But as excited as I was at that prospect, it was nothing compared to how thrilled I was that, shortly north of York, Babs had let me hold her hand in broad daylight, in public. We may have been together three years, but her no-public-displays-of-affection rule had remained enforced up until now.
I had fallen impossibly hard for her from the moment we’d met, and, as was my custom, I had resolved to be bold and confident and ask her out on a proper date immediately. Sure enough, just five and a half weeks and four aborted attempts later, I did. The first part of the sentence had gone quite well, but I was soon in freefall, making very little sense. Babs was looking at me the way someone might when faced with a piece of modern art: Is this thing incredibly complex and brilliant and I’m just missing something, or is it just a dildo strapped to a wok . . . ?
“Are you okay, Theo? It’s just you do seem to be speaking in tongues.”
“Ha! No, I’m fine! What I was trying to ask was whether you, you know, maybe, wanted to, sort of, go for dinner or something.”
A smile spread out slowly on Babs’s face.
“With me,” I added.
“Thanks for clarifying,” Babs said. “You know, I’d been wondering if you were going to ask me out. I know boys can occasionally be a bit thick when it comes to seeing the signals, but I did kiss you the other night. That’s quite a straightforward one where I come from.”
I looked back at her dumbly. She rolled her eyes and placed her arm in mine like she was helping a doddery old man cross the street.
“Where are you taking me out to, then?” she asked.
Hmm. I hadn’t got that far.
It turned out I was taking her to hell itself. I hadn’t had a clue what sort of place I should book, and so chanced my arm on somewhere which vaguely promised “fusion”—nuclear, judging by the taste. The waiters were horrible, the music too loud. There was mood lighting, but unfortunately the mood was “seven-year-old’s birthday party in a provincial bowling alley.” But for some reason it didn’t seem to matter. With every new snipe from the sarcastic waiter or dreadful song on the speakers, Babs seemed to find it more and more funny. As we left, drunk on a pitcher of warm margaritas, I kept trying to apologize, but she stopped me and said, “Listen, it’s one of my favorite things in life when something’s so hilariously awful it somehow becomes good—so stop worrying. There’s nothing like making the best of something bad.”
We turned a corner and came by a bar that was blasting out indie music.
“Come on,” Babs said, taking me by the arm, and soon we had joined the few bedraggled-looking indie kids shuffling on the dance floor. We drank beer from plastic pint glasses and danced in that way which runs the full spectrum of ironic and earnest, and then the DJ put on “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
“Well, if we’re going to be clichés about this . . . ,” Babs yelled in my ear, and before I could ask her what she meant, she was kissing me, and I was lost in lager and ambiguous food and cigarette smoke, and it was singularly the best kiss I’d ever had, and it is yet to be surpassed.
Two weeks later, halfway through watching a film—I can’t recall what now, and I doubt I knew at the time given how nervous I was—we had sex for the first time. Afterward, as I raised myself up on my single bed and saw how the dusting of freckles on Babs’s shoulder were lit as if in spotlight by the shaft of dawn sunlight creeping through the curtains, I wondered if she was thinking what I was: that this was all that mattered now, that conceding our bodies to each other in this way removed meaning from everything else, and that I’d never felt so attuned to the beauty of the world. Just then Babs patted me smartly on the bottom.
“That’ll do, pig,” she said, then instantly fell asleep.
Oh.
As I lay there, realizing that perhaps Babs wasn’t quite the romantic that I was, but feeling delighted nonetheless, I thought about what she’d said on our first date—that there was nothing like making the best of something bad. I listened to the soft sound of her breathing and thought about how different I felt already to the kid who’d arrived at university racked with insecurities and doubts. Maybe, I hoped, Babs was going to make the best of me, too.
In the following three years, I don’t think we spent a night apart. Even once we’d moved out of halls and were schlepping across the city to the other’s shared flat. We’d successfully cemented our places in the Sheffield Revue, which I put down to fate—that our blossoming romance had made our success inevitable—and which Babs had put down to the fact that only seven people auditioned.
The third part of our trio was a tall blond boy called Luke who was paper-thin, with mesmerizing cheekbones, like Bowie’s Thin White Duke. We were “mentored”—and I use the term lightly—by a guy called Steve, a balding, potbellied former comedy writer who now lectured in English part-time. Babs, Luke and I came up with sketch ideas and performed them for Steve, who, at best, told us they weren’t shit and, at worst, started clawing at the air as we performed like he was trying to expunge our words from ever existing. Eventually we cobbled together forty-five minutes of material to perform.
The student competition involved early rounds where rival universities performed on the same bill and then the audience would vote on who they preferred, like a battle-of-the-bands competition. Before our first show against Hull, I remember pacing around backstage, trying to psych myself up. I couldn’t hear the audience on the other side of the curtain, but I knew it was going to be a bear pit—the braying drunks of the London Comedy Store combined with the ferocious atmosphere of a Detroit rap battle. When we finally got out there, the vibe was more local library, which set the tone for most times we’d perform.
We probably deserved to go out in the quarters that year, but I thought we were robbed in our second year to go out in the semis. But finally, in our third year, we made it through to the grand final—and this time we were ready for it. Term finished in June, so we had a couple of months to wait before heading up to Edinburgh. Babs’s parents had a place in Northumberland, and they were traveling in Canada that year, so Babs and I got to spend the summer together in their little cottage by the sea. In the day we’d walk along the beach and take day trips out to the Farne Islands to watch the puffins. In the evenings we’d cook on the Aga and read by the log burner. When I was younger, I’d scorned the idea of that sort of domesticity. But those warm nights in the kitchen with Babs, getting distracted every few minutes because I wanted to kiss the nape of her neck—I think they were the happiest of my life. So much so that when the Edinburgh Festival rolled around, I secretly wished we could have a bit more time in the cottage. But the moment our train pulled into Waverley station, I started to get nervous and horribly excited all over again. Just one more knockout performance and we’d have every talent manager and TV commissioner in town trying to snap us up. It was all or nothing now.
To get to where we were staying, we had to run the gauntlet of the Royal Mile, weaving as fast as we could through the hordes of people handing out flyers and the street performers with their head mics and smug patter.
“Just juggle the knife and fuck off on your unicycle,” Babs muttered.
“Marry me,” I said, thankfully in my head.
Our accommodation was as horrible as I’d dreamed. Every interview I’d read with comedians about their Edinburgh experiences involved war stories of mice and asbestos—three people sharing a bare, ambiguously stained mattress. Well, this was our very own horror show. It was as damp as a cave—dark as one, too, when the one functioning lightbulb blew. Unaccountably, a single baked potato lay on the kitchen counter. Luke pointed to it like an explorer who’d discovered the new world.
It was almost too perfect.
The final was held at a grimy pub called the Tron. I’d been expecting something slightly grander, in all honesty. I was still feeling a bit underwhelmed, but with a few minutes to go until showtime, the audience s
tarted to file in—boisterous and loud—and before long the place was packed, a proper sense of tension in the air. In that moment it really did feel like it could be the start of something—the sort of intimate venue which a camera crew would return to when making a documentary about a performer’s life: the place where it all started. As that particular fantasy washed over me, I had to run to the backstage toilet and throw up.
After a less-than-cordial coin toss, the Cambridge Footlights team (Tristan and Hugo—naturally) chose to perform first. We watched them by peering through a curtain at the side of the stage. It was clear we were up against some stiff competition.
If we were hoping for a rousing, British-underdog-film-style speech from Steve, then we were sadly disappointed. He’d got stuck into the free booze backstage and was fast asleep under his coat. We sat in silence like stoic civilians in an air-raid shelter, the laughs from next door the falling bombs. Then the Cambridge boys took their final bow to enthusiastic applause. Babs, Luke and I exchanged determined looks. It was showtime.
It was so hot on the tiny stage that I thought I might pass out. Our timing was off from the start, and Babs fluffed a line that she’d never stumbled on before. The laughs were polite at best. I was sweating. My hands were slick with it.
A quick one-man bit from Luke where he played a depressed vet got some more solid laughs, and then, praise be, the wine snobs sketch got easily the biggest reaction of the night. We dived backstage for a quick costume change. Babs gave me a thumbs-up and a big grin, and I felt relaxed for the first time since we’d stepped onstage. This was all going to be okay.
From then on, we were on a roll. Even the surly grasshoppers sketch, which had played to silence in the semifinal, got proper laughs, and they just kept coming, in wave after glorious wave. Babs, in particular, was having an absolute stormer. In her solo sketch, where she played a vicar with anger management issues, her blistering riposte to a carefully chosen front-row member was so perfect that I nearly missed my cue. What a moment to realize just how much I was in love with someone, watching them dressed as a clergywoman viciously berating a cowering stranger.
Before I knew it, we were at our closing sketch—Napoleon public speaking. This required the three of us to change costumes again, so we’d prerecorded a parody of a budget airline advert which played out to the audience as we swapped outfits. As I stood in the wings, adjusting my military jacket, I could feel it in my bones that this was going to be the best we’d ever performed the closer. We were going to take the roof off.
I was first out onstage, and I waltzed on with an extra bit of swagger. I looked out into the crowd, making eye contact with everyone in turn, nodding to myself as if I knew some secret that they didn’t. Wonderful pockets of laughter were erupting just at this. It was like fireworks going off. And it was contagious. So much so that I took a gamble and carried on simply prowling the stage, making eye contact with every audience member once again as the laughter grew and grew. I went for one last sweep of each row, and that’s when I saw him. Joel.
He was in the back row, a beer in his hand, looking straight back at me, a smile on his face. Suddenly, I wasn’t onstage anymore. I was sitting back to back with Joel on dewy grass. I was lobbing stones at the Thames monument. I was kneeling by Alice on the cracked tarmac.
My staring shtick had gone on for just too long now. The laughter was dying away. The audience was growing impatient, and I heard someone clear their throat, someone else whispering to their friend. My eyes refocused on Joel, and I felt my stomach plunge. He was covering his mouth with his hand. His smile was gone, and now it looked for all the world like he was trying to obscure an unpleasant sneer.
“Theo!” Babs hissed from behind the curtain. There were a few relieved laughs at this. Perhaps they thought my stalling was deliberate.
I probably could have salvaged things if I’d said something then. I did try to get my first line out, but my tongue felt flabby and thick. My mouth was getting drier by the second, and my body was growing numb, like a hunter had shot a dart into my neck. Standing—even breathing properly—was becoming ever more difficult, and all the while, the silence grew. I finally managed to muster a few words, but by that point Luke and Babs had appeared at my side, taking me by each arm.
“I’m sorry, sir, you appear to have wandered into the wrong sketch,” Luke said, anger—out of character—palpable as he spoke. There were some sniggers, but unkind ones.
“We’ll be back in a minute, ladies and gents,” Babs said in a strange, forced “comedy voice” I’d never heard her use before.
They’d nearly led me off the stage. Looking back, if I’d let them get me off, then maybe they’d have recovered and got the audience back on our side. But just at the last minute I managed to wrench my arm away from Luke, determined to keep going.
“Theo . . . ,” Luke said, all pretense gone now.
I turned to Babs, but she had her eyes closed. And then I knew it was over.
I felt my shoulders slump. “Please,” I said, in one last feeble attempt to keep going. “I can still . . .”
Someone in the audience knocked a glass over, and I heard it roll along the wooden floor for an interminably long time before it came to a stop. I looked up and saw Joel on his feet, making his way toward the exit. I felt a shock of anger, and I barged past Luke and through the curtain, into the dressing room, where Steve was sitting, his hand in a monster bag of Doritos.
“You done, then?” he said, through a mouthful of crisps. “Sounded like it was going pretty well.”
But I didn’t stop. I charged through the dressing room and down the stairs, wrenching open the stage door and storming out into the street, where I stopped to take in big, hungry lungfuls of air, just in time to hear our closing theme tune play over a sarcastic round of applause and to see Joel hurrying away around a corner, jacket collar pulled up high, like someone hastily leaving a crime scene.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Joel
They say that on any given day in Edinburgh you can have weather from each season. The dial had stopped around midwinter in February by the time Theo caught up with me on the North Bridge, with icy torrential rain fueled by a swirling wind.
“Oi,” Theo shouted.
I kept walking, head down. I’d been drinking pretty solidly all day and I was unsteady on my feet, unable to get away as fast as I’d like.
“Joel, I know you can fucking hear me.”
The game was up. I slowed to a halt and turned around.
“All right?” I said. “Listen . . . mate, I—”
“Don’t call me ‘mate,’ ” Theo spat. “What the fuck were you doing in there?”
“Well, I . . . I saw your flyer. I wanted to see the show.” I scrabbled in my coat pocket to find the flyer, although I don’t know what I was trying to prove.
“Right,” Theo said, jaw clenched. “Thought you’d just come and sit at the back and take the piss.”
“What? No, god no—of course not. I was there . . . you know, just to see it—to support you.” This was all coming out wrong. I was trying so hard not to slur my words, and I could tell from Theo’s darkening expression that I sounded insincere.
“Right, and that’s why you waited till I was looking at you and started laughing all sarcastically, is it? That stupid little smile on your face—like you couldn’t believe your luck how shit I was. Is it not enough for you to be living my fucking dream in London—yeah, I read you won that BBC thing, I know what a big shot you are now.”
“Theo . . .”
“What?”
A blast of wind slapped freezing rainwater into our faces.
How could I tell him that I hadn’t been laughing at him—that I’d actually been overcome with such pride, with such a fierce feeling of love for my old friend, that I’d been desperately trying to stop myself crying? Theo! With his big, silly face and
his big, mad hair. He’d been so fucking good up there. I had no idea he could act, but he was a natural.
“I just wanted to see your show, that’s it,” I managed to say, glad that the wind and rain were lashing down even harder so he couldn’t hear my voice wobbling.
“You came deliberately to put me off,” Theo snarled, shoving me in the chest. Such was my state that I was nearly knocked off-balance.
“No, I—honestly, that’s not it.”
The rain came at us again. We had to step aside to let a family hurry past. I tried to use the distraction to get away. I couldn’t bear seeing Theo like this, but he grabbed my arm and yanked me back.
“Why is it you’re so determined to ruin my life?”
“I’m not, Theo. I just . . .”
“What?”
“I saw your face on the flyer and it reminded me how much I missed you, okay?”
This seemed to throw him. I saw his anger die down for just a moment. When he spoke again, he sounded plaintive.
“Okay, fine, but . . . couldn’t you have just called me or something? Sent a text? Anything but just turn up like that. You do realize, don’t you, that . . .” He pointed back in the direction of the Tron. “We were going to win, I know we were.”
“I know. You were so good. Honestly!”
Theo didn’t acknowledge the compliment.
“You know I worshipped you,” he said. “That day in the music block—stopping me from getting hurt. I still think about that day all the time.”
I took a step toward him. “Yeah, well, I know you’d have done the same for—”
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