Some nights the baby got a bit much, especially with Caroline pregnant for another, so we had a local girl come and look after him once a week, and we went off and did something else. One of those nights we went to see a play in the Browhouse with Ben as the star. We bought a couple of the comfy seats near the edge and settled in, Christine as comfortable as she could be, considering. The warm-up comedian was all right, nothing special, but amusing enough. Like a bluff uncle telling you how the world should be.
The play itself was not a particularly well-scripted adventure. It was about a wife and husband (Ben) in their nether years, slowly outliving all their old friends, becoming colder and more distant even from each other as the winter drew in and fake snow cascaded onto the stage from buckets thrown up at the side. There were laughs along the way, as walking sticks were chopped and changed as certain ones seemingly purposefully tripped the old gentleman over, stage children gasped at their grandparents� tawdry stories and gigantic underwear started filling the drawers, but it was mainly an attempt at a touching tale of two peoples� attachment to each other even as the very things they had loved each other for slowly faded. The clich�s were too prevalent, and the zip lacking from the lines, but the actors did a great job as far as they could. It was scary, as a middle-aged man still now about to have a child, to see old age, so imminent, in a painful light such as this. Doesn�t give you the best to look forward to.
I suppose by now Ben was as developed as he could be in terms of acting. There were few roles he couldn�t do, and he filled his parts as full as raw talent allowed him. All he could do to improve was simply age, and experience the world. Mature actors have the experience behind them to play the parts in ways that talent alone just won�t allow you. I found it a shame, then, that he was still plugging away in the Browhouse with his restricted job, unable to get much of a taste of the world at large.
When the play was over I sought out Ben and told him just that. �Thanks, Mr Berry, I�ll bear that in mind.� He replied, a twinkle in his eye, as he already had plans by then. He didn�t tell me, but he�d been cast in a new film, not a major role, but a speaking part. He was about to be thrust upon the world no matter what I advised him. It may have been better for the lad to have stayed out of the big pictures for a while longer and done a few tours with smaller groups, but that�s not the way it happened.
* * *
I didn�t actually see that film Ben first took part in, nor any of the later ones as he became bigger and bigger, a star in Hollywood with a superstar girlfriend and all the rest. I didn�t see any movies in that period, as Christine died soon after filming started for that first small role. She was driving our son to school when a lorry skidded and slammed down onto her car bonnet. All three, including our unborn son, were killed, over a variety of horrifically drawn-out periods of time. That almost did for me too, I even bought the shotgun and shots ready to help me join them, but I never pulled the trigger, no matter how many times I tasted the barrel.
Instead I went off, travelling, trying to find meaning in it all, that style of thing. I went east without any plans, tickets or accommodation ready. Just upped and left, the dead kid�s savings money in my pocket along with what else we�d saved up. Looking about, I figured it was as rainy a day as I�d ever get. I started in France and quickly left � the food was terrible (I seem to be rather isolated in my opinion of French cuisine as swill) and the people obnoxiously poncy, so I quickly got on a train and got seriously stuck into Eastern Europe � Prague, Zagreb, places like that. There I found a sort of peace. I admit I didn�t talk to many locals, language being a barrier I hadn�t the oomph to overcome, but the young travellers inspired me. So much youth, all bundled up in a package of optimism and unrestrained opportunities, if you ever need a good pepping up I�d recommend chatting to a good traveller any day. I was approaching fifty at the time, yet these twenty-ish nippers managed to give me the time of day and even connect, if I may use such an overused touchy-feely word, with how I was feeling: a sort of restlessness, without any real direction to their lives. The difference, I guess, was that they hadn�t found their direction yet, whereas I had already had mine and lost it.
Eventually I froze my nethers off on the Siberian railway lines, going all the way across into Asia and even more exoticism. It was there, in Thailand to be a little more precise, that I next saw a performance of Ben�s. It was a huge hit movie sweeping the people into the cinema by the human-bucketful. The plot was a favourite of fantasy books throughout history: some kid, orphaned early in life by evil types razing his village fighting back to provide revenge against the killers of his family. All the usual plot twists: his father being alive after all, then dying to save him; him turning out to be the born saviour of the planet and one of his close allies turning out to be working for the enemy, that sort of thing, were present. That wasn�t what appealed to the public, though it was a good piece of clear-cut escapism for the terror stricken multitude frightened by all the bombings, it was, and I think this you can guess, the wonders of our Ben.
That damned kid (I know he hasn�t technically been a kid for quite some time now, but that won�t stop me) makes me cry like a girl every time I see him act. Despite his voice being dodgily rendered by some Asian voiceover and my inability to understand more than one word in three (I had picked up some linguistics on my travels though, I wasn�t entirely lazy!) he touched me once again, and I felt the pain of losing my father, twice, more severely than I ever had when I lost him for real. He brought all the pain of my life back to me that evening as I sat in a rickety chair, my age-lined face stained with the tears of an old dog past his best, and realising it.
That was his high point, for which he will forever be remembered, and his last big movie. It was my last movie abroad as well. It moved me to the point where I realised there was very little more this escapism of my own could achieve. I went back to England to start anew. Though, of course, it wasn�t quite starting again. There is always so much history tugging at you mentally, emotionally, that no one can ever really start afresh, but I determined to do my best.
* * *