(2003) Overtaken (19 page)

‘That’s
mad. You don’t know all the world, they’re strangers. I bet if you had a
family you wouldn’t give your money away.’

‘I do
have a family. Parent, sister in
New Zealand
, cousins, hundreds of them, that I don’t ever see. They can look
after themselves. I’d rather sponsor the arts.’

‘I
can’t understand that but I suppose I’ll come and see your play since you ask
me. Will Florence be there?’

‘I’m
sure she will.’

‘I’ll
come then.’

As he
was about to get into the taxi, a police car turned into the end of my road and
slowly cruised past, both officers in the front seats staring hard at Sidney.
He turned to me, a look of panic in his eyes. ‘See, see! They’re still
following me!’ Then he shouted at the police car which was slowly and
deliberately turning around a few metres further on up my road, ‘I’m getting a
cab, look, I’m getting a fooking cab! Leave me alone!!!’

After
they’d gone Florence said, ‘What a nice man. I think his wife had good time
too; a pity she wanted to go home early with headache …’

Do you
remember when that ferry sank? I think it was called something like The Price
of Free Enterprise. (Was it really called that? It seems a bit metaphorical.)
Anyway they found that there were two male passengers that drowned who were
living complete double lives who had wives and kids and houses both in England
and Holland, plus there were two other men that drowned whose papers were
totally fake and they still have no idea who they were. So if you do a rough
calculation, on average every ferry has at least four men on it living secret
lives, men taking trips without explanation, who were vague about their
movements and who didn’t answer their mobile phones but always rang you back;
every plane had maybe two, every train three and every vehicle with me in it at
least one because I had not told Florence anything about the thing involving
Sidney. To myself I said I wanted to keep her uncontaminated by what I was
doing, figuring that she had been through too much already in her short life. I
might have meant it, though there was something about having a secret mission
that brought out the boy spy in me. Likewise there was no way to let Paula or
any of the other relatives in on what I was up to; they definitely wouldn’t
understand.

As I’ve
said there were many nights at the theatre from which I had got nothing at all,
yet I still had this strong feeling that if I just could find the right play
there would be something about the elemental, timeless nature of humans
performing in a darkened room for other humans that might begin to connect
Sidney with the empathy I hoped lay just below his skin. After all, that time
Siggi forgot her lines was a night at the theatre that was going to stay with
me for ever so it could happen.

However,
realising I needed specialist help in choosing the right play, after making a
few phone calls and telling
Florence
I was going to a conference on new developments in concrete, I took
the train down to
London
. Not
having taken an intercity train for years, I could see why people preferred to
drive. Okay, in first class on the train they did come round with a trolley
every five minutes offering you free stuff: sandwiches, booze, tortilla wraps,
naanwiches, but there was a guy down the other end of the carriage listening to
music on an MP3 player so loud it sounded as if his brains were being fried,
every five seconds some idiot would get a call on their phone and three times
the woman opposite me asked the trolley guy if he had a tomato but he didn’t.

Since
my unhappy year at college I had hardly visited London. My attitude to the
place was a kind of defensive ‘Who needs it?’ type of stance. We had said to
each other it was big and dirty and smelly, yet as I walked out from Euston
into the arid little park where packs of drug addicts scurried away from the
station in their stiff-legged, purposeful gait as if a commuter train had
recently got in from Junkietown I suddenly understood why people said they
liked the anonymity of the place. There was nobody in this gigantic city who
knew me, I could be whoever I chose to be — now all I needed to do was think of
somebody.

Walking
south across central London through the university district and then the hi-fi
and furniture shop district to my meeting, almost every road I tried to get
down was blocked either by unattended flimsy plastic barriers, abandoned
muddy, litter-filled trenches, stalled immobile cranes or roped-off mysterious
piles of gravel in the middle of the pavement: whoever was responsible for all
this disruption must have experienced a loss on the size of genocide to be
digging up London on such a scale.

In the
years since we had last met, on the day that Siggi had forgotten her lines,
things had gone very well for Laurence Djaboff and then they had gone very,
very badly. I’d followed his trajectory in the movie magazines that I read, the
usual story of being lured to Hollywood, then of slowly being stripped of every
precious principle and scruple and of being returned a broken and humiliated
man. Now he was back in London and looking to return to the theatre, which
wasn’t proving as easy as he’d hoped, having made far too many enemies in that
small introverted world.

We’d
arranged to meet in one of those members-only clubs that they have in
London
so people in the entertainment
business don’t have to have anything to do with the public. Like some of the
supermarkets I’d passed the club had its own beggar outside: sitting with his
knees drawn up under a dirty pink blanket, he pleaded with me, looking up from
the pavement with sad eyes, ‘Got any spare change, mate?’

‘No,’ I
said, ‘but I’m always looking for workers in my business. I could give you my
business number and guarantee you a good wage, maybe a place to stay, really
get you back on your feet.’

From
under his blanket came the James Bond theme rendered in tinny electronic tones;
he fumbled about trying to smother it.

‘Have
you got a mobile phone under there?’ I asked. ‘Just fuck off will you, mate?’
he said.

I
always offered beggars a job when they tried to tap me for cash — I’d never met
one yet who took me up on my offer. Inside, the club was like one of those
Escher prints, all narrow staircases that seemed to join up with each other so
that you were going down when you thought you were going up. I gave my name to
a slender French girl with a clipboard. Looking her up and down, I thought, My
girlfriend’s ten times better looking than you. After asking what my name was
four times she told me Laurence was in the Reading Room. Shouting Room would
have been a better name. The bar, all squeaky leather couches and hunting
prints, reminded me of the ancient souk in
Damascus
; everybody seemed to be trying to sell something to the person they
were with, frantically pulling ideas out of the air and yelling them at their
companions.

He was
sitting with a nearly finished drink in front of him. On this ordinary day
Laurence Djaboff was dressed in a one-piece olive-green cotton jumpsuit like a
tank commander might wear, thigh-high leather boots, a sleeveless untreated
woollen waistcoat that smelled like a hot camel and a brown suede baseball cap
worn backwards over his thinning grey hair.

After
we’d ordered more drinks from a waiter I said, ‘Your agent made it pretty hard
for me to meet you.’

‘Yes,
sorry about that,’ he replied, ‘but you know I’ve had a lot of nutters pursuing
me over the years. Presumably you’d be suspicious of an actor who came along
and said he wanted to build some houses. So some builder no matter how successful
wanting to finance a theatre tour…’

‘I
know,’ I answered, ‘but like I said to your agent, it will be in the nature of
a memorial.’

‘To
Siggi who used to be in my company?’

‘That’s
right.’

‘I do
remember her,’ said Laurence wistfully. ‘Terrific little actress, wouldn’t
sleep with me, she kept laughing on stage. Was that it? Was that why she left?’

‘No.
She forgot her lines and made some other ones up. In
Liverpool
.’

‘Right.
Ah, they go mad in so many ways: suddenly think they can’t act, get panic
attacks, develop obsessions with their thumbs … and she was killed in a car
crash?’

‘That’s
right.’

‘And
you want to sponsor some shows of mine? Anonymously?’

‘Yes,
anonymously. Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve recently made a lot of money, have always
been interested in the arts and you’re the only actor I know. I read in the
paper that you want to get back touring and thought I might be able to finance
your tour. I mean since you set fire to the Arts Council headquarters there’s
not going to be any government—’

‘Well,
I’d signed a seven-year contract with NBC at the time, didn’t think I was
coming back to this stinking country. I didn’t know they deported you from the
States for low ratings.’

‘Here’s
the thing,’ I said, aware that I’d suddenly started talking like a character in
a David Mamet play, ‘here’s the thing. What I want you to do is not put on one
of your own plays, though obviously they’re all great obviously. What I want
you to do is this, to think of the most amazing play you ever saw in your life,
the play that really changed you: I want you to stage that.’

As soon
as I got back from the bar with more drinks Laurence Djaboff, who’d been deep
in thought for many minutes, said, ‘I know what it is!’

‘Yes?’
I enquired eagerly, sitting forward in my armchair. ‘I doubt you will ever have
heard of it, an early Howard Brenton play by the name of Christie in Love. Now
you’re too young to be aware but there was a time in the late sixties and early
seventies when playwrights ruled the earth. Oh, it was the very heaven to be in
the theatre then. Arnold Wesker had his own shop where you could buy all manner
of Arnold Wesker products, and his chain of Chips with Everything restaurants.
Snoo Wilson had four chart-topping number ones and was on a special Christmas
Top of the Pops presented by Harold Pinter that was only eight minutes long and
spoken in an entirely made-up language.’

I was
pretty sure Laurence was making up all this stuff about the playwrights. We’d
done Chips with Everything at school for A level English and nobody had
mentioned the playwright owning a string of restaurants. Still, I didn’t want
to interrupt the flow.

‘Now,
it just happens at the moment to be the fashion in the theatre to revive plays
from that period. Audiences watch them now in a completely different way, of
course, for their strangeness. I imagine a lot of theatre-goers find early
Dusty Hughes as difficult to understand as Chaucer. Okay now, this Howard
Brenton play, I remember I went to see it at the Incendiary-Device Theatre that
used to be in Regent Street that only operated at lunchtimes; you could take
your sandwiches in and eat them while you watched a play. Anyway, everything
Howard Brenton has written before and since is complete shit but somehow in
that one play, Christie in Love …’

Up
until this point I had been sitting with a ridiculously dressed, mildly drunk
little man, but as Laurence Djaboff began to describe the play, in some way he
contrived to paint that autumn evening in late 1969 so vividly that it hung in
the wine-stained, shout-filled air in front of my leather armchair.

‘It was
performed in the round like a lot of stuff was then, the set was wonderfully
simple, a sort of pen about three metres by two and about a metre high made out
of chicken wire full almost to the brim with torn-up and twisted shreds of
newspapers. A claustrophobic atmosphere, very little space between the audience
and the chicken wire, just enough room for the actors to walk around.

‘As the
public filed in with the house lights still on there was already a policeman
digging with his spade into the newspaper like he was turning over a garden;
before the play began he’d covered every inch of the pen. On the crappy old
sound system over and over a tape broadcast details of Christie’s life and of
the women he had murdered. I’d bought a Dutch buckwheat pancake from a food
cooperative to eat and as I bit into it the policeman looked straight at me,
the house lights snapped off and he started to recite these filthy limericks:
sickening they were. You see what the set represented was the garden of 10
Rillington Place where Christie had murdered and buried all these women and I
remember at one point — it was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen — Christie
suddenly rose on a wire out of all the newspaper and he was wearing this
horrible crude paper-mâché mask; it seemed impossible for anybody to be under
all that paper, the policeman had walked and dug over every inch of it. It was
the most extraordinary piece of pure theatre.

‘It
turned my head over, that play, because in its own way it was revolutionary;
revolutionary for the time because part of the point of it was how terrible it
was to be a copper, to encounter such awfulness and this was at a time when
authority figures, coppers, soldiers, civil servants, were hated and despised
by anyone on the left; we couldn’t see them as human, we couldn’t imagine that
they had any feelings.’

‘Laurence,’
I said, ‘that sounds exactly what I want.’