"Nightingale, Adam - Just For Laughs, Counsellor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nightingale Adam)

"What?"

"Guess?"

"I don't know. He's dead?"

"No."

"Oh."

"No, some Charles Bronson impersonator got pushed under a train at teatime"

Shit.

"Apparently he was quite good. Had an advert in the Stage and everything." The Stage is a magazine for out of work actors and actresses.

I put the phone down mid conversation and immediately started to delete my Charles Bronson video collection. I didn't think that there was a market for Charles Bronson impersonators anymore.

I never found out how Andy found out. It wasn't important anyway. All this had begun with Big Bad Bob. Papa Mitchum. I guess I had wanted to share in his mythology somehow. I hoped that some of it would rub off on me. I have never smoked a joint, and if I did I would never inhale it. People don't step aside for me, and they never will, but in a way I have what I want.

Robert Mitchum made his name in film noir. Wasn't film noir the most fatalistic of all film genres?

Thunder Road
Angel Face
The Lusty Men
The Friends Of Eddie Coyle
Home From The Hill
Out Of The Past
Bob dies in them all. Fate pulls the trigger.

Despite my best efforts it was always going to end badly for me, just like it always ended badly for Bob. We had something in common, Mitchum and I, and that was enough. Either that or I was the most anal retentive idiot murderer the world had ever seen. I prefer to believe the former.

I could have gotten away with what I did easily, but I have decided to turn myself in to the police. It has to end badly for me, because it always ended badly for Bob. If I don't have that much, I have nothing.

So where does that leave me? I could write the great British prison novel, but I doubt I ever will. I will probably be some huge convict's puppy dog for a while, and I know that he will be a big James Stewart fan. In truth, what will probably happen is that the police will not believe me. They will think that I am a crank and let me go. Whatever happens, I think that I know this much. Nobody will ever write my obituary.


ADAM NIGHTINGALE writes a film page for City Lights, an entertainment magazine covering Robin Hood country in liddle-ol-England. He lives in London with his brother.


Copyright (c) 2001 Adam Nightingale