The Understudy: A Novel

by David Nicholls

  “I just need to know.”

  “What does it say on the bottle, Doctor Steve?”

  “ ‘Take one half an hour before going to bed.’ ”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I took.”

  “Just one?”

  “One, maybe two.”

  “Maybe more than two?”

  “I don’t remember!” She picked up a pillow, hugged it over her face. “Now, for cryin’ out loud, Stephen, just go to bed and let me sleeeep, will ya?”

  Stephen tugged the pillow away from her. “You can’t sleep, not just yet. Let me make you some coffee.”

  “I don’t want some coffee.”

  “But you’ve drunk all this booze, Nora.”

  “Soooo? I can handle my booze, unlike some people I can mention.”

  “At least sit up and talk to me for a while,” and he clambered onto the sofa, put his arm around her and hoisted her into an upright position. “Or we’ll watch the movie,” and he physically directed her at the screen, the kissing scene between Monroe and Curtis. “I think Curtis is really underrated as a comedian.”

  “Steeeve McQueen,” she mumbled, her voice low and mean, digging a finger into his chest. “Now, there’s a joke. What kind of a dumb name is that anyway? Your parents must have reeeeally had it in for you, Stevie-boy…”

  “Let’s just watch the movie, yeah…?” he said, his voice holding steady.

  “Jeeesus, Steve, you can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, really you can…”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  She flopped back against him now, in the crook of his arm. “I know you are, Steve, but all this helping, all this being ni-ice all the time, nice, nice, nice, nicey, nicey, nice, this whole mensch act, well, I don’t mind telling ya, it can really get on a person’s nerves, ya know? Really start to g-rate. In fact, to tell ya the truth, it can start to seem jus’ a liddle bit crr-reepy…”

  “You’re sure you don’t want that coffee?”

  And Nora suddenly wrenched herself away, scrambled to the other end of the sofa, turned and stared at him and shouted, “DIDNCHA HEAR? I SAID NO! FOR FUCK’S SAKE, STEVE, NO WONDER YOUR FUCKIN’ WIFE LEFT YA!”

  For a moment or two the room was silent as they sat at opposite ends of the sofa, glaring at each other in the flickering gray light. The words had felt so like a punch, that Stephen had actually put his hand to his head, and his mouth opened and closed again, starting to form words that he had to consciously prevent himself from saying.

  Nora wiped the corner of her wet mouth with the back of her hand, then let herself flop backward onto the sofa, curling up on her side, tucking her dress under her legs, closing her eyes tight.

  “Fuck you, Nora,” said Stephen, as if to himself.

  “Hey. Fuck you too, Stevie-boy,” she said quietly, but without conviction, and curled up even tighter.

  Stephen got up slowly, went into the kitchen and shut the door behind him. As a kid, when adults said “I need a drink,” he’d always wondered what they meant. Now he knew. Far too often these days, he found himself needing a drink. More than that, he found himself suddenly envious of Nora’s oblivion. Perhaps if he were to get as drunk and doped as she was, these things would matter less. This suddenly seemed like not just a reasonable plan, but an absolute necessity, and to this end he took a bottle of vodka down from the cupboard, poured a good three inches into a glass, and added some warm, flat tonic water. He saw that he still had the brown bottle of pills clenched tight in his hand and, without any clear idea of what this might achieve, he unscrewed the lid, popped one in his mouth, then drained the glass in one go.

  He poured himself another inch of vodka.

  He heard some noise from the next room, the sound of movement, then a sudden thump, the kind of noise a body might make, say, falling off a sofa. Stephen resisted the temptation to go and help, stayed where he was, emptied the glass again. Shortly afterward came a long, pained groan, the kind of noise you might make having just fallen off a sofa, then the sound of uncertain footsteps. Nora crouched in the doorway, bracing herself between the handle and the doorframe, cigarette packet in hand, her lips wet, her face completely white except for the dark smudges around her eyes, looking like a silent movie actress.

  “Hey,” said Stephen, struggling to stay stern. “How are you feeling?”

  “Just…awful,” she replied.

  “Forget it, we all say things we don’t—”

  “No, I mean, I think I’m going to throw up,” she blurted, and stumbled into the red bathroom.

  Witness

  They both huddled in the tiny room, his hand gently rubbing her back, or brushing the wet hair from her forehead. This intimacy would at any other time have been thrilling, but any romance or tenderness was undermined by the remnants of his anger, and by Nora being sick, repeatedly and volubly, into the washbasin. This went on for some time, so long in fact that Stephen got two chairs, and squeezed them in, so that she might at least throw up in relative comfort.

  They sat there largely in silence, or at least without speaking, and when at last it seemed to have come to an end, Nora finally said, in a rasping voice, “Love what you’ve done to this place.”

  “Thank you.”

  She raised her head from the basin. “Okay—I think that’s the last of it.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  She flopped back in her chair, smiled at him. “Well, it’s good to see, after all the shitty things that have happened today, that you and I still know how to have a good time.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Uh-oh—Doctor Steve’s back.” She put her hand to her head, then to her stomach. “I feel in-ter-esting. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask to borrow your toothbrush. I have my own, in my bag.” Stephen went to get it, taking the chairs with him, then returned and watched from the doorway as she laboriously brushed her teeth with one hand and reached for her cigarettes with the other, and thought about how she sometimes reminded him of an unusually metropolitan trawler skipper.

  “D’you want a shower, maybe? Freshen up a bit.”

  “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.” He reached past her, and set the shower running, then went back into the living room to find some fresh clothes for her to wear. He found a clean T-shirt in a drawer, a pair of tracksuit bottoms in the laundry bag, and returned to the misty bathroom.

  He was immediately reminded of the scene in Witness, where Harrison Ford’s jaded Philly cop sees shy Amish widow Kelly McGillis bathing, and there is a shared look of intense yearning between them. There were no yearning looks in this instance, or none that he could discern anyway, because Nora was in the process of trying, and failing, to pull her dress off over her head. The dress was the same one she’d been wearing when they’d first met at Josh’s party—old, black, beautiful, shiny with wear at the shoulders and bottom—but she had attempted the maneuver without undoing the buttons at the shoulder first, and there was a kind of louche escapologist’s wriggle going on, as she stood, mottled and pale, knock-kneed in mismatched underwear and a pair of sagging black tights, attempting to yank the dress past her chin with one hand, and using the other hand, in which she held the lit cigarette, to prevent herself tumbling over into the shower stall. Suddenly feeling a little Amish, Stephen chivalrously attempted to fix his gaze on a polystyrene ceiling tile.

  “Need a hand?” he said, to make his presence known.

  “Someone turned the lights out, Doctor,” she giggled from within her dress.

  “Okay, hold on,” and he stepped forward just as she tumbled toward him, grabbing his arms by the elbows, leaning into him, and pushing him back against the wall. She stood there for a while, laughing now, her body pressed against his, as he very carefully attempted to unbutton the dress from the inside out.

  “Ow! Hair, hair!”

  “Stay still, then.”

  “I’m trying…”

  A button popped off, and he palmed it into his hand. “Okay, I’ve got
it—hold on,” and he bunched the dress up in both hands, pulled hard, and hoped that she didn’t hear the sound of tearing fabric. After a moment she opened one smudgy eye, then the other, but didn’t move away from him, in fact moved closer, and they stayed there for a moment, his hands on her bare back, damp now with steam and sweat, supporting her weight, their noses touching, her hip bone pressed hard into his belly, poised halfway between a slow dance and a brawl.

  Nora started to laugh, a thick, woozy chuckle. “Well, this is…interesting,” she murmured, her cheek pressed against his now.

  “It certainly is.”

  “Care to join me?” she whispered in his ear.

  His hand had somehow found its way beneath her bra strap, and her skin felt soft and warm, but her breath smelled of cigarettes, toothpaste and whisky, and something else that he didn’t care to think about.

  “I’d ask you to dance, but my pantyhose appear to be falling down,” she murmured.

  With as much suaveness as he could muster, he reached around to the back of her thighs, grabbed the material, and tugged upward. “There you go.”

  “Thank you kindly, young man. So—care to dance?”

  “Dance? No, I think I’d better leave you to it.”

  “Oh,” she pouted. “Oh—okay. Party-pooper.”

  “Maybe another time.”

  “Yeah, maybe. May-be.” She grinned, and slowly winked one smeary eye.

  “Shall I take that, or do you want it in the shower with you?” he said, indicating the cigarette that was currently smoldering against the plastic shower curtain.

  Frowning, she brought the cigarette up to eye level, held it close and examined it curiously, as if someone had wedged it between her fingers without her permission. “Maybe not,” she murmured, shrugged, placed it between her lips, then passed it to Stephen, who did the same, noting that the end was slightly damp from her mouth. Nora was staring at him intently now from under heavy eyelids, her lips slightly pouting, in a lush, boozy parody of seductiveness, and in the search for something to do, Stephen leaned across and dabbled his fingers under the shower head.

  “Hot?” asked Nora.

  “A little hot. Want me to turn it down?”

  “No, I like it hot.”

  Stephen started making his humming noise.

  “Hey, are you nervous, Doctor?”

  “Why would I be nervous?”

  “Your nostrils are flaring, Doctor.”

  “Yeah, that happens sometimes.” He brought his hand up and pinched them together. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Doctor—I liiiike it.” She pressed her hips harder against his, and he felt a sudden sharp pain in his groin, as if he’d walked into a table. Her eyes were closed now, her face tilted up toward his, and he realized that he could almost certainly get away with kissing her. He considered the possibility. Was kissing something you should “get away” with? There was, it had to be acknowledged, a queasy, inebriated eroticism in the situation, and while this wasn’t an entirely bad thing, the “doctor” joke was irritating him, as was the sense that this addled seduction was less the manifestation of an unspoken sexual attraction, more the result of a cocktail of whisky and pills and getting even. And as for that “I like it hot” line…He was, he decided, too old and too sensible to be grinding hip bones like this. With some effort, he decided not to kiss her, a decision clarified for him by Nora visibly suppressing a bilious belch, then changing color and pushing him to one side to get to the washbasin.

  “You okay?” he asked, back in doctor mode.

  “I think so. I think maybe…maybe I should have that shower.”

  “So you think you can…do the rest by yourself?”

  “I think so. If not, I’ll holler.”

  “Well—you know where I am…”

  “I know where you are,” she said, looking up from the washbasin, and giving him a queasy smile.

  He smiled back, closed the door, then went and lay on the sofa, watching the DVD play out on the white wall, Monroe sitting on the piano singing “I’m Through with Love” with the volume on mute.

  Nora reappeared fifteen minutes later, dressed in the clean T-shirt, makeup removed, mute and pale and seemingly more sober now, clutching her aching ribs. She smiled and frowned at the same time, and, head down, crossed to the sofa and lay down with Stephen, curling in front of him. They lay there for some time looking at the glow of the fake coals on the electric bar fire, as the moisture from her damp hair soaked through his clothes to his skin.

  “Every time I close my eyes, the room starts to spin.”

  “Don’t close them, then.”

  “But I’ve got to. I’m so tired.”

  “Well, just lie here with me for a while. You’ll feel better soon.”

  “Soon?”

  “Eventually.”

  She shifted her position so that she was looking at the ceiling, her legs draped over his.

  “This has got to be the worst twenty-four hours of my life.”

  “Me too. Well, top five.”

  She looked at him, concerned. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you another time.”

  She sighed, and curled up tighter.

  “What are we going to do, Steve?”

  “About Josh, you mean?”

  “About Josh. About everything.”

  “Nothing tonight. Let’s wait till morning. Talk then.”

  “You think things will be better in the morning?”

  “Not better. Clearer, maybe.”

  “Why do you bother, Steve?” she murmured.

  “With what?”

  “With me. Why do you put up with it? What’s in it for you?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Nora exhaled deeply, and closed her eyes, and Stephen leaned toward her so that he could see her face. Two small crescents of toothpaste were drying in the corners of her mouth, and he had a sudden desire to wipe them away with his thumb and forefinger. She must have sensed him watching her, because she suddenly shifted position, flipping on her back and turning to face him.

  “What time is it?”

  “Half-two.”

  “Oh God,” she groaned. “We should try and sleep, I guess.”

  “Okay. You have the bed, I’ll have the sofa.”

  “I know I’m meant to argue, but I’m too tired.” She closed her eyes. “Unless…”

  “What?”

  “Unless we slept together. I don’t mean make out or anything. Just, you know—for warmth, whatever.”

  “I can’t, Nora.”

  There was a pause, and after a while she murmured, “Why not?”

  He could tell her, of course, but when he looked down at her face, her eyes were closed again, and her breathing had become slower and deeper, and there seemed no point in telling her while she slept. Besides, his leg had developed cramp, and was twitching disconcertingly, which he thought might undermine the moment. As if to emphasize the point, Nora had started to snore too, a surprisingly loud sawing noise. Her metropolitan trawler skipper’s snore.

  “Some other time, then,” he said quietly.

  In a film or a play, this would have been the moment where the hero would have lifted her up and carried her gently to the bed without waking her, but, realistically, there was a very strong probability of braining her on the coffee table, so instead he put his hand on her head, whispered, “Come to bed,” in her ear, and walked her over to the bed.

  “Can I sleep now?” she mumbled.

  “You can sleep.”

  Lying fully clothed on the sofa, he pulled his overcoat up over his shoulders, took one last look at Nora, then closed his eyes and sank into a sleep so deep that it felt like an anesthetic.

  Unresolved Sexual Tension

  He was woken the next morning by the smell of his own armpits.

  He peeled the cushion from his face, sat up and peered over at Nora. She was lying on her back, looking very pale and fragile, her mobile phone presse
d to her ear. Stephen watched silently as she frowned, sighed, erased a message, listened again, frowned again, sighed again, erased again…

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Just checking my missed calls.”

  “Two of those were mine.”

  “And the other forty-three?”

  “Ah. How is he?”

  “Well, the first five or six were apologetic, then he switched to anger, then he got kinda whiny, then defensive, abusive, and now he’s being…yes…sarcastic, I think…hard to tell. He sounds pretty drunk or wired or something. I locked him out without his keys, so God knows where he’s calling from.” She hung up the phone, slumped back onto the bed. “He sounds in a pretty bad way. I should call him, I guess.”

  “Yes, but…not just yet.”

  “No, not just yet.” She groaned and turned over on her side to face him. “So—I should apologize. For the bits I can remember, at least. I’m sorry, I haven’t been that wasted since my wedding day.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “But I should at least try and explain. You’ll have to come over here, though. I can’t feel my legs.”

  He stood, crossed and lay next to her on the bed.

  “The thing is, I got a little blue and had a little too much to drink, that’s all. I was trying to drown my sorrows, and I guess I must have held their head under a little too long. I wouldn’t want you to think it was anything more…melodramatic than that. Okay?”

  He took hold of her hand. “Except it wasn’t just the booze, was it?” “I just wanted a little oblivion for a while. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “So—subject closed?”

  “If you want.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay—subject closed.”

  She nudged him with her shoulder, and leaned forward to look at him. “Anything else we need to talk about?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Well, I seem to have these mysterious bruises on my hips, and I have a terrible idea that I may have got them by hurling myself at you.”