got him that gig.
We were six years – although you probably already know that – old when our teacher Miss – can’t remember her name – asked the class who would like to play the lead role. As she scanned the classroom for a raised hand I panicked. I thought she might not find a volunteer and pick me at random for the role.
‘Jarvis, Miss!’ I shouted out, pointing at Jarvis sat at the desk next to mine. The whole class turned to look at him as Miss thing thought for a moment, perhaps about how the cute kids always got to play the princes and princesses and maybe it was time to give the less fortunate uglier fatter balloon-faced kids a chance.
Why did the classroom seating have to be arranged alphabetically on our first day at school? Why couldn’t we have been seated boy/girl/boy/girl instead? Then I might have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado. Who knows, perhaps we’d be married now. With a houseful of sweet freckle-faced kids. Or why couldn’t I have just had a different surname? A name with its initial letter earlier or later in the alphabet. My stupid parents and their idiotic ancestors. If my surname had begun with an N or a P, I might have been sat next to Martin O’Brien on my first day at school. Martin O’Brien won three hundred grand on the lottery a few months ago. It was on the front page of the local paper. If my name had begun with an N or a P, I might have ended up managing Martin O’Brien instead of Jarvis and Martin would have had to give me £60,000 of his lottery cash.
The point is. I wouldn’t have been sat next to Jarvis Ham when the teacher was looking for her boy king and we could all end this story right here and get on with our lives.
‘Jarvis? Would you like to play the part of the Boy King?’ Miss I-can’t-remember-what-her-name-was said. She might as well have stood outside the school gates at home time and given Jarvis a free sample of heroin or crack cocaine.
Tutankhamun the Boy King would be Jarvis Ham’s gateway drug. Here’s my review of the show:
There was an American actor and comic named Victor Buono. He played the comic villain King Tut in the 1960s television show Batman. Look him up on the Internet. I hardly remember Jarvis’s King Tut performance, as I was only six myself, but for the sake of this anecdote I’m going to pretend that I remember the six-year-old Jarvis Ham’s King Tut being a lot more like that thirty-year-old plump and slightly camp actor’s version of King Tut than the ancient Egyptian boy child royalty that Jarvis was attempting to portray. I do remember that Jarvis had a beard that his mother had made from the inside tube of a toilet roll; it was covered in black and gold sticky paper and glued to his chin. His mother had also made the rest of his costume. She’d cut the top off a gold cocktail dress and made a headdress out of a tea towel that was held in place with a hair band wrapped in silver foil on top of her son’s royal balloon head.
The rest of the class, including me, carried Jarvis into the dinner hall on a golden throne: made from the headmaster’s office chair, covered in gold paper and decorated with hieroglyphics. It weighed a fucking ton.
It was not very brilliant.
After the performance was over our teacher congratulated us all for doing so well and she gave Jarvis a bag of Jelly Tots for his starring role. As we waited for our parents to pick us up and take us home Jarvis told me to hold my hand out and he poured six of the sugar covered jelly sweets into it.
My management commission.
Mister Twenty Per Cent.
The rest of the scrapbook was blank. What a waste of a good scrapbook. I suppose Jarvis might have started out with good scrapbook keeping intentions and then maybe he ran out of glue, or he lost his scissors. Or was this the beginning and end of the diary of Jarvis Ham? Just these two brief entries about the ancient Egyptian monarchy? Why couldn’t I have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado? I could have been reading her diary. I bet Suzie had some filthy secrets.
Then I found this shoebox:
I climbed into the car, adjusted the rear-view mirror and looked at Jarvis fast asleep in the back; his face squashed against the window and the start of a dribble slowly chasing a raindrop down the glass. Not really, it wasn’t raining, I’m just trying to insert a bit of poetry into the story. God knows it’s going to need it. He had the seatbelt pulled across his body but not fastened. He said it made him feel sick when it was fastened.
There was a new smell in the car. I think you’d call it funky, funkier than James Brown. I turned my head to look. Jarvis had taken his shoes off. They were on the back seat next to his big fat plum apron.
These shoes:
I thought about the shoebox and what I’d found inside it. There were some other newspaper cuttings. There were notepads and loose pieces of paper, stuff written on the backs of flyers and takeaway menus. I found a couple of photographs and some drawings, cinema tickets and hairdressing appointment cards and even one or two actual proper diaries. The shoebox was inside this huge old brown leather suitcase:
The suitcase had once been owned by an incredibly famous stage actor that I’d never heard of. Jarvis’s father had bought it at an auction for his son’s eighteenth birthday. It was covered in stickers of places in the world the actor had visited and the plays and musicals he’d appeared in while he was there.
In the suitcase with the shoebox there were two videocassettes, an Oscar statue, more notepads and books and various other bits of crap. It’s this collection of junk that I’m calling Jarvis Ham’s diary. It’s more of a boot sale than a diary. A boot sale that Jarvis had been secretly keeping and I’d been secretly reading.
I imagine some people would think I was nosy. You should never read other people’s private stuff. Especially diaries. Apart from anything else, you might find out things about people you’d rather not know about them. No shit Sherlock. Now you tell me.
As Jarvis’s manager though, it didn’t seem unreasonable to me that I should be entitled to read my client’s memoirs. And it’s memoirs that I imagine Jarvis would have liked to think that his collection of crap amounted to. Not a diary. Diaries were for teenage girls. The Memoirs of Jarvis Ham would be a seminal work of non-fiction that would one day be compiled, put into chronological order, published by Penguin or Faber and Faber and serialised in the Sunday papers. It would be read by a million Jarvis Ham fans and made into a Hollywood movie starring Tom Cruise with Jarvis himself modestly taking a cameo role as his own father. The Jarvis Ham memoirs would be a big fat doorstep of a book with black and white photographs. All it needed was some idiot to make sense of it all and put it into chronological order.
I opened a window to let the funk out of the car and I pulled slowly away from the Ham and Hams Teahouse and drove up Fore Street. We passed the ladies hairdressers: called simply, Mary, where both Jarvis and I had had our very first professional haircuts on a Saturday morning; when Mary would cut the hair of the young sons and grandsons of her more regular female customers.
We used to think there was something space age about the big hydraulic chairs at Mary, the way they moved up and down and the noise they made when they did so. The big hairdryers seemed pretty sci-fi too. Sitting in those big hydraulic space chairs we watched the old women in the mirror, reading
