looked at his balloon head and his baby face. His rainbow coloured hair and bright red hospital radio DJ glasses.
‘Maybe if he was still alive.’
‘What?’
‘Who knows what direction he would have gone in,’ I said, ‘if he’d lived. The fourth age of Elvis.’
‘What?’ Jarvis said.
‘After Young, Movie and Vegas Elvis.’
I looked at his face in the mirror again. ‘Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are’ it said on a transfer at the bottom of the mirror. Jarvis looked up from his newspaper.
‘Do you think he’s really dead?’ he said.
‘Huh?’
‘Elvis. Do you think he’s really dead or that he faked his death?’
‘No. He’s dead, definitely dead. The King is dead,’ I said. ‘Or on the moon.’
‘That didn’t happen.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The moon landing,’ Jarvis said.
‘Landings.’
‘What?’
‘Landings. There’ve been six manned moon landings.’
‘Really? Six?’
‘Yep.’
‘They didn’t happen,’ Jarvis said in a way that told me there could be no argument about it. ‘For a million pounds,’ he said. ‘Would you fake your own death?’
‘I sometimes think I already have.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know Jarvis. I just said it. Thought it would sound clever. Surely you have to be famous to properly fake your own death anyway.’
‘If you were famous then, for a million pounds would you fake your own death?’
‘If I was famous I probably wouldn’t need the money.’
Jarvis hated it when I didn’t take his games seriously. I looked at his balloon head inflating in the rear-view mirror and to avoid it bursting and ruining my freshly valeted car seats with Jarvis brains, I decided to play along.
Sort of.
‘There’s no way Elvis faked his death,’ I said. ‘Apart from the fact that he surely would have picked a more heroic cause of death than sitting on a toilet eating a peanut butter sandwich if he had faked it, apart from that, if Elvis was still alive he would have said something by now just to put a stop to all the people impersonating him, especially the shit ones, which is nearly all of them. Did you know – and I’m making some of the facts up because I can’t remember them – but there are around one hundred thousand Elvis impersonators in the world. There were only a hundred and something at the time of Elvis’s death. If this rate of Elvis growth carries on, by 2019 a third of the world’s population will be Elvis impersonators.’
‘Are you just saying this to sound clever as well?’
‘No, it’s true.’
‘Well, anyway,’ Jarvis said, but didn’t finish what he was going to say and went back to reading the job ads in The Stage.
You know how some people desperately want to get into the music business and so they get a job in a record shop? Or how actors work in call centres selling boiler maintenance cover and serve cocktails on roller skates wearing a tight t-shirt with no bra because it’s good acting experience? I mean: have you looked at the acting job ads in The Stage lately? Those are the only vacancies you’ll find there. Croupiers wanted for cruise ships, strippers and pole dancers needed urgently. Six pages of vacancies for door-to-door mobile phone salespeople and high street charity muggers, and maybe one acting job, that’s unpaid and has already gone.
In 1993 Jarvis got a job demonstrating – and mostly crashing – remote controlled helicopters into the floor of a toyshop and making unrecognisable balloon animals in the hope that it would be his big break into acting, one small step onto the yellow brick road that would eventually lead him to being presented with a real version of this piece of misspelled tacky plastic:
Jarvis had it made for himself at Southamleys toyshop when he was working there as Devon’s worst toy demonstrater – it was in the old actor’s suitcase. The job ad from The Stage was in the shoebox. There was also a 1986 Charles and Diana Fifth Royal Wedding Anniversary Diary in the shoebox, where I found the next series of diary entries. At last, a bit of love interest.
Because the diary is for the wrong year all the days of the week are wrong.
JARVIS GETS A GIRLFRIEND
MONDAY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 8th 1986 1993
After a boring amount of time spent working in the most boring job in the whole boring world something happened that wasn’t boring. There’s a new girl who works in the food hall at the garden centre. And she looks like Diana. (Lunch = fish fingers, chips and peas)
THURSDAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 11th 1986 1993
I stood in the longer queue at the food hall yesterday because the girl who looks like Diana was working on that till. The queue was so slow I nearly didn’t have time to eat my lunch. (Lasagne)
MONDAY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 15th 1986 1993
Some schoolboys came into the shop today and stole the helicopter I was flying. They just snatched it out of the air and ran away with it. The manager called the police but they didn’t catch them. The funny thing is they won’t be able to fly the helicopter because I still had the remote control, ha ha ha.
WEDNESDAY MONDAY NOVEMBER 17th 1986 1993
Chose the slow and long Diana lunch queue again. (Some pasta dish or other)
THURSDAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 18th 1986 1993
Today those schoolboys came back and stole the remote control.
