Dead Room Farce Read Free Page B

and, like Ran, she was never out of work. She’d started in her teens as the female stooge for television comedians, playing all those roles – secretaries, nurses, receptionists, shop assistants – that the sketches of the time demanded. And she’d always got the laughs by her mixture of sex and mischief. The body was undeniably sexy, but the jokey face – by no means traditionally beautiful – suggested another dimension to her character, an ironic awareness of the roles in which she found herself.
    This quality had stood Cookie Stone in good stead when the priorities of comedy changed, when political correctness emerged as an issue, and women comedians started to take a more central role. That revolution had put out of business many of the pretty little things who’d formerly adorned television comedy. It was now unacceptable for a woman to be on screen simply because she was sexy, and for that to be the basis of an item’s humour. But an actress who could look sexy while at the same time, by her expression, giving a post-modernist gloss to her sexiness, was worth her weight in gold. So there had been no blip in the career of Cookie Stone.
    But her ranking in the comedy business hadn’t changed. After a decade of playing stooge to a series of male comedians who commanded the lion’s share of the show’s funny lines (not to mention its budget), she now played stooge to a series of female comedians who commanded the lion’s share of the show’s funny lines (not to mention its budget). Cookie still had no power; she had simply changed bosses.
    And, in a way, that was fair. Cookie Stone had no originating talent, but she was a very good mimic and a quick learner. She absorbed the comedy technique of everyone she worked with and, as a result, had become a consummately skilful comedy actress. Her every take, her every pause, her every intonation, had been copied from another performer, but her armoury of them was now so large, and her skill in selecting them so great, that she was almost indistinguishable from an actress of intuitive comedy skills.
    â€˜I was saying, Charles . . .’ she continued, in a favourite voice, the humorous right-on feminist learnt from one of the first female stand-ups to do menstruation jokes on television, ‘I was saying that, like, you really look as though you’ve just had a fax saying the world’s about to end.’
    â€˜No. Rubbish. Someone just walked over my grave, that’s all. You OK for a drink?’
    Cookie raised a half-full glass of red. ‘Cheers, I’m entirely OK, thank you,’ she slurred, in the remembered voice of a comedian who’d killed himself with exhaust fumes after rather nasty tabloid allegations about rent boys.
    They talked and had a couple more glasses of red wine, and then looked round and realised there was nobody they recognised left in the pub. The rest of the
not on your wife!
company had all gone home, or on to eat. Maybe some of them, flushed with the success of the day’s rehearsal and the fact that it was pay-day, had even gone to join David J. Girton at some smart restaurant.
    Charles and Cookie could have had another drink, but it seemed the moment for him to say, ‘You fancy eating something?’ He wasn’t sure whether he was hungry or not, but he knew some kind of blotting paper was a good idea.
    Outside the pub, they swayed on the kerb. ‘Where we going then, Daddy?’ asked Cookie, in the voice of an American comedian who’d been given her own short-lived series at the moment when television had first fallen in love with female stand-ups.
    â€˜Erm . . .’ A taxi drew up in obedience to Charles’s wavering hand. ‘I know.’ He couldn’t think of anywhere else. There was an Italian on Westbourne Grove, just round the corner from his tiny studio flat.
    Inside the restaurant, he ordered a bottle of Chianti Classico. They also