Page 62 of Always the Bridesmaid

I hear his sarcasm but I’m mostly impressed. I’m also surprised to hear him talk about his mother. He doesn’t expand and I don’t know what is considered taboo when talking to someone who has had his kind of upbringing, so I decide that now, during Captain Charlie’s Day of Touristy Fun, isn’t the right time to pursue that line of enquiry.

‘Surprised?’ he asks, and I realize he’s talking about his education.

‘That you went to university or that you dropped out? One is more believable than the other.’ I say it tongue-in-cheek and thankfully he laughs.

‘Yeah, I can imagine.’

Charlie has pre-arranged tickets for us to enter Westminster and we have jumped a reasonably long queue to look around inside. The building outside is impressive but much like I have seen in movies and on the news.

‘Did you always want to be a comedian?’ I ask.

We head inside to the atrium.

‘Did I always want to be a comedian? Not really,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have a Mr Moon in Sing moment, at least.’

I get his reference to the kids’ movie (which every adult needs to see, not least for the epic music), and say, ‘Such a good movie.’

‘Great movie.’

We express our appreciation simultaneously.

When Charlie sobers, he seems to look everywhere except at me. He can pretend to be taking in the decorative ceiling or the paintings on the walls, even the fancy tiled floor, but I know he’s avoiding meeting my eyes.

We head left, following a tour group, and Charlie tells me we can steal their guide for free, which gives me some insight into the type of student that Charlie was.

‘I changed schools a lot as a kid,’ he says, still averting his gaze. ‘Every time I moved foster homes and got a new “family”, I changed schools, too.’ He adds inverted commas around the word with his fingers. ‘The younger you are, the easier it is to come and go discreetly. Kids sort of accept you and maybe even like the new kid because he’s like a shiny new toy – for five minutes, anyway. But as you get older, all it means is that you don’t have time to make and keep a set of good friends.’

He shrugs and finally glances in my direction but the connection is brief.

‘As you get older, you can be bullied for being a new kid – a bit different and completely undesirable to the other kids’ parents once they find out on the PTA grapevine what your background is. Or you can play the idiot, mess around in class, get kicked out of lessons, basically play up to the stereotype, which is the image the good kids have already sold to their parents on your behalf anyway.’

And suddenly, I understand. ‘You started playing the role of the class clown to protect yourself.’

We follow the tour group into a room with large wooden tables, highly polished with leather tops attached by what look like press-studs. There are portraits on the walls with the names of historic prime ministers underneath. Some of the older portraits look like they would fit in the National Gallery. The name of the room escapes my attention as Charlie and I continue to talk quietly.

‘I guess you could say that being the joker was my defense mechanism and when I finally got with a family and stayed with them long enough for them to convince me that I needed a good education, it was hard to break the mold I’d created for myself. So, I went to college and I got into university. I’m not stupid, believe it or not,’ he says with a laugh that I don’t return. I’ve seen enough of Charlie now to know he isn’t stupid, far from it. ‘But at university, I did what you might expect of me and started to piss away my grades. I was already disappointing my mother anyway, so back then I thought why not really rub salt in the wound and throw her kindness right back in her face. Two years into my degree, I quit.’

He shakes his head and looks at his feet.

‘Anyway, the only thing I knew was being the class clown, so I started going to open mic nights and after a while recognized that I had a talent for reading the room and dealing the lines at the right time. Fast forward another few years and I realized the many, many, many errors of my ways and thought, shit, I have nothing else to fall back on so unless I want to pull pints for a pittance for the rest of my life, I better put some real effort into this comedy thing.’

He raises his arms out from his sides, as if to say, this is me.

‘It sounds like one of those everything-happens-for-a-reason stories but I think you might be downplaying your talents there, Captain Charlie.’

He scoffs and I’m pleased I can lighten his mood.

I consider my next words and whether I should ask a question at all but I decide it’s appropriate. ‘You mentioned your mother…’

We’ve followed the tour group into a large dining hall now, which ironically would be fitting for a scene from Harry Potter, and I tell Charlie as much. He agrees and lapses into silence.

Eventually he must register my query about his mother, or decide he is ready to talk, which he does.

‘I was adopted when I was fifteen, which is pretty unlikely after more than a decade in foster care, but my parents…’ He looks to the ceiling as he speaks and I can tell he’s uncomfortable referring to his mother and father in this way. ‘They are good people. They had fostered for years, across all the age groups. I was wild when I arrived and I don’t know what it was about them but they had a huge calming influence on me. For the first time in my life, I was being spoken to like an adult. We had dinner as a “family”.’ He adds inverted commas around the word family, again. ‘Every night we would sit at the table, their maternal kids and foster kids – three of us, including me – and discuss our days at school or whatever else we had been doing that day. They encouraged me to go out to work with my dad at weekends – he was an electrician, so I used to help him out and he’d give me some cash, which inevitably I blew on stuff I shouldn’t. It was the first time I’d really had any money of my own – or any responsibility. In hindsight, they were amazing parents. I couldn’t see it at the time but I do now.

‘I calmed down in the home, a lot. Not at school but they recognized that and my mum is a teacher, part time in retirement now, and she saw the difference in me, so she tutored me at home and, by hook or by crook, I got enough GCSEs to get into college. I was used to change and my parents thought that moving to a college with new people would actually be a good thing for once in my life – they were right again. They formally adopted me, which had a huge impact on my view of the world. No one had ever been loyal to me before then, not even my own birth mother. So I went to college, still playing the class clown but making enough grades to get into university and the only thing I really cared about was history, so that’s what I studied.’

He’s shaking his head again and puts his hands in his shorts pockets, his shoulders high and tense.

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