Jamesie let out a yelp.
‘Would you quit sneaking up on people like that?’
Len’s nephew (he appeared to have walked under the serving hatch without ducking) told Jamesie to catch himself on and asked to speak to Hugh.
‘He’s busy,’ Jamesie said. ‘What do you want?’
But the kid insisted his message was for Hugh and Hugh alone. Jamesie bent down level with his earhole.
‘Anyone ever tell you you’re an irritating little fucker?’
‘And lived?’ the kid asked.
Jamesie straightened up, thumbs hooked in the belt-loops of his charcoal trousers.
‘What did they die of, laughter?’
Hugh had clocked the wee lad by now, but went on to the next customer regardless.
‘Can I get you a comic or something while you’re waiting?’ Jamesie said, and the kid pulled a face like he’d heard it all a million times before.
‘Cunny funt.’
‘Crayons?’ Jamesie persisted. ‘A dodie?’
One unhurried pint later, Hugh ambled over, wiping his hands on a linen cloth.
‘Right, what is it this time?’
Oscar was signalling another drink
‘Coming up,’ I said, and he smiled to show he had got my meaning if not my exact words. A passable seahorse of cigarette smoke, violet in the bar-light, glided across my line of vision, little wisps of fry twisting and tumbling in its wake. I thumbed Oscar’s coins uncounted into the till, watching out the corner of my eye the sketchy shoal drift in front of a Scottish geezer – something in pork butchery was all I knew – in the act of inhaling a Navy Cut; he exhaled, a single targeted jet from his pursed lips, and my fantasy was dispersed into the general murk.
‘You all getting there?’ I shouted.
Jamesie was tailing the kid round the corner and out of the bar.
‘That was hard now, wasn’t it?’ I heard him say. ‘Just as well you told Hugh and not me.’
‘They need somebody up in the Portaferry Room,’ Hugh explained to me. ‘I’m sure Len thinks we’re twiddling our thumbs in here.’
Stanley, his seat lost, was still standing at the bar, holding his ground despite the constant buffeting, pint glass between drinks anchored to the scuffed mahogany of the counter. He was steadying himself with his free hand for another swallow when I arrived again at that end of the bar.
‘Tight fit,’ I said, my subconscious seemingly hell-bent on innuendo. He mimed being crushed, goggle-eyed, tongue skewed over his bottom lip. His face, when it had recomposed itself, struck me as altogether less tense than it had been earlier. It was a look you grew to know well, working in a bar. Someone’s happy, we’d say.
Mind you, you didn’t often see it after barely one and a half pints. Stanley, I decided, was not much of a drinker and I wondered if he might not, after all, end up doing something tonight he wouldn’t normally do.
What it was Stanley normally did do remained a mystery to me. I was fairly certain he was single and yet he did not give the impression that he was actively looking, not in the way that most single men who came into the bar were looking. Of course I was familiar enough by this stage with furtive behaviour, but Stanley’s, if I was being honest, did not easily lend itself to my preferred interpretation. He grasped the base of his glass with little finger and thumb. The three remaining fingers were extended almost at right angles and moving in a way I fondly thought might be trying, independently of the rest of him, to send me a signal of some kind. I willed myself to discover the sense of it, but to no avail.
A guy squeezed through wanting change for the phone. When he had gone again he seemed, by one of those inexplicable quirks of bar congregation, to have drawn off some of the earlier pressure for space. Next time I looked, Stanley had managed to secure himself a bar stool. His cigarettes and matches were on the counter to one side of his glass and behind these he had divided his silver and coppers into two piles, though in the case of the former, maybe pile was too grand a word. I must have been staring.
‘That’s me,’ he said, cheerfully enough: ‘Cleaned out.’
I mumbled something about weekends and the next payday, but Stanley shook his head.
‘No. That’s me cleaned right out.’
He hauled on his cigarette and I thought now that what he was doing when he held on to the smoke the way he did was trying to make it last.
‘That bad?’ I asked and Stanley nodded.
‘Worse.’
He removed three shillings from the dwarf pile.
‘But, sure …’ He drained his pint and handed me the empty glass. ‘Fill her up.’
I left the glass on the crowded sideboard by the sink and took the last clean one from the drainer. Some idiot was trying to tell Oscar a joke.
‘Do you get it? England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are standing at the bar, looking miserable, and the guy says, “UK?” ’
Oscar caught my eye and made a play of looking at the other man as though deeply perplexed.
‘You-OK? Do you still not get it?’
Oscar frowned, left eye almost closing. The joker glanced around, saw me.
‘Is this fella right in the head?’ he asked.
‘As right as any of the rest of us,’ I said, and put Stanley’s pint on.
Oscar laughed suddenly, close to the man’s face. I had heard this feigned laugh of Oscar’s before; even when you knew it was coming its force could take you by surprise. The joke-teller hunched his shoulders, pulling in his neck. He banged his glass down on the bar and pushed through the crowd towards the toilet, looking back and shaking his head. Oscar was laughing good and proper now, without sound. He showed me the back of one splayed hand and jerked it towards me twice. Ten minutes. Now the hand mimicked a yakking mouth. I nodded. His index finger pointed back towards his own face which performed a series of ever more exaggerated expressions of interest. I joined in the laughter. Oscar leaned his elbows peaceably on the bar, I carried the pint down to Stanley. He saluted me before taking a sip.
‘Jam tomorrow,’ he said.
‘With the help of God and a couple of peelers.’
A saying of my mother’s – the nearest she ever came to outright prayer – that my father would sometimes trump …
‘With the help of God and the Great Gilhooley,’ Stanley said, taking my father’s words out of my mouth.
The Great Gilhooley. A music hall legend, a rabbit-from-the-hat, something-from-nothing man.
‘The patron saint of tight corners,’ said Stanley, toasting.
‘Powerful,’ I admitted. ‘But not a patch on,’ (conjuring another name from the collective past) ‘Bamboozlum!’
Stanley’s eyes widened, then narrowed; not for a second did they leave my face, but he was looking through me, not at me.
‘Danny!’ Hugh shouted.
‘Got to go,’ I said.
‘Bam-Bam-boozlum,’ said Stanley absently.
A Belfast abracadabra.
*
Bam-Bam-boozlum!
Stanley is three years old, standing on a chair in the scullery, letting on his teddy is doing the dishes.
A face ghosts across the window above the sink. Big hands under his arms hoist Stanley high into the air.
‘Bam-Bam-boozlum!’
Stanley gives such a howl the hands set him down again.
‘He doesn’t know who you are,’ Stanley’s mother says, but Stanley knows all right, that’s why he’s howling.
This is his father back from the war. Now you don’t see him, now you do.
Bam-Bam-boozlum!
From that night on Stanley was put to sleep in a room on his own and before too long Heather was born and then the twins, Philip and Paul, were born and by the time he was ten he could remember almost nothing of his life before his father’s reappearance save for the stories his mother would tell him, stroking his hair in the blacked-out night, about the places she used to go where doves flew out of handkerchiefs, where women stepped into empty wardrobes and bearded men stepped out.
Stanley would be the first to admit he was an oddbod of a child. A hummer, a twitcher. He spent hours at a time lying on his bed with a comic up to his face, not reading so much, you would have thought if you’d seen him, as trying to disappear right into it.
His mother was always at him, Stanley, get out into the street and play. But the street was hopeless. Men mooched on the corner from morning to night, dressed in overalls and dungarees, looking up and down the road for work that never seemed to come. How were you supposed to play with them staring out of their long faces at you?
Stanley’s father sometimes had occasion to stand out there too.
‘What we need,’ Stanley once heard him say, ‘is another war.’
And a man from somewhere else who had stopped by to see if the view was any better from this street said, ‘What we need is a proper bloody government.’
Stanley went home and read his comics and when his mother opened her purse one afternoon and closed her eyes to his outstretched hand, he started to draw his own. Four pages, thirty panels a page, each panel fully coloured. Heather and the twins helped with the colouring, reading as they shaded. Stanley couldn’t draw for toffee, but his sister and brothers didn’t care. They loved the fact that all his characters lived in Belfast. Tommy the Tiger Bay Tram, the Dunce of Duncairn Gardens. It wasn’t a deliberate decision on Stanley’s part, that was just the way it came out.
The Weeker, he called the comic, because it took him the best part of seven days to draw each one and because wheeker was a word they used then when they wanted to say something was really good, sticking out.
At twelve he had dreams of The Weeker making his fortune by the time he was twenty (Stanley, his mother said, would you for God’s sake GO OUT!) and then his father got up for his fry one Sunday morning and dropped down dead on the bedroom floor. Bam-Bam-boozlum.
At fourteen Stanley left school and went out to work.
He had wanted to be apprenticed to a printer, but, for reasons which at fourteen he was powerless to resist, ended up in a shop off North Street making tea and running messages for two brothers who repaired the electrical appliances which were just then becoming more numerous in the city: kettles, vacuum cleaners, radiograms and, little by little, television sets. The televisions were for the most part big Pyes and Marconis, BBC reception only, bought from London dealers when commercial television came in across the water. You could have got yourself a nine-inch screen for ten or fifteen quid: a little pewter peephole in a wall of teak and Bakelite. Stanley’s family did not yet own one so he got to know television, as it were, from the inside out. Perhaps for this reason he was never overawed by it. Time and again, unscrewing the back of a set in for repair (there was too much work coming in for him to remain a tea boy for long), he was reminded that what he was dealing with was nothing more marvellous than a complex arrangement of tubes and valves and bulbs and wires. He was not entirely immune to the attractions, but mostly he thought of television as a challenge to be mastered.
When he had been with the brothers a couple of years he moved down North Street a way to one of the new rental shops. Northern Ireland had its own commercial station by this time, Ulster Television, or Channel 9 as people called it. No home now was complete without its box. Stanley accompanied the senior engineer on his rounds. He noticed how their van was greeted at some doors like an ambulance come to the aid of a sick relative. He saw children cry when the engineer said there was nothing for it but to take the set away overnight. (But the Lone Ranger’s on today!) He saw fathers and mothers who looked like it was all they could do to stop themselves joining in. It would have made you think. It made Stanley think.
His mother worried that thinking was all Stanley ever did. Go out, she said. While you still have time.
For his eighteenth birthday he took the entire family to Blackpool. He had been saving for this holiday almost from the day and hour he started work.
Blackpool was where his mother and father were to have gone for their honeymoon, only the war got in the way.
It was the last week of August. The younger children spent most of the day at the pleasure beach. His mother seemed content to watch them enjoy themselves or to go for walks along the promenade. Stanley walked with her. He saw his first Punch and Judy show. And his second, and third, and fourth. The dog, the sausages, the baby, the rolling pin. The same every time. It irritated him vaguely in its repetitiveness, its pointlessness, but he would slow his pace anyway as he passed by, watching the arc of children sitting on the sand before the striped tent, rapt.
There was cold tongue for tea the first night in the guest house, corned beef the next. From then on Stanley and his family filled up on fish and chips at lunchtime. They went up the tower and to the pictures once. Stanley tried to persuade his mother to come with him to a show on the pier. His mother wouldn’t hear of it.
‘But you always used to tell me you liked shows.’
‘I used to like a lot of things.’ Stanley’s mother had just turned forty-one. ‘Anyway, you’ve spent enough already.’
She tried to persuade him to take off by himself in the evenings, go to a dance, with people his own age. On the penultimate night, more to please her than anything else, he did go out. Heavy rain had fallen earlier in the afternoon, but now the sun had come through over to the west, burnishing the rooftops and the rumpled spread of the Irish sea.
Stanley was wearing a new sports jacket and grey flannels. He had dithered before deciding to wear a tie, but once outside he took it off and slipped it, rolled, into his jacket pocket. Half a mile from the guest house he admitted to himself he had no idea what he was going to do. He went into the next café he saw and ate an ice-cream sundae. On his way out he bought a packet of cigarettes and stood for a while on the footpath smoking. Girls passed by, smelling of powder, linking arms. Boys younger than Stanley whistled at them or pushed one another into their paths to make them stop and talk.
‘Watch it!’ the girls shouted but stopped and talked all the same. Stanley tried hard not to feel disheartened.
A hundred yards on, he went into a lounge bar across the road from a ballroom with a board in front announcing Dancing Nitely 8 ’til Late. Stanley had never been in a bar or a ballroom in his life. He sipped a half-pint of mild (he hadn’t expected there to be a choice), looking out through the open door of the lounge. There were fellas on the other side of the street wearing leather jackets, jeans with six-inch turn-ups. One of the fellas ran a steel comb through his hair time and again as though there was nothing to be ashamed of in the act of public grooming. Stanley hoped he and his mates weren’t waiting on the ballroom opening. He hoped they weren’t planning on coming into the bar. He watched for forty-five minutes before they moved en masse down the street, but by that time he had no desire to go into a dance on his own.
He ordered another half of mild. The barmaid, a tall, narrow-shouldered woman in her fifties, asked him how he was enjoying his holiday.
‘Grand,’ he said. He remained standing at the bar for a while after his drink was drawn, but the woman said nothing more and eventually he returned to his seat. Two young men came in, dressed alike in sleeveless pullovers and open-necked shirts. They said hello to the barmaid and passed on through a door leading to a bare staircase. A short time later three more men entered and followed them up the stairs. Stanley could hear the thump of their feet overhead, tables or chairs scraping across lino. More men came in. A few bought drinks before joining the gathering above. Stanley thought they might be playing darts up there. He had heard one new arrival ask the barmaid if this was the right place for the league.
‘Go on up if you like, I’m sure you’d be very welcome,’ the barmaid said.
Without realising he was doing it, Stanley had been staring at the ceiling.
‘I don’t really play,’ he said.
The barmaid furrowed her eyebrows, but another man turning away from the bar with a glass in each hand called over to him.
‘You’d best hurry, meeting’ll be starting.’
Forgetting even to lift his drink, Stanley stood up and followed.
It was not a conversion, exactly. Afterwards Stanley reflected that he had been halfway down the road already.
He took a seat at the rear of the room under a heavy-draped window just as the lights were dimmed. On a table in the middle of the floor, a film projector had been set up. Its beam cut a rectangle – cream and gold Anaglypta – out of the darkness on the room’s front wall. The projector clicked and stuttered, the wallpaper took on a bluish hue: a rapid countdown from five to one and then the words Freedom! Castro’s Cuba appeared over an image of the president, his arms laden with flowers, being embraced by a pretty girl in army fatigues. Instantly the scene changed to an open-air school. Palm trees, a far-off suggestion of mountains. Another pretty girl pointed with a stick to the alphabet chalked on a blackboard. Tiny children, seated in an arc before her, bounced up and down on their backsides, mouths moving in silent unison.
A man Stanley couldn’t see spoke from somewhere close to the projector.
‘Eighteen months after the revolution swept them to power, Cuba’s communist leaders have begun the task of eradicating the poverty and illiteracy which under the Batista dictatorship blighted their island home.’
Elderly women looked up from books spread on their laps, squinting into the camera and out from the wall of the Blackpool public house.
‘Old and young alike empowered by education,’ the man went on, obviously reading.
Now men shouldering vast chandeliers of bananas crossed the Anaglypta screen. They waited in line to have the fruit weighed. There were smiles and handshakes. A truck drove off filled to overflowing, odd banana fingers slipping over the tailboard. The men ran alongside waving hats frayed at the brim. The commentator said something which Stanley didn’t take in. He was listening to the distant hurdy-gurdy cacophony of the pleasure beach. There was music too, closer at hand: guitars – the Shadows, Stanley thought – from the ballroom probably. Voices carried, shouts of greeting, fragments of conversation (‘She said to him, you think you’re too big? You’re not too big yet, no, and don’t you forget it’), mingling with the film’s flat Lancastrian commentary, so that the revolution appeared to have been translated into a riotous end-of-pier variety, the more compelling for its familiarity.
Not a conversion, a confirmation.
‘Good night?’ his mother asked when he got back to the guest house.
‘Brilliant,’ said Stanley.
Home again in Belfast he bought himself two lengths of felt, one red, one blue. He folded the lengths in half then drew a shape on each like an oven mitt with two thumbs and cut around them with the scissors from his mother’s workbox. He cut a semi-circle out of the folds, two fingers wide. Heather gave him a hand with the sewing, blue thread for the seams of the red mitt, red thread for the blue. The twins made twin papier maché balls, each with a hole let in it, and painted them as instructed, Philip’s bright yellow, Paul’s vivid pink. Using the finest brush he could buy, Stanley himself painted wide-eyed faces on the curved surfaces. As an afterthought he added a black moustache to the pink ball before gluing it to the blue glove and topped the yellow one with a red felt disc for a cap.
He gave his first performance kneeling behind the kitchen table.
‘Hello,’ he said, making his voice black-moustache gruff and bending the fingers of his right hand so that the blue glove puppet bowed. ‘I’m …’ He didn’t know the name himself until he said it ‘. Rab.’
His left hand shot up. The red puppet faced Heather and the twins, arms spread wide, then moved at speed down the table towards his right hand. Stanley pitched his voice higher.
‘Rab, Rab, I seen a …’
The blue puppet pushed the red one away.
‘You seen nothing,’ (again the name just appeared) ‘Jem.’
‘Oh, Rab, I did,’ Jem said, papier maché head twisted practically back-to-front. ‘I seen a …’
‘Saw, Jem.’ Rab turned to address his small audience. ‘I saw, I have seen.’ (Jem dropped from view, holding on to his hat.) ‘Now what did you see, Jem?
‘Jem?’
‘Wooo,’ said Stanley from under the table. ‘Wooo-oooo.’
He splayed the first and third fingers of his right hand and now Rab’s arms were flung apart.
‘Jem, Jem,’ he said, running this way and that. ‘I seen it too, Jem. Oh, Mummy, Mummy, I seen it too.’
Education through entertainment, that was how he conceived of it. From the very start he set his sights on television’s mass audience. For a year he practised at the kitchen table, performing only to his brothers, his sister, and, when the novelty wore off for them, his mother. He refashioned the papier maché heads, modelling chins and noses. (Rab’s nose was a near-perfect globe.) He replaced Jem’s red beret with a diminutive duncher, though not so diminutive that Jem could stop the peak falling over his eyes, and stuck shoe-brush bristles under Rab’s hooter until the moustache covered his mouth entirely. The insides of the gloves he padded with foam rubber, less for Jem than for Rab, and the outsides he dressed in tan overalls.
Rab and Jem had been friends since they were born. (Later Stanley would make a pair of smaller puppets, Wee Rab and Wee Jem, which he sometimes introduced into the act, one with an orange juice moustache, the other with a satin bonnet flopping over his face.) Stanley invented addresses for them two doors apart off North Queen Street. In the house in-between lived Maisie McClure, fair but formidable, with whom they were both secretly in love.
Rab liked to take charge. He and Jem would be standing around on the corner of the street, wondering what to do with themselves and Rab would tap his hand on his forehead. Now, let me think, he’d say. I know …
It wasn’t that Jem never came up with ideas, Jem in fact was full of them. Rab, though, gave them short shrift, at least until he could convince himself that they were really his ideas all along.
Rab and Jem spent a good deal of time on the street corner. They never were able to hold on to a job for long.
‘Last one in, first one out, that’s all I ever seem to hear,’ Jem complained.
In one early routine the two were deck hands on a cargo ship and had just been told they were going to be paid off when the ship docked in Belfast. Twenty miles off the County Down coast, the ship started to take on water. There was only one lifeboat and only two places left in it. Rab and Jem ran along the deck, the captain off-stage shouting after them: ‘Come back! One of those places is mine.’
Rab and Jem looked at each other then slid down the ropes out of sight.
‘You know the rule,’ Rab shouted as they disappeared. ‘Last one in, first one out.’
At the end of the twelve months, Stanley walked the city with cards for newsagents’ windows. He placed a small ad in the paper.
Introducing ‘RAB and JEM’, Belfast’s BIGGEST little comics. Puppetry at its best! LOW RATES. Book now, family FUN GUARANTEED!
His first engagement was an under-sevens Sunday school party. He had made a sort of lectern for the puppets to perform on with a floor-length black skirt behind which he kneeled on a velour cushion swiped from the settee at home. He did ten minutes. The children listened in silence for the first five. Stanley was starting to sweat, then one boy yelled, ‘Jem, he’s a big bully. Hit him a smack!’
The other children laughed at his daring. Rab’s moustache twitched with indignation, his eyes darting here and there seeking out the boy who had maligned him. The children laughed more. A girl shouted at him, ‘You are so a bully.’
Jem had snuck up behind Rab and now he gave him a dunt in the back knocking him flat on his big round nose. Rab bounced straight back up, Jem put his hands to his cap and fled. It sounded to Stanley, on the other side of the curtain, as though all the children were calling out at once: ‘Run, Jem, run!’
‘Unusual,’ said one of the Sunday school teachers afterwards, handing Stanley his fee.
‘Very,’ said a second, a bake on him that looked like a smile would break it.
That was fine by Stanley, he wasn’t doing his show for Sunday school teachers.
Three months passed before he got another date, a works’ Christmas party on the Albertbridge Road. He did the lifeboat routine which he’d just finished working on, he did the railway porters, where Rab and Jem load Lord and Lady Lucre’s luggage for a weekend in the country: twenty suitcases and trunks Heather had made out of cigarette boxes and tea cartons. He did fifteen minutes and when the audience wouldn’t stop clapping he did five minutes more. The parents were laughing as hard as the kids.
He was off then. For the next few years there was barely a weekend went by without at least one engagement. He splashed out ten pounds on a fifth-hand Ford Popular and added ‘No Distance Too Far’ to his small ad. His mother still worried about his social life. He assured her he was happy as he was yet a while.
‘Just don’t get stuck,’ she said. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to end up on your own.’
There were two or three girlfriends during this time, but none whose idea of a fun Saturday night was driving home along dark country roads from a Tufty Club in Clogher, with a lectern and a pair of glove puppets occupying the entire back seat. The last one had given him the shove after Stanley told her he had to work Valentine’s night.
‘Look me up if you ever figure out something more worthwhile to do with your hands,’ she said.
Stanley, for his part, never once doubted how worthwhile Rab and Jem were. The money wasn’t the thing, rarely in all the years of parties and dos did he make more than a few quid above costs. It was what he was able to say in his little act that was important. (He had one routine about ecumenics. He had one about the B.U.M. for which he made extra puppets: Rab with a white moustache, Jem with a walking stick, still waiting.) And more important than anything else was that he should get to say it on television.
He decided to give himself a year – he would be twenty-five by the end of it – and go semi-pro. For some time past he had been getting neighbours knocking on the door at nights asking would he come and have a look at sets that had gone on the blink. He could still do a bit of that on the side.
After only a month he took first prize in a big talent night in Craigavon and was featured in one of the new local Home Service shows. Even though no one listening would have known if he hadn’t, he had the lectern set up in the radio studio and did his routine kneeling on his mother’s cushion.
Later that week he had a phone installed in the house and waited for it to ring. He picked it up ten times an hour to check it was working. He sent his sister out to the call box down the street and had her phone him.
‘I told you there was nothing wrong with it,’ she said when he answered.
He carried on mending neighbours’ TVs and performing at children’s parties. Money was getting tight, but he couldn’t bring himself to raise his fee. Besides he was still hopeful of a break. He won another competition and the prize was two nights on the bill at Butlin’s, Mosney, when it reopened at Easter. His mother suggested he try to get on to Opportunity Knocks. Heather was to be his proposer and together they wrote a letter to Hughie Green. A fortnight later a reply arrived with details of the auditions in London. It had never occurred to Stanley that there would be auditions. The way it looked on television someone wrote in proposing you and the next thing Hughie Green was asking them who they had brought along for the viewers this evening. The letter pointed out that the auditions were very competitive. Glove puppets, in their experience, tended not to do well. It didn’t matter, Stanley couldn’t have afforded the trip over to England anyway.
Easter and Butlin’s seemed an eternity away. He was lying on his bed one December afternoon, in the room he still shared with the twins, reading the Belfast Telegraph. The Christmas panto had opened for booking in the Grand Opera House. Aladdin: ‘Full West End London Company, including Peters and Dell, Audrey Man, Dennis Clancy, Charles Mylne, Claire Wilson, with Belfast’s own Tom Raymond as Wishee-Washee’. Stanley read an interview with the guest director, Larry Bowen. Thrilled to be in Belfast, thrilled to be in the Grand Opera House, thrilled to be returning to live theatre, taking time out from producing the popular children’s variety programme …
Stanley bent the paper and looked across the room to the chest of drawers on top of which lay Rab and Jem, their heads lolling one against the other.
‘Crackerjack!’ he said.
‘Crackerjack!’ Rab and Jem said back, in sequence, naturally.
Aladdin was booked solid until the Tuesday of its second week, but on the Tuesday of the second week Stanley was in his seat in the front stalls half an hour before curtain up. A family of four boys, all in school blazers, took their places on his left, a man and woman and their early-teenage daughter on his right. The girl sat low in her seat, chewing on a lock of hair.
‘We never miss a year,’ the father confided in Stanley. ‘You can’t beat a good pantomime.’
The lights went down and his daughter sighed.
With good reason, as it turned out. All in all it was a pretty feeble show. The jokes were so crusty no amount of scraping would have dislodged them from the bottom of the barrel. The girl’s father laughed that much he got the hiccups. The two youngest boys on Stanley’s other side nipped each other’s bare legs until their mother cuffed them, whereafter the only time they left off looking sulkily bored was to exchange glances of mingled accusation and threat: You’re dead when I get you home, wee lad.
The panto wore on, old gags and crucified songs. Tom Raymond wasn’t the only thing on stage that was wishee-washee.
Stanley left the theatre a happy man.
He wrote to Larry Bowen, styling himself an admirer of ‘your excellent television work’ who had attended last evening’s performance of Aladdin and found it (would he lie or tell the truth?) immensely enjoyable. (The truth would keep until he had a foot in the door.) He was in the children’s entertainment business himself, a glove-puppet act, which critics had been kind enough to say had the potential for broad popular appeal. Perhaps if he and Mr Bowen could meet …?
He refused to contemplate the possibility that Larry Bowen wouldn’t reply, but when the phone rang the very next afternoon and a woman, identifying herself only as Mr Bowen’s assistant, asked him could he drop by the Opera House that Saturday morning coming, even Stanley was surprised.
Larry Bowen was something of a surprise too. Stanley, who had been expecting a much older man, would have put him at no more than thirty, though his hair was greying above the ears and in the little goatee beard which he had a habit of stroking when not talking.
A brisk young woman – Stanley supposed she was the assistant he had spoken to on Thursday, though she made no reference to that conversation – had met him at the stage door and led him down a corridor and up a flight of stairs at the top of which Larry Bowen was waiting with what seemed an entirely genuine smile on his lips.
‘You must be Stanley. How nice of you to come.’
The woman departed without a word and Larry held a door for Stanley to pass through into a windowless room containing a dozen or so filing cabinets, two folding chairs and a small table. Stanley couldn’t decide whether he was in an over-full office or a store which just happened to have a couple of seats.
‘We shouldn’t be disturbed in here, but you know what theatre is.’
‘Of course,’ lied Stanley.
They sat and for a moment neither said anything more. Stanley had brought a small case with him, which he centred on his lap. Larry Bowen locked his hands behind his head, crossing his legs and wagging one foot gently in the air. Stanley was no expert, but the shoe moving in front of him looked handmade and expensive.
‘Yes,’ said Larry at last, as though in answer to a question Stanley couldn’t remember asking. ‘I think it’s important – when I’m out of London … I like to keep abreast of what you are all up to.’
Stanley did not find that ‘you’ in the least bit patronising. On the contrary, he was rather pleased to be included in Larry’s implied community of entertainers.
‘I’ve had quite a year,’ he said and Larry Bowen nodded. ‘And Christmas, of course, is non-stop.’
‘And then I’ve a short season coming up this Easter in Butlin’s.’
‘Butlin’s?’ Larry Bowen’s foot wagged the harder.
‘Mosney,’ Stanley said. ‘Near Dublin.’ Then, worried that the word season, even qualified, might have been going a bit far, added, ‘It is very short.’
‘But still,’ Larry said encouragingly.
‘Well, yes, that’s the way I look at it.’
They were silent again, then both spoke the same word at the same time: ‘So?’
They laughed. Stanley tapped the top of the suitcase with an index finger.
‘Would you like me to …?’
‘Please.’
Stanley snapped the catches open, Larry pushed his chair back against the wall and leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingertips in beard. Behind the upright lid, Stanley slid his hands into the red and blue puppets. Rab adjusted Jem’s cap, Jem ruffled Rab’s moustache, they nodded their approval to each other and were just about to pop up and introduce themselves to Mr Larry Bowen of Crackerjack! fame when there was a knock at the door and the young woman returned to whisper in Larry’s ear.
‘Oh, dear,’ Larry said. He stood up. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but we appear to have a bit of an emergency all of a sudden. Widow Twankey, throat infection.’
He extended his hand to Stanley who, being unable to extricate his own from Rab in time, was reduced to gesturing with his elbows.
Larry’s hand became a cocked gun.
‘Tell you what, if you make the arrangement with Janet here, I’ll come and catch a performance soon.’
And with that he was gone. Stanley finally shucked off the puppets and closed the suitcase. Janet was flipping through the pages of a large leather-bound diary, frowning.
‘It isn’t going to be easy, you know.’
For the first time since he had written to Larry Bowen, Stanley experienced a distinct sinking feeling.
Janet was right, it wasn’t easy. Larry was due back in London the following Monday and wouldn’t be returning to Belfast until the end of the first week in January. Stanley had no bookings for a fortnight after that. He suggested he simply call in at the theatre again, but Janet was adamant.
‘Mr Bowen wants to see a performance.’
At Stanley’s suggestion she pencilled in 7.15 pm on Monday 23rd. She paused, waiting for the venue.
‘Let’s see,’ Stanley said. ‘It’s towards the top of the Ormeau – e, a, u – Road, on the left-hand side, there’s a church and then a little further on there’s like a path …’
Janet tutted.
‘All I need is the name.’
‘Well that’s just it,’ said Stanley. ‘I’m not sure if there is a name as such.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, the number then.’
They had been walking while they talked and had arrived again at the stage door.
‘If you just write Scout hut,’ Stanley said and left before he would read the contempt in her eyes.
A couple of days into the New Year, he wrote to Larry Bowen again. The Scout hut engagement, he explained, was a longstanding obligation, he hoped he could always find the time to accommodate such worthy causes. Larry replied as soon as he got back. Perfectly understood, couldn’t agree more. He even proposed they meet for a drink – did Stanley know the bar in the International Hotel? – the afternoon of the show so that Stanley could tell him a little more about the act.
In fact they spent an agreeable half-hour (Larry was a little late, understandably) talking about almost everything but Rab and Jem. Larry did say, though, that he had been speaking, unofficially you understand, at dinner, to a colleague in Light Entertainment and they were both of a mind that there were openings for fresh young talent in the glove-puppet line.
He touched Stanley’s sleeve as he rose to return to the Opera House.
‘Don’t worry about this evening, I’ll just slip into the back of the room. I am looking forward to it very much.’
Despite these reassuring words, Stanley had to struggle to quell the nerves three hours later as he went through his final preparations in the kitchen at the rear of the Scout hut, listening to the excited chatter of the Cubs out front. He had not been entirely untruthful when he told Larry this was a long-standing obligation, for he had played here once before and had been asked back. Appreciative audience, he remembered (Stanley kept a record of all his engagements), but no pushover. He told himself a touch of nerves was no bad thing, stopped you becoming complacent.
The Scout master rapped on the kitchen door.
‘Ready?’
‘Ready,’ said Stanley and then the lights were switched out and he had fifteen seconds to crawl into position behind the lectern’s black drape. The forward lights came back on. Stanley stretched his left hand above his head.
‘Hiya, Jem,’ a Cub Scout called and for the next twenty-six minutes the hut was a tumult of shouts and laughter.
He couldn’t recall a better show. The boys clapped and whistled and stamped their feet in the darkness which brought it to a close. The Scout master came back to the kitchen to congratulate him. He offered Stanley a cup of tea. Stanley declined. A friend of his was probably waiting to have a word.
‘Tall man, wee beard?’ the master asked.
‘That’s him.’
‘He left.’
Stanley wondered could there have been two such men in the hall; decided not.
‘I let him out myself,’ the Scout master said. ‘Halfway through.’
It was nothing to get worked up over. Leaving halfway through wasn’t in itself a bad sign. Larry Bowen was a busy man – he had a show of his own to think about, for goodness sake; thirteen minutes might have been enough to convince him and he did say he would be as unobtrusive as possible. It had been a good performance, the first half if anything stronger than the second. No, there was no need at all to worry. Stanley even managed to sleep late the next morning. Philip and Paul were both at work, Heather, a nurse now, was on nights and was already in bed. His mother was out doing the things his mother did to put in her day since she’d gone on the sick two years before with her back: shopping, dropping in on friends.
Stanley lifted the lid of the porridge pot on the back ring of the stove and found someone had already set it to soak in Fairy Liquid. The bubbles had retreated to the sides, sliming the surface of the water. A solid circle of porridge, worked loose from the bottom of the pot, lolled in oily suspension, reminding Stanley of the jars in the science block at school with their bleached, arrested foetuses. He replaced the lid.
The family’s assortment of cups, saucers and plates had dripped almost dry on the rack on the draining board. Floral patterns, blue and yellow checks, an abstract design of coffee tables and lamps. He ate a bowl of All Bran standing with his back to the kitchen sink. A women’s magazine lay folded open at the horoscopes page on Heather’s chair. Stanley briefly contemplated consulting his own stars, but decided that even reading them in jest lent them too much credibility.
He tried to invest the moment with a sense of ending. All these fixtures and furnishings would change. It would be the first thing he did, after he had moved out himself of course. The phone bill was overdue and he had given his mother the fee from last night’s show leaving himself more or less skint. That too seemed appropriate. He imagined, years from now, reminiscing: I’d barely enough in my pocket that morning for ten Park Drive.
It was mid-afternoon before the doubts began to nag. His mother had been home and gone out again. Heather came down to the front room and sat on the settee, the hem of her nightie tucked under her feet.
‘I thought you were away to London,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well I won’t be taking you along to write my scripts.’
Heather made a face – sorry I spoke – and pulled another magazine from under the cushion. Stanley stared at the telephone, squat and black and silent.
‘Do you think …?’ he began and then saw his sister’s raised eyebrows. ‘Never mind.’
He fetched his coat and walked to the shop for his ten Park Drive, but instead of returning home he carried on into town. The matinée had just come down in the Opera House. When he asked at the stage door, however, he was told that Mr Bowen was unavailable. Could he have a word with Janet, then? But, no, Janet had taken the afternoon off. Stanley left a note. He would be in the bar of the International Hotel if Larry had a moment free.
Walking away from the theatre he remembered he hadn’t a penny to buy a drink.
He tried to make himself inconspicuous, though not so inconspicuous that Larry Bowen would have an excuse for having missed him, and remained, dry, in the bar for as long as he could bear the glare of the belligerent-looking black-browed barman. The second time he called at the theatre he was informed that Mr Bowen had left for the day.
The evening sky was the colour of mud. When at last he reached home, Stanley had been walking through sleet for a quarter of an hour, so that even Heather’s note on the pad by the phone failed to take away the chill he felt:
Harry Bowen rang. (Clever Heather.) Sorry ’bout today. Tomorrow OK? Same time, same place.
‘How do I put this?’ Larry Bowen said.
He had arrived in the Blue Bar twenty minutes late, not as long as Stanley had been preparing himself to have to wait, but long enough to erode what little confidence he had been able to salvage from yesterday afternoon. The interview, having started badly, got worse. Stanley thought Larry found this highly amusing on some level, as though they had been talking at cross-purposes all along and were able now to see the funny side.
‘Your act is very, ah … Well, they’re Belfast puppets.’
Stanley took a drink so as not to say anything too rash.
‘But I thought I explained that to you.’
Now Larry Bowen really did laugh.
‘Oh, yes, you said. At least, I knew they were Irish. It’s just I was expecting … oh, you know.’
‘No,’ said Stanley, too miserable to make this any easier. ‘I don’t.’
‘Green suits – the little red beards?’
‘Leprechauns?’
‘Yes,’ said Larry. ‘Sort of.’ Then hopefully: ‘Leprechauns are instantly recognisable.’
Stanley let his gaze rove round the Blue Bar where very un-leprechaun-like Belfast men drank and chatted and smoked cigarettes.
‘You do see what I’m saying?’
‘I think so.’
Larry Bowen seemed to take heart from this.
‘It’s all a matter of what the public will accept.’
‘Like Liverpool?’ Stanley was thinking Doddie’s fucking Diddie Men.
‘Ah, well, now, Liverpool’s a little different. Liverpool we’ve – people in the rest of England, I mean – we’ve grown accustomed to it. And then, of course, some of your material …’
‘I’m coming up with new stuff all the time.’
Larry Bowen blinked away the interruption and made a mallet of his fist to drive the point home.
‘All that business about class …’ His voice tailed off, found volume again. ‘These are children we’re dealing with.’
‘It’s the world,’ said Stanley simply.
‘To you, maybe.’
Stanley was telling himself there was always Easter and Butlin’s. He was telling himself Crackerjack! wasn’t the only programme on TV. He was telling himself just about anything that would stop him wanting to hit Larry Bowen or burst into tears.
‘Another drink?’ Larry asked by way of conciliation.
Stanley shook his head. A minute passed. The Blue Peter hornpipe ran its jaunty course in the background.
‘Well, then.’ Larry stood. ‘I am sorry I can’t be of more help.’
Stanley took his offered hand. What else was he to do?
‘If ever you do have an idea you think might be more in our line …’
‘Of course,’ said Stanley.
‘Good luck, then.’
Two legal-types stepped apart to let him pass. He checked a moment and turned back.
‘The leprechauns, you know, would have a definite appeal. Just a thought.’
Walking home, however, Stanley had a better thought. Rab and Jem would disguise themselves as leprechauns to try and get work in England. They would be useless of course, terrible accents, beards coming unstuck. The worse they were the funnier it would be, a complete send-up of all the stereotypes, ending perhaps – yes, why not? – with their own. I mean, who wore a flat cap these days in Belfast?
He wrote the routine that night, laughing aloud several times, and next morning borrowed money from Heather to take it into town to be typed. He left the envelope with the doorman at the Opera House with instructions to deliver it into Larry Bowen’s hands. Saturday was the final night of the pantomime. The day after, Larry was leaving town for good. Stanley enclosed a handwritten note with the typed pages, requesting one last meeting in the International Hotel.
*
Janet it was who had come, black polo-necked, into the Blue Bar that morning of the fire with word that Larry Bowen was too tied up to get away. But Stanley by now was desperate. He would come round to the Opera House himself. (Janet didn’t think that was a good idea.) He would return to the bar later. He would wait until closing time if need be.
Janet shrugged.
‘So, wait,’ she said.
I wish I could tell you I got Stanley’s story straight from his own mouth. I wish I could tell you a lot of things I can’t. Like that I didn’t think Larry Bowen might have had a point; that Stanley’s act didn’t sound to me too like the worst load of crap.