Speaking With the Angel

by Nick Hornby

  Aha! That was the give-away, wasn’t it, mentioning Sally. Of course, they didn’t want to appear all boring and square in front of their other halves did they? They didn’t want their girlfriends to see what they were missing, the magic of corporeal mime, the life on the road, sleeping in the van, the excitement of setting out the chairs in some far-flung arts centre. No don’t let your world be challenged by ground-breaking art, just write out a cheque and fly off to the sunshine for a fortnight’s windsurfing. It’s just so easy isn’t it? I sent them details of the Barcelona Mime Workshop which was only five hours drive from their resort, but if they went, they never mentioned it to me.

  A couple of years went by and before I knew it their girlfriends had become their wives. Neal was the best man at Richard’s wedding and Richard was the best man at Neal’s. Obviously they’d seen a lot more of each other down the years and besides I don’t think either of them felt they could trust me with a best man’s speech! I think they were worried I might have mimed it the whole way through. Honestly, I’m not that obsessed. I would have done some talking as well.

  But it was at Neal’s wedding that I met Carol and the triangle was finally complete. She had that petite elfin quality that reminded me of Mia Farrow, though fortunately she didn’t have a house full of adopted Vietnamese kids that I’d have to be father to. We had a modest little wedding at the registry office and then round to the pub for a couple of pints and some miniature vol-au-vents. At closing time her dad took me aside and went all serious on me. He told me that before he was married he’d been in a jazz band; played all the clubs and dreamed of making it big. But he said that when he started a family he realized his priorities had to change. And then he looked at me meaningfully as he struggled to keep his balance.

  ‘Message received loud and clear,’ I said to him.

  ‘Good man,’ he replied, looking reassured as he patted me on the back. But really; as if I’d ever be even remotely interested in playing in a jazz band.

  Carol worked in the health service, dealing with psychologically disturbed children, which was tough for her because it wasn’t always easy to get time off to come to the shows. But in the evening we’d talk about all the problems we’d had at work – trying to hang on to my Arts Council grant, having to find rehearsal space, trying to discover why I’d not been invited to perform at the London Mime festival. ‘I’m glad to be out of that one actually,’ I said to her, ‘because the whole British mime scene is far too London based already …’

  ‘Guy …’ she said.

  ‘It’s all stitched up at the Montreal Festival anyway,’ I told her. ‘If you can’t afford to fly over to Canada then you can forget London.’

  ‘Guy,’ she said, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

  Carol had planned to go back to work after she’d had the baby, but then we had another one and she couldn’t bear to leave them. ‘We can live on what I earn,’ I said, confident that this suggestion would be contradicted. When she agreed with me I wanted to say ‘Are you mad?’ The flat was only one bedroom so they had to sleep in our room, but it wasn’t too cramped because I was away a lot of the time performing around the country. My pieces worked best in more intimate settings, so I tended to get bookings from smaller venues. But the trouble with these little halls is that a lot of them put out those awful plastic chairs which are very uncomfortable if you’re sitting through a two-hour show. It means that some people with bad backs or whatever can’t come back for the second half, which is a shame because they miss the real message of the piece. But, in a way, I almost prefer a small audience, the exchange is all the more personal. Of course if you’re on a door split you don’t take so much home, but I never became a mime artist to make my million. I hate the way that everything has become so commercial in our society – the way that money is held up as being more important than mime.

  Even Carol isn’t immune to this I regret to say. Things were obviously a bit tight after she gave up work to look after the boys, but sometimes I worried that she was turning into a breadhead like everyone else. I wasn’t so insensitive that I didn’t get the hint when she started talking about the different types of children’s car seat one could buy. She wanted us to get a car. But if all this sudden materialism wasn’t bad enough, she started going on about life insurance and a pension and all that other square stuff that keeps Friends Provident in business and pays for Richard’s big house in Leatherhead. Like he needs any more money. I told her we couldn’t afford to go mad at the moment – things were always tighter in the winter – ‘mime work is seasonal,’ I said, ‘you knew that when you married me. Anyway there’s a recession on and mime artists are always the first to feel the pinch.’ Oh yes, if you’re a teacher or a fireman, your job’s fine; you’re safe enough, but mime artists – well, we’re suddenly surplus to requirements aren’t we? But then mime has never been a pursuit that is particularly overvalued in British society – it’s not like being a doctor or something. You don’t get a sudden crisis where a member of the public shouts ‘Help! Help! It’s got very windy outside – is anyone here a mime artist who can show us how to walk against a really strong wind?’

  So Carol and I had our ups and downs like any couple. She did threaten to leave me once, said she’d find a man who might talk to her about things more. She thought it was because of what I did for a living. But her mother said to her, ‘No dear, all men are like that, it’s not just the mime artists.’ But she worried about us being in debt and the boys seemed to be costing more and more and they were getting too big to be sharing a room with their parents and then one day she just suddenly came out with it. ‘Guy, you’re forty-one years old,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you should be a mime artist any more.’

  There comes a point in a man’s life when he must face up to his responsibilities; when he has to put his family first and sacrifice the dreams he had when he was young and carefree. This was the theme that I explored in my next one-man mime entitled ‘Sell out in the Suburbs’. For the first time ever I spoke during a performance, I actually re-enacted that moment with Carol – at the very end of the show I said out loud, ‘And my wife told me not to be a mime artist any more!’ You should have heard the applause. Something in that piece really connected with people.

  I know why she’d said it. All her friends in Dorking had money and husbands with flashy cars and thought that Carol was strange because she didn’t have a nanny or a black labrador. They were always going on at her about me, they just couldn’t handle that I did what I did, like I was some sort of threat to their comfy suburban existence. That was the trouble with living in Surrey; it was full of people who lived in Surrey. When the pubs shut in Dorking the landlord shouts, ‘Come on; haven’t you all got second homes to go to?’

  Why did people always imply I ought to be spending my life doing something else? Teaching mime was the usual suggestion, but that’s not being a mime artist is it, that’s being a teacher. People didn’t look at the Sistine chapel and say to Michelangelo, ‘Hmm, nice ceiling, Mike, why don’t you teach interior decor.’

  I’d go to pick the boys up from school and the mothers would go quiet as I approached as if I was some sort of social leper. I may not have been the richest father at the school gates, but my kids loved the fact that their dad did something a bit more interesting and exciting than all the others. Marcel is nearly six now so he’s seen some of my more recent pieces. He’s so funny, I was talking to him about my work when he was sitting in the bath a few months back when he said, ‘Dad, it would be much less boring if you talked at the same time.’ The things that kids come out with! So I told him about the sublimated tragedy of the comic performer who’s lost the power of speech. About how silent mime evolved out of performing restrictions imposed on the early French theatre and that I used no spoken words because mime is a poem written in the air. And when I finished this explanation I looked down at him in the bath to see if he had taken it in. He was stretching his foreskin into different shapes a
nd he said, ‘Look, I can make Pokémon faces with my willy.’

  I’m taking the boys to see their first-ever kabuki theatre on Saturday. They’re very excited, bless them; I hope I haven’t built it up too much. It’s hard to explain to kids that so much of the material stuff that they want won’t really make them happy. That they’re being tricked by big businesses and advertisers and that it’s a never-ending spiral. Someone has to say this to them because the talking Buzz Lightyear (£34.99 from Toys ‘R’ Us) didn’t seem like he wasn’t going to mention it. I’m sure Carol knows I’m right but she can’t seem to help herself from buying them bits of plastic junk that have been made in some sweatshop in China. Eventually we got so far into debt that I had to take some drastic action. So I swallowed a few principles and joined the other commuters squashed on to the 9.07 from Dorking to Waterloo. I had heard what Carol had said to me. That something had to change, that I needed to take some serious action. So I started doing a bit of street theatre up at Covent Garden.

  You may have seen me there in my cyberman get-up; silver make-up on my face, the bacofoil suit; Kraftwerk blaring out of the tinny beat box. I had a private chuckle about the irony of it all, because there was me dressed as a robot when of course the real robots were all those poor office workers who came out to watch me during their permitted one-hour lunch-break. My act involved standing completely still for a few minutes and then suddenly coming to life. My head would swivel and my arms would mechanically relocate; each joint and muscle was activated with precision control as if individually powered by its own electric motor. This would cause great delight; I could feel the buzz of excitement in the circle of tourists around me but I could not even acknowledge that I knew they were there. I was a machine you see; a piece of mechanical hardware, and when you’re giving a public performance convention demands that you remain in character whatever might be happening around you. However, this long established principle does not take into account the possibility of being kicked up the arse by a drunken teenager.

  It had started with just a bit of heckling. There were three of them, lurching dangerously between the tourists, clutching cans of cheap lager.

  ‘Oi, CP-30! Where’s Obi Wan Kenobi?’ shouted the tall one.

  I didn’t understand how this was supposed to constitute an actual joke, but his friends fell about in hysterics anyway. Professional pride meant that I could not allow myself to even blink as they continued to harangue me.

  ‘Oi, Robot! When you have a piss, how do stop your knob going all rusty?’ he said. Now the crowd were laughing as well and I wondered if he was the theatre critic from the Sun. I tried to cling on to some professional dignity but it’s hard to conjure up witty put-downs with mime. The best I could do was to swivel round slowly and just stare at him; my face remaining totally dead-pan. This didn’t intimidate him in the way that I’d hoped. He surveyed me up and down, swayed dangerously and then with no warning whatsoever just kicked me up the bum.

  I think some of the crowd imagined that this was part of the show because they laughed and applauded all the more. A Japanese tourist had failed to capture the moment on video and asked him if he’d do it again and he was more than happy to oblige. Finally I breathed a huge internal sigh of relief; a couple of policemen had seen what was going on and were heading towards us. The performance-artist-baiting section of the show would now be over and the yobs would be sent on their way. But no. Instead of coming to my rescue and ordering the delinquents to leave me alone, the policemen stood on the edge of the crowd, folded their arms and chuckled along at the show with everyone else. They adopted one of those benevolent ‘it’s all just a bit of good-natured fun’ expressions that they learn at Hendon Police College. I wanted to shout out to them – ‘No, it’s not just a bit of good-natured fun, it’s not fun at all; arrest these drunken yobs at once.’ Agents of the state condoning the kicking of the mime artist; that just about says it all. Because the next day I lost my Arts Council grant as well.

  They said they didn’t have to give a reason. I went down to their offices and no one was available to talk to me. I’m afraid I lost control a bit actually and I shouted at the bloke on the desk that I couldn’t carry on without the grant any more, that the philistines upstairs had just killed off the only one-man performer in the whole country who was trying to deal with serious social and political issues through the medium of mime. ‘Is that what you want?’ I shouted. ‘To live in a country where there is not one socially aware mime artist touring the regions?’

  ‘I think I could live with it,’ he said.

  I walked back through the West End and as I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue I saw a face on a poster that I recognized. ‘Johnny Lee – live one-man show!’ the theatre boasted. I stared and stared at that familiar face and eventually it came to me. It was ‘Mussolini’s Mother-in-law’, the comic from the Edinburgh Festival all those years ago. He’d lost the stupid name but gained a successful career, judging by the queue at the box office. ‘Single tickets only’ said a note on the window, so I bought one and took my place in the audience. A solitary microphone stood in a circular pool of light in the middle of the stage, like some sort of statement about the minimalism of one man and his jokes. There was a warm-up act who played seventies glam-rock tunes on different sized Marmite jars, and then finally a booming deep voice came over the PA and announced ‘Ladies and Gentlemen – Johnny Lee!’

  Johnny rushed up the centre aisle, leapt up on stage and confidently grabbed the microphone out of its stand. He waited for the applause and cheering to die down, until he shouted into the mic with amazed and outraged incomprehension, ‘Have you ever noticed how there are too many words for small oranges?’ A huge laugh washed across the room. I looked round at the rest of the audience in disbelief but they genuinely seemed to think that this was hilarious. ‘I mean, there’s tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas – why can’t we just call them all small oranges?’ he went on, as the people on either side of me doubled up with laughter. He hit them with the next line – ‘Because I mean, the Eskimos have forty words for snow, right; because, like, snow is really important to Eskimos. So clearly Anglo-Saxon society totally revolved around small fucking oranges.’ By now the audience were red-faced and weeping with laughter and it was inexplicable. He’d just, well – got better.

  Johnny Lee went from strength to strength after that. He got the lager ad, which made him a household name, and soon the networks were falling over each other to give him his own series. He must be a multi-millionaire by now. He presents a show on Carlton called Celebri-TV, linking clips taken from closed-circuit TV cameras in which celebrities have been spotted shopping or putting petrol in their cars. There’s a picture of him in OK! magazine this week. He’s at a charity drinks party, chatting with TV gardener Charlie Dimmock and Falklands hero Simon Weston. Richard and Neal tell people that we saw him right at the beginning of his career at the Edinburgh Festival. ‘He was brilliant back then as well,’ they say. I suppose it’s just the luck of the draw if your particular talent is in vogue during your lifetime. Comedy was the new rock ’n’ roll. Then cookery was the new rock ’n’ roll. And mime; well, mime was the new mime.

  I’ve reapplied for Arts Council funding every year since, but with no success so far. They’re probably frightened that putting on white make-up is racist or something. I’m investigating getting funding from the National Lottery and I’ve just written to Channel 4 using Neal’s name suggesting that it’s about time that their remit for minority interests included a season of mime and then I mentioned this very good performer called Guy Jessop who I saw doing a wonderful show at the Harry Secombe theatre in Sutton. I was spending so much of my time writing letters and submissions that I had a rather good idea. Instead of doing all my office work from the kitchen table with the kids getting under my feet, I’ve got myself a part-time job, which allows me to do all my admin and get paid at the same time.

  So that’s why I’m sitting here now.
I haven’t told them it’s only a temporary arrangement, but I’m just doing it to clear a few debts till I get some funding. I work on my own and I don’t talk to anyone so that’s a bit like what I was doing before. I sit in this little booth from 7 a.m. till 3 p.m. and when the cars come into the car park I press the button and the gate goes up. And then I press another button and the gate goes down. So now I’m stuck inside a real glass box! I said to them, ‘You don’t have to provide me with a glass box, I can do glass boxes you know, that was day one at mime school.’ I reckon I could have done a passable electric gate with my arm as well; right arm goes up – a little judder when it stops at the top, hold it up there for a second or two and then like a piece of well-oiled machinery the arm goes slowly down again. ‘I’ll be the gate if you want,’ I joked to the head of security. He looked at me as if I was a nutcase.

  I wanted to talk to Richard about corporate sponsorship for my next show, but it never seemed the right moment, so this morning I wouldn’t let him into the car park until he gave me a straight answer! He said that Friends Provident did put some money into the local community but they’d already spent this year’s budget paying for a flower bed to be put in the middle of that new roundabout on the A24. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it might look odd spending the community sponsorship allocation on an employee.’ I said ‘I’m not an employee, I’ve just got a part-time job here to subsidize my theatre work, that’s all.’

  Because I am a mime artist, that’s what I do. Oh, here comes another car! Press the green button, gate goes up, a little nod and a smile, press the red button; gate goes down. ‘You’re the luckiest bloke I know,’ Richard said to me once. Well, he didn’t say that as he drove past this morning – he didn’t say anything – he was too busy talking on his mobile. Neal and Richard are renting a converted farmhouse out in the Dordogne this summer, swimming pool for the kids and everything. I think they knew we wouldn’t be able to afford it, so they didn’t embarrass me by inviting us along. Anyway I can’t commit to dates in the summer, I’m going to be touring the new show by then, probably. It’s just a question of plugging away for a bit until enough people get what you’re on about. But sitting in this box all day, you do sometimes wonder if anybody really cares. Richard and Neal stopped coming years ago. Even Carol didn’t come to my last production. Talk about walking into the wind. It seems that more people want to go and see the latest Julia Roberts movie than my mime about the African AIDS crisis – what does that say about our society? Oh they’ve got money if it’s for the pub or the curry house. But ask them to pay £7.50 for an evening of thought-provoking mime and they’ve already spent it on a chicken tikka masala. Actually, I could murder a chicken tikka masala right now. A couple of onion bhajis, pilau rice, lovely. Except I can’t really afford it. Bloody mime. It’s freezing inside this little box. I wonder if Richard could get me a job inside the main building.