put yourself in the public eye and you have to be prepared to accept the odd dig or two. But if people try to shoot you then frankly I think that is going too far. Ronald Reagan, the Pope, JR – they're all getting shot at the moment. And I blame the gunmen.

So, Jimmy, keep an eye out for a crazed assassin, and if you see one, stand behind a stone pillar or a bus until he's gone. Because there are some pretty weird people out there.

Mine sincerely,
Jimmy

It's true, there really are some pretty weird people out there, I thought as I prepared to gatecrash the showbiz funeral of a celebrity I was pretending I'd known. But I wasn't obsessed, I wasn't a stalker; I was just a fame tourist. Some people liked to wander around Rome taking snapshots of the deities of a bygone age. I merely wanted to see the icons of today, to see all the new gods lined up on display.

Back in Seaford, of course, I was already a little bit holy myself Following my distinguished appearance on the BBC news, a tribute which, I am proud to report, was also included in that night's specially extended evening bulletin, every single person I knew or had ever known had heard the good news: that Jimmy had been modestly keeping mum about a friendship with Britain's biggest TV star. Everyone wanted to talk to me to console me, to buy a few shares in the death of Billy Scrivens, to make this shared national experience have something to do with them. ‘Yes, a friend of mine is going to the funeral. . .' they'd say to their workmates when the subject came up. ‘I've been trying to help him come through it but it's very hard for him, you know, with the telly and newspapers reminding him of what's happened every five minutes.'

They had suddenly discovered that they had a place in this solar system. At the centre was the supernova Billy Scrivens. Around that star had revolved various planets, including, as it turned out, their friend Jimmy Conway, around whom they orbited themselves. And suddenly I noticed that the various satellites that looped around me were all at their closest proximity all at once, all in full view, lined up and shining brightly into my life. After the lunchtime news the phone rang continuously for the whole of the day of Billy's death and for every day in the build-up to the funeral

The second friend to call had been Chris. Chris was a very
nice person, but he'd never been the same since he nodded off on the beach at Rio de Janeiro. He'd been victim to a gang of criminal surgeons selling human organs on the black market. They must have whipped his brain out while he was asleep; there was no other explanation. He was the only person I knew to get a negative score in an IQ test.

‘Hey, Jimmy. You were just on the television!'

‘Yeah.'

‘Amazing!'

‘Yeah, it's weird.'

‘You must have run home really quickly'

‘What?'

‘I was expecting to get your answerphone but you're back already. That's amazing!'

‘No, it wasn't live . . .'

There was a pause while Chris thought about this.

‘Right. So they know the news in advance, do they?'

‘What?'

‘I thought the news was live.'

‘Well, most of it is, Chris. But it's amazing what they can do with modern technology these days.'

‘Yup. I'm with you. You've got your home phone diverted to your mobile, haven't you . . .'

The next caller took me slightly longer to place.

‘Is that Jimmy?' said the voice of an elderly lady.

‘Yes.'

‘Hello, dear, it's Audrey Lacy'

‘Sorry?'

‘Audrey Lacy. Brian and Audrey – your Mum and Dad's friends. You sound different, your voice has broken.'

‘Oh blimey. Hello, Audrey'

‘Brian and I just wanted to say how sorry we were
about your friend Billy Scrivens dying like that.'

‘Oh. Right. Yeah.'

‘Your mother had only just let on that you were friends with Billy Scrivens when she rang at eleven o'clock last night. So then when we heard the sad news on the wireless this morning, well, we just had to ring and say how sorry we were . . .'

‘Oh well, um, thanks, Audrey. Nice of you to ring. Yeah, it still hasn't really sunk in yet.'

‘Oh dear.'

There was a momentary silence during which I suppose I had expected her to say goodbye.

‘So, was he like that in real life as well?'

‘Hmm?'

‘Always joking and playing practical jokes on you and such like?'

‘Er, yeah – he was just the same,' I confirmed, and she seemed to have found the solace she'd been seeking.

This was a reassurance everybody demanded of me. That the friend who beamed out of their television set had not been deceiving them, that they'd been right to take him into their hearts. In the course of various conversations about ‘me and Billy' I had found myself being forced to embellish my fantasy with little details about things we had chatted about or done together. ‘No, we never talked about ideas for the show; when he was down here he wanted to get away from all that.'

More than one person volunteered to accompany me to the funeral. ‘You know, just in case you need a bit of support or whatever.' Honestly, these morbid groupies, they're so voyeuristic; it's sick, it really is. I'd got myself a ticket, I mean an invitation, and they hadn't, and that was all there was to it.

Although I began the morning with plenty of time to spare,
the hours were rapidly slipping away from me. I popped into Mr One Pound because I seemed to remember they had some cheap plastic belts but I quickly found myself being press-ganged into assisting Edna Moore who lived next door to the language school and for whom every aspect of the modern world always seemed completely baffling.

‘Oh hello there, Jimmy, could you give me a hand, dear, I've forgotten my glasses again – I can't read any of the prices.'

Obviously I was perfectly happy to find the time to assist a widowed pensioner like Edna, I didn't mind at all, nothing could give me greater pleasure than explaining the complex pricing system in the Mr One Pound shop.

‘Jimmy – how much is this?'

‘That's a pound, Edna. Everything in here is a pound. That's why the shop is called Mr One Pound, because everything you see costs exactly one pound.'

‘Oh I see. What about this?'

‘That's a pound as well. Everything here costs a pound.' In the background a tape loop was endlessly booming out the message: ‘It's all a pound at Mr One Pound, everything costs a pound at Mr One Pound.'

‘What about two of these?'

‘That would be, um, two pounds for those two items, yes, I think that's right. Two pounds.'

‘I only want one of them.'

‘That's one pound then.'

‘A pound for one of these? Haven't they got anything cheaper?'

I ended up carrying Edna's bags up the hill to her house, which left me less time than I had planned to walk the dog and somehow I managed to turn a leisurely drive up to London into a frantic race against time. There are some social
occasions at which you are not expected to arrive at the time stated on the invitation; indeed, it's actually quite cool to walk in a little bit late. Funerals, however, are not one of them. In
Debrett's Guide to Bereavement Etiquette
it is most definitely not the height of good manners to burst in through the doors towards the end of the ceremony, elbowing past the pall bearers going in the opposite direction down the aisle with the weight of the deceased on their shoulders.

Fortunately I just made it, but I had cut it so fine that I found myself trying to do the slow dignified walk into the church at the briskest pace possible. Behind temporary crash barriers, dozens of photographers and TV cameramen leered out at the invited guests. A soap actress was ahead of me and they called out her names, both real and fictional, and flashbulbs exploded like party poppers but she didn't stop for them. This was not the BAFTAs or the Oscars; it was a colleague's funeral. Though she did glance both left and right, towards both sets of photographers, as she walked slowly in. I suppose if you are going to spend that much on a fancy black hat you are going to want people to see it. It occurred to me that she probably didn't shop at Mr One Pound very often. I was next up. They raised their cameras once more, looked at me through their lenses and then put their cameras down again. ‘Is this a celebrity?' said the first action. ‘Nope, it's not . . .' said the second.

Just inside the church a couple of girls were collecting invites and cross-checking them against the lists on their clipboards. I was momentarily nervous that there might be some sort of test to check that everyone really did know Billy Scrivens, such as, ‘What was his favourite drink?' or, ‘What was his first job in television?' As it happened I knew the answers to both these questions; like thousands of other
people this week I had bought and devoured his biography, which was now racing back up the bestseller lists. I noticed that on these girls' name badges was the logo of
Hello!
magazine, which struck me as peculiar. Then I saw that at various strategic points around the church were photographers' lights set up on stands, with stepladders and tripods and cables and all the paraphernalia of a major fashion shoot. The men behind the crash barriers had been the unofficial photographers. You couldn't possibly have flashbulbs going off inside the church during a religious service. That would be inappropriate. So dazzlingly bright arc lights were set up for the official photographers all the way through.

It was a large, impressive church, a fine example of the unmistakable architecture of the period known as ‘the olden days'. Every pew was packed. The trouble was that from the few remaining seats at the back, the view was terrible. You could see the vicar and the organist and everything, but you couldn't see the congregation. The back of one celebrity's head looks pretty much like another, with the exception perhaps of Mr Blobby and Tinky Winky, neither of whom seemed to have been invited from where I was sitting. It was only once I was in place that I noticed an usher starting to fill up the two rows of pews along the side of the church. You must be able to see everyone from there, I thought. So after a moment's hesitation I squeezed past the mourners beside me and fought my way for the best view in the church, or second best after the photographer who was clambering to the top of his squeaky metal stepladder. Some of my fellow mourners looked a little perplexed by my suddenly clambering across them, but I shook my head sorrowfully, bravely biting my bottom lip, and so my reasons were not questioned. In fact, everyone seemed to be wearing the same courageous
expression: a clenched, sad smile that greeted fellow mourners with the message, ‘I know, yes, I understand, it's nice to see you too, but how dreadful it had to be in these circumstances.' There was real grief on famous faces. The photographers from
Hello!
were having a field day.