Brenda Monk Is Funny (10 page)

The gig finished and Fenella bought Brenda another drink.

‘That was good. You were good.’

‘No, I wasn’t, don’t be ridiculous. They were laughing out of charity and they weren’t even laughing that hard.’

‘No, it wasn’t just charity. Some of it was them just being nice, but you had a couple of pretty good shots, and you looked right up there. Not everyone does, you know. You stood right, and that’s just pure instinct. I knew you had it.’

‘Oh come on. I made a few awkward, crap remarks about Jonathan and got off.’

‘OK, the jokes could use some work. You liked it though, didn’t you?’

‘No, it was awful. I can’t believe you did that to me.’

‘Brenda, you liked it.’

‘No.’

But she had liked it. And the reason she knew that was that she hadn’t felt this alive for months. On the bus on the way home she stared out of the window, tingling all over, thinking about what she’d said onstage and how she could improve it. She was already ‘working on her material.’ It had felt good and powerful up there and it wasn’t just about getting some control over her own life, her own story, back from Jonathan. There was something more than that. One moment stood out in her mind, as if it were made of diamonds: there had been a second where she had looked out at the faces of the audience and thought, ‘I could say anything I want to. I could say anything I want to.’ She was reeling from that one moment alone. The rest was just a matter of writing some jokes.

Brenda lay in bed trying not to ring Jonathan. She felt on some level that he would not be pleased to hear about it, even though he would pretend to be delighted.

‘I always said you were funny, Bren,’ he would say sweetly, ‘you should go for it. I’ll help any way I can.’

There, she already knew what he would say, so no need to call. And she knew what he would mean, too: ‘Let me control this so that it doesn’t get out of hand. And also, what are you using for material? Because I might need it.’

So, if you know what someone will say, and you know what they mean, why do you need them at all? Brenda wondered consciously.

She sat up and pulled an old, empty envelope and pen out of her handbag and scribbled down what she had said on stage that night. Then she placed it carefully on her bedside table and went to sleep.

She woke to a text from Jonathan. Sometimes she wondered if he was telepathic as the few times he initiated contact always seemed to coincide with some seismic shift in her world.

‘I miss you. I hope you miss me.’

Interesting. He’d only been gone a week.

Another text, from Fenella.

‘When you going back on then? Got 5 for you tomorrow in Ealing. Don’t say no.’

Brenda amused herself for a moment with a little imaginary farce involving sending the wrong reply to the wrong text, and then decided to send the same text to both.

‘Yes.’ Yes.

One felt right, one felt wrong, because if she was brutally honest, she didn’t miss Jonathan all that much.

Ealing was a pain to get to. A bus, and two tubes, then a walk to the club. Fenella met her at the door and walked her in.

‘I’m giving you five of my minutes again. I’ve cleared it with Jo. I’m also giving you fifty quid which is a quarter of what I’m getting. Don’t get used to it, I just want to give you a sense of how it feels.’

Brenda’s mind boggled – she was getting paid? This was extraordinary, she wasn’t even that funny.

‘Have you been working?’

‘Not really, I can’t concentrate in the office.’

‘No, not that. I mean, working on your jokes?’

‘Oh, yes, constantly, I can’t think about anything else.’

‘Have they improved?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, we’ll find out tonight, won’t we?’

‘Yup.’

Brenda steeled herself. She decided not to go to the green room backstage. She’d sat in enough green rooms with Jonathan to know how it would be – too much psychological warfare for her liking and she didn’t feel ready to cope with it. She ordered a drink and sat at the bar, watching the audience drift in. It was a Thursday night so this was an after-work crowd looking for something to make an early start into the weekend. It wouldn’t be rowdy as they would be mindful of hangovers the next morning, but it would be cheerful. They would listen, that was the thing. In many ways the Thursday night crowd was the ideal audience for stand-up: in a good enough mood to laugh, but not so drunk they didn’t care what you said and often they were real comedy buffs who themselves preferred to avoid the weekend crowds. Jonathan had taught her that, and at the thought of him, Brenda’s stomach tightened. Why did she feel like she was cheating on him here, and yet not when she had slept with Pete?

The lights went out.

Brenda watched Fenella come on and give a few opening warm-up lines. The crowd were on her side immediately. She put them at ease and opened herself to receive the laughter she knew would erupt when and where she wanted it. Brenda knew what was coming, and nervously looked around the upturned faces that stretched between herself and the front of the stage. In a moment, Fenella would bring her on to do her five minutes. Then she would be up there, and the space she now occupied would be empty. Amazing how even the most banal and simple of thoughts now took an eternity to ticker across her mind. She felt that she was watching Fenella through glass and the words were muffled and unreal. Then she heard her name and forced herself off the stool and up to the low stage.

She took the mic from Fenella and faced the crowd.

Something was wrong, she could feel it immediately. There was not the warmth she had picked up from the audience at the new material night, this was more like a cool, detached interest. ‘They’ve paid money to see Fenella,’ Brenda thought rapidly, ‘they don’t want me. This isn’t fun and cute for them – I’m annoying them just by being here.’

She looked into the face of a young woman at the front. She was looking straight back at her. She felt she had disappointed her already and nothing she could say now would change her mind. This thought process felt as if it had already stolen at least half of the now seemingly endless five minutes that stretched in front of her. ‘About a pop song and a half,’ she thought unexpectedly. In reality it had lasted about four seconds, but that’s enough to put people off. She opened her mouth to speak.

‘My boyfriend’s a stand-up comedian. He thinks I’m an arsehole, literally. But I am, so it’s OK… It’s OK. He pumps me for material, literally.’

Silence, actual silence.

She’d totally screwed that up. The pacing was off, there was no charm to it and she was now staring straight up at the bright white spotlight that illuminated her, way over the heads of the crowd. She was not engaging them, or even communicating with them. Blood pounded through her head and a rushing was in her ears. It felt unreal, like the most clichéd of anxiety dreams.

‘We’re getting married next week so he’ll have enough material for a tour.’

A polite laugh from roughly three people.

Nobody believed her. Of course she wasn’t getting married next week. The set-up had no foundation so the punch had nothing to build on. By this point there was a tell-tale hum rising from the back of the room – people were starting to chat to one another in the darkness. A faint beeping sound and the chink of glass told Brenda that the bar was doing business. She had officially lost the audience.

Five and a half minutes later, Brenda practically ran off stage to sarcastic applause, face burning, acid in her throat. How she had stayed up there and even run longer than her allotted time was a mystery she wasn’t interested in solving.

Fenella muttered to her as they crossed, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. I’ll see you after my bit,’ and tipped up to the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, that was our rookie comedian Brenda Monk doing her second ever gig. She’s got guts, hasn’t she?’

The audience cheered, relieved to have someone on stage who knew what they were doing.

Fenella delivered her fifteen minute masterclass and found Brenda skulking outside.

‘That was a fucking horror show,’ Brenda blurted. ‘I’m never doing this again. What the fuck was I thinking? What the fuck were you thinking?’

Fenella pressed £50 in cash into Brenda’s hand.

Brenda tried to give it back but Fenella wouldn’t allow it.

‘No, you take it. You earned it. A new stand-up would snap my arm off for fifty quid. You did your five minutes. You stayed up there.’

‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous. I haven’t earned anything. You gave me five minutes and I totally screwed them up.’

‘OK, you were too mannered, too prepared, you stared up at the lights instead of looking at the audience and your voice went all weird and shrill. But apart from that, it was good.’

Brenda laughed and handed back the money.

‘Seriously, I’m not taking this.’

Fenella held it in her hand.

‘I’ll take this back on the condition that you do one more gig. Without me. Just one more. I’ll set it up for you and we’ll meet twice before it to work through your stuff. Then just do the gig and if you still hate it then I’ll leave you alone.’

Brenda considered this.

‘Why are you even bothering with me?’

‘To annoy Jonathan.’

Brenda laughed.

‘No, really, why?’

‘To annoy Jonathan.’

‘Ha ha. But seriously?’

‘Seriously, to annoy Jonathan.’

Brenda did not make any attempt to control her face. She was defeated and annoyed – did all roads lead back to Jonathan? Fenella adjusted her posture and looked Brenda straight in the eye, focused now.

‘OK, not just to annoy Jonathan. Although that will be a pleasing by-product when he finds out. I think you could be good, that’s all. There’s something about you, you know there is. Jonathan wouldn’t be with you otherwise. He might be a wanker but he’s not an idiot. And since he’s been with you, he has improved no end. I think it would be exciting to see you take back your material – I’ve never seen anyone do that before. So many comedians mine their relationships for jokes, but when do you ever hear the other side of the story? Never. It’s an experiment, think of it like that. I’m Frankenstein and you’re my monster, and I love comedy, that’s the truth. I love seeing something new happen in comedy. Aren’t you curious, Brenda? Haven’t you always been just a little bit curious, all those times you sat watching Jonathan, hearing your words come out of his mouth? Didn’t you wonder whether you could do it too? Maybe even do it better?’

Brenda stared at her shoes. She had wondered that. Many times.

Brenda met with Fenella twice over the next fortnight, and together they got ten minutes of material to some kind of standard. Brenda would stand in front of Fenella and deliver the jokes, a process she found excruciating. They picked over the precise wording of every line. Was it funnier to call Shrek a fascist rather than just racist? Or was fascist too much, and would kill the joke? Maybe right wing was better, funnier to give the audience the image of an old Tory buffer than some German mass-murderer? But then, racist had more punch. They found the rhythm in each set up, and the beats so that an extra unexpected line might get tagged on to the end which would flip the original premise nicely. They tried different versions, and grouped ideas so they flowed – a move from Shrek to Jane Austen in a way that felt conversational and natural, if such a thing were possible.

When Fenella decided she was as ready as she could be with almost no actual stage experience, Brenda vehemently disagreed, but resistance was futile. On their second date Fenella announced she had got Brenda an unpaid ten minute slot at a second tier comedy club in Balham two nights later. Fenella herself would be in Birmingham but she would call Brenda after the show. Brenda took this information home with her in a tightly wrapped little parcel of anxiety and sat fiddling with it sleeplessly for the next two nights. At work she stared at her computer screen, until the moment arrived when she could leave on the day of the gig, at which point she bolted out of the door and went to a nearby bar where she sat until it was time to get on the tube and head to the south east of the city. She had made the tactical decision not to go home, knowing somehow that she would not leave again that night if she did.

Brenda arrived early to the club. It was an affectionately regarded subterranean dive which had hosted a raucously successful monthly comedy night called Snort for years, booked and overseen by a grizzly monument of a man named Marvin. Brenda tentatively pushed open the door. Inside the room was empty and expectant. The main lights were on, and so somehow it felt naked and exposed – this was a room designed for darkness. There was a girl behind the bar with green hair, wearing a T-shirt with the name of a band Brenda was not cool enough to have heard of printed across it. Brenda had met this girl before when she had accompanied Jonathan to a gig here but she didn’t know her name. She didn’t like Brenda, she remembered that much though. Brenda didn’t know exactly why but she had a vague idea that there had been some kind of one-night-stand with Jonathan back before he had met Brenda.

The girl was currently engaged in emptying a dishwasher of glasses and stacking them on the shelf below the optics in preparation for the evening’s show. As Brenda approached the metallic smell and cloying warmth of the steam from inside the dishwasher hit her full in the face like a vomit cloud. Brenda stopped for a moment and gagged. The girl looked up.

‘Jonathan’s not here,’ she said and turned away.

‘Yes, I know he’s not,’ said Brenda. The girl shrugged.

‘Broken up, have you?’

‘Is Marvin out the back?’ Brenda asked.

‘Dunno. It’s a bit early for Marvin…’

‘OK, thanks.’

Brenda walked past the bar, fighting an urge to mess up the arty arrangement of beer mats advertising liquorice-flavoured shots and went over to the matt black door laid discreetly into the matt black wall to the side of the stage. Ah yes, the stage. There it was. Four black blocks on steel legs, each around a foot high, jammed together in front of a heavy black drape. A microphone in a microphone stand, its long wire snaking away down to the side, and off. And that was it. Nothing funny about this stage. Nothing funny at all. The only funny thing about this stage was who was on it. And in about an hour that would be Brenda, for a full ten minutes.

Within the rush that suddenly surged through her brain she managed to note a tiny tingle. A kernel of madness, as yet unpopped by the heat of the stage. A sliver of thrill. She would either make this room funny tonight or she would be enveloped in its silent blackness, buried alive in the softest of shrouds. She would either kill or die. For that was the language of stand-up comedy and where she used to roll her eyes at the overblown, absurd masculinity of these war-like epithets suddenly, in a white flare, she got it. She was a warrior, a gladiator, a…

‘Mini-Egg?’

Brenda turned round to find Marvin standing behind her, holding a yellow bag of sugar-coated chocolate. Brenda took a handful and started crunching them hard, grateful for a new noise inside her brain.

‘Still up for it, then?’ Marvin raised a wiry grey eyebrow.

Brenda tipped her chin to a scornful angle and sucked her teeth.

‘Of course. What do you think I am? I’m going to fuck this place up. You’ll never have seen anything like it in your life. You’ll be begging me to stop before someone ruptures something…’

Marvin raised a hand to stop the flow and Brenda abruptly shut up. Aware she was now breathing heavily through her nose, she felt her breasts rising and falling – too big, too big, too cumbersome, not flat and swift and aerodynamic enough for this – and a redness creeping up around her neck. She was a fraud. She was sure they both knew it, and her pathetic imitation of the combative style of the more established stand-ups as they psych-ed each other out backstage only served to underline the point. This was a terrible mistake. She could leave now and no-one would think any the less of her. Well, except for Brenda herself, but what did that matter? She’d let herself down before. Jesus, if you can’t let yourself down from time to time then we’re all doomed, and anyone who says different has clearly never been on a diet. Marvin knew she would fail. It was obvious. She’d be on stage, the yawning silence threatening to swallow her whole. She’d forget all her jokes. Word would get out that she, Brenda Monk, Jonathan Cape’s on-off-on-fuck-buddies-as-an-experiment-on-off-let’s-just-try-being-friends-for-a-bit-on-off-definitely-now-off-ooops-on-again girlfriend had actually thought she was funny. That would be the biggest laugh of the whole evening.

She framed herself to turn and leave just as the doors swung open and in swaggered Rossly Barns, a rangy, long-haired Australian comedian in grey jeans, studded belt, large boots and a leather jacket, whose own personal confidence, won from years of experience, appeared to know no bounds.

‘Hey, Brenda. Is Jonathan on tonight, then?’

‘No.’

Brenda jumped as she heard her voice come out deep and low, with a strong West Country accent. Then she realised it was Marvin talking.

‘Brenda is.’

Rossly’s reaction said it all. He pretended to collapse and die on the floor. It was a long, loud, drawn out death and when Brenda looked round, she could see the girl behind the bar laughing ostentatiously.

‘Get up, Rossly. A woman pissed herself right there last week,’ Marvin said.

Rossly stopped and leapt to his feet.

Brenda smiled at him sweetly, offering her hand as he steadied himself.

‘So you’re going on, are you, sweetheart?’

‘Yup. So you’d better dust your best jokes off or you’re going to look pretty amateur.’

‘Strong words, female, strong words. No Jonathan?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, let me say this. If you’re funny tonight I’ll fuck your brains out, how about that?’

Rossly had a glint in his eye that was not unappealing. He had a reputation for somehow getting away with the most profoundly crude material, and not for nothing. Brenda looked at him, breathing in the thickened atmosphere produced by a combination of recklessness and control – a comedian’s two principal weapons of choice. She could learn from Rossly.

‘And if I’m not funny?’

He paused. Perfect timing.

‘I’ll still fuck your brains out. I’d say that’s a pretty good deal for you, babe.’

And then Brenda started to feel excited.

‘And for you too,’ she said, ‘you get to fuck me either way.’

‘Either way, eh?’ Rossly arched an eyebrow. ‘How about both ways?’

Brenda let out a shout of a laugh. Rossly regarded her for a second, clearly assessing the impact of his little witticism and then, having made a mental note of the gag and rated it according to his own personal criteria, he moved off with Marvin, striking up a conversation about the running order. Brenda followed them to the matt black door in the matt black wall that led backstage and walked through.

The door led straight into a small shabby room with a toilet cubicle to one side and another door at the far end. Beyond which lay an even smaller room that served as Marvin’s office where Marvin and Rossly were bending over the desk, scrutinising the order in which the comedians would go on. Brenda guessed that Rossly was trying to make sure he had the sweet spot: the first act on after the interval when the crowd would be nicely warmed up, refreshed from a short break but not too tired to listen and laugh. This was surely why Rossly had turned up early. A comedian of his calibre would never normally bother to arrive until half an hour or so before the show started, at the earliest, so Brenda idly wondered what his agenda was. Perhaps he knew something she didn’t. Perhaps there was to be someone important in the audience that night.

Next to the office was a man-sized space with a worn red velvet curtain hanging over it, slightly too short and too narrow, but big enough to enjoy a final hidden moment before stepping out into the full beam of the spotlight. The lack of a door here meant that the other comedians waiting their turn had to be quiet when the show was on, forced to listen to all the other acts, the triumphs and the tragedies. There was no escape from the pressing judgement of one’s peers here and the awareness of this silent, hidden audience was probably the most intimidating aspect of performing at this particular club. In other larger venues the green room was a distance away from the stage, with a door or two in between. At those places the stage time was almost a relief from the constant scrutiny of other comics, as when they were not required by architecture to keep quiet they lost interest in the gig itself and set out to good-naturedly destroy one another instead. But not here. There was to be no such relief tonight.

Beyond the curtain was the left wing of the stage. Beyond that, a microphone and the unknown. At some stage in the club’s history a rather half-hearted attempt had been made to make this cramped, claustrophobic space feel like a comfortable green room for several acts or a large dressing room for one. Perhaps when it was built there had been a sweetly innocent plan to have local theatre groups perform Tom Stoppard plays here but such an idea had been quickly stubbed out by the sheer force of economics. Stand-up comedy was cheap to put on and made a bomb at the bar. Local theatre groups required all kinds of expensive kit and attracted the kind of audiences that drank one slimline tonic and went home.

There were two mirrors edged with naked bulbs, or open sockets where the bulbs should be. They were never turned on. The room was lit instead by an old, brown-fringed table lamp on a small table in the far corner. It was dingy but necessarily so, in order to avoid any bleeding of light onto the stage from under the curtain during show time. Round the edge of three-quarters of the room was a waist height sideboard where actors might lay out their make-up and good luck cards. Given that no actors had ever entered this room and those comedians who considered make-up integral to their public image usually arrived with the mask intact, along with the fact that a good luck card at a gig would be a sign of weakness and therefore an open invitation to ridicule, there was nothing on this sideboard other than three or four stickily empty pint glasses, a barren ash tray or two – a hang-over from the days when smoking was legal back here – and a mysterious dildo no-one wished to claim, remove or touch.

There were a couple of cheap metal framed chairs with tatty red cushions half-attached and two small matching sofas which may well have looked inviting at some point in the mid-1980s. The carpet was stained in various hues and damp in the corner next to the toilet room. The toilet room had no door as such, just a wooden screen that could be dragged across the entrance, although the comedians usually didn’t bother. Partly out of genuine laziness, partly out of a desire to appear unbothered by suburban concerns for propriety and privacy. In short, this was not the sort of place Joan Collins would feel able to prepare to meet her public.

Brenda had been in this room a couple of times before but only in her capacity as Jonathan’s girlfriend. She had sat on the left sofa trying look self-sufficient and mildly disinterested, alert yet unimpressed – the demeanour of any comedian’s girlfriend who knew the ropes. She had always felt she was there by invitation and could be ejected at any time and so it had been important that her presence take up as little of the room as possible. Now, it was different. Now she was an act. She had a right to be there on her own terms and she must show that she was worthy of it. She must expand to fill the space, or be crushed by the others. If comedy was 80% confidence she needed to increase her confidence by around 79% within the next… Brenda checked her watch… forty minutes.

Rossly sauntered out of Marvin’s office.

‘I’ve told Marvin to put you on after me, babe,’ he announced. ‘You’re doing ten, right?’

‘Yeah, ten.’

‘You got ten?’

‘If I take it slowly…’

‘Better to do a fucking amazing seven and leave ’em panting than fuck it up with a slow ten.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Not as if you’re getting paid so Marvin doesn’t give a shit if you’re three minutes light, do you Marv?’

Marvin looked up from the desk.

‘Suits me better if she doesn’t go on at all. Ludo always runs long and people start to worry about their trains once it gets on for 11 o’clock’.

Rossly nodded.

‘There you are, babe. You don’t even have to go on, if you don’t want to…’

He left that hanging in the air like a malingering fart.

Brenda smiled. Rossly couldn’t help but try to psych her out, throw her off her stride. It was instinctive. No point getting pouty about it. It was part of the game.