Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  I was already approaching actors for the film. A film script always has more weight with ‘talent attached’. I was waiting to hear from (still am, incidentally) Sean Connery, Billy Connolly and Anna Friel. To give you an idea of the extent I was residing in cloud cuckoo land at the time, I wanted to play the main character, Marty. So a meeting was set up with me and potentially my leading lady.

  She did indeed come from good acting stock. Her father was a major star in the seventies, playing Winston Churchill in Richard Attenborough’s Young Winston. Her sister was also an actress and had starred in Return to Oz and Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes. The signs were good. My sister said she was twenty years old and beautiful, a femme fatale with a string of men obsessed with her (including, awkwardly, Lucy’s boyfriend, Joe). She sounded exactly like the character I had created in the film, my fantasy girl.

  We arranged to meet Lucy and Joe in a pub in Belsize Park called the Sir Richard Steele. I wore my grandfather’s cashmere coat, even though it was the height of summer. I walked into the pub in work mode, pretending to be an up-and-coming screenwriter, but as soon as I saw her I completely forgot about my film. There she was. I’d sat in my smoke-filled flat in Edinburgh and created her, and now my dream girl had come to life.

  The last time we’d been in the same room as each other had been the Arnold House disco.

  Her name was Kitty Ward. She was the girl I had been looking for. My girl.

  In the romantic comedy that was my life, this would have made a good ending. We would fall madly in love and live happily ever after. Within moments of seeing her and chatting to her, I was totally up for that ending. Unfortunately, she wasn’t. It turned out we were actually at the beginning of a romantic comedy that might or might not have a happy ending.

  I may have written a story about a fictional hot young blonde bombshell who came to life, but she didn’t write one where she falls in love with a bouffant-haired university dropout with one sexual experience. As had been the theme of my youth, I just didn’t do myself any favours. My cashmere coat may have been exquisite and expensive, but it was also several sizes too big for me. It dragged behind me. When I sat down on the stool in the pub, it draped on the ground like a rug. When I saw other people with my hairstyle I would say, ‘What a twat!’ but for some reason continued to have it myself. And I was never myself, never relaxed, when I was attracted to someone. I always tried to do an impression of the kind of man I thought girls would be interested in, but as previous results had indicated, it wasn’t working.

  But I had one thing on my side. Destiny. When I asked for Kitty’s phone number, she gave it to me; I’m not sure she even knew why. This was only the second time a girl had given me her number. The first had been very recent. The night after I met Mark Cousins, I hooked up with my friends at a bar. I was feeling very confident after my high-powered showbiz tête-à-tête, so when I got chatting to a psychology student, I asked for her phone number, and she handed over her digits no problem.

  The following day I telephoned. ‘Hello, it’s Michael,’ I said, jovially, ‘we met last night.’

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘Michael, you gave me your number last night,’ I said, realizing she hadn’t exactly been waiting by the phone.

  ‘Did I?’ she said, hardly engaged in the conversation at all.

  ‘Yes, that’s how I called you,’ I explained, and then there was silence.

  She said nothing, so I said, ‘OK then, bye,’ and hung up.

  This was actually the most success I had with women during my stint at university. The condom from my university ‘starter pack’ was still in my wallet when I met Kitty in the Steeles pub. My prospects of using it were so slim, I thought I might have to leave it to someone in my will.

  The only thing that made me feel better about not having a girlfriend at university was my friend Robbie. Robbie had also never had a girlfriend. Like myself, he never pulled. Robbie was a virgin; it was common knowledge. At least I had some sexual experience. I always felt better about my situation because of Robbie. It eventually transpired, however, that Robbie was having more sex than anybody at university. He was a closet homosexual who was shagging every Tom, Dick and Harry and Sebastian and Craig and Jerome and Alfredo and then Tom again and then Sebastian with Alfredo … you get the point.

  So that just left me with my appalling record. But here I was in London holding the phone number of a girl I had connected with, a girl I had fallen for instantly. We had talked and joked in the pub about trivial things, but I could see what my sister meant. She was a real character. She was confident, opinionated, but her most noticeable characteristic was that she was smouldering. It was easy to see why men were falling at her feet. She wasn’t just beautiful with her blonde hair and English rose complexion; she worked it, she knew what she was doing. Men are pretty simple beasts, and she knew how to make them fall at her feet, how to make everything revolve around her. Oh, and her favourite film was Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. I was in love.

  Scarred by my previous disastrous ‘phoning a girl the next day’ experience, I felt sick with worry when I dialled her number. I typed it into my new BT phone with caller ID. Caller ID had just come out, and it was genuinely quite thrilling to know who was calling before you picked up.

  It was ringing. I was nervous. I cleared my throat. After taking advice from my sister, my plan was to ask her out for coffee.

  ‘Hello, it’s Michael,’ I said, jovially, ‘we met last night.’

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  I couldn’t believe it. Exactly the same as before. Why am I so forgettable?

  ‘Michael, you gave me your number last night,’ I said, like I did to the girl in Edinburgh.

  My heart sank. I thought we had connected. She was definitely flirting. There were signs. How could this happen? Why was this always happening?

  ‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

  She was joking. Funny. I nearly killed myself; but funny.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘So shall we go out then for dinner and talk about your script and stuff?’ she asked.

  Wow. Things had really turned around here. She sort of just asked ME out; to dinner. Not a coffee; dinner! The big one. The most romantic meal of the day, there’s wine and candlelight. Wine relaxes you, gives you confidence and helps you lose your inhibitions. Coffee makes you tense, uptight and talk too quickly, and gives you bad breath. Dinner was great news as was the other thing she said: ‘To talk about the script and stuff.’ ‘Stuff’! That’s good, that’s a good word. This wasn’t just about the script, it was about stuff too. Stuff could mean anything.

  ‘Yes, that’s a great idea, when are you free?’ I asked, revealing too much eagerness. I was hoping for that night, maybe the next day, certainly that week.

  ‘Let me see, I can do two weeks on Friday,’ she said, leafing through a diary.

  Two weeks on Friday? What? How can anybody be busy that many nights in a row? The only things I had in my diary were the things already printed in it, like St George’s Day, First Day of Spring and Christmas.

  So we arranged to meet in over a fortnight at PizzaExpress in West Hampstead, at 8 p.m. People who are having a dinner in a restaurant always book for 8 p.m. if they can. 8 p.m. is ‘dinner in a restaurant time’, although at home you never eat dinner at 8 p.m. Odd.

  In the two weeks leading up to our date, I thought only of her. I’d only just met her. A few days previously I didn’t know who she was, but now I was consumed by her. During this painful wait, I found out that I wasn’t the only one with these feelings for her. It seemed she had several suitors with much the same level of infatuation as me. On one level the news was good, she didn’t officially have a boyfriend. Men were in love with her, but she wasn’t in love with them. They are not me. I have a date booked in, for dinner, to talk about ‘stuff’. But then I panicked. Is that what she’s doing every night? Is she having dinner with different me
n every night? Is that why she couldn’t squeeze me in? Am I in some kind of auditioning process, like The X-Factor?

  When the night finally arrived, I put on my cashmere coat and walked to PizzaExpress just around the corner. She wasn’t in the restaurant, so I decided to wait outside for her, to greet her, and there she was jiggling to a halt in her sky-blue Mini Mayfair, looking stunning in a camel coat. ‘Get in!’ she shouted across the road.

  I was standing in front of PizzaExpress. Why does she want me to get in the car? ‘The restaurant is here,’ I said, motioning towards it like a model revealing a prize on The Price is Right.

  ‘Get in!’ she repeated.

  I crossed the road and squeezed into the smallest car on the road. We kissed on the cheek with predictable awkwardness. I went for one cheek, she went for two, there was a small headbutt.

  ‘I thought we were going to PizzaExpress,’ I said.

  ‘No, I thought we’d meet here. We’re going to Odette’s in Primrose Hill, you’ll like it.’

  OK, fine. We’re going to another restaurant. I, of course, hadn’t heard of Odette’s, mainly because I was not a multimillionaire. I thought twenty-year-olds went out for pizza – not this one, she went to Odette’s. She was sophisticated and classy. The bill was more than my rent.

  I had never been to a restaurant like this before. The waiter offered me ‘an apéritif’.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, so I said, ‘No, we’ll just have a drink to start.’ Kitty asked for a gin and tonic, so I asked for the same.

  The waiter said, ‘Would you like it on the rocks?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I think we’ll have it here at the table.’ After the meal started, the waiter gave us each a sorbet. How was I to know it was to clear our palate? My palate had survived for twenty years without being cleansed between courses. I didn’t even know what a sorbet was. ‘I’m sorry, we haven’t had our main course yet, this is dessert,’ I said quite firmly, ‘and anyway we didn’t order ice cream!’

  When I wasn’t being naïve, we hit it off. She was wild and fun. I was relaxed with her. We talked easily to each other, we laughed and flirted. We didn’t mention the script, the script was history. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life; she had fallen into acting because of her family. She wasn’t really an actress, and I wasn’t really a writer. I had tried to write another film and couldn’t. My writing started me on the road in comedy and led me to her.

  After dinner, we got into her Mini and I kissed her. I think the size of the car helped. I was practically sitting on her lap as it was. I think if she’d had another car, like an American-style station wagon, I might not have been so bold. We shared our first kiss on Regent’s Park Road outside Odette’s restaurant. She dropped me home, and I watched her chug off as only the old Minis can.

  It was the perfect night. I was smitten.

  She liked me. We had had a wonderful night sealed with a kiss. If I played the right moves now, she would be mine. I needed to be cool, mysterious, maybe not call for a few days. But I didn’t know anything about playing it cool. I didn’t even know ‘playing it cool’ was an option, it never crossed my mind. I didn’t want to waste any time whatsoever. In my opinion, we had found each other – let’s go, let’s start making a life together. So over the following days, I phoned her so many times that my behaviour could only be described as ‘creepy’.

  I didn’t know it, but I was undoing all the good work of our night together. After days of harassing her for another dinner, Kitty suggested we meet for coffee. I was being downgraded. I was expecting an upgrade to the bedroom of my studio flat (which also happened to be the living room and kitchen), but only coffee was on offer. So we met for coffee, which served to add hyperactivity to my stalker-like behaviour. She seemed so different. I didn’t understand it. I continued to smother her, making things worse for myself. She didn’t even finish her coffee before making an excuse to leave. I tried to kiss her again and rather than turning her cheek she actually pulled away.

  I went home devastated. My sister explained to me how I had played it all wrong and that I absolutely had to leave her alone for a while otherwise risk losing her for good. I felt sick. She left her hairclip on the table of the café in her haste to get away from me and I sat in my bedroom/living room/kitchen holding it, pining for her.

  I followed my sister’s advice and waited, for nearly an hour, before calling Kitty. I had already installed her number as Memory Preset 1 on my new BT phone. It rang and rang but went to the machine. After several times of calling, I started to withhold my number. I was now officially a stalker. How did this happen? A week ago we were relaxed, giggling and flirting in Odette’s, and now I had ruined it. I tried her number intermittently over the next few days before she finally picked up.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, it’s Michael,’ I said, still clutching her hairclip.

  ‘I know it is,’ she said, coldly.

  ‘You seemed a bit weird the other day, is everything OK?’ I asked, wishing I could turn back time.

  ‘Listen, Michael, I don’t know if I gave you the wrong impression or anything, but I’m kind of busy at the moment and, you know, I am sort of seeing someone.’

  Whoever she was seeing, it can’t have been that serious because last week she was with me, kissing me. I had had my chance and I had monumentally blown it.

  ‘Oh, OK, really, who?’ I asked, defeated.

  ‘It’s complicated. I’ve got to go, OK?’ she said, winding up the conversation and ending my life.

  ‘But I thought,’ I pleaded, ‘I thought we had something, I thought, I just thought …’

  ‘Well, you thought wrong,’ she declared and hung up.

  For all the heartache of unrequited love in my life, this was the lowest my heart had ever sunk.

  17

  H4E1N1D2

  ‘“Hend”, dat’s only eight, I hev terrible letterrrs,’ my grandmother said, trailing me for once in one of our Scrabble games that were now supporting me financially. I was her friend. She had favoured me since I was a little boy, she cared for me, looked out for me and loved me. But she was cruel, cold and judgemental to just about everybody else. Jim had died while I was at university. Her living alone had accentuated her eccentric behaviour. She had stopped talking to Lucy for literally no reason; she was never that keen on her and seized any excuse to ‘cut her off’. She couldn’t stand Steve, wasn’t all that keen on learning the names of my little brothers, and when it came to my mother, her daughter, she was constantly disappointed. Her treatment of my mum was very damaging and unnecessary. She continued to wield her purse like a light sabre and change her will on a weekly basis. I was torn. I could see that my grandmother was unkind, unpredictable and destructive, but she was old and my visits seemed to make her genuinely happy. So I stuck it out. But what I wasn’t going to accept was the word ‘hend’.

  ‘There’s no such word as “hend”, Grandma,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be zo ztupid, put it down, eight points, “hend”, “hend”!’ she said while waving her hands around.

  ‘That’s “hand”, Grandma. I should know – I’m a writer,’ I corrected.

  ‘OK, I vill do another one, but you’re not a bluddy writer. I don’t understand vot you are doing. You say you are a writer, but nobody is interrrested in your vork. You are a vaster and ven are you goin to get a girlfriend? Vot is wrong with you? …’

  Just as she was mid-rant, her new Polish cleaner, Marta, entered, dusting and polishing. My grandmother had a remarkably high turnover of staff. This one had been on the scene my last few Scrabble visits. She had the body of a gymnast and seemed to be wearing some kind of white catsuit. She reminded me of Princess Aura, from Flash Gordon, who was responsible for my earliest sexual stirrings. I couldn’t help but enjoy the view as she contorted herself while cleaning. As my grandma continued to rant, Marta caught my eye and licked her lips suggestively and blew me a kiss. I had been waiti
ng years for a girl to do such a thing, but the setting wasn’t ideal.

  My mouth must have dropped open because my grandmother stopped her criticisms in mid-flow. ‘Vy are you staring at Marta?’ Then she turned to her Polish cleaner. ‘Marta, daaarling, go and do the kitchen now, vill you, please?’

  My grandmother then turned to me and uttered a sentence I will never forget. She said, ‘Do you vant to fuck Marta?’

  Now I’m sure as you’re reading this, you might be thinking of your own grandmothers. Sweet little old ladies with black-and-white photos, who make tea and have biscuit tins and make their own jam. My grandmother was part-pimp.

  ‘No, what are you talking about?’ I said, horrified.

  ‘She’s alvays talking about you, ven are you coming round, Michael dis, Michael dat. She’s after ze money, don’t flatter yourself, but you can fuck her, because I know you are desperate. You never hev a girlfriend – are you virgin?’ She was unstoppable.

  ‘Grandma, please can we change the subject? If you must know, I have met a girl.’ My grandmother’s reaction to this was unexpected. I thought she would be pleased. This after all was what she said she wanted for me. But her face dropped.

  ‘Really? You hev a girlfiend?’ she asked, sceptically.

  ‘No. But I have met someone, and she’s the one. I can’t stop thinking about her,’ I admitted.

  ‘She’s not right for you,’ my grandma concluded, based on no evidence whatsoever.

  The thing with my grandma, and I suppose I was realizing it then, was that she wanted to be the most important person in my life. It was the same for my mother. My grandma never liked my dad or Steve, because she felt, in her warped way, that they were stealing her daughter from her, and now I was going to be on the receiving end. She wouldn’t accept anyone as my girlfriend.