by Lee Evans
Most annoyingly, every time I would turn around to adjust the stool, my backside kept hitting the notes. Then I had to start all over again with the mic stand, which had fallen forward between the lid and the piano. It forced the lid to slam on to my fingers just as I was about to play, making me look like an idiot. I had to stop, dazed and confused about where the microphone had disappeared to, my hands jammed uselessly under the lid. The whole act descended into a shambolic disaster. Even though I did my best to plough through, I accepted I had failed miserably. I was bombing big time. It was a car crash.
But in the midst of this dreadful, failing performance, something odd started to happen. It was odd because, instead of feeling as though I was failing, I suddenly felt quite positive. No, more than that – I felt euphoric. I was starting to like being on stage. But, even better, there was a sense that the crowd, curiously, were starting to like what I was doing. What was this strange feeling I was experiencing? Was I starting to be – whisper it – a success?
As I fumbled and blundered my way through the act, getting all muddled along the way, as I fought with the inanimate objects around me that never seemed to do what I wanted them to, there was no doubt something was stirring in the audience. It was a notion that was slow at first, but then grew from a ripple that gradually spread across the entire room, building and building all the time into a massive wave. Laughter! It appeared that the more I struggled to get something right and hopelessly kept getting it wrong, the more the audience roared and howled at my unfortunate situation.
My head began to clear and, as I looked around the room, I realized everyone in the audience was killing themselves with laughter. Why? I was getting it all wrong. I couldn’t understand why they were all in fits – the man from the brewery, the compere, the audience. In fact, the only person who wasn’t doubled up with laughter was Heather. I could just pick her out under the lights and saw she was just as dumbstruck by the whole thing as I was. She was clearly bewildered that I was, in fact, not dying, but going down a storm.
That was when everything seemed to click into place. I couldn’t help myself. For the first time in my entire life, I felt at ease. Indeed, I felt happier to be where I was, on a stage, than out there in the world, a place that appeared only to want to treat me unfairly, a world that never understood me. The feeling was mutual.
Here I was, getting it all so wrong, and yet – ironically – getting it all so right.
The cage was open. I unruffled my feathers and began to fly. I was enjoying myself now, soaring around the stage, improvising, getting tangled in the microphone wire, the stand. My amp became something to stand on, jump off. I played with the curtains at the back of the stage. A massive roar went up when, having never actually played the guitar, I used the strap around my neck to twirl it like a hula hoop around my head. As I stood there, swirling about like a crazed whirling dervish, the crowd went wild. Then, in a pool of sweat, my soaked clothes hanging from my buzzing, shaking body, completely exhausted, the stage littered with debris, I dropped into a bow and felt the electricity that ran through the room.
I straightened up and quickly searched the cheering, applauding crowd for Heather again and was so elated to see she was clapping with pure joy. The lights from the stage caught the tears in her eyes, making them twinkle as she beamed so hard I thought any moment she might burst.
38. The End of the Pier – and of Our Story
Afterwards, as we climbed out of the back of her friend’s cramped Ford, Heather and I asked if we could have a little time to reflect on what was a pretty eventful evening. Heather’s friend sped off along Southend’s gusty seafront after kindly promising to drop my guitar and amp off some time the next day.
We wanted to take a walk along the pier. It had become a special place for us. It was somewhere we always liked to go on a Sunday, when the sun was shining and glistening off the sea. It was a beautiful spot to spend a couple of hours forgetting all our troubles. Plus, it was free!
We hardly ever noticed how long the pier is – they say it goes a mile into the sea, and it’s billed as the longest pier in Europe. But we were oblivious to that, so engrossed were we in each other’s company as we nattered away to each other about our hopes and dreams. We would always end up sitting right at the end of the pier with our feet dangling over the edge above the sea, not saying a word, just content. We were comfortable with our silence, as long as we were together. Now and again, one of us would look up and cast out a fantasy for the other’s benefit. It almost always revolved around a favourite dish we hadn’t been able to afford, or a place we longed to go, or an ideal home we dreamed of buying.
Tonight was different, though. There was an unusual mood between us, something we hadn’t experienced for quite some time. As we stepped on to the planks of the pier, we linked arms. We squeezed each other closer and headed down the walkway. Our heads were bowed forward and we had to lean at times into the squally but warm winter wind. The breeze would suddenly rush up through the old blue and white Victorian railings as it went whirling off across the pier. It would sometimes catch us by surprise as it rushed at our backs, forcing us to quicken our step along the wet shiny slats. The pier was lit up by the swaying illuminations looped up on each lamp post that went along the entire length of the pier. It looked like one of those adverts you see in the magazines for some posh perfume.
The fresh air felt such a relief. It was so bracing after the intense, claustrophobic, intimidating atmosphere of the talent show where, just half an hour earlier, I had been struggling away, hoping against hope that the purgatory of my ten minutes – which, to begin with, had seemed like ten hours – would soon be over.
‘I knew you could do a bit of music, but I didn’t know you could do all that other stuff back in the pub,’ Heather said proudly, taking in the magnificent view of the estuary in front of us.
Although I wanted to explode with delight when she said it, I dismissed it straight away. ‘What? I can’t do anything. I was an idiot. I failed.’ I wanted to stay calm, so I replied to her playfully. But, of course, I knew it would only draw more praise.
Then I swallowed a deep bellyful of fresh sea air, as the two of us reached the very end of the pier. We held the top railing with both hands like you might a windy motorbike. We just let the warm wintry breeze whip up and dance around and through our clothes. It certainly felt like it was blowing all the cobwebs away. I closed my eyes for a moment, my thoughts racing back to the talent show.
They had us all lined up at the back of the stage, firing-squad style, as the compere read out the winners. The mood in the pub went very tense and quiet. It had been a long night. With eight acts to sit through, the audience must have been feeling just as tired as some of us up on stage.
By now the room had become hot and sticky. A lot of booze had been drunk, bolstering people’s enthusiasm for their favourite acts. So there were some pretty loud, intoxicated characters amongst the crowd. But no one was leaving; they had invested their support in their favourite performers, and they were not budging until they saw who had won. Although the stage lights were almost blindingly bright, you could just see the ones that had been on their feet most of the evening along the back wall and leaning wearily against the bar – from where, now and again, an impatient shout would emerge: ‘Hurry up, mate, Give us the results, for Christ’s sake.’
‘And in third place …’
I looked up at the ceiling. ‘If I’m not third,’ I thought, steeling myself for the worst, ‘then I’m nowhere.’ And that prize was worth twenty-five pounds, meaning we could pay at least the electricity bill and maybe the gas. It would be compensation for the money that Jonathan ripped off. I put my hands behind my back and crossed my fingers.
From where we stood on the pier, you could look out and see the mass of lights like some giant metropolis that lit up the huge oil and gas refinery about thirty miles away across the Thames Estuary on Canvey Island. Next, you
would take your eye along to the right where the lights got denser. They would then flicker as they got further and further away, up the river Thames inland to the Isle of Dogs and the financial towers of new money that stick up like miniature Christmas trees. The whole mass of lights play a trick on the eye, as it seems to hover like a space ship on the horizon.
Then you would turn your face into the dark, cooler wind that whips up off the unlit, ominous, open ocean just outside the gaping mouth of the estuary. It looks lonely, vast and black as it opens out wider still into the English Channel. Tilbury is still a busy port, so even at night you can watch the lights of mammoth, lumbering cargo ships as they slowly disembark, make their way past the pier, then break cover into open sea. Out there, they get smaller and smaller, becoming just dots of light as they position themselves in the busy shipping lanes of the English Channel before disappearing off across the world.
It really feels like you could be out at sea, you are so far from Southend – too far away indeed to hear the slightest noise of a moving car. The only things you can hear at the end of the pier are the deep rush of air as it whisks and beats past your ears and the waves as they crash and mingle amongst the great ironwork legs below.
‘Well, I thought you were the best there,’ Heather beamed, interrupting our reverie. She leaned back on the railings and smiled. She looked so beautiful. I loved the way her hair flipped and flapped around her eyes, which were flickering and watery because of the wind.
I tried to banter with her. ‘How do you know? You didn’t get there until I went on. You didn’t see any of the others.’
Heather didn’t respond. Rather, she stared out to sea. That was all right. Let’s be honest, I hadn’t done much that could be considered useful to anyone recently, let alone her. All I had brought her was bad news – and that was on top of losing the baby, which she still hadn’t really spoken about. So, at last, I felt I had done something, even if it wasn’t much, to lighten things up for her a little.
‘I never doubted you, Lee,’ she replied at last. ‘I know you always think people are against you. And I know that you have no self-confidence and that makes you get all in a muddle. But I believe in you, even if you don’t think I do sometimes. I know we’ve had some pretty bad things happen lately and, well, what I’m trying to say is …’
I turned to her. I had to – I was getting embarrassed. She had never spoken to me like that before. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. Covering my face, I changed the subject. ‘I’ll tell you what – that wind, it makes your eyes water, doesn’t it?’
Also, I didn’t want to take any credit. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t done anything. I had just been my usual stupid self. It was Heather who had suffered so much. It wasn’t about me, it was about us.
I stepped forward and tried kissing her but, as so often happens at times like that, the wind changed, creating an awkward moment when her friggin’ hair flopped across her face. So she was suddenly wearing a kind of woolly-mammoth-Chewbacca-from-Star-Wars-hairy-face mask. We both became instantly engulfed in her hair as it flapped about between our faces like a frizzy sandwich. We broke off and started spitting hair balls.
I gathered myself. ‘I know what you’re saying and I’ll never let you down again, and …’ I searched for the right words to give her some hope, faith in me for the future. ‘I promise that next time … I’ll … erm …’
‘Get on with it, you twat,’ she joked. ‘I’ve grown a beard waiting here.’
The compere left as big a gap as humanly possible in order to build up the tension before announcing the runner-up. However, the only tension that was building – to perhaps a critical point – was amongst the gathered number of near-to-bursting bladders that needed to be emptied. Then, of course, there were the other lot who were getting impatient for the winner to be called out, so they could start getting the pints in again.
By this point, I was desperate to get off the stage. The suspense had gone for me now. I had crossed the line the moment I had walked out in front of an audience and managed to perform a ten-minute set, even if it was completely disorganized and manic.
I hadn’t made the third place I had dared to hope for. So now I knew I was out of the running. I was really disappointed, as Heather and I wouldn’t be able to pay any bills. I’d given up, resigned myself to being back to square one. It had only been a throw of the dice anyway. The adrenaline had slowly seeped from my damp body, rendering me dead on my feet, not from the performance, but the damn nerves. The unrelenting adrenaline that possesses your body like some mad spirit uses up all your body fuel in one go. Then, selfishly, after it’s had its fun, it walks away, leaving you physically drained and shaken.
‘I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience, though,’ I reflected as I stood on the stage, waiting in line with the other performers. I had got a few unintended laughs that had completely converted my mindset. I felt the experience had somehow transformed me. I was on an entirely new bearing. It was nothing serious – it was just that I felt I had somehow crossed an invisible line. There was no doubt, I had been infected by something that had caused a disorder in the whole structure of my expectations. I was aware that I’d always had the symptoms of it, but didn’t know what had made it flare up like it had that night.
All my life I had been a fool, an idiot, picked on, frowned upon, vilified by whoever I came into contact with. Yes, I do mean you, Mrs Taylor. But onstage, I was allowed to be whatever I wanted: a fool, an imbecile, a comedian – with none of the attendant rejection. I was accepted, I was free. Instead of being the victim, in my mind I suddenly became the hero.
‘And in second place …’
I looked up to see the chairman of the brewery getting all fired up by the excitement that was now growing and beginning to take hold of everyone. He stood clutching a bottle of champagne for the winner. Next to him were a photographer and a journalist from the Evening Echo, the local paper. The photographer smiled over at me and winked, as I nervously gave him back a half-hearted grin.
That made me wonder. If I hadn’t come anywhere in the competition, would they still put my picture in the paper? If they did, I decided, I would do my best to hide behind someone else’s head. If I lurked towards the back, I thought, then I’d surely go unnoticed. As soon as anyone mentioned cheese – kazam! – I’d be gone.
I knew my mum and dad read the Echo. They got it religiously every day. The headmaster at my last school in Billericay always read it too. At lunch breaks, as I passed the staffroom on my way to getting up to no good, I’d always see him devouring the paper. Gary also always had a copy of the Echo tucked down his dash in the front window of his white van.
Then I wondered if Jonathan, that bloke who had conned us out of our last twenty-five pounds, might catch a glimpse of the paper as he was sitting in the café under the pier with some other poor sucker and feel a twinge of guilt about cheating a potential comedy star.
Heather and I turned back to face towards Southend. It felt as though we were so far away from land, it was like we were on a boat drifting offshore all alone. We were like ghosts observing the world from afar, disconnected from everything. There was only us.
From where we were, we could see the whole of the seafront from one end to the other. We could just make out the odd person wandering around beneath the dancing bulbs hung along the front. The main drag is illuminated by flashing signs luring people in with quotes from Las Vegas or announcing an impending gold rush. The slot arcades, the discos, the pubs, the fish and chip shops, the bingo halls, all that fun and diversion, is pretty exciting stuff – you just can’t get that if you go abroad. It all looked so romantic as its reflection flickered beautifully and skipped around upside down in the water just below the sea wall.
At one end of the sea front, like a great bookend, stands a club marked by huge lettering: ‘The Kursaal’. It boasts the only sprung dance floor in the country, for better bounce w
hen dancing. Then, at the other end of the sea front, you look up to the red flashing warning lights at the top of the helter-skelter in ‘Peter Pan’s Adventure Playground’. Perhaps the lights are a warning to the planes that take off from Southend’s small airport.
Just above that, the Cliffs Pavilion theatre is perched high up on the clifftop, dominating the entertainment below. The Cliffs is home to real show business, people off the telly, even from Las Vegas. They have all the big stars coming to visit. The venue packs ’em in. At that point, Heather and I had never been there. We couldn’t afford it, but I recognized some of the names from when I was a kid. I might spot an advert in the paper and think, ‘Blimey, I remember him,’ or, ‘I know her. I watched her when I was a nipper.’ I always kept it to myself, though. Somehow that sort of talk seemed frivolous and pointless, a world away from where we were in our flat.
By now it was late. It was winter, so the sea front was empty. I love that. The winter months in a seaside town are the best; I can’t stand it when it gets all packed in the summer months. The off-season is when the locals get Southend back for themselves. They can enjoy their town without the hassle of coachloads of marauding pissheads on a weekend beano, or the day trippers who flood in by their thousands. These visitors always head for the beach, take all their clothes off, put up with the brisk, freezing wind as long as physically possible without turning blue, then slowly but surely begin to put more and more clothes back on as they fight off the symptoms of severe pneumonia.
Quite unbelievably, they also endure a phenomenon where, through what’s called sun seepage, people wearing more layers than Scott of the Antarctic appear to go a bright traffic-light red, mostly at the back of the neck. Then, even though they are by now suffering the initial symptoms of frostbite that, if left untreated, would undoubtedly send a person into the screaming ad-dabs, they want to buy a freezing ice-cream cone before boarding the cattle train home.
