Driving Jarvis Ham

When I reached out

And most of all when you touched my hand outside the Wimpy Bar

And then you were gone

Were you sad then?

We’ve just turned onto the A38, onto the Devon Expressway. The trees are now too far apart to touch each other. If you look out of your window to the left you’ll see Dartmoor in the distance. There’s a jack-knifed artic and traffic backed up behind it over on the right, London and the North are up ahead and Jarvis Ham is in the seat behind. He’s reading The Stage newspaper. He’s taken his shoes off again.

These shoes:

The Devon Expressway. It sounds a bit sci-fi doesn’t it, like it’s a monorail across the moon or something.

It isn’t.

The A38 is a major English trunk road that runs for 292 miles from Bodmin in Cornwall to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and the Devon Expressway is a forty-two-mile stretch of the A38 between Plymouth and Exeter. It’s not important.

‘Actors wanted,’ Jarvis says, reading out loud from The Stage (the newspaper, he’s not on a stage – God forbid). ‘To be represented by an exciting new agency and personal management company.’

‘You know those things are always a con. They just want your money.’

‘Okay,’ Jarvis said and scanned the ads again. ‘Lookalikes wanted then. Who do I look like?’

‘Whom,’ I said.

‘Okay. Whom do I look like?’

I looked at Jarvis in my rear-view mirror: my Jarvis-view mirror.

‘How about Elvis?’ he said.

I looked at his balloon head and his baby face. His rainbow coloured hair and bright red hospital radio DJ glasses.

‘Maybe if he was still alive.’

‘What?’

‘Who knows what direction he would have gone in,’ I said, ‘if he’d lived. The fourth age of Elvis.’

‘What?’ Jarvis said.

‘After Young, Movie and Vegas Elvis.’

I looked at his face in the mirror again. ‘Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are’ it said on a transfer at the bottom of the mirror. Jarvis looked up from his newspaper.

‘Do you think he’s really dead?’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘Elvis. Do you think he’s really dead or that he faked his death?’

‘No. He’s dead, definitely dead. The King is dead,’ I said. ‘Or on the moon.’

‘That didn’t happen.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The moon landing,’ Jarvis said.

‘Landings.’

‘What?’

‘Landings. There’ve been six manned moon landings.’

‘Really? Six?’

‘Yep.’

‘They didn’t happen,’ Jarvis said in a way that told me there could be no argument about it. ‘For a million pounds,’ he said. ‘Would you fake your own death?’

‘I sometimes think I already have.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know Jarvis. I just said it. Thought it would sound clever. Surely you have to be famous to properly fake your own death anyway.’

‘If you were famous then, for a million pounds would you fake your own death?’

‘If I was famous I probably wouldn’t need the money.’

Jarvis hated it when I didn’t take his games seriously. I looked at his balloon head inflating in the rear-view mirror and to avoid it bursting and ruining my freshly valeted car seats with Jarvis brains, I decided to play along.

Sort of.

‘There’s no way Elvis faked his death,’ I said. ‘Apart from the fact that he surely would have picked a more heroic cause of death than sitting on a toilet eating a peanut butter sandwich if he had faked it, apart from that, if Elvis was still alive he would have said something by now just to put a stop to all the people impersonating him, especially the shit ones, which is nearly all of them. Did you know – and I’m making some of the facts up because I can’t remember them – but there are around one hundred thousand Elvis impersonators in the world. There were only a hundred and something at the time of Elvis’s death. If this rate of Elvis growth carries on, by 2019 a third of the world’s population will be Elvis impersonators.’

‘Are you just saying this to sound clever as well?’

‘No, it’s true.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Jarvis said, but didn’t finish what he was going to say and went back to reading the job ads in The Stage.

You know how some people desperately want to get into the music business and so they get a job in a record shop? Or how actors work in call centres selling boiler maintenance cover and serve cocktails on roller skates wearing a tight t-shirt with no bra because it’s good acting experience? I mean: have you looked at the acting job ads in The Stage lately? Those are the only vacancies you’ll find there. Croupiers wanted for cruise ships, strippers and pole dancers needed urgently. Six pages of vacancies for door-to-door mobile phone salespeople and high street charity muggers, and maybe one acting job, that’s unpaid and has already gone.

In 1993 Jarvis got a job demonstrating – and mostly crashing – remote controlled helicopters into the floor of a toyshop and making unrecognisable balloon animals in the hope that it would be his big break into acting, one small step onto the yellow brick road that would eventually lead him to being presented with a real version of this piece of misspelled tacky plastic:

Jarvis had it made for himself at Southamleys toyshop when he was working there as Devon’s worst toy demonstrater – it was in the old actor’s suitcase. The job ad from The Stage was in the shoebox. There was also a 1986 Charles and Diana Fifth Royal Wedding Anniversary Diary in the shoebox, where I found the next series of diary entries. At last, a bit of love interest.