The Understudy: A Novel (5 page)

Cary Grant

L
ike most people living in any great city, Stephen had the constant, nagging suspicion that everyone was having a much, much better time than he was.

Heading home each night on the bus, he’d see people with bottles in their hands, and convince himself that they were off somewhere extraordinary: a party on a boat on the Thames or in a swimming pool or a railway arch somewhere—places where toilet cubicles were only ever used for having sex, or taking drugs, or having sex while taking drugs. He would pass restaurants and observe couples holding hands, or gangs of pals bellowing happy birthday and unwrapping presents or chinking their glasses or laughing at a private joke. Newspapers and magazines taunted him daily, with all the things he could fail to do, all the gifted, interesting, attractive people he would fail to meet at parties in places he could never hope to live. What, he wondered, was the point of being told that Shoreditch was the New Primrose Hill, Bermondsey the New Ladbroke Grove, when you lived in a strange, nameless region between Wandsworth and Battersea, the New Nowhere? On each and every day of the week there were exhibitions and first nights and salsa workshops and poetry readings and political meetings and power yoga classes and firework displays and concerts of experimental music and exciting New Wave dim sum restaurants and big-room trance for a shirts-off, up-for-it crowd, all of which you could fail to experience. For Stephen, London was less a city that never slept, more a city that got a good nine hours.

But that wasn’t the case tonight. Tonight he was going to take his chances and actually leave the flat, and face the world again, and take his rightful place in the fashionable, fast-beating heart of things. It was the beginning of a new age, a new Stephen C. McQueen. There’d be no more standing on the outside, face pressed up against the glass. Josh was beckoning him in and never again would his evenings be accompanied by the pop of a fork piercing the film seal of a ready-meal. Riding up in the elevator at Chalk Farm tube station, he checked his reflection, undid his tie another half-inch, ruffled his hair and, by way of a little social warm-up, assumed the facial expression he intended to use when bantering with beautiful women. Forced to acknowledge that, all things considered, he looked comparatively good, he winked raffishly, popped an antibiotic just for the sheer decadent hell of it, then suppressed the gag reflex as it adhered to the back of his throat. Then, stepping out into the night, he consulted the page that he’d recklessly torn from his A to Z, and headed off to a famous person’s wild party.

It is,
he thought,
extremely important that things go well tonight. It is extremely important that I try and perform well.

S
tephen rang the bell on the high, wire-topped sheet-metal gate that protected this converted warehouse from the wilds of Primrose Hill; high-tech security was clearly a big priority for Josh, and Stephen thought there was every chance he might have to have his retina scanned. Eventually, the lock clicked open.
Nothing special from the outside,
thought Stephen, crossing the expanse of rain-drenched tarmac that acted as a moat in front of the long, low, red-brick building. But why was it so quiet? Perhaps the wild party hadn’t got wild yet. Or perhaps it was a bad party. Perhaps Josh Harper was actually having a
bad
party, like other, normal people—eight or nine embarrassed strangers sitting around in silence, eating dry-roasted peanuts out of cereal bowls, maybe even watching television, before drifting off at ten-thirty. Wouldn’t that be…just
fantastic
?

Stephen found the front door, another industrial steel-clad number, like the door of a vault, and cleared his throat, adjusted his tie and ruffled his hair one last time, and made sure that he was centered, focused and breathing from his diaphragm before pressing the button on the video phone. Josh’s face appeared for a moment, gratifyingly distorted in the fish-eye lens.

“Hey, it’s only Steve McQueen!” he shouted into the mike. “The Cooler King…”

“Heeeyy there, Josh!” Stephen grimaced, utilizing a strange American “game-show host” voice that seemed to spring from nowhere, and which he resolved he would on no account ever use again. He brandished the bottle of champagne at the lens, as if this would in some way guarantee admission.
My motivation is to be cool. Remember, Cary Grant. Elegant, suave, but also quietly capable of killing a man
.

“Come on up, Big Guy—first floor,” said Josh.

Big Guy
.
Where the hell did that come from?
thought Stephen.
Is he implying that I’m fat or something?
He entered the bare concrete stairwell, with its tangle of mountain bikes, clomped up the iron stairway to yet another metal-plated door where Josh stood, waiting for him. Despite the prescribed dress code, he wasn’t wearing a dark suit and tie. Instead he had on a beautifully tailored crisp white shirt, untucked at the waist and unbuttoned to below his pecs, so prominent as to almost constitute cleavage, worn with a tightly cut suit jacket and baggy, low-slung jeans, and bare feet, an outfit that trod the line between being either the height of cool, or its precise opposite. In his right hand he held a brimming martini glass held at the rim in a way that was elegant without being effeminate.

“Wotcha, Bullitt,” he drawled, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. With a shudder of foreboding, Stephen noticed that Josh was carrying a pair of bongos.

“Hello there, Birthday Boy!” chirruped Stephen, reminding himself he was pleased to be there, brandishing the champagne that had been warming up nicely in his tight hand.

Josh took the bottle, politely, but with a fleeting look of bemusement and distaste, as if Stephen had just handed him his prosthetic limb. “Oh. Champagne! Smart! Thanks, mate,” he said, seemingly embarrassed. “Let me show you round,” and with one hand on his back, he ushered Stephen in through the vault door, closing it behind him with an industrial clang. Then drawing his arm expansively around the room, he proclaimed, “Welcome—to My World…”

Stephen immediately noticed two things about Josh’s World.

First, it was immense; like a domesticated nightclub, and easily large enough to play five-a-side in, a fact emphasized by a football in the corner of the room, a basketball hoop and some chin-up bars mounted on the wall. The high roof was composed of white-painted girders and reinforced glass running the length of the apartment. A spiral staircase reached up to a raised level, screened off with discreet, translucent fabric walls, which he assumed contained some sort of tasteful erotic pleasure dome. Artfully mismatched furniture—modishly kitsch old cracked leather sofas, salvaged bar stools and brittle antique Queen Anne chairs—was distributed around the football pitch in little clusters, perfectly chosen to facilitate social interaction, and if not all of the furniture was entirely in good taste, then the bad-taste items were clearly the right kind of bad taste. The flooring was some kind of expensive seamless black rubber, as if the whole flat were somehow slightly kinky, and at the far end of the room, two Charles Eames chairs reclined in front of a massive flat plasma TV screen, currently displaying a frozen PlayStation game, a computer-generated footballer paused in midkick. Neat piles of imported American comics were stacked along the walls, scale models of the
Millennium Falcon,
R2D2 and an X-Wing Fighter acting as paperweights. Clearly, at an age when Josh might be expected to put away childish things, he had instead decided to invest heavily in them. An electric guitar and a drum kit lurked in the corner, like a dark threat, next to a DJ mixing desk, and the slow, discreet boom-tsch of generic chill-out music pulsed from huge hi-fi speakers perched high on metal stands.

The second thing Stephen noticed about Josh’s world was that there were no other guests.

“Oh God, I’m
really
early, aren’t I?” laughed Stephen, now very far from chilled out.

“No, no, not at all. If anything, you’re a little late. Still, gives you plenty of time to meet the others.”

Josh padded across the factory floor, pausing halfway to nonchalantly drop the bottle of champagne into one of three old-fashioned metal dustbins. Stephen felt slighted for a moment, but glanced into the dustbins as he passed, and saw that they were full of ice and perhaps another thirty bottles of champagne and vodka. Shop-bought ice. Stephen had never seen quite so much shop-bought ice.

“So what d’you think of the old place?”

“It’s amazing. What was it before?”

“Disused umbrella factory. I just prefer found spaces to houses, you know? I looked at hundreds of places before I found this—banana warehouses, carpet depositories, deconsecrated churches, disused swimming pools, libraries and schools. I even looked at this old abattoir in Whitechapel, but it really smelled of, you know, death. So we ended up here. Not much, but it’s home.”

At the far end of the room they turned into a screened-off industrial-style kitchen area, where three neat, clean, good-looking men with product in their hair were standing round, variously taking glasses out of cardboard boxes, laying out strips of pale smoked salmon like gold leaf, breaking up more bags of ice with a small silver hammer. All three wore immaculate, identical black suits and ties, suits very much like Stephen’s own.

“Guys, this is the famous”—a little paradiddle fanfare on the bongos—“Steeeeeve McQueen!” said Josh to deferential mirth. “He’s going to be helping you out today. Steve, this is Sam, John, and, sorry, I’ve forgotten your name…”

“Adam,” said Adam.

“As in don’t-know-you-from!” joshed Josh, and Adam gave a smile like ice cubes cracking. “Right, got it—Adam. Okay, guys, this is my good mate Steve!” All three turned and smiled their professional caterer smiles—“Hi, Steve, hello there, any relation?, pleased to meet you, Steve, loved you in
Bullitt,
Steve”—but Stephen couldn’t hear them because he was still trying to process the information, still trying to make sure that his conclusion was correct. It took a while, but finally the monstrous reality of the situation took firm shape in his mind.

I.

I am not a guest.

I have not been invited to this party as a friend.

I have been asked along as a waiter.

I am staff.

I.

I brought a bottle.

But Josh was speaking now, Josh his employer, saying something about people arriving in half an hour or so, which was plenty of time, and did he want to bartend or take food round or carve the Serrano ham off the bone or just collect coats or maybe they could take it in turns and was he any good at shucking oysters, but Stephen couldn’t take any of this in because of the sound of the blood ringing in his ears, so instead he asked…“Is there a toilet I can use quickly?”

“Sure. Use it slowly if you want!” quipped Josh, and one of the waiters obliged him with a £15-an-hour snort of mirth. “Other side of the room, on your left.”

“Thank you very much,” Stephen managed, very formally, and turned and walked stiffly across the room, as if he’d just learned how, stopping only when he was about twelve inches away from the wall. There was no sign of a door. He looked both ways along the length of the wall. Nope, definitely no door. He desperately needed to be on the other side of a door right now, any door at all, but there was definitely no door here. He contemplated kicking himself a door, but the walls looked too solid, so he worked out a form of smile, practiced it facing the wall, nailed it in place, then headed back to the kitchen, where Josh was showing one of the caterers, Adam perhaps, the correct way to open an oyster.

“…and hold the shell
flat
in your hand…”

“Hi there, Josh…?”

“…so you don’t lose the precious juices…”

“Josh, sorry, I can’t…”

“That’s the best bit about an oyster, the juices…”

“Hi there, Josh—JOSH!”

“Mr. McQueen?”

“I can’t seem to find the toilet.”

“It’s a concealed door—if you look carefully, you’ll see the…” Josh sighed, gave up on the oyster, hocked it impatiently into Adam’s hand, precious juices and all, and led Stephen out of the kitchen. As he left, Stephen glanced back, just in time to see Adam clutching the oyster shucker by the handle as if contemplating embedding it in the top of Josh’s head.

Josh, meanwhile, had his arm around Stephen’s shoulder, pointing at the wall opposite. “There—you see that rectangle?” and sure enough, Stephen could make out the faint outline of a door. “That’s the bog. Hidden doors, you see? Like in an old castle or something. Cool, isn’t it?”

“Amazing,” said Stephen, taking care not to move his face too much, in case it collapsed.

“
Should
be amazing—it cost me a fucking fortune…” Josh said, then headed back to the kitchen. “Just push it gently, and it should swing open…”

Stephen pushed the edge of the door and, sure enough, it swung open with a futuristic pneumatic hiss. Once safely inside, he turned, locked the door, stood with his head resting against it and let out a long, high, demented hum, the kind of noise you hear in hospital dramas, when a life-support machine is turned off. The bathroom was L-shaped, large and chic, gun-metal and black, lit only by a host of tea lights and a jasmine-scented candle, and it wasn’t until she gave a little artificial cough that Stephen realized there was someone else there.