Exclusive: Hear James Nesbitt Read An Original Short Story By Will Self

From Esquire

Esquire's Summer Fiction series, in aid of Unicef UK, brings together some of the world's finest writers, and greatest actors, for a collection of original stories and readings that offer, we hope, a ray of light in these dark times, as well as the chance to raise funds for Unicef's Generation Covid campaign. (Read Unicef ambassador and Esquire editor-at-large Andrew O'Hagan's piece on why the campaign is so vital here).

Where a child is already experiencing hardship, outbreaks of diseases bring a new emergency to an already precarious situation. This is the story of Generation Covid. For vulnerable children all over the world, it poses the biggest threat since the Second World War. Please enjoy these stories, then visit Unicef UK's Generation Covid page to donate and hear a special message from Unicef UK Ambassador James Nesbitt.

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Audio: read by James Nesbitt

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'All Actors Have Died' by Will Self

1. All Actors Have Died

Interior — night

“All actors have now died…”

The newsreader’s delivery is interesting, her tone emotionally neutral, of course. But have you ever noticed how, the worse the news, the more studiedly neutral its announcement? And surely, if we can pursue this line of reasoning a little further, in this very neutrality there yet lurks a sort of optimism; some defiance, even, in the poker face of a chaotic and still more indifferent universe.

“All actors have now died… the plague that has struck performers of all sorts, from humble mimes busking on the Left Bank in Paris, to the most exalted Shakespeareans treading the Stratford boards, has now run its course and the world is entirely devoid of any but the most amateurish thespians…”

“How do they do it,” I ask Geraldine, who sits beside me on the sofa, a sphinx-like minx, wearing only black silk panties and a pink cashmere cardigan. “How do they maintain such objectivity?”

“Fuck should I know…” she rolls on her haunches and scoops up some roasted and salted almonds from the dish on the side table. Behind the newsreader’s silicone-smooth hairdo are back-projected, heartbreaking scenes of the last few to quit the stage, lying in hospital beds, swagged in tubing, plugged into monitors, fretting, strutting and gasping for cues.

“You’re thinking,” I say, “of your own career, I s’pose..?” I try to be studiedly neutral as well — robotic, almost — but Gerry has never appreciated my more negative capabilities.

“Fuck you, Alex,” she mutters, on course for the kitchen island, her hips rolling.

To the accompaniment of her sandwich-making — fridge slam, butter smear and ham slap — I recall her triumph, all those years ago, in the school show: West Side Story. She’d played Maria as a sassy sort of virgin; I’d been in the stalls, for we’d been teenage sweethearts. If you stay together it makes for a different sort of relationship than most, I think: more sibling than sexual to begin with — unlike most marriages, which travel in the opposite and increasingly frigid direction.

And now? She parades about in front of me, altogether oblivious to the effect she has when her breasts fall forward from her cardigan into the cold light of the… fridge. Touch and after-touch, radiating out from my lover’s body… All the while, the newsreader continues:

“Astonishment continues to be widespread at the sheer numbers of the dead: who knew that so many trod the boards? More than 50,000 in Brazil alone…” A clip of a Brazilian soap opera is showing: the full-breasted heroine having a seizure in mid-histrionics… staggering, clutching at scarlet drapes then falling to the floor dragging the set down with her, the flats collapsing to reveal a gaffer standing, mouth open, with a roll of tape in his hand.

Gerry could’ve gone on — everyone agreed; she had the looks, the poise, the voice — but she’d been wise beyond her years, I think… and besides, at 17, already had a more compelling project: a vision of herself as a competent and high-achieving woman, the sort for whom a dreamy and ineffectual man is a perfect accessory, demonstrating to the world that she’s far more able than any mere careerist, as well as far more loving than any maternal homemaker …Touch and after-touch radiating out from my lover’s body — like those early photographs of humans and horses moving, in which several discrete exposures are captured on the same plate… You know the kind: serene in their studiedly casual superiority.

A spokesperson from Equity appears on screen, alongside a telepresent one from the Screen Actors Guild, whose heavily tanned features hang above a long-shot of Los Angeles, which, as ever, is typecast as itself. The woman from Equity is at first close to tears, then arrives: it isn’t the loss of life alone — the young actors with such promise, the older with so many laurels, and all with loved ones who mourn them painfully — or the loss of culture and enterprise: the house lights going down, the sets being struck. No — and here her tears become ones of anger — what most upsets her is that to begin with no one had believed the actors. They’d said they didn’t feel very well; a little nauseous, a bit breathless. They began to tell those around them that they were experiencing an awful sense of dislocation: as if they were being removed forcibly from their own lives and inserted into someone else’s.

And their husbands, wives and children, their producers, directors and the gaffer with the tape in his hand simply hadn’t believed them. That’s actors for you, they’d said, always making everything into a performance.

2. The Third Act Problem

Interior — night

Her ivory-coloured business card is engraved as follows: Geraldine McHendricks LLD, of McHendricks and Dalton, Inner Temple, London. She and her long-time associate, the studious Theo Dalton, left their respective firms four years ago to set up their own partnership, specialising in the most abstruse and expensive aspects of intellectual property law.

The venture has been a success conspicuous by its dividends: the £1,000 shoes and lingerie more diaphanous than spider webs. Last Christmas, Gerry flew the three of us to Bali, then, a fortnight later, on to Australia for a further two weeks’ outback safari. Gerry said she thought the contrast between such a populous place and so deserted a space would be… what? Amusing? Profound? I don’t know: this is part of her own intellectual property that I have no rights over at all.

Yes, it’d been the right time for Gerry to go it alone. (Have I implied that Theo’s ineffectual? If so, that would be mistaken: he’s actually the business-getter of the two; it’s just that his charm is entirely asexual.) While Carl was growing up, although she’d been the main provider, so necessarily away from home more, she’d still wanted to be a hands-on mum, which meant working in large practices that’d allow her to keep more regular hours. But once our son was in his late teens, she decided it was time to dedicate herself wholeheartedly to her career.

The man from the Screen Actors Guild holds the earpiece against his ear. The link isn’t that great, and from time to time his image glitches into lurid cubism: “This much we now understand,” he says. “The plague strikes at a certain point in an actor’s training, which would explain, if not in any way justify, the reactions of those around them. It’s often the case that after many weeks, months, years, perhaps, of hamming about, do-do-doing voice exercises, and playing pat-a-cake with their peers to foster an ensemble psychology, the wannabe actor suddenly finds that mark, and is able fully to assume the mantle of another, and so become a character.

“Cruelly, it’s at this precise moment — which, we can only assume, has been blocked out for them well in advance by their own biology — that the plague strikes, and they die in anguished ecstasy… or at least,” the SAG man’s tone is reverent, “that’s what we all assume, looking into their tragic masks…”

Gerry’s back beside me, a faint hammy-ness clinging to her as she licks her fingers. Why do I still find all this quite so arousing: the unconscious allusion to fellatio, accompanied by the peek-a-boo of nipples I’ve sucked on more than anyone, her own child included? Especially her own — not that Gerry ever had any difficulty breastfeeding. No mastitis or cracked nipples; she was one of the few in her friend-group of young mothers who could expel her milk with ease: 200 millilitres of kindness at a time.

There’s a montage of dead actors’ faces fanned out across the television screen, like a pack of cards, the court ones coloured by fame. Gerry and I glance at one another, and I’m conscious of an immediate and deep rapport. Between the two of us there’s no need for any dissimulation or histrionics. Besides, as we’ve known for weeks now, all actors have died, every single one; and furthermore, the Equity spokesperson reminds us, leaning forward in her TV studio chair (which is, in truth, indistinguishable from the office kind you see nowadays, fly-tipped in suburban streets, together with beige and obsolete computer equipment, their legs upended, their castors slowly revolving in the late spring sunlight), all those drama students who, in the early stages of the plague, were fast-tracked through the drama schools in order to take their places, have now died as well.

“It seems to be incontrovertibly the case…” says the Prime Minister, whose face has replaced those of the dead actors… Touché et après-touché radiating out from my lover’s body… a body summoned into being, it would seem, by my sight and my smell and my touch and my love… We are each other’s casting director — and we always get… the part… He’s speaking at the daily press conference which was held earlier: “…that anyone who aspires to perform in public, for money, will die from this dreadful disease. And so, the government has decided that the only way we, um, as a freedom-loving people with a long and proud theatrical tradition, can continue to enjoy any drama at all, is for a vast cast of volunteer amateurs to be assembled to take on their roles.”

We return to the studio, where the newsreader’s agitated face fills the screen as she stumbles over these words: “I’ve received some, er, b-breaking news while we’ve been on air that… from now on, er… so, we can’t just…” She casts her eyes down at the desktop, up and to the right, before bringing them back to the camera: “We can’t just read a prepared script off the Autocue… seems like newscasters in China are now falling victim to the plague… Anyway…” Sweat trickles messily down from her precise hairline. “From now on, we’re gonna have to read the news before we go on air, then give you viewers our own sorta… version of it — in our own words… To be honest, I don’t think I’m gonna be that good at it…”

3. Noises Off

Interior — night

Despite the wholesale social discombobulation, Geraldine is still going in to work every day. While it’s true that the overall number of fatalities remains small in terms of national population, the plague has nonetheless continued to spread: first infecting voice artists and extras, then moving on to at least some of the big-name fashion models. Nowadays, stand-ups really are dying out there, and the public have long since ceased to find it remotely amusing. Social unrest shudders the body politic with its slow, menacing handclapping.

Gerry says the reason she’s at work so much is, at least in part, because she’s joined a pressure group dedicated to helping the dead actors’ dependents. They’re arguing the case that, given the wholesale extermination of skilled professional thespians, their past performances must now be viewed as unique works, subject to some sort of retrospective levy, money which will be added to a fighting fund. Fighting fund… funny how martial metaphors are always summoned up by public health campaigns. Presumably, those playing the parts of our leaders wish to rouse us to some collective act of selfless bravery, but really they make the whole production of combating a deadly virus seem simultaneously hackneyed and farcical, like Shakespearean actors having at one another with wooden swords.

On the 10 O’Clock News just now, the newsreader was gossiping about a hand model who has died of the plague in Esher. Gerry often doesn’t get home until after I’ve gone to bed; as for Carl, we’re unashamedly proud of him, although understandably nervous. He’s volunteered for the AAC, the government’s Amateur Acting Corps, and is now in basic training at a hastily converted holiday camp outside Bexhill-on-Sea. Although he isn’t performing yet — and while I’ve never been much of a viewer before — I now believe it my patriotic duty to stay in and watch our courageous lads and lasses perform in soap operas and dramas, in all instances stepping straight into the parts played by their dead comrades. The amateurs have also been drafted in to take the roles of the ordinary people who take part in reality TV shows and panel games, for the limelight has proved fatal for them as well.

Missed cues, clumsy blocking, leaden deliveries accompanied by constant fidgeting. The dialogue for most television dramas — once abstracted from this over-lit realm — has always been clunkily ridiculous, while in my not especially humble opinion, their narrative arcs usually have all the predictability of a poorly launched Stomp Rocket. But the addition of truly bad acting to this miserable mix has thickened it still more: relatively short scenes — such as a character making a simple purchase in a shop — now seem utterly interminable, as the preposterous players duck and weave while talking over each other. The comedies are the worst. We’ve all known the jokes haven’t been funny at all for years now, what with their dumb puns, single entendres and clunkily contrived scenes of social embarrassment. But the effect of having such situations realised by wannabe comedians with awful timing is frankly tragic and, as I sit here watching them mumming and mugging, I’m insistently reminded not of happier times, but death… and destruction.

Just occasionally, though — when I’m in fact least expecting it, watching, say, some interminable car crash of a cop show, or an unreal reality one — I’ve been shocked out of my stupor by someone on-screen momentarily appearing to be the character they’re meant to be representing: a little moue, a sotto voce aside, followed by a skilled pirouette away from the camera. There have been rumours circulating on social media to the effect that — well, you probably guessed it — not all actors have died. Moreover, that those who have survived have outwitted the plague by playing the part of people who’ve never dissimulated in their lives, and then taking this imposture several steps further, by enrolling in drama schools under false names that might in time — assuming a vaccine is found — become their stage ones.

4. Pursued By Bears

Interior — night

Touch and after-touch radiating out from my lover’s body… a body made of many, a body that contains all bodies, nested within it… There’s Gerry’s key in the lock. Often, when she gets back this late, this exhausted, she’ll begin undressing immediately inside the front door: unzipping her pencil skirt to the hip, shimmying out of it, then shucking off her suit jacket and letting it fall to the rug, an antique Persian kilim she bought with the vast fees from one of her first successful cases. Or at least that’s what the carpet seller claimed it was; I’ve always had my doubts.

I’m not so absurd as to suggest my wife’s incapable of being economical with the truth, she is after all human, not some sexy automaton. But her professional reputation is that of a lawyer of the utmost probity, who wins her cases by dint of superior analysis and strategy, rather than the more familiar weaponry wielded at the bar, to wit: guile bordering on mendacity, and of course, force majeure. If I lean forward on the sofa, I can see her, standing in the fan of lamplight spreading out from the door and into the darkened hall. See her, the great swag of her auburn hair dangling down, a soft shower of gold as, one elegant hand on the newel post, she slowly, sensually, unpeels the leg of her sheer, black tights from her slim, swan-necking pale one. When we were in our teens and twenties, Gerry’s candour had been at once terrifying, and utterly charming: she’d barrelled through life, speaking her truth to all and sundry, reaffirming again and again that a spade was, indeed, a spade.

And now? Well, I feel we’re closer than ever. True, a faithful soul, my experience of women is confined to her alone, but as I think I’ve made clear, I’m a student of the drama, and in the world’s greatest plays we can find, witness and empathise with all human behaviour, from the greatest sincerity to the most bathetic betrayals. Since all actors have died, there’s been an upsurge in the latter — insofar as it’s possible to tell — and now not a day passes without it emerging that this heretofore maculate public figure has, in fact, been deceiving their spouse, defrauding their business, or otherwise indulged in deception; criminal, civil or familial.

There are those who link these phenomena, the plague and the lying; they say our rising mendacity is simply compensating for the loss of all those pro’ pretenders. Gerry’s now sitting beside me on the sofa, quite naked besides a gold anklet. It’s her charmingly forthright way of telling me that she wants to make love. The lips, the teeth and tongue, the fingertips, these cannot, I believe, lie. A person’s body, in the close confinement of another’s cannot lie, or at least not for long: the skin crawls away involuntarily. The philosopher Schopenhauer wrote: “There is an unconscious appositeness in the use of the word ‘person’ to designate the human individual, as is done in all European languages: for ‘persona’ really means an actor’s mask, and it is true that no one reveals himself as he is, and we all wear a mask and play a role.”

Could the plague merely have been a semantic problem, a case of the wrong terminology? If we’d referred to it as a pandemic, would that fact alone have made the disease treatable with our modern medicine? Instead, we made it into something biblical, which is also, perhaps, why it all ended up being a matter of faith, which is simply another word for a colossal sort of suspension of disbelief. Maybe all the actors died because we failed to have faith in them, failed to lend their beautifully crafted performances sufficient credence. Moreover, our current predicament could be coloured by this bad faith as well: who’s to say that the amateur actors who now fret over our stages and strut across our screens aren’t just as good as the professionals they’ve replaced? Who’s to say it isn’t us who’ve failed to play our part correctly… as an audience.

Touch and re-touch, Gerry thinks, radiating out from my lover’s body, as she rears up on the sofa, and, in one fluid motion, mounts her supine husband, rubbing her fundament into his hardening crotch. Why do I do it? she wonders, as she envelops him in the scent of Theo’s cologne, which she’s brought across town on the swatch of her own skin. But the answer comes as she moves together with Alex, the way they’ve moved together so many thousands of times before: I do it because I can… and because I’m good at it… and because he believes in me…

Will Self says:

This story appears in the July/August issue of Esquire.
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Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book Award, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Literature, and Umbrella, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Phone, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He recently published a memoir, Will.

James Nesbitt was appointed a Unicef Ambassador in 2005 and has travelled widely with Unicef UK, raising awareness and vital funds to keep children safe. The Northern Irish actor started out in theatre before moving into film in 1985. Television series he has appeared in include Searching, Ballykissangel and Cold Feet. Nesbitt has also starred as Bofur in the Hobbit film series.

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