Brenda Monk Is Funny (14 page)

A busy day passed – an internationally famous female pop star had posted pictures of herself to Instagram showing her sharing a bed with a top model, along with the caption ‘Me and the Missus’ and the media world had gone nuts. Brenda had done her duty and written a piece on the merits of lipstick lesbians. A somewhat dated phrase, but one that got as many clicks from male readers as female and so was still included in the headline. She also covered a press release from the Cabinet Office announcing their intention to find more women to bring into the government, as if all the women were currently hiding. And finally a quick blog for the paper’s website responding to an actor’s remark about British women having too high expectations in relationships that had clearly been taken out of context but filled a gap in the afternoon lull nonetheless. She replied enthusiastically to a text from Fenella about her progress, and more coolly to a text from Pete asking her to meet him for a drink the following night. She wanted to go, but she still instinctively played a little hard to get for some reason. She thought he could handle it. He didn’t seem fragile and Brenda liked that, it certainly made a nice change. And yet her habit of running when someone showed an interest was too hard to break and frankly, she couldn’t be bothered to analyse it much further – she had higher priorities than romance now.

Brenda felt a sudden and powerful urge to work on her material. She wanted to be good at this and she realised with a flash that this was the first time she had wanted to be good at something, or to work on something until she became good at it. At school she had been a perfectly fine student, and higher grades had come relatively easily. As had the 2:1 she had got without especially trying at University. She had always been perfectly capable and she now saw she had coasted along like this ever since. A newspaper traineeship came, the offer of a permanent position back when newspapers were not losing money hand over fist, her comedy reviewing which she enjoyed but didn’t devote herself to. It had all just been sort of…
Fine
. And nothing more than that. She had listened in wonder to others talk about their ambitions and wished she could point herself at something in the same way. But whenever she had tried (a homeopathy course had been a particular low point when she was politely ejected on the third evening for laughing) it had fallen short.

Now, by some miracle, here it was. And to think she had been living alongside it for the past year without even realising – she had been watching,
helping
others achieve the dream she should have been keeping tight hold of for herself. Her phone rang: Laura. She let it ring out and checked her diary. They had a dinner arranged that night, she had completely forgotten. Perhaps Laura was cancelling. Her voice message told her different.

‘Just checking we’re still on for tonight. See you about 7 at Millicent’s’.

Millicent’s: a vegetarian place in Soho. The kind of place that put daisies in tiny flowerpots on every table and proudly told you which village the couscous came from.

Brenda met Laura and Susie but was distracted throughout. They were in London for an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art of Tracey Emin’s line drawings, which they both enthused about whilst Brenda sat and tried not to look as if she was thinking about something else. Specifically how to develop her bit on Shrek, which she thought had some further potential she had not realised at the gig the other night.

‘Are you even listening?’

‘Yes!’

‘What did I just say?’

‘Something about Tracey Emin.’

‘But what?’

‘That she’s… better… than… people say?’

‘What’s on your mind, Brenda? Because if it’s not Pete then forget it because that’s what I want to talk about next.’

And so the conversation turned to Pete, as Brenda had known it would at some point. Laura was characteristically blunt.

‘What’s going on, then?’

‘Nothing. I mean, no, nothing official.’

‘Are you a member of the Royal Family?’

‘Not as far as I know but I haven’t researched that far back.’

‘So official, unofficial… What’s the difference? You’re either shagging or you’re not.’

‘OK, we’re shagging. Or rather, we have shagged.’

‘How many times?’

‘Laura!’

Brenda smiled to see Susie stepping in to remind her wife of social norms.

‘What? Sorry. OK. I don’t need to know how many times.’

‘You don’t
need
to know anything,’ Brenda said.

‘Agreed, but I love you and I like Pete. So I want to know.’

‘I like him, he seems… reassuring. I’m meeting him for a drink tomorrow night.’

‘Good, good. I’ve got a good feeling about it.’

‘That’s… great. Don’t do any spells.’

An awkward pause.

‘I mean it, guys.
No spells
.’

Susie shrugged and stirred sugar into her coffee. Laura looked out of the window. Brenda was defeated.

‘OK, but don’t tell me about the spells. Can you at least promise me that?’

‘No problem,’ Laura and Susie said in unison.

Brenda shook her head in amusement.

‘What was his ex like?’

‘Awful.’

‘No, not awful. Damaged.’

‘She cheated on him all the time.’

‘She had serious issues.’

‘How long were they together?’

‘About four years, on and off.’

‘So they might get back together again?’

‘No, not now. Pete’s done with it. I can tell.’

Laura said this with such finality and Susie did not contradict her, so Brenda believed it.

‘What does he do for a living?’

‘Why haven’t you asked him that, if you’ve done all this shagging? God, straight people are awful.’

‘I dunno. I was doing other things with my mouth.’

Susie’s hands went up to her ears before she could stop herself. Brenda knew that Laura had had affairs with men in the past but Susie had never seen a man naked and aroused in the flesh, and had no intention of ever doing so. Brenda laughed at her squeamishness.

‘He imports furniture.’

Brenda’s lip curled slightly and she tried not to look derisive.

‘Don’t be mean. It’s beautiful, the stuff he gets. It’s all Scandinavian design. That huge wooden table we’ve got in our dining room that you like so much? He got that for us at a 75% discount, so button it.’

‘OK, sorry. I just had images of him going on dreadful research trips to Bali and droning on about supporting the local communities over there by massively overpaying for antique chairs that were built last week by local men who laugh at him as soon as he’s on the plane.’

‘Ooh, you’ll cut yourself on that tongue one day.’

Brenda nodded with a glimmer of remorse.

‘Sorry, I’m too quick to judge, I know. As long as he’s not a hobby carpenter who’s
so in touch with the earth
in his spare time, I’ll cope. But if I catch him whittling on a Sunday afternoon I’m leaving.’

‘Just give him a chance, Brenda, OK? You’re used to pricks. It’ll take a minute for you to acclimatise to a non-prick.’

As soon as Brenda got home she poured herself a glass of wine and reached for a newly acquired Moleskine notebook (blank pages, always blank pages) and a pen and began to work on a set she could feel vaguely confident in. Her mind kept drifting back to Pete, with his mad, bad ex-girlfriend and his beautiful Danish furniture. Now she came to think of it his flat had been spectacularly tasteful, to such an extent in fact that Brenda had felt a little grubby even being in it, as if she spoiled the aesthetic.

What Brenda did next was the first act that marked her out as a comedian: she wrote it down. She made a note of this seemingly idle thought on how it felt to stand in the home of a man she was sleeping with and started toying with how she might turn it into a joke. This more than anything was the turning point – not the gigs she had done, not the gigs she had booked, but this. This act of writing down whatever was on her mind to see if it could be turned into material. She became immersed, making spider charts, circling words and drawing emphatic arrows from one to another –
Monk; Orgasm noise; Furniture; Whittling
– and it was 1am before she realised the time. For the first time she wanted to speak to Jonathan about something other than the status of their relationship. She wanted to talk to him about comedy. The trouble was, she was pretty certain he had no interest in talking about comedy with her unless it pertained directly to himself, and that was going to be a problem.

Pete was reading a book on his iPad when Brenda arrived twenty minutes late. He looked up and smiled as she apologised.

‘I got stuck in a meeting at work about digital policy for the next year and phones have to be turned over when the editor’s talking,’ she said, which was the truth.

‘It’s OK. I quite like it when people are late. It instantly gives me the upper hand.’

His eyes had a twinkle in them and Brenda sat down, relieved and pleased. For someone so apparently straight down the line, he did have the ability to surprise her and the mixture was enticing. Wine was ordered.

‘So, you import furniture.’

‘Yes, it sounds extraordinarily boring, doesn’t it?’

‘Well… No… I mean… You don’t do carpentry in your spare time, do you?’

Pete laughed.

‘No, do you?’

‘No. Well, I like DIY but no, I wouldn’t call myself a carpenter, no.’

‘Do you have anything in particular against carpenters?’

‘Maybe it was going to a very strict, oppressive Catholic school as a child. Jesus put me off them.’

‘You went to an oppressive Catholic school and it was carpentry you came out hating?’

Brenda laughed now and then immediately pulled her notebook out of her bag and wrote it down.

Pete watched her, amused.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s my new book for jokes. That was a good one. Can I have it?’ ‘Yes, you can have it. I can’t think what I’d do with it. Except maybe pull women and you’re here already, aren’t you, so what would be the point?’

Brenda blushed against her wishes and was annoyed with herself. Pete pretended not to notice.

‘So, have you got any more gigs booked?’

‘Err yeah. I mean, nothing big… Just a couple of open spots…’

‘Can I come?’

‘Oh, no, no. I’m not ready for that. I don’t want anyone I know there, it’d be too off-putting.’

‘OK. Can I still have sex with you afterwards, though?’

She wasn’t expecting that. She was about to object and then realised she liked it. And the tell-tale tightening between her legs confirmed it.

‘Maybe.’

‘That’ll do for now.’

‘Hey Pete, do I… do I… make a weird noise in bed?’

‘You snore a bit if that’s what you mean.’

‘It wasn’t what I mean, but now I feel even worse.’

‘What kind of noise?’

‘You know, like a noise at the end, like a strange one…’

Pete frowned a bit.

‘I can’t say I’ve noticed. I mean, you certainly sound like you’re enjoying it but frankly by that point I’m kind of caught up in what’s happening to me, so…’

Brenda nodded. She didn’t know if he was lying or just being a gentleman and though she would usually heap scorn on the concept of old fashioned courtesy, she suddenly found herself a little relieved that this man might spare her a little. That he had no desire to expose her any further than she wished to be exposed. Pete topped up her glass.

To say the evening went well would be an understatement of gross proportions. Two hours passed easily, turned into dinner and moved to Pete’s immaculate flat via the kind of taxi ride that would distract even the most conscientious of cab drivers. From taxi to hall, from hall to living room, from living room to dining table: the finest Swedish pine and strong and well built as one would expect with such a provenance, they certainly tested its structural integrity to its limits. Brenda didn’t ask about the ex-girlfriend and Pete didn’t ask about Jonathan. Brenda begged an early start and left Pete and his beautiful flat around 2am in a minicab, an arrangement to meet before the end of the week tucked into her smile.

The following morning Brenda sat down with her notebook again. Ten minutes. That was all Brenda needed for now: ten good, strong minutes. The journey proper started here. She had spent time going over and over her set, putting in the hours, tweaking it, honing it, trying to know it well enough to forget it. The idea that this ten minutes would become twenty, then an hour and so on seemed unreachable for now. A couple of texts with Fenella calmed her down a little, but she knew that in the most essential sense, she was on her own. No-one could go on stage for her – she could not send a replacement version of herself out there if the nerves got too much. And no-one was begging her to do it, either. There may be supporters, and in time even fans, but this was a path she would tread alone. If she had the precise combination of character traits that made it more appealing than frightening, the nerves would be overcome although perhaps never wholly conquered. The executioner is as lonely as the executed, but at least in comedy one could choose which to be. Brenda chose executioner, and this would inform everything she did from now on. She would kill. She would not die. At least, not if she could help it.

But when the next gig day came and Brenda found herself trudging down a rainy, wind-swept street in North London, she felt bleak. It was a cheerless late November weekday evening and people carried themselves as if braced for the winter that lay ahead. She suddenly felt that she did not want to do this. All the blood seemed to have drained from her body, leaving a joyless, desiccated husk. It seemed impossible, but she was here now and she knew deep down she had no intention of going home. She remembered Fenella telling her not to expect to feel excited or even nervous every time.

‘Sometimes you’ll just feel flat, and the idea of being on stage an hour later will seem inconceivable, and the time you have to wait until your name is called is interminable, with every moment an opportunity to leave, and every moment passing that opportunity lost. But in those times you just have to sit there. Physically force yourself to stay. And then suddenly, almost without warning, you will be standing on stage, doing your set, and then nothing else will exist and the light will warm you inside and out, and then you’ll be finished and you’ll feel amazing again, even if it went badly. It always does feel good when you’ve done it, you just have to trust it. You just have to dig in and mentally strap yourself to the club so you can’t leave, however much your whole being is screaming at you to walk out and go anywhere else but here. And you know what else? Sometimes the gigs you least feel like doing can end up being your best ones.’