So Me (12 page)

Then a lady was standing at the end of a trolley. We were in a room now. She was holding a thin tube. ‘This is a catheter and I’m just going to insert it into your penis.’ In a slow flash I was seven or eight years old and pouring salad cream on warm boiled beetroot. My Aunt Hannah was explaining a procedure they had performed on my Uncle Cecil in hospital. I remember at the time thinking that whatever it was that having that cured I didn’t care, I’d prefer to die. Now, all these years later, they were about to do it to me and I couldn’t do a thing to stop them. I couldn’t do a thing.

Bright sunlight woke me, streaming in through tall windows the next morning. Fans turned slowly on the ceiling. This might have been the St Charles hospital somewhere in the tropics. I didn’t feel like moving much, but I could see that I was attached to a bag of blood and some other tubes were coming out of my side and of course there was the Uncle Cecil special coming out of my cock. I had to ring Mike to tell him I would probably be late for my shift in Melange that night. Just then a nurse approached and asked me if I wanted to phone anyone. I gave her Mike’s number. She looked at me as if we were talking at cross purposes.

‘Would you like us to call your parents?’ she asked.

I processed this question. If they phoned them they would panic and get on a plane and come to London. What a waste of money if I was going to be all right. I looked up at the nurse and asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable, straightforward question.

‘Am I going to die?’

The nurse did something before she replied that I really don’t think was great in terms of bedside manner. She hesitated, and then almost stumbled over the word ‘No’.

Oh my God, I might die. This is serious; I may not get to Central on Monday to be in our second-year showing of
A Winter’s Tale
.

Another nurse came up.

‘Someone called Ashley rang,’ she said.

I gave a weak smile. Ashley knew and cared.

‘He said he’ll be in to see you later, he’s busy today,’ she continued.

Of course he was busy. Today was the day of his self-help group seminar. What could be more important than that?
Your lover lying with less than half of his blood left inside him in a hospital bed maybe? What blood did remain was boiling.

Mike Belben and my friend Helen from Smiths had started dating, so they turned up together. Rather helpfully, Helen walked in, looked at me and burst into tears. In her defence this turned out to be a fairly common visitor reaction. I obviously didn’t look great.

I slept as people stood around whispering. At six o’clock, handsome Ashley walked in and lit up the room. I hated myself, but I was thrilled to see him. He sat by my bed and, fighting back the tears, explained to me in as much detail as he could what I should have known he would say all along – that this was about him. It was about him collapsing in the hallway when the police came to bring him the news in the middle of the night. It was about him standing up at his fucking self-help conference and telling them all about what had happened and asking them to focus their healing energy on me. I can only imagine the expression on my face, and still he asked me with the wide-eyed glee of the truly deluded, ‘Did you feel anything?’ I had lost half my blood and all of my boyfriend.

I didn’t make it to Melange or Central. I lay in that ward for two and a half weeks as they drained blood off my lungs. Visiting me was pretty much on the timetable of every drama student in my year. Large groups with leggings and scarves gathered by my bed and made a note of how they were feeling at that moment so that they could remember the emotions later when they got a part in
Casualty
. Other people came too, policemen, ladies with forms explaining how I
could get counselling, others with forms explaining how I could get compensation. For the first few days the people I really wanted to visit me were world leaders. As I lay there I felt like I knew the answer to everything – world peace, hunger, history. I was like Solomon with a tube coming out of my cock. Sadly, this feeling faded quite fast and I went back to wondering if we’d get cream or custard with our pudding.

When I finally got out I was back in the flat with Ashley, but not for long. We had given notice, accepting that we and the flat were over. I was moving to Brixton to live in a room in a house, and Ashley was going to Hawaii on borrowed money for a conference on immortality. By now I found it hard to look at him without spitting. Immortality? I wanted to shake him. ‘Save yourself some money, you fuckwit – you are going to die, but hopefully not before you pay the money back to the stupid bitch who lent it to you!’

For some reason Ashley wanted us to remain friends. To stop his mindless rambling, I promised we would be. As he headed off to the airport for Hawaii, he made a great show of hugging me and crying. Dry-eyed I patted his back and thought to myself, ‘You’ll have to live for a fuck of a long time before I’ll ever want to see you again.’ He shut the door and I didn’t see him for fourteen years and when I did it was the sort of meeting you fantasise about having with an ex. I had lost weight and gained money and fame. All the things that normally embarrass or annoy me like fawning waiters or kids banging on the restaurant windows to attract my attention gave me a truly deep satisfaction. I’m not proud of the feeling, but I cannot deny the pleasure it gave me.

6

The Feeble Has Landed

I
WASN’T ALLOWED TO WORK
, and Central had broken up for the summer break. I wasn’t good at simply hanging around, so I decided to take full advantage of my new single status and post-stabbing skinniness. I booked a flight to Athens and decided I’d head to Mykonos, which was at that time the only gay haven I could think of apart from San Francisco.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t booked my accommodation, nor had I realised it was a state holiday. I ended up having to do the unthinkable: camp. I didn’t have a sleeping bag let alone a tent, but I didn’t have a choice either, and so as the moon shone down and a gritty wind blew across the island, I was to be found lying on a towel, wearing most of the clothes that I had brought with me and a sweater wrapped around my head.

During the day I would leave my bag with my passport and traveller’s cheques sitting in an unlocked zip-up holdall on the campsite. Perhaps it was a sort of post-stabbing fatalistic attitude to life, but remarkably that bag sat there for the next five nights untouched. Sadly, so did I. Bronzed, beautiful gay guys from all over the world roamed the island oblivious to the very needy boy with a fresh scar on his chest. Apart from ordering drinks or meals, I did not speak to one other person for five consecutive days. Looking back
this seems extraordinary for me, but I must have been much more emotionally bruised by the mugging and by Ashley’s behaviour than I had realised.

On the last day a Canadian jewellery designer spoke to me on the beach. As he approached me I actually did that thing of looking behind me to see who he was walking towards. Would I like to meet him for a drink later? We chatted a little. He was quite sweet and we talked easily, although I was a bit on the defensive. He walked me back to the entrance to the campsite and asked me if I’d like to have dinner with him. I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘Well, I’ve got to eat.’

He looked a little taken aback. I thought an apology explaining that this was the first time I’d spoken to someone in a week wouldn’t help.

I still don’t know why I didn’t sleep with the jewellery man. I ended up bunking up with him in his hotel in town, we rubbed copious amounts of aftersun on each other, I imagine I even got a hard-on. To the cynical, sex-starved man who is writing this now, it makes no sense, but maybe I didn’t want casual sex, I wanted to fall in love again. If I had known how many years that would take to happen, I’m sure I would have happily accepted a designer pearl necklace that night.

Back in London with the sort of tan that you usually only see in a sample book at World of Leather, I was starting over again. No Ashley and a new home. I’d moved to Brixton, and the man who owned the house, Henry, was one of the sweetest, gentlest men I’d ever met. The house was one of those classic three-storeyed terraced houses with a small back garden leading out from a tiny lean-to kitchen. Thanks
to Henry the whole place had a rural, Bohemian feel full of piano music and bubbling pots of red cabbage.

My final year of drama school was great and mainly consisted of a series of full-scale productions that were open to the public and, far more importantly, agents. This was what the whole process had been about, and tensions ran very high around casting time. People crowded in front of the noticeboard to see who had got which part, and every so often someone would run, shrieking with frustration and disappointment, into the ladies’ loo. A gaggle of actresses who wanted to explain how much they wished they hadn’t got such a big role, and, of course, to check out the quality of the crying, would usually follow. I know that if it hadn’t been for the stabbing I would have got sucked into the whole drama, but somehow my ambition had never reached the same level again. I got a good range of parts and tried to do them as well as I could, no more, no less.

Sadly, this sometimes wasn’t quite good enough. Dame Judi Dench came to the school to direct
Macbeth
. I have no idea what possessed her to do this, and as she stood in front of the assembled cast, the expression on her face seemed to suggest that she didn’t know either. Dan Mullane, the man I knew from Cork, got the lead and Saskia Wickham got to give her Lady M. I was stood at the notice-board for some time before I found out what my parts were. A lucky public was to enjoy my Donalbain and my Second Murderer. I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t memorable in these roles, but years later, when I was on the radio show
Loose Ends
, Ned Sherrin asked Judi, who was a guest, who had played the best Donalbain she had ever seen.

‘Donalbain,’ she laughed. ‘Isn’t that part normally cut?’

More laughter. Ned explained that the person who had played the role in her production at Central was sitting at the table. A panicked expression came over her face and her eyes darted around the group. She turned to the man on her right. ‘Of course, how . . .’

‘Not him!’ barked Ned.

It took her three guesses before she stumbled upon me. I like to think that had he asked about the Second Murderer, she would have immediately remembered me.

The biggest lesson I learnt during that final year was that I couldn’t play a serious role. Try as I might, through no choice of my own, people only saw me as a clown. I remember once while rehearsing Ibsen’s
Ghosts
, the director was putting me through my paces as Oswald. I was supposed to be positioning someone so I could draw their portrait. I was fully into the part as I tilted the woman’s face towards the light. I grabbed an imaginary brush. Suddenly I was wrenched back to the harsh reality of the classroom. The director exploded, ‘You’re supposed to be an artist, not a fucking window dresser!’ At first I was crushed that I couldn’t do heavyweight, but then I noticed that the light, silly roles that I found relatively easy some people couldn’t do at all. I had always been the funny one at work in the restaurant or at home, so it made sense.

In the summer of 1989, as we said farewell to Central, it would have been a brave bookie to take odds on who would become successful. A remarkable number of us are still working, and even more remarkably are still friends, but very few of us have names that the average reader would recognise. Perhaps that is no bad thing; perhaps it is just shallow me who judges success in terms of fame.

The really lucky ones left with jobs already lined up. Sadly, that didn’t include me, but I was still relatively confident because at least I had managed to get an agent. Barry Brown was the perfect agent: loud, brash and very pragmatic. I had a meeting in his house and was suitably impressed by the furniture and paintings on the wall. If he was this rich on ten percent, imagine being the person who held on to the ninety percent. I sat back and waited for the auditions and the money to come flooding in.

There is a lot of talk in drama schools about agents and what role they play in an actor’s career. ‘When you get one, don’t forget that they are working for you – you are calling the shots,’ is what you usually hear. Of course the reality is very different and you soon realise that as a client they are doing you a favour by representing you. I quickly learnt this and stopped expecting the phone to ring. In fairness to Barry, I did get my first job quite quickly. In September I was temporarily rescued from waiting tables and whisked off to, if not exactly star in, appear in
Shadow
of a Gunman
by Sean O’Casey at the Liverpool Playhouse. I was thrilled. I would be playing the parts of Tommy and of an English soldier. Thanks to Equity, the actor’s union that said that no two members could have the same name, Graham Walker was no more. From now on, I was Graham Norton, working actor.

I read the play, I marked my lines, I worked on the text. No matter that these were tiny parts – they would be perfectly performed. I got on the train full of shock and excitement that I was going to be earning money doing the one thing I had always wanted to do. When I got there, I found that a couple of other actors were nearly as inexperienced as me,
but that for the most part the all-Irish cast were old hands who took it all in their stride. I quickly discovered that my new friend in the cast would be a man called Desmond Jordan. Funny and handsome, with a heart that contained just the right-sized streak of mean, he was exactly the sort of man I would fall in love with. The slight complication was that he was in his early seventies. Still, I had a new friend and it gave my heart hope that there were other people out there who could be just as nice and interested as Ashley had been before his transformation.

Home was a big boarding house near the cathedral. The other people staying there seemed to be mostly unhappy women who ate nothing but toast and silent young men who never did laundry. Also in residence was the city’s mice population. Tiny furry friends were everywhere you looked: on top of the TV, jumping out of the grill when you turned it on to make toast . . . Once there was even one floating whiskers down in someone’s bath water.