The Understudy: A Novel

by David Nicholls

  “What did Colin give you, then?” he said, struggling to maintain a neutral tone.

  “I told you—sushi. It’s raw fish on rice, whereas sashimi—”

  “I know what it is, Madame Butterfly. I meant, what kind of fish was it?”

  “Don’t know, just pink fish.”

  “Well, we’re not having sushi, I’m afraid. I’m exercising some parental authority.”

  “ ’S okay. I didn’t like it that much anyway.”

  “No, me neither. Bleeeeeuch, raw fish,” he said, pulling a disgusted face, and they walked a little farther down the High Street, seeing who could pull the most disgusted face, and make the most disgusted noise, Sophie hanging off his elbow with her whole body weight, and for a moment Stephen felt as if he’d won a little victory over Colin, and big houses on Barnes Common, and sushi for the under-eights.

  As usual, they ended in Pizza Express, with all the others. While Sophie told a long and complicated story that he didn’t understand about a friend from school he’d never heard of, Stephen debated whether he should order any wine. He badly needed something to take the edge off last night’s hangover, but he didn’t want Sophie to think he was drinking again, or smoking either. He imagined the cross-examination when she got home. “And what did Daddy have for lunch, Sophie?” “Daddy had a bottle of wine and twenty Marlboro Reds.” It wasn’t that he was exactly fearful of his daughter—though she did seem an unnaturally shrewd, serious and intimidating little girl, more so since she’d started going to that new school—it was just that her behavior bore no relation to Stephen’s own memories of childhood. He would have been more than happy for her to get food on her clothes, to eat ketchup from the packet, to turn her nose up at anything green. But instead she sat upright in her chair, gave her own vegetarian order to the waitress, clearly and confidently and with a little polite thank-you-very-much smile, unfolded her napkin carefully and placed it neatly on her lap. She sliced her pizza into trigonometrically precise one-twelfth wedges, chewed it methodically, pronounced it “excellent.” She behaved with such easy sophistication and self-confidence that if Stephen had been bold enough to order a bottle of wine, the waitress would probably have asked Sophie to taste it. It was like going on an outing with an ambassador to the UN.

  “So how are you doing at this posh new school then, Sophs?”

  “Oh, okay. I’m good at art and writing, but my maths is a bit below par.”

  A bit below what? A golfing term. One of Colin’s golfing terms. “I shouldn’t worry, Sophs, I was always rubbish at maths too,” he said, trying to strike up some kind of allegiance.

  “I didn’t say I was rubbish at it. I’m just not fulfilling my potential, that’s all,” corrected Sophie. Stephen’s hand went instinctively to his cigarettes, nestling in his pocket next to Han Solo.

  “How about sport? D’you like sport?”

  “ ’S okay. I like hockey, but I find netball banal.”

  “You find netball what?”

  “Banal. It means—”

  “I know what banal means, Soph. What about the piano? How’s your piano coming along?”

  “Piano’s booooooring,” she said. Well, thank God, thought Stephen, a normal response. Still, better toe the line.

  “Yeah, well, it’s boring now, but you’ll be glad of it when you’re older.” My God, not the you’ll-be-glad-when-you’re-older speech—sometimes he bored himself, really he did. “I used to have piano lessons, and I always wish I’d kept it up.”

  “What’s a heavy pencil?” said Sophie, suddenly.

  Stephen stopped chewing. “Where did you get that?”

  “When you were talking to Mum. You said you were heavy-penciled, and she said you were always heavy-penciled. Except she swore.”

  “Heavy-penciled means…that was a private conversation, Soph.”

  “Why were you shouting, then?”

  “It means that I might have got a job. In a movie.”

  “And when’s it coming out?” she said, her eyes wide.

  “What?”

  “The movie, the one you’re heavy-penciled for?”

  A deep sense of unease rose in him. It was one thing to lie to your ex-wife, out of self-defense, but there was something unforgivable about repeating the fib, the lie, to your daughter. He opened his mouth, closed it, leaned forward in his seat. “Look, this movie, it’s not definite, it’s a possibility, a very, very slight possibility. It’s best if you just forget about it, okay?”

  “What kind of film is it anyway?”

  Well, Sophie, it’s a nonexistent one…

  “It’s a…a romantic comedy.”

  “What’s one of those?”

  “A romantic comedy is a story where one person’s unhappy, and then they meet and fall in love with another unhappy person, but they can’t get together and be happy because of the obstacles—”

  “What obstacles?”

  “I don’t know—she’s married to some big film star or something. Anyway, there’s lots of obstacles in their way, but in the end they overcome the obstacles and become boyfriend and girlfriend and everyone’s happy.”

  “And is that what happens in your film?”

  “It’s not my film, Sophie. I probably haven’t even got the part. I almost certainly haven’t got it. In fact, let’s forget about it…”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Please, let’s forget about the film, eh, Sophie?”

  “Not in the film. In real life.”

  Stephen touched the cigarette packet longingly with the tips of his fingers.

  “Why d’you want to know?”

  “No reason. I am just making conversation.”

  “Why, has your mum said something to you?” he asked, but the words came out wrong, and he sounded a little more bad-tempered than he’d intended.

  “Noooo,” she said defensively, with an upward inflection.

  “So why’s everyone so interested all of a sudden?”

  Sophie said nothing.

  “Well, the answer is no, I haven’t got a girlfriend, not in the film, and not in real life, all right?” There was a moment’s awkward silence, the kind of awkward hiatus that really ought not to occur in a conversation with a child. Sophie filled it by taking a drink from her glass, even though the juice was long gone. The ice cubes rattled noisily against her lip.

  “I only asked a question,” she added, finally.

  “I know, I know, Sophs…” He reached across, tucked her hair back behind her ear, and kept his hand on the back of her neck. Did he imagine it, or did she stiffen a little? Why did this always happen? he wondered. Sophie was the only unambiguously good thing he’d ever achieved, and he wanted very much to cast himself as a madcap life force, an irreverent, impoverished but lovably eccentric alternative to her boorish, mirthless stepfather. He wanted to be larger than life, even if in reality he felt slightly smaller. Clearly, Sophie was not convinced; she could sense the strain. The performance wasn’t working. He took his hand away from her head.

  “I don’t mind what you ask me, Sophs. You can ask me anything you want. It’s just it’s quite a personal question, that’s all. I mean, have you got a boyfriend?”

  “No-oooo. But that’s not the same.”

  “Why isn’t it the same?”

  “Well,” she said, slowly, in her parental tone, “mainly because I’m only seven years old.”

  And Stephen had to admit, it was a fair point.

  If I Only Had the Nerve

  …but the undoubted star of the show is Stephen McQue en. His performance of the Cowardly Lion is really, really good, and and got lots of laughs from the audience. With songs and laughter a-plenty, The Wizard of Oz is definitely an very good play, and I would highly reccommend it to most people, but it is Stephen’s performance of the Lion that really makes this play a Rrrrrrrrrrroaring Success!

  So wrote Kevin Chandler, theater critic for Shanklin St. Mary’s Comprehensive School’s Termly Times stu
dent newspaper of Stephen’s 1986 performance. The Sandown and Shanklin Advertiser concurred, calling him “a star in the making, just like his namesake, the American film star Steve McQueen!” It was, everyone agreed, a fantastic performance; he was, in Kevin’s evocative phrase, “really, really good.” At the last-night party, Beverley Slater, his Dorothy, and generally considered by pundits to be way out of his league, led him behind the humanities huts, and as he stood there, shivering in the December night, one hand placed gingerly in Beverley’s bolero, head spinning with applause and lust and contraband cider, his mind was made up. Clearly, a career in show business was a surefire gateway to social status, artistic fulfillment, critical acclaim and barely comprehensible sexual adventures with beautiful women, women even more glamorous, and fascinating, gorgeous and complex, than Beverley Slater. The only real dilemma would be how to balance theater work with his Hollywood commitments. He had the dizzying sensation that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

  He was, however, still on the Isle of Wight; a nice-enough place to grow up, but from a show business point of view, he might as well have been on Alcatraz. Over the Christmas holidays, Stephen decided to radically rethink his long-term career options. A career in computer programming lost its previous heady splendor, and he took up acting classes instead, the local equivalent of running off and joining a circus. To his parents, who ran a newsagent’s and were engaged in a tireless lifelong crusade against young shoplifters, he might just as well have announced that he had decided to drop computer studies in favor of crack and prostitution.

  Over the next few years he grew and developed as an actor. He bought a lot of candles, and tried to read by them. For a brief, regrettable period, he took to wearing his sweater knotted around his neck. He started carrying a small bottle of water around with him, and observing and imitating people he saw on buses, once nearly getting beaten up in the process. He watched Amadeus six times. At seventeen, in tribute to James Dean, he took up smoking and driving badly, bought a number of oppressively tight black polo-necks, and a long flowing overcoat, which he wore, collar up, all year round, turning Shanklin High Street into his very own Boulevard of Broken Dreams. He devoured a secondhand copy of Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares, and began to work hard on his affectations. Performing a scene from Look Back in Anger at college, he employed The Method, and managed to stay quite snippy and miffed for several weeks, ruining several family meals in the process.

  Right up until he started applying for drama schools, his parents hoped that he’d have a change of heart, do something more vocational, more structured. But it was no use trying to persuade Stephen; the words of the critics still sang loud in his ears: “A Rrrrrrrrrrroaring Success,” proclaimed the Termly Times. “A glowing future in acting awaits the talented Master McQueen,” screamed the Sandown and Shanklin Advertiser. In retrospect, it was perhaps an almost perfect example of why you should never believe your own reviews.

  Even now, some fourteen years later, watching a sparsely attended half-term matinee screening of The Wizard of Oz at the Richmond Repertory Cinema, Stephen couldn’t help thinking back to his own acclaimed interpretation, and wishing that Sophie had seen that performance. A videotape of the show did exist, in his parents’ loft, but theatrical magic rarely comes across on the small screen, and, besides, it was Betamax. He reached into his pocket for another fizzy cola bottle, and settled a little lower in his seat.

  Sophie, meanwhile, was doing her best to communicate that she found the film inappropriately babyish and unmagical: swinging her legs extravagantly, kicking the back of the empty seat in front, exhaling loudly through her nose during the soppy scenes, making facetious groans all through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” During the winged monkey attack, she’d slipped off to the toilet, and not returned. Stephen was too engrossed to notice at first, but when he eventually realized that she’d been gone for at least ten minutes, he leaped from his seat and stumbled up the aisle to look for her.

  On the way he cursed his inability to judge these days properly. She seemed to be growing up so quickly and, seeing her so briefly and intermittently, it had become impossible to spot the small increments of change, to notice the point at which she’d stopped liking The Wizard of Oz and started to worry about whether he had a girlfriend. Watching her grow was like a jerky stop-motion film: with every week that passed something small but significant had changed, something had been lost. Was she drinking coffee? Buying pop music? What was on the walls of her bedroom now? Did she want her ears pierced or not? This multitude of small gaps in his knowledge accumulated, until he didn’t know how to pitch his behavior anymore. He felt himself coming across as awkward, or patronizing, or self-conscious, or banal, or, worst of all, slightly creepy, fearful and strange, as if he’d abducted her for the afternoon. She was slipping away from him, just as Alison had, and there seemed no plausible way to prevent it.

  He found her sitting in the lobby, swinging her legs, reading her Jacqueline Wilson novel, and clearly identifying with it.

  “There you are! I was just getting worried about you. What are you doing?”

  “Just reading.”

  “Well, d’you want to come back in? We’re missing it.”

  “Don’t mind.”

  “It’s those monkeys with wings, isn’t it? That bit always freaks me out too. Look—” And he held out one violently shaking hand.

  “It’s not that.” She scowled.

  “Bit too banal for you, is it?”

  “A little bit banal.”

  “So, d’you want to go? Are you bored?”

  “Don’t know,” she said, unable to look at her father. She was pouting now, and staring at the floor. Not on the verge of tears, but just clearly terribly sad. This happened a lot on his days out with Sophie. Things would start well, with hugs and silly games and larking about, but gradually she’d lose her enthusiasm for him, and the fun would dwindle away, like a toy winding down. Stephen remembered what it was like, that terrible heavy sorrow you feel as a child, and knew that, short of producing a pony, or a baby grand, there and then in the cinema lobby, there was little he could do to shift it. He wanted desperately to try, though, so he crossed to her, held the top of her head with both hands and kissed it, then knelt down in front of her, and held her gently by both shoulders.

  “The thing is, Sophs, I know it’s only a silly film for little kids, and I’m a big, proper grown-up who should have grown out of all that stuff, but if I don’t find out if they get back to Kansas, then there’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep tonight. So come back in with me, and we’ll watch the end of the film, and then we can go absolutely anywhere you like, and do absolutely anything you like. All right?”

  Sophie looked up at her father through her fringe, then down at the floor. Smiling with her lips shut tight, she said, “I think—if you don’t mind—I think that I would like to go home now.”

  It was only with a great deal of conscious effort that he managed not to alter the expression on his face.

  “Okay, then! I’ll take you home.”

  Performance Anxiety

  Traveling back into town on the train, Stephen realized that he would have to find a way to make his daughter proud of him.

  There had been some successes before, of course—his Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet; that interesting new play; a not-so-bad-considering production of Godspell; a fringe production of The Caretaker back in ’97, other little sips at success. Unfortunately, Sophie had been unable to share in these moments, and the only performance she had ever seen her father give was his tragic, doomed Asthmatic Cycle Courier in Emergency Ward, which had made her cry uncontrollably, though not for the right reasons. In all his other work for the screen he had been dead or dressed as a squirrel, and now he worried that maybe Sophie thought his career was something he had made up, a complicated conspiracy between Alison and Stephen, to explain where he got to in the evenings. He had a sudden horror that Sophie might grow up and never see him doing anyt
hing wonderful, or even just good. Surely he had to represent something more to his daughter than two legs of a piano stool.

  Something had to be done, and urgently, but how to go about this remained a mystery. The title role in Johnny Johnson would be perfect, of course, but was also a figment of his imagination, and so unlikely to come off. All he needed was a major role that wasn’t a lie, a Best Actor Award that wasn’t stolen. Perhaps if Josh were sick to-night…Perhaps if something terrible had happened at the party…What if he had drunk too much, or there’d been some terrible skateboard pileup, he’d choked on a smoked almond, or been beaten up by his own caterers…?

  Josh was standing outside the stage door, jauntily signing autographs for a trio of Japanese students, grinning away, laughing and joking, in overenunciated English. After the monumental eight-hour faux pas of the party, Stephen decided the best thing to do was keep his head down, and slip by unseen.

  “Hey, Steve—hold on, will you?” shouted Josh, gave a solemn little fake-Oriental bow to his new friends, said “Sayonara” with a Japanese accent, then bounded over.

  He knows, thought Stephen. He knows I stole his BAFTA. My motivation now is not to reveal that I stole his BAFTA.

  “I ruv Japanese girls, don’t you? Vell-y sexy, velly, velly sexy. How are you today, rou naughty boy?” Josh barked in his ear, draping his arm over his shoulder, causing all the muscles in Stephen’s neck and face to contract simultaneously; a gangster’s hug, like the one Al Pacino gives John Cazale in The Godfather Part II. “I know it was you, Fredo…”

  He knows. He can smell his own buffet on me. He can sense his Han Solo in my pocket. He definitely knows…

  Joined at the shoulders, they squeezed, with some difficulty, through the stage door.

  “…feering a riddle bit tender, are rou? A riddle bit lough?”