Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

Carr nodded and awkwardly skimmed through the directory till he found the Fs and began again. He’d read out entries for Faal, Faas, Faasen, Fabb, Fabbicatore and Fabrini before Mick yelled that this was supposed to be the London telephone directory, not the Roman one. He didn’t want to hear all those foreign names. Carr moved on rapidly to Faber but Mick remained unimpressed.

“No, no, Justin, it’s still very, very lifeless. I tell you what, since it’s London, why not read it in a cockney accent? I know you can do accents.”

Carr nodded agreement and started to read the entries for Fagan. “Broader cockney,” Mick shouted. Carr tried to broaden the accent as he read out a few Faheys. “Broader, much broader,” and Carr exaggerated the accent still further as he read out some Fairbaims and Fairbanks, while Mick shouted, “And louder with more projection and more fire. I want to feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.”

In a loud, projected, fiery, broad cockney accent Carr did his desperate best to read out the Fairley and the Fairman entries, but his voice was trembling with fear and effort, his adopted accent was slipping, and before long Mick was bawling again. “Are you trying to defy me, Justin? Are you deliberately refusing to take direction?”

“No, no,” Carr assured him. “I’m doing my best. I am, I really am.”

“OK, Justin, forget the cockney. How about a different kind of London accent? How about Finchley? Can you do a Finchley accent?”

“I’ll try,” Carr said desperately, and he read a few more names and phone numbers in a nondescript north London accent before his voice became caught up in his throat, and he stopped and began to sob, his head lolling forwards, his shoulders heaving and shuddering.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t.”

Mick looked at the poor, naked wretch on the television screen and said grandly, “I want scale. I want nobility and pathos and dignity and tragedy. I want the magic to shine through these names and addresses. I want the whole of London, all its many facets and characters, all its rich culture and history, to come alive through your performance, Justin. Am I asking too much?”

“I think you’re mad,” Carr sobbed.

Mick crossed the room and scythed Carr’s legs from under him so that he fell heavily to his knees. Mick stood beside him and produced his gun. He held it to Carr’s head, then turned slightly so that he could see the television screen. The gun looked inky and blurred in the image, and bigger than in reality. Mick’s face looked fleshy and unformed, while Carr’s was a picture of real, not acted, terror. Carr could feel the gun being moved across his temple and he began to shudder uncontrollably.

“It’s OK, Justin,” Mick said. “We’re not making a snuff movie here. Not today. Not if you behave yourself, anyway.”

Mick looked around once again, as though hoping that a chair might somehow magically have appeared. He walked out of range of the camera and settled for the windowledge, leaving Carr to weep and kneel and shake on screen. Mick looked into the quiet mews below. If anyone down there had heard the shouting and the acting they had chosen to ignore it.

Mick said to Carr, “Do you know that song ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner that I love London town’? Do you? Well, you know, I’ve always thought it’s a really poxy song. I mean it’s not good enough to love a place just because you happen to come from there, is it? Loving it just because you’re a Londoner is rubbish. It’s not a reason, it’s just a prejudice. What do they know of London, who only London know? You follow?”

Justin was beyond following or replying, but Mick continued.

“Why not say you love London because of its architecture or its culture or its people? But just because you happen to be a Londoner…well, I think it’s crap. It’s like me saying, maybe it’s because I’m a northerner that I think all southerners are soft nancy boys who deserve to have their faces kicked in. Yeah. It may be true, but it’s not a reason, if you see what I mean. Tell me Justin, can you sing?”

Justin shook his head vehemently to say that he couldn’t sing at all, definitely not.

“Course you can sing,” Mick insisted. “Don’t be modest. Don’t they teach you anything at RADA? Come on, give me a few choruses of ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’, otherwise I’ll come over there and knock eight kinds of shit out of you.”

Softly, sadly, boyishly, Carr began to sing the song. It was a frail, paper-thin rendition, but Mick appeared to be finding it very effective.

“That’s lovely,” he said. “A voice like yours deserves a much bigger audience. Tell you what, Justin, I want you to go down into the street, into your mews, and I want you to sing that song, not just for me but for all your neighbours and for all your fans and for anyone else who happens to be passing by. Some of them may think it’s a bit eccentric of you to be singing in the street stark naked, but you’re an actor, Justin, you’re entitled to a few eccentricities. Why don’t you do it in the road? And the thing is, while you’re down there performing, I’ll be up here watching you and I’ll have my gun trained on you, and if the performance slips below par in any way, if I detect a lack of commitment, a lack of respect for the audience, I’ll shoot you. Got that? Sorry if it seems a little harsh, but everybody’s a critic these days, aren’t they, Justin?”

Carr sobbed and nodded, and somewhat to Mick’s surprise he left the house, went down into the mews and began to sing. He sang the song much more loudly than he had before, with a kind of fierce, tuneless passion, and as he sang he walked the full length of the mews, giving the performance his all, turning the song into a desperate showstopper.

The two girls in the office stood at the window staring and giggling in disbelief at the naked man in the street, a man whose face looked oddly familiar from television or somewhere. Meanwhile, the woman who’d been washing the Peugeot stepped back into her house the moment Carr appeared. Once inside she phoned the police, and though they didn’t consider it an emergency, although they didn’t rush, they did eventually arrive.

Carr was still naked and still singing when the police car pulled up. As the police threw a blanket around him and escorted him back into his own house, he began to talk wildly about an intruder, about Hamlet, about being forced to read aloud from the telephone directory, about having a gun put to his head. But the police looked over the house, saw the empty bottles, the unmade bed, the Rizla papers, and concluded that Justin Carr was a man who had been working and playing far too hard for his own good.

Gabby would never have said stripping was an art, she didn’t say things like that, but she’d have insisted there was a definite knack to it. Not everybody could do it, that was for sure. Having a reasonable body, having no problems about getting your kit off in public and being prepared to go through a few lecherous dance moves was only a part of it, and not really the most important part. It definitely wasn’t something you could train for, and although it was a thing you generally got better at the more you did it, there was a whole category of girls who did it night after night, year after year, and never got the hang of it at all. If your heart and instincts weren’t in the right place you were wasting your time. But if you had a certain native talent for it and if you were willing to put in some effort, then you could keep on working, getting well paid, and winning over audiences long after glamour girls with much better bodies had been booed off the stage.