The first night I stayed there, I opened the window of my bedroom and breathed in the night air. I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of complete sadness. I was sad simply because I was so happy, and knew that, one day, it would have to end.
On the morning of Saturday, December 19th, 1987, the doorbell rang. It was one of those scruffy dodgy old women who force you to buy heather off them "for luck, dearie". I'd heard from someone - probably some dodgy old woman with a load of heather - that, if you told these people to bog off, they'd put a curse on you and something important would fall off.
I wouldn't say I was a slave to superstition, but why take the chance? If you can walk around a ladder on the pavement without getting run over, you might as well do it! If there is a slim chance of avoiding contracting some awful disease if you salute every Magpie you see along the M4, do it! I've always been vaguely aware of getting fair amount of good luck over the years. Any good fortune I've had certainly felt nothing to do with my own efforts. It can lend one to feel that one doesn't really deserve any of it at all. If, then, health and happiness had come my way purely arbitrarily, through 'good luck', why rock the boat? There's enough general chaos, destruction and unhappiness in the world. If luck has helped me avoid any of it, I'm going to salute, spit, walk round in circles, anything it takes... just in case.
My attitude to the God thing is similar (Note that I expressed it as 'the God thing'. To just have said "God" would have made me cringe, made me feel I'd have to reach for the nearest tambourine and sing "Kumbaya". Strange, isn't it, the modern taboo over 'the God thing'? I can speak uninhibitedly and candidly about shagging, masturbation, goats etc. but 'the God thing' immediately censors me) If He's up there, and hell and damnation down there, why chance it?
One thing happened to me years before that really put the proverbial cat among the theological pigeons. I was fourteen and had been playing football with the other boys who lived in my road, one of whom was the local hard-nut. He had seven brothers, most of whom were in prison, and this gave him the confidence to bully the rest of us around mercilessly. He had the endearing habit of pointing to the tip of his hob-nailed boot as a sign of his intention to kick the shit out of you. We were playing on the sort of internal roundabout of our council cul-de-sac. It had an enormous tree in the middle of it. Not being particularly gifted, football-wise, I booted the ball a lot harder and higher than I wanted to and it soared into the air and plonked itself right at the top of the tree. It was bully-boy's ball...
We tried everything to get that ball down. Sticks, stones, all the things that actually would probably be breaking my bones the following morning if the ball wasn't returned. After twenty minutes or so the other boys slowly peeled away, relieved that it hadn't been them who'd got the thing up there. Bully-boy pointed at his boot and also left me to it. I carried on alone, throwing things to try and dislodge the orange pin-prick of a ball high up at the top of this tree. It was so far away, my missiles weren't even high enough let alone accurate. After a while, I gave up and sat down on the kerb distraught and sweating.
It was then I put my face in my hands and said the Lord's Prayer. I was asking for help in the rawest, simplest, sincerest way I knew. The world around me ceased to exist as I recited, lost in my desperate need.
After I'd finished, I stood up and walked towards the tree. I picked up half a brick, a lot heavier than the stones and sticks I'd been failing with before, and threw it up in the air as hard as I could. It hit the ball and knocked it to the ground...
I, therefore, keep a very open mind about all the things we may not fully understand and so, that morning, gave the woman at the door a quid and took the bacofoiled little bunch of heather off her, immediately setting off for the National on my motorcycle to give my three lines in the matinee performance of "Ting Tang Mine". The lines had to be given to somebody else as it turned out. I was in hospital lying on a trolley. Lucky, or what!
My journey that morning, from Norbury to Waterloo, was one I'd been doing since April, when I was rescued from the bed-sit, portable, baked bean, 'top of the pop' miming hell I'd subjected myself to for six weeks (see previous page). My salvation had come in the form of a five foot two inch bubbly blonde angel called Claire. She was in one of the other companies and we'd got to know each other from a safe distance in the Green Room bar. It was during one of my evenings there, trying to avoid going back to the portable for as long as possible, that she happened to mention that she'd just moved into a fantastic house in Norbury and that her house-mate needed two more people to fill the remaining two bedrooms. I jumped at the chance and went round to see the place the following night.
To say that it was beautiful would have been an understatement. Even if I hadn't been living in a damp hole for the previous six weeks, the place would still have taken my breath away. 1) It was detached. 2) It was huge. 3) It had a massive garden complete with rock-pool that you could light up from a switch in the 4) breakfast room. 5) Leaded windows looked out over the whole thing. 6) It had a garage. 7) It had cable. 8) Claire lived in it.
The house was owned by an oil exec who worked abroad. He'd rented it to his friend, Paul Carmichael, and Paul had found Claire, and Claire had found me.
The first night I stayed there, I opened the window of my bedroom and breathed in the night air. I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of complete sadness. I was sad simply because I was so happy, and knew that, one day, it would have to end.
It was fantastic to live with company again after my exile in Brixton. The following few months were one long holiday. Paul was great company, Claire was fun in human form, and I felt part of a family again. A month later, Amanda, an agency nurse from Lichfield, joined us and the house was complete.. I hadn't had such a good time in years. Claire was a brilliant, bright butterfly who lit up rooms wherever she went. Paul was a wonderfully mellow jazz musician who had a room full of state of the art sound equipment he let us all have a go on, and Amanda was...well, to be honest, Claire held such power over me, every woman else simply faded into the back-ground. Amanda was nice but very sane and normal, so not my type at all.
My time at the National, therefore, came to a very abrupt and unexpected end in the December. It's strange, isn't it, how we can be simply lifted out of a life we all think is set in stone and be forced to begin a new one? I'd only been back from a fantastic holiday in Portugal with Jay, the evil grinning man I understudied, and Lesley, actress extraordinaire, for a couple of weeks or so. There I'd been splashing about, dancing away, fit as a fiddle, without a care in the world. Who'd have thought what lay in the store of fate?
There I was, riding along, idly wondering whether I'd have time to get my Christmas shopping finished. I was moving along the outside of a long queue of Saturday afternoon traffic making its way down Brixton Hill towards Brixton. The lights at the front of the queue changed to green and I continued on, leaving the cars at the front behind me. There was also a long queue of traffic coming up the hill too and it was out of this queue, a small van decided to skip the jam and take a quick right down a side road.
Every rider has a safe space around him. This space is created over a long period of time through the experience of the constant shifting of the moving traffic around him. Outside this space is another zone of safety that you actually ride in. Well, suddenly, I found myself riding towards this van and as soon as I realised it was in a place I hadn't seen before, everything went into slow motion. My engine slowed as the brakes bit but I just knew it was never going to be enough. I wasn't going fast. By the time I hit, I must have slowed to about fifteen miles per hour. The bike stopped dead but I kept going, over the bonnet. I remember seeing my gloved hands, still in the position they'd been in when holding the bars, against the blue of the sky, and then bump! I rolled a couple of times and immediately sat up. My immediate thought was amazement that this was going to be the accident every motorcyclist spends every riding minute trying to prevent. My accident.
Nothing hurt, but then I also felt that moving wouldn't be a great idea. The ambulance came. The fire engines came. The fire engines parked up-hill of me and must have leaked water. My jeans were cut off me in hospital and handed to Amanda and Claire in a plastic bag. It wasn't until I returned home a fortnight later that I learned that they'd both been under the impression I'd pissed myself after the accident and had been given my soggy jeans to dispose of. How embarrassing...
So, yes, after the accident, I was taken to the nearest hospital and lay on a trolley for four hours. I made all the phone calls to let everyone know what had happened and generally felt pretty OK. My left leg, though, was beginning to twang about more and more and start to feel pretty badly bruised.
Eventually, I was taken to the X-ray department and, when I got wheeled back to the A&E, a doctor came up to me with the X-rays and informed me that I'd be spending Christmas in hospital. I was immediately pumped full of Pethadine and floated off into la-la land. As there weren't any beds available, I was driven to Orpington hospital and operated on that night.
It turned out that I'd landed on my hip and broken the neck of my left femur. They got out their Black and Deckers and screwed my leg back together. (If you are at all of a squeamish disposition, avoid this) It wasn't until the Wednesday, the reality of what had happened to me finally hit and I couldn't stop crying.
