"Nightingale, Adam - Just For Laughs, Counsellor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nightingale Adam)

This was real death in all its real obscenity. Not the romantic bestower of glory that I had exalted in my articles, but a viscous thief. This was death stripped of the romantic Mount Olympus hall of fame bullshit. For a tiny moment I actually felt ashamed of what I did for a living, I suppose. I should have seen her in person before she went away, but I didn't.

Well, she died. I got a few days off work on compassionate grounds and went home to pay my respects. I was asked by a relative of hers that I had never met if I would give the eulogy. It transpired that she had mentioned me many times in her last weeks and had suggested that I should speak at the funeral. She never phoned me or insisted that I come to see her. I said that I would be honoured. It was good, the best thing that I had written. It would never see print, but there was something pure about that in itself.

The morning of the funeral I was anxious. I had never read anything that I had written out loud in front of an audience before. I was concerned that nerves would hamper my delivery, a great woman's memorial spoiled by my clumsiness. It would all prove to be academic, because that morning a friend phoned to tell me that Frank Sinatra had died and his obituary was being given to somebody else on account of my "delicate grief stricken condition". Frank Sinatra had died and I was two hundred miles away in some provincial Midlands crap hole.

I didn't deliver the eulogy that I had written. I really couldn't be bothered. I just mumbled a few pleasantries about what a nice old woman she was and then went to the wake to get shit faced. Oh yes, guess what they played over the loud speakers as Mrs Creek was being laid to rest? "My Way".

Like I said, I got drunk. I couldn't hold my liquor like Bob or Franky, but I bet in all their days of raising hell they never pissed on a freshly buried old lady's grave. Grief has a million and one not always appropriate ways of expressing itself. Suffice it to say my family don't speak to me anymore, and if I ever return to the Midlands someone will have to write my obituary.

I went to London and smashed up all my Sinatra records.

The next day I read my hack contemporaries' feeble best efforts to do justice to the legacy of Blue Eyes.

This time I didn't experience the bouts of depression that had followed the Robert Mitchum episode. I was angry, make no mistake about that, but there was no self pity. It was a war and I needed a brand new strategy. Something reasonably radical. I pondered long and hard, then one evening I cursed myself for a fool for not having seen it sooner. Time was the issue here.

I'll explain. All the while my colleagues and I had been at the mercy of time. We had waited around for people to die. We were at the beck and call of fate, waiting for the rich and famous to OD, get shot, stabbed, choke on their own vomit, or, heaven forbid, die of natural causes. We had it back to front all these years. Why not give fate a helping hand once in a while? Control the market, so to speak. When we decided that a career had reached its zenith, then we should be the ones to terminate it and commit it to eternal posterity, save the public having to see their idols demean themselves with shoddy self work, the natural by-product of old age and prejudicial casting. How much more of a cult icon would William Shatner, for instance, have been if he had been killed in a boating accident just after the third and final series of Star Trek and had never lived to do T.J. Hooker?

Wouldn't it also be perfect to have our favourite actresses preserved in our collective consciousness forever at their most beautiful? Would Marilyn Monroe have been half as iconic if she had survived the Kennedy murder plot and lived to be fat, ugly and old? Can you imagine Bruce Lee in a retirement home? I think the monks did kill him, but if they did, then they did us a favour. We don't want to see our stars subject to the same cycle of decay that is the lot of every normal, unremarkable human being. We want our heroes to be immortal, preserved in time at their absolute iconographic peak. So why not pitch in, do them a favour, send a few to heaven when it suited us? And if I could bring the whole shebang to a tidy conclusion with a glowing thousand word obituary, then all the better.

That left me with who I was going to retire. It had to be somebody I admired. It would be unethical to retire someone I had absolutely no respect for. If I killed Michael Winner, people would read the obituary just to make sure that he was really dead. No, it had to be somebody that I would personally grieve for. The choices were slightly constrained by geography. I couldn't afford to go to America where the real glamour resides. This was a shame as I understood that Arnold Schwarzenegger had recently had a heart operation. American stars were a no no really. They were already paranoid about assassination, making them far too well protected when they come over here. It would have to be someone local, someone British. Anyway British stars, although always not ideal from the glamour perspective, were easier because we members of the fifth estate know where they all live.

John Mills? Peter O'Toole? Michael Caine? I'd think of somebody.

I had settled on Richard Attenborough, and I was sitting in a cafe in Soho contemplating what would be the best way to go about my business. I had to think of methods of disposal. The more spectacular the exit the better, but as it was my first time I couldn't really afford to be too demonstrative.

I was reminded of a Charles Bronson movie in which he played a freelance assassin who kills people by making their deaths look like accidents. The Mechanic. A Michael Winner movie! I was trying to think of how he had done it, when something I can only describe as providential happened. He walked by my window. The face of stone.

Charles Bronson.

I know what you're thinking. I can hear you thinking it. It wasn't Charles Bronson, just someone that looked incredibly like Charles Bronson. It was, it really was Charles Bronson. Long overdue a reappraisal, don't you think?

He was an icon in danger of being forgotten by those who had never seen the Magnificent Seven, Hard Times, The Dirty Dozen or Once Upon A Time In The West and remembered as the old guy in Family of Cops. I loved Charles Bronson almost as much as Bob and slightly more than Franky. I had never considered him as an obituary prospect before. He always seemed like he was made of granite, as immortal as Mount Rushmore. I assumed that he would outlive us all.

I certainly didn't know that he was in London at the moment. I was surprised that nobody seemed to recognised him. I know that he wasn't necessarily the world's greatest actor, I know that, but he had a presence the stars today would sell their souls to Satan to posses. Anyway, I followed him to Tottenham Court Road tube station and pushed him under a train. He was dragged for about twelve feet. It seemed apt to send him to his doom in the subway ambience of so many of his Death Wish movies. In rush hour, it's a really easy thing to get away with.

It was a bit of a risk. I mean, I hadn't really mentioned him within earshot of the editorial staff before. It wasn't a given that I would get the obituary. There was a lot of snobbery regarding Charles Bronson, but I figured that would go in my favour as none of the senior staff would be that enthusiastic. To the hunter the spoils. I would get the obituary. I left the tube station before the police and fire people arrived. I went home, switched on the all news channel on my TV and waited for the phone to ring.

Nothing.

I was surprised. He was a huge star in his heyday. I sat at my listening post for six hours. The phone went twice. One wrong number and a work mate wanting to borrow In The Wee Small Hours on vinyl. The third time the phone went it was a journo friend called Andy.

"You're a Charley Bronson fan, aren't you?"

I hate it when they call him Charley. It makes him sound like a homosexual.

"Yes."

"Well, guess what?"