The Understudy: A Novel (3 page)

“So what is your excuse then, you bad boy?” Donna scolded Josh indulgently.

“No excuse, just had a bit of a personal situation on the home front, if you know what I mean.”

Stephen handed the leather trousers back to Bev, who smiled sympathetically and rehung the costume on the rail, ready for its rightful owner. Stephen saw that Donna was now sitting on his own pair of trousers.

“Excuse me, Donna…” said Stephen, standing a little behind her. “Well, Josh, you’re a very,
very
naughty boy,” mooned Donna, enthralled.

“I know, I know, I know!” said Josh, taking Donna’s large hands and gallantly kissing the knuckles. “Tell you what, you can come round and spank me after the show.”

“Could I just get my trous…?”
said Stephen.

“I might take you up on that.”

“And so you should.”

“
You’re sitting on my…”

“I will then.”

“Come to the dressing room.”

“…If you could just…”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“…just let me…”

“…Not as much as I am. Bring a bottle! And a friend!”

“…Oooh, saucy boy…”

“Do you think I could get my trousers, please, guys?” said Stephen, grabbing them, and tugging. Donna stood, glaring at him for breaking the spell. A moment passed.

“Well, I’d better get the old makeup on!” said Josh, tossing his locks. “Can’t keep the people waiting,” and he held Donna’s head between two hands like a basketball, kissed it with a loud
“Mmmmmmoi,”
and settled in front of his mirror.

“Shestooduponthebalconyinexplicablymimickinghimhiccupingandamicablywelcominghimin…”

In the corridor, Donna scowled at Stephen. “You look awful, by the way,” she said. “Your face is completely gray.”

Stephen rubbed his hairline and examined his fingertips for traces of makeup; small smudges of mackerel blue and gray. He couldn’t tell Donna he’d been moonlighting. “Just a little bit…glandy, that’s all,” he said, rubbing either side of his jawline with his fingertips to prove the point.

“Honestly, Stephen, you’re
always
ill. If it’s not your glands, it’s pleurisy, or gastric
flu,
or your misplaced bloody
coc
cyx,” she said, then stomped off to get ready for curtain-up, her prison warder’s keys rattling against her hip as she went.

Stephen stood for a moment and watched her go. Once again, he was left with the sneaking suspicion that understudying someone like Josh Harper was a little like being a life jacket on a jumbo jet: everyone is pleased that you’re there, but God forbid they should actually have to
use
you.

The Man in the Black Wool/
Lycra-Mix Unitard

S
tephen C. McQueen loved acting. Some people are passionate about football, or the three-minute pop song, or clothes, or food, or vintage steam engines, but Stephen loved watching actors. All the years spent gazing at movies on telly in the afternoon, curtains closed against the summer sun, or in the front row of the local flea-pit cinema had taken their toll, and while other teenagers had had pictures of footballers or pop stars on their walls, Stephen had pictures of people who pretended.

Over the years William Shatner, Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and Jon Pertwee had lost their seats in the pantheon, to be replaced by Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman and Laurence Olivier. Years passed, and he’d begun to notice girls—in this case, Julie Christie, Jean Seberg and Eva Marie Saint, occasionally going behind their backs with a succession of Bond girls.

And now here Stephen was himself, pretending for a living and, when the opportunities arose, he loved this too. Of course, he was aware that, as a profession, actors had any number of faults, most of them beginning with the prefix “self-,” and that there were times when he felt embarrassed—ashamed, even—to be connected with such a silly, frivolous, fantastical world. But he also felt that there was a kind of integrity there in the very best performances, a kind of skill, an art, even. Yes, actors could be vain and pretentious, precious and pompous, sentimental and shallow, affected and lazy and arrogant, but it needn’t be that way, need it? He thought of Alec Guinness, silhouetted in the doorway in
The Ladykillers,
or the tremendous slow-dawning smile that lights up Shirley MacLaine’s face at the end of
The Apartment
, or Brando and Steiger in the back of the car in
On the Waterfront
, or Peter Sellers in
Dr. Strangelove
or Walter Matthau in pretty much anything, and he’d become inspired all over again. That ability to make complete strangers double up with laughter, or squirm with anxiety, or clench their fists in indignation, or scream, or weep, or wince, or sigh, just through the act of
pretending
—well, if you can do that and get paid for it, then surely that had to be the best job in the world.

As for celebrity, he had no desire to be famous, or at least not globally famous like Josh Harper. He had no expectation of seeing himself on a fridge magnet or a Happy Meal. He did not want his old cigarette butts sold on eBay, had no pressing need for the best tables in restaurants, no secret desire to be photographed with a telephoto lens looking paunchy in trunks on someone’s private island. Fame only interested him as an inevitable and not entirely unpleasant side effect of doing good work. All he wanted was fully employed fame. Nod-of-recognition fame.

Which made it all the more frustrating to be stuck in an acting job that involved virtually no acting whatsoever.

S
tephen headed away from Josh’s dressing room, back along the corridor painted two shades of glossy dark green some time in the fifties, giving it an old-fashioned, institutional feel, like a ritzy TB sanatorium. He received consolatory nods and never-minds from Debs from Wardrobe, Chrissy the ASM, Sam the lighting guy.

“Nearly, mate, nearly,” said Michael the DSM, consolingly. “Maybe next time, eh?”

“Maybe next time.”

He pushed through a heavy fire door, and headed upstairs. Halfway up the underlit stairwell, he passed Maxine Cole’s dressing room, nearer the stage than his and therefore superior. Fresh out of college, and straight into the small but memorable role of “Venetian Whore,” Maxine sat, wearing a white toweling dressing gown and an elaborate early-nineteenth-century wig, her small, hard, pretty features all bunched in the center of a broad perma-tanned face, under high-arched doll’s eyebrows. Her feet, in black lace-up boots, were up on the dressing table as she sat listening to
The Ultimate Chick-Flick Album in the World Ever
on her portable stereo, and reading
Heat
magazine with an almost religious intensity.

“Hey, Maxine!” said Stephen chirpily. “Did you hear about all the excitement?”

“Excite me,” mumbled Maxine.

“Number Twelve has only just arrived. A couple more minutes and I’d have been on.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Maxine, wholly consumed by an article about which actresses wore thongs, which favored big pants. “Why was he late, then?”

“Don’t know—trouble in paradise, apparently.”

“Really?” Maxine said, dragging her gaze up from the magazine. Nothing illuminated Maxine’s life quite like marital discord, especially if it involved someone she knew, or someone famous, or ideally both. “What did he say?”

“Not much, but he didn’t get here till five minutes ago. Strictly speaking, according to Equity rules, I could have gone on.”

“Yeah, I’d have
loved
to see you tell him that, Steve. ‘Sorry, Josh, d’you mind sitting this one out…’ ”

“Still—one day, eh, Maxy? One day it’ll be our turn.”

Maxine snuffled and turned the page. Clearly, she hated it when he lumped the two of them together. For one thing, she was actually visible on stage, and spoke, and moved around, and did some
proper
acting with Josh each night, in a number of small but significant roles. She appeared in silhouette in an upstage doorway as Byron’s beloved half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and when Byron recited, “She Walks in Beauty, Like the Night…,” it was Maxine’s job to actually walk, in beauty, like the night. Of course, the role of “Venetian Whore” consisted primarily of lying partially naked on a four-poster bed while Lord Byron wrote
Don Juan
using her buttocks as a desk, but at least people noticed her; you could hear them, the men, shifting in their seats, sitting upright. She had lines too, in jabbering Italian, largely for comic effect, but, still, a speaking part was a speaking part. On the poster outside, she got an “…and introducing…” credit. Yes, Maxine Cole was One to Watch, she was an Exciting Fresh Young Talent, she was the Girl from the Jalapeño-Cheese Tortilla Chip Commercial (“To dip or not to dip—that is the question”). Stephen, on the other hand, was a Good Company Member—not a bad thing in itself, but no more remarkable than a Safe Pair of Hands, a Reliable Little Run-around, a Comfy Pair of Shoes.

That loudspeaker crackled and buzzed. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your five-minute call. Five minutes, please,” and Maxine started rubbing expensive skin lotion into her long, creosote-tanned legs. It was a little like watching someone lovingly oil a gun, and Stephen discreetly turned and trudged up the rest of the stairs to his dressing room, at the very top.

Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, Guinness, Burton had all climbed these stairs at one time or another, and the tiny dressing room to which Stephen now ascended marked the location of what had once been Dame Peggy Ashcroft’s shoe cupboard. The smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd never really permeated this far from the stage. Instead the roar came from the boiler in the roof, and the smell was of cigarettes, old newspapers, decaying carpet underlay; that charity-shop smell. Stephen flopped in the tattered office chair in front of his mirror, a mirror that, mockingly, actually was surrounded by lightbulbs. Only about a third of them were working, and the only other source of light was a murky skylight, now black from soot and pigeon shit, giving the room a subterranean atmosphere, despite being in a turret at the very top of the building. He turned the lights on, licked a cotton-wool pad, and tried to remove the last of the corpse makeup, leaving little wisps of cotton attached to the two-days’ stubble. Then he lit a cigarette and sat for a while, looking in the mirror, examining his face; not out of any kind of vanity, but as a kind of professional obligation, like a truck driver checking the tread on balding tires, wondering if he can get away with it.

It wasn’t that it was a
bad
face as such—he had, after all, been cast as an Emergency Byron—but it had a soft, neutral, hard-to-recall quality, a milky blankness that made him much in demand for crime reconstructions and corporate-training films, but little else, the kind of unremarkable pleasantness that rendered him invisible to bartenders, bus drivers and casting directors. In the unlikely event of a movie being made of his life, he would perhaps be played by a young Tom Courtenay or, if the action were transposed to America, someone like the young Jack Lemmon, someone with that Everyman quality. Of course, the best person for the role of Stephen C. McQueen would be Stephen C. McQueen himself, but it was unlikely that his agent would be able to get him an audition, or that he wouldn’t play himself badly. That was, after all, what he had been doing for some years now.

As for his supposed resemblance to the star of the show, the best that could be said was that he looked like a smudged Polaroid of Josh Harper. A smudged, black-and-white Polaroid of a slightly older, plumper Josh Harper. The haircut that made Josh look like a Renaissance prince (and might perhaps even be called that—“I’d like a ‘Renaissance Prince,’ please”) somehow contrived to make Stephen look like the keyboard player in a provincial British eighties soft-metal band. His nose was a little too big, his eyes a little too small, his skin a little too pale, and it was the combination of all these small deficiencies that pushed it into ordinariness, invisibility. Only a mother, or his agent, perhaps, would call it truly handsome. Stephen frowned, drew on the cigarette, and ruffled his own “Renaissance Prince” with both hands, looking forward to the day, in just eight weeks’ time, when he could cut the bloody thing off.

Over the loudspeaker came the low rumble of Donna’s voice. “Beginners, please. Mr. Harper, this is your beginner’s call.”

Stephen stretched and turned the loudspeaker down. Not tonight then. No Big Break tonight. Probably just as well; he wasn’t really feeling up to a Big Break. He put his fingers on his neck, felt the glands in his neck, gathered saliva in his mouth, then swallowed. Maybe he
was
getting ill. He curled his tongue over in an attempt to probe the back of his throat. Tonsillitis, it felt like. He put the plastic kettle on to boil, tipped three spoons of instant coffee into a chipped mug, and ate a biscuit.

On the loudspeaker, he could hear the murmur of the audience subside, as the lights went down and the sound of the music began—a synthesized string quartet playing pastiche Haydn. He sat and listened for a while, alternating biscuit and cigarette, mouthing along to the lines with Josh, marking out the moves and gestures.

…And it was usually at this point in the play that a profound and stultifying boredom kicked in.

Stephen reached up to the volume knob on the loudspeaker; like the telescreens in
1984,
you could never turn it off completely, but it was possible to at least get Josh’s voice down to a low tinnitus murmur. He sat and read for a while, then at 8:48 precisely, exactly as he’d done ninety-six times before, and as he would do another forty-eight times more, Stephen wriggled into the opaque black wool and Lycra body stocking that he wore for his onstage role of Ghostly Figure. Very few men, perhaps not even Josh Harper, can carry off the opaque black body stocking with any great style or élan. Stephen looked like a long-dead mime, and freshly depressed, he quickly pulled the heavy black cloak over his shoulders, grabbed the white Venetian face mask and tricorn hat, and headed down the treacherous back staircase that led to stage left.

Onstage, Byron was approaching his tragically premature death, of a fever caught while nobly aiding the cause of Greek independence, and Stephen watched as Josh reenacted Byron’s illness taking hold. He was certainly coughing up a storm tonight. But was he any good? He was, it had to be admitted, almost supernaturally handsome—a poster face, the kind that looks equally at home protruding from a suit of armor, or a toga, or a space suit; feminine without being effeminate, masculine without being coarse, but with something cruel about it too, something hard about the eyes and mouth, the kind of face that could play a romantic lead or a strangely appealing Nazi. Onstage, Lord Byron solemnly intoned, “We’ll Go No More A-roving,” and Stephen watched with an uncomfortable but all-too-familiar mix of professional admiration, and a low, dull throb of envy in the pit of his stomach.