Rant Page 3

  I spot a garage and decide to pull over and find some fuel. And some kind of burn cream if they sell it; my face feels tight as a drum after my earlier fiasco. Getting to the garage involves swerving across three lanes of fast moving, honking, irate traffic (where are all these bastards going at four in the morning? Surely they can’t all be fugitives – unless they’re fleeing Birmingham, of course), but this is as nothing to an international man of mystery like my good self.

  Still shaking from the several near misses (do the back of your knees sweat when you’re scared?), I fill up the petrol tank and go in to pay. The guy behind the counter looks at me with open interest as I pay for the petrol, three pasties, two tins of travel sweets (Old-Fashioned flavour, whatever that is) and three tubes of Soothing Ointment – Good for Haemorrhoids. (You never know, I may be driving for some time yet.)

  As he rattles noisily in the till he asks, ‘What happened to yorr oibraws then, mayte?’

  I desperately try not to think of the Brummie pig from the Pipkins puppet show as I squint into the darkened window at my reflection and see that most of my eyebrows have in fact disappeared. The fire. I rack my brains trying to think of a plausible explanation and the only one that pops out is:

  ‘Canther. I have canther. Had. Cancer.’

  ‘Bloody ’ell, cancer ov thee oibraws? Oi’ve never ’urd ov that, loik.’

  ‘No, it was the, er, chemotherapy. Made my hair fall out.’

  ‘Woi ’uv yow still gut ’air un yorr ’ead then?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit hit and miss really. Not all of your hair falls out at once. You should see my pubes – like a Mohican they are, and my legs – hairy right down the back and bald on front.’ I’m rambling now, obviously, and hope he doesn’t ask me to remove my trousers and underpants. If he does I may have to shoot one of us. To be honest I would be my preferred choice.

  But instead he looks at me blankly and asks, ‘Ah yow taykin’ tha piss?’

  Astute man. Wasted in a job like this. Come on, Mike, stop being a snob.

  ‘No,’ I sigh, ‘See, that’s the reaction I always get. That’s why I prefer only going out at night. Since...since...my mother...’

  He looks ready to burst into tears. ‘Hey, look, orlroyt, it’s orlroyt. Sorry Oi asked. Here, tayk anuther tin uv swayts. Gow on. Yow tayk care naw. Boy, boy.’

  Well, that worked, but I really must stop drawing attention to myself.

  I get back behind the wheel and drum my fingers on it.

  I could go into Birmingham. Ha, ha, ha. Why?

  South to Bristol?

  North to Manchester?

  No. No good. I can’t decide. I get out of the car again and open the boot.

  ‘Manchethter or Brithtol?’ I ask. ‘Sorry, Brissstol.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well, what about Birmingham?’ Definite shake of the head there.

  ‘Yeah, I agree. Well?’

  ‘Miffmuff,’ comes the reply, after a second or two.

  ‘Your people are there?’

  A hesitant nod.

  ‘Is that who you phoned last night?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Good. And when we get there, I think we’d better change cars, don’t you agree?’

  Again, a nod. I wonder if I should sit him in the back window to entertain passing children and lorry drivers.

  ‘Will you help me steal one?’

  Nothing.

  ‘I’ll let you sit on the back seat for a bit.’

  He nods. Boy does he nod. I slam the boot, just to remind him who’s boss, and see the garage attendant staring at me suspiciously. I wave and he gets busy with the chewing gum displays. I wonder how much he’ll get for selling the cassette from the CCTVs on the forecourt, once he realises who I am. Weird. Ten years as an actor and I’ll be on TV more in the next forty-eight hours than I could have hoped for in a lifetime.

  Still, I’m feeling a bit perkier now and climb back behind the wheel for the drive to Miffmuff. Put the radio on. The Clash, singing,

  My Daddy was a bank-robber

  But he never hurt nobody

  Yeah, and who’s going to believe that?

  Monday May 3rd – Tuesday May 4th.

  On the day after my unusual delivery, I was standing in line at the bank. It was a long line, as usual. I had a rather bulky carrier bag in my hand and I was wearing a somewhat obvious false moustache and glasses. I was also very nervous. Sweaty, in fact, and sure that I’d been followed, though I can’t say I’d seen any evidence to back up my paranoia.

  The previous evening, having apologised for my mood that morning and made things up with Anna a bit, I told her that I’d had a phone call about some film work. It was art house stuff, by an independent director who’d got my name from a friend of a friend. Best to have some excuse for having money handy, just in case.

  Art house is fairly safe as a porky pie, because that kind of stuff never gets shown in cinemas – it just seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of the I-told-you-the-world-wasn’t-ready-to-understand-my-work kind. The fact that most of it is incomprehensible shit seems by the by to the producers.

  Anna seemed a bit sceptical at first, but I managed to calm her fears with a lot of I probably won’t get it anyways and moaning about how it was just some rich kid’s fantasy that we all should suffer for his art.

  She was much more suspicious when I offered to walk down to the shop and buy toilet rolls and margarine, and maybe pick up a takeaway, but that soon disappeared when I remembered to ask her for the money.

  I phoned ahead to the Indian restaurant and, pulling on a black hat and jacket, I left the house and wandered down the road past the cul-de-sac, then doubled back and ran, hunched over, up the path to No. 6. Yes, I know, if anything is guaranteed to draw attention to yourself, it’s behaving like a member of the SAS in suburban Newcastle, but I was nervous, all right? I crouched by the gate into the garden, doing some breathing exercises I’d picked up at a weekend workshop with the RSC, but it didn’t quite work and I ended up sounding like Rolf Harris remixed by Fatboy Slim.

  I had walked past the house a few times during the afternoon and it didn’t look like the garden would be hard to get into. There was no sign of activity in the house and I wondered if anyone lived there or if it was just some kind of drop-off point.

  One more deep breath, then I lunged over the gate, caught a bootlace on the catch at the top and crashed upside down into the other side of the door. I hung there powerless as I felt my shoelace come slowly undone, until I dropped and smacked my head on the concrete below. The first few lines of ‘Starry, Starry Night’ flashed though my head.

  I lay still for a few seconds, not entirely through choice, to see if anyone had overheard me, but it was hard to tell through the ringing in my ears. I reached up a hand to my aching forehead and it came away covered in blood. Great.

  I staggered to my feet and leant against the wall until the sickness passed, then moved on down the garden. A perfectly ordinary, suburban garden. I’m not sure exactly what I’d expected – a Sherman tank perhaps, or a Cruise missile silo; a few weapons of mass destruction painted with the Al Qaeda corporate logo, at least – but this was not obviously the garden of a killer. The lawn was a bit hummocky, though, and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled as I wondered whether this was where he buried his victims. Shaking off the thought, I moved on.

  Around at the back of the house there were French windows looking into the lounge, same as our house. The curtains were open slightly and light spilled into the garden. I squinted into the room. There was a fairly tatty three-piece suite and a lovely new widescreen TV showing one of those heart-warming documentaries about disability. Or at least it showed two massively overweight ladies, who were obviously incapable of undressing themselves, helping each other out of their clothes and washing each other in a si
nk before shaving each other’s bikini lines. Not that I watched for very long. That was just the impression I got. Honest.

  There was no sign of anyone in the room, so I moved around to the far side of the house and the kitchen. I squatted beneath the open window and peeped in.

  A fairly portly man in the most enormous pair of underpants I’ve ever seen in my life was making himself some tea and toast. He had an enormous jar of Marmite on the bench too. Flash git. He wore an appallingly bad toupee, which appeared to be on back to front, and some enormous slippers with a stars-and-stripes motif on them. He was standing with his back to me – and what a back it was. Across his back was a series of puckered, star-shaped scars that if I didn’t know any better I would have said were bullet holes. And, as I don’t know any better, then I’ll say they were bullet holes. Ouch. This was obviously one mean dude.

  But when he turned to put some dishes into the sink I saw what looked like a perfectly ordinary, late-middle-aged man, making some supper before settling down to watch some fairly tame pornography. Nothing odd here. If you like that sort of thing, of course.

  He picked up his supper and shuffled back in the direction of the lounge, whistling something I couldn’t quite catch under his breath. I was still squatting there, wondering what on earth I was doing, when I heard the lock click on the French doors. After a few seconds a voice called out, tentatively, ‘Hi! Who’s that out there?’

  He had an American accent. I had a vision of him withdrawing a bazooka from those XXL Y-fronts (if you’ll pardon the image) and advancing slowly toward me with it clutched in his hand.

  ‘You better answer me,’ he said. ‘I have a gun and the police are on their way.’

  Needless to say I didn’t answer, and had tensed up so much I couldn’t have spoken if I wanted to. Not without peeing myself, anyway. When I heard him shuffling toward me around the corner of the house I stood up quickly and I swear I heard my bladder squeak in protest. I may have done a little fart.

  As he rounded the corner I leapt at him.

  Actually, that’s not strictly true. As he rounded the corner I tried to surprise him and run past, but my loose lace caught around my shins and as he and the path were the same width I ended up leaping onto him, while we both shrieked in terror and he fell over backwards. I skinned my knuckles too. They were really sore.

  While I lay on top of him, nose-to-nose, he grabbed at my shoulders, and asked, not unreasonably under the circumstances, ‘What the hell—hey, aren’t you the guy who’s been walking up and down watching my house all day? You some kind of burglar? You better speak to me right now and…and…. What…what the hell is that funky smell, boy?’

  But I chose that second of distraction to give him a first-degree Chinese burn and he yelped, letting me go momentarily. I was up and off him in a flash (well, under a minute, anyway – he was a lot stronger than he looked), shouting, ‘Stay where you are, you bastard, my mates are just around the corner, and if you move they’ll be round here like a shot, just you see…and I’ve got your gun and…look, just…stay!’ I could hear him struggling to get to his feet and shouting, ‘Gun? What gun are you talking about?’ but I had whipped open the back gate (shite, it wasn’t locked after all) and run off into the night before he appeared. I ran for a few hundred yards more until my bladder got the better of me and I had to pop off behind a bush and make a noise of the horse-and-tin-bucket variety, while I got my breath back.

  An American? Well, possibly. He could be putting the accent on. An American who tried to assault me? Again, possibly. It could be argued that the assaulting went the other way, I supposed. An American who was the (possible) intended recipient of a gun and large sums of money. And who very probably would be able to recognise me if he saw me again in the street or a police line-up. Or at the very least he could identify my farts. Though that was a particularly nasty one so hopefully I could get away with it if asked to repeat the process in a police line-up. And had I really told him I had his gun? Oh mercy me, what had I done?

  I hurried to the Indian and picked up the takeaway, which had grown cold and congealed on the countertop. Then I popped into the corner shop and, ignoring the furious stares of the shopkeeper, picked up the margarine and toilet rolls. I had to use most of one of them to mop up the blood from my head and knuckle wounds (the toilet roll that is, not the margarine). On the way home I had time to feel a complete jerk (I didn’t ask his name but he seemed to quite enjoy it, ha ha) whilst thinking up a plausible story for Anna about the group of kids who’d attempted to steal our supper and had only given up after a long hard fight which left me horribly wounded and in need of a great deal of sympathy. And kisses. Oh, and lukewarm Indian takeaway. Oh, and some of that good, hard loving. Oh, Anna.

  So there I was in the bank. Bright and early. Or early, anyhow. Anna had looked even more dubious when I’d been up and out of the house before her but I didn’t want to have the cash and gun hanging around the house any longer than necessary. As I’d come in some scrawny little jerk wearing a cheap suit and a rapper’s attitude had sideswiped me with the door and bashed my nose. He glowered at me like I’d forced him to assault me by daring to be on the same planet as him.

  As he pushed past I flailed around with my hand and somehow grabbed the tail of his coat.

  He rounded on me. ‘Get – your – hands – off – me!’ he hissed, pulling himself up to his full five foot two.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I just wanted to say thank you.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘For barging the door into me,’ I continued, while he continued to stare. ‘Otherwise we might never have met.’

  He looked a little less cocky, and his focus shifted down to my nose, obviously inspecting the damage he had inflicted. He frowned slightly. Maybe he did have some kind of conscience after all.

  ‘I mean, it’s so hard to meet people these days,’ I said quietly, leaning into his face, trying to remember the lines from my last stage show. ‘Since they let me out of the home. I have so few friends these days. No one to…play with anymore. And then you deliberately push the door into me so we can have a little…human contact. That’s why you did it, wasn’t it? I know how it is. I’ve been watching you for months now, and you’ve obviously been watching me too, haven’t you, you cheeky little minx. It’s hard to find company these days, isn’t it? For people like us, who are so…choosy about our friends? And when I look at you I just know we can be gooood friends. Can I come back to your house? I know the address, but… Do you live with anyone? Anyone who’ll miss you? I – no! Come back! I love you!’

  But he was gone.

  People stared at me as I joined the queue, grinning to myself. They’d obviously overheard some of our conversation and were giving me some fairly searching looks until I made eye contact. Then they stared at their shoes like someone else had dressed them and they’d only just discovered how cheap and nasty they were.

  ‘Oh lighten up,’ I muttered. ‘Just having a bit of fun.’

  My idea (how’s this for brilliant?) was to open a safe deposit box and put the cash, the map and the gun inside. I had a passport, which had been made up as a prop for an appearance in Casualty and which I couldn’t distinguish from the real thing, so I was hoping nobody else would. The moustache I was wearing was from the same episode and matched my photograph on the passport. Whilst working at the BBC, I’d “borrowed” some headed notepaper (oh come on, everybody does it); it had only taken a few seconds to write a letter to myself, using the false name and a false address, and Robert’s your mother’s sister’s husband, I had enough ID to carry out my plan. The huge plaster on my forehead, courtesy of my adventures the night before, helped too. I was just wondering why anybody works for a living when a life of crime and deceit is so simple, when the number light thingy changed at the front of the queue and it was my turn with the cashier.

  I walked over, smiled at the bland fa
ce of the young bloke behind the counter, whose badge identified him as Norman and tried to say, in my best Lee Marvin voice, ‘Good morning, I’d like to open a safe deposit box, please.’

  Now, disguising your voice is one thing, but even I couldn’t quite distinguish which words I’d used and whether they were in the correct order, so I wasn’t at all surprised when Norman looked at me, all open-eyed, and said, ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  I made a great show of clearing my throat and said again, ‘I’d like to open a safe deposit box. I have all of the relevant ID here.’

  ‘Your moustache would appear to be a little…crooked, sir.’

  I looked at my reflection in the countertop and saw what looked like a great hairy caterpillar crawling up the side of my nose.

  ‘Ah!’ I muttered. ‘Haven’t quite got used to it yet… I’m just trying it out. Have to wear it in a film next week. I’m an actor, you know.’

  Norman obviously didn’t know. Or care.

  ‘Can I be of any assistance today, sir?’ he said in a voice which might as well of been supplied by a ventriloquist for all the expression that showed on his face. I know I wanted to shove my fist up his arse. And not in a good way.

  Sighing, I pulled off the moustache and slipped it into my pocket. Low profile, I reminded myself, stealthy as a ninja.

  ‘I want to o-pen a safe-ty de-pos-it box, Norrrrrr-mannnn.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone with me. I’m not an idiot, sir.’

  ‘Well, the chap who was here a moment ago was. Best have a word with him when you see him next.’

  He handed me the forms and a tiny pen and sent me off to fill them in. After a few false starts (it’s difficult sometimes to resist going onto automatic pilot and filling in the truth on those forms. Banks are so intimidating, don’t you find? Or they are if you don’t have any cash. Or if you do have a big bag of cash which theoretically belongs to someone else. But finders keepers and all that…) I managed to complete the form and rejoin the queue.