Brenda Monk Is Funny (7 page)

Jonathan knocked it out the park, but Fenella knocked it further, a fact that was apparent within two minutes of her set which was also, coincidentally, the precise time Jonathan decided he wanted to leave.

Lloyd and Brenda dutifully trooped after him, and the mood was not improved by Joan signalling from the back of the audience that she wanted to stay and watch the end of the show. The cab ride back to the flat was silent, save for a single outburst by Jonathan who shouted, ‘Fuck,’ and then continued to stare out of the window for the rest of the journey. Once inside, Jonathan went to his bedroom, and Brenda followed him.

Jonathan lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. Brenda lay down next to him and stared at the ceiling.

‘You still leaving tomorrow?’

‘Uh, yeah. Unless you want me to stay…’

‘No, don’t worry. You go, you go. I don’t want to take up your time.’

‘You’re not taking up my time. I can stay if you want me to.’

‘No, it’s OK.’

A pause where Brenda tried to figure out the right way to be. Jonathan had got used to being the best at any gig he went to. It had been that way for eighteen months now. It was strangely fascinating to see him dealing with this.

‘Do you mind if we don’t have sex tonight?’

‘Er, no, that’s fine. Don’t worry about it, it was great last night, so…’

A light snore. Jonathan, it seemed, was already asleep.

The 13.20 from Edinburgh Waverley to King’s Cross left on time and the Festival slid away from Brenda. Or rather, perhaps she slid away from the Festival. There was much thinking to do and instead of feeling gnawed from the inside at the prospect of four hours alone with nothing to do but examine her life, or try to distract herself from this pursuit, Brenda felt glad of the time. Getting up that morning had been as if in a dream. Jonathan had been sleeping deeply and she had hesitated over whether to wake him. In the end she had, feeling that leaving without saying goodbye would seem a more dramatic statement than she intended to make. So she had gently leant over his face and kissed him on the lips. He had jumped unexpectedly violently at the touch of her lips, and then tried to focus on her face, as she whispered she was leaving now to get her train. He had nodded and smiled and was whiffling again before she even left the room. Oddly, this had not bothered her as much as it usually did. She felt there was some strange membrane around her now, flesh coloured and transparent but shielding her from anything that would get under her skin.

Brenda put her hands round the cardboard cup of cappuccino, drew it up under her chin and settled back into her seat. As the train gathered speed, she tried to look inside herself. What was going on in there? Why was she not obsessively checking her phone to see if Jonathan had called to a) see if she had got her train OK or b) beg her to come back and stay a little longer?

She pulled her phone out and looked at it, but more out of habit than feverish need. Nothing. Of course. And now it hit her quite hard – there would always be nothing. Then when the nothing became too much to bear she would turn it into something by calling or texting him herself, so that there was not an abyss of nothing to stare into but the weight of expectation. Which at least reminded Brenda that she existed and was alive, even though ultimately she felt worse when the return message was vague or so impersonal you could almost suspect it had been sent from the list of pre-written templates that came with Jonathan’s phone, or worst of all, when it was clearly intended for someone else.

Again, Brenda asked herself whether this version of herself was what Jonathan really wanted, and further, whether she could in fact provide it. She didn’t have to break up with him after all. She could just coast along like this for some time and see how it felt. She didn’t want drama, contrary to what Jonathan liked to tell her. In fact she wanted excitement, and these two were very different, although one could always be mistaken for the other. Realising all this was a thrilling discovery. It also meant the end of their relationship as anything other than an arrangement – some sort of Jane Austen type partnership of convenience, but with fewer bonnets and more jokes about anal sex.

Brenda shifted as she tried to imagine this new reality – the crack at her feet had stabilised for now and she saw that she could in fact stand over the gap with a foot on each side. Eventually she would have to make a decision one way or the other but for now, and so long as the crack remained stable like this, she had a little time to play with. Her thoughts were her own business and she felt no compunction to share them with Jonathan for the time being. She was replete, like an egg – all was within, hidden and protected behind a smooth, inscrutable shell. The unwitting Jonathan may have been busy telling the world about the precise shape of her individual tits but, as exposing as that may be, in reality it was she who was, for once, in charge.

Brenda arrived home to a warm early evening in London. The smell of barbecuing meat turned Hackney into an open air restaurant and Brenda remembered that she had barely eaten since yesterday morning. The streets seemed mellow and lazy. Even though it was a Monday this part of town was populated by shift-workers, part-timers, working-from-homers and the unemployed and so there was no reason not to light the charcoal on such a beautiful evening. Weather like this should not be wasted, the people reasoned, and they were right. London had never felt more welcoming to Brenda and she did not feel that space around her as she usually did when she was alone. She alighted the bus a stop early in order to pop into the small supermarket near her flat and buy a bottle of the palest Rose they had in stock, a packet of sausages, some finger rolls and a bag of salad. She had a disposable barbecue stashed somewhere from last year, she felt certain. The large stone sill on the outside of her kitchen window was wide enough, she had discovered, to hold it if she secured it by puncturing one side of the foil tray and winding an unbent paper clip through the hole and twisting the other end around a little protruding screw in the wooden frame. A large glass of water to one side was a precaution that she had never actually needed.

Brenda let herself into her flat and let the silence wash over her. She checked herself again for loneliness but found none, and smiled a little inside. An evening alone and this was not, for once, a bleak prospect. She did the necessary with the barbecue, opened her wine and twenty minutes later the smell of Brenda’s cooking meat was mingling with the rest and she sat at the sash window, with it pulled right up, her toes over the frame next to where the hot foil tray sat and listened to laughter that curled up from gardens below. She felt warmed inside from the hot sausage bleeding into the soft roll, grease and tomato ketchup emulsifying in her mouth, cut through with sips of ice cold wine.

Happiness – this was what Brenda felt. She recalled her father saying once that he wished he remembered to be happy more in his life, to notice it, to mark it, and to understand that happiness is delivered in fleeting moments and the sane person seeks only to note it rather than strive to make it a constant state which is, ironically, the path to madness. Happy. This was happy. And she was alone. Brenda made a note of that too.

The sun went down, and a pleasant summer chill met the air. Brenda remained in situ, letting her mind fly from one thing to the next without forcing it to alight on any moment in particular.

She liked Fenella, she was impressed by her. And she suspected Jonathan’s dislike. She wondered, recalling Fenella’s crack about him being ‘good in bed’, whether they had slept together. She considered the wisdom of asking Jonathan. In this moment of sanity, she decided not to, although she felt she may not always be so sensible.

She examined her feelings about Jonathan’s show. It was exposing, that was a fact, but she didn’t really know how to feel about it. She had no frame of reference, and no-one to ask. She couldn’t call up any of her friends with the question, ‘How did you feel when your stand-up comedian boyfriend used you for material in the most intrusive way possible?’ She had to figure it out by herself and this was a lonely place to be. She couldn’t even ask Jonathan as he took any interrogation of his artistic decision as evidence of disloyalty.

Brenda decided the thing she hated most was the feeling that people pitied her. That they thought she was abused, and exploited – that’s what made her feel nauseous. She did not want to be pitied. That was the source of deep vulnerability and Brenda always reacted badly to anyone who asked to be pitied in order to get attention or manipulate those around them. Pity was the death of independence as far as Brenda was concerned. Once you are pitied, there’s little chance to recover. And working as a journalist had certainly taught her that. You could be dishonest, depraved, downright immoral, but once the public pitied you, that was it. Perhaps it wasn’t the intrusion she minded, perhaps it was the lack of control. Yes, she just wanted more control. Pouring the last of the bottle into her glass, Brenda decided she would call a halt to the ‘thinking’ for tonight, take a sleeping pill and go to bed. She felt calm, and checked her phone for the last time with a wry smile. Still nothing. Some boyfriends, she thought, might send a quick text to check she had got home OK. Perhaps it wasn’t the fact that strangers didn’t think she existed outside of the show that bothered her most; perhaps it was that apparently Jonathan didn’t either.

Jonathan did not call the next day, or the day after that, and Brenda successfully resisted the urge to contact him. She was curious to see what he would do – she had never left it this long before. She got her answer on Wednesday morning when she answered the phone to him, and his first words were, ‘why haven’t you called me?’ This made her laugh, which pissed Jonathan off. She didn’t help matters by asking if he had forgotten how to use the phone and the conversation did not go well. She had his attention though, in a way she had not experienced since the first few months of their relationship. She felt dangerous and unpredictable and Jonathan, being a good comedian, was adjusting to his audience. If she was going to run away, he was going to have to come and get her – it was his instinct, he couldn’t help it. It was when she stood still that the trouble started and this was all well and good, but Brenda wasn’t sure she had the energy to spend her life running, especially when getting caught was becoming less and less interesting.

Brenda briefly enjoyed Jonathan’s insecurity from an academic point of view – the tables so pleasingly turned – but heard the death rattle of their relationship. She had always provided the steady love that Jonathan could kick against, and if she was going to withdraw it, Brenda knew he would simply get it from someone else. God knows they were queuing round the block to provide it. But Brenda still felt she didn’t want the drama of an actual break-up. She did not want to disturb the signs of life pecking their way into the world that she was nursing in her internal incubator. A break-up, however long overdue, would necessarily divert her attention, and she realised with extraordinary clarity that she need not do anything because Jonathan certainly wouldn’t. When the time came the actual decision to stop this would have to be hers and she wasn’t ready to make it yet. Not because she loved Jonathan, for she now knew she did not, but because she didn’t have any spare energy to steady a rocked boat.

So she comforted Jonathan by saying she had been ill and allowed him to comfort himself by saying he wished he had known so he could have looked after her, which was a brilliantly deluded thing to say given that he was several hundred miles north and had been notable by his absence the last time Brenda had been ill and he had only been a short taxi ride away. But the conversation ended as it usually did, with Jonathan making promises he wouldn’t keep and Brenda pretending to believe them. It was just that this time she was conscious of her pretence. It was an interesting sensation. She was taking that well-worn advice to ‘fake it ’til you make it’ and it felt sophisticated and womanly.

Wednesday was quiet, as was every other in these dog days of news. Many reporters could barely be bothered to come into work and those on casual and freelance contracts took advantage of the uncertain hours, and left the country altogether if they could afford to, leaving a skeleton staff to divvy up whatever did limp in. Today some distraction took the form of a new women’s rights charity being launched by a soap star and a singer who was famous in the 1990s. They had chosen an August launch so that they could be sure of some coverage, which served both to reinforce and undermine the premise of their cause. Brenda was sent down to the tea-party they were giving for journalists. She skulked around in the function room of the mid-level hotel in Mayfair that was now filled with trays of cupcakes and deliberately mis-matched tea sets one was meant to find both adorable and anachronistic and thought how much she hated events like this. There was a lot of earnest eye contact and nodding going on as a selection of ‘strong women’ (here the winner of a City-based sexual harassment tribunal, there an acid-scarred former model-turned-campaigner who had been assaulted by a jealous ex-boyfriend, an actress who had written a long confessional article about racism in the film industry, Nancy Dell’Olio) discussed their work and themselves. A sense of great import was in the air, and no doubt it all was important, it’s just that Brenda wasn’t entirely sure what specifically this charity was fighting for or against, other than a general sense of injustice against women and girls all over the world. The facts of which Brenda did not dispute, it’s just she had gone to three of these in as many months and they were all starting to blur together.

Spotting a friend from a rival newspaper, a very sharp and excellent columnist and profile writer named Emily, Brenda wove her way through the low-key-designer-clad power women to where she stood.

‘What is this again?’

Emily turned and smiled.

‘No idea. They’re doing some sort of speech at 3, I think.’

Brenda checked her watch – ten minutes to go. She had a sudden and perverse urge to wait the ten minutes and then leave exactly when the speech started, but she knew this would not go down well back at the office.

‘I interviewed that Fenella Lawrence last week,’ Emily said. ‘Do you know her?’

‘I just met her this weekend in Edinburgh.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I liked her. She doesn’t take any shit and she’s good at what she does. Bit abrasive for some maybe, but I don’t mind it.’

Emily nodded.

‘So, were you seeing Jonathan?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I read a review of his show this morning.’

Ah, so that’s why he’d been a bit off kilter. Brenda usually checked for his reviews online every day but she had overslept this morning and not managed it before his call. Emily continued. ‘Sounds like he’s getting the most out of you, eh? In more ways than one.’

‘Where was it?’

‘
The Times
. It was pretty good. Just said he had a lot of observations on relationships that seemed fresh and funny. They said the “girlfriend” was a great device that brought the show together into a coherent whole.’

‘That’s going to be his speech at our wedding.’

Emily smiled into her tea.

‘Is it going well?’

‘It’s fine. Are you going to give Fenella a nice write up then?’

‘Yeah, no point dumping on her now. She’s tipped for the big award up there so best keep it positive, I think.’

‘Did you want to dump on her?’

‘Not particularly but it’s always an option.’

Always a journalist first, feminist second, thought Brenda. But that was what made her so readable – Emily saw the many faces of her interviewees and made a judgment as to which ones to expose to the readership by assessing the prevailing wind and trying to get slightly in front of it. And this was interesting intelligence about the Edinburgh Comedy Award, which everybody performing up there expended vast amounts of energy pretending was not the focal point of the whole Festival. Once people made it into TV, film, radio, they mostly forgot about it but its significance to gigging comedians was huge. Brenda could tell how badly Jonathan wanted to win it by the fact that he had not mentioned it once. If Fenella took it home this year he’d be silently livid and impossible to manage. She didn’t envy Lloyd that task, she thought, and then realised with a start that she was already painting herself out of the picture.

There was the sound of teaspoon on teacup which signalled the start of the speech. Brenda stopped listening around the ‘we’ve come a long way, but we still have so far to go’ mark, and without warning, an image of herself onstage popped into her mind.

She was standing in front of a small crowd in what looked like a classic New York fringe comedy club – a bare brick wall, a mic in a stand, a spotlit circle illuminating her face and upper-body. Brenda had never been to New York, so this image must have been created from things she had seen on screen. She couldn’t hear what she was saying, nor the laughter from the audience, but she could tell from their faces that the gig was going well. What interested her most was her appearance. She had short blonde hair and she wore a black jumper.

Emily nudged her, and the image vanished, dissolving back into reality: this room, this tea cup and its non-matching but meticulously sourced saucer, this cupcake from that designer bakery.

‘You were humming,’ Emily whispered.

‘Was I?’

‘Yeah – just quietly, but it was getting louder.’

‘Thanks.’

Out in the street, Brenda decided to walk. She was glad to be out of a room she had found unexpectedly oppressive. There had been a jangling sense of suppressed competition and hidden agendas that sat awkwardly with her after the straightforward fearlessness of Fenella’s approach to conversation. And this part of London fascinated her. It was as unfamiliar to her as any foreign city, with its monochrome perfection. It was as if the rich preferred London in black and white, perhaps they thought it would befit its heritage, and so here, in the corner they controlled, this was how it appeared. Maybe they went to the Caribbean for colour; maybe they curated the whole world in this manner. Glossy black railings against pale white walls, ornamental trees in huge pots, pools of pearl grey pebbles in unused front gardens and even on one street, a pair of armed guards in black uniforms, loafing outside an apparently empty house, guns held softly. So silent, it was, silent and somehow sterile. Why did wealth suck the life out of everything? Or was it just that wealth meant you could inject life wherever you wanted it and so often that was elsewhere? A perennial state of ‘elsewhereness’ – that was maybe how it feels to be very rich, Brenda thought. This part of town suited the sunshine though. It made the walls glow like magnesium, and you could see your reflection darkly in the freshly painted railings. It was pleasant in its way, calming. Different to the money of Islington that seemed nervous, frantic, with bohemian pretensions, constantly trying to pretend it was all perfectly normal as property values increased around owners’ ears, driving them half mad. This Mayfair money was cool and keen to remove itself from normality as effectively as possible, to cruise above it at an altitude of 30,000 feet in a soft tan leather interior.

Brenda thought again that she would like to be rich. Or rather, she would like to be free and riches seemed like a path to freedom, if you could be reasonable with your needs. Daydreaming as she passed a Chanel shop, she thought how well the black and white of the store’s exterior, and interior for that matter, matched the general architecture. Everything matched here, and there was no shame about it. Money meant order and order was appealing. And of course, if you wanted chaos you could buy it and then pay someone else to restore order when you had finished. How successful would Brenda have to be to have all this, she wondered? And then she asked herself the next logical question: what should she try to be successful at?

This actually stopped her in the middle of the pavement. She had never asked herself that question before, not as baldly as that. She had asked herself what she wanted to do, or what her dreams were, to which the answers were vague and unconvincing. But now she asked herself what she should try to be successful at. And this meant she had to ask herself what she was good at. It was at this point that she discovered that she had absolutely no idea what that was.

This moment required a drink. Brenda sat down outside the grand Art Deco edifice that formed the exterior of a bar and restaurant – a local landmark. A curious, decadent tiled courtyard that held a stall of fresh shellfish on ice and a florist. Brenda couldn’t see how these two went together, but somehow they did, perfectly. Everything here matched, she reminded herself with mock gravity, sometimes just by dint of geography. If it was here, it matched, that was the point. If you made it here, you matched.

Brenda ordered a glass of champagne – it seemed the thing to do. An expensive looking Lebanese couple sat in silence at the next table. He stared at his Blackberry, and who could tell what she stared at behind her £500 sunglasses. A heaving ship of fruits de mer sat incongruously between them, untouched. Brenda could not take her eyes off the woman’s hair, though: a long slick of shiny, nutty goodness, with bronze, chestnut and mahogany strands glinting and flashing in the sun. Brenda remembered her daydream and touched her own sorry mop. She had still not rescued it from her own efforts, and was suddenly seized with an urgent need to get it cut and coloured. Hair – the window to a woman’s soul, she thought, and took a swig of champagne.

An hour later and Brenda sat looking at herself in a floor to ceiling mirror, her head a patchwork of foils. An hour after that and Brenda left the salon with a short, sharp cut, peroxide blonde to the roots, giving her scalp a baby-pink appearance. She was delighted. It changed everything – her face, her sensibility, everything. A good haircut was no fucking joke. Brenda was no snob – she knew the power of a good look, and didn’t sneer at those who made it their business to look, well, the business. Intellect could only get you so far and unless you were planning to be Iris Murdoch, which Brenda was not, this was a step in the right direction. She still didn’t know what she was good at but she felt now at least she had the hair of someone who stood a fighting chance of finding out.

She didn’t bother going back to the office, she had tapped out her piece on the women’s charity on her phone and filed it remotely whilst she waited for the colour to develop on her hair. In any case Janet, her editor, was in Umbria for the next fortnight and barely bothering to check the content. She had left a deputy in charge who was just running press releases as articles as they came in, practically word for word and with lots of pictures. Brenda’s phone buzzed: a text from her old friend Laura asking if she was around that weekend to make up the numbers on a trip to Cornwall. Someone had dropped out and so there was a room in a cottage going spare, starting the following evening through ’til Monday. Brenda texted back ‘yes please’ immediately and full of bounce, went home to begin washing clothes.

Another train journey then, and in completely the opposite direction. Brenda arrived at Redruth station around 6pm and the green smell of the earth rolled around her nostrils like fine truffles. Cornwall was a good place to come if you need to figure something out. This pagan land, too far even for the Romans, throbbed with unspoken but long held knowledge. Ley lines, secrets and cider; fertility, folk music and forgotten paths that could be re-opened with the thwack of a good sized stick. And the sea, the sea, shimmering in glimpses, caught between hills. A taxi took her the dozen or so miles to the coastal village of Coverack on the Lizard and a winding road that went first down and then up, met the cottage that was pushed into the side of a cliff overlooking the bay below. Laura opened the front door, and threw her arms in the air.