This Is Your Life (31 page)

‘Well, what can I say?' I stammered. ‘I feel a bit, you know, embarrassed.'

The mob laughed again. Billy put his hand up to silence them and they obeyed.

‘Embarrassed? Why would you feel embarrassed, Jimmy?'

The vicious bastard, he was going to make me go over it all; no detail spared in front of thousands of people.

‘Well, all this,' I said, gesturing to the set and the audience. ‘You know, and you suddenly being here,' and then I attempted an ironic philosophical laugh which came out as a wheezy semi-snort.

‘Bit of a shock, eh?' said Billy.

‘Er, yeah, you could say that. But can I just say, that whatever people think about it all, at the end of the day it's not like anyone got hurt, is it? I mean, there's no actual harm done.'

Still with his arm firmly around my shoulder, Billy nodded sagely and there was a slightly awkward round of applause, which was strangely encouraging. They were clearly prepared to give me a fair hearing.

‘Thank you, Jimmy. It's very kind of you to say so. No doubt there'll be the usual killjoys who'll say the whole faked death and funeral thing was somehow in bad taste or not politically correct or something, but I think they'd do well to
remember that this event is raising a great deal of money for charity, for
British
kids.' This prompted a knee-jerk round of applause, with a lone ‘Yeah!' being shouted out from the stalls. And then Billy punctured the tension by saying, ‘And anyway, how else was I supposed to put off paying that tax bill!' and there was a huge laugh and more applause. Billy hadn't realized I'd been talking about myself; he thought I was talking about what he had done. Typical, these celebrities; they're so self-centred.

I could almost touch the love glowing up from the faces below us now. I realized that Billy wasn't going to sour the mood by having it all out with me now on stage. Mr Family Viewing Light Entertainment wasn't going to provoke some bitter row on live television in which he'd be seen throwing accusations and bitterly raking over past events. That would come later in private. No, I discovered that first the bastard was going to make me really suffer. He was going drum home the difference between his total mastery of an audience and my desperate failure even to illicit one titter with his brilliant material. He was going to make me finish my set.

‘Anyway, Jimmy – I believe you were in the process of entertaining these good people before you were so rudely interrupted. So why don't I get off stage and let you finish your act?' Then he turned to the audience saying, ‘And I'll see you later to see who will be next to get the shock of their lives!' I attempted a half-protest at his suggestion but he was already skipping off and left me totally isolated in the middle of the stage once again. I saw his smile drop the moment he passed through the doorway to the wings, where he was handed a towel with which he wiped his brow.

Now I faced Billy's fans as a condemned man. All right, so they may not know my secret yet, but soon it would be out and
I'd be a national joke: the fantasist who had forged his fame.

‘Do you remember when Billy Scrivens came back from the dead?' they'd say to each other. ‘There was that supposed comic who'd got famous claiming they'd been old mates, and he managed to get on telly and everything but he was really crap and it turned out he was just some tragic wannabe . . .'

‘Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about him. Jimmy something – was it? God, what a sad act he was!'

This was the identity that awaited me as my fourteen and a half minutes of fame now drew to a close. Left onstage to perform the last rites on my fading life as a celebrity; compelled by its crown prince to finish digging my own grave in public. Having failed completely to communicate with this audience first time round, I was now forced to stay out there and face them alone once more. Only now they'd all been reminded what a real comic sounded like.

‘Er, right, where was I?' I shrugged, and surprisingly there was a ripple of laughter, I suppose more out of embarrassed empathy with my bizarre situation than anything else. I remembered that I'd been talking about computers when they had mysteriously started laughing at me – because, it now turned out, the late Billy Scrivens had been mugging right behind me in what must surely go down as the greatest bit of upstaging in the history of Western theatre. Gone was the beginning of my glittering career; this was now my swansong. I took the microphone from its stand, a shell-shocked and defeated figure. My fantasy was over, I was done for. I was no longer desperate for the love of the people in front of me. In fact, I felt a vague contempt for them. I had wanted this so much when I first walked out onto this stage what seemed like several hours ago. And now, I thought, I really couldn't give a flying fuck.

I grunted the first joke with a disinterested sneer, not even attempting to hide the fact that I didn't want to be there.. And they laughed. They really laughed at the comic conceit that had been served up before them. On paper I had not considered the joke to be any funnier than anything I'd said before, but it seemed that the way I'd delivered it had somehow amused Mistress Audience. I glanced round, half expecting to see Billy Scrivens tiptoeing out behind me – or even Princess Diana and Elvis Presley dancing the tango across the back of the stage. But there was only me. Still exuding the same miserable antipathy I reluctantly wheeled out the next joke and they laughed again. Now they seemed comfortable with me; surprised and amused that I dared to be this rude to them.

It occurred to me that first time out they must have been barely able to concentrate on a single word I was saying, knowing that Billy was going to creep up on me at any second. That might explain my earlier failure. Either that or I'd been a crap comic. But whatever the reason, now that the tension had been released, they were laughing at every joke, exploding every time I pressed the detonator. Some gags got more than I expected, others less than they deserved, but I was finding my balance. I was off and cycling away. I was being a successful stand-up comic.

I focused on maintaining this sneering, disinterested posture that seemed to have them hanging on my every word. Now when I knew that I had a good punchline coming I had the confidence to slow right down, to make them wait a second or two before I deigned to share it with them, holding back till exactly the right moment for maximum comic effect. Then ‘Bang!' and their delight was all the greater. I felt so in control; I could make the sea of eager faces still and silent on my
command or summon the waves of laughter to break upon the shore. I finished the set to enormous applause and as I took a small and humble bow I could hear increasing numbers of people shouting ‘More! More!' Not wanting to push my luck, I decided against performing Billy's planned encore. I wanted to freeze this moment for ever. I was safe out here on stage, I thought; they wouldn't dare hurt me in front of all these witnesses. It would only be when I walked back to the wings that the recriminations would start. Where once I'd been terrified by the prospect of going out onto the stage, now I was frightened at having to leave it. I gave the audience a final farewell wave before I stepped out of the lights and into the darkness. I had no defence I could muster, no mitigating circumstances I could possibly plead. I braced myself for whatever it was that Billy Scrivens was about to say to me.

‘Jimmy, me old mate!' he chuckled, ironically I presumed. ‘Sorry to do that to you, y'old bastard, but great TV, eh! You have to admit, bloody tip-top TV!' and he gave me a playful punch on the arm, clearly delighted with the way the evening was going. ‘When you ran to the door like that, Jimmy, brilliant, brought the bloody house down! You never dreamed, did you, not for a moment, you never imagined what was going to happen?'

‘Er, no. No, I didn't,' I stammered, regarding him suspiciously. He muttered contentedly to himself at being reassured of this.

‘Well, it's great to see you again, Jimmy, it really is. It's bloody boring being in hiding for twelve months I can tell you. You start to miss all your mates a bit. Know what I mean?'

I still was unsure what I should say. Was this another test? Was he providing another opportunity for me to incriminate myself further? On stage a band I half recognized were
playing their hit single and the lead singer shouted, ‘Sing along if you know the words . . .'

‘Um, yeah, well it's great to have you back, Billy,' I ventured. ‘And well done, you know, on pulling this off.'

He liked that. I could almost hear him purr with satisfaction.

‘You know, Jimmy, we never saw enough of each other before my little sabbatical. We should make sure we get together more often.'

‘Er, yeah. That would be, um, lovely.'

And I just stared at him and he smiled back at me and then looked out at the group on stage, happily tapping a foot in time to the music.

It was at this point that I realized that Billy Scrivens was completely mad. He was so totally self-obsessed that he couldn't remember who he knew and who he didn't. He literally didn't know who his friends were. All the anxiety I had expended about my deception was based on the presumption that Billy Scrivens was a sane person who would have noticed that we'd never properly met before. But the media said that I was an old friend of his, so he presumed it must be true. Were all his friendships so superficial that he couldn't remember who he'd spoken to and who he hadn't?

There had been no mention of all the material I had just done and I wondered if he'd even been listening.

‘Oh, and Jimmy – I definitely recognized half of those gags you just did.'

Shit! I thought. He had been listening. Here it comes.

‘Typical bloody writers, eh? Billy Scrivens drops dead and the first thing they think is: That means he won't be using that stuff we wrote for him. Let's see if we can flog it a second time; get Jimmy Conway on the phone!' and he slapped me on the back and gave a huge laugh.

‘Yeah, writers, coh!' I concurred. ‘Who needs 'em?'

‘We do, worst luck. Ha ha ha!'

It appeared that I had got away with it scot-free. My mind raced through all the possibilities, all the exits that needed to be covered, and from every angle it suddenly seemed I was in the clear. I had claimed to be a friend of a dead comic and even he had believed me. I had gone on stage as a proper comedian and after a fashion and for whatever reason got a fantastic response. OK, those weren't my jokes, but it transpired they weren't Billy's either. The writers had already been paid for them, so they weren't going to kick up a fuss if Britain's top comic had chosen to pass them on to a friend. I had got away with it, and what's more I'd been good. I had found my voice and been a proper entertainer, and just because I couldn't write the stuff, it didn't mean that I couldn't hire some writers to do it for me like Billy obviously did.

I had achieved everything I had ever wanted. I crept into the hospitality room where a collection of stunned celebrities were exchanging accounts of how it had felt to have a dead superstar come up and tap them on the shoulder while they were onstage. Each one was patiently waiting for the current speaker to stop talking before immediately launching into their own identical account of the same experience. I needed to go back to my dressing room to get my head together so I went to take a bottle of beer from a six pack of fancy Czech lager and then just picked up the whole pack.

It had been less than thirty minutes since I had left this little cocoon, but now I was completely transformed. I lay back on the sofa and drank the first beer straight back and then started on the second one. I was a proper comic. I had done it. I felt euphoric and dizzy and ten foot tall.

And then I remembered that just before I had gone on stage
my mobile phone had rung. Who on earth could have been ringing at such a time? I wondered as I took another swig of beer. I'd ring them back and ask them if they'd seen the show. I turned on the phone and saw that whoever it was had left a message. The voice on the recording was distant and distorted but still unmistakable, even if we hadn't spoken for weeks. It had been Nancy calling me from Seaford. She relayed her message in tears. Tamsin was pregnant.

19 Station Road,
Seaford,
Sussex

Dear Jimmy,

When you were thirteen years old you wrote a series of letters to your future self, sort of time-capsule telegrams to remind your adult incarnation of all the plans you had for your fame and fortune. You may remember that when you were reunited with these letters as a grown-up it seemed that life hadn't turned out quite as you had hoped. You felt a failure, and went to some fairly unconventional lengths to try to put that right. Well, I'm writing this letter to you after all that has happened. I think I'm now a lot older and wiser than I was two decades ago, or indeed twelve months ago. At last I know what it means to be a success.

It seems to me that the process of maturing is learning not to worry too much about what other people might think of you. As a teenager you are crippled by this overwhelming anxiety;
countless precious opportunities are not taken out of fear of embarrassment. It is not until you reach your thirties that you finally realize with a huge sigh of relief that you don't much care if a few people don't like you. What a liberating day that is, when someone asks you an unreasonable favour and you have the confidence to say no.

The problem is that evolution hasn't yet found a way of making this curve level out when a person has developed exactly the correct degree of concern for what others might think. Halfway through your life you get it about right, but the trajectory continues inexorably on the same path until you're a pensioner who simply couldn't give a toss. What else could explain Doreen Cutbush's once green, now grubby-grey gilet with its permanent doggy sheen, or the grumpy old man in the bread shop who, when asked if he'd like his loaf sliced for him, replies ‘Piss off!' One can be too unconcerned about what people think.