Bin: crap that won’t be valuable to anyone and can therefore go in the bin.
Charity shop: clothes, knick-knacks that might be of interest to the local charity shop, raising money for the Terrence Higgins Trust.
Of interest: anything we think Ross might want to look at on his return from his trip abroad. Any personal papers, bank stuff, letters from people, stuff that might be too exposing to show people who didn’t know Jocelyn.
It’s then that Ross explains he will give me a key, and we can come and go as we please for the next two weeks. He won’t be here. He and Finty are off to Dubai. (I bet they are.) They’ll be back in a week, and hopefully by then we will have ‘broken the back of it’.
I love how he assumes we can just drop everything and work on this full-time. But neither of us argues with him. The idea of going through all Jocelyn’s stuff is quite tantalizing. Minutes later they’re going out the door, and Finty’s cooing to us, ‘Ciao, pussycats!’
As soon as the door shuts, we both burst out laughing and impersonate her – not only her voice, but we prance around like she had in her tiny mini-skirt, all pouting and preening.
‘Seems a bit soon, doesn’t it?’ Kathleen says with a grimace.
‘What? For him to be shagging someone else?’
Kathleen nods.
‘You don’t think . . .’ Kathleen is chewing her bottom lip.
‘What, Conky?’
She gasps and throws her bag at me. It misses, but the drama is superb. ‘You BASTARD!’
And we both howl with laughter. Then we settle down; we are meant to be here to go through our dead friend’s stuff. We should have a sense of decorum.
‘You don’t think she killed herself coz she’d found out about Ross and Finty?’
It’s certainly worth considering.
‘I mean, think about it,’ Kathleen continued, ‘She passes judgement on people for a living, she’s well known for it. She’s always slut-shaming and . . .’
‘Was . . .’ I correct her.
‘Saying women need to be better in bed to stop their fellas straying, and then he goes and trades her in for a younger model. Maybe it was about to come out in the papers and . . . she shat herself and . . .’
I don’t like it when Kathleen swears. It doesn’t suit her. She never used to swear when we were kids. It makes me feel like life has tainted her and makes me wonder what she’s seen. Even if, right now, she might have a point. She sees me mulling it over and her face lights up, thrilled that I can see the validity of it.
And it does indeed make sense.
‘Well, there’s only one thing for it,’ I say.
‘What’s that?’ she says.
‘Let’s go through her shit!’
I offer my hand up for a high five, she slaps it, and boy – she packs a mean punch!
Finty has left rolls of bin bags on the table in the kitchen. We rip some off and wonder where to start. We plump for the bedroom. Surely everyone’s juiciest secrets are in their bedroom? Before heading there, Kathleen has a look in the fridge and pulls out a bottle of wine. She offers it to me with a shrug as if to say, shall we?
‘It’s not ours.’
‘We’re helping him out.’
‘It’s ten in the morning.’
‘Twenty past!’
She chuckles, and seems to blush, and replaces it in the fridge door. I then realize she was just winding me up. I think.
Kathleen practically dives for the bedside cabinet. ‘I bet she’s got a MASSIVE dildo in here!’ she says, ripping the door open. Again, I’m not sure I like this older potty-mouthed Kathleen. She wasn’t like this the other night. Maybe she gets more ladylike the more she’s had to drink.
She lets out a disappointed groan.
‘What?’
‘It’s tiny. It’s one of them bullet things you can get in Sainsbury’s.’
And she holds what looks like a large silver bullet aloft. I feel myself blushing now. It’s embarrassing, hearing meek and mild Kathleen spouting forth about vibrator size.
‘They’re really shit,’ she says.
‘Please stop now, Kathleen.’
‘Doesn’t touch the sides,’ she adds as an aside. I feel a bit sick in my mouth. Suddenly she’s swanning out of the room, saying she needs to ‘piss like a racehorse’.
And I wonder . . . is she tipsy? She’s being very . . . forward.
I decide to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she’s feeling a bit emotional. It is all a lot to take in. Our friend is gone, and here we are, about to rifle through her possessions like we were as close as we were when we were kids. I open the other bedside cabinet. There’s little of interest in there: a couple of pairs of what look like reading glasses, some used earplugs, some coconut body butter. I stick it all in the rubbish bag. As I’m doing that I hear Kathleen calling me.
‘Adam! Quick! Come here! Look what I’ve found!’
I rush to where her voice is coming from. She’s in a little room that just houses a toilet and a sink. She is standing staring at the wall.
What’s she found? What’s she seen? Has she found IT – the reason why Jocelyn killed herself?
She points to the wall. ‘Look.’
On one of the walls is a framed gold disc for Jocelyn’s record. ‘That’s got to be a piss-take, surely,’ I say, unimpressed. The song had done so badly.
‘No, not that, that!’ She points elsewhere, guiding my eyes away from the framed disc.
Above the sink is a framed poster for Supper with Sam.
My voice catches in my throat as I do an audible gasp. Immediately tears prick my eyes, and I have to bite my top lip to stop myself from crying. What a wuss I am.
See? She hadn’t really. She hadn’t forgotten me.
‘She didn’t forget me, then,’ I say in a stagey whisper.
Kathleen shakes her head. ‘Every time she took a shit, she thought of you.’
I look at her, expecting her to be grinning, trying to gross me out. But she is transfixed by the poster. She was being genuine.
I look back to the poster. Blimey. Supper with Sam. That’s a blast from the past.
‘Oh my God, Adam, look at this!’
Kathleen is pointing up. I look to the ceiling to see a Christmas bauble suspended next to a skylight. It’s purple glass with gold decorations on it, and it hangs from a gold ribbon. I know what’s inside it without even having to stare further.
‘The three wise men,’ I say.
‘The loft club,’ Kathleen says. ‘Blimey, she’s had it all these years.’
And suddenly I feel very sad.
London, 1990
Amazingly, Supper with Sam was snapped up very quickly by a ‘new writing venue’ (posh theatre speak for a theatre that puts on new plays by unheard-of writers) in Shepherd’s Bush called the Boiler Room. The artistic director, Anthea, who was very fond of wearing those dayglo hippy pants that wouldn’t look out of place on a beach in Goa, described the play in the initial letter she wrote to me as ‘garrulous, visceral, an exploration of the pain of the Troubles as seen through the eyes of four disaffected youth’.
The Troubles. Oh yes, I should explain. When I sent the play to the various theatres I panicked and worried that people might think it was autobiographical. So at the last minute, to give it some distance, I wrote on the title page:
The play is set in the fictional town of Ballymcknock in Northern Ireland, present day.
When I first met Anthea – she had leathery flip-flops and each toenail painted a different colour, which I found impossibly theatrical – I could see she was disappointed that I didn’t have a thick Belfast accent. But after a period of adjustment you could tell she thought I was a genius to have written a coruscating account of Northern Ireland despite never having stepped foot in the country.
‘You might not have an Irish passport, but you have an Irish soul,’ she was fond of saying.
The Boiler Room was so called because they’d decided
that by putting on new plays in a small room above a pub with the sound of traffic rattling around Shepherd’s Bush Green, they were stoking the fires of important TV drama or the bigger London theatres. ‘Come see our stuff today. You’ll see this writer’s work on a bigger scale tomorrow,’ etc. The idea of which, of course, I loved. Today the Boiler Room and Anthea’s cheesecloth waistcoats; tomorrow the RSC, Channel 4 – who knew?!
Maybe they should have called themselves The Deli, as Anthea was quite fond of saying. ‘The plays we put on are like broccoli in 1982. You could only get it in delis. Eight years later you can get it in Kwik Save.’
I wasn’t sure what that really meant, but it sounded good. She was one of those posh birds with the gift of the gab.
One thing I was less keen on was Anthea’s assertion that my play was, and I quote, ‘far too fucking long, darling’. I’d argued the punters would be getting value for money. She slapped her desk – causing her tobacco tin to jump a few centimetres in the air – and said ‘No. I know theatre. I am theatre. All decent plays are two hours, including an interval.’
‘Try telling Shakespeare that,’ I’d countered.
She’d practically snorted. ‘I’d’ve told him the same. Overrated, over-produced SCHMUK. Roll on the moratorium.’
‘Is that his latest play?’
She’d pointed to me without even cracking a smile and said, flatly, ‘You’re funny. Funny sells. Put more jokes in this.’ At which she’d jabbed her finger at my script.
So . . . what? Let me get this straight: I had to cut an hour out of my play (according to Anthea) and add more jokes. Make your mind up, Anthea, girl!
But I didn’t say anything. I just nodded. And panicked. But I made the changes. I wasn’t going to risk not having the play put on because of artistic differences.
Anthea decreed she was going to direct the play. ‘I get Ireland. I am Irish.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Tunbridge Wells. But my grandma was Falls Road through and through. Well, she had a cleaning lady who was.’
The Boiler Room didn’t pay its writers or actors when they put a play on. Anthea assured me this was completely normal. The arrangement was something called a profit share. Basically everyone did the show for free, and then when the play made money at the box office they would split the profit between everyone involved.
‘Does that mean you and everyone in the office work for free, Anthea?’ I’d asked.
She shook her head. ‘No, we’re on a wage. Peanuts, basically, but we have charitable status.’
Breadline Bohemians, I called them in my head. She had a way of dismissing me quite regally with a flick of the wrist, so I found it easier to just shut my mouth when she said stuff like this and nod in agreement. Pointless pissing off the woman who had the power to make or break my career.
Needless to say, I found the whole experience of putting on Supper with Sam incredibly exciting. Choosing the poster design, the designer, casting the actors. I couldn’t make all the meetings as I couldn’t afford to just jack in my job at Hyper Hyper, but every second I spent at the Boiler Room I soaked up and recalled to myself in bed later that night in vivid technicolour. I knew I wanted to treasure these memories for the rest of my life. What if I never had a play on again? Everyone was saying (well, Anthea was) I was the new theatrical voice of my generation, but even geniuses are wrong sometimes. If this never happened again, I needed to remember everything in vivid detail.
Kathleen was desperate to read the play, but I lied and told her it was illegal, that the theatre had told me I wasn’t allowed to let anyone see it until it was on. And Kathleen believed me. But all she did, all day long, was ask me questions about how it was coming along.
‘What’s it about, Adam?’ she’d whine over the futuristic outfits at work.
‘It’s a coruscating look at disaffected youth in Northern Ireland.’
‘My God, it sounds so deep.’
‘It is. It’s like a garrulous and coruscating swimming pool.’
‘Wow. And have you heard any more about that coloured girl from thingy?’
‘Showbiz Comp? We’re still waiting to hear. And we don’t say coloured in London. We say black.’
‘Black? Right. Sorry.’
‘It’s all right, Kathleen. But you do need to work on your racism if you’re not gonna show me up on opening night.’
‘Sorry, Adam.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘D’you think . . . and say no if it’s gonna be a ballache. D’you think I could invite Cynthia to opening night? She loves the theatre. I was telling her about the play.’
‘Yeah. Feel free to bring your girlfriend,’ I said, sounding a bit more cutting than I meant to.
‘Don’t be like that, Adam. You’re always so busy with your writing and rehearsals, I’ve got to have other friends.’
‘I’m only joking, Kathleen.’
‘And she was dead excited to hear about thingy off the telly.’
‘She’s only human, babe.’
In the end, we did manage to get that girl off the telly. I was OVER. THE. MOON. God, the cast was so fantastic. I was particularly excited by this casting of Harriet Newland, who was almost a household name thanks to starring in the children’s TV show Showbiz Comp for eight years. She was now twenty, and wanting to recreate herself as a serious actress of the theatre. She had hit the headlines briefly in the tail end of the eighties for being found with cocaine on her in a nightclub. But, like she said at the audition, ‘I’ve grown up a lot since then. Just like the kids do in this incredible piece.’
Blimey. Harriet Newland thought my play was incredible!
And then she’d done this amazing Northern Irish accent, bellowing TO BE SURE, TO BE SURE, FURRR PLAY TO YE in a really deep, gruff voice. She sounded like Jim McDonald from Corrie.
Anthea later said they’d need to find a cheap voice coach.
The lad who was playing the character based on Mark was currently in an advert on the telly for cider. Every time it came on, me and Kathleen would shout THERE HE IS! And we’d watch the advert, then coo over how fantastic he was in it, even though he didn’t have any lines and he just sort of giggled at his ‘mate’, who was the main character in the advert and really liked the cider, and how much more of a man it made him when he drank it. The actor’s name was Tom Hangs. Which was always a bit embarrassing because when I’d tell people I had Tom Hangs in the play they’d look incredulous, gasp and be like . . . You have Tom Hanks in your play? That’s amazing! He was so good in Big. And then I’d have to say, ‘Well, no. This is Tom Hangs. With a G. He’s really good, though. He’s in that cider advert. Laughing.’ People seemed less interested then.
The girl playing the character based on Kathleen was a girl with a massive nose called Suki. She was from New Zealand and so her Northern Irish accent wasn’t brilliant, but Anthea had worked with her a few times and said she was ‘magical’ on stage.
‘She’s lambent, Adam. Wait till you see her. And that nose!’
‘Yes, it is pretty big.’
‘Big? It’s got its own postcode. Biggest schnozzle in Spotlight.’
And then, of course, there was the guy who was playing the character based on me. Anthea said she’d (yet again) cast a fantastic young actor who she thought epitomized the character really well. I couldn’t wait to meet him. When eventually we met for warm white wine and crudités at Anthea’s Bayswater flat, I got quite a shock. He was SO effeminate. He kept SCREAMING literally. And everything he said he said so LOUDLY and laughed his HEAD OFF. I was really put out. I took Anthea to one side.
‘He’s going to tone that down, isn’t he?’
She did a side-eye thing. ‘Why?’
‘Well, he’s . . . so . . .’
‘Camp?’
I nodded.
‘The character is camp, Adam. He’s like you. He doesn’t give a shit what people think. Audiences will adore him. Just like people adore you, Adam.’
<
br /> Ouch. That stung. I wasn’t that camp, was I? Was she saying I was really similar to him? His name was Joshua Moonlight (I mean, that had to be made up, right?) and I really took against him. I’ve never felt like that about many people. Margaret Thatcher, Julie Andrews, and him. Joshua Moonlight. Or Joshua Fucking Moonlight, as I usually called him. Behind his back, of course. Face to face, I was too scared of him.
The designer was an Israeli woman called Irit who had been an award-winning theatre designer in Jerusalem, but had recently moved to London. Oh. And she had recently become registered blind. I had a pang of doubt when I found out that the woman who was going to be responsible for the look of the play couldn’t see anything, but Anthea put my mind at rest.
‘She’s partially sighted. She can still see things. And design isn’t always about having a good eye, it’s about having a good imagination. It’s about feeling the play. Irit feels things deeply. But don’t judge her too much. Her English is appalling.’
Fuck me. If her English was bad, how was her Northern Irish?
Following the crudités and wine at Anthea’s, the actors did an informal read-through of the play in her lounge, sitting on beanbags and scatter cushions.
Irit sat cross-legged, playing with some worry beads and nodding astutely at times, and looking completely baffled at other times. Anthea veered between closing her eyes and looking close to orgasm, to staring out of the window looking like she wanted to throw herself out of it. I just sat there feeling confused.
Their Northern Irish accents were awful. In that moment I realized it probably would have been a good idea to cast some actors from the actual place. As the play ended, round about the time I had expected the room to be in floods of tears, I looked at Irit and realized she had fallen asleep. Anthea poked her with her bare foot as she stood up and announced that the read-through had been ‘eye-opening’ and ‘delicious’ and given her lots of ‘food for thought’. Harriet then ran to the loo and locked herself in, crying her eyes out really loudly, screaming that everyone hated her and that she was the worst actress in the world. Cue everybody else standing at the door, tapping it and telling her how amazing she was and how she was one of the most gifted performers they’d all ever had the privilege to work with. Eventually the sobbing died down, the lock flicked and Harriet came out, dabbing her eyes with some toilet paper and thanking them quietly, between sniffs.
The History of Us Page 14
