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Epigraph

His stomach turns a somersault with the drop of the elevator. He steps out into the crowded marble hall. For a moment not knowing which way to go, he stands back against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching people elbow their way through the perpetually revolving doors; softcheeked girls chewing gum, hatchetfaced girls with bangs, creamfaced boys his own age, young toughs with their hats on one side, sweatyfaced messengers, crisscross glances, sauntering hips, red jowls masticating cigars, sallow concave faces, fat bodies of young men and women, paunched bodies of elderly men, all elbowing, shoving, shuffling, fed in two endless tapes through the revolving doors out into Broadway, in off Broadway. Jimmy fed in a tape in and out the revolving doors, noon and night and morning, the revolving doors grinding out his years like sausage meat. All of a sudden his muscles stiffen. Uncle Jeff and his office can go plumb to hell. The words are so loud inside him he glances to one side and the other to see if anyone heard him say them. They can all go plumb to hell.

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

Introduction

I sincerely hope you will be disappointed by this book. To disappoint, anger and dismay has always been my ideal. Of course I’ve made the book a fairly commercial collection of light-hearted topical comments. This is so I can dismay you further by pocketing a huge advance and spending the rest of my life surfing, reading crime thrillers and fucking.

If I had it my way this book would be an impeccably researched novel about the friendship between Tom, a young white boy, and Jefferson, an old black gardener, set in turn-of-the-century Mississippi. It would possess an air of complete authenticity. The old gardener would have an encyclopaedic knowledge of herbs and their uses, but he would be an illiterate and solitary curmudgeon. He would heal the boy’s broken arm with a poultice and later save his little brother from dying of a fever. Young Tom would convince Mr Bridges, his schoolmaster, of the gardener’s gifts and together the three of them would start to write a herbal encyclopaedia. The three protagonists would come from very different worlds, so there would be a lot of conflict but also a lot of wry humour and wisdom.

After the first 50 pages the reader would wonder what kind of follow-up this was to the jokey autobiography of a panel-show contestant. After 100 pages they would be completely drawn into the world of Tom, Jefferson and Mr Bridges. After 150 pages they would be nervously wondering whether Tom’s stepmother could really have been so spiteful as to burn the manuscript.

For the final 50 pages I would have a description of Old Jefferson surprising Tom in a hay barn and the two of them having brutal, unprotected consensual sex. As he fucked the boy, he would scream about how he didn’t give a shit about plants. Perhaps in modern words, because he was a time traveller or something. His cock would grow to a fantastical size within the boy, and glow and hum like a lightsaber. The boy’s arsehole would start to talk. ‘I clench and unclench just like a vagina’ it would note cheerfully in poor French.

Perspective would shift jarringly to a microscopic civilisation that lived in the hay under Tom’s face. They would be a poetic, romantic people for whom time moved incalculably slowly. Tom’s face would have hung in their sky like the sun for millennia before Old Man Jefferson started fucking him. Its gradual change to a rictus of pain would excite and disturb the minds of their greatest philosophers. Eventually, the glowing tip of a huge black cock emerging from his mouth would cause the whole society to commit mass suicide.

Ideally, the title of the book would be an endless binary number and it would scream when you opened it and then a brawny fist would shoot out from between the pages and rip the nose right off your face. As you fell to the ground squealing, the hand would hail a cab that would run over your head. A passer-by would film your death on a mobile, making it an internet phenomenon. Huge crowds of Japanese teens would gather at stadium events to masturbate each other as they watched it on overhead screens. This footage of your nonchalant and motiveless murder by a book would attract a billion YouTube hits and not a single sympathetic comment. In a million years a super-advanced civilisation of androids would misinterpret the film and you would become a figure in their culture analogous to a paedophile Guy Fawkes.

Through advanced scientific methods they would re-create your consciousness and you would re-live your whole life over and over again, but with all the enjoyable stuff taken out. On the day of your 18th birthday someone would hit you so hard on the back of the head with a polo mallet that your eyes would pop out. Crawling from your burning house you would have your arse clawed out by a mountain lion and when you reached the hospital you would be diagnosed with AIDS of the leg and cancer of your empty eye sockets. Through a synaptic quirk you would have one image frozen in your mind so it was as if you were looking at it constantly – your long-dead Chinese stepfather’s dead arsehole. The only way to treat your eyes would involve, every night just before bed, playing the screams from a horror movie loudly to encourage a wolverine to fuck the sockets. Somehow its stinking cock would numb the holes even as its scrabbling feet shredded your face and scalp. You would continue to re-live this life in ever-increasing detail long after the universe had ended, praying for death to a God who was already dead himself.

I got into comedy because I loved watching comedy as a child. I later discovered that’s a bit like loving burgers as a child and deciding to become a cow. I’ve never found anything in life particularly heart-warming or uplifting. Except the smiles of my children and even those are ruined by the knowledge that someday my children will die, their smiles having long gone as they struggled with the mental and social handicaps they developed from having a cunt like me for a dad. If you want to hear something uplifting go read something else. You are well catered for in our culture; there are hordes of halfwits who want to help you find an upside. One day both you and I will be hipbones and shinbones buried in a box being eaten by worms. You will find no solace here.

Just fuckin witcha! I’ve always had an instinct to laugh at everything, the good stuff, the horror, everything. With laughter comes perspective. You might be scared of the dark, you might be sitting alone in the woods in the dark but if you suddenly heard laughter … no, wait a minute. Some people don’t hold with the old ‘gallows humour’, it’s not civilised, there’s some stuff you shouldn’t laugh about and so on. I think we’re all in this trench together and everything is fair game. Do me a favour. Any time you have a problem with somebody having a laugh, have a think about where your grandparents went, look around and tell me what you think a gallows looks like.

‘Slowed by the grass, the guys laugh as they spacewalk on the suddenly deep carpet’

I’ve been living at the top of a high-rise on the outskirts of Glasgow. I can’t say where exactly but it’s the tallest one in the city. The evening I moved in I remember standing at the bottom just looking at it, reaching up endlessly into the night. The partying windows and the partied-out windows, a punch card for the fifth dimension. One night me and my mate Paul Marsh stop in the wee pub at the bottom of the flats. We’re supposed to be going round to our pal Murphy’s to play FIFA on the PlayStation and have a few joints, but the Celtic game is coming on in the pub and it seems daft to go play football. We phone Murphy to come meet us and after the game we walk down to the high street, Murphy’s elongated frame casting a daddy-longlegs shadow under the streetlamps. I get us all fish suppers and, for a laugh, pickled eggs, ’cause we’ve not had them in years and are genuinely fucking surprised they still happen. We get the lift up to mine to have a few beers and get MTV Base on.

Murphy is banging on about some show called The Game and genuinely can’t believe we haven’t heard of it. Cannot believe it. He’s laughing and shaking his head and chokes as he opens the wee bag with the pickled eggs in. He’s eating the third egg by the time the lift starts and then he realises. He looks up embarrassed with his face stuffed with eggs and says, ‘Sorry guys, fuck, sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ I say, and fuck knows why but I tousle his hair, like he’s a wee boy. ‘I fucking hate eggs,’ I say stupidly and we all laugh. We’ve had two joints outside the chippy and we’re all stoned.

I’m staring at a football sticker someone’s put on the intercom. It’s Anthony Stokes, the Celtic player, with the bland smile of a waxwork. The smile that a millionaire in his early twenties conjures up for a contractually necessary photograph. Someone has scratched his eyes out with their thumb, really precisely, so with the perforated metal of the intercom underneath he seems to have the eyes of a robot beeman. As we go past the 14th floor the lift gives its usual shudder. Some really bad bastards on this floor.

I dig out some of those big plastic plates I have for when the kids come round, easier to clean. My flat looks like it’s been furnished at a hoopla stall and I just think, fuck this, fuck playing it on the portable telly again, this is nuts. ‘Wait till you see this, lads!’ I yell, rising unsteadily and aiming at the far wall. I’m pressing at the wall and suddenly it flies open with a rattle, not the Star Trek whoosh I’d paid for.

Paul looks up from his chips and still has his hand in his mouth, like a baby. I’m standing with my arms wide and laughing. Behind me – the lights slowly rising – is a massive room going back an impossible distance in Victorian splendour.

It’s an expedition down to the far wall where a huge plasma sits, still paused on a grimly realistic cup game I was playing as Celtic. Slowed by the grass, the guys laugh as they spacewalk on the suddenly deep carpet. The room is the whole floor down one side of the building and I’ve roughly modelled it on a stateroom on the Titanic. There are walnut panels, replica straight-backed chairs, an ottoman and three huge brass floor-to-ceiling portholes. Glasgow in the darkness is just lights.

I take them to the big oak table and there’s the whole estate mapped out in a wax model. It’s a proper belter too. All the local characters are there, wee white wax people, wee wax hardmen and wide-os, and wee wax shopkeepers (I just keep those ones in the shops, you never really see them anywhere). All the wee wax people are mostly in their houses because I haven’t really fucked with it since last night. I notice that the wee Murphy, Marshy and me are all in my flat, right by the table.

All over the rest of the table are notes for the book, paragraphs in longhand on A4, scraps of paper, a stack of little notebooks for sitting in cafes.

‘This the book?’ says Paul, compartmentalising both the stateroom and voodoo neighbourhood with typical élan.

‘Aye,’ I laugh. ‘That’s “War” you’re holding right there. I explain “war”, man …’

It’s like a wee neat pile of stress, those notebooks, so I just mumble, ‘It’s good for absolutely nothing,’ but, like most references, this passes Marsh by. I take the notebook off him and put it back where it was.

‘Some days I think it’s brilliant, some days I think it’s shite …’ I offer over my shoulder while I’m plugging the controllers in.

‘Like having a kid!’ slurs Murphy, but he’s got kids so we all groan at the harshness.

Murphy gets bored of the football. He can never get the shooting right, always just fucks it over the bar. He’s sitting through in the lounge of the real flat watching MTV loudly, as Paul and I fight a gripping series of Old Firm encounters. I play as Celtic and the ref is even biased on the fucking PlayStation, Marshy getting away with several tackles Frank Miller’s Batman would have been proud of.

I wake Murphy up when I’m going to bed and he phones a cab. As I’m saying goodnight to Paul, I notice the wee light flashing on my laptop. David Murphy doesn’t even know any porn sites and has just pishedly typed the word ‘groped’ into Google.

I go into my room and start the big stretching session I always have before bed. No matter how long I do, my legs always ache when I get up. Telegram from Mr Death! He’s sorry he can’t be with you right now! Telegram from Mr Death!

I’m in the middle of a confused dream where I’m married to a Muslim woman who won’t let me fuck her, when I hear the drill of the doorbell. I bang through to the living room and nearly fall over Paul, who for some reason is sleeping on the floor, right beside the couch. As I open the door, I look behind me and check we closed the wall, and when I look back I see two massive cops.

They’re plainclothes, CID or what have you. The older one has those watery eyes some older Scottish guys have, like he’s about to start greeting. In front of him is a man with a side-parting who looks like an enormous schoolboy.

‘Mr Francis Boyle?’ he asks, but it’s not really a question. ‘Alright if we come in?’

All the grass is through in the stateroom, I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s on the big tarpaulin I put down so we wouldn’t get burns on the carpet. ‘Paul! We have visitors!’ I shout, and he leaps up startled. Literally springs up like he’s part of an ambush, then sits down suddenly on the couch, internalising a massive spasm of guilt.

The two cops are making a show of looking about, like explorers in a bad movie. I make them a cup of tea and we all sit down around the tiny kitchen table while Paul sits rigidly in the other room, too paranoid to leave. I expect some kind of introduction but there is none.

‘This is a fairly unusual matter,’ the younger one starts happily. ‘I believe you know the TV presenter Dom Joly?’

I try to shrug but the mug I’m holding is too full, so it comes over like a twitch. ‘Eh, not really. I met him a couple of times doing panel shows. We did a couple of panel shows together.’

‘Panel shows,’ agrees the older one mournfully, his eyes filling right up like tears are going to start rolling down his face.

‘Mr Joly was the subject of a serious sexual assault over the weekend,’ chirps the other guy. I don’t really register what he says at first. I’m aware that I’m not really saying anything and I start to feel uneasy.

‘Dom Joly?’ I ask foolishly. They don’t acknowledge this in any way, so I say, ‘sexually assaulted?’ and then there’s a long pause.

‘Dom Joly has been sexually assaulted,’ the old policeman confirms sadly. ‘Dom Joly from Trigger Happy TV.’

‘God, I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say, trying for a concerned look and tone. I actually feel nothing or – if possible – less than nothing. ‘He’s a big guy,’ I add puzzledly.

‘It’s believed Mr Joly was drugged, although we are still looking for a physically powerful attacker,’ side-parting confides excitedly.

‘That’s terrible.’ I look blankly at the digestive beside my cup that it would now be inappropriate to dunk. ‘Someone drugged his drink, or …’

‘They somehow got the drug into food served in his dressing room,’ he explains.

‘A Chicken Kiev,’ watery eyes announces.

I feel a rising, horrified excitement. The sort you feel when somebody dies. ‘Am I a suspect?’

They both laugh.

‘No, no, no, Mr Boyle.’ They beam silently at me for a bit. ‘You are on a list of, eh, celebrities we’re contacting in case they may be in danger.’

‘Danger? In danger of, eh …?’

‘Of being sexually assaulted,’ the old guy nods vigorously. ‘Of being subjected to the same kind of sexual assault as Mr Joly … there have been other incidents like this involving other, eh, celebrities.’

‘The suspicion is that this guy has been operating for several years, attacking people who have been famous but then slip below a certain level of public recognition,’ his partner explains, inexplicably ending by smacking his fist into his open palm.

I hold my tea in both hands like I’m nursing a Scotch. I try to think of a polite way of asking, then blurt out, ‘Who? Who else has he raped?’

The old boy flips open a notebook. ‘A lot of the presenters from The 11 O’Clock Show, Tony Slattery, Steve Punt, Sam Fox, Michael Greco, two … no, all three of the ladies from Smack the Pony, Frank Sidebottom, before he died. We can’t really name people.’

‘This has been going on for a while?’

‘It seems to be getting more active. And he seems to be focusing his anger on comedy.’

‘Everybody does,’ I smile.

As I show them out, Paul gets up halfway as some sort of farewell and it ends up looking like a curtsy. They both shake my hand warmly and, as the younger cop heads out, the old guy grips me by the arm and forces something into my hand. He fixes me with the liquid eyes of a dying spaniel and leaves without a word.

Half an hour later Paul and I are still smoking a joint on the couch, passing the picture back and forth. It’s a dressing room. I reckon it’s an ITV dressing room at LWT. In the foreground you can see part of a guy lying on the floor, his trousers off and a huge arse exposed. Is this Dom Joly? Is he fucking dead? Why would they take a photo while he was still unconscious? Did the rapist take it? On the wall is the real focus of the piece. Written in blood (presumably, we agree, Dom Joly’s arseblood) is a slogan in block capitals.

‘SHOWBUSINESS HAS NO BOTTOM.’