Life and Laughing: My Story (22 page)

That would be the last time we spoke.

Since I had my driving licence, I was barely at home. On the evening of 27 December, I was in Highgate at the house of a friend whose parents were away. There was a group of us, including Sam and some girls, most of whom I fancied. We had been larking about all day, watching movies, smoking cigarettes, eating junk food. This was prior to the days when everyone had a mobile phone, so my mother was clueless as to my whereabouts. I remember the phone ringing and being told it was for me. ‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Michael, it’s Mum. I’ve been trying to find you all day. You need to come home immediately.’

‘Why? Has something happened?’ I asked, not overly concerned.

‘You just need to come home now. I can’t tell you over the phone,’ my mother said coolly. Her voice seemed relatively normal. I didn’t sense that anything terrible had happened.

‘Why can’t you tell me now? Is it something bad?’ I pushed.

‘Michael, don’t worry. Just come home now, OK?’

‘OK,’ I said, hanging up.

Because of my mother’s tone, I was intrigued rather than panicked. As I drove home I wondered what might have happened. Might it be to do with one of my brothers or Lucy or Grandma or Jim or Steve’s parents? All I knew was that it couldn’t be that serious. My mum’s performance on the phone was too convincing. As I neared Golders Green, the thought suddenly entered my head: what if it is something serious? That’s exactly how my mum would behave on the phone. It was like when my dad asked me to sit down when he told me I was leaving Merchant Taylors’ – people don’t like to deliver bad news on the phone. I was so consumed with mucking about with my mates and my various teenage crushes that I hadn’t really thought this through. Something bad had happened. To whom? As I drove alongside the park towards my house, my father’s face popped into my mind. A chill came over me.

I turned the corner into my road just as the panic in my mind was reaching a crescendo. The front door of my house was open, my mother was standing outside, her body buckled with pain, tears streaming from her face.

I jumped out of my car. ‘What is it?’

‘Your daddy’s died.’

It was strange because I felt like I knew before my mother opened her mouth to tell me. I knew, I knew my father had died.

‘Where’s Lucy?’ I said.

I ran upstairs to find Lucy in my bed waiting for me, crying. Through all the changes in my life, my parents divorcing, remarrying, moving home and school, having new half-brothers and sisters, Lucy was the constant in my life. We experienced everything together. Our dad had a new life, a new family, and so did our mum, and as hard as everybody tried for it not to feel this way, Lucy and I were stuck in the middle. But we had each other, and at this moment we needed each other more than anybody else.

The previous day, Boxing Day, my dad had complained to Holly about chest pains in the night. He went out for a walk and some fresh air, had a heart attack and died on the side of the road. It destroyed me to think of him on his own, strangers trying to help him. He was fifty-three years old.

Holly lost her husband, their children Billy and Georgina lost a dad they hardly got a chance to know. His first wife, to whom he was married long before I was born, held a memorial service for him. A death affects so many people in so many different ways. For me, I lost a future with my dad. I felt that our relationship had been dominated by circumstance and distance, but that we were cut from the same cloth and that we would become closer and I would learn from him. But that was not to be.

The months following were a bit of a whirlwind. My dad was cremated, and Holly brought his ashes over from America. We didn’t really know what to do with them. Holly, Lucy and I decided to go to Scotland, where his parents were originally from before emigrating to Canada. We went to Edinburgh and walked up Arthur’s Seat, which is the main peak of a group of hills that overlook the city. It was a typically blustery, chilly Scottish day. We climbed as far as we could, Holly clutching the solid brass urn containing my father’s remains. It was surreal and ultimately comical. We selected a spot. Dog-walkers kept passing by. ‘Good morning!’ they would say in their thick Scottish accents.

We waited for some privacy, and then Holly tried to say a few words, but they were blown downwind so Lucy and I struggled to hear her. Then it transpired there was no way to open the urn. There was no lid; it was solid brass all the way around. We’d taken a five-hour train journey, booked hotel rooms and climbed a small mountain only to find we couldn’t get it open. The only solution was to try to smash it open against a rock. So Holly repeatedly banged the sealed-shut container against the largest rock she could find. After a period of denting, she finally broke through at a moment that coincided with a large gust of wind, which blew my father’s ashes all over her face and hair. She was covered in grey soot, she could barely get her eyes open. Another Scottish dog-walker passed saying, ‘Good morning’, before noticing Holly’s appearance and scuttling off encouraging her dog to follow: ‘Come along, boy, hurry up.’

‘Your dad would find this hilarious,’ Holly said as she shook his remains out of her hair.

We all laughed at the absurdity of the situation.

Holly then changed her position, the ashes caught the wind once more and now flew freely along the hilltop, billowing in the cold morning air and then disappearing.

Goodbye.

The sudden nature of my dad’s death was shocking, and made it especially hard to deal with. One day I was chatting to him on the phone, the next he was gone. Little things freak you out, like his voice on the answerphone or his unmistakable smell on his clothes. I kept replaying our final goodbye at his borrowed flat in Maida Vale over and over in my head. I drove there in my Spitfire and sat outside. I drove to our old house in Hampstead and walked around the block, a walk I used to do with him as a child. He had just gone. Vanished.

But a few weeks later, the most extraordinary thing happened. I received a letter from him, seemingly from beyond the grave. My dad had been on a turbulent plane journey on which the captain made the passengers sit in the crash position amidst panic and praying. It made him think about his mortality and the possibility of dying without being able to say goodbye to his family. So he wrote letters to his children that he planned to update over the years. It’s an extraordinarily thoughtful thing to do. Most people avoid the subject of death altogether, not wanting to tempt fate. Maybe my dad had this foresight because his own father also died young and suddenly, also in his early fifties. Or maybe he knew somewhere deep down that he was nearing the end. Whatever made him write it, I was so grateful. This letter was the most wonderful and thoughtful gift I have ever received. I have cherished it and kept it in my desk ever since.

The letter starts with: ‘If you are reading this, it means the worst has happened.’

It was like he spoke to me one last time. He apologized for the time we spent apart and advised me as best he could. It was poignant and from the heart and helped me to move on.

He ended it with:

You’ve got good stuff in you, so go get ’em! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and I want it to be as full of happiness as possible.

I believe in you, Michael, always be the best you can be.

I’ll love you always.

I had experienced a terrible loss. There were things left unsaid, but my dad addressed them and left nothing unresolved between us and me in no doubt of his love for me, allowing me, in his words, to ‘go get ’em’.

14

I returned to Woodhouse to find that just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Tina had had a breast reduction. I had never even heard of such a procedure. That should be illegal, this is a man’s world, we can’t be having that. Tina’s shrinking tits were the talk of the college. Apparently her assets were giving her back pain so she was medically advised to reduce their size. If I was her doctor, I would have recommended back exercises or perhaps finding a hobby that involved lying down. Why didn’t she come to me? I would have helped her support them, taken some of the strain off her back, that’s the kind of guy I am, always thinking of others.

The world was suddenly a very different place, but I had no time to dwell, my A-Levels were rapidly approaching. This was the culmination of school life. Everything would come down to three grades, three letters that defined my academic abilities. A peculiar thing that happens before A-Levels is that teachers predict what grades students are going to gain. Despite displaying no psychic abilities before this point, they suddenly start to predict the future. These predictions are then put to universities, who may or may not make offers to students.

I simply wasn’t prepared for my exams. Not only had I lost my father but I had changed schools mid-term and the standard of teaching at Woodhouse was a lot poorer than at Merchant Taylors’. In Biology, for example, the ‘teacher’ copied the textbook page by page on to the white board without saying a word. We then had to copy from the white board into our pads. At the end of the two years, we had each compiled handwritten versions of the textbook.

The net result was that I was ‘predicted’ low grades and subsequently rejected by every university. This annoyed me. I thought the ‘prediction’ procedure was scandalous. They had no way of knowing how I would perform in my exams, and if they accepted ‘predictions’, couldn’t I tell them about the Tarot card reader? Maybe that would have helped my cause.

The atmosphere at college was dominated by revision for the exams. Suddenly everybody was studious. The kebab shops were empty and the library was full. It was suggested that Tina had worked her tits off. This, after all, was the reason we were there. I got my head down and started cramming, but feared it was too late.

My exam results were exactly as predicted. I got a C in Chemistry, a C in Biology and a D in Geography. This meant two things: my future was in turmoil and my teachers may actually have been psychic. Most of my friends were taking a ‘gap year’ between school and university. I told everybody I was taking a gap year, but in truth I had no place at university, so the rest of my life was lining up to be a series of ‘gap years’.

I had no money, and my grandma was in no mood to reward me for failing my exams. So I started working as a labourer for some builders who had installed my mum’s new kitchen. I was told to wear ‘something you don’t mind getting ruined’, so I put on my elephant T-shirt that had so far helped me pull precisely zero girls. I arrived for my first day in my Triumph Spitfire, which was surprisingly still working, although the fuel tank was leaking petrol into the car. Believe it or not, I was oblivious to petrol being flammable (I was lucky to get that C in Chemistry) and was lighting up cigarettes while driving.

You might be questioning why I took up smoking, given my dad’s struggles with cigarettes. Well, as with everything else I did, it was another attempt to pull the opposite sex. Seasoned seducers advised me that ‘Have you got a light?’ is a wonderful chat-up line. I tried it a few times when I was a non-smoker, and it didn’t have quite the impact I’d hoped for.

I would sidle up to a hotty and ask, ‘Have you got a light?’

To which she would say, while fluttering her eyelashes, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So far, so good. She would get out her lighter and spark up a flame.

And I would just stand there awkwardly.

‘Don’t you have a cigarette?’ she would ask, confused.

‘No, I don’t smoke,’ came my baffling reply.

So I started smoking, and guess what, they’re really addictive.

I started my building career on a family house in Hendon. It seemed that one of the occupants was a person called Jeremy who had also just done his A-Levels as there were cards scattered all over the mantelpieces. ‘Dear Jeremy, congratulations on your exam results, good luck at uni’ was the general theme. I spent my first two days sweeping the driveway before being promoted to painting one of the bedrooms. It appeared to be Jeremy’s bedroom as congratulations cards dominated the room. This wasn’t a high point for me. Whoever this Jeremy was, he had passed his exams and was off to university, and here I was painting his bedroom. I was up a ladder rolling eggshell emulsion on the walls when Jeremy himself walked in.

‘Michael?’ said Jeremy.

Shit. I knew Jeremy. He was in my class at Woodhouse. What an unfortunate coincidence.

‘Jeremy! You’re Jeremy, this is your room,’ I said, stating the obvious and struggling to keep my balance on the ladder.

‘Are you a painter now?’ Jeremy asked, confused.

‘Yes, at the moment I’m doing some painting,’ I replied honestly, before trying to jazz up my responsibilities, ‘and … sweeping.’

‘How weird … running into you … in my bedroom … painting it,’ Jeremy correctly pointed out. ‘Oh, OK, well, see ya.’

Jeremy then ran off to celebrate his exam results while I finished decorating his bedroom.

He was embarrassed for me, but I wasn’t. I found it funny. I could see the comedy in the situation. I enjoyed telling people the story of how I had done so badly in my exams I was now painting the bedrooms of my former classmates. I was starting to make people laugh with little anecdotes and stories from my life. People were beginning to refer to me as ‘the funny guy’. I would mimic people and do impressions. I was constantly riffing on life to others and even to myself. I started to look for comedy in every situation. I would stand on my terrace in Golders Green at night, smoking cigarettes and chatting to myself, making myself laugh. Funny was starting to be my thing.

My dad’s old personal assistant, Pete, offered me a job as a ‘runner’ at his production company off Ladbroke Grove. It was a lovely circle of life that I should be working for him at the same age he was when he worked for my dad. It was good to get a little razzmatazz back into my life. Showbiz had been sorely lacking since my dad was making
The Kenny Everett Show
. Steve’s job in ‘computer-aided design’ just didn’t have the same ring. Pete’s company was called Partizan, and they made music videos for the likes of Björk, Radiohead, Annie Lennox and Massive Attack.