The Star Witness Read online

  Andy Hamilton is a comedy scriptwriter and performer. He regularly appears on QI and Have I Got News for You. His writing credits include Outnumbered, Drop the Dead Donkey, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Trevor’s World of Sport, What We Did On Our Holiday and many others. He plays Satan in the Radio 4 comedy Old Harry’s Game, which he also writes.

  THE STAR WITNESS

  Andy Hamilton

  For Libby

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type witness in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  1

  The Mistake

  If you know me at all, you will know me as a liar.

  That is almost certainly the perception you will have of me. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about that. I lied, that is public knowledge. But the lying is only one small part of my story – a story that needs telling, if only so I can come to understand it better myself. So I’m going to present myself to you, warts and all, or as my friend Mac describes me, ninety-five per cent warts. And I’m going to tell the story as I lived it, in the here and now, stumbling from moment to moment, with my heart in my mouth.

  So, where to begin? With my character? Maybe. Maybe I should start in my childhood, or the rapids of adolescence, but there was nothing exceptional about my upbringing; so I think that this story begins more recently, at a critical choice, at a tipping point.

  It begins with a fork.

  I am sitting in a restaurant with a beautiful young woman with impossibly blue eyes and there is a forkful of lamb suspended in mid-air a few inches from my mouth. And that’s where it will stay. I can see myself now, a frozen frame, the first bad decision. I should have kept eating, it was just a crass remark, I should have let it go. If only I had let it go.

  She is waiting for a response to her latest observation, and I could ignore it, God knows I’ve ignored all the others. She’s already come out with several potential fork-stoppers. Almost as soon as we arrived – as the head waiter led us to our “special guest table” – she hit me with the first one.

  “Irony is dead,” she announced, flicking her hair back out of her eyes. “That’s what my mate Keir says, he says audiences aren’t interested in ideas any more, they want emotions, he’s doing an article about it – ‘Sincerity is the New Irony’.”

  I let that one go.

  I’d known many beautiful women who talked rubbish; having to listen to them was the price you had to pay.

  And so I had let her babble on. There was the occasional diner, I noticed, who was staring at us, but that was normal.

  All through the evening, she kept them coming. As we finished our minuscule entrées, she had told me that fashion was basically just literature written in clothing.

  I waved that one through.

  When she had said that if Sophocles were alive today he would be writing for Hollyoaks, again, I gave no response – not the barest flicker.

  But slowly, as the meal wore on, something deep, deep down inside me had begun to recoil. I had been listening to this kind of drivel for months now, trying not to wince whenever she expressed an opinion. So why the hell was I still seeing her?

  At one level, the answer was simple. She was stunning. Also, she was twenty-four and I was fifty-two, so do the maths. My ego – fairly swollen to begin with – had grown to the size of a cathedral because this beautiful young woman found me attractive, even though I was old enough to be her considerably older brother. But our conversations had become…well, I knew that my passivity was demeaning and that was making me angry, I suppose, deep down.

  Looking back, I see that now.

  But, at the time, I think I told myself – heigh-ho, she was what she was. We were what we were. So, the evening would probably have passed without incident if she hadn’t finally come out with an absolute belter.

  She looks up from her plate and says: “Of course, many people feel that the black community in South Africa was better off under apartheid.”

  That’s the one.

  The one that stops the fork.

  I have a choice. I could eat my lamb, or I could change the subject, but instead, after quite a pause, and with an edge of disdain, I hear myself say that fateful word.

  “What?”

  I put down my fork, unaware that I’m stepping towards an abyss.

  “Many people feel the black community was better off then,” she recaps, with a breezy smile.

  “Many people?” I echo, flatly.

  “Yeh.”

  “Many people…as in who?”

  “Well, y’know, commentators…observers.” She pauses for a moment, losing confidence. “Commentators,” she repeats, a little too loudly. “Y’know, Africa-watchers.”

  “Africa-watchers like…?”

  “Well, like my friend, Janine.”

  “Right, Janine’s a journalist, is she?”

  “No, she’s an estate agent.”

  “An estate agent.” There is a coldness creeping into my voice that I can do nothing about.

  “In Putney,” she adds, as if that fact was significant.

  “And where does she get her detailed knowledge of South African history from?”

  “She’s from Johannesburg.”

  I pause to gather my thoughts; my head now jangling with irritation.

  “She’s a white South African.”

  “Yes.”

  “In Putney?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So she’s not really an ‘Africa-watcher’, is she? She’s more of an Africa-leaver.”

  Her cheeks are starting to redden as she chases a lentil around her plate.

  “I don’t quite get the point you’re trying to make, Kevin, perhaps I’m being thick.”

  I try to smile. “All I’m saying,” I begin, carefully, “is that maybe your friend, Janine, is not the best qualified person to—”

  Bang! In she comes! “Well, Janine happens to be a very bright woman, actually.”

  “Well, she can’t be that bright if she’s an estate agent, I mean, all the really clever South Africans get to be dental hygienists.”

  Her lovely mouth hangs open for a few seconds, then she goldfishes for a few more, before straightening her shoulders and telling me that I am a racist.

  I laugh, a lot. I can’t help it, this is like shooting fish in a barrel and, shamef
ully, I am starting to enjoy myself. She leans forward in an attempt to keep the conversation private.

  “It is very racist of you to write her off just because of where she’s from.”

  “Yeh, yeh, OK,” I sigh, dabbing at my eyes with a napkin. “But if God had intended us to like South Africans, he wouldn’t have made them sound like that.”

  Cheap, flip and easy, but it feels so good. Her voice has a little crack in it now and she is starting to sound like a ten-year-old.

  “You are so prejudiced.”

  “All right, Jade, lighten up, it was just—” And then, suddenly, up they pop, from nowhere, two of them, a man and a woman, middle-aged, sort of drab.

  “You’re him, aren’t you,” says the man, pointing at me like I’m an exhibit.

  “Yes.” I give him the standard smile. “I’m him.”

  “I said you were him, we’re sitting over there, my wife said you weren’t him, but I said you were him. I knew you were him.”

  He turns to Jade. “And you’re her.”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “The new one. That was a good cat-fight you had with his ex. She had it coming.”

  Before Jade can answer, he’s turning back to me. “So what have you got planned for this one, eh? Are you going to do the dirty on her like you have with all the others, you dirty monkey, eh?”

  His wife is trying to intervene now.

  “Leave them alone, Barry.” (It might have been Gary or Harry.) She tugs gently at his elbow, but he is still leering at me.

  “So what have you got planned, eh? What’s going to happen?”

  “I’m afraid that, contractually, we’re not allowed to divulge the storylines of future episodes.”

  “Oh, go on, you can tell me.”

  “Well yes, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  “What, and stick me under the patio along with that drug baron who tried to frame you for the raid on Bobby’s health spa?” He swivels back to Jade. “You’re too good for him, er…what’s your name again?”

  “Jade.”

  “No, no, no,” he says, with a dismissive flap of a hand, “not your name, her name.”

  “Melanie.”

  “Yeh,” he chuckles, “Melanie’s too good for you.” He’s aiming his finger at me again now. “You bad dog. She’s got morals. And a kiddie.”

  “Leave them be,” sighs the wife.

  “A kiddie with a life-threatening illness.”

  “They’re having their dinner. I’m sorry, he’s being annoying, isn’t he?”

  “No, not at all.” My smile is starting to hurt now. He sets off again.

  “All I’m saying, Joan –” (Jean? Jane?) “– is that he won’t run rings around her, like he did with all the others. Especially the last one, she just cried all the time and shouted at her gay brother. But this one, she’s clever and independent-minded.”

  “Well, her character is,” I say, fast, a reflex. He stares at me for a moment, blinking slowly, like a character out of the Simpsons.

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, her character…Melanie…is clever and independent-minded, but in real life she gets all her opinions off estate agents.”

  Silence.

  The wife is looking at the floor, embarrassed, and Jade is staring at me with her jaw hanging slack. It was just a moment of casual cruelty, the kind of smartarse remark that I must have made hundreds, even thousands of times.

  I shouldn’t have said it. If it all began with that first “what?”, then this was the next nail in my coffin. And I am sitting there with a smug grin, oblivious and empty.

  The man’s wife is the first to speak.

  “Right…well, nice meeting you both, come along, love.” She leads him away. He calls over his shoulder to Jade: “Keep your eye on him, Melanie! And stay away from the canal!”

  “Bye!” calls the wife.

  I give her a playschool wave. “By-e.”

  Jade is still staring at me, her big blue eyes filming over with tears. I feel awkward. I try to lighten the mood.

  “Well, that’s our audience. Hanging on to reality by their fingernails. Makes your blood run cold, doesn’t it, eh?”

  She’s still staring.

  “This wine’s not bad…”

  Still staring.

  “…for house plonk.”

  Finally, she half-croaks the word, “Why?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why? Why did you feel the need to say that about me just now?”

  A bloody good question, as it happens. After all, if you’re going out with someone and you feel the urge to humiliate them in front of total strangers, then that’s probably a bad sign, isn’t it? True, some relationships thrive on routine humiliation but that’s usually inside marriage.

  Anyway, the depressing, inescapable truth was that this relationship wasn’t thriving. It was no fun any more. And yet it had started out as a lot of fun, seven months ago, when we first met in make-up.

  It was a Monday in August sometime, or it could have been September. I know it was warm, because I can see the sweat on Polly’s face as she powders my forehead.

  Nigel, the first assistant, is bustling around behind me talking anxiously into a mouthpiece and coughing intermittently, a lung-scraping cough that makes everyone wince. I can hear the sparks shouting at each other – ripe jokes about Wayne Rooney – and the clang-and-rattle of moving lights. The runner, Avril (or is it Alice?), charges past, breathlessly looking for a lost actor and I’m about to take my first aspirin of the day when suddenly Pam arrives with a continuity Polaroid. Within moments, Pam and Polly are primping and preening me.

  “Leave me alone, you pair of harpies.”

  “Behave,” says Pam, whacking me on the back of the head with a comb.

  “What are you doing?”

  “My job. Shut up and keep still.”

  Now Simone from wardrobe has arrived and they’re all consulting the Polaroid.

  “You know my theory about women who work in make-up and wardrobe…”

  “Not interested,” Pam mutters.

  “I reckon they’re all girls who didn’t get given any dolls to play with as kids. I’m just an adult doll.”

  “You’re not an adult anything.”

  They giggle as Simone gets out a different set of Polaroids.

  “Scene 38B? He should be in the blue shirt. OK, shirt off, Kevin. That one’s wrong.”

  Nigel trundles back, still shouting at someone down his mouthpiece.

  “What do you mean his car didn’t pick him up? He’s due on set now.”

  “Morning, Nige,” I say quietly.

  “He wasn’t home? Well where the fuck is he?”

  “Morning, Kevin, how are you,” I reply on his behalf.

  “Eh? What? Oh, yeh, sorry, morning, Kevin.” Then he coughs, long and hard.

  “Can you die somewhere else, Nige? We don’t want your germs.”

  But he doesn’t respond. He’s listening to something he doesn’t want to hear through his earpiece, his forehead folding into yet more creases.

  “What…? You are joking. Tell me you’re joking…he said he was going to Spain?” His head drops forward in defeat.

  “Gavin?” I ask, knowing the answer.

  “Yeh, totally AWOL. I dunno, it was a lot easier before he went into rehab, least you knew where he was…blacked out on his bathroom floor.”

  Then he’s shouting down his mouthpiece again. “Have you rung his moby? I really don’t need this. He’s in five scenes today, without him we are totally upgefucked.”

  The shouting triggers his cough again. Pam and Polly shake their heads. A passing stagehand mutters: “If he were a horse, they’d put him down.”

  A different runner beetles past, a work-experience girl, out of breath, looking for the caterers because there are no plastic cups. A sound man (Del? Mel?), who has the beginnings of Nigel’s cough, arrives to mic me up. But Simone is pulling me out of my shirt and Pam and
Polly are moaning that everything’s being done in the wrong order this morning and the Health and Safety man is shouting something about some cables and amid all this mayhem I slowly become aware of a beautiful young woman standing nervously on the fringe of the make-up area. She has enormous, blue Disney eyes, long, naturally blonde hair and a smile that carries a hint of apology.

  “Hi,” I say, as Simone rams me into a new shirt.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry,” Nigel flusters, “this is Jade. Everyone? This is Jade. Jade’s playing Melanie, the new character.”

  “Hi, everyone,” she says with a little-me wave.

  “Welcome,” I say, as Simone tugs at my collar.

  “Hi.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Terrified.”

  “That’s normal. On my first day, I threw up in the dressing room.”

  “Well, you still do that,” sighs Simone. Pam and Polly cackle.

  “Ignore this lot, Jade,” I say, “they’re full of hate.”

  A couple of crew step forward to shake Jade’s hand, but everything is drowned out by Nigel’s coughing. In between coughs, as he fights for air, he is imploring the producer down the phone: “You have to do something, Louise, you have to lay it on the line for Gavin, a final warning or something.”

  The sound guy starts coughing as well. I can see Jade is looking thrown.

  “The crews on soaps are always ill, I’m afraid. It’s the schedule, it’s relentless, long hours, up at five, not home till ten, it kicks the crap out of the immune system.”

  Her face has dropped.

  “But the actors are OK. It’s the performing, means we’ve got enough adrenalin to see off the bugs. Well, till we stop filming, then we’re sick as dogs.”

  “Right,” she says, raising perfectly arched eyebrows.

  Then Nigel ups his volume. “Look, Louise, Gavin has to be put on notice…Well, I dunno, can’t you have a word with the writers? They could put him in a coma or something…drop a bit of viaduct on him…again.”

  I step closer to Jade. She smells of apples.

  “Have they told you where your storyline’s headed?” I ask her.

  “Um, well, as far as I know, I, um, I sleep with you…obviously.”