Boracic Lint

By Martin Bryce

An out of work actor with a serious superiority complex lands work playing Santa Claus in the grotto of the world famous London department store, Harridges. It seems like child's play , it turns out to be anything but. Every ounce of his improvisation skills is challenged by the children who come to see him. His colleagues stretch his wit and wisdom to the limit until he makes a fateful decision.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Bryce
• Release date: May 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458083241

Martin Bryce

Graham Houghton was born in Liverpool, UK and spent a fortunate childhood growing up wild and free on the fringe of the Lake District. Badly educated at a minor English public school which was staffed largely by emotional refugees from WW II, he then made the mistake of starting his working life in the military. After receiving a right bollocking from his CO for defending himself against a sexual assault by a more senior officer cadet at RMA Sandhurst, he left for the love of a girl - thank you JP. Thank you also for running off with that dickhhead who sold toilets to local councils, thus leaving him free to meet the woman he's now been married to for 44 years. After a string of more or less, mostly less interesting jobs, he eventually fell into bed with archaeology and has never left it. And along the way he has written - technical reports, 38 children's books some of which are available secondhand on Amazon, newspaper and magazine articles, an award-winning (Los Angeles, 2010) screenplay 'Cry of the Dreamer', which NEEDS REPRESENTATION, and the ebook 'Boracic Lint', a darkly comic tale in which Father Christmas turns to drink. Mountains and lakes, exploring, theatre, literature, good food and wine, these are all things that amuse him. But his greatest achievement is being one half of a partnership that has produced three of the finest people you could hope to meet - thank you Julia. He now lives in Australia and wonders... why?

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What readers are saying about Boracic Lint

This is one of the most downright enjoyable pieces of writing I have seen. It is just hilarious. There is also an elegance to your writing that gives an addictive quality that the reader is transfixed with. This is both belly laugh humour and extremely subtle and I salute you. Carl.Martin,

It's funny that you use the word Dickensian to describe the agent, because that's how I feel about your book. It could be a modern Pickwick Papers with a host of mad characters , humour and vibrancy. This is so very much my sort of book but I thought they didn't write them like this anymore. Lynn

This is absolutely hysterical - so well written and so easy to read! You have a true gift for characterisation - so much so that I was imagining stars in the movie version! Liz

It gives me a new take on the man behind the suit. All in all, this reminds me of Confederacy of Dunces. Your protagonist has a little bit of Ignatius J. Reilly in him. The people he confronts during the job fit the scene so well. This is a hoot. I love it. Pete Williams

Boracic Lint

by

Martin Bryce

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Martin Bryce at Smashwords

Boracic Lint

Copyright © 2010 by Martin Bryce

ISBN 978-0-9805722-1-6

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction.

To Julia

for her patience, understanding and love.

To Jenny, Ian and Robin

because I love them.

The Bull to Jove.

Other People’s WISDOM

Back in the first century Seneca wrote of audiences, It’s the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the insanities we commit.

Of actors, well actresses really, Ethel Barrymore is quoted as saying, in the twentieth century, For an actress to be successful she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno and the hide of a rhinoceros.

PROLOGUE

In the two years since leaving RADA, the best my agent had found for me was a part as a Sikh in a play in Bradford, of all places! And a walk-on, or rather carry-off role as a corpse covered in a sheet in a pilot episode of a second rate cop show for Cuba.

To be fair he had found me other things; the commercial for suppositories for French television being the highlight. And he’d told me of several calls for film extras, but always he’d left me to do the leg work and always he’d taken his forty percent. I was still waiting to hear from the RSC about my audition. A formality really, but every time I tried to pin him down about it he was either off to a vital business lunch, or busy finalising the details of an important contract for one of the many lesser talents on his books.

While it was not exactly what I had had in mind for a Christmas engagement, a pantomime wouldn’t have been too much to ask, the unpalatable truth was I was skint. That’s why I accepted the part. And what a pantomime it turned out to be.

So, there I was playing Father Christmas in Harridge’s Grotto. I hadn’t met any of the other applicants at the so-called audition, really just a short interview at the Job Centre with Sharon, but I imagined the competition had been pretty stiff and I felt relieved to have been offered the part. It wasn’t long before I was really beginning to look forward to seeing the joy and wonder in the eyes of the little children as they saw me, or rather Santa, for the first time at the end of the magical Grotto. What follows is what happened, as it happened.

SCENE 1

The athlete’s foot was back. I’d had it, on and off, ever since catching it in the terminally bleak Victorian showers at St Onan’s College for sons of the Clergy. Although none of my male forebears had been called to the cloth, I was eligible for entry on the grounds that mother had trained as a High Priestess in the Temple of Isis as a way of beating the post-natal depression caused by me being born. Onan’s, like many other boys’ boarding schools, was world famous for upholding the three pillars of wisdom - thuggery, buggery and skulduggery - which underpinned an English private education. Inevitably, during a particularly intense era of political correctness, it was closed down after a joint operation comprising the, the Fraud, Vice and drug Squads, NATO the RSPCA, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Department of Education.

My father’s recommended treatment for T. interdigitale, which he learned in the Navy, was to soak the feet in bowls of super-saturated brine and methylated spirits alternately. He said it would make them as tough as boot leather, which it did. So, it was goodbye to Terpsichore and I still had the toe rot, on and off.

I had a letter from him soon after I landed the part.

Chatham House

Victory Park

Little Shipton

Devon

Dear Wretch,

I understand from your damned mother that you’ve excelled yourself again. She thinks it all rather jolly, you poncing around playing Father bloody Christmas at Claridges, or whatever the name of the blasted place is.

Let me make it quite clear that as far as I’m concerned you’re beneath contempt and your already minuscule share of the estate diminishes further with each pathetic item of news about you that I am forced to listen to. Let me remind you that you once had a promising naval career, but no, you had to let that poisonous little trollop addle your brain with ideas. Half-witted little bugger.

Your younger brother, who I’m sorely tempted to acknowledge as my only son, is to take his first command next month - a minesweeper. He’s being sent to the Gulf to knock some bloody sense into those blasted ragheads. Before that he’ll be home for Christmas and your bloody mother hopes you’ll come, too. Why she should want you here is beyond me.

She sends you a cheque for Christmas; I’ve deducted the amount from your inheritance.

The dogs are well.

The Admiral

I don’t suppose you could expect anything else from a man who had spent his entire working life having ships sunk under him. The last one was my old dinghy, which he managed to stack into a rock at Methoni, off the Peloponnese coast. Too much ouzo, probably, although the official account raved on about dragons’ teeth and sirens, golden fleeces and voluptuous Lesbian warriors. And there was the inevitable salt-in-the-wounds experience, for an English Admiral, of being rescued by a ‘bloody chimpanzee of a Greek; probably one of Phil’s bloody cousins to boot!’

Good news about the dogs though.

That same day, on a visit to the library, I bumped into Tanya Hall or rather she bumped into me. Nicknamed ‘Tandem’ for her ability to multitask in an interesting way, she was an awesome piece of paintwork. She also used perfume in industrial quantities figuring, I suppose, that if she used a week’s worth of the stuff at once, it would last a week. Someone needed to have a word with her, but it wasn’t going to be me.

I knew her as secretary of the local Amdram club where I’d delivered acting workshops. Pinioned between her boobs and a stack of books on the supernatural, an appropriate juxtaposition, I was forced into polite conversation, although even my extensive acting skills were scrambling to cope with the rapacious flirt who was coming onto me like a scramjet on heat. In short, I let slip that I was ‘resting’.

‘Ooh, really!’ She cooed, fingering my chest. ‘You wouldn’t like to…’

‘No!’ I blurted, fearing the worst.

‘But you didn’t let me finish, you naughty boy,’ she exhaled a balloon of tobacco-breath and pinched my left nipple.

‘Ow! That hurt!’ I protested, drawing the attention of innocent children and their parents stocking up on merry literature for the holiday.

‘I’ve written a play,’ she announced, groping in her backpack. ‘The Company have made it their next production.’

‘How nice,’ I said, trying to ignore the top of her head which was thrust into my groin as she searched her bag.

‘Of course, we need a Director,’ she said, ‘and I immediately thought of you.’

‘Why? What have I done?’ I croaked, the first glimmerings of panic rising in my mind.

‘There,’ she said decisively, thrusting the script into my stomach. ‘It’s a farce.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ I replied, weighing the thing in my hands with heavy heart.

‘So, you will do it, yes?’

‘Er, well… that is…’ Beads of sweat were breaking out on my forehead; I could feel mild palpitations in my chest.

‘Oh you poor boy. You’re poorly.’ She dug in her handbag, retrieved a lipstick stained tissue and dabbed my brow with it.

‘No really, I’m fine,’ I gasped. ‘Just a bit close in here, you know,’ I added trying to crab sideways out of the pneumatic clamp.

‘I should never have asked,’ she declared with a smirk.

‘No really, it’s quite alright.’ Big mistake; she pounced.

‘Oh I knew it,’ she said with glee. ‘I knew you’d agree. I knew a real pro like you could never refuse an opportunity like this!’ I may have been a real pro, but I’d just been shanghaied by an older one.

That afternoon I checked my make-up box and found it all but empty, so I took a trip to Aladdin’s Cave - Madam Moineau’s theatrical supplies emporium. There was everything, from foundation make-up to a suit of lights, from an on-stage nursery to a mediaeval armoury. It was thespian heaven and I was instantly transported, as I always was at Madam M’s, from the grim, grey reality of London’s winter streets, to the glitter and excitement of the traffic of the stage. I stocked up with several products from the Justin Knight range. I was tempted to buy a pair of ‘Santa’ boots, but smart as they were, my funds didn’t run to it. And anyway, Harridges had said that they’d provide everything necessary.

Back at my lodgings, I found Mr Higginbottom, my humourless landlord, in terse mood. A northerner, his passion was a whippet called Cnut, a passion which was only equalled by his hatred of cats.

My cat was called Cloudesley and was suffering a bit of a veterinary condition at the time. Unable to leave the squalid little two-up, two-down that the northerners and I called home, he had dumped a load in the hallway just after lunch. Despite pleas from his feeble-minded wife, Higginbottom the Sour had spent the entire afternoon skirting round the foetid pile refusing to clean it up on the grounds that it was my cat that did it and I, therefore, had to be taught a lesson. Northern rectitude at its rectal best provided a shitty end to a mixed day.

I climbed the gloomy stairs to my tiny, cold, damp room. I lay on the bed and turned to the first page of Tandem’s script; it’s a challenge, I thought, like cave diving for claustrophobes. Within seconds I was in clinical shock. My stomach was churning, my spirits, already sinking, plummeted. She’s Got His Scent was, indeed, a farce. One of those asinine, Gilbertian situations where everyone gets their brains shagged out, except, of course, for the brainless Vicar. He, predictably, loses his trousers in a crappily contrived situation involving a futon and a gormless little tart who, wearing a continental waitress’s costume, bends over a lot. The dialogue was thin to the point of near-invisibility and how in the name of Judas I managed to get involved I’ll never know. But the deed was done, the parts had been cast and a rehearsal timetable was already ticking down, so I decided to regard my part in it as Community Service, although what my crime had been was beyond comprehension.

I hastily concocted a supper, a sort of kedgeree made with tinned tuna, a boiled egg with a deeply blackened yolk, the last of my rice and the remains of a can of peas. I washed it down with a can of lager while listening to the weariness that was the news, then made my way, unwillingly like snail, to the Arts Centre to confront the cast and the first rehearsal of Scent.

SCENE 2

The delicate tracery of frost flowers on the inside of my window confirmed that it had been a bollock-breakingly cold night and that I’d been wise to leave my thermal underwear on. Cloudesley had slept on the bed keeping my feet warm, but the succession of cat farts throughout the night had given me a smidgin of sympathy for Mrs H. Then, as the unseen Sun crawled above the frozen rooftops and my feet began to itch, came a knock at the door.

‘Who is it?’ I yawned.

‘Who d’you bloody think?’ snarled Higginbottom the Small.

I swung out of bed and opened the door. There they were, visitors from the planet Despair, Mr and Mrs H standing together, stooped and pinched, in all their grey, wrinkled, tragic hopelessness. He was holding a bunch of unlit candles.

‘Yes?’ I enquired sleepily as Cloudesley shot first between my legs and then Mrs H’s, pushing her nicely over the edge of coping with life and sending her into a dead faint. H attempted to lift his waif-like bride, but wasn’t quite up to it on his own, so I took hold of her legs and we carried her to my bed. She came round just as I, standing between her legs, was lowering her feet to the mattress. She gave me a terrified look, screamed like a banshee and in one bound was out of the door faster than Cnut with wings. As he watched her hurtle in her own unsteady way down the stairs, H the Simpatico mumbled something I didn’t quite catch, then he turned on me.

‘T’bloody pipes’r froze.’

‘Ah.’

‘Gotta thaw ‘em,’ he grunted.

‘That’ll be why you have the candles, then,’ I observed.

H looked at me, expressionless, but his soul radiated a curious, frozen hatred. Then, slowly, his thin northern lip curled. ‘Yu’ll have ter open t’taps,’ he sneered, pointing to the cracked and blackened sink in the corner of the room. In the arctic atmosphere, I crossed the room and did as I was asked while H the Artless placed lit candles under all the exposed pipes he could find.

Having arrived home late and tired from rehearsal the previous evening, I hadn’t bothered to apply father’s brine and alcohol pickle to my feet. Fortunately the cold of the cracked lino floor stopped the itching dead and as it seemed that there would be no water for some time in the house of mirth, I decided to visit the aquatic centre and enjoy a hot shower there. So, with towel, bathers and tube of fungicide stuffed into my environmentally friendly calico shopping bag, I set off in reasonably high spirits, planning to stop off at the Black Cat Café for breakfast. Sr Corsini made a magnificent bacon sandwich which simply oozed… well, some sort of spread, and his coffee was… strong.

‘You can keep your Subways, Senor Corsini,’ I said, ‘there’s nowhere like the Black Cat Cafés of this world in the frozen, drear, sleet-abused mornings during winter.’ Then I remembered that Cloudesley was still on my bed. The urgent dash back to Mafeking Avenue did nothing for my digestion.

Le Misérable, ankle deep in water in the hallway, was on the phone to the plumber. The thawing pipes had burst while he had been out walking Cnut. La Misérable hadn’t known where the stopcock was located and was now crying quietly in the kitchen as I paddled gently through the flood. She was doubly upset as they’d only just finished decorating the ground floor for Christmas. For the second time that morning I felt a twinge of sympathy for her; but I gave Mr H a big beaming smile and a cheery little wave. I smuggled Cloudesley out under my coat, leaving H berating his own existence.

I arrived at the aquatic centre only to find that it didn’t open until ten o’clock. Shit! I was frozen, my feet in particular due to my desert boots becoming waterlogged during the cat evacuation mission. I could almost feel the toes blackening as frostbite took hold, but at least they weren’t itching. I decided to ride on the tube for a while for warmth and after a search, during which the extra large tube of fungicide was examined minutely by armed anti-terrorist officers, I boarded a Circle Line train and began to read through my notes about the previous night’s shambles of a rehearsal.

First act blocked (the thing should be burned).

Casting. Hah! Not sure that an apprentice Stonemason (this one anyway) is going to be able to enter the role of glamorous pop star, Randy Broome, however much the imbecile fancies himself (Birmingham accent – oh please!).

McGregor. Dreadful, and would be in any role requiring the man to speak in English. Not even his fellow Glaswegians could interpret the swinelike grunts he emits. Unfortunately he’s the senior member of the Company and casting director, so no chance of removing him from the role of West Country Vicar and uncle to the pop star

Misses Neave, Blumberg. Mr Roberts (Archbishop!! You might as well cast Mr Bean as Jesus Christ) - never mind.

Miss Pickering. Unhappy about the morality, or lack of it in ‘Scent’. Says she’s not been happy with it from the start and the rest of the Company knows that. Believes they are trying to get rid of her by giving her lewd parts – might suggest she does the vamping scene with the Archbishop, naked. Both of them.

Stage Manager. New to the Company and a refugee from the hippy era (thought they’d gone extinct during the Thatcherite impact). Thinks a flat is what you live in and has no idea what a patchboard is. Suspect if I mention gels he’d go into a conspiratorial huddle and ask how much a gram. Claims to be able to hang wallpaper and paint scenery – suspect if he had a tail he’d use it as a brush.

Rowena! Rowena Singleton. Ah, fair Rowena, whose beauty shines soft, as spring sunlight on the bejewelled webs of dawn. In short, deep down, drop dead 3D gorgeous. And terrific as Debbie, the heroine of the thing.

We hit it off as soon as we saw each other. At least I thought so.

After rehearsal the Company retired to the Rat and Carrot, a pub considered to be their ‘Green Room’, to feed humanity’s old but grand addiction to chemically altered states of perception. Despite the Company’s name for it, the shocking pink wallpaper with the Spanish dancing lady design was anything but restful. I drank halves of bitter, Rowena G&Ts. I paid. But for me, the best thing was that she was also working at Harridges, on men’s toiletries, over the build-up to Christmas so I