Ithaca by Alan McMonagle

Author:Alan McMonagle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

BRANDO

The girl was right. Everybody loved Brando. At the library, I put his name into search and in less than half a second the internet gave me two million, nine hundred and eighty thousand websites about him.

In the movies he was a tough-talker, a rabble-rouser, and a wild man who rode around on a motorbike asking everybody what they had. Then he was in charge of a mutiny aboard a ship in the high seas. A soldier in the war. A cowboy. A Mexican revolutionary organizing rebellions. Then he was the top man in a family of gangsters. Just like Tony Soprano. Then he was Superman’s da. In one movie he was a lad who used to be a contender for the boxing title, now working on the docks with his brother and a bunch of hoodlums. Surprise, surprise, there’s a girl he’s keen on and it’s tearing him apart because the hoodlums he’s involved with have flung the girl’s brother headfirst off a rooftop. Turns out the hoodlums have told him to lose the boxing fight and he has to settle for a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

There was lots more. Brando’s da was a travelling salesman, always on the road, and his ma liked to act, but preferred heading to the nearest liquor bar and staying there from one end of the day to the next. Brando would go out looking for her and drag her home. Best of all, he would perform little one-man shows to keep her from heading out in the first place.

He didn’t care that he became world famous. He drove a fast car down Sunset Boulevard with a fake arrow stuck in his head. He ducked around movie sets firing his water pistol at the other actors. He had a pet raccoon called Russell he used to bring to parties. Brando could swim, too, and when he made enough money he bought himself an island that was next to impossible to find.

He had lots of clever things to say. If I wasn’t an actor, I would have been a conman and ended up in jail. That was something he said. And he was expelled from school for riding a motorbike through the halls. And he could speak French.

Oh boy.

No wonder Ma kept a photograph of him.

He liked ice cream and cinnamon buns and could eat a breakfast of corn flakes, sausages, eggs, bananas, and a stack of pancakes drenched in syrup. For dinner he had a couple of steaks, potatoes and a few apple pies à la mode. So hungry was he, his second wife put a padlock on the fridge. So Brando would get his friends to lob bags of Whoppers from Burger King into his back garden.

Eventually he got fed up acting. He called himself a fraud. A pretender. And a liar. He said he was a glum joke of a man and told anyone who would listen that he would sweep the floor if he was paid enough. And all the

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