The Understudy: A Novel

by David Nicholls

  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.

  Cary Grant

  Like 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.

  Stephen 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.