The Understudy: A Novel (4 page)

Then the red light in the wings changed to green, his cue to enter, and Stephen rolled his shoulders, cleared his throat and stepped out onto the stage. There was a time when walking onstage in front of a theater full of people might have given him a little thrill, but, frankly, this late into a long run, there was more adrenaline in trying to cross Shaftesbury Avenue. Besides, the lighting was deliberately murky, there was a lot of dry ice, he was a very, very long way upstage, and he was wearing a full face mask. Still, if a job’s worth doing…

Think ghostly, he told himself. My motivation is to open the door in a ghostly manner.

He did so, then made a deep, somber bow as Josh turned and walked past him, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Now close the door, but not too fast,
he thought, and slowly closed the door. He stood perfectly still as the stage lights faded on a slow ten count, then as soon as the applause began, turned and walked swiftly offstage, so as not to get in Josh’s way. And that was it—walk on (ghostly), open door (slowly), bow (somberly), close door (slowly), walk off (quickly). Room for interpretation was slight. An old theatrical saying has it that there is no such thing as a small part. This was that small part.

As always Josh Harper was waiting in the wings, eyes wide with elation, grinning and sweating like an action hero.

“Hey, Stevearoony, mate,” he shouted above the roar of the audience, dropping into his natural voice, a soft, semiauthentic cockney. This was another of Josh’s not entirely endearing qualities—a congenital inability to call anyone by their chosen name, so that Donna became “The Madonnster,” Michael the DSM became “Mickey the Big D,” Maxine was “Maximillius.” At some point Stephen had been designated “Stevearoony,” “The Stevester,” “Bullitt” or, perhaps most annoying of all, “Stephanie.” There seemed every possibility that if Josh were to meet, say, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela, that he would address them as the Dalaroony Lamster and Nelsony Mandoly. And they probably wouldn’t mind.

“…
really
sorry about getting your hopes up earlier, Steve. You know, about going on.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Josh. Nature of the job…”

“More! More! Encore!” shouted the audience. Maxine was onstage, taking a token solo bow, but it was Josh they were screaming for.

“No, it’s not okay, Steve, it’s fuckin’ unforgivable, and unprofessional too.” He grabbed Stephen tight by the shoulder. “Listen, just to make it up to you, what are you doing Sunday night?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“It’s just I’m having this big party, and I wondered if you were available?”

“More! More! Bravo!”

“Bear with us a sec, will you?” Josh sighed, then almost reluctantly, as if bowing to rapturous applause were a chore, like taking the bins out, he turned, executed a gymnastic little hop-and-skip and scampered from the wings back out into the burning white light of the stage. Stephen watched as Josh flopped forward from the waist, and hung there, head and hands dangling limply to the floor, as if to emphasize just how completely and utterly ex-
haust
-ing the whole damn thing had been. But Stephen’s mind was elsewhere. A party. Josh Harper’s party. A famous person’s party. He didn’t really approve of fame, of course, and consciously tried not to be influenced or impressed by it, but, still, a proper, genuine, fashionable party, full of successful, attractive, influential, beautiful people.
And he’d been invited.

“Bravo! More!” shouted the audience.

Josh was back by his side. “Quite a big crowd, seven onwards—what d’you think? I’d really appreciate it…”

“Sounds good to me, Josh.”

“More, more, encore…” shouted the audience.

“Goodly good, mate! I’ll text you my address,” and he simulated some dainty, two-thumbed texting on a little mimed mobile phone; another of his gifts—a prodigious and gifted mime, always conjuring objects out of thin air: a waggled pint, a finger-and-thumb phone, a ball kicked into the back of the net. “Oh, and it’s suit and tie, by the way! And don’t tell the others, Maxine or Donna or anyone else. I see enough of that lot as it is. Just our little secret, yeah?”

I’m the only one he has invited,
thought Stephen, glowing.

“Sure, Josh, it’s our secret.”

“Bravo! Encore! Encore…” The applause was starting to dip a little, but was still enthusiastic enough to justify another curtain call, if Josh could be bothered to take it.

“What d’you reckon? Think I can squeeze one more out of them?” asked Josh, grinning.

“Go for it!” said Stephen, now full of goodwill for his old pal. Josh turned and strolled slowly out onto the stage, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his sweat-soaked puffy shirt, and the audience’s applause swelled once more as he stood at the front of the stage, looking around slowly, up into the gods and down at the stalls, applauding the audience back, thanking them, flattering them.

Standing invisible in the wings, perspiring into his black unitard, Stephen C. McQueen looked down at his own hands and found, to his surprise, that he was applauding too.

Kitchen-Sink Drama

A
s a teenager, falling in love with old British movies of the fifties and sixties on telly, Stephen had always been fascinated by the notion of “the bedsit.” He liked to imagine himself, in black-and-white, as an Albert Finney type, living in shabby-romantic furnished rooms overlooking the railway lines at two shillings and sixpence a week, where he’d smoke Woodbines, listen to trad jazz and bang angrily at his typewriter, while Julie Christie padded around wearing one of his old shirts. That’s the life for me. One day—the teenage Stephen had thought, captivated—one day,
I’ll
have my very own bedsit, little suspecting that this was the only one of his fantasies that was destined to come true.

The estate agents hadn’t actually called it a bedsit, of course. They called it a “studio,” implying that you could either live in it or record your new album there, the choice was yours. The “studio” was situated in a drab, nameless area between Battersea and Wandsworth, the kind of neighborhood where every lamppost is garlanded with a rusting bike frame. A small row of shops contained all the necessary local amenities: a Chinese take-away, an off-license, a laundry, a scurvy-inducing Warsaw Pact grocer’s called Price£avers, where a packet of Weetabix cost £3.92, and a terrifying pub, the Lady Macbeth, a floodlit maximum-security wing that had unaccountably been issued with a drinks license.

Stephen’s epic journey home involved the tube to Victoria, changing at Green Park, an overland train to Clapham Junction, then a lurching bus and a brisk, nerve-jangling fifteen-minute walk, past Chicken Cottage, Chicken Village and World of Chicken’n’Ribs, then on to Idaho Fried Chicken, Idaho being the last remaining U.S. state to be granted its own south London fried-chicken franchise. There he ran the gauntlet of the feral children, who stood in the doorway and hailed his nightly return with hearty cries of “wanker/tosser/twat.” He unlocked the anonymous, flaking mustard-colored front door, and the smell of questionable fried poultry accompanied him up the narrow gray stairs.

On the first-floor landing, he was pounced on by Mrs. Dollis, his neighbor, a tiny, aggressive elderly lady with a startling selection of random teeth, as if her gums had been pebble-dashed. She bobbed her head suddenly out from her doorway, turning the first-floor landing into Stephen’s own personal ghost train.

“Foxes have been at the bins again,” she grumbled.

“Have they, Mrs. Dollis?”

“There’s chicken skin all over the floor. ’S disgusting.”

“Well, isn’t that the shop’s responsibility?”

“It’s not mine, that’s for sure.”

“I’ll sort it in the morning, Mrs. Dollis, okay?”

She groaned at this, as if Stephen had somehow been engaged in a secret program training foxes to get at the bins, then disappeared, and Stephen continued up the stairs to his flat. He double-locked the door, and lowered the aging blinds, slightly too small for the window, against the sodium glare of the streetlights outside.

There were two furnished rooms. The first, the aforementioned bedsitting room, was just about large enough to swing a cat in, and it was fair to say that there had been times when, had a cat been to hand, Stephen would almost certainly have swung it. Without much expectation, he pressed the button on the answering machine, an aging flesh-colored model with a special in-built “gloat” feature. In a strange, sardonic intonation it informed him, “You [obviously] have [only]
ONE
new message.”

He pressed
PLAY
.

“Hello, Dad. It’s Sophie here…”

Stephen grinned. “Hey, hiya, Sophs,” he said to himself, in a sentimental, slightly dopey voice that would have embarrassed Sophie had she been there to hear it. She continued, in her formal phone voice, like a junior speaking clock.

“This is just to say that I am very much looking forward to seeing you next week, and…and that’s all, really. Mum is here. She wants a word…”

A word. Stephen frowned, and instinctively stepped back a little from the answering machine. There was a rustle, as the phone changed hands, then his ex-wife came on, speaking low with her soft Yorkshire accent.

“Hello, there. Obviously you’re onstage at the moment, giving your all, then it’ll be back to Dame Judi Dench’s gaff for a game of Pictionary and some songs from the shows or something, but don’t forget—Monday. Hope you’ve got something nice planned this time, not just the movies again.” Then, in a lower voice, “And just so you’re prewarned, Colin’s taken half-term off, so he may well be here as well…”

Stephen bared his teeth, waved his fist at the answering machine.

“…so no fighting, verbal or otherwise. Try and be
nice
to each other. For Sophie’s sake. Please?”

Stephen pressed
DELETE
with a little more venom than absolutely necessary, then continued wrinkling his nose, baring his teeth, kicking things, but not too hard, as he went next door to the kitchenette, with its emphasis on “-ette.” Here a small Formica table fought for lino space with a sink unit, a water heater that roared like a jet engine and a homicidal gas cooker. Despite Stephen’s constant endeavor to keep the place clean and fresh, this room had a strange fermenting smell, like the inside of a child’s lunch box. The origins of the smell remained obscure—there was no fridge at present, the last fridge having recently committed suicide, or perhaps been murdered by the oven. In the meantime, he managed by keeping milk for tea on the window ledge, which would do fine for now. The studio was not really designed for large-scale entertaining; it was designed for solitary drinking, consuming fast food and weeping.

Still baring his teeth at no one, he went into the bathroom or, more accurately, the “shower room,” where a toilet, a washbasin and a temperamental shower unit were so close together that it would be technically possible to have a shower and brush his teeth while still sitting on the toilet. There he peed angrily, simultaneously leaning across and searching the bathroom cabinet for some leftover antibiotics to fend off his impending tonsillitis. In a perfectly understandable fit of insanity, the previous owner had painted the bathroom a deep blood-red gloss, and one day, when he could face it, Stephen had resolved to set upon the epic task of painting it over with something less oppressive: eight coats of magnolia, perhaps. Until then, it was a little like showering in a crime scene.

Of course, there were limits to what a new coat of paint could achieve. The flat, he had to admit, had been a terrible, terrible mistake. He had bought it in an emergency, during the insane booze- and grief-blurred weeks after the end of his marriage, as a place where he could be alone and clear his head—a bolt hole, a stopgap, a temporary solution, just until the dust settled and life got better again. In time, perhaps, he’d smarten it up, turn it into a hip, cool and compact bachelor pad, and with this in mind he’d kitted it out with the Holy Trinity of grown men living alone: the games console, the broadband connection and the DVD player. And here he had sat most evenings, watching old movies and drinking too much, trying not to phone Alison: the overriding soundtrack of this period was the pop of a fork piercing the film seal of a ready-meal, and the lesson that he’d learned was harsh but clear—never invest in property when drunk and/or clinically depressed. Slowly, the months turned to years, two years now, and here he still was, shipwrecked and fridgeless. Miss Havisham with PlayStation 2.

Still, no point dwelling on it. Keep optimistic. Keep cheerful. His luck was bound to change soon. He found the mystery antibiotics: huge, ancient yellow-and-black things, like hornets. In the divorce, Alison had granted him custody of all the leftover pharmaceuticals. He couldn’t remember quite what they were originally for, but an antibiotic was an antibiotic. Returning to the kitchen, he poured himself a beaker of red wine, swallowed one of the pills and, already feeling better, he decided to watch a movie. In the living room, he pulled his most valuable possession out from under the bed: the Toshiba TX 500 digital video projector.

Of course, there’s no match for the true cinema experience, but the previous Christmas Stephen had unexpectedly made a little extra money from a low-budget educational DVD he’d appeared in—
Sammy the Squirrel Sings Favorite Nursery Rhymes
—in which he’d played the eponymous squirrel. It had been a personal and professional low point, but the reward was the digital video projector which, when connected to his DVD player, projected movies, eight feet by six feet, and only slightly blurred, on the wall, turning his bedsit into a private screening room. If it wasn’t quite the true cinema experience, it was pretty close, and all that was missing was the smell of popcorn, the rustle of sweet wrappers and the presence of a single other human being.

The white wall opposite the sofa served as his makeshift screen. Three large framed film posters,
Serpico, Vertigo
and
The Godfather Part II,
brought a little bit of Hollywood to southwest London. He took these down, leaned them carefully against the wall, then balanced a pile of books on a kitchen chair, plugged the DVD player into the projector, and turned it on. The room was immediately illuminated with an eerie, almost nuclear blue-white glow.

He turned to the rows of DVDs and videos. Of his own work for the screen, he owned an episode of
Emergency Ward
on video (the non-speaking, all-wheezing role of Asthmatic Cycle Courier), his poignant, doomed Rent Boy 2 in
Vice City,
a small role in a seemingly endless short film and an Open University mathematics program in which he’d played a Quadratic Equation. He also owned a complimentary DVD of
Sammy the Squirrel Sings Favorite Nursery Rhymes
—no director’s commentary but with six cut scenes and sing-along captions—which he kept hidden at the back of his wardrobe, still in its cellophane, under a pile of sweaters. He did not feel like watching any of these. Instead he contemplated
Manhattan, Midnight Cowboy
and
À Bout de Souffle,
before deciding that, yes, he was in a
North by Northwest
state of mind. Cary Grant
and
James Mason, together.

He poured some more wine, watched the first few scenes, the bachelor and ladies’ man out and about in fifties Manhattan, and decided that Cary Grant was definitely the way to go for Josh’s party. Projected on his own mental cinema screen, he imagined himself at Josh’s penthouse apartment, dressed in an immaculately tailored lounge suit, brimming martini glass held at the rim in a way that was elegant without being effeminate, at the center of a circle of other party guests, the women, heads cocked, lips slightly parted, the men standing respectfully, deferentially, a little farther away, all of them listening intently to his every word. Rather frustratingly, he had no idea what he might be saying, but he knew that when he reached the end of his monologue, the group would rear backward in a great gale of admiring laughter.

And he imagined his good friend and mentor Josh Harper watching from the other side of the room, smiling approvingly, raising his martini glass in tribute, welcoming him into his world, and Stephen returned the smile, and toasted him back.