Perfect Timing

by Owen Nicholls

“What the shit, pal?” she says as she gives him a shove, and me a hand up.

  The guy is white as a sheet, even for someone who gets Scottish levels of sunshine. I can see his hands are shaking and he has the same look in his eyes my brother, Dom, does, when he’s having an episode.

  “I’m all right,” I say, putting my hand in front of her to stop her swinging at the guy, who I can tell is suffering much more than I am with my skinned kneecap. He looks lost in himself, but my God there’s a soul screaming out. His eyes are the same color as mine—the color of Coca-Cola—and for a moment mine and his connect.

  He half mumbles an apology and starts to walk away.

  “Wait here,” I say to Julia and I run after him.

  “You all right?” I ask.

  He doesn’t stop walking; instead he quickens his pace.

  “Wanna come to a comedy show? It’s me and my friend, the one who wanted to punch you for ruining my jeans.”

  He looks down and clocks that my legs are bleeding through the denim.

  “Shit, shite, shit,” he offers in a weird mix of Scottish and English.

  “It’s all right.” I wiggle my leg like a cancan dancer to put his mind at ease. “Nothing broken. My name’s Jess. What’s yours?”

  He mumbles again, the name “Tom” barely making its way out of his mouth.

  To counter his silence, I start gabbling at a mile a minute. “I know what you’re going through, Tom. My brother has panic attacks all the time—he has this phrase he repeats to himself: ‘And. That’s. OK.’ Don’t know how or why, but it helps.”

  Tom suddenly stops walking and looks me in the eye again. I feel like I’ve seen this guy somewhere before. For some ridiculous reason, I lick my lips, as if he’s going to kiss me. That would be weird, right? Maybe I’ll kiss him. That’ll make him feel better. Wow. Turns out I get hungry and horny before a show.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologizes again. “I really am. But could you…fuck off?”

  As I stand, dumbstruck, he hightails it into the night. Leaving me with a bleeding leg, wet lips, and the weirdest feeling in my stomach I’ve had in a very, very long time. I return to an impatient Julia.

  “What was that all about?” she asks.

  “Dunno.” I shrug. “I offered him my hand in marriage but he declined. Woe is me.”

  “His loss,” Julia tells me as she links her arm through mine. “Right. Let’s go check out this venue.”

  Hill Street, Edinburgh

  Ten minutes later

  It quickly becomes clear that we’ve been had. The venue is gorgeous. Truly high-end. There’s a camera-crew setup that would make Spielberg shit his beard, and enough advertising on the stage to make it feel more like the QVC channel than a comedy venue. The idea that David Matthews could only just stretch to two hundred quid per act is laughable.

  “What the actual, Julia? I’ve seen royal weddings with less money.”

  “And to think we had to barter for anything.”

  “Dave Matthews is an arsehole.”

  Her eyes are wide as she takes it all in. She points up at the rigging.

  “Those lights are gonna give me a migraine.”

  She’s only half joking. Julia gets these horrid migraines after shows sometimes. The stress of it all takes a high toll on her. Bright lights and eating late are other triggers. In the past I’ve likened her to Gizmo out of Gremlins, but she doesn’t seem to like that much.

  David bounds across the stage, all smugness and light.

  “What do you think? Pretty neat, right?”

  “I think you could afford to pay us more than a couple of hundred quid, you tight bass.”

  His smugness amplifies as he looks up at the giant advertising banners showcasing the latest brand of sneakers that look exactly like these sneakers have looked for the past twenty years.

  “You named your price. And don’t forget the—”

  “The exposure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “And these!” David holds out two boxes of box-fresh trainers. He hands them to us. “You get to keep them!”

  “A gift. How generous of you. I’d rather have the cash equivalent, though.” I smile enough to let him know I might be joking. But this time he isn’t laughing.

  “Your contract. Remember? The shoes?”

  I look at Julia and she’s wearing the face of a kid who’s been caught eating all her Easter eggs on Good Friday. “Did I not tell you?” she asks, all innocence and light. The facade quickly crumbles and she fills me in on how the corporate sponsor has stipulated that all acts need to be clad in their footwear. She does this while begging my forgiveness.

  “It wasn’t so much a lie. More an omission of the truth. I thought you might go all Bill Hicks on me, the righteous angry comic, raging against artists working as salesmen.”

  “Because I would have!” I holler back.

  What Julia has really done is not only instantly forgivable, but also incredibly generous. She’s made it so that I get to have the high ground, principles intact, in the knowledge that it would be beyond crazy to travel to Edinburgh and then refuse a gig just because they made you wear a brand of trainers you probably would have worn anyway. Also. Free shoes!

  “Well. What can you do?” I shrug. She smiles in a way that suggests we both know her master plan has worked perfectly.

  “Still,” she counters. “If I’d known there was this kind of money in shoes, I’d have applied for a job in Clarks years ago.”

  Despite feeling like we’ve had a number done on us, we’re still both in very high spirits. It’s easily the most professional setup we’ve been a part of, and despite that same tiny Bill Hicksian voice telling me I’m a sellout, I’m really quite proud of me and Julia for getting here. After all, Mr. Hicks never had to try to make it in the world of comedy as a woman. His rigid set of principles might just have taken a little bending if he wasn’t born with that oh-so-privilege-making thing of testes and a knob.

  David returns and offers a hand to each of us in turn, pulling us up onto the stage. He tells us to get used to the space, that tonight we’ll be on second to last, and then retreats into the shadows. Julia looks at me and we beam. The space holds at least five hundred people, and with it being televised—on digital, but still—who knows how many earballs and eyeholes will be on us. The same thought seems to flash through Julia’s mind, and seconds later we are blasted with the full set of house lights.

  “Jesus!” I yell, shielding my own face from the retina-scorching filaments. The lights go off and someone yells an apology from the back of the stage. Julia squints heavily and we both file off the stage to be met by David.

  “You all right?” he asks Julia, and I’m suddenly hit with the nauseating thought of her getting sick.

  “I’m fine,” she offers breezily, but I can see her blinking and slightly wincing with her left eye screwed tight.

  “How long until we’re on?” I ask David.

  “A little over three hours.”

  Julia looks at her watch and presses some buttons, synchronizing the time. I blink away the big bright light from my eyes.

  “Is there somewhere quiet we can go, preferably without a bajillion lumens being shot into our eyeballs?”

  David leads us behind the stage and down a small corridor into a green room that’s painted blue. In one corner is a sink, a kettle, and a microwave. In the middle of the room, three tatty non-matching sofas are arranged in an almost-U.

  “There’s a bathroom through there.” David points to a door opposite the sink. “It’ll get a little crowded in here once the other acts turn up, but you should have some time.”

  His mobile rings. He pulls it to his ear with the fluid motion of someone who constantly talks on the phone. He whispers to us if we need anything we should shout and then disappears to more i
mportant problems. I run Julia a glass of water and sit her down on the middle sofa. Already looking pale, with her left eye pretty much all the way shut, she’s exhibiting all the signs of a major migraine.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Jess,” she says and I instantly feel all the frowning muscles in my face doing overtime.

  “You’ll be fine, mate. Three hours is plenty. What we’ll do is…you down that water, I’ll switch the light off and stand guard outside. You try and sleep it off. Deal?”

  She salutes me and I make my way out of the room, leaving her in total darkness. Suddenly my worst fear isn’t the two of us standing on stage getting heckled as corporate sellouts. Looking at the state she’s in, it’s clear there’s a fifty-fifty chance she won’t be able to go on. Which leaves me with a pretty shitty decision to make. Break our contract and take the two of us back to Sheffield with our tail between our legs, or go on solo and most probably tank. I hear the toilet flush from inside the room, and whatever was in the bowl goes down the pan along with our hopes of a good show.

  7

  One of Those Mystical Things

  Tom

  Thistle Street, Edinburgh

  August 2, 2015

  As I exit the bathroom I am plunged into total darkness. Which is odd because five minutes ago, as I sat in the green room alone, it was definitely fully illuminated.

  I scramble about for a light switch immediately outside the loo but to no avail. Unfamiliar with the layout of the room (I think there were some sofas in the middle and the exit is definitely on the other side of that), I begin to paw my way forward. On the second step, my shins hit what I assume is a coffee table. I let loose with a couple of quiet profanities and carry on inching my way to safety. I feel the wall and take the approach that if I just stay left I’ll find the way out. Like in a maze. As my head whacks into a shelf about eye level, I start to rethink this plan. Finding nothing else in my brain, I edge my way slowly along the wall until I finally find my salvation. A door handle.

  I stumble out into the corridor and immediately trip over. As my eyes become accustomed to the light, I see a familiar face looking down at me. I look at her knee to make sure it’s really her.

  “You all right?” she asks upside down, before her face lights up with glee. “It’s you! The guy who rugby tackled me outside the curry house. Tom, is it?”

  She puts out a hand and I take it, overcome with embarrassment, and clamber to my feet.

  “Somebody turned out the lights.”

  “Huh?”

  “In the green room.”

  “Oh yeah!” she says, full of enthusiasm. “That was me. My friend has a migraine. I say ‘friend.’ She’s my partner, too.”

  The second she says the word “partner,” the wave of discomfort, the overwhelming feeling of discombobulation I usually feel in the presence of someone of the opposite sex, completely evaporates. The idea that there is zero potential for me to let myself down in a romantic sense suddenly allows me to be a normal human being. Well, a normal male at least.

  “Yeah, she gets these terrible migraines. Bright lights and late eating usually trigger them.”

  “Like Gizmo,” I suggest.

  She lets out a squeal of joy at my reference and punches the air.

  “Exactly! That’s what I always tell her.” She pauses. “She does get wet, though.”

  As much as I’m strangely comfortable in her presence, the double meaning of this makes me go a shade of red that’s off the Dulux chart. Her face when she realizes what she’s said is a truly beautiful thing to behold.

  “I didn’t mean it like that!” she yells, before realizing her loud voice might wake up her partner. She whispers, “Although that is definitely going into the set.” It suddenly dawns on me that I’m fraternizing with the competition.

  “You’re in the show?” I ask.

  “I am! Well, if Julia comes round. We both will be. I’m Jess.”

  “I’m—”

  She interrupts. “Tom, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s weird. I swear I know you from somewhere. Other than when you violently stopped me buying Indian food.”

  It sounds like a line but, knowing I won’t be making a fool of myself for saying it, I reply that I feel exactly the same way. She asks me a few questions about where I’m from and we can’t pinpoint a single merging of lives.

  “Oh, well,” she concludes. “Must just be one of those mystical things.”

  It’s a weird sensation to suddenly experience how other people behave. If she were straight, there’s no way we’d be having this conversation. Not without me tripping over my tongue, sweating incomprehensibly, and genuinely making a huge tit of myself. That she’s incredibly attractive would be the first inhibitor. That she’s actively talking to me would be the second. As we continue to jabber away, I almost feel like a regular person.

  “What’s the name of your band?” she asks.

  “Wider Than Pictures.”

  “Oooh, arty. Do you play old-sad-bastard music? Is that your thing?”

  I know she’s teasing and I like it. Am I letting my guard down? Is this what that feels like? Oh, happy days!

  “No. It’s all new-sad-bastard music. You and…” I ask, waiting for her partner’s name.

  “…Julia.”

  “Is it all militant-feminist comedy?”

  “I don’t even have a comeback to that. It really is. We’ve caused actual riots in Conservative Clubs before.”

  I throw my fist up as if I’m about to start my own political movement. “Rock on, sister!” I must have nailed the tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation I was aiming for, because Jess laughs and steps closer.

  “How long have you and Julia been together?”

  She looks up and to the right as if accessing some secret calendar. Counting the days of their union. “Five years, eight months, and three days.”

  “That’s weirdly accurate.”

  “I just remember our first gig together.” She adopts a broad Yorkshire accent. “Like ’twere yesterday.”

  “So, you dated before you were in an act together?”

  She looks at me as if I’ve just announced I’m the King of Uzbekistan. Or as if I’ve just offered her a half-chewed biscuit. Half confusion, half disgust. She steps away from the little circle of trust we’d made.

  “Because I’m in a female double act, I must be gay?” There’s genuine rage in her voice and I take another step back.

  My stomach drops. The feelings of inadequacy, self-loathing, and uselessness flood my body again.

  “I’m so sorry. I really didn’t mean to…I just…when you said ‘partner.’ I don’t know…I just…”

  Brandon’s booming voice saves me. “You owe us twenty quid for the curry, mate.” I turn to see the band heading toward me.

  Jess steps in front of the door, just as Brandon grabs the handle.

  “You can’t go in there,” she instructs him.

  Christian steps up. “The guy out front said this was the green room. He said we could hang in here until the show starts.”

  I decide to step up, to do whatever I can to make up for my stupid error.

  “It’s rubbish in there. No drink. No atmosphere. Let’s just go back out. Watch the competition.”

  Colin shakes his head. “Some crap comics and a poet. No thanks.”

  I look over to Jess, who’s now in a real rage. She steps up to Colin, almost nose-to-nose.

  “Crap comics, yeah? What are you, then, faux-Arctic-Monkey-wannabe-douchebag?”

  I try not to grin at this, because I’m one of only a few people who know that Colin once walked into a barber’s with a picture of Alex Turner and asked for hair “just like this.” We’ve never stopped ribbing him for it. Instead, I step in and physically drag them
away before more words are hurled. Not one of the band has a violent bone in their body, but the look in Jess’s eyes leads me to believe she could really throw down. When all’s said and done, none of us fancy getting thrown off the bill or kicked in the balls.

  As they file away and out into the venue, I fight against the urge to just walk away and cut my losses. My usual modus operandi. You can usually count on me to quit, but not this time.

  “Jess. I’m really sorry about my mistake. Earlier. You know. And for them”— I point to the back of my band’s heads as they round the corner—“being a bit knobbish.”

  At this she cracks a half-smile.

  “It’s OK. I’m just a bit highly strung. Worried about my”— she flips up the bunny ears—“ ‘partner.’ ”

  I raise her half-smile with a full one.

  “Cool.”

  “Cool.”

  “Best of luck with the show.”

  “Yeah. You too.”

  I begin to walk away before I stop. Then, in the most uncharacteristically Tom Delaney move in the history of moves by Tom Delaney, I add, “Maybe I’ll see you after?”

  * * *

  —

  None of the other acts are bad. The first poet is great in fact. She’s got this unashamedly honest sexual-awareness thing going on. And she’s damn funny to boot. The act before us got the biggest reception by far, just for walking on stage. He’s midway through his third and final song. It’s just him and a guitar and crooning that might not be out of place on a cruise ship for the over-sixties.

  He can sing. Undoubtedly. All the right notes. But there’s a question I ask when it comes to other people’s music: Do I believe you? And, right now, as he’s singing about having his heart broken by an angel, I very much do not.

  Jess hasn’t been on yet. I haven’t gone back to see if her friend is doing better. As the nerves begin to rise, it’s our brief encounter outside the curry house that I keep replaying. Those three words she said her brother tells himself. “And. That’s. OK.”

  I don’t want to be here. “And. That’s. OK.”