The Thompson Gunner (15 page)

I'd like to say that I was in control, rational, and that it wasn't so much about him. I chose sex over cigarettes, and
because I couldn't find a kickboxing class. But there were hours when we were together and I wasn't sad. I don't think I was sad at all.

His writing in the note was at different angles. The paper had moved. He'd paused, and looked at me asleep there, and known what he was doing. He'd given it thought, and still it was such a lazy crappy effort.

After a shower I can convince myself my eyes are less puffy. I can't make a decision about what to wear though, and my suitcase is half-empty before I settle on my ‘Alby Mangels – Ladies Man ‘88' T-shirt and my favourite black Dogstar pants, which always make my thighs look great (athletic, yes, but not Tour de France). The seven-twenty minibus is about to leave when I get down to the foyer.

I sit across the aisle from the two other passengers, and the nearer one says ‘I'm Niall' in an Irish accent, but from the south. ‘And this is Ken.'

The driver slams the door shut and the minibus goes dark.

‘I'm Meg,' I tell them, and Niall reaches out to shake my hand and then Ken does too. ‘Are you both on the program tonight?'

‘Niall is,' Ken says. He's facing me, but the bright foyer lights silhouette him and all I can see is the shaggy outline of his hair. ‘I don't start till tomorrow, but they tell me there'll be free beer backstage, and that's enough for me. Besides, we've only got two nights in Perth before we move on to Sydney, so we've got to fit in as much hospitality as we can.'

His accent is different, less of a lilt, harder on the vowels.
The minibus jerks away from the kerb and into the traffic. We cross King Street and pass the bright lights outside the theatre.

‘And where are you from, Meg?' he says. ‘Somewhere in Australia other than Perth I'd be guessing, if you're staying in the hotel.'

‘Yeah, Brisbane. And you're from Belfast? Or somewhere near Belfast?'

‘I am. How did you know that?'

‘I spent the first eight or nine years of my life on the Ards Peninsula. We left in 1972.'

‘And why wouldn't you if you had the chance?' he says. ‘We'd be about the same age, you know. Funny that we'd meet in Perth. 1972? Yeah, I was eight then as well. We should have a beer or two tonight, when you're done.' The minibus turns a corner and he grabs the window frame for balance. ‘I've got a big brother who got caught up in a lot of stuff that year. He was an angry bastard then. I used to run some of his messages.' He stops himself, and smiles. ‘But I was from Ardoyne. I guess you and I would be as likely to meet in Perth as anywhere.'

We're stopped at some traffic lights, waiting to turn, and the headlights of the oncoming cars come in through the windscreen and I see Ken properly for the first time. He shrugs and smiles. His hair is greying at the temples in an attractive sort of way, his teeth are uneven. He's holding a packet of cigarettes and pulling one of them in and out.

It's a knowing kind of smile that he's giving me, and
I nod and say ‘I guess' and I can feel myself smiling too, in the same way he did.

‘Well I'm from Cork,' Niall says, ‘so don't mind me.'

Ken laughs, puts the cigarette in his mouth and takes it out again. ‘Am I right in thinking they don't want us to smoke in the bus? It's not made easy for smokers in this country.'

I tell him we'll be there soon, a couple of minutes.

He's from Ardoyne. He ran messages for the IRA. He knows where I'm from too. We wouldn't have met.

We take a right turn and, as the minibus goes dark, my eyes are on his hands which are fidgeting with his cigarette. He's still got the smile. He says he could kill for a beer.

We turn left past the train station, then left again. We're at the Watershed already. A volunteer meets us and takes us in through the back entrance. Ken lights up, and offers his cigarettes around.

‘You did well coming here,' he says to me as he puts the packet back in his pocket. ‘The heat's something, though. Is Brisbane like this?'

The green room is crowded with T-shirted volunteers, comedians and several people I can't account for. There's food on a long table and beer in plastic tubs.

‘Ah, we're in business,' Niall says. ‘What are your thoughts, Kenneth? Domestic or imported?'

They set off to plunder, and in seconds they're elbow-deep in ice and talking through their options. I pick up a paper plate and put a couple of strawberries on it. Felicity comes in the other door, her mobile phone clenched in her hand. She sees me, and mimes a big sigh of relief.

Her
first words to me are ‘I'm so tense' and they come out as though they're under pressure. But she's excited too, excited at the prospect of the festival finally starting and the sell-out crowd we'll have tonight.

Once they see us talking, a couple of volunteers come over and ask about TV, and how I got started. They want to talk about how it works, and about stand-up, and about how it isn't easy to get a break in Perth. They get me to sign their T-shirts. A cluster of people forms around us, and it's like doing the show early – six, seven faces turned my way and waiting for the next funny line, demanding the next funny line. ‘You're hilarious,' one of them says, though I'm frankly closer to heartbroken, my head full of more wreckage than the McKendrys' field. Murray, Rob Castle, that poor dying girl this afternoon, Ken and his IRA messages. I'm pushing it away, all of it, just to get the job done.

Felicity interrupts and says, ‘There's a sound check to do. I've got to take Meg to do a sound check before we let the audience in.'

‘Oh, I was supposed to do that,' one of the volunteers says, still trying to make out the scrawl that I've put on her T-shirt. ‘I didn't know that was now.'

I get my first real sense of the venue when Felicity takes me outside. Its walls are temporary and it has no roof. It's built over a pond at the entrance to the art gallery. There's water and light and scaffolding, and it's a clear starry night. Beyond the screens, I can hear people talking, a crowd forming. Sound feels different here when I test the mike, but I know it's going to work. It's going to be fine.

We don't rush back inside.

Felicity
says, ‘Do you ever get sick of that? All the same questions, all the questions about TV?'

Her phone rings. She looks at the number and says it's only Adam. I leave her to take the call, pointing out that it'd be preferable not to refer to him as Only Adam when she answers. She gives a laugh, puts her finger in her left ear – where it now seems to spend half its time – and as she turns her back I hear her saying ‘Hello again'.

The first two acts have ten minutes each, then I have twenty. I could be out there in not much more than half an hour. I sneak out the back way, around the side of the building, as the gates open. This is exactly the time when, years ago, I would have been setting off for a walk with my packet of cigarettes in one hand and my beer in the other, collecting my thoughts, wandering around murmuring my routine to myself, getting the feel of it back, putting the punchlines in place.

It was the morning cigarettes and the ugly binges that made me give it away. I still liked the pre-show solo cigarettes all the way to the end. They came with a sense of anticipation. They marked the last minutes of calm when I had nothing to do but blow blue smoke up at a dark sky before stepping into the light in front of hundreds of people.

For a while after giving up, I'd still head out patting my pockets, my hands looking for the packet and at best finding sugarless gum instead. Now a work night involves none of the cigarettes and half the beers. I'm older and wiser and that affects most things, though probably not enough.

The first act starts. I can hear an announcement over on the other side of the building, and applause. It's a big crowd all right, a big noisy crowd, and the thought occurs to me that I wouldn't give this up for anything. That's one of those things people say in an offhand way, but it looks like I've gone and done it. I've put it to the test and here's where I am, about to go on stage again.

Thank
you. Start with thank you. And it's great to be back in Perth. And great to be here at the Watershed helping kick this comedy festival off. Actually, the first time I did a big event in Perth it was a debate a few years ago and it was broadcast on ABC TV. . . thought I should go a bit glam . . . turned up with a dress that needed a strapless bra. And had I thought that through? No, of course I hadn't. And at the ABC they don't have much money, but they're great at improvising. So the make-up person found a roll of ABC tape – white with blue logos – and taped me into the best cleavage I've ever had. I felt like a fighter pilot being buckled into her seat, but trust me it cleaved like nothing you've ever seen. And, since I hadn't thought through the dress, I really wanted to think through the tape. She told me no way would it come unstuck under the studio lights when it warmed up, no way would the lights make it visible through the dress. She was full of guarantees . . . then on to the after party, dancing in a club, UV light, the tape fluoresces through the dress, with ABC logos showing prominently around my breasts. And, of course, no one tells me for ages.

. . . and on we go from there. And nice work too, making all those bold assertions to Felicity about female comedians
doing more than ‘chick stuff, and then opening with a story about a frock and my breasts. But it's there as a Perth story, and after that I think I can get through without relying on gender-specific body parts, or garments, and without a single brand name being dropped.

The second act's started. I'm ready.

Later, hours later, while the band was playing and the comedians were cleaning up the food – but particularly the beer – Felicity put her phone away and drank too much and I did too. Not a stupid amount too much, but more than I'd meant to. And I caught a cab back to the hotel, leaving the others to finish the green-room stocks before roaming the town for the next drink.

I'm sitting on my bed with the lights off, CNN on low volume. I'm on my third glass of water. It's not that late.

With the doors shut it wasn't difficult in the green room to talk over the band, but it was cooler outside so we spilled out onto a balcony where the music was louder. But it didn't matter. Bands are there to make noise, and they weren't bad at all. A breeze came in from the west and I looked up to see some clouds blowing in across the stars.

I told Felicity about the last time I'd played in Perth, at a festival a couple of years ago, when one of the acts was the famous throat singers from Kazakhstan. She said she'd seen a show of mine that time but missed theirs, so I did my best to demonstrate and beer churned up from my stomach and fizzed into my nasal passages. Just at the wrong moment for Felicity, who had taken a mouthful of beer herself and reversed it out her nose too.

So
we leaned over the railing, both of us dealing with the great discomfort of beer travelling backwards.

‘The famous stomach singers from Australia,' I said to her. ‘You've heard of them?'

And I noticed how much she seemed to have changed from the person who met me at the airport, though perhaps I was seeing only a change in circumstances. Here she was, beer in her hands and dripping off the end of her nose as she leaned out over the garden bed, laughing and spluttering. I asked her about the jacket she'd worn the night I arrived and she told me it was her mother's. They'd talked, though Felicity hadn't wanted to, and her mother had insisted that I would expect a jacket.

‘Speak in your accent,' she said then. ‘The one you had when you were eight.' So I did, and she said, ‘That is so cool.' She found a tissue in her pocket, or a serviette from the buffet, and she wiped her nose. ‘You get asked the Irish question a lot,' she said. ‘The one about Irish people being writers and storytellers and comedians. You don't seem to like it much sometimes.'

I told her I was supposed to hide that. It wasn't a question that should surprise me, and I'm supposed to have an answer ready to go.

‘The problem is that people get all kinds of views in their heads,' I said, knowing she'd just asked the Irish question no one else had. ‘And I'm too in-between to deal with them. I'm from there and I'm from here as well, so I don't know.
I don't know what influences what really, and it's not my job to bother too much about that. I'm just sick of people who have these simplistic views about the place when they've hardly got any connection to it. They've hardly spent any time there. Which'd be me, obviously. But I'm clearly talking about the other people.'

I felt like a tired drunk digging a clumsy hole through their own argument at that point, but it didn't stop me pushing on. I told her I'd had enough of the romanticising that goes on around the tale of the downtrodden Celt. And all that crap about craic and the funny instruments and, really, why the fuck can't they move their arms when they dance? And all those stories about being dirt poor in Limerick where it was rainy every day and, to be sure, we had to lick the moss off the very stones for sustenance, and then we went on to worthy achievement in the New World, now a major motion picture.

She asked me if I'd actually read
Angela's Ashes
, and I asked her if she'd let me be a hypocrite in peace. I hadn't read it, as such, but I had seen the trailer for the movie. And she couldn't deny there was an awful lot of rain in that trailer.

I tried to rise above the wreckage of my case – or tried to do something but I'm not really sure what – by saying, ‘Anyway, the whole notion of the “the Irish” or “the Celts” isn't as straightforward as people think. There's centuries of migration.'

And Felicity said, ‘Yeah, I heard Colm Toibin talk about that. You know, the Irish novelist? He was here for the
Writers' Festival once. His name's French, I think. Maybe Huguenot.'