One Last Brodie
He hated car work but it was good money. They paid him by the hit, so if he did three takes he made nine hundred quid. "You feel every penny in the morning, he said. "Hurts like a grand and a half.
I sneaked on set once, despite his warnings. It was a location shoot in the Peak District for some doctor programme. With a drenched baseball cap pulled down low, he stepped off the pavement into the path of a Ford Mondeo, which struck his knees at about seven miles-per-hour. He skidded across the bonnet and finished in a puddle, face down dead, the peak of his cap against the tarmac. I could see the actor he was doubling, in the same clothes, off to the left under the make-up girl's clear plastic umbrella. There was a light natural drizzle that evening, but the rain machine fired a localised downpour at my man.
"Again? he said, rising.
He had thought about jacking it in before I came along. When we met, he had already quit the movie work and started running his self-defence classes. I think I was in the remedial group. We were so out of shape that we never even got to do any self-defence. Instead we worked on flexibility as a pre-cursor to movement. He made us stretch. Toni, my best friend and gym buddy, called us the PE class (Pie Eaters). We all ogled him. He had a slow careful way of telling you what to do, and a face full of concern. Great arse too, let's not kid ourselves.
"Push your hand down along your shinbone and feel the stretch. Far as it will go, he'd say. And Toni, mimicking his deep voice, would whisper this alternative commentary to me from the next stretch mat:
"Push your hand down my crab ladder and into my ill-advised shorts. Feel my shaven balls in your fist. Etc.
Puerile I know, but isn't it so funny when you're not supposed to laugh? And he was so serious.
Although I was quite forward in those days, I didn't talk to him because I was busy looking physically retarded and being fat in my gym clothes. It was not the time of the week when I felt at my most empowered. Nevertheless, our bodies send us signals, so they say, and at the end of one of our sessions he strolled over to help me stretch out my calves. I was lying on my back with my left leg in the air. Not a bad end to a romantic encounter, but a poor start. He took hold of my trainer and gently eased my toes down.
That's when it happened.
The most embarrassing type of wind. The kind that makes a woman feel helpless. Toni calls it 'Lady Trumpets'. There was an initial 'release', and when he moved my leg back it happened again. His expression remained unchanged: the same vague worry. To my credit, I was stoical. Under normal circumstances I would surely have made a brazen wisecrack. I was a coarse girl back then, partly because I wanted to express my contempt for old-fashioned ideas of femininity and partly because I was common, and a tart. But I must have realised the importance of this moment, for I closed my eyes and blushed until he moved on to Toni.
"Don't mind our Becky, said my best friend. "She likes to let her foo do the talking.
In the changing-rooms, I began to laugh it off. This, after all, was the pattern all my relationships took: I liked a bloke, I opened my legs, I humiliated myself, and he ended up walking away in disgust. I had been fortunate this time, to avoid the whole rigmarole of peach schnapps, fabricated childhood memories, tears, snot, itchiness, vomit, loud Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen, along with the threat and sometimes realisation of violence. I almost congratulated myself. Despite my poor physical condition, I was prolific in the early stages of seduction because I had discovered that simple secret: men ' especially the bad ones ' always say yes when asked. Most, however, regret it. I felt glad that I had not come to see regret on the craggy face of Mick Sadler.
But you know that's not the end of it.
When Toni and I had said goodbye, I saw him in the car park. Usually he sprinted to his car to get away from one or other of the old dears from Pie Eaters. This time though, he meandered around and pretended he had lost his keys. I looked on, dazzled and dubious. After a while he tiptoed over and asked me if I wanted a lift. Who was I to speculate on the nature of attraction?
He drove a Mercedes that his mother had bought him with his money. Never looked comfortable in it. He must have been feeling particularly awkward that night, wondering why he'd invited me into its cavernous cockpit (I wondered myself). I spent most of the journey trying to think of something to talk about other than vaginal flatulence. Don't, I thought. This is what always happens.
"I'm sorry about what happened in the class today. The noises, I said. Fuck. The noises? Idiot.
I thought he'd deny all knowledge but he proceeded with his professional sincerity. "Look. That happens all the time. Nothing to be embarrassed about. And you dealt with it well. I've had women run out crying before now.
"How ridiculous. I just wanted you to know that it was nothing personal.
"Personal?
"I mean it wasn't aimed at you, I said.
He turned his head away to check for a gap at a roundabout. Great, I thought. He's sickened. But his shoulders were shaking. "Are you laughing? I asked.
"'Wasn't aimed at you,' he repeated, giggling. "I'm sorry.
He surprised me, so I laughed too. "I thought about blaming it on arse wind but that's hardly much better, is it? I said.
He cracked up then. A silent laugh, all about the helpless movement of a body so used to being under control. That made it all the more gorgeous, of course.
The next night I got smashed and wrote a text message to him that started, "I know I don't have your number but¦
Mick Sadler, or Michael Mayer as he was known in the credits, had been working as a stunt-person for eleven years when I met him. He was thirty-four. "I'm eighty-eight in stunt years, he used to say. Many stuntmen get involved through relatives in the business, but Mick came from the civilian world, having briefly trained as a repairman for a telephone company, shinning up poles. In that way, he had something in common with those early stuntmen, the Keystone Kops ' a bunch of steeplejacks, sign-painters, rodeos, clowns and punch-drunk bare-knuckle fighters who had what the Careers Adviser would call 'transferable skills'.
He was short and well-built. Other men sized him up in pubs, the way men do, working out if they'd beat him in a fight. I wanted to tell them (I did, once or twice, in the early days) that they did not stand a chance. You see, in order to qualify for the British Stunt Register, Mick had to excel in the following disciplines: fencing, karate, gymnastics, horse-riding, high-board diving, sub-aqua, swimming, and trampolining. "Didn't do sky-diving, he told me, that night in his car.
"Why not? I asked, mock-disappointed.
"Not much call for it.
No, I didn't suppose there was.
His first job was to fall off a roof on 'The Bill'. He did four takes. And all DC Burnside had to do was say 'slag' in a slightly threatening way. He gave me the usual sound bite: "People think you have to be crazy, he said. "But it's really the opposite. My job is to keep the actors safe. I don't do anything if it isn't safe.
And yet.
And yet he had broken almost every bone in his body. A battering ram had dropped on his arm in a medieval epic and, a year after we got together, a horse stood on his head and nearly killed him. That was in a fairytale.
I think he'd wanted to act at some point, but had been too embarrassed to say. His mother had certainly formulated grander plans for him. On our first Christmas together, having sneaked into his mother's spare bedroom, I challenged him about it. I said I suspected him of being a closet extrovert. "But you're too nice, I said. "You got bullied into doing the job nobody else wanted.
He denied it of course, but with telling words. "My whole objective is to make sure no-one sees who I am. If I wanted to be an actor, I certainly went a funny way about it.
It's difficult to say exactly why, but those words are so significant to me. He had a funny way of going about things and that's the truth.
I loved him straight away, and I knew he didn't want to do his job any more. "My GP told me that you build up a higher pain threshold in time. The more you get injured, the less it hurts. There's a limit though, I suppose.
"Have you hit the limit? I asked him, coaxingly, in my attic flat.
"It's the psyching up I struggle with, nowadays. You have to really get really ready for it. It's those first few minutes when I wake up.
Over the next couple of years, I witnessed those minutes, and they hurt me too.
He changed me and I'm not ashamed of that. These people on the TV always commend each other for 'being themselves', but what's wrong with trying to improve? Okay, I didn't become the Virgin Mary (it doesn't grow back). I still had a potty mouth and an unstable streak. And it wasn't like he told me to get my act together, or insulted me into action. I remember lying on the rug with him on New Year's Eve. Just me, him, Jools Holland and guests. "Why doesn't your Mum like me? I asked.
"Because you drink and smoke and laugh with your mouth open and swear. And you're quite clearly filthy. All the reasons I like you, really.
"Hootananny, I said.
He turned onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. He had spent the previous day doubling Nigel Havers, dodging a chandelier which fell onto a bed. "Lying down makes me nervous, he said.
"Lying down makes me wonder why I ever get up, I said, laughing.
It seems strange now, that I should have said such a thing.
So how did I change? The most important point: I started looking both ways before I crossed the road. This was new. I stopped drinking cider. I stopped going to his classes, but I went to the gym (I never got thin, but those endorphins!) It's all the usual stuff, I suppose. Also, I stopped sleeping with so many men. I told him the number once. The estimate. "When you consider I was thirteen when I had the first, it's really only 2.9 per year.
Later that night I said something soppy about how special he was and he said, "That's me, special number thirty-three. That was the nastiest thing he ever said to me, and he put his hand over his mouth like a child straight away. These days, I am not the sort of woman who has the urge to talk numbers.
In general, we laughed our way through the days. The previous tenant in my flat had obviously been a lunatic. He had left nothing but a shelf made from two garden stones and a plank. And he had painted the place bright orange. Almost everything: the ceiling, the woodchip, the shelf, the window frame and part of the glass too. He had even daubed the cord that operated the light in the bathroom. One morning I was having a bit of a breakdown because the water had turned brown and I said, "I fucking hate this orange bastard flat.
Mick went to the shop, bought waffles, Cava, fruit salad, eight tins of emulsion and a new stepladder (mine "reminded him of hospital). That afternoon was the funniest, sexiest few hours I've ever spent doing DIY. Do It Yourself and Do It to Each Other.
He can be found on the DVD extras of a time travel caper called 'Ruff and Tumble'. They put together this montage of a famous elderly actor smashing him across the back with a chair. He's wearing those big pantaloons and yellow stockings. Every time he gets hit he falls to the floor, rolls about for while, and says, "Again? Then they just show him being smashed over and over, some hillbilly banjo music dubbed on top. On the last take the chair shatters into three pieces and a leg flies towards the camera. Mick walks away with his hands on his hips, which means he is properly hurt. The old actor is half-laughing but saying, "Holy shit man, you okay? Fuck. I am sooo sorry.
All Mick had to say, when I first showed him the footage, was, "I was wearing pads.
No doubt you'll be picking up some bad vibes between his mother and me. Jean Reynolds lived in a grey semi in the ditch-end of the city, near the KFC, the LaserQuest, and the Showcase Cinema. Mick had tarted her house up beyond belief, but she insisted she'd never move. She used to tell her friends that her son was a Hollywood star and that he'd met Charles Dance and Robert Redford (she kept it relevant for the oldies), and that he doubled Clooney because he was the only one handsome enough. "I don't want to cause any rumours because I think that Kidman woman's a respectable lady, but let's just say she's decided to work with Mick in her next film too.
You see now why I was so popular.
But then, after all that spouting, she used to ask Mick how his 'ridiculous job' was going and call him 'Crash Test Dummy' or 'The Dummy' or 'The Fall Guy' or 'The Dummy Returns'.
And then she used to put on her best dress and go alone to the Showcase for the Derby premiere of a risible fantasy film to see eight tenths of a second of her son falling off a giant catapult into quick sand.
As far as I was concerned, she was the driving force behind his persistence with a job that was quickly killing him.
He once told me this story: a few weeks after the battering ram accident, he had taken a taxi to her house. (The injury eventually required major reconstructive surgery on his left shoulder. It took him a year to recover, and even then dislocation was always possible.) When he let himself in, Mick saw his mother in her premiere dress straddling a man on the armchair. She squealed and ran into the bathroom. Mick was a taciturn fella, but he had a heart and tried to make the bloke in the armchair feel as relaxed as you can with an erection in corduroy trousers. They talked about Mick's arm, which was in a sling.
When his mother re-emerged, in a raincoat, she said, "I think you should leave. Mick stood, but she said, "Not you. The other man rose with a similar lack of fuss and made his farewells.
"You didn't have to do that, Mick said to his mother.
"Yes I did.
"He seemed nice.
"He isn't.
Mick then told her about the accident with the battering ram. She looked manically at his arm. He told her he had quit movie work and would only work in TV from now on; he was willing to take the pay cut. Jean was wild. It was unclear, from Mick's telling of the story, what had upset her most ' the arm, the resignation, or the corduroy hard-on. Perhaps even Mick didn't know. "You do these things to me on purpose, she had said, pummelling his good arm. "You don't want anything nice to happen. You hate nice things.
What he hated was sitting in a trailer for three months in the Moroccan desert, playing 'If I miss the bin with this toenail clipping I'll die on set tomorrow'. He hated looking at his colleagues out of the window, wondering which one would make the mistake that killed him.
As it happened, that colleague was very nearly a horse. He was shooting footage for one of those 'dramatised' history documentaries. Mick the Roman took an arrow in the breastplate and fell from a chestnut mare. After two takes, the horse, being a fairly intelligent animal, got the idea that this was dangerous bullshit and he stopped abruptly before the mark, threw Mick over his neck and stamped him. The Roman helmet probably saved Mick's life, but he needed twenty-two stitches around his temple.
They were filming in Romania, so I spent two days sitting by the phone trying not to buy Scrumpy Jack from Oddbins. It was March, and whenever the sun went in, that orange paint showed through the emulsion like blood rising to slapped skin.
He came home with a black eye and a bald patch and tried to split up with me. "I can't concentrate on my job, he said. "I'm thinking about you all the while.
"I'm thinking about you, too. It's normal Mick. It's good.
"It's distracting. I'm responsible for -
"Distracting? I suggest you say something fucking nice now, before I open some stitches.
"I don't mean it like that. It didn't matter before, if I got hurt. It does now.
"Terrible lines, Mick. Do they teach you boys this shit at school?
I had a bit of a relapse then, firstly by trying to unzip his trousers, and then, when he wouldn't let me, by smashing up the flat. But you can see that he was talking nonsense. After a few minutes of hurling ashtrays and bottles I sat down and cried. "You can't leave me, I said. "You've made me like my clothes again.
That banal truth seemed to have an effect on him. I told him that it was part of being alive to take responsibility for yourself and someone else, and that if he couldn't do it he was a wanker and a coward no matter how many things he jumped off. "Quit, I said. "I hate you being away. I hate how dangerous it is and so do you. Just quit. You're a sword-fighting, scuba-diving gymnast. You can do anything you like. Fucking anything.
A week later he unveiled to me a four-year retirement plan, involving ownership of his house and his mother's house and a large cash injection into his own self-defence company. "Four years and I'll be there, Becky. So will you.
That last bit cheered me up. I moved out of the orange flat and in with him.
Four years. It's a long time in an accident book. Pain is supposed to be a beneficent signal. The body warning us. God, I ask you, couldn't we have a simple system of lights instead? A whistle like a kettle to tell us our hand is burning, skin that turns blue like a pregnancy test when we rupture a ligament? Our anticipation of Mick's pain, or preparation for it, was utterly exhausting.
I did not have a conscious strategy for dealing with his work, but when I look back now, my mind developed padding. I would wake him up at 5am to make love before he left. Then I would cry all morning at work. By the time I caught the bus home I was away in nostalgia and reminiscence. I lost him everyday. You might think all this is over-dramatic, and I would have said so too. However, I never once admitted my premature grief, even to myself. It was all too much like a buddy movie: the old cop on his retirement day, lying in a pool of his own brain, talking about his yacht and his beautiful daughters. Did I really think he was going to die or end up in a wheelchair?
I knew this: I hadn't ever wanted anything like I wanted a future with Mick. And I knew this: in 1922 Bobby Dunn, one of Hollywood's first stuntmen, took a high-dive into a tank of water and came out blind in one eye with his face slashed because someone had left a safety match in the tank. A match.
The big wheel was point break for me. A cable TV show about a drug dealer. They had employed him as a utility stuntman for much of the series. "Someone to chuck stuff at, he said. He'd been beaten up, hit by a car, and drowned. I could just about cope with that. But for the last episode, in January, he had to fall from the top of the big wheel. What hurt me most, I suppose, is that he didn't tell me about it. Sure, I hated going to work and thinking about the danger he was in, but that had become the nature of our relationship. We shared it.
It was his mother who telephoned the news, in her uniquely ungracious way. "It's your bloody fault, she said. "You're a bloody gold-digger, just like the rest of them.
I was stunned into calmness. "The rest of them? Mrs Reynolds, he's only slept with two women in his life.
"See? Vulgar. I told him. You're just filth. And now he's going off tomorrow to kill himself well I hope you're happy and I'll see you get nothing.
"Kill himself? What are you talking about?
Silence.
"Talk you dry old bitch, why is he killing himself tomorrow?
I thought the noise I could hear on the other end of the line was the dial tone, which is why I said the C-word. But it wasn't the dial tone, it was the sad whine of my boyfriend's mother. This, I thought, was a real professional - she gives out a shitload of cusses and then cries at the first show of aggression from me. "What are you playing at? I said.
"God, he's been doing it for years and I just can't stand it anymore, she said, sucking breath through the convulsions. "I just wish he'd stop.
"Well, I said, "if you want him to stop, you've got a funny way of going about it.
As I said the words I raised my hand to my forehead like a silent movie klutz.
Through snotty explosions and trembling lips, she told me about the big wheel. He had visited her, and said that the stunt was tough and he was feeling pains in his shoulder and dizziness and he didn't trust the people on set and they hadn't spent enough money and they'd cut corners on his contract. Jean said there had been a meanness in his voice, like he was accusing her of something. Really? I thought.
If she picked up a hint of accusation in her son's voice, he certainly got similar feelings when he arrived home to me. I was not aggressive. I had arrived at the point where I wished he would have an affair so I didn't have to go through it anymore. Lying to me about the big wheel was enough, and a wretched relief possessed me as I packed my bag. I told him I could no longer cope, especially if he was going to lie.
"You know what? Fine, he said. "It's my job. I can't get another one because my CV doesn't have much scope. If you can't take it, I'll do it on my own. It's better that way.
Jean called me late that night, but I didn't pick up.
I went back to Mick's after work the next day. Predictably, I had been unable to divorce myself from the anguish of his final fall just by leaving his house. It had been a horrible day, contemplating the loneliness of my ex-boyfriend's death. By 5pm I had decided that if he hadn't died on set, I would kill him myself; I would throttle him and have done with it.
He was not home. Seeing the commonplace things of our existence, I realised that I had overreacted and he probably was not dead (although thinking about it now, what's more commonplace than death?). Out drinking, most likely. A big wheel. We had never been to a fair together, never been on a ride. I walked around the house, trying to imagine the moments following my departure the previous day. The state of the bathroom suggested he had been angry about it. Four of the tiles had come off the wall and the doorframe had split. A green pool of aftershave on the floor filled the room with his smell, which made me cry (already). A bottle of whiskey stood by the bath, which explained the painkillers downstairs in the kitchen. For a moment I thought of suicide, but then a hangover seemed more likely. It was neither, as it happened.
I myself took a beer from the fridge and sat down, watched some programme about a maternity ward and tried to grab onto my anger like a ledge. I remembered him telling me about the pranks of Buster Keaton and Al St John: they would pretend to fall out of windows, hang on to the windowsills calling for help, and their friends would rush over to their whitened knuckles to find them standing on the cornice below the window, laughing that they were safe (and ignoring the fatal drop behind them). A fall, in those days, was called a Brodie, after a bloke who had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and lived. Mick hated practical jokes.
I woke from a doze at 11pm and phoned him. No answer. I called everyone and got through to the mobile of a runner from the set, some teenager in a nightclub, who shouted that Mick was in hospital. Again that nagging relief. It has happened, so I no longer have to wait for it.
I picked his mother up from her house. Waiting outside with the engine running, I could see the lights of the Showcase above the pedestrian bridge that traversed the dual carriageway, blue and yellow and red burning through the freezing fog, the titles meaningless from this distance. The cinema car park was deserted.
Jean already knew about the accident, but I had no cause to complain this time. What was I to him, now? I had no title and no claim. "Look, Jean, I said. "Me and Mick.
"I know, she said, but without satisfaction.
Jean wore a large knitted jumper with a high neck, and a flimsy blue spotted scarf: fake chiffon and useless against the weather. She told me what had happened, a confused, stoned smile on her mouth the whole time. It was a story which Mick would add to over the years, and although I have no trouble picturing him in the scene, I always hear his mother's suddenly kind voice in accompaniment.
He had woken on the day of the stunt without his usual fear and packed his kitbag. On the radio Judy Garland sang 'The Man That Got Away'. He went upstairs to shave, and that's when it all became clear to him. Mick was still half-shaven when we arrived at the hospital, a dark ridge of stubble on the left side of his face. "A fly cemetery his mother said, running the side of her finger against the grain, almost giggling. Yes, as with many important historical moments, Mick made his decision with a razor at his throat. The hour after that I imagine in a sort of slow montage. Him naked, swigging whiskey, necking pills, getting ready for it. Lying in the bath, in and out of sleep. Rubbing a little aftershave across his gums to top up the drink, and then slamming himself over and over and over again into the tiled wall. I see the heroism of his leaning shadow, the force of his conviction and his love for us made physical. The way he would have stifled his cries for the sake of the neighbours. Riling himself for the fifth run, insulting himself for the tenth, slapping himself for the twelfth, mollycoddling himself for the fifteenth. I hear the pop and the scream as the shoulder joint releases the bone. The unnatural buckle and dangle of the arm. His hair, grown shaggy for the role, would have fallen over his face as he lay on the floor, laughing and screaming and crying and free. He phoned the runner to explain his absence before he passed out.
He had a nice low singing voice, a bass thumper, but on our first holiday, he sang the Judy Garland song in a hilarious falsetto I never knew he had. Full of surprises, that one. Not the least of which was his admission that he had once been half in love with falling through sugar glass or jumping off horses. Something about oblivion, an empty physical rush that was all the better for its emptiness. I told him that I knew what he meant; I had once craved just the same thing, but those days were long gone for both of us.
