Nerd Do Well

by Simon Pegg

  Before I let Star Wars go (and it’s unlikely that I ever truly will), it’s worth mentioning how the films affected me emotionally, if only to demonstrate how deeply its influence ran.

  It was 2 June 1983 and Return of the Jedi had arrived in cinemas in the capital. After much planning, Sean and I were due to travel to London to see it. However, a last-minute change meant that I was unable to make the trip as early as Sean due to my being admitted to Bristol Children’s Hospital to have a birthmark removed from my forehead. The birthmark, an oval of darkly pigmented skin on the right side of my forehead about the size of a ten-pence piece, became troubling to me as I grew into my teens whereas before I had assumed it to be cool. I developed a habit of constantly smoothing my hair down to conceal it in order to avoid hurtful comments from people who hadn’t seen it before, the most common of which was, ‘Why have you got as leaf stuck to your head?’

  When my mother realised the birthmark had started to bother me, she took me along to our GP who identified it as a ‘hairy naevus’ and assured me that he could ‘have it off in no time’. I was put on an NHS waiting list and in a matter of months I was booked into Bristol Children’s Hospital where the procedure was to take place. On 2 June, as Sean Jeffries was travelling to London to see Return of the Jedi before me, I was getting into my pyjamas and climbing into my bed on ward 34 of the BCH, being looked after by a number of delightful nurses, all of whom I fell in love with. I watched the original Star Wars on the ward’s video cassette player as a consolation for missing the fun in London, and Mum and Richard went into Bristol and bought me a Biker Scout action figure, one of the new Return of the Jedi range, released in conjunction with the opening of the film. Even now, I can still feel the thrill of studying the packaging before ripping it open to get inside (would have been worth a fortune today if I’d left it in the box, stupid child). The smell of the fresh plastic and the sophistication and newness of the mould compared to the older, now well-used figures in my collection filled me with a wonder and excitement that completely dispelled my nerves about the operation.

  When visiting hours ended I said goodbye to Mum and Richard and settled down for my first night alone in hospital. At 6 a.m. I was woken by the nurse and asked to put on one of those embarrassing gowns that leaves your arse exposed. I was then given a small plastic cup containing two pills, which I duly swallowed. Nine hours later, I became aware of a familiar whistling coming from somewhere in the distance and struggled my way back to consciousness as though from the bottom of a swimming pool. The first person I saw when I opened my eyes was Mum, sat by my bed looking anxious. Actually, it’s perhaps more accurate to say I opened my eye; the other one was already open and had been since the operation, despite Mum’s frequent attempts to close it. The procedure had entailed cutting the naevus out of my forehead, then pulling the skin together and stitching it up. This resulted in my right eyebrow being pulled up into a quizzical Spock-like expression, where it remained for a few months until the skin was stretched back to normality. Fortunately I was a teenager and frowned a lot, which helped pull the skin around my eyebrow down to a less surprised height. In the hours after the operation, though, the stretch was at its maximum and however many times Mum gently closed it, the lid would open, settling me back into an unnerving one-eyed stare.

  Mum called the nurse who came over and welcomed me back to the land of the living. She was a bit surprised that I was awake and seemed impressed, if slightly concerned, that I had come round from the anaesthetic an hour or so early. I remembered the whistling and realised the culprit had been R2-D2. Some of the other children on the ward were watching the Star Wars video a few beds down and the sound of robots and lasers and spaceships had brought me out of my heavily induced sleep prematurely. Mum immediately noted this down in her ‘things to do if ever Simon is in a coma’ book before cracking open the grapes.

  I recovered very quickly, unlike the boy in the bed next to me who had had his ears pinned back. He could only manage half of Star Wars later that evening, before projectile vomiting Ribena into a kidney dish. The nurses hit him up with a few more painkillers and sent him off to his bed, while I was allowed to watch the video all by myself, the TV stand pulled up intimately to the end of my bed.

  A few weeks later, now fully recovered, I travelled to London with my babysitters, Paul and Fay, a young couple who often looked after my sister Katy and me when Mum and Richard were out at the theatre. I loved Paul and Fay. They were cool and loved movies as much as I did. Whenever they came round, they would allow me to stay up just that little bit past my bedtime, so we could discuss our favourite films and television shows. They had no children of their own at the time and they felt more like friends of mine than friends of Mum and Richard’s. When the marketing campaign for Return of the Jedi began, we hatched a plan to see the film in one of the big theatres in London, where the screen was four times as big as Screen 1 in the ABC and the sound system consisted of speakers that encompassed you in a siege of blaring, crystal-clear sound. I was extremely excited; not only was I going to London to see the film I longed to see more than any other, I was going with my friends, who treated me like a grown-up and laughed when I swore.

  I had only been to London once before, as a birthday treat in 1977. We had visited the Natural History Museum and Madame Tussaud’s, then gone to see Harry Nilsson’s musical The Point! at the Mermaid Theatre. On the journey from South Kensington, where I had marvelled at the huge dinosaur skeletons in the museum, we stopped on Wood Lane to look at the BBC building. We actually stopped the car and got out to look at it, the famous concrete doughnut where so many of my favourite programmes were made. Eighteen years later I called Mum from my dressing room inside the building, before recording my first appearance on the BBC’s Stand Up Show and reminded her that we had once stood outside and just looked, like Victorian orphans outside a cake shop. It says a lot about the level of mystique retained by television at the time that it could make a grey, ugly building seem enchanting. In the early eighties I would experience the wonder again, when I went to see daytime magazine show Pebble Mill being recorded in Birmingham and met Don Maclean from Crackerjack. I also met Greek crooner Demis Roussos but he was a bit of a knob. I knocked on his dressing-room door and asked for his autograph, which he grudgingly scrawled in an illegible dribble of ink into my autograph book. To this day, if ever I sign an autograph, my internal monologue is singing ‘Forever and Ever’, to remind me to put some effort into it, lest anyone walk away, look at their spoils and think, ‘What a knob.’

  Anyway, in 1977, we clambered back into Richard’s Opel Manta and set off for the famous house of wax. In 1995, I was fantasising about stepping out of my ESTB and striding across Wood Lane towards the awestruck little boy gawping at the building where they made Doctor Who. In 1983, I was sat in the auditorium of the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road, and as the lights dimmed, the curtains parted and the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare blasted from the circle of speakers, London’s potential to amaze seemed boundless. It was a truly amazing experience and when the film came to an end, we left the theatre, dazed and thoroughly entertained. Paul has often recalled the moment he looked over to see if I was enjoying the film and witnessed my slack-jawed awe at the imperial speeder bikes, careening through the forest of Endor at breakneck speeds. I remember sensing Paul clocking my expression and nudging Fay in amusement. Rather than look back at them and break the moment, I continued to gawk at the screen, happily making a performance of my genuine wonder. This wasn’t to show off or get attention, more my way of demonstrating to them how grateful I was that they had brought me there. Besides, it’s not like I really had to act: the speeder-bike chase was and still is a hugely exhilarating sequence, pissing on anything else that came afterwards, helped along perhaps because I care(d) so much about the individuals riding the speeder bikes in the first place.

  The effect of the film upon us was so strong that, even a full year later, Sean and I would cycle every morning
the four and a half miles from his house in Little Whitcombe, up the same steep hill where I had been visually punished for fondling Meredith Catsanus’s budding boobs, to my house in Upton St Leonards. We would then climb over the fence at the end of my garden into the small area of woodland that backed on to our house and play with our Star Wars figures, re-enacting the forest scenes from Return of the Jedi with a host of new characters and vehicles collected since the release of the film.

  And then one day, 25 May to be precise, a friend of mine by the name of Chris Dixon was hit by a car while out running and was subsequently rushed to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, where he remained unconscious for ten days. Chris lived in the same static-home park in Little Whitcombe, Gloucester, as Sean Jeffries and in truth was more Sean’s friend than mine. There was even a slight antagonism between Chris and myself as we jostled for Sean’s attention. I was Sean’s best friend at school but at home, with the benefit of proximity, Chris and Sean became very close. Whenever I visited Sean at the weekends, Chris would join our fun and games, and though there was a proprietorial tension between us, we got on well most of the time. The thing that bonded Sean and me specifically was a love of Star Wars, which had started six years before and been maintained as the saga continued.

  After Chris’s accident, our sojourn to the woods became a way of keeping our minds off the battle Chris was fighting in Bristol against his injuries. Towards the end of the week, Sean pulled into my driveway on his racing bike as he always did and said, in a tone of voice I had never heard him use before, ‘Chris is dead.’ I had stepped out of the side door of the house to get something from the garage as Sean had arrived and now stood in my socks, staring at him blankly, trying to process the information he had just imparted.

  His eyes were red, and although I didn’t see him cry, I knew he had not long stopped. This in itself was alarming. I had never known Sean to cry, not even while being terrorised by sadistic bullies in the changing rooms at Gloucester Leisure Centre. Unable to truly comprehend the idea that someone so young, someone I knew, could have died, the idea that Sean had been crying seemed somehow more terrible. We walked numbly over to the large Safeway supermarket near my house and bought drinks and Return of the Jedi themed biscuits, then went back home to do what we always did. We played Star Wars in the woods behind my house. Perhaps not as vocally or even as enthusiastically as we normally would, but play it we did and it helped us enormously.

  Escaping into that world which we so loved enabled us to cope, at least initially, with the shock of losing Chris. I hadn’t been bereaved since the night Mum had interrupted Fabulous Animals, but this time the implications were so much more serious and shocking. I suddenly understood the dazed look of bewilderment on my mum’s face that night as I felt it creep across my own, eight years later, as Sean delivered the news. That evening, lying on my bed, the tears came and I was able to articulate my grief freely; but for those first few hours in a world where I suddenly and shockingly found myself one friend down, I had coped in the only way I knew how: by going into my imagination where, in death, you simply disappear and become part of a greater world. I can still see Chris in my head, a robust young bruiser with a scruff of blond hair and an infectious, cheeky smile. I’m sure Sean can too.

  7

  ‘What are you doing ’ere?’ whispered the Scarlet Panther throatily, a thin film of sweat glistening on her amazing knockers, as she lay in Pegg’s muscular arms.

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ quipped Pegg, his dwindling member resting on his lower chest.

  The mysterious beauty (the Scarlet Panther) looked at the inert figure of Canterbury standing nearby, still wearing his burka. She frowned, a delightful wrinkle appearing between her eyes like the one Meg Ryan used to have.

  ‘Are you sure ee cannot see us?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘If the virus you implanted to disable his early-warning sensors performed a temporary memory wipe, then he’ll need time to recompile his storage platters. Trust me, he is in the robot equivalent of snoozetown, USA. He didn’t see a thing.’

  ‘Zhat’s a relief,’ smiled the Panther, arching an exquisitely plucked eyebrow. She was unspeakably beautiful. Tall and slender with alabaster skin and a shag of wavy copper hair. Born and raised in Paris, France, her American Ivy League education had not fully rid her of her Gallic purr. She was tough, tenacious and wily, but possessed an innate sophistication that hinted at a deep intelligence. Pegg always felt slightly hypnotised by her perplexing charisma, feeling clumsy in her presence, forever cursing himself for saying things before he had properly thought them through.

  ‘Believe me,’ said Pegg, ‘if he had been watching us, there’s no way he wouldn’t have achieved major droid wood.’

  The Panther let his crude remark go with an admonishing smirk that only made him blush with regret for an instant.

  ‘I’ll repeat zee question,’ she furtherised. ‘What are you doing ’ere?’

  ‘Looking for you, of course,’ said Pegg, ‘although I didn’t have to look far. How on earth did you know I was in Morocco?’

  ‘Zee flag was up over zee riad,’ stated the Panther plainly.

  ‘What?’ coughed Pegg.

  ‘Zee flag zat lets everyone know zhat you are in.’ The Panther was finding it hard to conceal her amusement at Pegg’s frustration.

  ‘Damn it, Canterbury, I told you not to put it up!’ Pegg spat, jamming a fist into his palm.

  ‘Eet has been up for months actually,’ said the Panther.

  ‘Damn it, Canterbury, I told you to take it down!’ Pegg jammed the other fist into the other palm.

  ‘I am teasing you,’ purred the Panther, tracing a fleeting white strip down the valley between Pegg’s diamond-hard pecs. ‘I saw zee jet come in to land last night. I ’appened to be taking tea at Ali Ben Hassan’s Old-Fashioned Tea Shop and Internet Cafe in the square, when you arrived.

  ‘It’s supposed to be a stealth jet,’ grumbled Pegg through his teeth.

  ‘Yes, but you put all those lights on zee side and painted “Pegg Jet” on the fuselage in reflective paint.’

  Pegg cursed internally with a bob of his head and muttered something as his lips tightened into a sphincter of regret. He became lost in thought.

  ‘Looks pretty good though, doesn’t it?’ Pegg eyed the Panther hopefully.

  ‘Hell, yes,’ she said in a comedy African American voice that wasn’t racist. She smiled, sensing his moodiness dispersing. ‘Why were you looking for me?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Murielle,’ Pegg said affectionately to his old lifeguarding colleague, for it was she from earlier. The two had chosen different sides of the moral highway after leaving Gloucester Leisure Centre and had been on a perpetual collision course ever since. ‘I know you lifted the Star of Nefertiti from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquity in Cairo, with the express intention of selling it to the highest bidder.’

  ‘Oo told you?’ Murielle enquired, half furious, half impressed, half amused.

  ‘Who do you think?’ Pegg was enjoying having the upper hand.

  ‘Needles!’ It was Murielle’s turn to jam her fist into her palm. ‘Le petit twat!’

  ‘I love it when you talk French,’ chuckled Pegg, only to be met with an angry glance from his nemesis/fuck buddy.

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have invited him over for zhat tour of zee local minarets.’ Murielle cursed her decision to holiday with a known informant.

  ‘He is a known informant,’ said Pegg echoing her thoughts, ‘and besides, if you hadn’t, we would never have had all that amazing sex. Now let’s return the diamond to its rightful place in Cairo, then get a suite at the Marriott Hotel and Omar Khayyam Casino and have some more –’

  ‘Eet’s too late,’ said Murielle, already regretting selling on the Star of Nefertiti and, in doing so, missing out on at least a month of shagging and blackjack. ‘I stole it to order, eet’s already been delivered.’

  ‘Who to?’ urged Pegg, rising up on t
o his elbow to indicate urgency.

  Murielle avoided Pegg’s gaze; she seemed reluctant to divulge the identity of the buyer, although Pegg sensed this was more from regret than any misplaced loyalty to her employer. Pegg intensified his glare so that Murielle could almost feel it burning into her pale, flawless skin, which she clearly moisturised regularly.

  ‘Lord Black,’ she whispered shamefully.

  ‘What?’ Pegg leapt up, his body flexing with tension. Things had suddenly become very serious. He didn’t even have a semi any more. ‘Lord Black is a notorious criminal and nobleman, Murielle; I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve foiled his attempts to commit massive atrocities in the name of needless financial gain!’

  ‘I know,’ pleaded Murielle, ‘but this was simply a case of interior design and zee fee ee offered me was really good considering the current economic climate. Eet was more than enough to keep my deaf brother Etienne at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris.’

  Murielle became unfocused momentarily as her thoughts drifted to her gifted, but sadly deaf younger brother, for whom she committed most of her non-violent crimes, thus giving her illegal activities a moral justification only intensified by the fact that she always made sure there was never a direct victim.

  ‘Murielle, I need you to focus,’ enforced Pegg, pulling her face towards his with a gentle yet firm insistence. ‘What do you mean, interior design?’

  Murielle shook her head several times, trying to clear her thoughts, her fiery red hair scattering across her swimmer’s shoulders.

  ‘Ee said ee was doing up his town house in Hendon. Ee was collecting artefacts to go round his pool and said zhat zee Star of Nefertiti would make a wonderful addition to ees collection.’ Murielle frowned as she searched her memory.