One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night by Christopher Brookmyre Read Free Book Online Page A

for NBC’s lame but lucrative
There Goes the Neighborhood
, ‘Mad Matty’, the grouchy‐
but‐
loveable Scottish bartender, was played by Matt Black. However, the truth was that once Matt Black had played Mad Matty, Matt Black, as was, no longer existed.
    Matt Black had sold out. The man who’d so gleefully lobbed boulders at other comics’ undignified lack of integrity had moved into his own villa on Glasshouse Row. The only difference was where the rent was coming from.
    The sin he’d condemned Jack Dee, Vic Reeves, Allan Davies and all the other usual fucking suspects for was doing ads. (‘It’s not just them endorsing the product, you have to understand: it’s the product endorsing them. It’s the fuckin’ BSA approval stamp on a comedian‐
safety certificate. Guaranteed: no sharp edges.’)
    Matt hadn’t done any ads, but then neither had he particularly needed to, financially. He was filling every hall in the country, selling CDs and videos by the truckload. But perhaps more importantly, he didn’t covet the cash. This was, he appreciated, symptomatic of a middle‐
class upbringing on the Springwell Road. If he’d known what it was really like to be skint, like half the folk he went to school with, then maybe he’d have instinctively gone after every penny too, no matter what he had to do for it. No, not maybe: definitely. Because whenever something he did want had been dangled before him, he’d jumped like a daft wee dog. Women, booze, drugs – and most of all, fame.
    He’d made some ripples Stateside with a couple of controversial appearances on a late‐
night talk show, enough to start earning him bookings in New York. Then the sitcom role was offered, which was when he bent over and spread his cheeks.
    LA. Tinseltown. Celebrity pals. Movie‐
star girlfriends. All that stuff. He’d depicted himself as impossible to impress, iconoclasm personified, but when those things came within touching distance, he was just another small‐
town boy from Auchenlea, dazzled by the bright lights.
    He could barely remember the lies he’d told himself at the time in justification: maybe something along the lines of him taking them for mugs, or it being a means to an end, widening the potential audience for his real work. That was until he tried to go back and
do
his real work.
    A joint in New York, a place he’d fucking slayed them a year before.
    Dead on stage. No vital signs. Pronounced at the scene.
    What the fuck, he told himself. There were film scripts on his desk now, for Christ’s sake. He’d moved on from that stand‐
up stuff anyway. It had been a means to an end.
    ’Course it had. All that work developing his craft, it had really just been so that he could pull women and party with the in‐
crowd. All those years writing his material, building up a following, cultivating a unique and widely envied reputation had merely been an overture to being the second‐
string bad guy in a straight‐
to‐
video cop thriller, or playing Mad fucking Matty on
There Goes the Neighborhood
.
    That disastrous show in New York had been almost eighteen months back, but he could see it now as the bright cold dawn of one long, messy day that ended on a Mexican beach less than a week ago. A long, messy day and a very long, dark night.
    Matt reached out and grabbed Plook’s
NME
from under his arm, then signed his name across Greg Dulli’s forehead. He drew a smiley face beside the signature and handed back the paper.
    ‘My new image, pal. Mr Sunshine.’
----
    The hire car was a bit of a sales‐
rep job, a Mondeo, but it would make smooth work of the A9, and what’s more it had a CD player. It was probably the same juvenilia synapse in the male brain as made him read newspapers from the sports pages backwards, that had Matt sussing out how to work the stereo ahead of adjusting the mirrors or figuring how to get the thing into reverse. It wouldn’t accept his disc at first, and he was on the verge of taking