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work cut out saving himself!
    There was no getting away from it; one person’s success is another person’s failure. Clayton had tried hard to pretend that Lucky Bazza’s success didn’t bother him, but the truth was it hurt like hell. He had believed it to be the bitterest pill of all to swallow. But then Stacey left him for Bazza.
    Throughout this dark, depressing period of his life, and presumably in an effort to raise his flagging spirits, Stacey had kept up a steady onslaught of derogatory comments. “You’re not funny at all,” she complained to him one day. “I can’t remember the last time you made me laugh.”
    He couldn’t remember ever telling her that he was funny. Why would he? Why would he go around saying he was funny? Who, me? Oh, I’m the funniest man on the planet. Wind me up and watch me go. I’ll have you in stitches for hours . Comedy doesn’t work that way. Everyone knows that. Everyone except for Stacey, maybe.
    The way he saw it, being funny was a disability. It dragged a person down with the sheer weight of expectation that it fostered. “Go on, then, make me laugh,” was the expectation of anyone who met him for the first time. It was a hell of a weight to lug around.
    When it became obvious that Clayton was not going to earn his agent any money from fresh writing, Glen began getting him appearances on panel shows for TV and radio. He rapidly made a name for himself as the grumpy, dry-witted, mordant guest. Then one week when he was appearing on a topical news show, he let rip with a vociferous attack on the guest host, a sickening man with a squeaky-clean image and an ego the size of Texas. Clayton couldn’t abide him. Off camera, the squeaky-clean image was anything but squeaky-clean. “Let me stop you right there, Baby Doll,” Clayton had said when the host, grinning from squeaky-clean ear to squeaky-clean ear, had started to describe Clayton as a one-hit wonder who couldn’t write without his co-writer, the much more talented Barry Osborne.
    Clayton’s diatribe made the headlines the next day and, ever since, when an example of a truly excruciating on-screen moment was called for, the clip of him outing the host as a coke head with a penchant for dressing up in baby-doll nightdresses whilst indulging in sex with men twenty years his junior was shown. The man’s proclivities were well known in certain showbiz circles, and Clayton didn’t regret his outburst, or the man’s subsequent downfall from prime-time television.
    For weeks afterwards Clayton was hot property. Every newspaper and chat show host wanted to interview him, probably in the hope that he would let rip with some other salacious exposé. He was glad when the circus left town and the telephone stopped ringing.
    Stacey wasn’t so happy. He had never been interested in being Mr. Showbiz, but Stacey had loved the razzamatazz of an opening night or the chance of being snapped by the paparazzi coming out of a restaurant or a club late at night. He’d played along initially, knowing that it pleased her, but when they’d reached the sniping Heather versus Macca stage of their relationship, he told her he would sooner stay at home playing Scrabble while having his toenails systematically ripped out at the roots. Stacey’s response was to accuse him of being small-minded.
    Later, when she announced that she was leaving him for Bazza, she said his small-mindedness wasn’t his only area of deficiency. Small in the trouser department? That was news to him. But apparently, Lucky Bazza was gloriously endowed. Funny, because as far as Clayton could recall from the many side-by-side urinal situations they’d shared, Lucky Bazza hadn’t shown any outstanding tendencies.
    When he thought about it, gravitational forcefields were odd things. He had been sucked into Bazza’s life, then Stacey’s, and now here he was, drawn into the unlikeliest of situations; holed up miles from anywhere pretending his name was Shannon, and