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Of the four people in the audience that night, two walked out before the thirty-minute mark, one fell asleep, and one cornered Marwood outside the venue to ask him where on earth he had gotten the idea for scene with the dead bartender.
“It’s autobiographical,” he told her. “It all really happened.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, how horrid,” she said. Then, as if considering how that might have come off, she said, “Quite well written—but I thought you were going to be in it. Who is that fellow? Have I seen him in anything before?”
It was a departure, admittedly. Most of the people who had showed up so far knew him from his television work in the seventies and eighties: pulpy stuff on wobbly sets with the occasional period piece stuck in for good measure. He was not “known” in the same sense for his screenwriting work even though that had been what paid the bills throughout the nineties—which in turn had been far more pedestrian than whatever this was, or rather whatever it was trying to be.
And then there was Withnail, in a starring role. His first. Quite possibly his last.
“They loved it,” proclaimed Withnail when Marwood came back inside. He was resting with his feet up on the dressing room counter, head tipped back as he puffed on his concerningly complex vape device. “Our best one yet.”
“We have to leave,” said Marwood.
“Leave?” Withnail cried. “But I thought we’d paid up in advance? They can’t kick us out because of low ticket sales. That’s against the spirit of the thing. Send me in, I’ll light a fire under their arses, I’ll unleash the dogs—”
“No, Withnail, we have to leave the venue. Right now. The kids are about to be in.”
The show in the venue after theirs each and every day was a troupe of rainbow-haired children—university students—who apparently put on some kind of comedy and music revue. He wasn’t clear on the exact format, but whatever they did, it always left sparkling confetti all over the dressing room floor. Marwood kept finding it in his boots. One time a flake of it had glittered in Withnail’s hair for an entire evening.
The absurdity of the whole thing was never more manifest in these moments: Withnail forcing his way through a chattering group of twenty-somethings who in the same way that they themselves had once adopted the starched accoutrements of the Edwardian age were now clothed in paisley, fringe, and flowers.
“Good show today, guys?” asked one of them—pink hair, eyebrow piercings. They were all unbearably friendly and quite terrifying.
“We’re the toast of the town,” said Marwood, and ceded the room.
***
Four thousand shows played the Fringe each August. To say nothing of the press and the tourists. Accommodation was unbelievably expensive and after expenses Marwood had not been able to afford anything better than a rather squalid room a thirty-minute bus ride from the city center, so in between their show time and their evening plans—a dinner somewhere Withnail had chosen, usually—they had to find some ways of entertaining themselves in town.
It was raining. That was probably why nobody had showed, Marwood thought, they could not face the weather. Cowards.
The Surgeon’s Hall was mere blocks away, so off they trotted. “Seniors get in free today,” said the woman behind the counter with a buoyant smile. Marwood cringed, anticipating the reaction, but Withnail only bowed lugubriously and swept inside, leaving Marwood to shuffle along in his wake.
Withnail stalked the grand hall of anatomy like a wraith, his coat flapping behind him. Parents and children gave him a wide berth.
“I don’t like this place,” Marwood muttered. The tumors that lined the walls all seemed to be eyeing him. He stopped in front of a particularly bulbous teratoma, floating in formaldehyde since the days of Asquith.
“It looks a bit like a woman,” said Withnail. “D’you see it? Her leg, there, and one breast, viewed from a three-quarters angle…”
“God,” Marwood said, growing pale, “what if something like that’s growing inside me right now?” He could picture it all too easily.
“The show must go on,” intoned Withnail.
“But what if it doesn’t? What if we’re struck down?”
“At least we didn’t get fat,” Withnail called smugly. He had come upon a display about David Lambert and was leering at it. “Not like this bastard.”
True, Withnail was still as rangy as ever; possibly even thinner, having dried up a bit, hardened and sunken in onto himself, become the grinning skull which had always-already been peeking out from behind his face. It had only made him more magnetic—the silver hair, too, in profusion, somehow more of it than he used to have, forming a sort of tarnished halo.
Marwood had not filled out egregiously either, but he was no showstopper in his dotage. In the mirror of late he found himself grimacing at the flabby lack of dignity he saw there. How long had he been oozing mediocrity out of every pore like this? Something had to be done.
***
And here, he had done it!
The lights came up: Withnail said, “Oh, you should have seen us.”
It was a grand show. Or it could have been, if it hadn’t been playing in a dank, leaking dungeon deep below Cowgate with the occasional blowjob taking place in the back row.
They were all there, in some form or another. Danny, Presuming Ed; girlfriends by unlikely names like Pigeon and Snippy; drama school teachers and pub louts and Camden riffraff. Speed and booze and pot. Striving and straining towards something bigger than oneself. The detritus of those hoary old decades. Even Monty made an appearance, disguised slightly, but certainly present.
The thrust of the thing was obviously about decline, regret, memory. Not nostalgia—that was far too cheap—but instead the visceral evocation of a mood of past-ness. Marwood was quite proud of it. And look, Withnail was more than doing it justice. He staggered about the stage, shivering in an imagined London autumn chill. He declaimed, monologued, recounted; he played off himself, played himself, made the whole thing come alive. Only when he was watching it did Marwood forget to question instigating the entire affair.
“There’s money,” he had said, “a fair bit of it,” and Withnail had asked, “How on earth—” and Marwood said, “My daughter works in nonprofits, she helped me with the grant.”
Silence on the line as Withnail had recalled, internalized, and repressed once more the fact of Marwood’s family.
“A month?”
“Sixteen performances. Four a week, an hour each.”
“An hour,” scoffed Withnail. “What could you possibly get done in an hour? Don’t tell me, it’s abridged Shakespeare. For babies. With diverse casting.”
“It’s about me,” Marwood said. “I’ve already written it. But I haven’t acted in—I just don’t think I ought to do it. I’d like you to.”
This, he knew, had the potential to be an insult. A hand of charity extended to man who had never, in the forty years he’d known him, stooped to such indignities.
But forty years mellows a man, especially a forty years as anticlimactic as Withnail had had.
His father had died in 1974, Monty a few years later, and the flush of inherited cash and property which followed had snatched him back from what would have otherwise proved to be a road to perdition, but was still an unorthodox road nonetheless. He had been variously: an absentee landlord, a wannabe painter, a one-time model for Vivienne Westwood, a frontman, a born-again Christian, a bookie, a food critic, a dealer in Oriental tapestries and carpets, a man with a van, and a pub owner. Rarely an actor, though. In fact, never. It seems that after he had lost Marwood's sympathy and encouragement he had not been able to go out for a single audition.
And around the time that Marwood’s career entered its first—but not final—death throe, he had called him.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Where have—who is this? How did you get this number?”
But he had known.
“Six months of Radio Times without a look in. Squat Betty is slacking.”
“She hasn’t been my agent for five years, Withnail.”
“Who are you with now? No, don’t tell me, only tell them to do a better fucking job, I’ve got this program on and it’d be a sight better with you in it than this Martin Shaw bugger, I’m sick of his face, he’s got pure smarm dripping out the eyes, I want to fucking throttle him.”
Marwood had laughed, really laughed, for the first time in weeks. And so nearly thirty years later as Withnail agreed to take the part he found himself with that same feeling, a sort of high, the addicting rush you get from standing before a precipitous drop, knowing you could throw yourself off at any moment, but have the good sense not to.
***
It was unclear how any of these people did it. The amount of uppers that must be shuttling through the streets of Edinburgh at this moment in order to keep the whole lunatic thing rolling along was beyond comprehension. Although, he considered, did they do uppers anymore? Certainly not the same uppers as they had once done: they being he and Withnail, at one point in time. They had other stuff. Websites.
The website which bedeviled him at the moment was the one which told him how many tickets they had sold each night, and how many (if any) had been reserved by members of the press. He had gone a bit mad clicking at it hour after hour, to the point where Withnail now slammed the laptop shut on his fingers in the middle of the cafe.
“Come on. Don’t you want to know?”
“What I want to know,” Withnail said, “is why can’t we transfer some of those fuckers’ sales to ours? Can you… hack?” He was pointing out the window, across the street where a large poster loomed for Trainspotting: LIVE!, a show that Marwood was dimly aware sold thousands of tickets every festival.
“No, I can’t. We’ll just have to do things the sensible way. I’ve contacted every journalist I know—sent out mailings and pitches. An acqauintance of mine from the BBC says he might stop by on Saturday or Sunday. But that’s only if he doesn’t go to this ballet thing… And then there’s the woman from the Guardian… perhaps I could tell her it’s my dying wish. Or yours. Or both…”
Withnail yawned. Could he not care, just a little?
Marwood’s stirrings of annoyance were interrupted from becoming anger by the appearance of one of the confetti children through the cafe door. He—she?—had flyers in hand and went about placing them on every table.
“Oh, hullo guys!” they said, when they arrived at Marwood and Withnail’s table. “Fancy seeing you here. Suppose you don’t need one of these!” Marwood ignored Withnail’s grimace and said, “Actually, I’ll take one.” He needed to understand how they were doing it: as far as he could tell they were selling at least thirty tickets a show. Imagine!
“I’m Sylv, by the way,” said the child, whose show according to the flyer had the absurd name of Tender Disco. “Do you have one of yours? I ought to take it—quid pro quo, ha.”
“I’m afraid we’ve given them all away,” Withnail sneered. “Sorry.”
They hadn’t had any made, truthfully. The advertising budget from the grant money had gone to a few unbelievably expensive posters on the Royal Mile and the Meadow Walk, which had almost immediately been crudely defaced.
“That’s alright. We’re definitely planning to come and see it soon—Thursday, maybe. The show on after us, the two-man magic show, it’s really very good, we went out drinking with them last night, what a riot! We were trying to get them smashed enough to get them to tell us how they did the trick with the sunglasses, but no luck!”
Marwood was not nearly lubricated enough to craft a reply. Meanwhile Withnail was staring, dead-eyed, into his coffee.
The child—Sylv—blinked, said “Well, see you at four,” and left, fluttering away out into the drizzle in a whorl of tie-dye. Marwood attempted to grab the laptop again to check the tickets and Withnail tried to snatch it back and it ended up flying off the table with a heavy clatter onto the floor and attracting the attention of the entire cafe.
Good God. One week in, and they had already entered the slough of despond, and were now floundering around in thick black sin. He didn’t know why he thought this would be a good idea. Four straight weeks of Withnail? Was he suicidal?
It occurred to him—a thought so sensible it could not possibly have been his own, and must have entered into his cranium at a distance from his daughter—that he had in fact gotten exactly what he wanted. Every day he regained a little more of his lost youth. Tramping about with Withnail, eating horrible cheap pies and living like students in a room growing more squalid by the day. A three-quarters-life-crisis. After a middle age spent decaying into stolid dignity this sort of fever of the unwise was nothing if not utterly electric.
***
Halfway through. Now or never. The second Thursday night performance had been, unbelievably, fairly good. The room about a third full. Was the tide turning? Laughter and applause. Marwood, watching from the booth, biting his nails as Withnail dove into the monologue at the forty-minute mark. Some bits there cribbed from old journals… the arena of the unwell and all that.
“You could afford to be mad,” intoned Withnail. “You could afford, just barely, to live off of your own fumes. And while doing so spend hours looking deep into the soul of yourself, or the city, or another human being, puzzling out inch by inch the smallest slice of its infinities. My god, the dole, the dole, the beautiful bloody dole. If it was a girl I’d have fucked it. If I hadn’t had it I’d have become a suicidal businessman. No artist should have to work between the ages of twenty and thirty. It’s violently unethical.”
Six Tender Disco kids in the front row, their mouths perfect O’s. Yes, it’s all true. This is what they took from you, children. Vote Labour.
As they filed out afterwards they all stopped to congratulate Marwood and say how much they loved it and how they’d tell their friends to come see it and he thought, he really thought things were turning in their favor.
Pride before the fall.
One of the other audience members that night—an utter nobody—had “Tweeted” some bit of denigration. Don’t bother, worst show at the Fringe, load of rubbish, etc—it didn’t really matter what he’d said, only that somehow Withnail had seen it and it had sent him spiraling into the depths of fear.
“You’ve played a dirty trick,” whined Withnail. He was high on something; who knows what or where he’d gotten it.
“I’ve done nothing of the sort. You agreed to perform in this show in good faith. I didn’t have to ask you. I could’ve left you to continue curdling.”
Withnail seemed to be going off somewhere else. “I couldn’t even manage to die young like a sensible individual. And now look at me. I’m a shell. A withered husk, and you—you mock me, you cruel, cruel man, you set me up to be mocked.”
“What are you talking about? What are you talking about?” Marwood cried. “You’re trying to wind me up. I will not be wound up. The show starts in half an hour and then you will have to be on that stage.”
“It was all engineered to humiliate me. By you. I see what this is. It’s revenge.”
“Are you not capable of believing I genuinely wanted you to have this? This, if nothing else?”
“Why didn’t you give it to me in nineteen-ninety-fucking-four? Your bloody ITV drama—”
Marwood could’ve screamed. He snapped, “Christ. You’re worse than any of my ex-wives. Put together!”
“I am one of your ex-wives,” Withnail snarled, which was the last straw. Marwood extracted himself from the room, leaving him there. He was not sure where he was going but he found himself in the venue bar, where in a cozy corner booth the Tender Disco kids could be seen inhaling pints in a spirit of uncouth jubilance. In a split second Marwood had made his decision.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Can I speak to you? It’s urgent.”
Sylv made their excuses and joined Marwood by the bar, frowning in concern.
“Listen, he won’t go on. My—Withnail, I mean. I can’t figure it out. He thinks I’m trying to humiliate him. I just want him to do the fucking show. We have real press in,” he said miserably. “The Guardian.”
“Oh. Oh, I understand,” Sylv replied, far more sympathetically than was warranted. They were nodding, blinking those big doe eyes at him. Did they have a fetish for sad old men? “Look, how long have you been—what I mean is, is this the first time you’ve actually worked with him on a creative project?”
“Yes.”
“Some can, some can’t. I love my partner to death but I’d never be able to put on a show with her. We’d kill each other.”
They agreed to do it. They looked the part, anyway, and having seen the show the day before it was fresh in their mind. One of the barbacks had a coat which fit the bill, and they went on in it only five minutes late, reading from the cue script but with such facility you forgot they were holding it.
And when, twenty minutes in, Withnail roared onstage and demanded his goddamn part back or he’d make him regret it, Sylv gave a stunning turn.
“No matter what you do to me,” they improvised, jabbing a finger at him, “you’ll still end up like this. I’m untouchable.”
The audience and Marwood held their breaths. Sylv stomped offstage, coming breathless past the booth with the flash of a triumphant grin.
“Damn him, he isn't wrong,” Withnail said. “But I don’t look that bad, do I?” And then, an effortless segue back into the script: “It was always about looking the part. In an alleyway off of Savile Row we once found a bin overflowing with silken cast-offs…”
***
They acquired booze. They sat waiting for the bus to fucking Musselburgh and drank and when the bus arrived they hauled themselves on and continued drinking. Marwood was considering what to say and how to say it. Who could possibly know what Withnail was thinking.
“You were horrid to me,” said Marwood. “You know that?”
“I loved you,” said Withnail. Eyes red-rimmed. At that precise gradation of drunkenness when honesty and only honesty was possible.
“Shut up. You can’t say that now. You wasted it. Too late.” This may have not been true. But Marwood remembered every word of the story Withnail had told; and the one he had supplied to replace it. Bits and pieces had come to him in flashes regularly and at the most inopportune moments over the past decade. Including at least one of his weddings. It was almost as if one or both of them had become, over the years, more true than the starved, sad truth.
When they reached their flat, Marwood said, “Sylv assumed we were together. That’s why she agreed to stand in. The child was sympathetic.”
Withnail looked at him. Really looked. “Are you suggesting something? Are you horny right now? You dog.” But he was grinning.
Marwood didn’t know quite how to explain to him at this overdue stage that if he had not received his deus ex machina back in ‘69, there was an embarrassingly large chance he would have let Withnail do whatever he wanted with him, subsume himself under that ego as well as any fleshy parts of choice… Instead he said, thickly, “I’m only saying.”
“I know what will happen if we try,” said Withnail with a hint of fatalism. “You’ll come in about six seconds and I won’t be able to get it up at all.”
For a moment Marwood was devastatingly offended, and then he was giggling. “You’re right. God, you’re right.”
He gave himself over to a far simpler desire which was for now to just lie down. He was so tired, he was old and tired and drunk and this was ridiculous and the woman from the Guardian had given him an approving nod and handshake after the show and they might well wake up to a four star review, thanks probably only to Sylv, an impossible performance that could not and would not be repeated—tomorrow, he supposed, they would have to finally stay and watch that absurd confetti show. The thought exhausted him further.
But when he felt Withnail crawl into his bed, arrange himself there half-over him, and begin immediately to snore cantankerously, with such comfort and ease as if it were something done every night, he was utterly awake, and piercing through the cloud of intoxication came a lancing ray of painful and certainly doomed optimism.