The Man Who Would Have Been Coe

For years, Spencer has derived inexplicable enjoyment from spreading false death rumours. Gleefully oblivious to my warnings that by creating a belief in someone's death he destabilises the life force that protects them, he sentences those he despises or considers most expendable to a variety of ignominous departures. One might imagine such an obnoxious pastime restricted to morbid adolescence. Not so in Spencer's case! As recently as Muriel's birthday last October, he partially ruined the day by solemnly informing her gathered cronies that Marilyn Manson, their favourite 'pop' star, had been fatally gored by a bull. Much wailing ensued before Spencer blithely confessed to having made it up. I know for a fact that, in the past year, he's informed eight separate people of my death by causes ranging from traffic accident to cerebral haemhorrage. When I returned from my last (aborted) American lecture tour, my appearance in the Drumfeld Spar caused pandemonium among fellow shoppers convinced that I'd perished on the Pacific Coast Highway.

The pointlessness of such a ruse is so overwhelming that, on occasion, even I've been taken in. This morning, however, when he excitedly informed me that Samuel Nimmo had died suddenly of a massive heart attack, I smiled and said, "very good, Spencer. Let me look out my black tie." Not even the paragraph pertaining to his death in the Herald convinced me. Had Nimmo attained a level of celebrity for his demise to merit a mention, however brief? It didn't seem entirely inconceivable that Spencer, stooping to unplummeted depths, might have somehow planted the story. Only reference to the internet convinced me that Nimmo, the boy who would have been Coe, was, indeed, no more.

In casting Samuel Nimmo as Hamilton Coe, the producers of the People Who Saw Tomorrow demonstrated both contempt and ignorance of their subject. Nimmo, at the time a fifteen year old actor stunted by a metabolic disorder and physically unsuitable for most of the parts he auditioned for, had no conception of how to tackle the role. I don't know how much research he did, if any, but his performance exhibited zero comprehension of the clairvoyant experience. The repercussions were immediate. I was deluged with hate mail and renounced from seventeen different churches. One particular zealot threatened to have me forcibly baptised, adding that contact with consecrated water would cause my skin to melt. For weeks I was unable to venture outside without an adult escort and on these occasions children would point at me and emit a bloodcurdling shriek, an impression of Nimmo's version of my investigative technique. It took years for my reputation to fully recover from the damage inflicted.

Nimmo's freakish performance attracted the interest of the sort of voyeurs who intentionally seek out bad art in order to reassure themselves of their own intellectual superiority. The influence of such champions was, however, minimal. Blindly encouraged, Nimmo briefly re-located to Los Angeles, the worst city in the world for someone of his temperament and appearance, where he auditioned for various ‘Child of Satan' roles popular at the time. In this, he was stymied by his unequivocally sinister appearance: in the popular imagination, the son of the devil is superficially cherubic. Nobody glimpsing Nimmo would imagine him to be anything other than a bad egg.

An outsider by appearance only, Nimmo craved acceptance and was mortified by his treatment in America. In Britain, his rejections had been sweetened by words of encouragement: nobody would have referred to his appearance as a factor, however obvious. L.A. casting directors, however, thought nothing of laughing incredulously as he entered the room. One was so incensed by Nimmo's temerity in auditioning that he emptied the contents of his ashtray over his head.

Embittered by rejection, Nimmo returned to Britain where he was reduced to appearing in pantomime and being physically demeaned in rock videos. Footage of him dressed as an imp or satyr occasionally resurfaces on the music shows Spencer watches in the early hours of the morning. It was at this time that he formed an unreciprocated fixation on the actress Kate Winslett with whom he appeared on an episode of Casualty, a BBC soap opera set in a hospital on which Nimmo regularly appeared as a corpse or malign, inner city child. To this day, Nimmo claims to have secretly married the actress: in an eerie parallel to my own problems with Samantha Eadie-Coe, he was, in fact reported for harassing her after an incident outside her apartment reported in various newspapers.

Later that year, Nimmo (now calling himself Sammy Nemo) increased his notoriety by claiming to be fourteen years old and attempting to join a scout troupe. Attributing his haggard appearance to a rare disorder, he eagerly participated in a Duke of Edinburgh camping exhibition before being exposed by concerned relatives. Nothing excites British journalists more than the suggestion of paedophilia to which Nimmo's subterfuge was attributed. Almost certainly innocent of this, his behaviour was, in fact, a desperate attempt to reclaim the innocence lost when he fell in with the makers of The People who Saw Tomorrow.

I was surprised by how saddened I was by Nimmo's passing. In posturing as Coe, however ineptly, he represented the insecurities of my childhood. Had I lacked resolve and the capacity to channel my energies, I might have followed the same path. By whatever quirk of circumstance, some of us are destined to follow a separate path from that of the herd. Solitude is a prerequisite of genius in any endeavour: the man who walks alone, however, must possess the inner fortitude to master his emotions. How many sensitive souls are deformed from within, helplessly becoming sad, isolated misanthropes, tormented by what might have been?

 

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