The Understudy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Josh Harper. A smudged, black-and-white Polaroid of a slightly older, plumper Josh Harper. The haircut that made Josh look like a Renaissance prince (and might perhaps even be called that—“I’d like a ‘Renaissance Prince,’ please”) somehow contrived to make Stephen look like the keyboard player in a provincial British eighties soft-metal band. His nose was a little too big, his eyes a little too small, his skin a little too pale, and it was the combination of all these small deficiencies that pushed it into ordinariness, invisibility. Only a mother, or his agent, perhaps, would call it truly handsome. Stephen frowned, drew on the cigarette, and ruffled his own “Renaissance Prince” with both hands, looking forward to the day, in just eight weeks’ time, when he could cut the bloody thing off.
    Over the loudspeaker came the low rumble of Donna’s voice. “Beginners, please. Mr. Harper, this is your beginner’s call.”
    Stephen stretched and turned the loudspeaker down. Not tonight then. No Big Break tonight. Probably just as well; he wasn’t really feeling up to a Big Break. He put his fingers on his neck, felt the glands in his neck, gathered saliva in his mouth, then swallowed. Maybe he
was
getting ill. He curled his tongue over in an attempt to probe the back of his throat. Tonsillitis, it felt like. He put the plastic kettle on to boil, tipped three spoons of instant coffee into a chipped mug, and ate a biscuit.
    On the loudspeaker, he could hear the murmur of the audience subside, as the lights went down and the sound of the music began—a synthesized string quartet playing pastiche Haydn. He sat and listened for a while, alternating biscuit and cigarette, mouthing along to the lines with Josh, marking out the moves and gestures.
                      
    The curtain rises to find Lord Byron sitting at a desk, scribbling away with a quill by the light of a candelabra. Slowly, he becomes aware of the audience’s presence—he scans the auditorium at his leisure, smiles, speaks in a self-mocking drawl.
    LORD BYRON
    Mad, bad and dangerous to know!
    (He smiles wryly)
    That is what they call me in England now, or so I am told. And it is, I must confess, a reputation that I have done little to assuage.
    (He places the quill down, picks up the candelabra, crosses center stage, limping slightly on his clubfoot
    (left), and surveys the audience)
    Like all reputations it is simultaneously accurate, yet fanciful. Perhaps you would care for another point of view? ’Twill take but ninety minutes of your time…
    (He smiles once more, a slow, knowing grin)
    Or then again, perhaps not. Perhaps you actually prefer the legend to the truth! Truly, I would not blame you. It is only human nature, after all…
    I was born in the year of Our Lord 1788…
                      
    …And it was usually at this point in the play that a profound and stultifying boredom kicked in.
    Stephen reached up to the volume knob on the loudspeaker; like the telescreens in
1984,
you could never turn it off completely, but it was possible to at least get Josh’s voice down to a low tinnitus murmur. He sat and read for a while, then at 8:48 precisely, exactly as he’d done ninety-six times before, and as he would do another forty-eight times more, Stephen wriggled into the opaque black wool and Lycra body stocking that he wore for his onstage role of Ghostly Figure. Very few men, perhaps not even Josh Harper, can carry off the opaque black body stocking with any great style or élan. Stephen looked like a long-dead mime, and freshly depressed, he quickly pulled the heavy black cloak over his shoulders, grabbed the white Venetian face mask and tricorn hat, and headed down the treacherous back staircase that led to stage left.
    Onstage, Byron was approaching his tragically premature death, of a fever caught while nobly aiding the cause of Greek independence, and Stephen watched as Josh reenacted Byron’s illness