The Understudy: A Novel (24 page)

“The wind beneath your wings?” prompted Stephen.

“Yeah. Yeah, if you like. Is that really such a bad thing?”

Stephen reached for the door handle.

“And, anyway, we had a deal. You cover for me with Nora, and you get your big break, remember?” said Josh.

“That wasn’t the deal, Josh.”

“Wasn’t it? Because it sounds fair enough to me. Hey, still—if you want to forget about the eighteenth, then that’s fine by me. But you know me; I’m very, very rarely ill. It’s unlikely a chance like this will come up again.”

And suddenly Stephen realized that a piano was never, ever going to fall on Josh Harper. Not unless someone pushed it.

Stephen sighed, and closed the door. “You promise you’ll finish it?” “I promise.”

“Tonight?”

“Absolutely.”

“No excuses, no sneaking back to her flat?”

“Scout’s honor,” said Josh, holding his hand up.

“Okay, then,” said Stephen, very quietly.

“What?”

“I said…I said all right.”

“So you’ll cover for me?”

“Yes, Josh. Yes, I’ll cover for you.”

By the time they stepped outside, the autograph hunters had given up hope, and disappeared off into the night, and they stood for a moment on Wardour Street. Josh grabbed Stephen’s hand with both his, and squeezed something into his palm.

“There you go—present for you,” he said, grinning expectantly.

Stephen looked down at the small effigy of Lieutenant Virgil Solomon of the Planetary Expedition Force, then back at Josh’s grinning face, and wondered how far up his nostril it might be possible to jam the action figure.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said, because he didn’t.

“Forget about it, and thank you for…well, you know, for covering for me. I’ll make it worth your while. The eighteenth, yeah? Two evenings and a matinee.” He lunged forward and gave Stephen his Superman hug, winked and turned north toward the club. “See you tomorrow, Stephanie,” he said, over his shoulder.

“Josh?” shouted Stephen after him.

“What?”

“Could you use my proper name, d’you think?” said Stephen, slowly and quietly.

Josh walked back toward him. “What—you don’t like ‘Stephanie’?”

“What d’you
think,
Josh?”

“But I’ve always called you Stephanie, ever since I’ve known you.”

“Yes, Josh. Yes, you have. But I don’t like Stefano, or Stevesters, or Stevaroony, or Bullitt, and I definitely don’t like Stephanie.”

“I’m sorry, mate. I had no idea,” he said, sincere and contrite. He punched the top of Stephen’s arm, and backed away, breaking into a grin. “See you tomorrow—
Stephanie
!!!”

Stephen smiled, lips tight together, mimed an invisible gun, pointed it at Josh’s head, and pulled the trigger, and Josh laughed, mimed his head exploding, turned, and scampered away.

Kryptonite

I
t was that last “Stephanie” that did it.

In Victoria Station, he slipped into an old-fashioned phone box, Clark Kent–style, and closed the door. He could have used his mobile phone, of course, but he was paranoid that they might track his number. He knocked aside the fast-food containers with the back of his hand, wiped the mouthpiece of the receiver on his coat and called Directory Enquiries for the appropriate number, then dropped another coin in the slot, took a deep breath, sniffed and dialed.

At the very last moment he decided to disguise his voice, use an accent, a Welsh accent maybe, and to put something over the receiver. In a film this would be a white handkerchief, but all he had in his pocket was a purple Pret A Manger napkin. Quickly, he stretched it over the mouthpiece. It smelled slightly of Thousand Island Dressing. Welsh accent? Or Geordie perhaps? Cardiff or Newcastle. A voice answered the phone, and the accent crashed somewhere in between.

“Could ai speeek to your showbiz desk, please?”
Showbiz
desk? “Showbiz”? Even in a recognizable accent, the word seemed suddenly absurd.

“I beg your pardon?”

The accent veered off toward the West Country. “Yah showbiz dairsk?”

“Sorry, still can’t hear you…”

He took the napkin off the mouthpiece and crossed the Irish Sea. “Oi wood loike to spek tow the showbiz desk if I moy, please.”

“The
showbiz
desk?” asked the telephonist.

He cross-faded to his normal voice. “You know—the gossip pages, famous people, showbiz, that kind of thing.”

“Can I ask who’s calling?”

“Actually I’d sort of prefer to remain…anonymous.” Even in his own voice, he was aware of how foolish he sounded. Surely there was some way of doing this with some dignity, and without saying the word “showbiz” again? Maybe not. Maybe he should just hang up…

Suddenly, a well-spoken lady on the showbiz desk picked up. “Hello there, Anonymous, how can I help you?”

“Hello, is that the showbiz desk?”
Stop saying “showbiz.”

“Ye-es,” said the woman in a smooth, insinuating voice. Stephen hadn’t been expecting this—he’d hoped for some cynical, raddled old geezer, not this crisply spoken, skeptical young woman.

“Hi, there. I just wondered, this is a tricky matter, but do you know the famous actor Josh Harper?”

He heard her exhale through her nose. “We’re aware of Josh Harper. What about him?”

“Hi, well, it’s just, I was just in this private members’ club on Berwick Street, Lounge—do you know it?”

“I know of it, ye-es.”

“Well, anyway, he was with someone, this woman, who didn’t look like his wife.”

“I see.” She paused, wrote something down. “Any idea who she was?”

“She looked vaguely familiar, the policewoman from that TV show
Summers and Snow,
is it?”

“Abigail Edwards?”

“Exactly. Abigail Edwards…”

There was a moment’s silence. The loudspeaker on Victoria Station blared out an announcement, and Stephen felt a surge of paranoia, as if this might in some way give him away.

“And how d’you know it’s not just a friendly drink?” she asked, skeptical.

“I’m pretty sure it’s more than that.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Was she writing something down, playing for time while they traced the call? His ears started to perspire, something he had never experienced before. Clearly he hadn’t thought this through. Clearly he should just hang up….

“So, Mr. Anonymous, do you have a name, or number or something we can call you back on? Maybe a mobile?”

“Actually, I’d rather not.”

“Because I have to tell you that we don’t usually pay money for this kind of thing.”

“Oh, no, no, I don’t want any money.”

“I see. Right, well, we’ll look into it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Okay, then—good night.”

Stephen was about to hang up.

“But before you go, can I just ask you something?” she asked, suddenly very friendly and chirpy.

“Sure, sure…”

“I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m curious. Can I just ask—why are you doing this?”

“ ‘Why?’ ”

“I mean, a grown man like you—what do you care? What’s your motivation?”

It seemed a very good question, and not one Stephen was equipped to answer immediately. For Nora? Was he doing it for Nora? Did he imagine she would in some way be
pleased
?

“Is it some sort of moral crusade?” she asked. “Public interest? Are you just settling some sort of score? Have you got something against him? A grudge or something?”

Stephen hung up the phone.

In the romantic-comedy version of his life, this would more normally be the point where he should have done something heroic, something quirky and charming, passionate and romantic, something performed out of love for Nora that would make the audience roar their approval. But try as he might, he could find precious little romance in an anonymous phone call. He stood with his head resting against the glass, ankle-deep among the burger boxes and discarded evening papers, and wondered if he’d ever felt lower in his life.

He reached into his pocket, and dropped Josh’s action figure into the debris on the floor.

And when he stepped out of the phone box, he was still Clark Kent.

Skin Work

T
he results, the next morning, were better, and worse, than he could ever have hoped for.

Stephen was sitting in the canteen of a production facility in Twickenham, wearing a heavily padded nylon squirrel costume. An immense fiberglass hazelnut sat on the table next to his bacon roll. Opposite him, the floor manager flicked through the paper, and that’s when Stephen saw it, and groaned out loud. The floor manager looked up.

“Any chance of me borrowing your paper?”

Immune to his animal charms, the floor manager scowled, and Stephen was forced once again to accept that playing the title role in a film didn’t automatically grant him any particular authority.

“For one second? Please?”

The floor manager exhaled through his nose, handed the paper over, and left. Stephen gripped it tightly in both paws.

Just as there is no such thing as a small part, there is supposedly no such thing as bad publicity. Yet this was clearly bad publicity. Photographs of celebrity street fights never look particularly impressive—arms seem to flail ineffectually, punches always seem to miss their mark; it always looks more playground than boxing ring—and this photograph was no exception. In many ways, it was a generic sort of snap, the kind that appears in a newspaper every day, just another famous person, eyes glazed, falling-down drunk, pressing their face into a bouncer’s chest, flopping boneless out of a cab. Even so, it was strange to see a class act like Josh Harper in such a photograph, to see him losing his cool, and some way down the chart from Number Twelve. A smaller photograph to one side filled out the story: Abigail and Josh stepping out of the Lounge club in the rain, Abigail with her hand over one side of her face, Josh standing chivalrously in front of her, pointing at one of the paparazzi, snarling, his eyes red from the flash of the camera. Then the main photo—Josh suspended in the air over Berwick Street, one leg kicked high, a leather-blousoned paparazzo tumbling backward. “Not Josh-ing anymore,” read the headline.

Hot young superstar Josh Harper was out on the town with a beautiful brunette last night. Nothing unusual there, except the woman was
not
Mrs. Harper. Instead it was Abigail Edwards, star of TV’s hit detective series
Summers and Snow.
“I saw them in the club talking very intently,” said an onlooker. “They seemed to be really getting on. But when they left the club together and he saw the cameras, he just started to completely freak out. He was swearing and lashing out like a wild animal…”

Inside his wild animal costume, Stephen felt all his pores open simultaneously.

’Allo, ’Allo, ’Allo

“He started shouting, then tried to snatch my camera away and throw it to the ground,” said freelance photographer Terry Dwyer, who sustained cuts and bruises in the attack. “He just went wild. I don’t know what he was so angry about. It was just an innocent little snapshot, after all…”

Stephen tossed the paper back onto the table, then sat with his head, his real head, in his paws.

He must have known this might happen when he made the anonymous call, but he’d blithely assumed that Josh would get away with it, as he always did, that the photographers wouldn’t bother turning up, or that the photo would prove too innocuous for the newspaper to bother with. But there it was. What had he been thinking? And what about Nora? Surely she’d have seen it. Should he call her? What would Josh have told her? Would she be angry? Of course she’d be angry, she’d be devastated, destroyed, and it would all be his fault. He felt shabby and spiteful, the kind of petulant shame he hadn’t felt since he was a child, and the costume wasn’t helping matters either.

“Everything all right?” asked Olivia the Owl, sliding her full-English breakfast next to his.

“What? Oh, just someone I know in the papers.”

“Josh Harper! You
know
Josh Harper? Is he a friend of yours then?”

“Yeah, well, sort of…”

“Really?” she gasped, eyes wide. “A
good
friend?”

“Well, not a
good
friend exactly…”

She swooped on the paper, peered at it gleefully. “Josh, Josh,
Josh
—what have you been up to, you
naughty
boy? And with
her
!”

“Mr. McQueen? We’re ready for you now!” shouted Geoff, the director, a squat, depressed-looking man, and clearly not an animal lover. Stephen tucked the massive hazelnut under his arm, and walked through to the studio, his tail literally between his legs.

The first song in the schedule was his big solo number, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” When the backing tape started up, Stephen dutifully smiled with his big buck teeth, and began pumping away on prop oars for the best part of the morning, ad-libbing squirrel-y chat to the imaginary kids at home about gosh, by his tail and whiskers, what hard work all this rowing was, all the time thinking about Nora, how she was, when he might see her, what he might do to make amends. Finally, after rowing some considerable distance, he handed over to Olivia the Owl, who was to perform a song about sizzling sausages, for reasons that didn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. The last session scheduled that morning was to involve a lot of improvised banter with local schoolchildren, and Stephen would need as much strength as he could muster if he was to handle a whole studio full of precocious kids, so he headed back to the canteen, in the hope of clearing his head a little. By his tail and whiskers, he felt awful.

The paper was still there on the canteen table, open at the photo, smeared with buttery fingerprints now, Josh pointing out at him accusingly from pages five and six, his face contorted, sweaty and bleached out, eyes red with the glare of the flash. Another terrible thought—what if Josh couldn’t do the show tonight? What if he bailed out, citing “personal difficulties”? What if he went on some terrible self-destructive drunken bender? Stephen had a momentary vision of a broken, red-eyed Josh stumbling around an anonymous hotel room in his underpants, the contents of the minibar emptied out onto the bed; Josh lying unconscious in an overflowing bathtub, his mobile phone ringing unheeded. Cut to a theater full of expectant journalists, following up on the scandal, wondering what has happened to the leading man; Stephen standing in the wings as the lights went down, wearing Josh’s costume, the reviews the next day, newspapers spinning toward the camera. “Missing Star’s Understudy Gets His Chance to Shine…” Cut to Josh in the hotel bath again, his head sinking slowly below the water…

Stephen reached into the deep marsupial pouch in the front of his costume—zoologically inaccurate, but convenient—and turned his mobile phone on. Instantly it began to vibrate in his hand, like a living creature, and he came very close to hurling it across the room. He peered at the screen—Nora’s name.
Keep calm,
he told himself.
Just keep calm, be nice, try to help. It’s the least you can do.
He put the phone to his ear, wondered why he couldn’t hear anything, pulled the red fur hood back, then put the phone to his ear again.

“Stephen? Are you there?” she whispered, her voice low and hoarse.

“Hi there!” he said sympathetically, removing the prosthetic teeth and scampering out into the corridor.

“Oh God—you’ve seen it. I can tell, you’ve seen it. You’ve got that pitying tone to your voice. That poor-Nora tone. Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

“I’ve just seen it now.”

“God, I
hate
this crap, it’s
so
humiliating! That slimy little creep…”

“I’m sure it was perfectly innocent.”

“Bull
shit,
it was innocent. Josh has told me all about it, the little
prick
. Not straightaway, of course. He came back at two in the morning, with these bruised knuckles, and said that he’d been
mugged,
would you believe, and there I am, mopping his brow and tending to his wounds like this complete
idiot,
until it finally seeped into his tiny brain that it was all going to be in the papers, and he confessed. I’ve been awake all night, watching him babble, and wring his hands, and make these pathetic excuses.”

“It must have been—”

“It’s been awful, the worst, just this long, awful, terrible huge row, shouting, screaming for hours on end, throwing things…”

“Is he still there?”

“No, he’s gone now. Would you believe it, at one point, he was trying to spin me some bullshit line about how it was all down to his lack of
self-esteem
. That’s when I lost it, and threw the little prick’s
Millennium Falcon
out of the window. He went out to get it and I locked the door after him and I haven’t seen him for the last three hours.”

“And what did he say had happened?”

“He said this
act
ress, what’s-her-name, Abigail or whatever, is ob
sessed
with him, that she se
duced
him, the poor little lamb, that he’s only flesh and blood, that it was a moment of weakness, blah blah blah. Basically, his defense was I can’t help it if I’m so goddamn irresistible, the arrogant little—”

“Where is he now? Is he there with you?”

“No, he’s gone into hiding, at his agent’s or something. And now there are these little men with cameras hanging around outside, and I’m scared to answer the phone. I can’t even leave the house to get more booze, and I think I might be going crazy.”

“More booze? Is that a good idea, Nora?”

“Certainly seems that way…”

“It’s quarter past eleven, Nora.”

“You got any better ideas?”

He should go and see her, of course. He should get out of the stupid costume and jump in a cab now and rescue her, but did it count as a rescue if you were responsible for the situation in the first place? Maybe he could confess—maybe; try and convince her that he had done it out of some weird, twisted sense of devotion, tell her that he was in love with her, and he’d fouled things up irredeemably but was there any chance, even the slightest possibility, that she might feel something in return? This was clearly the thing to do, but he was filming with the precocious kids soon—a long, quite demanding semi-improvised segment, climaxing in a rendition of “Ten Green Bottles.”

“Stephen—I need to ask you something.”

The register of her voice had changed, and he could tell she was now lying down. For the second time in twenty-four hours, he had the strange sensation of feeling his ears start to perspire. “Go on.”

“Well, last night Josh told me he was out with you, and it turns out he wasn’t, and I just wondered—did you know anything about all of this?”

Keep a steady nerve. Acting is
re
acting. Sound indignant
. “No!”

“You had no idea?”

No, too indignant. Don’t protest too much
. “No…”

“And you haven’t been covering for him, have you?”

Incredulous. Try incredulous.
“No-ho-ho!”

“Because I’d hate to think that all this stuff was happening behind my back, and everyone was just kind of…
laughing
at me.”

“Nora—I would never, ever do that.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“I wouldn’t
dare
.”

She laughed, briefly and bitterly, through her nose. “No. No, of course you wouldn’t.”

They were quiet for a moment, and Stephen thought once more about how he wasn’t nearly as nice a person as he pretended to be.

“Stephen—I need to ask you a favor.”

“Of course.”

“I wondered…I wondered if I could come and stay with you?”

Had he just heard her correctly? He tucked his whiskers out of the way. “Stay with me?”

“I don’t really want to be here alone, with the phone ringing all the time, and photographers hanging around outside, and I thought about running back to New York for a while, but then I’ll just have to explain it to everyone, which is just too humiliating to even think about, and I could always go to a hotel, I suppose, but I’ll just end up swallowing the minibar, and, and, I don’t know, it’s not a good time for me to be alone. I need a friendly face, so I thought maybe I could kind of…hide away. With you? Just for a couple of days or so. D’you think that would be okay?”

Stephen tried to picture Nora Harper in his flat, and couldn’t quite do it. Of course, he was flattered that she was turning to him, and thrilled at the idea of her proximity, at having her there, all to himself, if only temporarily. But try as he might, he couldn’t see Nora in his studio in Battersea borders. He pictured the curling linoleum in the kitchen, the blood-red bathroom, the socks drying stiff on the storage heaters…

“If you don’t think it’s a good idea…” she said quietly.

“No, it’s not that, it’s just it’s a bit of a dump, that’s all. I mean, it’s just very different from what you’re used to. It’s a bedsit, for starters—well, not a bedsit, a studio.”

“You’ve got a couch, haven’t you? I’ll sleep on the couch.” She laughed through her nose. “Or
you
can sleep on the couch. Of course, if you’re worried I’m going to jump you in the middle of the night…Hey, what if I promise not to force you into tearful, loveless sex?”