They were well acquainted.
I once spent an excruciating lunch with him (Beej, not Rick Astley) in one of Eastbourne’s Pizza Hut clones. All we could eat, which in Brendan’s excuse for a mind, and despite posters (and later protests) to the contrary, was only valid whilst his plate was clear.
So he would periodically visit the gents, his pockets stuffed with crusts from the pizza slices.
Someone, I forget who, maybe me, maybe Sir Alec Guinness (who was never one to pass up all you can eat pizza) told him quite sensibly to stop it before he blocked up the toilet.
I forget the exact words he used, but the gist was entirely that the crusts weren’t in the toilet bowl. Fella.
He was closeting them in the cistern.
And he was pleased by this. In much the same way as a dog who has performed a good trick will look at his carer for approval. My applause was reserved for the person who would eventually have to remove the mouldering mass of dough owing to the smell1
Which brings me untidily to Brendan’s marriage and preceding stag.
He met his future wife in Eastbourne, she was a hairdresser, ten years his senior, with two young children. It will be of little surprise to learn the depths of George Smiley the Younger’s feeling for his weef-to-be, were I to tell you, gentle reader, the absurd lengths he went to ensure the taxi taking him to the church went past the ‘Lezza’s’ parents house (see Part 1).
But let us first part the mists of time and the curtains of shame as we go back to that night, that portended such connubial bliss to come. Operation Stag-Do was being run by a corpulent ginger depressive who Brendan had given the diverting codename of ‘Timbo.’ aka The Best Man. It was not uncommon, if you had stayed out all night, to find him on the seafront in the early hours of the morning, sitting in one of the windbreaks (which inevitably smelt more or less strongly of urine) reading a book about physics. No idea why, Jeorge once caught him eating apples gloomily in a caravan as a teenager, so maybe he fancied himself an auburn Isaac Newton. Anyway Timbo’s first stop on this celebration of the solitary life of Beej was to the Kitten Club in a run down suburb of Brighton. Fortunately I had brought a book.
We were lead gingerly by the titian fatty down the stairs to a room where there wasn’t enough room to swing a cat, let alone watch a bored mother of two dance to Wham in various states of undress. Years later I met a lady, fully clothed, who had worked there for a while, she told me a lot about her son who did Speedway (I hoped, without conviction it was a method of taking amphetamines). She made quiet, disparaging comments about the dustiness of my bathroom whilst I tried to excise the image of her and her then paramour, Calibos, Lord of the Marsh and the son of Thetis, using what I believe is known as a ‘ball-gag’ in a caravan near Castle Donnington2.
Ignore Hamlet, in fact, fire Shakespeare’s entire canon out of one; you have never seen tragedy until you’ve seen the expression on the face of a fat ginger virgin in his mid-20s whilst a woman (doesn’t matter who, I suspect even his mum would do) gives him a lap dance. I spent two hours trying to read a book. After that it was drinking and not dancing in a club, then an hour long taxi ride back to Beej’s secret hideout (the house above a hairdressers he shared with his beloved). We got there long before his fiancé had returned from her hen do, so the James Bond of Eastbourne plans a little surprise:
‘We should hide,’
‘Why ?’
‘Well we can jump out.’
Everyone (myself and the best man and a large Canadian, who no one knows) agrees, waits ‘til Brendan goes upstairs then we put on the telly and drink more beer. An hour or two passes. At some point I go to the toilet. A chubby forearm clutches the sill.
‘Brendan what are you doing out there ?’
‘I’m waiting to leap out on the missus.’
‘In the toilet ?’
‘Um yeah.’
‘Well I need to go.’
‘Oh just close the window, I can balance on the kitchen roof if it’s quick.’
I thank the gods that I just needed a piss and then contemplated not opening the window again. But I did.
His future wife returns with her friends, they have had a much better time.
‘Where’s Bren ?’
Nobody answers.
Our eyes all gesture upstairs. There’s sadness in all of them, compassion too. Poor woman.
She’s had a couple of drinks so what passes for sublety amongst us is lost on her. Fortunately she needs the bathroom. Fortune is relative in this instance, I think everyone was just glad it hadn’t been one of her friends.
Minutes pass.
There’s a scream, surprise not fear, a very loud crash. Then a pause, followed by a heavy footfall down the stairs and then the front door slams.
No one does anything for a bit. Then I, and a possible future bridesmaid to the oh-so-happy couple venture silently up the russet paisley (that’s not a euphemism they just had nasty carpet). The toilet is at the top of the landing, facing the stairs. The bowl is the first casualty of Brendan’s master plan, then the pot pourri strewn over the broken enamel like dirt on a coffin. At the risk of neglecting the very real human tragedy of the evening, I confess my first thought was, ‘if someone tries to flush that, the room’ll flood.’
My companion discovered the third casualty in their bedroom. The future Mrs Spy, eyeliner and nose running.
Those of you who have seen me channel my inner Columbo will know what follows, so there is no need to make you suffer as I did to piece together The Case of the Broken Bowl.
Beej had hidden outside the bathroom,holding on by his arm and balancing on the kitchen roof. Upon hearing his wife to be, he launched himself bodily into the confined space. Fortunately she had not begun to avail herself of the facilities. His ingress and landing were not controlled and his foot went through the porcelain. He saw no way out other than the most brutal. He told her he ‘didn’t love her and couldn’t go through with it.’ He then vacated the building.
There was discussion about the very nature of Beej, whereupon it transpired that she was well aware 1. - 4. of the following ‘facts’
1. Beej had never got over the death of his uncle who died in a plane crash.
2. Beej had got the scars on his legs from the plane crash he was in with his uncle.
3. Beej’s uncle lived in Chiselhurst. He ran a greasy spoon café.
4. Brendon obtained the scars whilst trying to ‘karate kick’ his elder brother after he (Beej) had just got out of the bath. At the age of 5 or so his towel had fallen off and the naked youngster had sailed over his brother (who ducked) straight into the glass partition.
5. Beej had not, as he claimed to Jeorge ‘caught one in the leg in Bosnia’
6. Nor had he,as he claimed to me, ‘been shot in the leg parachuting into France.’
Beej’s mother had helpfully revealed 3. and 4. and I contributed 5. and 6.
None of which located Brendan, Ace of Spies. My work done3 I found a quiet corner and settled down to sleep.
The Best Man later found him asleep beneath a bench in a nearby pub garden at 3 in the morning.
Brendan the Spy and Dee the Hairdresser were reconciled the next day and married the following month. They have one son. They separated after Beej relocated to the garden shed of the domicile, where he lived for two months estranged from his wife, before returning to his parents house. They have never divorced. ‘Uncle Bren’ now lives in France with a lady and their young son.
Footnotes
1 The pizza crusts, not Brendan the Spy’s sweaty carcass; which would doubtless expire in just such a place, a half-smoked rollup made of the unprepossessing remains of another, already smoked, cigarette hanging from his fat purple face
2 An image Jeorge had conjured for me whilst I was cooking them all dinner. All true, Calibos had cheerily informed him. I wonder to this day what make of caravan it was.
3 Actually I found Brendan ‘round the corner (I am not without tradecraft of my own). We discussed his options, it was clear he still had feelings for The Lezza and was convinced he could win her back by travelling to Paris and finding her. I disabused him of this fanciful notion with certain salient pieces of evidence to the contrary, the chief of which was that she had enjoyed frequent periods of intimacy with Jeorge, indeed he had visited her in Paris quite recently. It was at that point H.17 decided to retreat still further, both geographically (from me) and mentally (from life). I could not be bothered to pursue him. There was still beer to be had and the task of bringing him in from the cold belonged to a fatter, gingerer man than I.
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