Read Online Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Craig Ferguson
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like she might cry. Mr. Petrov actually was crying. The looks on the faces of the girls, Saul saw that. He knew that he’d better do something soon or he would lose his brother forever and he would be totally alone for the rest of his life.
ALTITUDE ATTITUDE
FRASER HAD BEEN WORRIED ABOUT FLYING long before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. In 1988, just before Christmas, he had been in London interviewing for a job as on-camera reporter for Thames Television. What they actually said they were looking for in the ad in
Media
magazine was a “Wacky Outside Broadcast Personality,” which would mean he’d get to do the corny little news stories that went at the end of the local London broadcasts to cheer people up after the hatchet deaths in Peckham. The duties would involve interviewing “local eccentrics,” which meant that Fraser would get to speak to syphilitic farmers who dressed their livestock as the Supremes etc. etc.
Thames, after seeing his demo reel, had offered to fly him there and back from Glasgow but he chose to drive the nine-hundred-mile round-trip for two reasons:
1. He had just purchased a new car—well, not exactly new, it was four years old with forty thousand miles on the clock but it had been well kept by an anally retentive cash-register salesman from Mother-well. It was a cream-colored Mercedes 200 that rattled a little but it made Fraser feel very successful and mysterious. He thought it looked like the kind of car that would belong to a highly paid assassin; inreality it looked more like it belonged to an ambassador from a smallish African country, but Fraser loved it and wanted to take a road trip in it.
2. Jack Trampas had told him about a sensational massage parlor called Ladyfingers in Preston that he wanted to try out. Preston is situated halfway between Glasgow and London and therefore is the ideal spot to stop for a rub and a tug to alleviate the stiffness brought on by prolonged driving and a sporadically hyperactive libido. Fraser had resisted the temptation to stop in Preston on the way; he wanted to feel clean and virtuous for his big interview in London. As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. The interview was conducted by three ex-Cambridge television executives who had already agreed to give the job to an old friend of theirs from university, Richard Kelton-Peters, who had been a leading light in the Cambridge Footlights Review, the campus amateur dramatic society that put the children of the wealthy on the fast track to show business.
Fraser felt depressed after the interview; he knew it had gone badly. All three men kept pretending to not understand his accent.
Fucking English, thought Fraser as he walked out of the Thames building in Teddington. He wasn’t the first Scotsman to think this.
Why the fuck would they bring me all the way here just to fuck with me?
He wasn’t the first Scotsman to think this either.
The reason he had been brought to London was so that, if charged with nepotism, the executives could quite honestly point to the countrywide search for the ideal candidate before stating that “Dickie was simply, when all’s said and done, the best chap for the gig.”
Fraser walked across the car park and out onto the main street. He was headed toward the Underground station when he saw a middle-aged woman sitting by the doorway of an out-of-business fried-chicken franchise. The place could not have been closed for long, as it still smelled strongly of warm, dead poultry.
The woman was grubby and tubby and obviously had lost numerous rounds with extremely inexpensive alcohol products but she had a kind of matronly look about her even though she had been living onthe street for no little while. She reminded Fraser of his mother and suddenly he felt very guilty indeed.
“Spare change?” the woman growled, her look more accusatory than pleading. There was no question in her voice; it was a statement of fact, monotone
ALTITUDE ATTITUDE
FRASER HAD BEEN WORRIED ABOUT FLYING long before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. In 1988, just before Christmas, he had been in London interviewing for a job as on-camera reporter for Thames Television. What they actually said they were looking for in the ad in
Media
magazine was a “Wacky Outside Broadcast Personality,” which would mean he’d get to do the corny little news stories that went at the end of the local London broadcasts to cheer people up after the hatchet deaths in Peckham. The duties would involve interviewing “local eccentrics,” which meant that Fraser would get to speak to syphilitic farmers who dressed their livestock as the Supremes etc. etc.
Thames, after seeing his demo reel, had offered to fly him there and back from Glasgow but he chose to drive the nine-hundred-mile round-trip for two reasons:
1. He had just purchased a new car—well, not exactly new, it was four years old with forty thousand miles on the clock but it had been well kept by an anally retentive cash-register salesman from Mother-well. It was a cream-colored Mercedes 200 that rattled a little but it made Fraser feel very successful and mysterious. He thought it looked like the kind of car that would belong to a highly paid assassin; inreality it looked more like it belonged to an ambassador from a smallish African country, but Fraser loved it and wanted to take a road trip in it.
2. Jack Trampas had told him about a sensational massage parlor called Ladyfingers in Preston that he wanted to try out. Preston is situated halfway between Glasgow and London and therefore is the ideal spot to stop for a rub and a tug to alleviate the stiffness brought on by prolonged driving and a sporadically hyperactive libido. Fraser had resisted the temptation to stop in Preston on the way; he wanted to feel clean and virtuous for his big interview in London. As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. The interview was conducted by three ex-Cambridge television executives who had already agreed to give the job to an old friend of theirs from university, Richard Kelton-Peters, who had been a leading light in the Cambridge Footlights Review, the campus amateur dramatic society that put the children of the wealthy on the fast track to show business.
Fraser felt depressed after the interview; he knew it had gone badly. All three men kept pretending to not understand his accent.
Fucking English, thought Fraser as he walked out of the Thames building in Teddington. He wasn’t the first Scotsman to think this.
Why the fuck would they bring me all the way here just to fuck with me?
He wasn’t the first Scotsman to think this either.
The reason he had been brought to London was so that, if charged with nepotism, the executives could quite honestly point to the countrywide search for the ideal candidate before stating that “Dickie was simply, when all’s said and done, the best chap for the gig.”
Fraser walked across the car park and out onto the main street. He was headed toward the Underground station when he saw a middle-aged woman sitting by the doorway of an out-of-business fried-chicken franchise. The place could not have been closed for long, as it still smelled strongly of warm, dead poultry.
The woman was grubby and tubby and obviously had lost numerous rounds with extremely inexpensive alcohol products but she had a kind of matronly look about her even though she had been living onthe street for no little while. She reminded Fraser of his mother and suddenly he felt very guilty indeed.
“Spare change?” the woman growled, her look more accusatory than pleading. There was no question in her voice; it was a statement of fact, monotone
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