Brenda Monk Is Funny (9 page)

‘The truth is, I hate it but I’m intoxicated by it. I know it’s destructive, but somehow I can’t look away. And when I tell him to stop it, he doesn’t believe me because I don’t entirely know if I want him to stop it, because I like the attention and if he stopped then I suppose I worry, deep down, that I won’t exist anymore. Or that I won’t matter at least, and I want to matter. I have an ego, even though it’s not me on stage. It makes me feel important, but at the same time I know it’s doing damage to my… my… me.’

Pete stopped crumbling hash for a moment and blinked a couple of times.

‘I’d hate it. Just, properly hate it,’ Dan volunteered. ‘If I was going out with someone and they did that, I’d dump them immediately.’

Brenda absorbed this somewhat damning assessment of her relationship, but she didn’t really care what Dan thought. All her attention was focused on Pete who just steadily continued preparing the joint. Brenda watched as his tongue slid over the gummed side of the paper to moisten it before sticking it down and she felt hopelessly turned on. She could feel the tightening between her legs. He exuded some kind of sexual health and strength, some kind of goodness, that fitted with this place, with its green smells drifting through the open window, mingled with salt from the sea. To have sex with Pete tonight, here in this place, seemed like the right thing to do. The healthy thing to do. The natural thing to do. To reject it would be to reject nature. At least, that’s what Brenda was telling herself and there was no-one here to tell Jonathan.

She recalled a sleazy old man chatting her up in a bar three years before, when she was in the death throes of her university relationship.

‘You’re a sexy little bitch, aren’t you? But then, you know that, don’t you?’ he had said, three double gin and tonics to the good. ‘Let’s go to my flat and fuck. It’s enormous, and so is my cock.’

‘But I have a boyfriend,’ Brenda had protested, thrilled by the sheer force of his directness.

‘Well, where the fuck is he then? Not here, that’s where.’

Brenda had seen the logic, but declined anyway, though she sometimes wondered, given that the university relationship was now long over, whether she should have gone with this man, just for the experience alone – it would have made a great story. And as for Jonathan, she asked herself now, ‘Where the fuck is he then? Not here, that’s where.’

Pete lit the joint.

The three smoked in silence and then Dan made his excuses and went to bed. Brenda took a long drag and leant back gently as Pete moved his arm up to the back of the sofa, creating a nook for Brenda to drop into. They lay like that, quietly, for some time until Pete stroked her hair, moved his fingers down over the side of her face and then ran his thumb along her lips. She tipped her chin upwards and Pete kissed her softly. The tenderness of what followed shocked Brenda more than anything else. She hadn’t been expecting it to be so gentle. Pete led her up to the innocent double bedroom and made what Brenda could only describe as love to her. That’s how it felt. And then he fell asleep.

Sleepless, Brenda crawled out of the bed at around 5am, crept downstairs, was violently sick into the toilet, then sat on its lid and cried as silently as she could. She called Jonathan and got no reply. She gathered up her things, scribbled a quick note to the effect that she had a family emergency, called a taxi and left.

The rest of August passed exactly as Brenda expected, and was no more eventful for her than it had been prior to her trip to Edinburgh, only now she had plenty to think about. The big news was that Jonathan was nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award, and the bigger news that Fenella Lawrence won it. Brenda called him that night and he answered on the third ring. She pictured him holding his phone, waiting the three rings in order to not look too eager.

‘Hi.’

‘It’s me.’

A pause. He always insisted on a short pause in order to convey to Brenda that she was not necessarily the most important person in his life at any given moment and therefore not the only ‘me’. They both knew perfectly well that her name showed on his caller ID but it was a charade she allowed because it would require too much effort to challenge. She was now simply irritated by it.

‘Oh, hey.’ His voice was flat and pouty.

‘Where are you now?’

‘At the flat with Lloyd.’

‘You didn’t want to stay at the party?’

‘You’re fucking joking, aren’t you? Anyway, it’s her party now, not mine.’

Brenda thought he sounded about ten years old, but didn’t say so.

‘Anyway I’m surprised you haven’t rushed up here to congratulate her, what with you two being new best friends and all.’

She stifled a laugh.

‘Oh Jonathan, stop. We’re not new best friends. I’ve met her once.’

‘Yeah, well.’

‘Listen, you’ll get it next year.’

‘I probably won’t come next year.’

‘You said you weren’t bothered about awards.’

‘Look, Brenda, I’m tired, OK? I don’t need this interrogation. I just want to go to bed.’

Brenda genuinely felt sorry for him. But she couldn’t quite bring it into focus to the extent that she could provide any real comfort. Something was making her scratchy, as if she would like to shake her hands hard and be rid of all this.

Brenda and Jonathan spent one night together in early September and then he flew to New York. He would spend a month there and then fly on to Los Angeles. He hoped to be back for Christmas he said, but would see how things went. There was no mention of Brenda coming out to visit him and she dared not bring it up it in case he said no and she would have to stop pretending to herself that it might happen at some point and admit that they were, to all intents and purposes, over. The award was not mentioned once, although it was the only subject of the entire night, and the idea of it sat elephantine in one corner, sulking and huffing and puffing. Jonathan was edgy and restless and they did not have a good time. It felt like the end, although neither would admit it. Brenda wasn’t quite ready to say it was over and Jonathan never liked to say anything was over in case he changed his mind at a later date. So they watched a film and had OK sex and Brenda wished him luck as he left the next morning. He hugged her warmly and told her she was very special and by the time he got into the waiting taxi he was already on the phone.

So, September was here with its fresh stationery and sense of a new beginning but Brenda was bored as hell. Pete had sent her a couple of messages having found her on Facebook and Brenda had stared at them and then ignored them and then heard nothing since. She was still horrified at the care he had taken over her in bed. It made her feel nauseous, but she didn’t know why. She felt somehow compromised, and she did so loathe her own vulnerability.

She was having a particularly dull Monday, trying as she was to write a piece on whether or not women are oppressed by fashion. It was a boring topic on which there was little new or of interest to say but some designer had got himself in trouble by using teenage boys to model his women’s clothes in a high-end photo-shoot and so obviously this required a sharply delivered response from every mid-level female journalist in the UK, including Brenda. She was just writing a sentence she hated herself for more than any other that morning when an email announced its arrival with a metallic ping.

‘Hi Brenda Monk. I am doing a gig tonight in Shoreditch. Just a very low-key new material night to try out some stuff. I have 20 mins. Do you want 5 of them? Fenella.’

Brenda read this three times because essentially it made absolutely no sense to her. Why would she want five of Fenella’s twenty minutes? Was she suggesting they have a drink, and then she would do the remaining fifteen? She went to the loo for something to do and to see if a change of scene would clarify this email. She was mid-piss when she realised: Fenella was asking her to go on stage. To perform. For five minutes.

‘Hi Fenella. Thanks for the offer but I’m not a stand-up. Congratulations on your win by the way. Brenda.’

She decided not to add the customary kiss. Fenella hadn’t put one and to be honest, Brenda had never really liked this rather cutesy protocol that seemed to have grown up in the media before anyone had the chance to offer an opinion about it. It was now at the stage where it seemed rude not to add a kiss to a business email to a complete stranger, especially if you were a woman. Even the men were at it and Brenda had actually changed banks six months earlier when a junior financial adviser named Keith had added a kiss to the bottom of a message about extending her overdraft.

Brenda clicked send and regretted it. She felt disappointed somehow, though for what she didn’t know for she was not, as she had said, a stand-up. But nevertheless it seemed that the lights had dimmed a little over her head and everything looked a shade darker.

‘OK. Come down anyway and see the show. I’d like your opinion. F.’

Now Brenda was flattered, and she could never resist someone she respected blowing a little smoke up her arse – who could? Anyone who believes they are themselves immune has perhaps never had the experience.

Later that evening, Brenda found the small room above a pub just off the now eye-gougingly trendy Shoreditch High Street. Brenda fought the urge to vandalise the rows of customised fixie bicycles chained to the dirty railings up and down the road, and pushed open the door to the ironically traditional English pub, serving ironic lager and ironic wines and spirits. At least they were not serving cocktails in jam-jars yet although the now ubiquitous fish-finger sandwich was being consumed by a small table of hipster TV researchers, one of whom wore a child’s Mickey Mouse sweatshirt from 1986, at a table towards the back. Brenda had an image of them all eating turkey dinosaurs and potato faces twelve months from now and wondered whether they ironically went to one another’s houses for tea and had their mums cook it for them. But there was no time to enquire as Fenella was ordering a drink and waving at her.

‘Nice hair, very good.’

Brenda touched her head. She’d forgotten that not everyone had seen the short blonde style she had now adopted as her normal hair.

‘Here, drink this.’ Fenella handed Brenda a glass of what looked like coke but turned out to also contain a double shot of vodka.

‘It’ll make everything funnier. Have you dumped Jonathan yet?’

‘No.’

‘But he’s fucked off to America in a huff, hasn’t he?’

‘I wouldn’t call it a huff. It’s been planned for months.’

‘His face when they called my name at the ceremony. Christ, it was a picture.’

Brenda smiled thinly.

‘Why do you hate him so much?’

‘Because he’s a prick,’ Fenella replied simply. ‘He wants to act like he’s on some kind of imaginary team of stand-up comedians, but in reality he’s only in it for himself. Which is fine. I mean, we all are. Stand-up is not a collaborative thing. I just wish he’d admit it. He makes a big deal about being “honest on stage” but he’s anything but honest about himself. He’s plenty honest about you though, isn’t he?’

Brenda chose to ignore this. August and Edinburgh were over, and as far as she was concerned so was Jonathan’s show. He was already working on new material and he hadn’t won the award so the momentum for that collection of jokes was gone and they might as well not exist now. He’d still use some of them, of course, carved up and re-allocated into a ‘best of’ set for the American market but the intensity of that hour would not exist again. The jokes had been lit and had exploded in the sky, and the crowd had ooh-ed and aah-ed and moved on.

In the venue above the main pub around a hundred seats had been roughly put out facing a small temporary stage and a microphone. Although it was a secret gig word had clearly got out that Fenella Lawrence was doing some new material and it was already two thirds full. Brenda had bought another drink and now sat at the back of the room, as was her habit, waiting for the start of the show. The rest of the seats were filled over the following ten minutes and finally, at five past nine, the MC for the night, a comedian named George who prided himself on being an intellectual, hopped onto the stage block and started the show.

He did a couple of warm-up jokes, and drew the audience out of themselves with a little participation – a favour to the other comedians who now hovered to one side of the room, as it meant they could get a sense of what type of crowd was in, and perhaps adjust their material accordingly. Or perhaps not. There was a move towards deliberately contrary material at the moment and then pointing out to the audience that it wasn’t working, which often led to a laugh. You had to have a fairly sophisticated bunch for this to come off but there were several high profile comedians playing sell-out rooms in decent theatres with this style of comedy and amongst the ‘comedy connoisseurs’ it was widely considered to be a ‘bit meta’ and therefore of higher quality than your average gag-smith. How long the self-appointed taste-makers would venerate this style was hard to say but its practitioners would continue with or without them and in the end, Brenda thought, perhaps it hardly mattered what the reviewers and commentators said. Perhaps all comedians were just trying to find what suited them and sod the rest.

Two comedians passed across the stage with some success. They held notebooks by way of apology or explanation, and the fact that this was billed as a ‘new material’ night made the crowd forgiving. They felt they were being let into a secret, that they had access to the process, rather than just paying to see unprepared comedians doing half-thought through jokes they hadn’t yet bothered to learn, and so the atmosphere was generally supportive.

George brought Fenella on last, and the crowd cheered and whistled. Fenella quietened them down quickly and effectively.

‘Don’t do that – I’m planning to be shit tonight.’

And then this happened.

‘Before I start reading out of my own pathetic little notebook, I’d like to introduce a brilliant new comedian who is going to do five minutes. Please give her a warm welcome as she’s new to this game. Ladies and gentlemen, Brenda Monk!’

The crowd applauded and so did Brenda.

And then she realised what was happening.

Fenella pointed to her at the back of the crowd.

‘Come on up then, Brenda. You’re making me look like a dick.’ Brenda’s eyes widened in horror and shook her head vigorously, trying to pass it off as a joke. The crowd laughed, and then lulled expectantly, and then started to wonder what was going on. ‘Come up here, Brenda Monk, and tell these good people your story. Come on, come on, come on. We want to see her, don’t we?’

‘Yes’, the crowd called, feeling they were witnessing some comedy moment they could talk about for a good few days. Fenella got off the stage and walked over to Brenda, took her arm, and pulled her to the front. She walked her up to the stage, shoved the mic into her hand and stepped off, applauding with the rest of the whooping crowd.

Brenda stood and looked out at the expectant faces, and felt nothing so strong as that she was facing the wrong way. Any previous stage experience she may have had from a decade earlier may as well have never happened. Her mind was blank and as a hush fell over the room, nothing was coming to her. The crowd shifted uncomfortably, and the air-conditioning unit buzzed. Someone cleared their throat.

Fenella stood to one side with her arms folded, unwavering, unmoved.

Brenda lifted the microphone to her lips.

‘Hi.’

The audience tittered. Brenda adjusted her stance.

‘Hi,’ she said again.

‘HI!’ shouted a man at the back, from the semi-darkness and the audience laughed out of relief more than anything. Brenda smiled too, and breathed hard into the microphone, amplifying a great huffing noise across the room.

‘I’m Brenda Monk. And, ummmm, I’m going out with a comedian. Well, I say going out, he has sex with me and then writes jokes about it.’

A laugh. An actual laugh. Not a big one, and it was more generous than genuine, but still, there it was.

‘He literally pumps me for material.’

Another laugh, a little bigger.

‘He says I’m an arsehole, but you know, maybe I am an arsehole.’

This received a minor murmur. Strange – it worked so well for Jonathan. Brenda floundered a little, mind racing, trying to find a grip as she fell down the black hole. And then, from nowhere,

‘We’re getting married next month to make sure he has enough jokes for a tour.’

Another laugh, a little smaller than the first, but enough.

Brenda glanced at Fenella out of the corner of her eye, and Fenella nodded.

‘Ummm, I don’t… I don’t know if I’m going to stay with him much longer though, as he met my mum last week and I haven’t heard from either of them since.’

Pause.

‘My dad thinks he’s hilarious though.’

The biggest laugh yet.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Brenda Monk!’ Fenella was already beside her, taking the mic out of her hand and gently pushing her off the stage to the sound of kind applause.

‘Wasn’t she great? That was her first ever gig, people, and you saw it here. So, look, what am I going to talk to you about tonight? I haven’t a fucking clue…’

Brenda floated to the back of the room in a daze. She didn’t hear Fenella’s set, and was only vaguely aware of people around her rocking with laughter for the next quarter of an hour. She took a deep drink and sat still until her heart stopped racing.