Spin Cycle (6 page)

The 7-Eleven was a five-minute drive away. She decided to pop round the corner to the pub and see if Terry could spare a carton.

As usual on weekday nights, the Red House was pretty quiet. She walked toward the bar. From what she could make out, Terry, the excabbie, salt-of-the-earth landlord was the only person serving. He appeared to be pulling a pint for a youngish bloke who was sitting at the bar doing a crossword. She was struck by his pallor—he looked like a blood donor who couldn’t say when—and his wild Bob Geldof hair.

Having eyed the hair for a moment or two she decided he didn’t use Wash and Go—he used wash and forsake. She leaned on the bar, a couple of feet from him. Terry looked up, smiled and mouthed that he’d be with her in just a sec.

“OK, Tel,” Rachel heard the mad-hair guy say, “what about three across? Exclusively female, ending in
u-n-t
.”

Terry continued to pull gently on the pump.

“Aunt,” he said.

“Oh yeah, right,” the bloke said, drawing on his cigarette. “Course it is. Otherwise three down—largest antipodean country—would’ve been Custralia.”

Rachel shook her head and laughed quietly to herself. She watched him cross out his previous answer. He was wearing a very fitted seventies-style royal-blue velvet jacket with wide lapels. Underneath it was a tangerine-colored shirt unbuttoned to the chest, with a long pointed collar and frill down the front.

He threw the newspaper and pen down on the bar and grinned.

“Right. Finished,” he declared. “OK, I spent a couple of hours on it yesterday morning after Kilroy. Three more in the afternoon. Twenty minutes now. So that’s what . . . ?”

“Five hours, twenty minutes,” Terry said, picking up another glass.

“
Wick
-id. Blimey, I reckon that’s my best time yet.”

“So it took you as little as five hours then,” Terry said, putting the pint glass down in front of him, “to do the
Sun
crossword.”

“Tel, mock not. You know how dyslexic I am.”

He uttered the word
dyslexic
with two hard, back-of-the-throat, phlegm-clearing sounds common to consumptive tramps and heavily accented Liverpudlians. “I mean you know as well as I do, I can’t count m’ balls and get the same answer twice. Right, I’m off to the can. Put the beer on me tab.” He stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

It was only when he stood up that Rachel noticed he was tiny—no more than five five—and that along with the velvet jacket he was wearing skin-tight black leather trousers and platforms. What a poseur, she thought. But he was good-looking, she supposed, in a disheveled, Byronesque sort of way—albeit a half-pint version. He wasn’t her type, though. She’d never found men with pale skin particularly attractive. Unlike Shelley, for whom the warmed-up corpse look was a definite turn-on.

“Terry,” Rachel said, suppressing a giggle, “who on earth is that?”

“ ‘Im?” Terry said, grinning. “That’s Tractor.”

“Come again?”

“Tractor. Apparently his real name’s David Brown. And David Brown happens to be the biggest-selling make of tractor in Cornwall. So everybody calls him Tractor.”

“But he sounds like he comes from Liverpool,” Rachel said.

“Yeah, I thought that was a bit strange—still . . .”

“And does he always dress like that?”

“Always. He reckons the seventies was the most stylish decade of the twentieth century. To be honest, I can’t see it myself—all those perms and droopy moustaches. And that was just the women.” Terry burst out laughing.

Just then Rachel noticed a copy of
The Clitorati
lying on the bar. Blimey, she thought. What was it about this book that attracted such knobheads?

“Somehow I don’t see him as the kind of bloke who’d be into heavy feminist literature,” she said, turning the book over and glancing for a few moments at the blurb on the back cover.

“Oh, no, he’s not reading it,” Terry said. He leaned forward and looked quickly to the left and right and said, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but he uses it to pick up women.”

“To pick up women? You’re joking.”

“No, straight up. He calls it ‘is ‘ticket to Tottieville.’ Says it makes him look intelligent and sort of new mannish. Doesn’t seem to be having much luck, though.”

“Really,” Rachel said sarcastically. “You do surprise me.”

Terry chortled. “So, Rachel. What can I get you?”

She explained about having run out of orange juice and asked if he could possibly spare a carton.

“No problem.” He walked the couple of paces to the fridge. She started to tap her hand on the bar in time to the music. Somebody had just put ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” on the jukebox.

“There you are,” he said, putting the carton on the bar.

“Thanks,” she said, handing him a fiver.

He turned toward the till.

At that moment, Tractor returned and sat back down on the bar stool next to Rachel. She continued to face the row of bottles behind the bar, but out of the corner of her eye she could see him looking at her.

“Great book,” he said, picking up
The Clitorati
.

“So I’ve heard,” Rachel said, turning to give him a half-smile.

“In my opinion,” he said, lighting up, “it’s a profound and thoughtprovoking historical analysis of gender conflict.”

He drew hard on the cigarette.

“Funny,” Rachel said, ostentatiously fanning away the smoke, “those words are identical to the quote on the back cover.”

“I don’t believe it. You have to be kidding,” he said.

“See for yourself.” She reached across and turned the book onto its back and tapped the cover.

“I am gobsmacked. Totally gobsmacked,” he said. “Who’d have thought it? Well, you know. Great minds and all that.”

“You reckon?” she said, smiling. He was a total twonk, but part of her couldn’t help finding him entertaining.

He didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Funnily enough,” he said eventually, flicking ash into the ashtray, “I know this great clitoris joke. D’you want to hear it?”

“Er, not really,” she said.

“OK, right. Well, there’s this woman walking past this pet shop and she sees a notice in the window advertising a clitoris-licking frog. She’s intrigued so she goes in and says to the bloke behind the counter, ‘Excuse me, I’m inquiring about the clitoris-licking frog’ and he says . . .” Tractor paused for effect. “And he says . . .
’Oui, madame.’
”

Tractor started guffawing. Despite herself, Rachel’s lips were starting to quiver.

“Get it?” he said, between laughs. “It’s
frog
as in
Frenchman
.”

“Yeah,” she said, stifling her giggles (laughing would only encourage him, she thought). “I get it.”

“I love this song, don’t you?” he said after a moment.

“It’s OK,” she said.

“So, er, what’s your favorite record then?”

By now Terry had returned with her change.

“Linford Christie’s hundred meters,” she said, turning away from him to take her change.

“Cheers, Terry. Bye,” she said.

She smiled briefly at Tractor and started walking toward the door.

“Wey, hey, Terry, I reckon I’m in there,” she heard Tractor say. “She really fancies me. She’ll be back, mark my words.”

Rachel swung round.

“You know,” she shouted back, “it’s such a shame when cousins marry.”

But Tractor didn’t react. Instead he was standing in front of Terry, pointing to his leather-clad crotch.

“Terry, as a mate,” he was saying, “tell me honestly . . . do my balls look big in these?”

CHAPTER 6

“. . . So anyway, sex with this American bloke was so good, even the neighbors had a cigarette afterward.”

Once again, the audience hooted. Tonight, unlike a week ago, they were lapping up her material.

“But they’re a funny lot, Americans,” Rachel continued. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this relaxed onstage and she was relishing every moment.

“There they are, the richest, most powerful nation on earth, but not one of them’s got a decent haircut. Where does your average American go for a cut and blow-dry? Albania? And what about all those ridiculous euphemisms they use for anything lavatorial? I was listening to this woman from LA on the radio the other day—you know the type: thin, neurotic health food freak who looks like she spends her whole life petrified that soon there’ll be nothing left in the world to decaffeinate—anyway she spends five minutes giving masses of full-on detail about what she and this bloke got up to in bed and finally she goes: ‘And then he went to the bathroom in my mouth.’ ”

The audience roared.

“So then this agony aunt comes on and says that women should tell their partners how to make love to them. Yeah right, I thought. Mine has a major fit every time I tell him how to drive.”

Shrieks from the women.

“Well, that’s my time up for tonight,” she said, putting the mike back on its stand. “But I’d like to leave the women in the audience with this final thought: remember, not all blokes are arrogant, egotistical gits—some are dead.”

Whistles accompanied the laughter and applause. Rachel felt herself beaming.

“You’ve been a great audience,” she shouted above the din. “I’ve been Rachel Katz.” She bobbed her head briefly by way of a bow and jogged offstage.

She’d arranged to meet Adam at the bar at the back of the Anarchist Bathmat when she finished her set—which coincided with the start of the interval. When she arrived, having done a quick change in the loo into the new Ghost dress she’d bought especially (having miraculously discovered some space on her Barclaycard), the area round the bar was teeming with people, but Adam was nowhere to be seen. Tonight, their last night together before Adam went off to South Africa for a month, the night they’d planned to go out for a romantic dinner, he had to be late. She looked at her watch. It was just after nine-thirty. She’d booked the table at Momo for ten. It could take them ages to find a parking space in the West End on a Saturday night. If Adam didn’t turn up in the next few minutes they would miss it. Realizing she had no option but to wait, she shouldered her way to the bar, grabbed an empty stool and eventually managed to order a Coke.

She’d been sitting there for a couple of minutes when Pitsy Carter, a pain-in-the-arse Aussie comic, appeared pushing her way through the crowd. Rachel groaned inwardly at the sight of the woman who without doubt headed Australia’s most unwanted list.

“Oh, hi Rache,” she said with her usual Aussie mateyness, grinning from one tiny bleached pigtail to the other. “Great set.” She punched Rachel playfully, but too hard. Then she turned to order a beer.

“Thanks,” Rachel said, forcing a smile as she began rubbing her shoulder.

“That last bit,” Pitsy went on, shoving her change into her back pocket, “you know—’not all men are arrogant gits—some are dead’ totally cracked me up.”

Pitsy—hipster jeans, sleeveless crop top, fleece tied round her waist—brought her beer bottle to her lips. As she did so she revealed one of the tarantulas of thick black underarm hair that had provoked her secret nickname. Since Pitsy, whose real name was Janeece, described herself as Australia’s very own Germaine Greer, apparently having no idea that Germaine Greer was a) already Australian, and b) not intentionally funny, everybody assumed she kept the tarantulas for political reasons.

“I was racking my brains to work out where I’d heard it before,” Pitsy continued. “Then I remembered I’d read it on a bumper sticker a few months ago, but it works so much better when you say it out loud.”

Rachel’s first inclination was to punch Pitsy’s lights out. Her second was to tell her to shut up and shave. Instead she took a deep breath and smiled.

“Oh right. Glad you think so,” she said evenly. Although Pitsy always made her feel like she wanted to jump for joy—off a tall building—Rachel had made it a rule never to let Pitsy provoke her. Unlike everybody else on the circuit who thought Pitsy was a spiteful, dangerous, class A bitch, Rachel had come to the conclusion that infuriating as she was, Pitsy merely had a kangaroo loose in her top paddock.

“She’s just thick,” Rachel said to Lenny, the Anarchist Bathmat emcee, when he’d taken her to one side and warned her to give Pitsy a wide berth. “Believe me, Lenny, she’d buy a zebra and call it Spot.”

* * * * *

“Thing is,” Pitsy said, taking another swig of her beer, “I was slightly concerned about your mike technique. When I did my comedy class back in Killadingo, they warned us not to get too close because you pop. And I have to say I detected a fair amount of popping tonight.”

“Popping,” Rachel repeated, unable to stop a trace of iciness creeping into her voice.

“Yeah, it’s caused by—”

“Thanks, Janeece,” Rachel cut across her, “I’ve been in the business awhile now. I know what causes it.”

“I’m sure you do,” Pitsy carried on breezily, “but I always reckon it’s useful to have somebody take you back to first principles. . . . So Rache, you going in for the comedy contest, then?”

“What contest?” Rachel said, more than mildly taken aback.

“You know, the ‘Joke for Europe’ contest. It’s being held at the Gas Station in Islington, the last Sunday before Christmas.”

She went on to explain that the event was being filmed and sponsored by Channel 6 and that the winner would be given his own show on Channel 6.

“Plus they get to enter the Eurovision Comedy Contest in Helsinki next March. Apparently it’s going to be mega. Thirty countries are taking part.”

Rachel burst out laughing. “The Eurovision Comedy Contest? Come on, Janeece, somebody’s been winding you up. The Eurovision Song Contest is already a total joke in this country. Has been for years.”

She explained that people only watched it to make fun of the over-the-top costumes, because of the entirely political voting and because the Slovenian goatherding songs that seemed to come up every year were so gruesome they became good again.

Images flooded into her mind of some Turkish stand-up in a sparkly jacket and a Michael Bolton haircut dissing the Greeks with a routine about Ariana Stassinopoulous, a Greek Orthodox priest and a souvlaki; oh, yes, and the Swedes getting ten points from each of the Scandinavian countries for some pathetic gag about being God’s frozen people.

“Well, the song contest may be a joke,” Pitsy said, “but according to my agent, everybody’s taking the comedy competition very seriously. I can’t believe you don’t know about it.”

“Janeece,” Rachel said, frowning and shaking her head, “are you absolutely sure about this?”

“Absolutely. My agent mailed me the registration form a few days ago. I sent it in and I’ve got an audition next week. Didn’t yours send you one?”

Rachel didn’t have an agent. She couldn’t afford one.

“No,” she said with an awkward smile, “he didn’t. Must have forgotten.”

“Well, phone him and ask for one. And make sure you tell him how bloody fucked off you are. You don’t pay an agent ten percent to forget.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Rachel said, giving Pitsy another smile. “I’ll do that.”

“Anyway,” Pitsy prattled on, “I was a bit worried at first that I might be barred—you know, being Aussie and all that—but it seems like it’ll be OK, since both my parents were Brits and I have dual nationality.”

“So you’re going in for it then?”

“Does the chief rabbi eat pork? Too bloody right I am. The thing is, as the competition’s only open to comics who are relatively unknown and there are loads of us out there, they’re limiting the number of entrants to seventy-five. So I’d register quickly if I were you. And don’t worry, you can always come to me if you’re having problems thinking up new material. I’ve got stacks of old stuff from when I was doing stand-up back in Killadingo that I’d be more than happy to pass on.”

“Really?” Rachel said faintly, through her indignation. There may have been some doubt as to whether Pitsy Carter was a bitch or merely an idiot, but the one thing nobody ever disputed was that she had van Gogh’s ear for comedy.

Pitsy majored in dated, hackneyed gags about menstruation, lightbulb jokes and lame insights into life on her uncle Frank’s sheep station in Killadingo. The latter included a routine about her aunty Gwen drowning in a vat of Vegemite (complete with sound effects). How she’d found her way onto the comedy circuit at all nobody could quite make out. That she’d ended up performing at top comedy venues like the Anarchist Bathmat was even more baffling—particularly as she wasn’t exactly a hit with the audiences. But for some reason the bookers loved her. If Rachel didn’t know better, she’d say somebody was bribing them.

“Look,” Pitsy said, “I’m gonna pop outside for a quick ciggie—I’m on in a few minutes. You know, Rache, I’m so glad I’ve got you to talk to because sometimes I get the feeling people take an instant dislike to me. Have you got any idea why?”

“Perhaps it’s just to save time, Janeece,” Rachel said with a kindly smile.

Pitsy gave her a quizzical look.

After Pitsy had gone off for her smoke, Rachel drained her Coke bottle, then looked round for Lenny to get the lowdown on the Joke for Europe contest. As luck would have it she spied him almost immediately, heading toward the bar.

“Hi, Rache,” he said breathlessly. “Great set.”

“Thanks,” she said, flattered. She was just about to ask him about the comedy contest, but he got in first.

“God, I just found out about this earthquake on the Internet—six point nine on the Richter scale.”

“Blimey, that’s pretty huge, isn’t it?”

He nodded excitedly.

Lenny was the world’s only seismologist stand-up. Despite being brought up in housing projects by his mum, a single parent with four kids apart from him, he turned out to be gifted academically. In his teenage years he’d developed a passion for rock—although in Lenny’s case it was granite and bauxite rather than Motorhead and it seemed natural that he would study geology at the university. After three years at Cambridge, where he ended up neglecting geology in favor of the footlights, he decided to see if he could make it as a comic.

But he’d never been able to give up geology entirely—in particular his passion for earthquakes. These days he spent much of his time searching out new ones on the Internet and logging their details in a school exercise book. That he could be cool, witty and at the same time a bit of an anorak appealed to Rachel’s passion for quirky personalities, and the two had been great friends almost from the moment they met.

“You know,” Lenny continued, “I can’t believe it didn’t make the papers.”

“Where did it happen?”

“Bolivia.”

“How many people killed?”

“Luckily none at all. It happened in the desert.”

She looked at him and started laughing. “OK, let me get this straight. You seem to be saying that an earthquake in some remote part of Bolivia where nobody was killed should be front-page news in Britain.”

“But it was massive,” he persisted. “I just can’t believe none of the newspapers carried it.”

“Lenny,” she said, “let me buy you a beer. Then I’ll explain to you what makes a good newspaper story.”

She got them a couple of Budvars and they sat down at a table.

“So,” she said, “Pitsy’s been telling me all about this comedy competition.”

“God, didn’t you know about it?” he said, sounding both surprised and apologetic at the same time. “I thought everybody knew. I take it you’ll be entering.” He put the beer bottle to his lips.

“Dunno,” Rachel said with a diffident shrug. “I’m not sure I’m quite up to it.”

“Not up to it?” he came back at her, his accent pure Emmerdale. “Don’t be daft. Course you are.”

She blushed.

“I mean,” he went on, taking another swig of Budvar, “if the competition had come up a couple of years ago, when you started out, I’d have agreed with you. You were bollocks then.”

“You know your problem, Lenny,” she teased. “You never come out and say what you mean. It’s so bloody annoying.”

He grinned at her. “But a couple of years down the road and you couldn’t be more ready. This competition is open to unknowns and face it, Rache—you’re one of the best-known unknowns on the circuit. You’d be mad if you didn’t give it a go.”

“I dunno,” she said again, looking down into her lager.

“Rache, I mean it. This is a great opportunity. You mustn’t walk away.”

She asked him if he was entering and he told her Channel 6 was looking for somebody to emcee the competition and he had auditioned along with a dozen other hopefuls.

“I’ll find out in a couple of weeks,” he said.

She said she’d keep her fingers crossed.

“You know, Rache, there’s no doubt in my mind, you could win this thing. And even if you didn’t actually come first, you’d be bound to come in the top three or four, which would still be brilliant. I mean you’d still get your name known and . . .”

He broke off and looked at his watch. “Oops. Sorry Rache, I gotta go and start the second half.”

Lenny reached into the pocket of his tartan trousers and pulled out a copy of
Plate Tectonics and Crustal Evolution
. He opened it and removed a scrap of paper he was using as a bookmark. He handed it to her. “That’s the name and number of the producer guy to ring at Channel 6.”

With that he drained his bottle of beer, put it down on the bar and trotted off.

Rachel sat staring at the piece of paper and mulling over what he’d said about her being mad not to enter the competition. She didn’t dare share his confidence about winning, but deep down she knew she was just being modest when she’d said she didn’t think she was ready. She was. She didn’t need Lenny to tell her how much she’d come on in the last two years. Of course it would be brick-shittingly scary performing live on national TV, but she couldn’t walk away from an opportunity like this. She just couldn’t.