Brenda Monk Is Funny by Katy Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

I’ll catch up with you at the Attic Bar later or something.’
    Jonathan adjusted to this newly carefree tone.
    ‘I’m doing
Late n Live
tonight, actually, so maybe come there…’ ‘OK, cool. Can you put my name on the door?’
    ‘Yup. I’m on third.’
    ‘OK.’
    Jonathan kissed her on the head and went to his bedroom.
    Brenda felt a new reality opening up at her feet, a tentative crack in the earth. Was this the kind of exchange Jonathan wanted when he complained that she was ‘too intense’? It certainly felt cool and detached but there was no love in it, no need or passion, no relationship that you could find any expectation in. Brenda was disconcerted and part of her felt a lurch to go straight into Jonathan’s room and snuggle up to him, apologise for being weird and ask if she could come to his show after all, to re-establish the connection between them or at least to revive the usual dynamic they were now so used to. But Brenda didn’t. Maybe a week ago, she would have. Maybe even a day ago. But for some reason she was sitting still, staying put. Why, she did not know. It made her feel a little sick but she still had three batteries full of cool mountain air inside her and that was enough for her to power on with, whatever this was.
----
    Brenda was excited about Fenella’s show. She arrived in good time to the venue: a theatre space set on three sides, with a sunken stage in the middle. The Box Office had issued her ticket with no trouble and she now sat on the back row, as the excited babble of her fellow audience members bubbled around her, rising and popping in vertical streams.
    The stage was bathed in a dimmed amber glow, waiting to be occupied, dominated. The music had a low, thumping bass line but Brenda could not hear the top line because of the chatter. She felt a brief sensation of vertigo at the thought that Jonathan was less than a hundred metres away in his own venue, starting his own show, and once again itemising her sexual proclivities to strangers as she, herself, Brenda, sat right here. Not just an idea, a set up-punch, but actual flesh and blood with agency and autonomy. She stifled an urge to get up and run over to Jonathan’s show, to take her ‘proper place’ at the back as part of his ‘team’. As she pictured some other version of herself there, right now, waiting with docile loyalty to hear her life laid out for the laughter of strangers, another universe of possibilities borne out of the choices she did and did not make was instantly created and she felt so out of bodied that her stomach actually twisted. She shook her head and to her surprise said, ‘No.’ But not so loud that anyone could hear it. Then suddenly all the lights went out, and a voice boomed,
    ‘Ladies and Gentlemen and everyone else, please welcome Fenella Lawrence into your lives.’
    The crowd burst into applause and Fenella bounded onto the stage, already miked up with a radio device clipped round her ear that sat along her cheek and stopped next to her mouth. She wore exactly the same outfit as she had before and her hair gleamed like dark, silky melted chocolate under the lights. Brenda wondered if it was a wig, but then Fenella started talking and she forgot about her hair. She forgot about everything except Fenella Lawrence and the master-class that was unfolding before her eyes.
    Fenella had easily as much command of her audience as Jonathan, and to Brenda’s mind, even a little more. The material was good too – sharp and relevant, punchy without being crude and without that reliance on sexual charisma that Jonathan often fell back on, although she certainly had sex appeal and wasn’t hiding it. She didn’t flirt though, that was the difference. There were no biddable women on the front row imagining, even planning, their accidental encounter and subsequent seduction with every minute that passed. And so, unlike Jonathan, there was nothing to distract Fenella, no easy route to an easy laugh.