This Is Your Life (35 page)

Around the room I was flattered to see a few people nodding.

‘He always, and I mean always, uses the correct word for irregular plurals.'

I double-took slightly from the stage, as she continued.

‘You'd never hear Jimmy uttering such hideous modern abominations like curriculums, stadiums or stimuluses – with Jimmy it's curricula, stadia, stimuli every time.'

I did my best to look moved by the warmth of this tribute as I thought about the winter's night when she had got me up at four in the morning because her waterpipe had burst and I had scrambled around in the snow outside her house trying to find the metal flap to turn off the mains supply.

‘Radii, alumni, memoranda – what can I say? He's the sort of man who would never say one criteria when he means one criterion. I've always maintained that credit should be given where it is deserved, so there you are.' And with that she stepped down again with the dogs under her arms glancing around as if to say, ‘What? What else was there?'

There was a slightly embarrassed pause, punctured by a heckle from Dave.

‘Just as long as he never bloody says two cappuccini again.'

‘Thank you very much, Doreen,' I said, ‘for making the effort to come up onto the rostrums.' Nancy then introduced a slide show of photos from the past. There were pictures of us all from ten years ago where our innocent young faces smiled at the camera oblivious to our appalling sense of fashion. Pictures of a day trip to Dieppe, scenes from parties or picnics or just friends squashing into photo booths. Near the end there was one of Nancy and me in our early twenties sitting on the beach and kissing.

Not everyone stood up and gave a speech. Norman just said that I was ‘a good bloke and that' but then added that he wasn't very good at talking in front of people. He said, however, that he would like to pay tribute to me in another language, ‘a more, like, universal language, the language of music'. And we all thought, Oh no, he's not, is he? He's not
going to finally perform air guitar for us all here and now, is he? However much we had quizzed him about his accomplishments in this unconventional field, none of us had ever been treated to a display.

‘This is for you, Jimmy,' he said, and then Panda cued the music and Norman struck a deadly serious pose, fell to his knees and started pretending that he was playing. The moment had come for him to share with us all the joy that was air guitar.

You'd think if you were introducing a group of friends to an unconventional art form that you might try to lead them gently by giving them a brief and accessible taster. If someone had never heard an opera, you wouldn't introduce them to the form by forcing them to sit through the whole of Wagner's Ring Cycle. So what did Norman choose to mime for us? One of the shorter, more popular Beatles tracks maybe? Or a brief snippet of Rodriguez's guitar concerto number 2 perchance? No, for this crowd of air guitar virgins, Norman had selected the Everest of mimed guitar solos:
Freebird
by Lynyrd Skynyrd. All thirteen head-banging minutes of it.

It's quite hard to know what to do when a fully grown man is leaping around in front of you pretending he is playing a rock classic on an imaginary electric string instrument. Some onlookers tried to move their heads from side to side in a jaunty wish-I-could-sing-along-but-don't-know-the-words kind of way. A couple of people attempted to clap in time but this was not picked up by anyone else so they sheepishly stopped again, as if they'd never meant to clap for more than twenty seconds or so anyway. Most of us adopted that benign appreciative fixed smile as worn by Western tourists incomprehensibly watching an intricate dance in the Indian subcontinent. As it happens, he looked as if he was probably
pretty good at it. His fingers gave the impression that they were playing the chords that were intended; he strummed and spun and rocked like the real thing. But at the end of the day it was, you know, well, it was air guitar.

The piece took nearly a quarter of an hour to perform but it only felt like twice that. Exhausted and emotionally drained from his athletic and frankly sweaty performance, Norman finally took a bow to an explosion of applause and cheers and whistling. Chris shouted for more, except it came out as ‘More-ow!' because someone kicked him under the table to shut him up. As the applause died down, Norman staggered to the bar to get himself another gallon of cider, while Nancy took the stage once more. ‘Thank you very much, and Norman will be concluding his tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd later on this evening by miming a plane crashing into the side of a mountain.'

Nancy had clearly planned out the whole evening but now one or two of the non-speaking onlookers wondered if they might add a spontaneous word or two.

‘I was once in a car with Jimmy and we were stuck in a traffic jam and he let two cars out instead of just one.'

‘He always follows the country code and closes gates to prevent livestock escaping.'

I wondered if we might be starting to scrape the barrel a bit now. Next I'd be credited with always putting the lid back on the toothpaste, I thought, until I remembered that actually I didn't. Nancy realized the show was coming to an end and stepped in to round things off.

‘Jimmy, you explained to me that you made up all that rubbish about being famous because you so wanted to be a success. Well, before you finally leave us all for sunnier climes, your friends and colleagues wanted to reassure you that you
always were a great success. I know it was always your dream to appear on
This Is Your Life
, and, OK, maybe now you'll never get to be on the real thing. But you're the biggest star around, Jimmy. So it gives me great pleasure to say to you at last, Jimmy Conway,
This Is
Your
Life
!'

And her emphasis made me realize where I belonged. Standing on that little stage in the back room of an ordinary pub in a nowhere town I felt at ease with myself, so much surer of who I was and where I fitted in than I had done on the huge stage with pretend friends like Billy Scrivens. My real friends were more sincere because they were cynical, more flattering because they could be rude, richer because they were poorer. Nancy passed me the big red book as Norman cued in the signature tune once more and everyone gathered around to laugh at the photos and point out the little mementoes they had done for me. Norman rolled a joint and Panda tried not to wince as he failed to pass it to the left.

We carried on drinking into the evening and then food was served for everyone. And this was a proper meal, not stupid fancy nibbles that leave you starving. Betty went from table to table, doing her very hardest stare at whoever happened to be eating, failing to use her psychic powers to convey the inspired idea that they should give all their food to her immediately. Everyone commented on how sweet she was as she mournfully rested her head on the laps of various diners. Then their legs started to feel damp and they realized she was drooling all over them.

I went round the room talking to people I hadn't seen for ages, and laughed and joked among friends with whom I had so much to catch up. And now that we were all relaxed, they asked me what it had been like to meet all those famous people and be on telly and perform on stage and be in an advert. I
gave them the honest answer that there had been moments when it had been thrilling and terrifying, but throughout it all there had been an anxious empty feeling inside me that had never gone away. Until now, I thought: I never felt so much like a celebrity as I did that evening. Everyone was on a high because we knew we'd had a really special night and what was more we'd done it ourselves. Even Tamsin couldn't help but smile. I made sure I had a chat with her on her own in the corner and this time I was going to report every word of it to her mother.

When the evening was over we walked slightly drunkenly along the seafront, laughing about the night that had just been.

‘You can't say we didn't give you a good send-off, Jimmy,' said Dave.

‘Er, yeah, about that,' I said awkwardly. ‘Do you know, walking along the seafront with you here now, I'm not so sure that I want to go.'

‘What!'

‘Well, after how sad everyone said they'd be to see me leave, it sort of makes me feel like staying now.'

‘Really?' said Nancy, seeming pleased.

‘What – after Nancy went to all that bloody effort?' objected Dave.

‘That's fantastic, Jimmy,' interjected Nancy. ‘Would you just come back to working at the language school then?'

‘Well, for the time being, I suppose. Tamsin once said she wished I was her teacher. It made me wonder what it would be like to teach kids who actually understood what I was saying to them.'

‘You'd be brilliant, Jimmy, I know you would.'

Chris seemed confused by this and said, ‘I reckon you
ought to make a go of this stand-up comedy lark, Jimmy. That seemed to be going pretty well for you.' And then he added ‘What? Why's everyone stopped walking? Why are you all staring at me like that?'

Eventually each of them peeled off the group and weaved their way up their various streets until it was just Nancy and me walking along the seafront. We left the promenade and crunched our way across the shingle and sat down. I let Betty off the lead so she could run off down to the shore and bite the sea. Twelve years I had lived on the coast and I was still surprised every time I discovered that the waves carried on dutifully crashing on the shore at night-time as well as during the day.

‘Nancy, I don't know how to thank you. All that trouble to say goodbye, and now I'm saying hello again.'

‘Yeah, well, it worked then, didn't it?' she said with a smile.

‘Suddenly it feels like everything in the world is perfect,' I said tactlessly and her face fell. ‘Sorry, that was stupid of me.'

We sat in silence for a minute.

‘Nancy, I spoke to Tamsin before she went off with Kelvin tonight.'

‘The father of my grandchild, God help us . . .'

‘Yeah, well, I chatted about that with her this evening.'

‘I know, I saw you; why, what did she say?'

‘Well, she talked about herself and how awful it was but how she had no moral choice except to go through with it. But there was something about the way she was relishing the drama of it all that made me suddenly wonder if . . . well, you know . . .'

‘No, I don't know, tell me!'

‘Well, I wondered if she was making the whole thing up.'

Nancy looked completely astonished at this suggestion and
yet I saw that it prompted a glimmer of hope in her face.

‘What, pretending to be pregnant? Why on earth should she do that?'

‘To exercise some sort of power over her mother. To make people talk about her.'

‘That's a pretty massive lie to tell just to get a bit of attention.'

‘Not the biggest though – remember you're talking to the expert here. And that's what I'm trying to say. I recognized the syndrome. I think it's just desperate attention-seeking; it's not that different to what I did or even what Billy Scrivens did.'

‘You didn't ask her outright, did you?'

‘Of course I didn't. I was just a sympathetic ear. I asked her about the morning sickness and she said it was awful. I asked her if she'd felt more tired than usual and she said she did. I asked her if her tongue felt larger than normal at the end of the day because of course that's always the first sign, and she said, oh yeah, that's definitely the worst thing about being pregnant, the terrible tongue-swelling . . .'

‘Hmmm,' said Nancy. She lay back on the shingle and stared at the stars. ‘Do you know, now I think about it, she wouldn't let me see the test. She wouldn't let me take her to the doctor and then last week for the first time ever she did her own laundry. My God, I think you're right. I think you're probably right. How could she do that to me? She's a bloody headcase!'

‘But that's better than a pregnant headcase!'

Nancy laughed and burst into tears at the same time. ‘Oh Jimmy!' And then in her delirious state she kissed me full on the lips and hugged me tight.

And then we kissed again, more gently this time and now
without any pretend excuse. With the moon reflecting on the water and the waves lapping on the beach it could not have been more romantic and perfect. Perhaps the only tiny detail I would have changed was not to have Betty bringing us a dead half-rotted seagull she found on the beach . . . but maybe I'm being picky.

‘Thanks for organizing this evening,' I said. ‘It was the best birthday I've ever had.'

‘The things a girl has to do to make a man see she's interested in him!'

I realized that I'd got it into my head that nobody would be interested in me until I became somebody special, but I didn't want to go over all that again.

We kissed some more and Nancy said, ‘I thought we were supposed to be just friends.'

‘We are. I'm a
boy
, who is your
friend
. A sort of “boyfriend”, if you will.'

‘And I'm a
friend
who is a
girl
. . . there must be a word we can find for that. Look, are you really sure you want a woman with a screwed up teenage daughter in tow?'

‘Oh Tamsin's all right. She's pretty balanced compared to some of the kids I've taught at the language school. I really think that together we could help her find herself. She'll pass through this phase soon enough, you watch. And then think of the money we'll make with all that scrap metal.'

We kissed again and then just sat there watching Betty running excitedly in and out of the breaking waves.

A couple of weeks later Tamsin came back from walking the dog and actually brought us both a cup of tea in bed.

‘How disgusting!' she said.

‘I'm sorry, Tamsin. Would you rather I slept in the spare room?' I said.