The Life of Lee (41 page)

It felt as if I was held to the wall by Velcro, but somehow I found the strength to peel myself off it. I forced my feet out in front of me to make my way along the corridor of people, all their eyes now fixed on me. I almost sleep-walked towards the set of three steps that led up on to the stage where all the lights were focused.

I could see everyone clapping and shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything at all. My body was so on edge, my senses now completely in tune with the situation. The only sound surreally audible was the rustle of my suit as it bent and twisted with my movement – that, the sole of my shoe thumping against the ground and the loud deep gasp of air forced in to fill my lungs before rushing out again.

Time seemed to slow right down. People’s voices sounded like a record with someone’s finger pressed upon it. I pushed out another debilitating step in front of me. I felt as though I was wearing an anvil as a shoe; my knees wobbled and bent around in their sockets as I had to concentrate to find the strength to hold them in place. I was sure they would buckle from under me at any point, weighed down as I was by the amp and guitar that now felt like huge, great, cumbersome boulders. Every muscle had now turned to blancmange; the blood had drained off and left them as soon as my name had been called out and was now probably languishing somewhere around the Kursaal Ballroom on Southend seafront, doing a lively version of the mambo bop de do da friggin’ day.

I forced another step forward, then another. I would only have to climb the three steps and I would be there, in front of all these people. My heart was now in my mouth, pumping at full steam ahead as more coal was thrown on the furnace. I heaved myself up the first step, my stomach bubbling away like it was a Jacuzzi at a swingers’ party.

I took another step; just one more and I’d be on the stage. I was hardly doing anything that physical, but sweat, as though it were abandoning a sinking ship, poured out
from every nook and cranny of my body at such a rate that my suit and shirt were drenched through. I was starting to resemble someone who had just got off the wet and wild ride at a theme park.

I lifted my leg up to take the final step, but then something unexpected happened. The compere who had just introduced me turned to exit the stage. He was obviously leaving me to it, but as he swished past me at speed, my instincts now having been heightened to such a degree, it made me jump. I didn’t quite know what it was – he was simply a blur that came out of nowhere, unexpectedly rushing towards me. Just catching him out of the corner of my eye like that made me flinch.

It put me off my concentration and, as a result, my feet did not quite clear the lip of the top step, but instead struck the front of it. The top half of my body then toppled over and the sheer weight of the Vox amp shot me forward like an out-of-control firework. So, I imagined, there I went, straight into the losers’ basket, arriving like some mal-coordinated lunatic on to the stage and then, just as suddenly, disappearing again below the heads of the audience like a drowning maniac.

On the way, I had managed to crash face-first into the microphone stand, which had now joined in the proceedings. I, along with the mic stand and everything I was carrying, then careered like a panicked pack horse of electrical equipment across the small, temporary platform into a loud amplified thumping pile just beneath the massive banner stretched across the stage that read: ‘Talent Show. Winner gets £250’. Well, I thought from my crumpled heap underneath it, that’s me out then.

My face now buried on the stage beneath a pile of equipment, I could hear only silence. The whole room seemed dumbstruck, trying to fathom exactly who, what or even where I was.

Deeply frustrated, I winced at my embarrassment. This was not a good start. I had blown it completely. I imagined what Heather might be thinking. Having asked her friend to drive her there, she had obviously wanted to follow me after our small row earlier. I had stormed out of the door with my guitar, and she, of course, had demanded to know what I was up to. I told her, ‘I don’t know, but I just need to do this!’ I had left her looking annoyed and perplexed. Now here I was, a heap on the floor, our only chance of keeping anything we’d ever had abandoned at that last step.

I scrambled to my feet and, in a futile attempt at covering my initial mistake, I carried on setting up the amp and guitar as if nothing had happened. I was under the impression that if I could get that going and start playing something, then maybe I had the narrowest of chances of getting away with it. But I panicked, thinking there was too long a silence during which something should be happening. I felt the audience becoming a little impatient and everything began getting all muddled up.

I slammed the plug of the amp into an extension lead at the back of the stage, but then from sheer nervous energy started manically leaping around the tiny stage area, trying to organize my guitar. Its lead had become a frustration as whenever I tried plugging it into the amplifier, the volume was inadvertently turned up way too loud and just shrieked with feedback, causing me to jump back
with fright. The noise of me landing would then rattle the echo-springs inside the archaic amp, resulting in another loud burst of ear-splitting racket. Another leap back then loosened the strap on my guitar, which fell to the ground just before I attempted a strum.

By now things had got so out of control, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was all over the place and could see any hope of even remaining on stage fading fast. I looked for help at the side of the stage, where I knew the compere-stroke-DJ stood behind his record decks. But he appeared to be laughing so hard at my misfortune that I couldn’t get any understandable response out of him.

I felt so deflated, mortified at being laughed at. I couldn’t believe how badly it was all going. I just didn’t envisage this happening at all. Eventually, the compere jabbed his finger towards the piano on the other side of the stage: ‘Get on that, you nut case!’ he cackled over the now-growing laughter from the crowd before dissolving into a fit of hysterics again.

As I stumbled over towards the piano, I picked up the mic stand on the way. I was going to use it to sing into, but it was now just a mangled, floppy, useless piece of uncontrollable metal in my hand, all the tightening screws having been loosened in the commotion.

I tried desperately to find some dignity at the piano, but it was made completely impossible by the continuing unpredictability of the mic stand. Every time I tried tightening it into one position, another joint would somehow loosen and it would fall to pieces again. At the same time, I was trying to position the piano stool, but was frustrated that I was unable to get it to the correct height.
One moment I was sitting at the keyboard like a small child, the notes just below my chin; the next, after desperate attempts to raise it, it looked like I was sitting on a bar stool and the keys were so far away I couldn’t even reach them.

Most annoyingly, every time I would turn around to adjust the stool, my backside kept hitting the notes. Then I had to start all over again with the mic stand, which had fallen forward between the lid and the piano. It forced the lid to slam on to my fingers just as I was about to play, making me look like an idiot. I had to stop, dazed and confused about where the microphone had disappeared to, my hands jammed uselessly under the lid. The whole act descended into a shambolic disaster. Even though I did my best to plough through, I accepted I had failed miserably. I was bombing big time. It was a car crash.

But in the midst of this dreadful, failing performance, something odd started to happen. It was odd because, instead of feeling as though I was failing, I suddenly felt quite positive. No, more than that – I felt euphoric. I was starting to like being on stage. But, even better, there was a sense that the crowd, curiously, were starting to like what I was doing. What was this strange feeling I was experiencing? Was I starting to be – whisper it – a success?

As I fumbled and blundered my way through the act, getting all muddled along the way, as I fought with the inanimate objects around me that never seemed to do what I wanted them to, there was no doubt something was stirring in the audience. It was a notion that was slow at first, but then grew from a ripple that gradually spread
across the entire room, building and building all the time into a massive wave. Laughter! It appeared that the more I struggled to get something right and hopelessly kept getting it wrong, the more the audience roared and howled at my unfortunate situation.

My head began to clear and, as I looked around the room, I realized everyone in the audience was killing themselves with laughter. Why? I was getting it all wrong. I couldn’t understand why they were all in fits – the man from the brewery, the compere, the audience. In fact, the only person who wasn’t doubled up with laughter was Heather. I could just pick her out under the lights and saw she was just as dumbstruck by the whole thing as I was. She was clearly bewildered that I was, in fact, not dying, but going down a storm.

That was when everything seemed to click into place. I couldn’t help myself. For the first time in my entire life, I felt at ease. Indeed, I felt happier to be where I was, on a stage, than out there in the world, a place that appeared only to want to treat me unfairly, a world that never understood me. The feeling was mutual.

Here I was, getting it all so wrong, and yet – ironically – getting it all so right.

The cage was open. I unruffled my feathers and began to fly. I was enjoying myself now, soaring around the stage, improvising, getting tangled in the microphone wire, the stand. My amp became something to stand on, jump off. I played with the curtains at the back of the stage. A massive roar went up when, having never actually played the guitar, I used the strap around my neck to twirl it like a hula hoop around my head. As I stood there,
swirling about like a crazed whirling dervish, the crowd went wild. Then, in a pool of sweat, my soaked clothes hanging from my buzzing, shaking body, completely exhausted, the stage littered with debris, I dropped into a bow and felt the electricity that ran through the room.

I straightened up and quickly searched the cheering, applauding crowd for Heather again and was so elated to see she was clapping with pure joy. The lights from the stage caught the tears in her eyes, making them twinkle as she beamed so hard I thought any moment she might burst.

38. The End of the Pier – and of Our Story

Afterwards, as we climbed out of the back of her friend’s cramped Ford, Heather and I asked if we could have a little time to reflect on what was a pretty eventful evening. Heather’s friend sped off along Southend’s gusty seafront after kindly promising to drop my guitar and amp off some time the next day.

We wanted to take a walk along the pier. It had become a special place for us. It was somewhere we always liked to go on a Sunday, when the sun was shining and glistening off the sea. It was a beautiful spot to spend a couple of hours forgetting all our troubles. Plus, it was free!

We hardly ever noticed how long the pier is – they say it goes a mile into the sea, and it’s billed as the longest pier in Europe. But we were oblivious to that, so engrossed were we in each other’s company as we nattered away to each other about our hopes and dreams. We would always end up sitting right at the end of the pier with our feet dangling over the edge above the sea, not saying a word, just content. We were comfortable with our silence, as long as we were together. Now and again, one of us would look up and cast out a fantasy for the other’s benefit. It almost always revolved around a favourite dish we
hadn’t been able to afford, or a place we longed to go, or an ideal home we dreamed of buying.

Tonight was different, though. There was an unusual mood between us, something we hadn’t experienced for quite some time. As we stepped on to the planks of the pier, we linked arms. We squeezed each other closer and headed down the walkway. Our heads were bowed forward and we had to lean at times into the squally but warm winter wind. The breeze would suddenly rush up through the old blue and white Victorian railings as it went whirling off across the pier. It would sometimes catch us by surprise as it rushed at our backs, forcing us to quicken our step along the wet shiny slats. The pier was lit up by the swaying illuminations looped up on each lamp post that went along the entire length of the pier. It looked like one of those adverts you see in the magazines for some posh perfume.

The fresh air felt such a relief. It was so bracing after the intense, claustrophobic, intimidating atmosphere of the talent show where, just half an hour earlier, I had been struggling away, hoping against hope that the purgatory of my ten minutes – which, to begin with, had seemed like ten hours – would soon be over.

‘I knew you could do a bit of music, but I didn’t know you could do all that other stuff back in the pub,’ Heather said proudly, taking in the magnificent view of the estuary in front of us.

Although I wanted to explode with delight when she said it, I dismissed it straight away. ‘What? I can’t do anything. I was an idiot. I failed.’ I wanted to stay calm, so I replied to her playfully. But, of course, I knew it would only draw more praise.

Then I swallowed a deep bellyful of fresh sea air, as the two of us reached the very end of the pier. We held the top railing with both hands like you might a windy motorbike. We just let the warm wintry breeze whip up and dance around and through our clothes. It certainly felt like it was blowing all the cobwebs away. I closed my eyes for a moment, my thoughts racing back to the talent show.

They had us all lined up at the back of the stage, firing-squad style, as the compere read out the winners. The mood in the pub went very tense and quiet. It had been a long night. With eight acts to sit through, the audience must have been feeling just as tired as some of us up on stage.

By now the room had become hot and sticky. A lot of booze had been drunk, bolstering people’s enthusiasm for their favourite acts. So there were some pretty loud, intoxicated characters amongst the crowd. But no one was leaving; they had invested their support in their favourite performers, and they were not budging until they saw who had won. Although the stage lights were almost blindingly bright, you could just see the ones that had been on their feet most of the evening along the back wall and leaning wearily against the bar – from where, now and again, an impatient shout would emerge: ‘Hurry up, mate, Give us the results, for Christ’s sake.’