Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

‘Deal,’ I said, raising my glass. Ingrid and Mel raised theirs too, and we all drank to obliterated memories.

I was seriously drunk by the time we spilled out of the restaurant. Ingrid took the first taxi and I took the next, leaving Guy with his arm around Mel waiting for two more.

Who was I kidding? I didn’t know whose flat they were going to, but I could tell they were going there together.

I saw quite a lot of Guy after that evening. He seemed happy to count me as a friend, and he certainly made my life more interesting. It turned out he really was an actor, of the struggling kind. After three years at university, where he had only just escaped being thrown out, he had somehow managed to get into a reputable drama school, where he said he had done quite well. Since then, things had been difficult. He had had a few bit parts in repertory theatres and a small number of tiny roles in TV. He had been an extra in Morty’s Fall . He had an agent, who ignored him. He attributed his lack of success to the oversupply of young actors and an invisible network of contacts and friends of contacts that excluded him. That may have been partially true. A greater reason, I suspected, was that he just didn’t try hard enough. He went to the gym and watched Countdown on the telly when he should have been writing letters and knocking on doors. Young actors are supposed to be hungry. Guy was thirsty. And slaked his thirst every evening and many lunchtimes.

I was happy to join him in this. It made the afternoons much easier to get through if I knew I was going to meet Guy for a pint or five after work. Of course, it made the mornings quite painful and it played havoc with studying for my professional exams, but at least it shook things up a bit. Guy had a small flat off Gloucester Road and we frequented several pubs and bars in that area. We were occasionally joined by other friends of his, including Torsten Schollenberger when he was visiting London.

What did we talk about? I have no idea. Probably meaningless drivel. For our different reasons we needed to find friendship and escape the tedium of the daylight hours. Often, as the evening progressed, Guy would begin to chase women. He was usually successful at this. He was good-looking, of course, but he also seemed able to transmit an aura of danger and excitement that hooked them. I tried, unsuccessfully, to work out what kind of women went for him. Then I realized that almost any woman would, provided she was in the right kind of mood. The curious, those looking for excitement or searching for a quick escape were drawn to him. Guy offered sex, fun, danger and absolutely no chance of commitment. He provided an opportunity for good girls to be bad for a night.

Many of them took it.

Mel was different. He treated her like a backstop, someone to go to when he felt like sex and the evening had failed to provide him with any. He rarely seemed to make any arrangements to meet her, but often at ten or eleven o’clock he would slip off to her flat in Earls Court. From what I could tell, she was always there waiting for him.

Just occasionally she would come out with us. She was always lively and amusing and often ignored by Guy. He was never rude to her, but he was often indifferent, which was worse. I could see what was going on: Mel was in love with Guy and Guy was using her. Mel was too scared of losing him to complain and so she put up with him. If I had thought about this, I would have realized that this showed a deep self-centredness in Guy’s character. So I didn’t think about it.

Guy took me flying with him. His father had bought him his own plane, an expensive Cessna 182 with the registration GOGJ, which he kept at Elstree aerodrome, just to the north of London. We went for lunch to Le Touquet and Deauville in France and to a pretty grass airfield on a hill opposite Shaftesbury in Dorset. Guy was a skilful flyer, and enjoyed skimming along at fifty feet above the waves, or a few hundred feet above the English countryside.

Inspired by Guy, I decided to learn to fly myself. I trained in an AA-5, an old banger compared to Guy’s BMW. I was taught that it was safer not to fly much below two thousand feet, that it was important to check the aircraft thoroughly before every flight and that drinking any alcohol before flying was strictly banned. I wasn’t at all surprised that somehow different rules applied to me than to Guy but, as I learned more, I became increasingly nervous sitting next to him in an aeroplane.

On the surface, Guy seemed to be leading a great life. And I was very happy to deal with him on the surface. But it is hard being a struggling actor, even a struggling actor with a wealthy father.

One evening I left work on the dot of five to meet him at a pub near Leicester Square. He had an audition near by, and he had suggested a drink afterwards. He was already there when I arrived, staring at his bottle of Beck’s.

‘I take it you didn’t get the part?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘They promised they’d call. They only call you if you get the part, you know. So I probably won’t hear anything.’

‘Cheer up, you might get it.’

‘It’s just a crappy part in a dumb commercial. That’s not it, Davo. It’s just so humiliating.’

‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’

‘I know. But it’s not what I expected. I loved drama school. I mean really loved it. Standing in the middle of the stage, being someone else, taking the audience along with the fiction that I was creating, manipulating their emotions. It was great. A real power kick. And I was good at it too. Chekhov, Ibsen, Steinbeck, even bloody Shakespeare, I could do them really well. At the end of the year we had a graduation performance and I was one of only four people to get a call from an agent asking me to go on her books.’

‘Sounds promising.’

‘And now what happens? I go along to meet Diane from Casting, who takes a Polaroid of me, gives me a few lines of truly horrible dialogue to speak at a camera and then it’s “goodbye, we’ll call you.” ’

‘One day they will.’

‘Yeah, but most days they won’t. And to be rejected by Diane from Casting makes you feel like the tiniest speck of shit. I mean, it’s me they’re rejecting, isn’t it? What don’t they like about me? My voice? My face? Maybe I can’t act after all. Maybe this whole thing is one huge mistake.’

‘Come on, Guy. You’ll make it. You always do.’

‘Yeah, precisely. I’ve always been a success. I did well at school, didn’t I? Tennis, soccer, head of house. And I thought I’d do well at acting. I thought I’d do something that even my father would notice. But at this rate I’ll never get the chance. Diane from Casting will see to that.’

‘You need another drink, quick,’ I said. I went to the bar and bought him one. As usual, the alcohol did its work. Half an hour later we were chatting up two Italian girls. Guy got the pretty one and I passed on the ugly one. But it turned into a good evening.

I was in a newsagent’s looking for a copy of Private Eye when I caught sight of the cover of Patio World . I bought it, leafed through the pages with a total lack of interest and spotted a phone number printed inside the front cover. As soon as I was back at my desk I dialled the number, got through to Ingrid and suggested a film. We went to Dances with Wolves and afterwards to a Thai restaurant in Soho for dinner.

The evening didn’t seem like a ‘date’ but rather like two old friends meeting up after a long absence. Which was nice, especially since in reality we hardly knew each other. I liked Ingrid. She was refreshingly straightforward, but also perceptive. She seemed to understand what made me tick without me explaining it to her. She was a good listener, tempting me to tell her more about myself than I intended. Not that I had anything shocking to tell, rather the opposite. But that, too, she seemed to understand.