The Thief of Time Read Free Page B

make the top ten) and even spent six months in a production of
Aladdin
in the West End where there was widespread screaming whenever he appeared in his waistcoat, pantaloons and precious little else. He is fond of recounting how he was voted ‘most shaggable boy’ four years running in some teen magazine, a title that chills me but delights him. He knows the television business inside out. He’s not really an actor, he’s a star.
    His screen persona is that of a good hearted angel, not too blessed in the brains department, to whom nothing good ever happens. Since his first appearance in the programme in the early nineties, his character has appeared to find no reason whatsoever to leave a one mile radius of London. I’m not even sure he knows that any other world exists. He has grown up there, gone to school there, and now works there. He has had several girlfriends, two wives, enjoyed an affair with his sister and an unconsummated romance with another boy – quite controversial at the time – was briefly being considered by an important football club before leukaemia laid him low, had a great love for the ballet which he was obliged to keep secret, flirted with drink, drugs and athletics, and has done God only knows how many other things in his illustrious career. Any other boy would be dead by now with all the exertions that have come his way. Tommy – or ‘Sam Cutler’ as the nation better knows him – lives on and always comes back for more. He has, for want of a better word, pluck. Apparently this endears him to grandmothers, mothers and daughters alike, not to mention quite a few young men who copy his mannerisms and catchphrases with gay abandon.
    â€˜You look ill,’ I told him as we ate, glancing briefly at his pale, blotchy skin and the red rings hovering beneath his eyes. ‘And can we
please
just eat in peace?’ I begged a hovering waitress who was holding a notebook and pen expectantly as she stared at her hero with barely disguised lust.
    â€˜It’s the make-up, Uncle Matt,’ said Tommy. ‘You have no idea what it does to my skin. I used it at first because you need a little for the cameras, but then it affected my skin so badly that I needed even more to look any way normal. Now I look like Zsa Zsa Gabor on screen and Andy Warhol off.’
    â€˜Your nose is inflamed,’ I observed. ‘You take too many drugs. You’ll burn a hole in it one of these days. Just a suggestion, but perhaps you should try injecting rather than inhaling?’
    â€˜I don’t do drugs,’ he shrugged, his voice perfectly even, as if he felt it was simply the socially correct thing to do –
denying
it, I mean – while being completely aware that neither of us believed him for a moment.
    â€˜It’s not that I’m
opposed
to it, you understand,’ I said, dabbing at my lips with a napkin. I was hardly in a position to lecture him. After all, I was an opium fiend at the turn of the century and I survived it. Lord, what I went through with that though. ‘It’s just that the drugs that you take will kill you. Unless you take them right, that is.’
    â€˜Unless I what?’ He looked at me, baffled, grasping a hand around the base of his wine glass and rotating it slowly.
    â€˜The problem with today’s young people’, I said, ‘isn’t that they do things which are bad for them, as so much of the media likes to think. It’s that they don’t do these things right. You’re all so intent on getting off your heads on drugs that you don’t think about the fact that you could overdose and, to put it plainly, die. You drink until your liver explodes. You smoke until your lungs collapse beneath the rot. You create diseases which threaten to wipe you out. Have fun, by all means. Be debauched, it’s your duty. But be wise about it. All things in excess, but just know how to cope with them,