Dead Room Farce (3 page)

He reckoned Cookie must be late thirties now, maybe a bit more, and, like Ran, she was never out of work. She'd started in her teens as the female stooge for television comedians, playing all those roles – secretaries, nurses, receptionists, shop assistants – that the sketches of the time demanded. And she'd always got the laughs by her mixture of sex and mischief. The body was undeniably sexy, but the jokey face – by no means traditionally beautiful – suggested another dimension to her character, an ironic awareness of the roles in which she found herself.

This quality had stood Cookie Stone in good stead when the priorities of comedy changed, when political correctness emerged as an issue, and women comedians started to take a more central role. That revolution had put out of business many of the pretty little things who'd formerly adorned television comedy. It was now unacceptable for a woman to be on screen simply because she was sexy, and for that to be the basis of an item's humour. But an actress who could look sexy while at the same time, by her expression, giving a post-modernist gloss to her sexiness, was worth her weight in gold. So there had been no blip in the career of Cookie Stone.

But her ranking in the comedy business hadn't changed. After a decade of playing stooge to a series of male comedians who commanded the lion's share of the show's funny lines (not to mention its budget), she now played stooge to a series of female comedians who commanded the lion's share of the show's funny lines (not to mention its budget). Cookie still had no power; she had simply changed bosses.

And, in a way, that was fair. Cookie Stone had no originating talent, but she was a very good mimic and a quick learner. She absorbed the comedy technique of everyone she worked with and, as a result, had become a consummately skilful comedy actress. Her every take, her every pause, her every intonation, had been copied from another performer, but her armoury of them was now so large, and her skill in selecting them so great, that she was almost indistinguishable from an actress of intuitive comedy skills.

‘I was saying, Charles . . .' she continued, in a favourite voice, the humorous right-on feminist learnt from one of the first female stand-ups to do menstruation jokes on television, ‘I was saying that, like, you really look as though you've just had a fax saying the world's about to end.'

‘No. Rubbish. Someone just walked over my grave, that's all. You OK for a drink?'

Cookie raised a half-full glass of red. ‘Cheers, I'm entirely OK, thank you,' she slurred, in the remembered voice of a comedian who'd killed himself with exhaust fumes after rather nasty tabloid allegations about rent boys.

They talked and had a couple more glasses of red wine, and then looked round and realised there was nobody they recognised left in the pub. The rest of the
not on your wife!
company had all gone home, or on to eat. Maybe some of them, flushed with the success of the day's rehearsal and the fact that it was pay-day, had even gone to join David J. Girton at some smart restaurant.

Charles and Cookie could have had another drink, but it seemed the moment for him to say, ‘You fancy eating something?' He wasn't sure whether he was hungry or not, but he knew some kind of blotting paper was a good idea.

Outside the pub, they swayed on the kerb. ‘Where we going then, Daddy?' asked Cookie, in the voice of an American comedian who'd been given her own short-lived series at the moment when television had first fallen in love with female stand-ups.

‘Erm . . .' A taxi drew up in obedience to Charles's wavering hand. ‘I know.' He couldn't think of anywhere else. There was an Italian on Westbourne Grove, just round the corner from his tiny studio flat.

Inside the restaurant, he ordered a bottle of Chianti Classico. They also ordered some pasta – at least he was fairly sure it was pasta, though he had no recollection of eating it. Maybe it was one of those evenings when at the end of the meal impassive waiters had gathered up virtually untouched plates.

Charles did remember them ordering a few sambucas, though, and joking as they blew out the blue flames that rose from the top of their glasses. He remembered Cookie's head leant close to his across the table, her tongue constantly licking over her prominent teeth as she talked. And he remembered, in a fit of righteousness, ordering each of them a large espresso ‘to sober up a bit'.

He also remembered listening with great concentration to Cookie Stone, though he was a little vague about what she actually said. He knew, however, that it was said in many different voices, that there was a lot about the actor's identity, and how every actor hid his or her true, snivelling, abject self under the comforting carapace of fictional characters, and how few men bothered to probe into what the real Cookie Stone was like, and, generally speaking, what bastards men were, and how all most of them wanted was just to get her back to their place for a quick shag.

And Charles remembered being very understanding and very sympathetic to Cookie, and saying she was right, yes, she was right, she'd really put her finger on it, and how if only men and women talked more, communicated more, then maybe there'd be a bit more understanding between them and they'd be able to break away from these old-fashioned stereotypes. Men and women were both people, after all, that was the important thing about what they were, people. Men and women were people.

He must also have paid the bill at some point, presumably with a credit card. He couldn't actually remember doing it, but the fact that he and Cookie were allowed to leave the restaurant suggested that the relevant transaction had somehow taken place.

For the life of him, he couldn't remember the conversation that must have ensued on the pavement outside the restaurant, the precise form of words – and who they were spoken by – which led to Cookie Stone going back to his place.

He must have been drunk, though, for that to have happened. To let someone else see the shambles of old newspapers and grubby clothes in which he lived, he must've had a few.

Charles had recollections of finding an unopened bottle of Bell's at Hereford Road, and of opening it. He had recollections of charging a couple of glasses, then of moving a pile of newspapers and books off the bed, and of lying down on it with Cookie.

But of what happened next, he couldn't be exactly sure. Certainly, when he woke at three-fifteen, she was entirely naked. She lay on her back, breasts pointing firmly upwards, and snored nasally. Charles was wearing his socks and, somewhere round his shins, telescoped trousers and briefs.

But he didn't have time to explore further. His head was drumming, his throat was as dry as a desert of sandpaper, and he felt violently and urgently sick. He just managed to make it to the bathroom, where he threw up loudly and copiously into the toilet bowl.

Charles Paris finished the day, as he had begun it, with his trousers round his ankles, though this time it was not for professional reasons.

IT WAS'NT GOOD. It really wasn't good. The words swam in front of his eyes, and if there's one thing you don't want when you're being paid to read a book for audio cassette, it's the words swimming in front of your eyes.

In the not-inconsiderable annals of Charles Paris's hangovers, this one stood out. He'd never felt as bad as he did at that moment. He knew whenever he had a hangover he thought he'd never felt as bad as he did at that moment, but this was on a different scale. It really was.

Everything felt dreadful. His whole body ached. The joints, particularly knees and elbows, ached even more than the rest of his components. There was a pain and stiffness at the back of his neck that rendered him incapable of moving his head without moving the rest of his body too, like some awkward cardboard cut-out. The dryness in his mouth had moved on from sandpaper quality to the feeling of having been sand-blasted. His eyes stung as if he'd spent a couple of hours underwater in an over-chlorinated pool. And his digestion felt seriously at risk. The jacuzzi of his stomach threatened to overflow at any moment, and without warning of which direction that overflow might take. His guts complained at their treatment with rumbles that wouldn't have sounded out of place in the third rinse of a dishwasher cycle. And a rumbling stomach doesn't help an audio book recording either.

He could have tolerated the sickness of his body, if his mind had not also been infected. While his mouth continued to pronounce the swimming words on the page, his mind seethed with self-hatred and recrimination. Why on earth had he let himself get so drunk? He must've been aware of the way he was going, why hadn't he put a brake on it?

He was such a fool. A man in his late fifties behaving like a teenager at his first grown-up party. And it was hideously unprofessional – the worst insult that can be levelled at an actor – for him to get so wasted the night before he was to start on a whole new area of work. Getting the contract to record an audio book could be a breakthrough into a different, and possibly lucrative, market; he mustn't screw it up.

At the bottom of all these anxieties, lurking like some evil predator in the depths of a murky pool, lay the question of what he'd said the night before. Worse than that, what he had
done
the night before.

Cookie Stone. What had happened between him and Cookie Stone? He knew the position in which they'd found themselves at three-fifteen, but what had been the precise sequence of events that had led up to that?

Various possibilities presented themselves. One – the most unlikely – was that they'd just gone to bed together for a cuddle, mutual support for two lonely people, and by agreement nothing else had happened. A second scenario – also, he feared, unlikely – was that they had enjoyed a long session of abandoned, passionate and satisfying love-making. The third – and the one towards which he was unwillingly inclining – was that they had prepared to make love, gone through all the soft-talking and the anticipatory blandishments, that they had started to make love, and then that he had proved incapable of completing the process, and fallen into a drunken stupor halfway through.

Charles had a horrible feeling that that was what had happened, but his memory could offer him no help on the subject. His recollection of the previous night's events, after their departure from the Italian restaurant, was, to use the most generous adjective possible in the circumstances, hazy.

And there hadn't been much chance in the morning for Charles and Cookie to compare notes. He had woken in a sweat of panic at 6.33, suddenly aware that he was supposed to be catching the 7.15 train from Paddington to Bath for the day's recording. In the rush of his own dressing and incomplete ablutions, and of hurrying Cookie through her reduced morning ritual, there hadn't been any opportunity for an assessment – or more likely a post mortem – of the previous night's encounter. They had parted with their stale mouths joining in a dry kiss and a cheery ‘See you Monday', but no mention had been made of any relationship in which they might be considered to be involved.

And, as so often after an unsatisfactory skirmish with a member of the opposite sex, all Charles could think about was his wife Frances. Though there seemed almost nothing now left between them, he still felt as if he had betrayed her. There was even, at the back of his mind, the appalling thought that at some point during the events of the previous evening, he'd found a message from Frances on his answering machine. Surely that couldn't be true, surely that was just the guilt getting at him?

Even worse, though, was the fear that he'd actually phoned his wife back, just a quick call to establish contact, and that she'd said she wouldn't talk to him until he was sober.

No, that bit couldn't be true, he felt sure. It was just his mind providing another prompt of guilt to add to the muddy swirl of self-recrimination. But, hallucination or not, it wasn't a thought that improved his mood.

As it had transpired, in spite of his heroic rush to the station, Charles had just missed his train at Paddington and had to wait nearly a full hour for the 8.15. He'd hung mournfully about the concourse, clutching a copy of
The Times
he didn't feel up to reading, and wishing the owners of the privatised station had made more seats available. At one point he contemplated the rough remedy of a Full English Breakfast, but the smell of food as he entered the cafeteria brought nausea back to his throat and he had had to hurry out again.

The train had arrived in Bath on time, at 9.38, but there had been a queue for taxis and, as luck would have it, the driver Charles finally got seemed to be spending his first day in the city. The address of the studio was not familiar to him and, when they at last reached the relevant road, they had difficulty finding the right building. The studio was a recent conversion, and its name had not yet been put up outside.

As a result, instead of arriving in good time for a relaxed chat before the contractual ten o'clock start of recording, Charles had bumbled in at ten-twenty, panicked and deeply hungover. His producer said it really didn't matter, missing the train could have happened to anyone, but the girl who seemed to be looking after the technical side looked less than amused.

But then, if anyone was going to sympathise with Charles Paris's condition, his producer was that person. Mark Lear himself was certainly not unacquainted with the bottle. Charles had known him for years, and they had worked together when Mark was a BBC Radio producer of Further Education, a department which had later become known as ‘Continuing Education' and no doubt gone through a whole raft of other name-changes in the years since.

Mark Lear had always been a licensed BBC malcontent, continually moaning about the Corporation and asserting that he wasn't going to stay, that soon he would be ‘out in the real world, doing my own thing'. Well, in the late 1980s, along with a great many other members of the BBC staff, he got his wish, though not perhaps in the way he would have wanted. Mark Lear had been offered an early retirement package that didn't carry the option of refusal, and at the age of fifty found himself being taken at his word and having the opportunity to ‘do his own thing'.