And then…
My ears prick up as he starts talking about how hot it was the other day and—maybe, yes, Oh my God, I can’t believe it…yes! He’s actually using one of my jokes! One of MY chuffin’ jokes! And then, just as quick as it came, my elation is replaced by panic. WHAT IF NOBODY LAUGHS?? I mean, there’s an actual room here filled with actual people. Strangers, THE PUBLIC are here, listening to a joke that came from MY head, and if they reject that they reject me and oh, good holy crap, why did I do this?
But then…he hits the punchline.
“…you understand, right? ’Cause the Aldi’s manager sure didn’t.’
Time stands still. Just for a moment. And I turn and I look around the pub to see people’s faces lighting up with the biggest grins and then…laughing! Actually, full-on belly-laughing. Because of me. And it feels like I’ve just been injected, straight into my brain, with pure total joy.
He’s changed some of the wording so it fits his style better, but by the end of his set he’s used all of them! ALL of MY jokes. And they ALL got laughs! He finishes up his set with the joke I gave him yesterday, and he doesn’t change the wording to this one at all. Just says it exactly as I’ve written it:
“Yeah, that’s my dad over there, so obviously I can’t bad-mouth my parents too much tonight because, well, you know, I value my life. But isn’t it weird how when you are merrily telling off your parents, that’s fine, but if one of your friends joins in with you that is NOT fine? No one can tell off my parents but me!
“It’s like squeezing a zit on my own butt: it’s fine for me to do it, but if your friend does it for you that’s just plain wrong.”
A big laugh erupts and Leo pauses, then adds my final word:
“Apparently.”
This seals the deal and now everyone is clapping and hollering with laughter. At my joke! And it feels frick-frackin’ amazing. It doesn’t even feel like he’s getting the laughter and I’m not—it feels like we both are.
He smiles, thanks the audience, hangs up his microphone, and swaggers off back to his friends who all high-five him and pat him on the back.
“That was so funny!” says Kas.
And I laugh, still on a high from the whole intoxicating fog of this delicious feeling.
“So come on, Pig, quick, before the next act—how does he know your name?” says Chloe.
I shrug with a grin. After all, they always have boys passing them notes and getting their friends to ask them out. Why can’t I have a little boy attention for once? Even if it is based on nothing more than my little brother falling over outside a boy’s house.
“We’ve just seen each other around,” I say casually, unable to wipe the smirk from this bloody brilliant evening off my face.
“Ha ha! Pig, you dark horse, who knew?” says Kas, laughing.
On the other side of her though, Chloe looks pissy.
“Kept that a secret, didn’t you?” she says.
“He only knows my name, Chloe—we’re not engaged or anything!” I say, determined to enjoy every moment.
“Well, if you’re not going to give us any more details, I’m off to the can,” she says and saunters off.
“What’s her problem?” I ask Kas.
“Oh, you know Chloe. She hates it when anyone else gets any attention from boys. Don’t worry about it.”
And I’m not really. I’m mostly just thinking about the massive laughs me and Leo just got. Me and Leo. Together. Whether he knows it or not. Now that I know he likes the jokes I really should just tell him I wrote them. But then that might ruin the whole thing—he probably thinks one of his friends wrote them, and if he finds out it’s a dumpy girl two years younger than him he might freak out. So I’ll keep it to myself—as my secret.
After all, I am sworn to never reveal my secret identity. For I am the comedy ninja. And my work here this evening is done.
By the time Chloe returns from the bathroom, Jake’s playing his set. He plays slow love songs he’s written himself, and though he’s actually not bad on the guitar his lyrics are terrible, full of meaningless clichés, lines that you wouldn’t ever hear anyone say in real life, at least not without throwing up a bit. Stuff like, “I’ll always be true,” “your sweet caress,” and “my tender loving care.” He sings with a pained expression and his eyes closed and at one point stops playing the guitar for a moment and clenches his fist in the air in a classic pulling-the-invisible-toilet-chain, boy-band move. Seriously.
When he starts his last song, Freya leans over to us and excitedly whispers, “He wrote this one about me!” which makes me wonder why she’s not worried if he openly wrote the other songs about some other girls. The song is called “My Forever Passenger” and while the creepy love song lyrics are still there he’s bravely combined it with his love of fixing cars, at one point ambitiously rhyming “heartache” with “handbrake” and “the way you felt” with “fan belt.”
He walks offstage to the polite applause filling the room and just nods as if to say, “Yeah, I know, I’m amazing.”
And, while he’s really, really not, it’s cool. Why not let the guy have this moment? God knows, I’m having mine. I feel flipout fantastic. And nothing’s gonna spoil this feeling. Ever.
Argh (spoiler alert), who am I kidding?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Freya is all over Jake when he returns to the table, and we’re also telling him what a great set it was, and talking about perhaps heading back soon, when Leo’s dad announces, “And next up we have…Pig. Pig? Can that be right? Erm, anyone called Pig around?”
The color and feeling drain from my whole body, and I freeze.
Chloe leans over to me and says, “Come on, Pig, they’re waiting for you!”
“What? What’s happening?!” I manage to get out, wondering if this really is a daydream. Or a nightmare. “No, no, I can’t. Wait, what?”
Seeing the panic in my eyes, Kas puts an arm around me and whispers with a kind smile, “Go on, Pig, you can do it—it’s now or never!”
“Never! I choose never! Never’s fine for me!” I say.
Then a voice behind me starts chanting, “Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig!” and soon half the pub joins in, and I realize there’s no way out. The world is suddenly a blur.
“Take this, you’ll need it,” says the same voice from behind me and a glass of water is thrust into my unsteady hand. It occurs to me for a moment that the voice may have been Leo’s, but there’s no room in my head for that right now. There’s only room for a swirling, sickening crapstorm of panic and dread.
I get up from my seat, but my knees have turned to jelly and for a moment I think I may have actually forgotten how to walk. Somehow I manage to persuade my legs to move, and I shuffle up to the stage. What else can I do?
The spotlights are blinding. Leo’s dad covers the microphone and leans over to me. “So you’re Pig? Really?”
“Erm, yeah.”
“All right, well, what you doing, love?”
“Erm, I was told to come up here?”
“No, I mean singing? Poetry?”
“Right, erm…comedy?” I offer, although for a moment I think singing a hearty rendition of “Summer of ‘69” might be the easier option; a quicker, simpler way to kill myself through humiliation rather than the torturous slow death I’m currently experiencing.
Leo’s dad announces, “And now, everyone, give it up for the comedy stylings of…Pig!”
He leaves the stage as a smattering of applause echoes around the otherwise now silent and expectant pub.
I move to the middle of the stage. Spotlight on me. Faces in the dark staring at me. My mind a complete blank. It’s so close to an actual nightmare I suddenly panic that I’m not wearing all my clothes. Too late now if I’m not.
I glug down some water, though somehow my throat still feels like it’s lined with sandpaper.
Who the hell put my name up for this?
Chloe. Must have been her. When she stalked off to the
“can” after finding out about me knowing Leo.
How could she?
With a now violently convulsing hand, I put the glass down on a small table next to the microphone stand.
The microphone itself is way too high up for me. I struggle with it, trying to angle it down, but it won’t budge. So with hands still quivering like dying fish, I yank it out of its holster. There’s a yelping feedback sound from the speakers behind me, and as they squeal my stomach turns and I consider just running offstage, out of the door and as far away as I can possibly get.
But no, I’m here. People are waiting for me to say something. Technically—technically—this is what I’ve always wanted. I have to do it now. But my mind is still blank.
Just say something. Anything!
“Hello. This is, my, er, first stand-up.”
The words are barely recognizable as human sounds as it turns out it’s very hard to talk when there’s literally no moisture in your mouth. Lips are sticking together. Teeth are sticking to lips. Tongue has adhered itself to the roof of my mouth. I cough, reach down, take another gulp of water, put the glass back down.
The room is SO painfully silent. My brain is a hive of confusion and panic. I know I’ve written countless jokes in the past that are stored in there somewhere, but somehow none of them can break through. They’re all mashed up, tangled in the furthest reaches of my idiot mind.
Deep breath.
I can do this. Maybe.
“So, yeah, this is my first stand-up. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear that.”
A tiny laugh echoes around the room. Tiny, but a laugh nonetheless. This makes me feel better.
“And erm…yeah, get used to it because I will be this awkward for the whole routine.” This gets a proper laugh from the audience. A slightly nervous, pitying laugh, but a laugh all the same. Enough to spur me on. I scan my brain for something, anything, any of the jokes I’ve ever written, just something to say. And slowly the fog in my brain starts to clear, at least enough for a couple of possibly half-decent funny thoughts to break through.
“Man, this is scary. I mean, despite my dainty appearance, I don’t scare easily. But this, whoa! I am scared of spiders though. I know it’s a cliché, but there we go.”
I’ve relaxed a bit now, so use a trick I’ve seen stand-ups use.
“Anyone else in here scared of spiders?”
A few people shout yes. Excellent!
With every word I speak, my confidence grows. “Right, you people—you’re the enlightened.”
A bigger laugh—the room is actually enjoying my joke. Maybe I can do this!
“And you ignorant lot, you just don’t understand, do you? You just don’t get that it’s not that we don’t like spiders, it’s not that we think our personalities are incompatible. We just know they are genuinely the work of the devil. And seriously, if an eight-fingered disembodied hand with beady eyes and a sack of venom runs at you, who’s the idiot? The dude who wants to pet it, or the dude who runs the hell away?”
It actually gets a real laugh—the comedy gods are smiling down on me!
“So anyway, it wasn’t my idea to come up here, it was actually my, er, ‘friends.’ I say ‘friends,’ but, erm, now it feels more like we’re Hunger Games contestants: even if I survive this, I’m still going to have to kill at least one of them.”
Another good laugh fills the room, giving me a high I’ve never experienced before.
“We love you, Pig!” shouts Kas.
I squint into the darkness behind the blinding spotlight to smile at Kas. I’m starting to ruddy well enjoy this! It’s everything I’ve always imagined it might be!
And then I see that Leo, my Leo, is sitting next to Chloe, his arm resting on the back of the seat behind her, almost like his arm is around her. He whispers something to her, and they both giggle.
My thoughts jumble up. What? What is this? How could she…? Just what?
Then I remember everyone’s looking at me. I need to keep going.
“Umm, yeah, so everyone calls me Pig.” I look down at my big wobbly body then up again. “I think it’s ’cause I’m just slightly more intelligent than a dog?”
People laugh.
“No, but I guess we should discuss the elephant in the room, but, erm…I forget what that is…which is weird because usually I never forget.”
It takes a moment for people to get this, but when they do there’s another big laugh, which would have felt great if it wasn’t for Leo and Chloe. Why the hell is his arm still on the back of her chair?
“No, but seriously, erm, I know that I’m on the big side, and healthy eating and obesity is a big important issue now and, well, I read just this week that apparently one in every three Americans has…eaten the other two.”
Another laugh.
“So at least I know I’m not alone and, well, I actually truly believe that inside every thin girl there’s a fat girl trying to…eat her way out.”
A bigger laugh and a few claps too.
Leo laughs as well, and then Chloe whispers something to him, her mouth right next to his ear. Closer to him than I’ll ever get. He carries on laughing, but he’s looking right toward me, and it suddenly feels like they’re laughing at me, not with me. Is this why she put my name down for this? Because she was jealous that Leo knew my name, not hers, so she wanted to get me away so she could move in on him?
My brain turns to mush. The fog sets in again. The room is staring at me and I’m saying nothing. I’ve got nothing. I’m done. I can’t do this any more. I can’t do this ever again.
“So that’s it. Thank you, erm, yeah.”
With shaking hands, I put the microphone back in its stand as people applaud and a few even whoop. Out of sympathy, I’m guessing. Sympathy for the stupid fat girl who just made a complete arse of herself onstage.
They are clapping quite loudly though. Perhaps I wasn’t so bad after all? I got some laughs. And if it hadn’t been for—argh—Chloe and Leo maybe it would have been half OK?
Leo’s dad emerges from the shadows at the side of the stage. As I turn to walk off past him, he smiles at me, then suddenly reaches his arms out. So, without thinking, I move in for a much-needed hug.
Wow, what a nice guy.
Then when his arms, instead of reaching around me, reach behind me, I realize with a devastating thud in my insides that he was actually just trying to catch the microphone stand which I’m knocking over with my butt as I turn around.
Time lapses into a painful slow motion forcing me to fully absorb every humiliating millisecond as I stand onstage, in front of everyone, my arms around Leo’s dad’s waist as he lunges in vain to save the mic stand, a victim of the destructive power of my arse cheeks.
The stand crashes to the ground, sending the water in my cup flying and dispensing its contents over the electrical equipment behind me. There’s a loud bang and a flash lights up the gawping faces of the audience before all the electrics go out and the pub is plunged into darkness and, for a moment, a stunned silence.
Then…
“That’ll do, Pig, that’ll do,” says Leo’s dad.
Everyone screeches with laughter and applauds wildly. And this time they definitely are all laughing at me.
“No need to worry, everyone!” shouts Leo’s dad as I sheepishly unclamp my arms from around his waist. “Leo—go and flip the switch in the fuse box!”
People start to turn on the lights on their mobile phones, illuminating the pub enough for me to see the embarrassing mess I’ve made of the stage.
“I’m so sorry, what can I do?” I say, crouching down and trying to mop up the water on the floor with the sleeves of my shirt.
“Nothing, love. Accidents happen—don’t worry about it. Just move back and let me deal with it, OK?” says Leo’s dad.
“OK, yep, no problem,” I say, trying to hold myself together as Chloe and Kas gather around me in the semidarkness.
“You all right, Pig?” they say thr
ough great fits of giggles.
Their laughter at me, and knowing it was Chloe who put my name down for this torturous mess in the first place, sends me over the edge, and I can feel the hot sting of tears behind my eyes. I get up and run past them, to the door and out of the pub, then up the street.
“Pig!” they call, coming after me. But I don’t want to hear it.
I run to Jake’s car and lean up against it. As it lurches under my weight, I put my head in my hands and the tears start to fall. And then the car alarm goes off, screeching and wailing into the night air.
Just my luck that the only thing that actually works on this car is the frickin’ alarm, which is in fine voice as it screams to the world to come and look at the idiot.
Kas and Chloe run up the road toward me.
“Bloody hell, Pig,” says Kas, giggling. “It’s not your night, is it?”
“I’ll go and get Jake!” says Chloe, laughing.
Then Kas notices my tears and puts an arm around me. “Seriously, don’t worry about it, Pig. It’s all fine. You were great in there!”
“I was awful. It was awful. Please, I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, shrugging her off and turning away.
“But you totally nailed it, and did you see Leo watching you? He was loving it too.”
“Oh, I bet he was, loving having his arm around Chloe anyway,” I spit back.
“It wasn’t like that, honest. He just came and sat next to Chloe—it’s not her fault,” says Kas.
I turn to her, my blush of humiliation deepening. “Whatever. And really I couldn’t give a crap. Like you say, it’s fine.” I look back up the road, wishing it would open up and swallow me.
We wait in silence until Jake and Freya come back with Chloe, then we all get in the car, with me in the middle, of course, doing what I’m best at—being a big lump of human ballast. I look down at my hands as I pick at my fingernails, my crispy hair falling down either side of my face, forming a useful set of curtains between me and Chloe and Kas.
Chloe goes to say something to me, probably the same nonsense Kas said, that it was all “fine,” that I did “great,” that all my dreams of doing stand-up haven’t just been dropped from a great height into a great steaming pile of turd burgers. But out of the corner of my eye I see Kas raising a hand up to Chloe and shaking her head, the universal symbol for “Don’t say anything now or she might go mental.”
Pretty Funny for a Girl Page 11
