(2003) Overtaken (9 page)

The
Aldis lamp clacked back: ‘S-h-e’s a r-a-n-d-y s-l-a-pp-e-r y-o-u c-a-n h-a-v-e
h-e-r.’

‘Wow,
Kelvin,’ said Siggi, standing back and taking in my new clothes. ‘You look like
a drug dealer.’

That
night I drove Siggi, the redhead and another girl from the drama school to a
studenty-type pub. They told me excitedly that they had put together their own
comedy group called the Hitler Sisters and that night they were putting on
their own one-hour show in a room above the pub. Their show was called Am
Misbebavin.

The
redhead said, ‘Those stiffs who teach us at the
Old
Vic
School
think our dream is a lifetime of
playing Titania or Cordelia in the theatre.’

‘If
we’re lucky!’ said the other one.

‘Or
third prostitute with weeping head wound in Casualty.’

‘Do you
know we’ve spent the last two weeks making puppets out of fag packets?’

‘I mean
what is that all about?’

‘They
should be teaching us stand-up comedy not bloody fencing.’

‘There’s
all these great comedy clubs opening now.’

‘And
there’s all these great women comedians coming along.’

‘Nelly
Shank, Beth Coil, Jenny LeBute, Mrs Patel—’

‘I
think she’s a man.’

‘Still,
it’s not a boy’s game any more.’

‘No
way!’

‘Yes
way!’

‘Party
on, dude!’

The
upstairs room of the pub where once earnest mechanics had studied The
Communist Manifesto had now become the Giggle Room. Seated at small round
tables, the audience were students and the young clerks who spent their days in
the insurance offices around the city and needed an easy laugh when they went
out for the night. I thought of all the great laughs we had on the sites and
felt sorry for them; I didn’t have to pay for it.

I stood
at the back leaning against the sweating wall. The lights dimmed and on to the
spotlit stage came the three drama students. The third girl sat at a
war-ravaged upright piano and while she played all three sang a song about
Tampax and periods. Then the redhead did a routine about periods and boyfriends
and Tampax, then Siggi sang a song about cakes and periods, then they performed
a sketch about a boyfriend buying Tampax for his girlfriend who was having PMT
because it was nearly her period, then there was another sketch about what a
wimp your boyfriend is when he has a cold, then there was another song about Mrs
Thatcher having her period, then Siggi read a poem about ‘The Disappeared’ of
the fascist junta in Argentina, then they finished with a song and dance
routine about Tampax.

Throughout
the show I experienced a rising sense of discomfort. Not because I was
disconcerted by the stuff they were doing: I wasn’t entirely sure whether it
was funny or not but I’d laughed along with everybody else. No, what had caused
me increasing trouble was Siggi.

From
the moment she had stepped on to the shabby stage I had not been able to take
my eyes off her. I’d always thought that phrase was just an expression that
didn’t mean anything, like stuff people said about ravens in pies and plucking
motes out of the eyes of Pharisees or whatever, but for me and for the rest of
the audience it was a literal truth, we could look only at her. The entire
crowd were joined in an unspoken conspiracy and the only ones who weren’t in on
it were the other two girls on the stage. Indeed if anything the other two got
more laughs than Siggi did and received more applause because we, the audience,
felt awfully sorry for them, so they must have thought that they were doing
better than she was and treated her with a certain patronising hauteur.

As the
applause died down, after they’d left the stage, I said to the young guy in the
overcoat tied with string who was promoting the show and who had been standing right
at the back twitching as promoters have always done throughout history, ‘Mate,
can you tell Siggi’

‘Which
one’s she again?’ he interrupted. ‘The one with the talent.’

‘Oh
yeah, her.’

‘Right,
well, can you tell her I can’t stay like I thought I could and I’m sorry I’ve
got to get back home because I’ve completely forgotten an important meeting
I’ve got early tomorrow morning.’ Then I left.

Driving
north along the empty motorways, I thought of how crystal clear this day had
been, how every detail sparkled and glinted and was fixed in my memory for
ever. If I’d had to, I knew that in six years’ time I would be able to tell
some detectives which shelf the parmesan cheese had been on in the student
girl’s fridge, how many buttons were missing from Siggi’s blue coat and what
the soup of the day was in a cafe two doors down from the pub where the comedy
show had been. A few years later Sage Pasquale won a competition in the
Manchester Evening News for tickets to a special advance screening of Kenneth
Branagh’s Frankenstein; the little redhead had a small part in it playing a
crone and funnily enough up there on the big screen her thumbs did seem to be
too broad.

Just
like me, Siggi didn’t finish her college course but in Siggi’s case it was a
sign of success not failure. All the shows at drama school she’d been in during
the preceding eighteen months, there’d been an agent or a casting director in the
audience looking her over. She told me later they were usually middle-aged
women who travelled in twos, the agent and a sidekick. They’d take her out for
coffee or a drink afterwards, adeptly shaking off the other drama school girls
who tried desperately to tagalong.

Siggi
listened calmly to the plans they laid out for her, the exciting opportunities
in theatre and TV that awaited, but it was only when Laurence Djaboff came that
she got excited. Laurence Djaboff, founder of the famous Laurence Djaboff theatre
group, for whom she willingly abandoned her graduation show. He offered her the
leading role opposite him in his new piece, Hard Wee Man, the play he’d written
about his childhood in
Aberdeen
’s
notorious
South East End
, as
the son of the only Orthodox rabbi in the
Highlands
.

Suddenly
interested in her again, the whole gang, apart from me, booked to see the play
on its opening night when it came to
Liverpool
’s Everyman Theatre. Apart from the odd phone call and a few brief
meetings none of the others had seen much of Siggi in the last three years.
They all said they were very excited that they knew someone who was starring in
a play.

‘Hi,
it’s Siggi, do you wanna meet for a drink?’

I was
extremely surprised to get a call from her on my brand-new carphone. ‘Er …
sure. Welcome back to
Liverpool
by the way,’ I said.

‘Yeah,
right, come to the rehearsal rooms. Oh, and bring a sports bag with, like,
running stuff in it, trainers and shorts.’

‘Why,
are we going for a run?’

‘No,’
she said like I was daft.

I got
to the dance studio where the Laurence Djaboff Company were rehearsing Hard Wee
Man half an hour early and watched through a glass panel set in the wall as they
soundlessly went through their play like underwater performing fish. Even
through a plate of greasy glass the raw power of Laurence Djaboff burned like
the heat off a pizza oven. At that time he was at his peak, thirty-five years
old, a good ten years more than the majority of his troupe apart from one old
bloke who must have been in his seventies. Laurence was a compact bundle of
windmilling energy dressed in a sharp-looking Hugo Boss suit, cream silk shirt
and highly polished American Florsheim Oxfords.

Right
on
one o’clock
the action
stopped and the actors and actresses began to file out of the studio. I edged
past them, smiling in a vague way and went inside; only Siggi and Laurence
Djaboff remained.

I’d had
thirty minutes to adjust to the change in her appearance. In later life people
would come and go in my life and would mutate while outside my gaze, but since
I saw my friends more or less every day we were changing in ways that were
imperceptible to each of us. Siggi was the first person I was close to who had
dropped out of my sight for a lengthy period. I was shocked by the fact that she
was the same but different: it was sort of like watching Terminator 2 — the
cast were more or less the same as the original film but older, glossier and
with more muscles.

‘Let me
introduce you to Laurence,’ she said. While me and Siggi had been saying hello
to each other the great actor had been changing out —of the Hugo Boss suit
which was his character’s costume and into his own clothes. Out of the corner
of my eye I’d watched as he’d put on baggy harem pants in striped moiré silk,
blue suede pixie boots, a blue linen collarless peasant blouse over which he
put a brown leather Sam Browne belt with a suede purse where an army officer
would have worn his revolver; on top of all this he wrapped a brown mohair
cloak and on his head he put a black woollen astrakhan hat which he arranged in
one of the floor-length mirrors at a precise tilted angle.

‘Laurence,
this is my friend Kelvin.’

‘Hi,’
said Laurence Djaboff. ‘Is this the guy you’re going for a run with?’

‘That’s
right.’

He
turned to me. ‘I’ve told her I want her to go for a run to prepare for the show
tonight. I’ve sent two of the others to a cemetery, Miles [the
seventy-year-old] has got to have sex with a sailor and my female co-star I’ve
sent to the bus station to dance for money. I myself am off to see if I can get
into a fight at the airport.’

‘That
shouldn’t be too difficult,’ I said.

‘Would
you like a fight?’ said the actor suddenly, in a reasonable, friendly manner.
‘Would you like to go to the airport with me to have a fight? I’ll pay for the
taxi.’

I said,
‘That’s very kind of you but no, I have to go for a run with Siggi.’

‘Are
you sure?’

‘Yes,
pretty sure.’

‘Yes,
of course. Well, please yourself.’ And with a flick of his cloak he left.

As we
slipped into the Victorian pub across from the theatre Siggi said, ‘Mad cunt
that he is.’

We sat
in one of the side rooms, afternoon light ricocheting off the bevelled glass
as I went to get us both drinks. When I returned and sat down she said, ‘I
can’t remember it.’

I said,
‘What?’

‘The
play, I can’t remember my lines in the play.’

 ‘But
haven’t you’ve been touring all over the country, performing night after
night?’

‘Yeah
… well, mostly,’ she said. ‘Well, always. I do remember my lines but I’m
becoming terrified that at some point I won’t, that I’ll be standing there one
night not knowing what to say.’

‘But
why would that happen? I bet you’re really good at remembering your lines.
You’re really talented.’

‘See,
yeah,’ she said, becoming nervously animated, ‘that’s the problem, how talented
I am.’

‘How
can you being talented be a problem?’ I asked. ‘I’m supposed to be so fucking
great, aren’t I? There’s been all these women casting directors coming down
with their witchy wizened little sidekicks saying I’m going to do this or I’m
going to be that, but then I started thinking that, well, okay, but it’s basic
to be. able to remember your lines or stand up or not be sick on the stage and
if I couldn’t do any of those things then I was no better than the crappest
actress.’

‘But
why should you be sick on stage or forget your lines?’

‘I
don’t know, but what if I did?’

‘That’s
crazy; it’s like worrying if you’re going to be gored by a bull on stage or if
your shoes will catch fire.’

Sweat
burst on to her forehead and her eyes grew big. ‘Has that happened?’ she
squeaked.

Siggi
had five more double gin and tonics before going back to the Everyman. I
suggested drinking so much might not be a good idea before performing a play
but she said in that case I didn’t know anything about the theatre. After
lunch, feeling really quite drunk myself, I rang Loyd and asked if it was too
late to get a ticket for the play that night.

 ‘I
thought you said you didn’t wanna see the play?’ Loyd said suspiciously.

‘I
don’t remember saying that,’ I replied. ‘I just thought I’d be busy at a meeting
but as it turns out I’m free to see Siggi in her play.’

On the
opening night of Hard Wee Man in her home town, Siggi, with the whole gang
watching, didn’t exactly forget her lines, instead she made up some different
ones. I can’t remember any of what she said now but it was great dialogue, real
poetry, majestic, fluid, vivid, and her performance was one of luminous,
twitchy energy; the audience’s eyes followed her about as if she were a tennis
ball: it’s just that none of the others in the cast knew what to say in reply.

After
the interval Laurence Djaboff came on stage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as
you can see one of our cast has been having problems so I am afraid tonight’s
performance is cancelled. If you wish …’