TEAM VIKING
*
Set: Stage right a microphone, loop pedal and Casio keyboard.
Upstage centre an old amp with a plastic Viking helmet and can of Lynx Africa sitting on it.*
A pre-amble, talking about the venue/weather/my health/the attractiveness of the audience (always positive regardless of my feelings). After clearance from front of house I ask if anyone has serious respiratory issues. ā
Iām sure that you know that we perfume the bodies of the dead, Vikings did as well. Smell is also apparently the most potent of the senses when it comes to remembering.
I lightly spritz the audience with Lynx Africa unless someone has declared their asthma in which case I explain what would be otherwise happening.
Now Iām going to go and do the lights and when I come back I will be a performer and all the rest of this will be artifice.ā”
I go and dim the house lights.Ā§
Hello my name is James, Iām gonna tell you a story and all of it is true.*
I call upon Odin, King of the Gods and father of stories to aid me in this account.ā
So.*
The sun was shining down; warm, not too hot, still and bright, really bright; like God had turned the contrast up on the world. Seeing the sharp, sharp edges of yourself and everything else. It wasnāt just the light, I also had that cotton wool feeling, yāknow, thick wads of cotton wool insulating you and at the same time youāre observing things more than usual because of the awareness of separation between yourself and the outside world andā¦
People were milling about, lots of people, so many people, I think there were eight hundred or something; more people than I could be friends with or know, and I was grief-handing which is like glad handing but at a sad time, āHi nice to āā āUniversity, I see āā āYeah, yeah, yeah,ā āThank you my speech was very goodā (I didnāt say that obviously), but people were being, Dadās old friends they were being very kind, they said that what I said was good, I think one of them described it as profoundly moving, which I found profoundly gratifying.
It was lovely, I sāpose. In fact there were so many people there that all of Dadās old students had to go in the church hall, the overflow, theyād set up some sort of audio relay so they could hear the whole ceremony, my speech.ā
Itās great at a funeral, if you can hold it together (obviously not emotionally, let that shit* out), but if you donāt think youāre a funny person and you want to do a joke and have people laugh, just save it for a funeral, or when someoneās suffering from the profound effects of grief because it makes people really susceptible, you can do anything, knock-knock jokes, funny noises, even mime, people will love it. Iād done all three ā yeah my speech was pretty weird. There I was in the aftermath, people milling around, lost in my own hazy daze.
Tom and Sarah approach, Tom a proud peacock.ā
āGreat speech mate āā (course heād say that he helped me write it) āā shame about the delivery.ā
āā¦ā
Sarah: āIt was great, you did him proud.ā
āIām going over there now,ā Tom, motioning to a group of my Dadās old students.
Sarah: āHeās pretending to be you to try and pull.ā
Tom: āTheyāre really pretty Jim, besides, itās what your old man would have wanted.ā*
Sarah, lighting a cigarette, āSure, but is it what they want?ā
Tom, on his way, āAbsolutely.ā
We laugh.
Sarah assesses my face.
āYou okay Jim?ā
āā¦ā
and she gives me a hug, one of those glorious world-beating hugs where you realise what a weight youāve been carrying because itās not there in that instant.
Tom and Sarah my best friends sinceā¦forever. We grew up together, the three of us, in a suburban, middle class, middle England ā there was nothing middling about it though because it was fucking extraordinary. Of course now Iāve grown up, Iāve seen a lot more of the world and I understand that so much of it was this privileged idyll, surrounded by enough money for a lot of imagination, but you see, we were the last generation who played outside, and looking back on us now I understand why people really push the computers because if all the other kids are like we were. Iām very happy theyāre sat inside quietly glued to a screen because:
āOh look thereās a window, oh and here are some stonesā¦ hey guys Iāve just thought of the best game!ā* Yeah, we were dangerous. We were so dangerous we got banned from reading the Just William books because we did too many of the things in them.ā So watch out.
I met Tom first, when we were very young (we went to the same crĆØche and stuff) his mum was on her own, so he used to come over to our house when she went out on dates. Which was quite a lot. A very organised lady in a pre-internet dating world.
We played Knights, we played Robin Hood but mostly and most importantly we played Vikings. Inspired by the 1958 film with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.ā” Has anyone seen it? Itās amazing isnāt it? And it exploded like a glorious atom bomb in our nascent consciousnesses.
The story of Vikings is this: you have Kirk Douglas, blond hair, bum chin, he is Prince Einar, the anti-hero. His likes include: quaffing, wenching and fighting. His dislikes: everything else. Total Viking. Then thereās Tony Curtis, honest faced, wearing only a beard, a burning sense of justice and some historically inaccurate very revealing leather hot pants, he is Erik, the illegitimate son of the English Queen and the Viking King, Erik the bastard, our hero. Then thereās a princess that both of our boys are in love with, eye gouging hawks, flesh eating crabs, man eating wolves (nature is all very dangerous in Vikings) castles being scaled, evil Kings ā itās got everything.
I would always be Einar because blond hair, bum chin before the beard and Tom: Erik the bastard cos No Dadā¦* and from the age of four or five you would find us conquering the castles of England in the drizzle of our back-gardens on a daily basis. It was great fun.ā
Enter Sarah, from over the fence next door. Perfect, we needed a princess to ravish.
āWould you like to play with us?ā
āThat depends. What are you playing?āā”
āVikings, have you seen it?ā
āDonāt think so.ā
Fast forward two hours later ā
āSo that was pretty great.ā
āYep. So you can be the Princess āā
āIām not going to be her. Sheās boring. Iāll be Eric.ā
Tom made it clear that that was not gonna happen, over his dead body.
āIn that case, Iāll be the other one, Einar.ā
āBut Iām Einar.ā
āProbably not anymore,ā was their consensus.
So from then on I would be the dangerous animals, or the castle, or the beautiful princess (I was a wonderful beautiful princess). Whatever was necessary to keep the narrative spinning because we just had to do the whole film over and over.
We could only do the final scene one time though (cos our special effects budget was quite small). We got my paddling pool filled up, Playmobile pirate ship, covered in twigs and set ablaze with my gerbil Ragnar on board. Best. Day. Ever.
Itās important to point out that Ragnar was dead already, we werenāt psychopaths.*
And that was the beginning of Tom, Sarah and me. We were Team Viking.
I had a drag of Sarahās cigarette, made more small talk with strangers, watched Tom get not one but two numbers and in his words a ācheeky goodbye kissā and whsssh, everyone vanished, Iāve never seen eight hundred people disappear so quickly, we went to the crematorium, weird sad music played something woefully inappropriate, the curtains closed. The curtains closed and that was that. We went for dinner (Pizza Express obviously) my family, Tom, Sarah, my girlfriend Esther, lest I forget, sheād been there, sheād been with my mum all day, sheād been great. The next day I had to come back to London ā the pub had only given me a few days off. Sarah gave me a lift (I had a train ticket but she was coming back to continue her PhD at Imperial so she drove).
Mum kept the Ashes, I still donāt know what she did with them ā I should probably askā¦
Back down in London, I just carried on in a sort of mechanical way. Funny thing about machines: theyāre not very good at relationships, but I had computed that Esther was sad, and I calculated that that was because I was sad, so I thought weād do a lovely thing, try and press restart: go to Victoria Park, hire a rowing boat and go out on the lake. Romantic. Then the guy running the boats was a real prick for no reason, itās not like his jobās shit ā so just be kind alright and if you canāt be kind be nice. But no, he was an arse about me not having the right change, then when we did get a boat one of the oars was split ā and he was just so rude it was a relief when Esther suggested we just sack the whole thing off and go back to her place.
So we went back to her house and she broke up with me.
Two days later, getting home from a day shift at the pub. Tom and Sarah sitting on my doorstep. Ooof, so fucking nice, oh yeah, apparently Esther had called Sarah and said, āJust so you know, Iāve broken up with James, I donāt think heās gonna be alright, so maybe you guys shouldā¦ā Nice, right? But before you think that sheās really cool and awesome for doing that, y...