I am ill. My throat burns, my muscles ache, the room spins when I stand. I can’t remember the last time I was ill, but because I have a weekly column, I can look it up: a year and a half ago. And I wasn’t this ill then.
“You don’t look well,” my wife says.
“I’m not surprised,” I say. My voice sounds like a tyre inching over gravel.
“I can tell you’re unwell because you can’t be bothered to act unwell,” she says.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“You should go to bed,” she says. “Right after you move all that garden waste from the back to the front. They’re coming to pick it up tomorrow.”
I rest my forehead on the kitchen table and cough quietly.
“Why are you acting?” my wife says. “You don’t need to act.”
“Evidently I do,” I say.
Unfortunately, I also have to play two gigs over the weekend with the band I’m in. I’m not a great believer in the notion that the show must go on – screw the show, is my motto – but I’m responsible for delivering the drums, and the drummer.
“Are you better?” my wife asks when I come downstairs late Friday morning.
“No, worse,” I say. I am too weak, I find, to get the cap off the new milk. And also too weak-willed: three tries seems plenty.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“I’m going to drive to Honiton,” I say. “I have no choice.”
From a personal point of view, the gig in Honiton is an unlikely triumph. It’s not exactly a stoic performance – I think at one point I may have described my symptoms to the audience – but it’s still a testament to the efficacy of a finely judged combination of pills and beer. The next day, however, I’m a husk – a husk facing another gig, in Oxford.
I play the soundcheck in my coat, with sweat rolling down my ribcage in cold, fat beads. I don’t dare test my voice ahead of its one unavoidable obligation: I have to sing a song about mustard, in French. I wrote it, so it’s my own fault. Up in the dressing room, I can barely face my pills and beer.
By the end of the gig, I’m mildly delirious, but pleased that I can finally get on with the normal business of being ill: bed rest and complaining. A woman blocks my path as I drift away from the stage.
“I have two questions for you,” she says. In the circumstances, two seems like a lot.
“OK,” I say, my voice a broken croak.
“Do you really like mustard that much?” the woman asks.
There is a brief pause while I consider my answer. “Yes,” I say finally.
“And do you really speak French?”
“No,” I say. “I used up all the French I know on that song.”
“My friend is French,” she says. “It would be great if you went up and spoke French to her.”
“I don’t speak French,” I say.
“What, not even ‘Hello’?” she says, crossly.
“I know hello,” I say.
“She’s just over there,” the woman says, pointing to a woman deep in conversation with the guitarist from the support band.
“She looks busy,” I say.
“It would really make her day,” she says.
I can tell from where I’m standing that it really wouldn’t. I take two cautious steps towards the Frenchwoman, before glancing back over my shoulder. The first woman makes a shooing motion with her hand. I take three more steps. The Frenchwoman continues her conversation.
“Bonjour,” I say. The Frenchwoman looks at me blankly. She is clearly thinking: whoever he is, he doesn’t look well.
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