The Understudy: A Novel

by David Nicholls

  “Remind me.”

  “Trust me, you won’t have heard of it.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I’m not proud of this…”

  “Go on.”

  “It was called,” and she winced, “oh God—it was called…‘Love Junkie.’ ”

  Stephen winced too. “Great title.”

  “Isn’t it? And the kids love those drug metaphors. And any song that rhymes junkie with monkey, funky and flunky has got to be a hit, right?”

  “You know, I think I have heard of you.”

  “Liar.”

  “So why did you give it up?”

  “I didn’t. It gave me up. Besides, the few connections I have are in the States, and Josh needs to be here for his work. He’s at that crucial stage in his career, or so he keeps telling me. So we’ve decided to put it on hold. Temporarily, of course. In the meantime, I’ve been writing a little.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “The usual, stories, a screenplay or two.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Not really. I mean everyone writes, don’t they? If you went down to that party, went up to someone and asked them how the writing was going, not one of them would say, ‘What writing?’ ”

  “Have you shown anyone anything?”

  “No…”

  “Well, you should.”

  She drew hard on her cigarette, and gave him a stern look. “Why should I?”

  “Well, because I think it’s important to persevere with these things.”

  “ ‘Hold on to your dreams’?”

  “No, but to have ambitions. To find the thing that you love doing, and do it to the best of your abilities.” He glanced across at her, to see if he’d got away with this. There were, at least, no outward signs of gagging. “And also because I imagine you would be really good.”

  She curled a lip dismissively. “That’s just something nice to say. How could you possibly know that?”

  Stephen felt slighted. He was perfectly capable of making blandly soothing remarks to people, but this hadn’t been one of them. “From the way you talk. You just seem as if you would be. A good writer, I mean. That’s all.”

  She dipped her head a little, a sort of apology, and took the bottle of champagne from his hand. “Thank you, Stephen.” Then she took a long swig, wiped a drop of champagne from the tip of her chin with the back of her hand, then quickly sucked the drop from her finger, the whole gesture striking him as wonderfully deft and cool.

  Shortly after the breakup of his marriage, when he’d pulled himself together enough to leave the flat, Stephen had started to notice that he had developed an unnerving ability to make women need the toilet. He’d be at a party, and at a certain point, usually when he mentioned the recent divorce, they’d touch his arm lightly and say, “Will you excuse me? I must go for a pee,” and he would realize, once again, that he was, in fact, the Human Diuretic, a superhero with extremely specialized powers. Usually, he didn’t mind too much; the divorce had leached him of any romantic instincts, and he’d managed to avoid casual, loveless sexual encounters with disconcerting ease. But, even so, he was surprised, and a little unnerved, to realize how much he wanted Nora to stay here with him. He felt the pressure of her elbow against his on the railing. Put your hand in the warm curve at the small of her back, lean over and…

  “D’you want to know what Josh and I just argued about?”

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “Okay, well, we’re getting ready for the party, and we’d just, you know, made out, and everything was fine, and he lay there and leaned over, with his dopey, constipated romantic-lead face, his close-up face, and said that I was”—she gave a little shudder “—I was the wind beneath his wings.”

  “Ah.”

  “…Like I’d be pleased, as if this was the fulfillment of some great ambition, to be somebody else’s wind? Anyway…then we had this big shouting match and, oh, I don’t know. It was so stupid…” For something to do, she tossed her cigarette over the railing of the ocean liner, following its trajectory with her eyes. “Well, screw him, anyway. Josh Harper can make his own damn wind…”

  “Oi-oi-oi, what’s going on here, then?” a voice boomed across the rooftops. They both turned around to see a madly grinning Josh at the other end of the roof, his arms outstretched, a glass in each hand. Tottering a little behind him was a young woman in a variation on a dress: two rectangles of black leather, tied at the side with leather string that pressed into her bare flesh, advertising her lack of underwear, and making her appear elaborately trussed. She was clearly very drunk, and struggling to stay upright in high heels on the wet decking.

  “We’re having a private conversation, Josh—go away!” drawled Nora.

  “But Bullitt’s meant to be working. Bullitt, you complete skiver!” he said, his arm around Stephen’s shoulder, waggling his finger jokily under Stephen’s nose. “I don’t pay you fifteen squid an hour to stand around chatting up my missus.”

  “Screw you, Josh,” murmured Nora, taking a cigarette from Stephen’s packet.

  “Whooooooh!” Josh and the girl laughed conspiratorially, and for a moment Stephen felt the same crackle of tension he’d felt in the school playground, just before a fight broke out.

  “Hey! Hey, hey, hey!” said Josh, draping his arm over Nora’s shoulder now. “I’m just joking, my love. Steve can do whatever he wants—we’re all mates, aren’t we?” and he planted a wet, boozy, matey kiss on Stephen’s cheek and blew a small raspberry on Nora’s bare neck. Clearly finding the raspberry less sensual than Josh might have hoped, Nora wriggled free. He grabbed hold of her waist. “Tell me—how is my favorite girl?”

  “Don’t know, Josh—who is your favorite girl?”

  “You are, of course. Hey, you missed me cutting my cake!”

  “I did? Well, I’m sure someone videoed it.”

  “They did, actually.”

  “Well, there you go—the moment lives on,” drawled Nora, and even through the blur of booze, a momentary look of sincere hurt passed over Josh’s face.

  Standing a little way off, the girl in the black leather patches stumbled and swore.

  “I’m sorry, I am soooo rude,” shouted Josh. “Everyone, this is…” His mouth hung open slack, searching for the name.

  “Yasmin,” said the girl, swaying back and forward, trapped by her heels in the wet decking. “Yasmin with a Y.”

  “Y indeed,” murmured Nora, crossing one arm across her chest, and placing the cigarette in the center of her mouth like a blowpipe. “Yasmin, shouldn’t you put some clothes on, sweetheart? You’ll catch your death…”

  By way of diversion, Josh tightened his grip around Stephen’s and Nora’s shoulders. “So! What were you two talking about then—not me, I hope.”

  “You know, you really must stop automatically assuming that people are talking about you, Josh,” murmured Nora, attempting to shrug off Josh’s arm.

  “I don’t!”

  “There are other topics of conversation, you know.”

  “I know, I know! I was joking!” said Josh, his arms raised in surrender. “Christ, Nora, why d’you have to give me such a hard time? I said I was sorry, didn’t I?” They all stood in silence for a moment, listening to the insistent thump of the party beneath them.

  “Oh, sodding hell,” muttered Yasmin, bending, ungainly, at the knee now, struggling to wrench her strappy high heel from the decking without spilling her cocktail. “It’s fucking freezing up here. I’m going back in.” Stephen noticed Nora eye the back of her head, and tighten her grip on the neck of the bottle, which she held at her side, like a cudgel.

  “So who’s Yasmin, Josh?” hissed Nora.

  “I dunno—she’s a dancer or something.”

  “A dancer! Ballet? Jazz? Table?”

  “Funny, Nora, very funny.”

  “I think I’d better head down too,” mumbled Stephen, but Nora and Josh didn’t seem to hear. Instead
they stood now, eyes locked, Josh holding Nora tight by the tops of her arms, as if to prevent her leaping over the railing. Walking away, he could hear them speaking in low, urgent voices.

  “So how come this complete stranger is at your birthday?”

  “She’s not a stranger, she’s a…friend of a friend or something.”

  “Girlfriend of a friend?”

  “I don’t know, do I? I was just trying to be sociable, you know, pleasant, instead of just moping about and scowling at everyone.”

  “And is that why you were bringing her up on the roof? So you could be pleasant to each other?”

  “No, to show her the view! Exactly the same as you and Steve.”

  “Well, not exactly the same, Josh.”

  “Why not the same?”

  “Because at no point was I going to unbutton his fly with my teeth…”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nora, not this again. Why can’t you just believe that I love you?”

  “You don’t make it very easy, Josh.”

  “Come here, Nora.”

  “No, Josh.”

  “Please…?”

  Without looking back, Stephen held on to the stair rail and descended back into the party, and from the room below came the terrible sound of bongos.

  Errol Flynn on Antibiotics

  In retrospect, Stephen realized, he should never have left Nora. If he’d shinned down a drainpipe and gone home, or even jammed his hands deep into his pockets and hurled himself onto the tarmac below, the evening might still have held one or two pleasant memories. But, instead, he had decided to return to the party, as one might return to an unexploded firework, and from the moment he returned to the party, he was doomed.

  Descending the spiral staircase seemed to take a great deal more concentration than climbing it—the glass steps made it seem as if he were stepping into air, and they felt disconcertingly spongy and yielding beneath his feet. Adam from the caterers was waiting at the bottom, angrily banging the ash out of ashtrays into a champagne bucket.

  “And where the hell have you been?” he snapped.

  “Just talking,” mumbled Stephen, his tongue suddenly far too big for his mouth. “Josh said it was okay.”

  Adam tutted and narrowed his eyes. “ ‘Josh said, Josh said…’ Just because you know the boss, superstar, you’re still just a waiter.”

  Stephen snarled at Adam’s back, then went to get another tray of drinks from the kitchen, downing in one a glass of red wine, cowboy-style.

  When a large number of people have been drinking steadily for several hours, there’s sometimes a wonderful moment when everyone simultaneously reaches a state of almost perfect conviviality: relaxed, affectionate, curious, attractive, amicable and open. This perfect social moment had been achieved, for perhaps a minute and a half, then left behind, many, many hours ago. The party had mutated into something new and terrible now—drinks had been spilled, thongs had ridden up into view, the expensive hi-fi speakers had been blown but were still thumping and buzzing. Voices were raised—frequently funny voices, and names weren’t so much being dropped as hurled. A huddle of groovy, stubbly boys (wearing T-shirts that read “Dislexic” and “Your point is…?”) were standing round the mixing desk, competitively shuffling their iPods, and the music had entered its ironic-pop phase. People were vogueing ironically, crunching broken glass to powder underfoot, or they were hunched together in tight little groups, shouting and flirting aggressively. The whole room resembled a convention for drunk, deaf nymphomaniacs, and Stephen rolled invisibly through the crowd in the protective glass bubble of service, smiling blandly, keeping discreetly out of the camera-phone photos, pouring drinks and picking up abandoned half-full glasses, each one containing a lipstick-smeared cigarette butt. He found himself handing drinks to a tiny young woman in a spaghetti-strap dress, who was shouting up to a tall, thin, flamboyantly dressed man with a neat goatee that looked glued on, visibly perspiring under a tweedy fisherman’s hat; a mildly famous young actor who’d had some success playing snide, supercilious bastards.

  “…I mean, telly’s okay, it pays the bills,” said the woman, chewing gum as if her jaw had been motorized, “…but theater’s my first love. It’s soooo much more exciting, that one-on-one feeling, that sense that anything can happen. I tell you, I’d give up Summers and Snow in a flash—in a bloody flash—for a chance to do a funky little new play…”

  Stephen peered at the woman more closely and, yes, it was his old colleague, TV’s perky, independent-minded Constable Sally Snow, aka Abigail Edwards. Taking a glass from his tray, she caught his eye and gave what Stephen mistakenly took to be a smile of amiable recognition.

  “Evenin’ all!” he said cheerily, bending humorously at the knee.

  Constable Sally Snow wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry, do we…?”

  “We’ve acted together!”

  “Oh. Oh. Have we?”

  “Uh-huh. Last week, remember? Here’s a clue.” And he rolled his eyes up into his head, let his tongue loll out to the side. Abigail and the goateed man looked blank. “I was the Dead Guy? The killer’s fourth victim? On the mortuary slab? You fainted when the pathologist removed my lungs, remember?”

  “Oh, right, right. Of course! You’re Dead Guy.”

  Silence.

  “The name’s Stephen, Stephen McQueen. With a P-H, not the famous one!” he jabbered, thinking he might as well get it in first.

  “Obviously not,” drawled the man with the stuck-on beard, proving that his snide professional persona wasn’t much of a stretch, and Stephen had a sudden urge to tear his goatee off, or at least to enjoy trying.

  “So—you probably didn’t recognize me with my clothes on!” he said, turning to Abigail, but a burst of Van Halen’s “Jump” obscured the remark.

  “What did you say?” drawled the perspiring man, looking down at him from under drooping eyelids. Even through the mist of booze, Stephen realized the remark had been a mistake. He didn’t want to repeat his mistake, but saw no alternative.

  “I said, she probably didn’t recognize me with my clothes on!”

  “What?” said the man again, his hand cupped to his ear.

  Working on the principle that a remark gets funnier the more it is repeated, Stephen said, “She probably didn’t recognize me with my clothes on.”

  “We can’t hear you.”

  “I said, she probably, she probably didn’t, I said she probably didn’t—”

  “Speak up, please.”

  “I said, she probably didn’t recognize me—”

  “One more time…”

  “I just said that she probably—”

  “Again?”

  “She probably didn’t—”…and Abigail Edwards put a sympathetic hand on his forearm, as if she were visiting a fan in hospital. “We can hear you. Ignore him. He’s just teasing you.”

  Oh, right, I see. Well, in that case, maybe he’d like to just go fuck himself? thought Stephen, before noticing the expression on their faces, and realizing that he’d actually said it too. The three of them stood, saying nothing, the man smirking and sniggering through his nose, invulnerable, Abigail biting her lip and glancing around the room, and it occurred to Stephen that if the building were any higher than two stories, he would definitely follow Van Halen’s advice, and go ahead, and jump.

  “Will you excuse us, we’ve got to…” said Abigail finally, not even bothering to finish her excuse. “Come on…,” and Constable Sally Snow grabbed the goateed man, and tugged him away, as if taking him into custody. As he left, the man placed his empty glass onto Stephen’s tray.

  “More washing up for you, I’m afraid.” He grinned, winked, turned and left.

  Stephen stood for a moment, rocking back and forward slightly. Any last traces of boozy bonhomie he’d salvaged from Nora had evaporated now. He felt unwell. No, worse than unwell. He felt…damned. This was hell. And hell was not just other people, it was specifically these other people. He became aware that
the glasses on his tray were starting to chink together dangerously, as in the early stages of an earthquake…

  “Excuse me? Hello…?”…and that someone was speaking to him…

  “Hello, there? Anybody hoooo-oooome?”…An extremely small, astoundingly beautiful young woman, one of the Hot Young Brits Currently Turning Heads in Hollywood, was frowning up at him from some distance below, sucking a lollipop. “The Bitch Is Back,” said the curly writing on her T-shirt. Stephen read this, and smiled, and then felt a sudden urgent need to emphasize that he was reading her T-shirt, rather than staring at her breasts.

  “ ‘The Bitch Is Back’!” he said aloud, delighted to have defused what might otherwise have been a potentially embarrassing moment.

  “Yes, yes, all right, very clever, now listen—we’ve spilled some red wine,” said the Hot Young Brit, pulling the lollipop from her mouth and waggling it at him. “Could you get some salt, please? If it’s not too much trouble?”

  “Absolutely. Salt,” and unthinkingly he handed the tray of dirty glasses down to her, which she took instinctively, then stood and looked at in confusion, holding it at arm’s length, as if she’d been handed the head of John the Baptist.

  “Exceeeuse me!” she drawled, but Stephen was gone, heading directly away from the kitchen and the salt, and seeking refuge, for the second time that night, in the toilet.

  Miraculously, there was no queue, presumably because everyone was too far gone to find the thing, and with huge relief, Stephen locked the door behind him. The bathroom was a very different place from the rubber-and-gun-metal showroom he’d hidden in five, no, God help him, six hours ago. Even above the heady scent of the Diptyque candles you could smell the drugs and the asparagus wee. He sighed and leaned over the toilet, his arms outstretched before him, as if about to be frisked.

  Did it have to be like this? Weren’t drunk actors meant to be lovable? Wild, carousing, boozy testosterone-fueled men, Burton, or Harris, or Flynn or his own namesake; bighearted, irresponsible forces of nature, filling rooms with convulsive laughter, their wild, irrepressible, boozy charm melting the hearts of beautiful women. It seemed unlikely Stephen would be melting any hearts tonight. Clinging to the cistern, Stephen wasn’t even entirely sure that he was capable of peeing effectively, and he remembered, far, far too late, that “lovable drunk” lay just outside of his range. Booze didn’t make him anarchic or funny or daring or louche. It didn’t make him irrepressible; if anything, it made him repressible. It was like some terrible self-inflicted injury, as if he’d elected to be repeatedly run over. Like any schoolboy, he knew it was a bad idea to mix grape and grain, but to go grape/grain/antibiotics/grape/grain/grain/grape/antibiotics/grain/ grape/grain was beyond stupid. He decided to blame those mystery antibiotics. Even Errol Flynn knew not to drink on antibiotics.