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For Candice
It’s life’s illusions I recall
Joni Mitchell
Jack paused in the wings. He knew how to delay his entrance by just the critical number of seconds. He was calm. He was twenty-eight, but he was already a veteran, twelve years on stage, not counting a year and a half in the army. Timing was in the blood, think about it and you were lost.
He patted his bow tie, raised a hand to his mouth and politely cleared his throat, as if about to do no more than enter a room. He smoothed back his hair. Now that the house lights were down he could hear the gradually thickening murmur, like something coming to a boil.
It did not happen very often, but now it happened. The sudden giving way of his stomach, the panic, vertigo, revulsion. He did not have to do this thing: turn into someone else. It posed the paralysing question of who he was in the first place, and the answer was simple. He was nobody. Nobody.
And where was he? He was nowhere. He was on a flimsy structure built over swirling water. Normally he didn’t think about it. Now his own legs might have turned to useless struts of rusting iron, clamped in sand. Above all there was the concern that no one should see this, know that he suffered in this way.
No one ever would. In fifty years no one ever would.
He checked his flies for the fourth or fifth time, so that now it was a mere fingering of the air.
He needed someone to push him, to give the brutal shove in his back. Only one person could ever do it: his mother. No one would ever know this either. Every night, every time, still her unseen shove. He barely noticed it and barely thought to thank her.
Where was she tonight? As far as he knew, she was with a man called Carter, her second husband she called him, a garage owner in Croydon. And good luck to her. But it hadn’t stopped her giving him, all these years, her invisible push in the back. Sometimes even, he imagined, invisible again among the seats in the dark, her watching, approving eye.
That’s my Jack, that’s my brilliant boy.
A garage owner—called Carter. I ask you, folks, I ask you. There was a theatre in Croydon called The Grand. He had played there, pantomime. Buttons. Had she come, secretly, with Mr Carter—smelling of car engines and thinking: Bloody Cinderella? That’s my boy Jack.
Now he was a boy of twenty-eight and already an old stager, wearing like a second skin this black-and-white get-up that was the outdated rig of showmen, conmen, masqueraders everywhere. These days they were wearing jeans and leather jackets, and twanging guitars. Well, that had come too late for him. For him it was the cane and the boater and the tap shoes. ‘And now, folks—don’t scream too loudly, girls—it’s the sensational Rockabye Boys!’ As if he were their fucking uncle. But he had the looks (he knew it), the grin and the lock of hair—he swept it back again—that could flop forward and knock ’em dead (on and off stage, incidentally).
If he could just get on stage in the first place.
As for her ‘first husband’, there was a man who was truly nobody, truly nowhere: his father. But in between—and it had been a long in-between—she had gone on stage herself, what a cruel bastard business. Think about it and you were lost. And who did she have to push her?
No one must see this, no one must know. He could hear the rising murmur waiting to engulf him. He must breathe, breathe. ‘Don’t cry, Cinders.’ Now he had only himself to push himself, but how was he to do it? Cross the line, step over the edge.
• • •
Jack was compere that season (his second) and Ronnie and Evie had the first spot after the interval. It was thanks to Jack that they were in the show at all, and the first spot after the interval was a good one to have. When everything changed, fell apart that August they moved up to last spot of all, not counting Jack’s own end-of-show routine.
They’d moved by then up the billing too. People were coming specially to see them. The billboards even started to carry pasted-on fliers with such stuff as ‘Come and See with Your Own Eyes!’ Jack had said, ‘Who else’s eyes would it be then?’ But his quips weren’t so many by those days. His public quips continued. Have you heard the one about the garage owner’s wife? The show must go on.
‘You’re in Brighton, folks, so bloody well brighten up!’
It went on through to early September, and the public only saw the marvel of the thing, the talked-about thing. Then the show was over and the talked-about thing was no more than that, it could only ever exist in the memories of those who’d seen it, with their own eyes, in those few summer weeks. Then those memories would themselves fade. They might wonder anyway if they really had seen it.
Other things were over too. Ronnie and Evie, having had a remarkable debut, coming from nowhere to achieve summer fame and having secured for themselves, it would seem, future bookings, even a whole career, never appeared on stage again. Ronnie never appeared again at all.
According to Eddie Costello, one of the local ‘Arts and Entertainments’
