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Walking into the Wind
By John O’Farrell (abridged)
There’s a moment when you’re up on stage when you suddenly become aware that everyone is looking at you; that the entire room is totally focused upon what you are doing. For that precious hour or so the audience completely loves you and that is why being on stage is the greatest job in the world.
‘You have got to be the luckiest bloke I know,’ said Richard the first time he saw me perform at the Edinburgh Festival. ‘Twenty-three years old; doing exactly what you want to do, everyone thinks you’re great; no office, no boss, no suit and you get paid a fortune to boot.’
Fifteen minutes earlier I’d been bowing as two hundred people cheered me and clapped and shouted for more. Now we sat in the pub opposite the theatre and I counted out the two hundred pounds cash that I’d just been paid. I knew it took Richard and Neal a couple of weeks to earn that much money, so I thought I’d better just check it again. A beautiful girl approached our table and asked for my autograph. She blushed and told me that she’d really enjoyed my show and thought I was brilliant. My friends looked on open-mouthed as a I scribbled my name in her programme. It was the first time this had ever happened to me. ‘You sort of get used to it,’ I told them.
I think that day was the first time they understood why I’d refused to follow them into the slavery of a normal job. Now that they’d glimpsed this world of fringe festivals, they couldn’t believe that this was my everyday life. They quizzed me about the actresses I met, the festivals I’d played and the European capitals I’d visited. They were impressed, amazed and jealous and I realized why I’d got them there. I was engineering envy.
And yet they’d thought I was completely mad when I’d first told them what I was going to do when I left school.
‘Mime?’ they’d said. ‘That’s not a job.’ Everyone’s reaction had been the same. My home town of Dorking was home to the national headquarters of Friends Provident Insurance. The job of my school careers adviser seemed to consist of getting sixth formers into his office, establishing in which particular department of Friends Provident they imagined themselves spending the rest of their lives and then setting up the job interview.
It wasn’t until about halfway through the interview that I finally summoned up the courage to tell him: “I don’t want to work at Friends Provident. I want to be a mime artist.’
* * *
I spent a couple of years living at home and signing on the dole. My parents worried about me and I was sullen and withdrawn. In the end it was my mother who secretly encouraged me to apply to the famous Jacques Lecoq’s school in Paris. ‘You get your interest in the theatre from me,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen everything Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ever done.’
Paris was a revelation. I studied pantomime. I used no words and so had to work much harder to communicate with my audience: I had to be an actor, dancer and a gymnast.
The next year, Richard and Neal came and saw me at the Glastonbury Festival and were really positive about the show. They both had company cars by now. As they left the next day I watched them pull away and then I saw Richard stop at the top of the lane to get his suit out of the boot and hang it up in the back of the car.
I continued to tour around the country, although it became a little frustrating when one or two of the venues in which I had done really well still didn’t want me back the following year. Then I secured a booking at the Pontefract Arts and Leisure Venue. It was a great show. A two-hour mime tackling issues like the environment and the annihilation of the indigenous people of the Amazon basin by the multinational mining corporations.
‘Was it about Jack and the Beanstalk?’ said Richard afterwards. ‘When you were doing all that chopping – I thought that might be Jack chopping down the beanstalk.’
‘That was the destruction of the rainforest,’ I said. Honestly! I think I really conveyed the terrible suffering that was happening in Brazil. Because the audience looked quite depressed by the end of the evening.
The following Christmas Eve we went on a pub crawl through Dorking as we’d always done when Richard let slip that he and Neal had already booked to go to Club Mark Warner with their girlfriends at the end of June.
‘What about Glastonbury?’ I said.
‘Erm, to be honest Guy...’ he said, ‘Well, it’s quite interesting to see someone do it once or twice. But I’m just a bit bored with all that white make-up. And Sally doesn’t like mime. She likes musicals.’
A couple of years went by and before I knew it their girlfriends had become their wives. It was at Neal’s wedding that I met Carol. We had a modest little wedding at the registry office and then round to the pub for a couple of pints. At closing time her dad took me aside and went all serious on me. He told me that before he was married he’d been in a jazz band. But he said that when he started a family he realized his priorities had to change. ‘Message received,’ I said to him.
Carol worked in the health service, dealing with psychologically disturbed children, which was tough for her because it wasn’t always easy to get time off to come to the shows. But in the evening we’d talk about all the problems we’d had at work – trying to hang on to my Arts Council grant, trying to discover why I’d not been invited to perform at the London Mime Festival.
‘Guy,’ she said one day, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’
Carol had planned to go back to work after she’d had the baby, but then we had another one and she couldn’t bear to leave them. ‘We can live on what I earn,’ I said, confident that this suggestion would be contradicted. When she agreed with me I wanted to say ‘Are you mad?’
Things were obviously a bit tight after Carol gave up work to look after the boys, but sometimes I worried that she was turning into a breadhead like everyone else. She wanted us to get a car, she started going on about life insurance and a pension. So Carol and I had our ups and downs like any couple. She worried about us being in debt and the boys seemed to be costing more and then one day she just suddenly came out with it. ‘Guy, you’re forty-one years old,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you should be a mime artist any more.’
* * *
There comes a point in a man’s life when he must face up to his responsibilities; when he has to put his family first and sacrifice the dreams he had when he was young and carefree. This was the theme I explored in my next mime. I actually re-enacted that moment with Carol – at the very end of the show I said out aloud, ‘And my wife told me not to be a mime artist any more!’ You should have heard the applause.
I know why she’d said it. All her friends at Dorking had money and husbands with flashy cars and thought that Carol was strange because she didn’t have a nanny or a black labrador. They were always going on at her about me, like I was some sort of threat to their comfy existence. Why did people always imply I ought to be spending my life doing something else?
Eventually we got so far into debt that I had to take some drastic action. So I swallowed a few principles and joined the other commuters on the 9.07 from Dorking to Waterloo. I started doing a bit of street theatre up at Covent Garden. I had a private chuckle about the irony of it all, because there was me dressed as a robot when of course the real robots were all those poor office workers who came out to watch me during their one-hour lunch-break.
Then came the day when I lost my Arts Council grant as well. They said they didn’t have to give a reason. I’ve reapplied for Arts Council funding every year since, but with no success so far. I was spending so much of my time writing letters that I had a rather good idea. Instead of doing all my office work from the kitchen table with the kids getting under my feet, I’ve got myself a part-time job, which allows me to do all my admin and get paid at the same time.
That’s why I’m sitting here. I haven’t told them it’s only a temporary arrangement, but I’m just doing it to clear a few debts till I get some funding. I sit in this little booth from 7 a.m. till 3 p.m. and when the cars come into the car park I press the button and the gate goes up. And then I press another button and the gate goes down.
I wanted to talk to Richard about corporate sponsorship for my next show, but it never seemed the right moment. ‘You’re the luckiest bloke I know,’ Richard said to me once. Well, he didn’t say that as he drove past this morning – he was too busy talking on his mobile. Neal and Richard are renting a converted farmhouse this summer, swimming pool for the kids and everything. I think they knew we wouldn’t be able to afford it, so they didn’t embarrass me by inviting us along. Anyway I can’t commit to dates in the summer, I’m going to be touring the next show by then, probably. But sitting in this box all day, you do sometimes wonder if anybody really cares. Richard and Neal stopped coming years ago. Even Carol didn’t come to my last production. Talk about walking into the wind. It seems that more people want to go and see the latest Julia Roberts movie than mime about the African AIDS crisis – what does that say about our society? It’s freezing inside this little box. I wonder if Richard could get me a job inside the main building.
| COMPREHENSION EXERCISES |
47. Find the Russian for:
the job interview; to sign on the dole; a revelation; out of the boot; a venue; we went on a pub crawl; a wedding at the registry office; to go (all serious) on sb.; to have one’s ups and downs; things were ... tight; to face up to one’s responsibilities; to clear a few debts; I can’t commit to dates; it’s freezing inside.
48. Find the English for:
в придачу вы получаете кучу денег; смотреть, раскрыв рот; консультант по трудоустройству; угрюмый; замкнутый, углубленный в себя; истребление коренного населения; не успел я оглянуться, как…; отвести кого-то в сторонку; родить ребенка; возражать; беззаботный; принять решительные меры; безуспешно/безрезультатно; мешаться под ногами; идти против ветра/плыть против течения.