Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

Enderby had a nightmare and woke from it, impertinently engorged, at something after four. He dreamed that he was forced to act the role of Shakespeare in Actor on His Ass because both leading man and understudy had walked out and there was nobody else who knew the lines. No question of cancelling the performance, too much investment involved, backers insisted that show go on. Enderby as Shakespeare went on stage and opened mouth but no words came out. The audience jeered and somebody threw a missile like a miniature moon. It hit his head and cracked open and covered him with olive oil. The audience roared. Enderby awoke sweating. Thank God it was only a dream, nightmare rather.

"I mean, damn it, look at me," Enderby cried supererogatorily, for that was precisely what they were doing. The cast, with two notable exceptions and a nailbiting Jed Tilbury in charge, his colour today like that of a very old elephant, sat around in the greenroom, looking at Enderby. The coffee machine needed repair, and it growled within like a stomach and infrequently, into a plastic yellow bucket, gushed slop. "Why can't somebody else do it, for Christ's sake?"

"Tomorrow night, okay," Jed Tilbury said. "Floyd learning the lines and Shep learning the other lines." He meant a long youth in a lumberjack outfit with a yellow coxcomb and another, older, in jeans and a Monte Carlo Grand Prix tee-shirt. "But there's tonight, man, and it's the opening and you got this British voice and you wrote the goddamned thing. And you'll have a wig and a beard – and, Jesus, you got Ape here to push you through it, and Oldfellow's songs are taped, and, Jesus, you got to do it, man." Enderby looked at the sweating youth, not so blackly cocky as he had been, a lot on the poor bastard's plate. "And it's Ape's show, we know that, she push you through."

"Yes," Enderby said, with some bitterness. "Ape." April Elgar sat there in a mauve track or jump suit looking rested, as though after some great black night of black amation, her own kind, right. Baby, ah just died. "Goats and monkeys. Actor on his ass. Shakespeare reduced to the animalistic was bad enough. Now Shakespeare's reduced to me. Besides, I don't belong to the appropriate union."

"Ah, fuck that," somebody said.

"You're a poet," April Elgar said without warmth. "You got that in common."

"I fear," Enderby said, "I fear – You lot are actors, and that means you're superstitious. That fag Oldfellow would have made Shakespeare just vulgar. I'd make him absurd. I can't do it."

"Oh Jesus God." Jed Tilbury's black emotional lability began to show. "I got this job to do, can't you see that, man? I got to put this show on now Gus Toplady has slung. I got a career to think of, man." He began to cry. As Enderby had half-expected, April Elgar did a there there patting act and even kissed his limp hand. Call of the blood, fellow melanoid in distress. Just died. One of the girls from the secretarial concourse came pertly in to announce:

"Pete Oldfellow's still blacked out with concussion. Dick Corcoran has this broken arm they've set and cuts and bruises. And he's charged with drunk driving and damaging public property. A mailbox it was. That was the Illinois police on the line."

"Orange juice," Enderby said. "I should have warned him. I didn't think, blast it."

"What in the hell did they think they were doing?" Jed Tilbury cried. "Wearing those goddamn costumes too?"

"They might have been in drag," somebody said. "Fart in gales or whatever they're called."

"And the car," the girl said, "is a writeoff. Lucky to be alive, the police say."

"No sense," Jed Tilbury said with sad weight, "of professional responsibility."

"And," said the girl, "we have to tell the press and the radio and the TV. About cancellation."

"Yeah," bowed Jed Tilbury said, "we gonna cancel."

"Lifelong love and devotion," April Elgar said obscurely, though not, in a second or so, to Enderby. "Let's see some of that. We don't cancel. Stick your ass on the line. You going to do it."

"Oh God oh God," Enderby moaned. "What have I to lose? The ultimate tomfoolery."

"You just pretend," she said, "that you're acting a Baptist minister. The words are different, that's all." Most frowned, not understanding.

Jed Tilbury showed both relief and the concern of immediate problems. "We got to do a run through," he said. "Start now."

"No rehearsals," Enderby said. "I know my own lines."

"Yeah, but there been some changes -"

"About which I was not consulted. And I was barred from your bloody rehearsals. The joke, the man who wrote the bloody thing, that's all. Not one of you spoke up."

"That's not true," April Elgar said. "It doesn't matter, but that's not true."

"All right, thanks. So I get up on that stage as William Shakespeare, and you'd better all pray hard that the man himself doesn't punch through the bloody shoddy thing from the shades. Perhaps you'd better arrange a quick seance with Mrs Allegramente, if that's her real name, stupid bitch always going on about the sufferings of Northern Ireland, knows sod all about it. Get the enigmatic voice of the Bard on the hot line. Bugger everything and everybody." He got stiffly up, the minor poet daring to be Shakespeare, Marsyas who was flayed for his temerity, and then hurried stiffly out to the nearest toilet. There he was urgently drained like a sump. Awaiting him outside was April Elgar. She said:

"You'll be all right. Just be yourself. If they laugh, okay they laugh. I don't think they going to laugh. You care for Shakespeare, that's got to come out."

"That's the bloody trouble." And then: "What did you do last night?"

"No business of yours, sonny."

"Tell me."

"No, I don't tell you. You want to be jealous, okay you be jealous. Then you don't have to act jealous tonight. It's pretty hard to act jealous." And then: "You got no claim on me."

"Love," Enderby said heavily. "Love, love. No, no claim, you're right. Love. I'm going off now to get drunk."

"You better not."

"You've no claim on me. I do what I want. What time do I have to report for duty?"

"You and me," she said, "are going to eat lunch, right. A couple martinis, okay. Then we go through the script. Then you have a little sleep. Then we come back here together. We give 'em all hell, you and me. Cabbages, sheep's heads, you got to despise them. Okay?"

Enderby sat in what had been, and might be again (emerging from blackout was the news), Pete Oldfellow's dressing room. He felt absolutely stone cold and indifferent as Pete Oldfellow's dresser, a retired minor actor new to the job, breathed Southern Comfort onto him. He sat and saw himself in a mirror framed with hot bulbs. Wig, beard secured with strong spirit gum. The Burbage portrait stared grimly back, though without earrings. Codpiece, hose, shirt, jerkin, ruff. Outside in the corridor there was scurrying and he could almost smell the sweat of nerves, as in a stable. A calm voice over a loudspeaker said: "Fifteen minutes." The dresser said: "Your teeth okay? That bottom set looks kind of wobbly to me." Enderby realized that he had left his tubes of toothglue back in his hotel bathroom. He gnashed at the mirror. They'd hold. The door opened and April Elgar came in in scarlet silk, café au lait bosom achingly on show. Her ink hair flashed with stage gems. She held out an envelope.

"Give 'em hell," she said. "My momma sent this. Enclosed, just for you. She sends her warm affection, happy in the Lord. We got a full house, baby. Don't open it now." Enderby propped the letter against a Max Factor makeup outfit. "There he goes." They heard the faint voice of Jed Tilbury addressing the audience, apologizing for absence unavoidable of Pete Oldfellow and begging indulgence, part of William Shakespeare being taken at short notice by play's author the distinguished British. The audience's angry response did not come through. Soon, however, the farting of trombones and thuds of drums did. Overture and beginners. "Luck," she said and was off.