Denise Mina - The Dead Hour

Dub took her scarf out of her hands, bundled it into a ball, and threw it into a corner behind the bar where the coats were kept. The barman caught her eye and she ordered a half-pint of shandy for Dub and a Coke for herself.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come tonight,” he said.

“Where else am I going to go? The Press Club? You’re the only man I know who isn’t thinking about leaving his wife.”

“Apart from Sean.”

He always sneered when he said her ex’s name and Paddy didn’t really know why. It wasn’t as if they’d ever met or anything. “Who’s up first?”

“Some guy, does a bank manager with a lisp.”

“Funny?”

He shrugged. “Punters laugh and clap. It’s not comedy song clapping either, it’s all the way through.”

Dub had a theory that comedy songs were never funny and audiences were applauding with relief when they finished. A comedy theologian, he had formulated innumerable laws of comedy and had an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy history, could trace a joke through a hundred incarnations. He had an amazing library of comedy albums ranging from early Goons to bootlegged Lenny Bruce tapes and early Ivor Culter. Paddy had been to his house many times to listen to them in Dub’s cramped bedroom in his parents’ bungalow. They sat on the bed drinking tea and smoking, his mum didn’t mind, listening and laughing at the wallpaper. Occasionally Dub lifted the needle off to explain why it was funny. She could count the number of times she’d seen Dub laugh on the fingers of one hand, but nothing engaged him like comedy. She’d seen him in a trance watching a good visiting act.

The club began to fill up for the nine o’clock start and people approached Dub, complimenting him on his performance the week before, asking favors, and passing on messages from comics they’d run into on the circuit. Paddy stayed in his gangly shadow, glancing nervously at the door every time she saw a shape that looked like the funny policeman. He wouldn’t come, she felt sure. If he did turn up she’d try to give him the impression that Dub was her boyfriend. She’d hang close to him and laugh at his jokes or something. Maybe touch his arm.

It was the usual sort of crowd: a lot of friends of the acts, a few genuine punters, some terrified, sheet-white boys there for the open spot. The few punters were pretty straight looking, guys in shirts or C &A sweaters with girlfriends wearing lemon yellow knits or kitten-bow blouses, all shop-bought style. They had heard about the comedy scene and had come in from the suburbs to spot the next Ben Elton. They were pleasant, amenable people, looking for an excuse to laugh, not the famously intolerant Glasgow Variety audiences who had bottled off most of the great British acts of the last half century.

Somehow, without being called, everyone drifted over to the collapsible chairs in front of the stage and sat down, resting their drinks on the floor and arranging their coats over their knees. Dub slipped away to check the speakers and leads and Paddy checked the door one last time. He wasn’t coming and she was relieved. She sat down at the back, in an aisle seat where Dub could see her face in the light from the stage. He didn’t need a smiling pal in the audience anymore but she did it out of habit. He hadn’t always found it easy.

The lights dropped and Paddy just had long enough to consider the fire hazard involved in blacking out a cellar full of smokers. Dub came rushing up the aisle, brushing Paddy’s shoulder as he passed. The stage lights came up, Dub lifted a gangly leg up the two-foot step onto the stage, took the mike from the stand, and launched into his “why don’t you just go and live in Russia” bit.

It was like making vegans watch a seal cull. The audience had traveled to get here and they were nice people, choosing to giggle their Friday night away instead of getting drunk and fighting with their loved ones or neighbors. Yet here they were, sitting looking at their knees, glancing back for the fire exit while a young man had a low-grade nervous breakdown on stage.

Muggo the Magnificent described the symptoms of his anxiety as they arose: his throat was drying up and now he was shaking, look at his hand, look, he was shaking, it wasn’t like this at parties when he stood up to talk, honestly. My feet are stuck, he told them, I can’t move and I’m sweating. I think I’m going to cry. It would have been a kindness to shoot him.

Dub bolted from the shadows and picked him up like a bit of scenery, carrying him off down the aisle to the bar. Paddy initiated a round of applause.

The next open-mike volunteer came on without an introduction from Dub, who would be busy in the back room feeding a sugary drink to the dying man. He was wearing a brown suit and a jester’s hat, was sweating and too excited, trembling a little. He leaned too close into the mike, making an ear-raking pop.

“Okay,” he said, “listen up, arseholes, because this is funny.” Somewhere in the world this would have got a laugh. Sadly, that place was not here.

“Christ,” muttered Paddy, and got up to go to the toilet for a break from the carnage.

“Hoi, fatso.” The guy onstage had spotted her. “What do you do for a living?”

She turned on him with a look she had learned on the newsroom floor. He flinched, knowing that he might be holding the mike and have the benefit of amplification but he had picked on the wrong fat bird tonight. He buckled and the audience saw it. Some of them turned and looked back at Paddy.

“What do you do?” he repeated.

“I book comedians,” she said loudly.

The audience laughed, with surprise at the level of aggression, snowballing into gratitude that she had given them an excuse to let off some energy, which was what they had paid their money for. Paddy used the noisy hiatus to slip off to the empty ladies’ loo.

She checked herself in the mirror. Across a darkened room a bad comic could see she was overweight. She took hold of the pocket of fat under her chin and gave it a vicious little squeeze. She wasn’t trying hard enough. Everyone was losing weight on the F plan but she was dreaming of chocolate and sugary icing on sticky buns, hoovering up calories. She hadn’t enjoyed a guilt-free mouthful for months. She didn’t know why she couldn’t have been born slim like Mary Ann.

She back-combed her hair with her fingers at the side where it had gone a bit flat, then ran her finger under her eyes to straighten her chewy black eyeliner and stepped back out just in time for the break.

The joking policeman was standing at the bar looking as much like an off-duty polis as was possible without swinging a truncheon. He was dressed in stay-press slacks and a smart V-neck sweater over a shirt. The barman brought him a long clear drink with lemon and ice in it and he sipped it, smiling faintly at the stage area of the room.

Paddy considered bolting back into the ladies’ and staying there until he went away. But Dub would come looking for her. Worse, the policeman might ask for her and then everyone would know he was there to see her. She took a deep breath and walked over.

“All right there?”

“Hi,” he said, smiling a crocodile grin. “Hi. You look nice.”

She noticed with horror that he had taken off his wedding ring.

“Did you catch any of the acts there?”

“No.” As he looked her up and down his smile slipped to the side of his face and nestled there. “Can’t say I did.”

“They weren’t very good.”

It was halftime and members of the audience gathered around them, pressing for the bar, repeating Paddy’s assessment about the quality of the acts. She looked over and saw Dub skulking in the doorway to the keg cellar, an area jokingly referred to as backstage.