by William Boyd
‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘That’s funny, I can use that.’
‘Use it to improve your chat-up lines,’ she suggests. ‘Feel free, be my guest.’
‘I’ll use it in my act,’ he says.
She knows he wants her to ask him what his act is but she decides not to, for the moment.
‘So you read Kafka, as well,’ she says.
‘Kafka is the most-read author on the Underground,’ he says. ‘It’s a well-known fact.’
She looks at him quizzically – this could almost be true. She’s getting used to his beard: normally she doesn’t like young men with full beards. A bit of stubble – a few days without shaving, fine. But this is a proper beard, trimmed, grown to a sharp point on his chin like a figure in an Elizabethan miniature, she suddenly thinks.
‘I’m Bethany,’ she says, offering her hand.
He looks at her in surprise and hesitates to take it.
‘I had a shower this morning,’ she says. ‘Clean as a whistle.’
He makes a conscious effort and shakes her hand.
‘I’m …’ He hesitates again. ‘I’m Aldous.’
‘You don’t seem that sure,’ Bethany says.
‘I have a few names I go by,’ he says. ‘It’s important to make the right choice at the first introduction. It shapes everything.’
‘What are your other names?’ Bethany asks.
‘Shel,’ Aldous says. ‘Sometimes Sheldon Stone. Sometimes just Stone.’
‘Aldous Stone, then.’
‘No, actually, Aldous Peploe.’
Bethany Peploe, she says to herself – don’t like it. She does this unconsciously when she meets guys she’s attracted to. It’s a tic, a habit she can’t rid herself of, always projecting forward into some unimaginable future, fast-forwarding.
‘Why are you frowning like that?’ Aldous asks.
‘Sorry, nothing,’ Bethany says. ‘Why do you have other names?’
‘They’re my stage names,’ he says.
‘Ah, your “act”, of course,’ she says. ‘I hope to hell you’re not a conjurer.’
‘I’m a stand-up comic,’ he says.
At eleven o’clock that night Bethany is waiting in a small queue outside a comedy club in Dalston called the Quota System. There’s a poster with names of the comics who are appearing but she can’t see Sheldon Stone on the list. Then she sees there’s an open-mic session as well and, wearily, she realizes that when Aldous said he was a stand-up comic what he really meant to say was that he would like to be a stand-up comic.
Still, she has to stay out late so she might as well try to have a laugh. Her phone bings. She sees it’s Sholto.
‘Hi, Bethany –’ he begins.
‘I shouldn’t speak to you again,’ she says.
‘Bethany, please,’ Sholto begs. ‘How was I to know she would do that?’
‘You knew – you set me up.’
‘Well, I know they have this weird sexual thing going but I never believed she’d do that.’
‘They can do what they like,’ Bethany said harshly, ‘I’m paying rent, I’m their lodger not a sex slave.’ She lowers her voice as she senses the queue’s growing interest in her conversation.
‘Hold on a second,’ she says, and lights a cigarette, turning to the wall.
‘Giel wasn’t in,’ Sholto says. ‘Maybe Noémie wanted some company.’
‘Noémie was naked, for God’s sake,’ Bethany says.
She and Sholto had been lying in bed, half asleep, when the door opened and, before she could properly respond, a naked woman, Noémie, had slid into bed beside her and started kissing her and then Sholto.
‘You pimped me out,’ Bethany says harshly.
‘I swear,’ Sholto says, his voice cracking, ‘I’d never do that to you – I love you.’
‘Oh well, what’s done is done,’ Bethany says, suddenly tranquil, as she’s just reminded herself of her new philosophy. Things Go Wrong. Malfunction, disorder, chaos – the natural state of things. To expect that a middle-aged Belgian woman would not want to have spontaneous threesome sex in the middle of the night is the mistake she’s making.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she says to Sholto, appeasingly. ‘It’s life’s fault.’
‘What’re you talking about?’ he says. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I have to go,’ she says, ‘I’m meeting someone.’
Salt in the wound.
Shel Stone’s act was not bad, actually, Bethany thinks to herself, standing in the bar, waiting for Aldous to appear. It showed promise, anyway. He was the last one on for the open-mic session and the three comics before him were hopeless so expectations were low and the crowd’s attention was waning, the hum of conversation growing. ‘Please welcome Shel Stone!’ the MC said and left the stage. The lights went off and a spot shone on the microphone on its stand. No one appeared. Five seconds. Ten. Then some sort of loud banging about occurred in the wings. Muffled grunts and curses. Then Shel Stone burst on stage and fell heavily to the ground. The spot found him and he staggered to his feet. He was wearing a tight black suit and a white shirt with a thin black tie. ‘Bastard fucking bastard!’ he bellowed in a thick Scottish accent at someone in the wings. Then he jolted, as if he suddenly realized where he was and had spotted the audience for the first time. He dusted himself down and stepped up to the microphone, thumbing away a trickle of blood from the corner of his lip. He stared out into the audience and smiled slowly. The place was quiet. ‘HULLOOOO GLASGOWWWWW!’ he shouted, throwing his arms wide. The audience said nothing – then the catcalls and jeers began.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Shel Stone said, his accent cockney all of a sudden. ‘Lost me bearings.’ He turned to the wings and pointed. ‘I’ll sort you out later, you BASTARD!’ The audience were completely with him now. He straightened his tie and smiled at them.
‘I don’t do this all the time, you know. This is like me hobby. I got the day job …’ Smile. ‘Guess what I do.’ There were a lot of ribald suggestions. Shel quietened the crowd.
‘I’m a sperm donor,’ he said.
Boos, hisses. It didn’t get much better.
Bethany sees Aldous slip out of the stage door and look for her in the bar. He’s back in his usual clothes – a zip-up jumper and cargo pants – and no one in the bar seems to recognize him as Shel Stone.
‘You were great,’ she says.
‘No I wasn’t,’ he says. ‘I want your honest opinion.’
‘Okay. Let me buy you a drink,’ Bethany says. ‘You find a table.’
‘It started quite well,’ Bethany says, ‘but I’m afraid wanking jokes are so pathetic. Sad. Didn’t you see? Only the men thought it was funny.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Aldous says, ‘it’s pathetic, you’re right.’
‘It’s not original,’ Bethany goes on. ‘I think you stole it from a film, anyway.’
‘Everybody steals everything,’ Aldous says, defensively. ‘It’s the comic ethos.’
Bethany, mollifying, analyses further.
‘The beginning was such a shock, you see. You shook us up. We all went quiet – nobody knew what was going to happen. It was kind of dangerous. Funny and dangerous. That’s the way to go, I reckon. Your accents were good.’
‘Yeah …’ Aldous says to himself, nodding. ‘See what you mean. Keep it surreal, yeah. Don’t let them relax. I’ve got to be more surreal.’
‘Kafkaesque,’ Bethany says. Aldous chuckles, drains his drink and tries to kiss her.
‘What’s he like?’ Moxy asks, lighting her roll-up.
‘He’s cute,’ Bethany says. ‘He’s got a beard –’
‘Yech,’ Moxy says.
‘– and he thinks he’s going bald so he cuts his hair really short.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Haven’t asked yet,’ Bethany says. ‘Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. He tried to kiss me but I wouldn’t let him.’
‘Not like you,’ Moxy says.
‘Bitc
h.’ Bethany smiles at her and tells her about Sholto and Noémie – having leapt out of that frying pan she had no desire to be burned again for a while.
‘So what’re you going to do?’ Moxy asks. ‘You can’t stay at home.’
‘Try and get in to drama school,’ Bethany says.
‘You tried that before,’ Moxy says, ‘and you didn’t get in.’
‘Ah, but I’ve been in a film since then,’ Bethany says.
‘An extra in an unreleased film,’ Moxy says, ‘very impressive. Oh, yeah.’
‘It’ll be different this time around,’ Bethany says. ‘I’ve changed.’
Aldous and Bethany sit in a sushi bar on the Dawes Road near Aldous’s small flat.
‘I’m having a bit of trouble rewriting my act,’ Aldous says, dabbing wasabi on to a rectangle of tuna. ‘The Quota are going to try me out on the bill – five minutes – and I’ve only got material for two.’
‘You’ve only got material for thirty seconds,’ Bethany says. ‘Let’s be honest.’
He looks at her. ‘I’m going to need your help, Bethany.’
‘I’m very busy,’ Bethany says, ‘I’m applying for drama school – you know, interviews, learning lines.’
‘I’m manic depressive,’ Aldous says, ‘I can’t do this on my own.’
‘You mean bipolar,’ Bethany corrects him.
‘I prefer manic depressive,’ Aldous says. ‘I get periods of mania and then I get depressed. What’s the North Pole and the South Pole got to do with it?’
‘You’re right,’ Bethany says, ‘the poles are rather similar.’
‘There’s something there,’ Aldous says, pointing his chopsticks at her. ‘I don’t go white to white – pole to pole. I go blazing red to pitch black.’ He pauses. ‘There’s a gag there. See? Told you I needed you.’
Bethany goes back with Aldous to his flat.
‘I’m not sleeping with you,’ she warns, ‘not staying the night.’
‘We’re going to work,’ Aldous says, a little wanly, disappointed. ‘Yes. Come up with a new act.’
The flat is small and incredibly neat – a bedroom, painted black with a black blind, a kitchenette and a bathroom with a shower. The sitting room contains a sofa, a TV, and a desk beneath some shelves filled with books.
‘Very spartan,’ Bethany observes, prowling around – she’s curious about dwelling places, perhaps because she’s had so many herself in the last year or so. They tell you a lot about the occupants.
Aldous makes her a cup of coffee and sits at the desk facing her on the sofa.
‘How do we start?’ he asks.
‘Open a newspaper,’ Bethany says, ‘see what grabs your attention – instantly, no thinking about it.’
He fishes in the wastepaper basket and takes out a Standard and begins to flick through.
‘Right,’ he says, after a minute. ‘Here’s something – makes me fume. Pets aren’t called “pets” any more, they’re called “companions”. How bloody stupid.’
‘There you are,’ Bethany says, ‘instant material. Take a pet on stage, introduce it as your “companion”.’
‘I can’t take a dog or a cat on stage,’ Aldous complains.
‘I’m not talking about mammals,’ Bethany says. ‘We need something more surreal. Remember?’
Bethany experiences a simultaneous thrill of pride and anxiety when she sees the name ‘Shel Stone’ on the poster of comics appearing at the Quota System. Then, in the auditorium at the back, she feels strangely anxious again, even a bit sick, as if she were going on stage, not Aldous.
She watches unsmilingly and silently, with apprehension, as the audience laugh. Shel starts with his usual banging and drunken fall on stage and says, ‘Hello Brisbane,’ in a good Australian accent and launches into an Australian anecdote before the yells and the boos quieten him. He asks them to guess his day job. More obscene suggestions.
‘I’m a cage-fighter,’ Shel says to incredulous heckling, and from the wings a small hamster cage is thrown on stage that he then proceeds to stamp flat with maximum force and aggression.
‘I’m against animals being imprisoned,’ he bellows. ‘So I fight cages whenever I see them.’
Then he reminds everyone that pets aren’t called pets any more, no, they’re called companions.
‘I’ve brought my companion on stage,’ he says. ‘He’s an ant, called Archie.’ He reaches into his pocket and holds out a finger that ‘Archie’ is perched upon. ‘He does backflips,’ Shel says and puts Archie on the ground. ‘Go on, boy, backflip, backflip.’ After ten seconds more cajoling (‘He was a bit hung-over this morning’) Archie still won’t do a backflip. So Shel stamps on him. ‘Sod it. Plenty more where he came from.’
Bethany relaxes – this is all her stuff and it has worked well. Surreality, that is Shel’s schtick.
Then Shel goes off-message. ‘Hands down all you guys who watch Internet porn,’ he says. ‘See, ladies, it’s universal.’ Then he goes into a riff about the ‘pornification of everyday life’ and Bethany senses half his audience leaving him, the room going quiet.
Bethany has applied to twenty-four drama schools in the London area. In the space of three days she has had eleven rejections – then she had an acceptance from the English National Institute of Drama. The address was in Hampstead, no interview required (‘because of your impressive film-acting experience’); fees £3,000 a term plus VAT.
Bethany weighs this up shrewdly. There is the problem of the fees; there is the problem of chicanery. Still it is an offer, she thinks: if I can’t go to RADA or LAMDA then at least I can go to ENID. She accepts the place offered. What she needs, she realizes, is some stability in her life – however half-baked or half-cocked or half-assed ENID is, she calculates, she might be able to make it work for her.
Coming home late from Aldous’s flat – she is sleeping with him but not spending the night – Bethany is frightened by the shadowy figure of a man trying to open the front door of her mother’s house.
‘I’m calling the police!’ she shouts.
‘No, no. Please,’ the man says with a heavy accent. ‘I living here.’
A light goes on in the porch and Bethany sees he has a set of keys in his hand.
‘I am Demerson,’ he says. ‘I living with Alannah.’
Bethany introduces herself and they shake hands. Demerson is a thickset young guy, handsome with astonishingly white teeth, but with strangely old-fashioned-looking curly long hair – almost as if it has been permed. He looks a bit like a footballer from the 1970s.
Alannah finally opens the door and lets them both in. Bethany thinks it’s time she moved out again.
Shel’s new act is going down well at the Quota System. He does variations of the Archie the Ant gag. He invites an audience member up on stage to stroke Archie. Then he or she stands on him. ‘You killed him! You killed Archie!’ Tears, recriminations, abuse.
He and Bethany work on new material. Bethany comes up with another runner about how crap children’s jokes are. Shel, she has to admit, does a fine free-associating job deconstructing them. ‘When are your shoes like the sun? When is a door not a door? No, you little prat – your shoes do not look like the sun when they shine. They look like clean fucking shoes!’
Bethany goes up to Hampstead to inspect ENID and is surprised to find a bona-fide acting school with classrooms and a small but professionally well-equipped theatre. All the other students she meets there seem to be foreign, however. Her mother says she’ll pay for the first term and Demerson finds her a job dog-walking at £20 an hour, as many hours as she wants.
Bethany is suspicious – this is not normal: everything seems to be going well and this is not how the world works – no. Life is a dysfunctioning system, she knows: failure, breakdown, disappointment, frustration – where are you hiding?
Aldous is offered a gig at a comedy festival at the Soho Theatre. A TV company has asked him to audition. Bethany is due to start at ENID in a week and whe
n Aldous suggests she move in with him it seems the natural thing to do. They are lying in bed when he asks her. She says she’ll go back to her mother’s and fetch a few things – see how it works for a week or so, she says. Nothing hard and fast, you understand – a test. Aldous slips out of bed to open a bottle of wine to do honour to their potential cohabitation.
‘You’re incredibly thin, Aldous,’ Bethany says. ‘I’m thin but you’re thinner than me. You’re not a male anorexic, are you?’
Aldous thinks about this, strums his ribs with a thumb. ‘Just not very interested in food,’ he says. ‘Like drink, though.’
He opens the wine and they celebrate.
Aldous gives her a spare set of keys, symbol of the fluidity of their new arrangement.
‘Come and go,’ he says. ‘Be capricious.’
Bethany returns home to pick up a few clothes, books and her make-up. A rucksack’s worth of commitment, she says to herself, climbing back up the stairs to Aldous’s flat. She’s about to ring the bell but instead decides to use her new keys and lets herself in.
Music is playing in the sitting room but there’s no sign of Aldous. She hears the loo flush and heads for the bathroom – she can set her face cream out, her stuff, claim her space. Then she stops. Aldous clearly hasn’t heard her come in and for some reason is talking to himself, it seems.
Bethany leans forward, ear to the door and hears what he’s saying.
‘Come on Archie,’ he says. ‘Time for your bath, there’s a good boy. Hop in. We’ll lather you up, get you all nice and clean. Bethany’s coming to stay. Don’t want to be a dirty little ant-mucker, do we?’
Bethany stands there for a second, thinking. Then she turns and lets herself quietly out of the flat.
Things go wrong.
Nine …
Bethany is running into Victoria station trying not to look too distraught but probably failing, she thinks. She glances back, wondering if somehow Demerson has managed to follow her but she can see no one in the thinning crowd of the hurrying commuters. Her eyes flick to the departure board looking for destinations. Trains that are about to depart for distant destinations. She sees: Hastings. Leaving in three minutes. Battle of Hastings. War. 1066. Arrow in the eye. That’s for me. Buy a ticket on the train. She runs to the platform.