I. And not earlier. See 'earlier'.

i6₅

'No come on, Jimmy...'

Everyone else in the pub agreed with my new friends that I had been 'fuckin' great', sensibly preferring agreement to having their mouths filled with Caledonian forehead.¹

The next day Bernard and I had got as far as:

'INT. HOSP. CORRIDOR. DAY.

ENTER PROF. LOFTUS

PROFESSOR LOFTUS (brusquely): Morning Matron...'... when we were sidetracked by the thought that if you used the word 'bedpan' it always brought gales of laughter from the older ladies in the studio audience. We had resented this easy laugh in other people's episodes and decided to put it to the test and so an old X-ray cupboard became an old bedpan-cupboard so that the word could then crop up regularly without trace of subtlety or humour. (The experiment was disappointingly successful; the artless bedpan got the laughs every time.) We were writing about our sixth or seventh gratuitous 'bedpan' when, 'Bring bring bring,' insinuated the telephone.² It was the man from Radical Alternatives to Prison ringing to say the job for the other lad had fallen through, could I employ both of them for a short time doing the samejob?

'Yes, provided it's for a short time and they'll only get fifteen pounds a week each, OK?'

The man said, 'Yes, that sounds good,' and went back to the courtroom. About an hour later there was another call to say, 'The accommodation for one of them has fallen through.' So I said, 'OK, we've got a spare room, we can put him up for just a couple of weeks.'

'Oh that's fine, we'll easily find somewhere else in that time.'

I should have predicted this, but half an hour later the phone told me, 'The accommodation for the other boy had fallen through.'

'All right, they can share the same room but the accommodation is just for two weeks and no more.' I was guaranteed this and went back to the task of gratuitous bedpan-inserting.

The two lads, because of my generous help, had been given a year's probation, said the next phone call and Mr 'Thing' would be bringing them round on Wednesday. They didn't appear on

i. "A moothfull o'heedies.'

2. See note i on page 137, if you really must.

Wednesday. I was certainly apprehensive about what I'd taken on but two weeks and a part-time job for one of them was really all I had promised. I wallowed in the thoughts of how good I was being.

Mr Thing arrived on Friday with Brendan and Jimmy. I found out later that the reason for the delay in their arrival was that they had been taken to a hotel and he had been trying to screw them. Not knowing this then, I merely thought Mr Thing to be an over-talkative, mild man of about sixty years with a rather shabby raincoat. Brendan was a shy, pleasant and quite intelligent Dubliner. Jimmy was a loudmouthed chatterer with buck teeth and an adenoid-pum-melling-Brooklyn-Irish-high-pitched-blackboard-scraping whine. To love them equally as my brothers was going to be a tough one. They both told stories of Ashford which were horrific. They and a friend called Charlie were the subjects of a half-revealing Sunday Times enquiry into that 'Reformatory'. Their experience with Mr Thing hadn't shocked them; they had learnt to expect that sort of thing as part of everyday life and were even grateful to him.

They were both particularly anxious to please us, as they told me this was the first time anyone had ever done anything for them without expecting something in return. They were keen to fit in and were soon hardly as noticeable as having two adolescent mentally deranged wild female cougars about the place and after a while intermittent high-pitched macawlike screaming and the banging and crashing of favourite objects became acceptable background noise.

Jimmy came from Chicago actually, the 'Brooklyn' bit I mentioned was added because it was the most appalling nasal accent that I could think of at the time. He had been to Dublin on holiday with his family and there met Brendan while 'trolling' on the Quays.¹ The two had formed a friendship which made them inseparable. They had no sexual interest in each other but they seemed to like the same sort of man despite the fact that, being Catholic, they expected to get married and have lots of children. Back in Chicago, Jimmy had forged his father's signature to a cheque which paid for his return trip to Dublin. The two of them had left Dublin

i. The Quays in Dublin were then a popular meeting place for gays.

and set off to see if the streets of anywhere else were paved with anything else. A sensible thing to do: ignorance and poverty breed brutality and home life for both of them had meant being on the receiving end of anything from promises of eternal damnation to being held down by your older brothers to have the backs of your legs beaten with fire-irons.

The matron from a local runaway's home rang me to say that she had no room for either of my two lads and what did I know about Mr Thing? She had dealt with him before but recently had begun to suspect his honesty - did I know, for example, that he claimed to be my co-author on my next Monty Python book? We both came to the conclusion that he was an outrageous con-man who spent much of his time hanging around juvenile courts 'helping' youngsters to his own Radical Alternative to prison....

David, Brendan, Jimmy and myself, realizing that help from outside sources was unlikely, decided that the two boys should stay until we could find reasonable accommodation and that they should both look for jobs - we really did only need one cleaner three times a week.

I trusted them and they never let me down. David and I left them alone in the flat for several weeks while I was filming in Munich and came back to find everything in order and a huge 'Welcome Home' sign in the main room.

Life for them was a fantasy and they regarded truth as relative and not absolute¹. It took a great deal of patience and a lot of shouting to impress on them that they were on probation and that they had enough money not to try to cheat London Transport of iop merely because they had thought up a story which seemed plausible to them. Stretching David's tolerance to the limit, I took them on holiday with us to Ibiza. I warned them about staying in the sun too long and how dangerous it is to go to sleep on a lilo. Later that day I had to swim half a mile out and then another back, pushing a lilo loaded with a barely conscious Brendan.

We returned to our villa to see Jimmy who'd had to stay in, having turned lobster-red the day before (despite warnings about the sun). He was wearing a white sheet and was paddling around with mysteriously bright orange hands and

i. They had a point.(D.) Absolutely. (G.)

feet! I racked my brains for the differential diagnoses for orange extremities but came to the conclusion that a bottle of ManTan hadn't had its label read. They were trouble. But then so was I.

In a restaurant above the steps leading up to the castle (fortified part) in Ibiza town, a friend of mine who'd had quite a lot to drink started to argue with the bouncer. I joined in on his behalf, standing up telling the bouncer that if he wanted to push anyone around perhaps he should pick on someone his own size. He did. One big push. I'd forgotten that my seat was on the edge of the parapet and I remember falling through the air thinking, 'I wish we had the cameras rolling - I'd never do a stunt like this again...' before landing fifteen feet lower down on the stone steps going, ⁴Waaaghh...' I broke three ribs and was sore about the hips and head for a day or two, but as soon as I felt well enough went straight back to shout abuse at the man from a safe distance - no sense in calling the police to your aid in Spain in those days....

Living with Brendan and Jimmy was rather like having two people around who were rehearsing to be Laurel and Hardy; the epitome of Murphy's Law¹, anything that could go wrong for them did. This brought out a paternal instinct in me and a 'They've got to go' instinct in David.

David was right: they would have to live their own lives -I think they had learned as much as we had time to teach them. After sporadic attempts to hold down jobs, Jimmy managed to get one on the London Underground. He was very proud of his uniform, which he regarded as the first step towards his ambition of being an airline pilot. No longer on probation, Jimmy moved out and lived at a friend's flat. Brendan stayed on several more months until he found a flat which was suitable for both of them. Brendan came back to Belsize Park three times a week to do the cleaning as originally planned.

I was very pleased with the progress they had made, particularly Brendan, who was quite literate. They both took

I. Which states that in a given situation anything that can go wrong woll.

pride in what they had achieved and even invited me round to dinner at their place. I recognized quite a lot of my own cutlery, plates and dishes but I kind of assumed that they knew that I knew I would have wanted them to have them.

Then Jimmy moved out of their flat to live with a new friend but made frequent visits to see Brendan at work at our place. Suddenly these visits ceased. There had been a quarrel.

A month or two later Jimmy arrived at the flat one night very drunk and with a slashed left wrist. I examined this, cleaned it up and it didn't look too bad. No severed tendons. I put a temporary dressing on it and tried to persuade him to go to hospital for sutures. He refused. Eventually, with Brendan's help, we persuaded him to go for treatment. The cuts were not so deep that further surgical treatment was essential but I was aware of the psychiatric implications and did not want to bear that burden alone....

I assumed that this half-hearted attempt on his own life was a cry for the attention his new friend was not providing. Brendan and Jimmy saw each other again and for a time all was well.

Jimmy by now was working in a pub. One day his new friend came to see him there near to closing time and an argument flared up. Jimmy rushed off in a fit of pique, expecting to be followed by a contrite friend. He ran home to his flat and decided to stage a little display, just to show how deeply he had been offended. Jimmy's idea of that kind of display was to hang himself from a clothes-line post in the garden, while standing on a chair waiting for his friend. Unfortunately he didn't realize how fatal hanging actually is: the chair slipped from under him and he died. Either the chair slipped by accident or he was stupid enough not to know that your head doesn't like being without a blood supply and that he thought he could hang dramatically there until his friend came home....

I hate to think of that struggling figure trying to tear the noose from his neck that he had put there himself: there were two noose marks, one on the neck, the other across the face at chin level and scratch marks suggesting he'd tried to wrench it upwards in his struggles to pull the thing free.

The coroner rang me up, as I had been his employer for

I>

W'"%\

A dingy drawing-room

some time. He didn't need any further verification of identity and I was glad I didn't have to see the corpse. Now I had to tell Brendan about the death of his friend. He took the news deceptively calmly but insisted on going down to see the body. I told him not to go - it's pointless - 'He's dead isn't he? That's it. What you will see will not be Jimmy. It will be a horrible sight.' I knew, I had seen hangees before - the bloated, blue face etc. He went anyway, and found the sight indeed horrific, feeling, I suppose, some guilt himself because of their recent argument and long separation. He projected most of that guilt onto me.

For a period of six months or so after that he would ring up drunk in the early hours of the morning blaming me for killing his friend. During these calls it gradually became apparent that really he was punishing himself. Getting drunk every night didn't provide any relief. One night he called and simply said, 'I'm in an awful place, get me out of here please, Graham.' I took a mini-cab round to the address he'd given. There were sounds of a party of sorts in a basement flat. I went in and there was a room full of middle-aged men sitting around in a tiny dingy drawing-room watching a teenager dancing around in his under-pants. I saw Brendan, he was very drunk - I strode up to him, lifted him up bodily and carried him out over my shoulder. The next day we had a chance to talk soberly at last.

Brendan had a sister in Eire to whom he had written frequently and we both felt that some time away from London would be good for him. He went back to Ireland and from his telephone calls it was clear that he had managed to overcome the iterative aspects¹ of his feelings after Jimmy's death. He had found a friend there who said that there were good prospects for work in Denmark and that was where he was going.

He has written frequently since from Denmark and has a steady job, a flat, friends and can even speak the language.

I have tried to write this succinctly without allowing too much emotion to cloud my account of the events and so would like to end by simply screaming, 'Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa^aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghghghghghghghghghghghghghgh ghghghghghghghgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'

I. A psychiatric way of expressing unbearable heartache.

CHAPTER TEN

John of the Antarctic