Misadventure

By Anthony Miller

Steven Ambrose has risen from a humble background to sitting all day in his flat in Crouch End trying to think up horrible ways for characters to die on BBC TV hospital drama “Misadventure”. However, instead of writing he spends much of the day trying to distract himself from his own loneliness by complaining to the Council about trivial local issues. He is continually disturbed by the owners of the house next door to his block of flats who seem to have decided to build a nuclear shelter without proper planning permission. Steven goes round to confront them only to discover that the woman next door is the wife of someone who works at the same funeral business as his girlfriend Susan - she turns out to be a best friend. Steven soon finds himself invited round next door to a series of rather peculiar dinner parties. These lead to Steven and Susan becoming embroiled in a strange web of corporate takeovers and sexual rivalries. Steven’s writing career starts to take some unusual turns too as a character he based on a council employee becomes increasingly difficult to write for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Miller
• Release date: Sep 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463970768

Anthony Miller

Anthony E Miller is a comedian and novelist. He was Managing Director of Pear Shaped in Fitzrovia for many years and has gigged all over the UK even though nobody wanted him to. He has written one other novella Seaweed (published by Whimsical Publications).

Book preview

Chapter 1

As he sat at his desk by the front bay window of his flat the white cursor blinked. The photons that emanated from metal oxide coating of his PCW9512 made Steven feel emptier than the vacuum inside the tube. There seemed to Steven to be more electrical activity in the cathode rays than there was going on in his brain. Perhaps there were indeed no electrical signals in his brain. He imagined doctors connecting him up to an electrocardiography device and not finding a signal. He kicked the desk and hurt his foot. The pain at least convinced him that he was at least not simply a solid inert mass waiting for some incantation to animate him like a Golem.

When Steven had stared writing for the BBC’s then new hospital drama Misadventure he had found penning the episodes a fairly simple affair. True to the BBC’s public purposes set out in the Royal Charter to enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain each self contained episode was designed simply to unsubtly lecture the proletariat on how those in Wood Lane thought they should (or should not) live their lives (and die).

As the BBC could only afford to have a few regular characters on salary there were an extremely small number of continuing storylines so each episode resembled a medieval morality play but in modern sets and with modern medical technology. The result of this financially imposed simplicity was that the most taxing part of his regular freelance writing gig on the program had been to think up horrific ways for the the visiting artists’ characters to get injured/die. Ideally the injury should be both very painful and graphic but not too graphic that it couldn’t be put out before the watershed.

To Steven this had become very boring so to make his days and the scripts less dull he would inject dark jokes into them of the kind he would never have told on stage himself when he’d been a stand up just to see what reaction he would get from the production office. Most but not all of these would be assiduously blue pencilled by angry script editor Tony Fuller who liked to express his displeasure in tart margin notes and pseudo-Churchillian bon mots.

Steven enjoyed Tony’s outrage but he enjoyed it even more when a politically incorrect joke of his made it under the wire of Tony’s assiduous vetting procedures. One or two of his more subtle jokes had even generated actual complaints. He enjoyed that too because the buck for that sort of thing stopped with the script editor and it was always fun playing innocent while listening to Tony squirm. Tony deserved to squirm. Even when Steven’s scripts were entirely sensible and plausible he was often told by Tony they were taking things too far so why not have fun and go there anyway? For example when his storyline about rats getting into the hospital mortuary and eating the dead bodies had been rejected by Tony on the grounds it was too gruesome and obviously implausible Steven had responded by writing a long letter referencing genuine real life occurrences of similar events. However, Tony merely told him coldly that grave desecration was too taboo for before the watershed. Blame the vermin on the 6th floor, he said.

Chapter 2

Steven would have cogitated more on all these issues but his mental meanderings were interrupted by a series of loud noises from next door. There were always loud noises from next door or had been for quite a while now he came to think about it. Bangs and thuds that he had no idea how anyone could make in such a small suburban street. It had started since the new people had moved in. It might have been home improvement but Steven hadn’t noticed the house next door improving as a result. What was there to improve anyway? It was true the house next door had been built in the 1880s but the Neo-Classical exterior looked as spick and span as if it had only been erected a day ago. Steven didn’t know who had moved in but he knew they had no consideration and like most tolerant people he employed a zero-tolerance policy to anti-social behaviour.

He had tried knocking on their door to complain before but no one had come out.

Not being able to see the source of the noise from the front lounge window Steven moved to the back bedroom window. In the back garden of the house next door was a woman he had never seen before. Steven tried to make her face out but she had the hood of her parka up and he was too far away to see clearly. He could tell or guess it was a woman by the way she stood and carried herself. It was cloudy and raining a bit but this didn’t deter her from smashing through a small patio with a shovel and from having dug a rather large hole that was filling with rain and mud. Steven watched her stop a moment longer. She touched her unseen face. She leant on her shovel. She went back to smashing up the patio with the shovel.

Steven decided it was very important that he go downstairs and have a word with her.

Eventually after selecting a coat to wear over his pyjamas and after selecting a brightly coloured umbrella to match it he descended communal garden where he peered over the waist level fence and coughed. The lady took no notice or didn’t hear him. Steven felt slightly embarrassed and coughed again and was again ignored. The lady simply continued lifting up her shovel and smashing the hell out of what had once been a rather tasteful Andalusian patio.

Excuse me, said Steven in a very loud but polite voice.

The woman turned. She kept her hood up and her mouth was obscured by a scarf.

I live next door and I’m trying to write a television script, said Steven as though she needed to know this. Can I ask what you’re doing?

Yes, I’m trying digging a hole, said a muffled voice from beneath the scarf.

Why?

Why not?

Well, it’s not illegal … at least I think it isn’t … but I just wondered if you could keep the noise down a bit because I’m trying to write. My name’s Steven Ambrose I live next door, mansplained Steven.

I’ll have finished smashing the patio up soon, said the woman who seemed to have little understanding of either the importance of his vocation or the beauty of what she was destroying.

Yes… a shame. I thought it was quite a nice patio.

It was. But it’s in the way..., said the woman smashing at it again with the shovel.

Of what? … if you don’t mind me asking? said Steven looking at the enormous hole she’d dug. It was about five feet deep at least at the centre and filled at the bottom with muddy water.

Nuclear shelter.

What?

We’re building a nuclear shelter, repeated the woman removing the scarf from her mouth. She had a nice mouth. It seemed a shame to conceal it. Surely it wasn’t that cold?

What for? said Steven.

Surviving a nuclear war.

But the cold war’s over?

You really think Russia is going to stand for what’s going on in Yugoslavia forever?

Steven knew things were going on in Yugoslavia but had no strong opinions on or detailed knowledge of that conflict so said nothing in response and just let her rant about it for a while. When she had finished and after he hadn’t really listened to her I hadn’t thought of it like that was all he could think of to offer up. He hoped it made him sound as if he understood what she’d