The Dead Hour

I

Kate was surprised that the Mini held out as well as it did. The tank was half-full when she left Bernie’s garage but the needle kept slipping down toward empty and she thought the tank was leaking. She drove slowly, far more slowly than she had in the BMW, missing the suspension of the big German car.

The sun was setting softly through the trees as she neared the corner before the cottage. She held her breath when she passed it, expecting to see cars outside, but there were none. She stole a glance toward the boathouse on the left side, down by the water’s edge, but there were no signs of anyone there, either. She slowed and took another deep breath as she pulled the car over to the verge. Better not to park in front of the house, she might need to get away quickly.

The inside of the house was a turmoil still-life. They had broken everything, smashed everything that wasn’t attached to the walls, pulled cushions off the sofas, yanked the mirrors and all the photographs off the walls, leaving them facedown where they lay on the floor. It was worse in the kitchen. Every shelf had been emptied onto the floor, heavy stoneware jars had been dropped into the Belfast sink so that a giant white crack skittered across it. The table had been overturned. She could hear the message clearly. We will do this to you.

Kate lifted a wicker hen basket from the floor and filled it with all the tins of food she could find. She had left the cardboard box of powdered milk on the worktop when she ran off to the boathouse and they had knocked it over but left it. She folded the waxed paper over at the top and placed it carefully in her basket. She could use it to cut the dunes in the brown envelopes. She could stay up here for weeks if she did that.

She looked out of the kitchen window, up the hill to the chimney on her nearest neighbors’, knowing it would be empty until May when they always came back from Kenya for the summer, watching for smoke to be certain she was right. The house was still, the ochre of the chimney blending perfectly into the green of the conifers in the foreground. A casual viewer would never know it was there.

She was smiling to herself when she realized that something had changed in the garden. A patch, a big patch, of disturbed earth by the back wall.

She knew exactly who it was and knew how easily it might have been her.

II

It was her night off and Paddy had considered skipping Blackfriar’s pub comedy club this week, nervous that the married policeman might turn up. But she’d slept well during the day and been sitting in the living room, watching Junior Superstars, when she realized that she’d be up all night anyway, sitting on her own, worrying about Ramage hearing the details of the Burnett call after next week’s police inquiry. She might as well go into town.

The pub was on the edge of the old warehouse district. Most of the buildings were high-walled, small-windowed storage facilities for tobacco bales and mountains of sugar, monuments to the end of Empire now empty rat runs.

It was reported to be up and coming as a residential area. New York-style lofts had been carved out of rat-infested grain stores by developers who didn’t really understand the qualities of the space. They had crammed small new townhouses inside the grand walls of the warehouses, cutting windows in half and leaving cast-iron pillars in the middle of kitchens and hallways.

The regeneration had only just begun and the council had put in a lot of streetlights to make the new yuppie residents feel confident about leaving their Volvos and Saabs in the street. It still felt like a well-lit ghost town. Paddy knew that McVie’s flat was here somewhere. She was curious but afraid he meant to try to touch her or something. McVie was a strange man, sometimes avuncular, sometimes leering, sexual signals shooting out every which way.

Through the doors Blackfriar’s was smoky and full of good Friday cheer. A crowd of psycho-billys were gathered at a table near the bar, all wearing denim and battered leather, every one of the girls with a slash of scarlet lipstick, regardless of her coloring. Three hard-looking mohawk mullets were playing the slots, their pints of snakebite-and-black delicately balanced on a thin shelf.

Paddy made her way through the throng. In a narrow corridor leading to the back exit, a small black door sat open in a wall pasted with posters for events past and future. A girl sat guarding it from a little console table. She had a dainty face and pretty brown corkscrew curls that she wound endlessly around her finger. Miserable, she tapped the tabletop with a thick black marker.

Paddy took her scarf and mittens off, tucking them inside her coat pocket, and then she saw the sign that made her heart sink. OPEN-MIKE NITE. In two years of hanging about comedy clubs Paddy had never ever seen an open-mike spot go well. Any idiot with a nervous complaint could get up onstage and die and have it witnessed by a paying audience. Dub said she was a jinx: he’d seen people storm at an open mike and sometimes established comedians used it to showcase new material but whenever Paddy was there it was always gut-shittingly awful.

Lorraine saw Paddy grimace at the blackboard. “One, is it?”

“Hi, Lorraine, how are ye? I’m on the guest list. I’m here with Dub MacKenzie.”

Lorraine nodded uncomfortably, pulled the lid off her black marker with an adamant phut. Paddy held her fist out and Lorraine scribbled her initials on the back of her hand.

“I like your leather.” Paddy pointed to Lorraine ’s brown coat. It wasn’t nice at all. It was made of stiff, shiny PVC and didn’t fit around the shoulders.

“Thanks.” Lorraine shifted in her cardboard coat. Paddy smiled and stroked her own soft green coat as she traipsed downstairs.

The cellar doorway opened out into an oppressively low-ceilinged room. The bar ran at ninety degrees from the entrance. To the right was the smaller stage area with collapsible chairs in a few rows in front of it.

In among a thin crowd of milling drinkers, stooped over the bar, was Dub MacKenzie. Since he had left the Daily News, skinny Dub had taken up smoking and had actually managed to lose weight. He was wearing a pair of red checked trousers, a blue surfer shirt, and blue suede shoes with an inch-high crepe sole. He turned to the door as she stepped in, raising a hand and letting his long fingers unfurl into a greeting.

“You might have told me it was an open mike,” she said, pulling her bulky scarf out of her pocket. “I wouldn’t have come. It’s inhuman.”

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.

III

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.

Below the level of the bar, in the dark at pelvis height, the policeman’s hand found Paddy’s. He took hold of her fingers, pressing meaningfully. Shocked, Paddy yanked her hand away and muttered “No!” in a manner that conveyed her disgust so fluently there could be no going back or dressing it up.

He turned on her. “You fucking invited me here,” he said, and loomed over her.

Paddy grabbed his sleeve and pulled him out of the crowd. She led him over to the audience seats. A couple of them were still occupied, people keeping the places or watching their friend’s belongings, staring at the empty stage, taking in the ripped curtain and the broken chair half-hidden behind it.

She sat him down. “I invited you here because you’re funny, not because I fancy ye. I don’t. It was the middle of the night and I got confused and grabbed your hand by mistake. You’re very funny. You should know that this comedy club is here. Because you’re funny.”

It was like a rejection wrapped in a compliment. He looked at the blank stage and the punters watching it, looked at Paddy again. It seemed to Paddy that he remembered he didn’t really fancy her anyway. He decided to let it go. He nodded. “I am funny.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“And what’re you after? You want to manage me or something?”

“I don’t want anything from you. I don’t even want to be friends with you, but I come here every week and watch six unfunny comics for every good one. I thought you’d like to know about it.”

Dub appeared at Paddy’s side, staring at the policeman, who stood up and held his hand out.

“Right, pal? Are you one of the comics?”

“Yeah.” Dub shook his hand firmly once and let go. “I compere here. Dub MacKenzie.”

“I’m George Burns.”

Dub reeled as if he’d been slapped on the back of the head. He shook his head at Burns. “No, pal,” he said, “what you are is comedy fucking gold.”