Jeffrey Bernard - Reach for the Ground

Foreword by Peter OToole

Duckworth Overlook

This eBook edition 2013
This edition first published in 2003 by
Duckworth Overlook
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1996 by Jeffrey Bernard

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBNs
Paperback: 978 0 7156 3150 8
Mobipocket: 978 0 7156 4675 5
ePub: 978 0 7156 4676 2
Library PDF: 978 0 7156 4677 9

JEFF
by
Peter OToole

Jesus came for Jeffrey in the Middlesex hospital. I was witness to this. Word had come to me that Jeff had had a leg sawn off and so I creaked down to the hospital bearing, of course, a bunch of grapes, trodden, fermented, bottled, and sought out the old bugger. Lounging in a wheelchair, brilliantly clad in a multi-coloured dressing gown, a plastic parrot on his shoulder, Jeff sat contemplatively sipping a little vodka, puffing on a nourishing fag, and all in what turned out to be the designated smoking area: a spot outside his ward, between the lift and the window, with a battered, standing, burdened ashtray as the areas centrepiece.

Mr Cobb, he told me, his surgeon, a man whose name we both associated more with breaking land speed records than with sawing off limbs, had pronounced the operation good, and was particularly tickled by the neat state of Jeffs stump. This, given the circumstances, could not be considered as bad news and we moved on in our chat to the subject of amputees and the phenomenon of their sensing phantom limbs. Quite true, Jeff was telling me, why, earlier that day hed twice been convinced that he had crossed his legs, not an easy trick when you consider that usually it takes two legs to complete a successful crossing and that hed had only one of the articles to muster up for the venture, nevertheless at this point it was that Jesus came for Jeff. Came to him quietly, firmly to grasp the handle of his wheelchair, gently to roll him into the lift, authoritatively to take him down for exercise in the hospital gymnasium. From then on, every day of Jeffs stay in hospital,Jesus the Portuguese porter trundled him down for a session of physical jerks with a physiotherapist in the gym.

Didnt do any harm. Unlikely to have done much good. But, who knows, given Jeffs extraordinary sensibilities, mayhap he had felt a phantom fitness?

Practically forty years ago we first met, Jeff and I, indirectly at that, and, as I recall, heres the way it went. Lovely girl she was. Tall and blonde and blue-eyed; supple of limb, graceful, rangy, exquisitely equipped in all departments and who, one night, I managed to manoeuvre into an intimate situation. Meet had it seemed to me that time to murmur into her dainty ear my feelings for her. I fancies you something horrible, or some such expression of desire came grunting from me. Nor, you should know, did the luscious darling shy away in displeasure or disapproval. Not a bit of it. What the lovely did do was to gaze at me sweetly, gravely, and then lay on me the irksome fact that from time to time she was stepping out with a stage-hand at the Old Vic. Think of that. A rival I had for the affections of this toothsome sweetheart. A rival, indeed, but one who was only a fucking stage-hand while there was I already an actor in the fucking West End. True, my part was a small one; true, too, that the play had died a death, was coming off in a matter of days, but what of that? What contest, for the pertinent bestowal of my ladys favours, could there possibly be? Leading man to be who next time round would surely have his name twinkling in lights on the Avenue versus some anonymous back-stage rude mechanical humping about chunks of scenery? No contest.

Take your time, baby, see you on Saturday. Thats right. Youve got it. Came Saturday, I wound up drinking whiskey down the Kismet, wedged between Maltese Mary and No Knickers Joyce, while my gorgeous fancy sauntered out on the arm of one scene-shifter name of Jeffrey Bleeding Bernard. Hewas in the winners enclosure, Id taken a tumble at the off. Bastard.

Years thundered by, during which rumblings Jeff and I did from time to lurching time, in pubs and clubs and shebeens, stumble into one another, have one or two for the nonce, chunter of this, that and tother, and would then both go our own private, distinctly separate ways. Came 1989, Jeff and I really met again. Based on Jeffs scouringly honest, sobbingly funny articles from his Low Life column in the