Brenda Monk Is Funny (18 page)

Down a wide flight of stairs, a few chatty words exchanged with the woman on the door and a flash of Fenella’s membership card, and Brenda was able to survey the scene. The room was cavernous, like a sunken empire, and was decorated somewhere between a traditional pub and a set from
Oliver!
The scale and style of it was a delightful surprise, and gave it the feeling of a speakeasy – a whole world suddenly there in front of you with just a push through one unassuming door. Fenella ordered shots of Tequila and bottles of beer for everyone.

‘Up and in,’ she shouted, and then all put their shot glasses to their lips and flipped them.

‘OH YES, THANK YOU,’ Josephine cried and took a swig of her beer.

‘I had no idea this place was even here,’ said Brenda.

‘Yeah. It’s great. It’s cheap to join, it’s open ’til three and pretty much anything goes as long as you don’t break the furniture.’

Brenda looked around. It was full but still felt roomy. There were strange homely touches like Edwardian style lamps and rugs, but the wooden chairs and tables were solid and bereft of style. All over the walls were framed posters from shows long since over, and black and white pictures of dead British theatre stars. There were Art Deco prints and in one corner a collection of bandanas had been incongruously pinned to a cork board and hung above a sofa. On one wall was a painted mural of a classic pub scene from a hundred years ago. Brenda felt that she had walked into the part of Disney World called ‘Pub Land’ – there was something so self-conscious about it all, and yet it wasn’t forced or pretentious.

‘Loads of comedians hang out here after shows and stuff. I’m surprised you’ve never been before,’ Nellie was saying sweetly.

‘I’ve been with Jonathan mainly for the past year and it’s not really his kind of place.’

‘Jonathan and I used to come here all the time,’ said Josephine with a factual tone.

‘Oh.’

Brenda didn’t know what to say to that so she said nothing and drank her beer.

Another three rounds of tequila and everyone was best friends.

‘Why is it so shit being a woman?’ Nellie was shouting, the ditzy little girl voice gone. ‘I wish I was six foot tall and like, nineteen stone and then I could kick everyone in the FACE if they PISSED ME OFF.’

She stumbled against a passing male who tipped her back onto her feet and continued towards the exit.

‘S’not shit,’ Brenda said, ‘I like it. I like my tits and my vagina.’

‘Good for you,’ Nellie said gaily, ‘I’m sure they’re very nice.’

‘Thanks.’

‘What’s your comedy ’bout, then?’

‘Dunno yet.’

‘She’s still finding her voice,’ said Fenella, who had drunk more than anyone and seemed the least affected.

‘Oh yeah. Good. Takes ages.’

‘I FUCKING LOVE GOLDIE HAWN,’ Josephine shouted as she caught site of an old TV that was turned on with the sound down behind the bar. On the screen was a film from the 1980s,
Bird on a Wire
, and Mel Gibson was flirting with Goldie Hawn as if from another lifetime.

‘That’s what I wanna be like when I’m old. Just like Goldie Hawn, all sort of buttery and sexy but at the same time not giving a shit about anything.’

‘I wanna be like Katharine Hepburn,’ piped up Brenda, ‘I wanna live on my own on a farm and carry logs around and make my own kayak and tell everyone they’re fucking it all up.’

Fenella and Nellie collapsed onto their table in a heap of giggly booziness.

‘I’m going to live in a hotel in Berlin,’ said Fenella, ‘and take a young lover every now and again and smoke loads of hash. And then one day, when I’ve had enough, I’ll end myself in the bath. It’s very considerate to kill yourself in a hotel room, you know. It means no-one you know has to find your body. And they have to clean it all up, too.’

‘I want a nice little cottage by the sea and a husband and three dogs,’ said Nellie, the little girl voice now back in place.

Fenella mimed sticking two fingers down her throat and Nellie belted her across the arm with surprising strength, and then seemed to collapse a little, her forehead beading with moisture. ‘I’m gonna be sick.’

Nellie bolted for the toilets.

‘She’s not one of us,’ Fenella murmured as she watched Nellie go.

‘Shuddup, course she is,’ Josephine said, suddenly annoyed. ‘She goes up there, she does her act. Just ’cos we hate it, doesn’t make her any less of a comedian.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Fenella with an insincere tone.

Brenda was quiet and tried to squash thoughts of having her own comedy appraised in this way if she ever had need to lurch off and find a friendly toilet bowl.

‘For fuck’s sake, Fen. Not every woman who gets on stage has to advance the fucking cause, you know. We’re not all obsessed with the fucking
sisterhood
. This life’s hard enough as it is without insisting that everyone with XX chromosomes has to like, stick to some kind of feminist script, or whatever.’

‘It’s alright for you. When you get bored of the sisterhood, you get to talk about being black – what the hell am I supposed to do?’

This made Josephine roar with laughter. Brenda jumped.

‘Nellie’s good and that’s all you need to know,’ she said when the laughter attack subsided.

‘Yeah, I know… But still. It’d be nice if she wasn’t so… Submissive on stage. She could be better, don’t you think? If she wasn’t trying to be so
likeable
all the time. I mean, what does she think’s gonna happen if, like, one person thinks she’s a bitch? LOADS of people think I’m a bitch and my career’s going fucking marvellous.’

Josephine rolled her eyes and looked drunkenly at Brenda.

‘And what about you, Brenda Monk? Are you gonna
advance the cause
?’

‘Yeeeaaah,’ drawled Brenda, barely able to operate her mouth, ‘I’mnachaaangeevrything…’

‘Good,’ Josephine drawled back, ‘’bout time someone did.’

‘’Bout fuckin’ time,’ said Fenella.

Brenda couldn’t specifically recall a dog shitting in her mouth but it must’ve happened at some point, for her saliva was turd flavoured. The alarm on her phone had been screaming with increasing hysteria for some time and she managed to turn it off without looking at the screen, the brightness of which she thought might actually blind her. She lay back and groaned. The sharpness of the pain that lay in a straight line across the tops of her eyebrows was intolerable and though she knew she needed water as a matter of urgency, the taps seemed impossibly far away. She lay very still, waiting to die. After five minutes it was apparent that death was not going to save her and she rolled out of bed and crawled to the shower.

Brenda sat curled up on the bottom of the shower cubicle and let the hot water wash away her sins, aware that she was drinking too much on a nightly basis now. She turned her open mouth upwards, hoping that hydration inside and out would make it all go away, but she knew this was going to be with her all day. She desperately wanted to take the day off but knew that would mean trouble. She had already taken two days off the week before and a few more before that, and people were starting to notice. It was still a week until Christmas, and the office was busy. She couldn’t get away with being absent. Her editor needed the newspaper’s blog sites constantly updated after an edict from on high regarding ‘digital strategy’, so she was basically writing double the number of words compared to the same time the year before, although without the benefit of double the number of ideas. Or double the income.

Brenda got dressed as if it were the last thing she’d ever do on earth and stumbled out into the world. It was cold and frosty and this offered some relief. She could finally stand to look at her phone and saw a text from her dad:

‘Will I ever see you again?’

There was also a missed call from Jonathan along with a notification of new voicemail. She pressed the button and held the phone slightly away from her ear.

‘Hi Bren – so it’s all going really, really well out here, but I’m popping home over the holidays for ten days or so and thought it might be nice to hook up. Let me know.’

She couldn’t let him know because she didn’t know herself. The memory of Josephine’s Terrible Mess story was still vivid and though Brenda did not want to confront Jonathan with it she also didn’t want to sit with him, pretending she didn’t know about it. And in any case, she had no idea of the state of play of their current relationship status. Neither had ever been inclined to give Facebook the satisfaction of having its insistent ‘About Me’ section completed in full, so there was no external marker for how things stood. Brenda did not believe they were still a couple. She certainly didn’t feel that they were, but they had yet to officially ‘split up’. So what should she do about seeing Jonathan? Now that she knew his horrible secret could she even bear to talk to him again? There was no way this could be resolved before coffee, an almond croissant and a poo. So Brenda cleared her mind and got on the bus.

She knew something was up as soon as she sat down at her desk because her editor asked to have a word at lunchtime. She never asked to have a word. When Janet wasn’t delivering instructions verbally, she was typing out instructions via email. Janet never asked for anything. She decided what she wanted to happen, who was going to do it, and then issued the aforementioned instructions. That was how Janet did things and she had been around newspapers for a long time and it wasn’t going to change. In any case as a working method, it was reasonably successful, Brenda had observed, so you couldn’t really complain. She got results and she kept people employed, which with journalists falling around everyone’s ears at rival papers, was not something to be sniffed at. But today Janet had a gentle tone that Brenda had not heard before and if anything it freaked her out more than the usual bollocking. Brenda resolved to keep a low profile for the morning and just deal with whatever this lunchtime ‘word’ was about as the situation became clearer. She wrote a quick blog on a silly little story that had come that morning regarding a poll carried about by Pedigree Chum suggesting most women would rather have a dog than a boyfriend, was sick twice, ate a fried egg sandwich, felt a bit better, and tried not to fall asleep on her keyboard.

Lunchtime rolled around and Janet took Brenda to a small cafe round the corner from the office. This was ominous indeed.

‘I’m not going to fire you,’ Janet said as her opening gambit.

Brenda genuinely wasn’t sure if she was pleased or disappointed.

‘But I would like to know what’s going on.’

‘I’m trying to be a stand-up comedian,’ Brenda said simply, too hungover to lie. Que sera, sera – that was the only way forward when dealing with a blinder like this.

Janet sat back hard in her chair.

‘Thank god for that. I thought you were pregnant, and we just don’t have the budget for another maternity leave.’

Brenda smiled, happy to have given some relief. Janet pressed on.

‘A stand-up comedian? What on earth for?’

‘Don’t know, just wanted to try it.’

‘Are you funny? You don’t seem funny. You’ve never struck me as funny.’

‘Well, it’s not a very funny place to work.’

Janet seemed mildly insulted by this.

‘How many gigs have you done?’

‘About thirty.’

‘Are you any good?’

‘Getting better.’

‘Huh.’

Janet pondered for a moment and Brenda forked in hummus and chips with a tomato salad dripping in oil and vinegar.

‘Do you want to write about it?’

‘Not really,’ said Brenda.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t explain it, just feels a bit… private.’

‘
Private?
Oh I’ve fucking heard it all now. You’re doing stand-up comedy and it’s
private?
What, do you do all your gigs in your own bathroom with the door locked or something?’

‘No. I just mean I don’t know what I’m doing yet and I don’t want to tell everyone about it in a national newspaper while I figure it out.’

‘Well, fine then, but don’t waste any more of our fucking time being late and hungover. If you can’t turn it into a regular blog, you’re on your own.’

‘OK.’

‘You’re on notice, Brenda. If you change your mind, let me know. We can do some kind of big thing about women in comedy and whether or not girls can be funny. Tie it in with some other shit about being a woman in a man’s world, or something.’

Brenda nodded, thinking that sounded like precisely the kind of thing she was trying to avoid.

‘Alright then, good. I’ll see you back at the office. I’ve got to see Tony before he fucks off on holiday.’

And with that, Janet got up, paid for both of them and left Brenda to her hummus.

The rest of the day was a write-off, and Brenda started to wonder whether she actually wanted to get fired. Her first paid gig was forty-eight hours away, and Brenda knew she needed to concentrate: this could be the real beginning, and set her on the road to the rest of her life.

In the end the paid gig was uneventful, mundane even. She stretched her material to the required fifteen minutes, and although it had felt solid there had been no particular magic. Brenda was disappointed. She had wanted something special to mark her first booking as a professional stand-up, but in the end it had felt flat. She had tried the post-Pete row material again but somehow it hadn’t quite hit the mark, it had felt calculated and false, which was annoying. After all, Brenda thought, she couldn’t go through an actual break-up every time she needed to do a good gig. Falling back on old material – ‘When is the right time to do a shit at your boyfriend’s house? Let me tell you – it’s not right as he’s reaching climax…’ – felt boring and cheap, as though she was cheating someone. But they’d laughed, and so she couldn’t have been cheating them. Then who? Herself? Did that matter, if the crowd liked it?

Brenda’s artistic catastrophe was broken, and somewhat relieved, by the promoter handing over her money, and she couldn’t deny the thrill of receiving that brown envelope, with four £20 notes inside and her name scrawled across the front:
Brenda Monk 80
. She knew she’d keep it forever – the envelope, not the cash.

Over the next few days, she considered the maths. If she could get three paid gigs a week, that would be £960 a month. Not quite enough to live on, but she had one credit card she barely used with an £8,000 credit limit, pristine and ready to abuse. She could use that to supplement the low income, and as she improved she would get more paid gigs. She would be given larger amounts for the gigs she did, and then one day she would be a headliner making three or even four thousand a month, like Jonathan, and that was plenty for anyone. In fact, that was way more than she was making now. She wondered if her dad could lend her a bit to tide her over. He never had much, but sometimes he was able to magic up a few hundred pounds if the tide was right. There were no guarantees though and she didn’t expect it. In fact she had always refused his help in the past on the basis of her pride and need for independence. But perhaps if it was offered, she could force herself to accept this time. Comedy, it seemed, was more important than pride and in any case it would be good to see him. Brenda picked up her phone and texted.

‘Sorry, lots going on. Lots to tell you. When you free?’

‘Christmas Day.’

Brenda laughed and replied instantly.

‘It’s a date. See you for lunch x’

Brenda checked her diary – ten days away. Why did Christmas always come around so fast? One minute it was months away, the next it was here, and then over again. Sometimes she wondered whether it was even worth the bother. Scrolling back through her messages she came across an unanswered one from Jonathan.

‘Hey did you get my voicemail? Call me on my cell.’

Cell. Annoying. He was affecting Americanisms already. Perhaps he was back in the UK now, Brenda thought, sharing her time zone, breathing her air. Did she want to see him? Not enough to call, but she was curious. She made a note to text him back… At some point.