Driving Jarvis Ham. Jim Bob
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Название: Driving Jarvis Ham
Автор: Jim Bob
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежный юмор
isbn: 9780007468324
isbn:
In fact, other than Jarvis’s birth, his first acting job and meeting Princess Diana outside the Wimpy there was no record of any other event in the shoebox or the suitcase for the first eighteen years of Jarvis’s life.
I could fill in some of the gaps for him of course. There are a lot of gaps. I could tell you Jarvis was picked on a bit at school. That might be important, I don’t know. He was called Piggy and Pork Ham and Fathead, and that was just by the teachers. I’m joking of course. The other kids did take the Mickey out of Jarvis but it didn’t seem to bother him all that much.
What else? Jarvis was neither an underachiever or an overachiever at school. Academically at least, he was average. He wet himself in the classroom twice that I’m aware of, but that had more to do with bad teachers on a power trip putting the fear of God into schoolchildren if they ever dared ask to be excused for five minutes to go to the toilet.
He loved drama at school. From the day that Miss whatever-her-name had chosen him to play Tutankhamun he wanted more. He didn’t get picked for any further lead roles though and he had to be content with being a king carrier like the rest of us, but he loved it anyway. Jarvis liked dressing up in the ludicrous costumes his mother made and talking in even more ludicrous accents and voices.
At secondary school there were fewer opportunities for his acting skills. There was no proper drama department and Jarvis always said his English teacher didn’t like him and so never picked him for any of the end of term productions.
In his last year of school he took a lot of days off with made up illnesses and on the final day of the last term he went home early before all the tears, shirt signing and flour and egg fights. He said that people had been throwing eggs and flour at him at school for the last five years so why would he choose to stay around for another afternoon of it voluntarily?
Jarvis had no brothers or sisters but he did have two parents – one of each – and when he left school he started working full time with them in the Ham and Hams Teahouse.
At weekends Jarvis used to put on little shows for his parents in their front room. He had a magic set, with a top hat and a wand and a collapsible card table that he’d cover with black cloth to put all his tricks on. He was a shit magician if that helps the story.
Jarvis also did impressions of people from TV and had a terrifying looking ventriloquist’s dummy called Ronnie that his dad eventually had to get rid of as it gave Jarvis’s mother nightmares. There’s an old photograph of Jarvis with Ronnie on the mantelpiece in the Hams’ living room, and if I was cruel – which I’m afraid I am – I’d say that when I looked at the photograph, I found it difficult to tell which one was the ventriloquist and which one was the dummy.
On Jarvis’s sixteenth birthday his mother was rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties. After two weeks in hospital she was in a wheelchair for a while. I hilariously used to refer to her as A Mum Called Ironside. Jarvis always laughed, so that was okay.
Perhaps by being reticent with the diary action for the first eighteen years of his life Jarvis has actually done us all a favour. Nobody really likes that opening twenty or thirty tedious pages of a too big celebrity autobiography when the author bangs on about their childhood and about what their grandparents did in the war, when all we really want to read about is the up to date juicy stuff with all the famous people and the sex and the drugs and the fighting.
If the gaps in Jarvis’s adult life really do annoy you though, why not fill them in yourself. People are mad for audience interaction these days. It might even be fun. In those months in 1992 for example, when not much happened because Jarvis was busy reading this book:
Why not imagine he was playing football for England instead.
Or on the unfilled diary pages of 1993 and 2002 you could pretend he was building an ark because God had told him in a dream that a big flood was going to wash Devon into the sea, or you could pretend he was baking a massive cake for the Queen or something. Seriously, go ahead. Make it up. I wish I had.
But perhaps you honestly can’t be bothered to do that and you’d just prefer the truth, no matter how dull.
In the first half of 1993 Jarvis was flying model helicopters and blowing up balloons at a toyshop and for nearly all of 2001 to 2010 he was depressed. There. It’s this year’s Bridget Jones. Call Hollywood.
Right. Let’s get on with the sex, the drugs and the fighting.
I turned up the in-car radio to drown out the in-car snoring, adjusting the volume knob like I was cracking a safe. Turning it up loud enough to drown out Jarvis’s snoring but not loud enough to wake him up.
If a fast song came on I’d put my foot down and accelerate with it. I knew these narrow B roads like the back of my hand. I knew the high hedges and the telegraph poles. The farmhouses, the churches and derelict barns converted into open plan holiday homes. I knew the village post offices and which farm shops sold fresh eggs and cheese, and which sold honey and strawberries. I knew where the trees on either side of the road would appear to bend over to touch each other’s fingertips, creating a tunnel over the road. I knew when we were coming up to a red telephone box or wooden bus shelter. Cows. Horses. Sheep. Potholes and pigsties. That’s what the back of my hand looks like.
I’d driven down this particular road hundreds of times. I could take the curves and corners at speed, like a rally driver. I knew where the really narrow parts of the road widened slightly in case I needed to pull in to let an approaching vehicle pass. I could drive with my eyes closed. I could take my hands off the wheel and let my mind do the steering. Sleep-drive: navigating by driving over the cat’s eyes and potholes. My car could read Braille; it’s these new tyres. At the moment I was stuck behind a tractor.
I waited for the road to widen so I could overtake. I watched blades of straw rain softly down from the back of the tractor’s trailer onto my windscreen. I heard Jarvis, sensing the car’s drop in speed, shifting restlessly in his sleep in the back seat. I was really hoping to get as far into the journey as possible without him waking up. In many ways I was like a new and exhausted parent transporting an insomniac newborn baby. Don’t wake up, don’t wake up.
I looked at the petrol gauge. The needle was practically on the E. Why hadn’t I filled up before I left? I tapped the gauge with my fingertip but it didn’t move. I rocked side to side in my seat hoping that might shift the petrol about in the tank and give me a few more miles. The needle stayed on the E. I was going to have to stop for fuel. Arse candle. If I stopped at a garage Jarvis would definitely wake up. Balls.
The tractor turned off and I overtook. The tractor’s driver waved as I passed. I waved back. I didn’t know him. This is Devon.
The nearest petrol station was next to a closed down Mister Breakfast. The rusty sign was still there outside the boarded up roadside restaurant. With its picture of a cartoon chef in a wife-beater string vest, a knife in one hand and a fork stabbed through a sausage in the other, welcoming passing hungry drivers in with his toothy grin. Mister Breakfast had a big droopy moustache and a chef’s hat. He looked a bit like the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show. Someone had spray painted the word ‘cock’ on his hat.
As I pulled into the petrol station next door to the closed down restaurant, I felt – what does nostalgia feel like? – I don’t think it was nostalgia.