Miss Havisham's Bathroom

Fran had been told she couldn’t really call herself a stand-up if she hadn’t done The Black Lake Pub gig. So, she had signed up and agreed to a car share. Twenty minutes from Manchester and fifty years back in time, in daylight the area might have been called stone-built picturesque. On a February evening, with an empty field to the left and the dark waters to the right, it was Gothic isolation.

In the car, the conversation was about the news from Italy: legs on balconies catching lockdown sun, dolphins swimming the canals of Venice, applause for health care workers as wrapped corpses left hospital. It made her aware of the mixing of breath in the car. The winter outside, the icy slush on the roads had meant she couldn’t wind down the windows while driving.

Approaching the pub, Fran’s sat nav screen blacked out. She parked in the dark as the boys in the back jostled. Her forehead was creased with tension, shoulders high as she prayed not to hit the stone wall that separated people from deep water.

As the car emptied, there were no words of thanks for the lift. During the drive, she had become aware that her fellow performers didn’t see her as a peer. She was free therapy, reliability, maternal, a taxi. Fran pulled her coat close against the February wind and the sharp pins of rain it carried. Not for the first time that evening, she questioned her life choices. Fran took in the freshness of the weather and the sound of the lake lapping against the wall.

Dermot had been running the pay-what-you-want, split-bucket gig for years. In the early noughties he’d been nominated for a Best Newcomer award at Edinburgh and that accolade was still on the chalkboard outside the pub, alongside the price of a pint and a pie.

Fran followed the boys inside. The temperature didn’t rise as the stepped into the pub. There was no background music or chatter. The furnishings were sparse. This was not a cosy country inn hoping for the passing tourist trade. It made no effort to appeal to strangers.

Dermot held out his hand as he introduced himself and she had to work hard not to recoil and just accept the offering. The stench was over-powering. The boys had joked about it, but Fran was not ready for the reality. It smelt like he was decaying from the inside.

“So, you’re the driver, eh?” Dermot asked.

“And an act,” Fran asserted. Dermot snorted.

“Well, you all get ten minutes. I’m not over strict ‘specially if the crowd like you.”

The "crowd" at this point of the evening consisted of a smattering of sparsely populated tables of pot-bellied, bald men, tight, angry faces with their fists around pints of murky brown beer.

“It’ll liven up,” Dermot suggested. “I’ll not put you on first. Always hard for a lady. You can come on after the break.”

Fran nodded. She was in her head, rehearsing her first line.

Matt nudged her with his elbow, “I think you’re in there.”

Alex agreed, “He’s in the market for a new girlfriend.”

“Yeah, must be about twenty years now.”

The boys laughed and Fran smiled at their laughter, unsure of the joke.

***

It became clear that not only one was she the only woman on the bill, she was the only woman in the room and this wasn’t about to change. She barely registered the acts in the first section. She had heard it all before: jokes about crazy ex-girlfriends, weak bladders after a night out, casual racism. Alex’s brand of surreal silliness closed the section. It got some titters, but the audience were the children who bullied him, not the children who had to make comedy out of playground trauma. There was a general shuffle to the bar and smokers made their way outside.

Fran steadied herself with her complimentary diet coke and started chewing gum to combat dry mouth.

Eventually, Dermot ambled back to the couple of upended pallets with a microphone stand he called a stage. He coughed and a globule of phlegm landed on the deck. It glistened. It took up all Fran’s attention. It was a Koh-I-Noor of mucus.

He held his audience up for ridicule and they bayed at being told they were stupid and ugly. And then he broke the mood. “Look lads, your next act is a lady.” There were boos. “Yes, I know it’s hard for a girl to get on this stage and I’m really hard for this one…”

Fran prepared to die.

She climbed onto the pallets without so much as a clap or a whoop. Dermot’s odour lingered on the microphone, hitting the back of Fran’s throat as she swallowed before starting her set. Fran spent her time on stage trying to avoid the slime filled-spit. It held more space in her head than her jokes. The men went to the bar and ordered drinks, conversations continued as she went through the act about her mid-life crisis, the divorce, the way women get stretched in the middle across generations. Then she called Boris Johnson a fuckwit and the room froze. It was the deepest silence she had ever known as she walked off stage.

“No seriously, lads. She looked alright for a lass of her age,” Dermot derided.

One of her car mates was still to perform so she couldn’t just drive off. Instead, she waited to ask Dermot where she would find the ladies.

He looked confused.

“Nobody goes in there.”

“Well do you want me to use the Gents?”

His face was a long sneer. “They’re out the back, but…”

Fran didn’t wait to hear the rest of the sentence. She needed a refuge away from the men.

She exited the pub through a back door, littered with cigarette stubs and vaping stickers. The smell of urine wafted in waves as the wind whipped around Fran’s face. It took a moment to adjust to the dark, but by the light of her phone she could pick out an outhouse.

Effort was needed to push at the door. As it gave way, a gentler perfume reached her, a small, intimate smell, powdery like the kiss of a favourite aunt or a young girl’s freshly washed hair. The creak of the door sounded like an uncomfortable, forced laugh.

A switch on the wall produced a flicker and then a low light from a dirty overhead bulb. Tiled walls, two stalls, a large mirror textured with mildew and grime. Everything should have been pink, had been pink some time ago, but now it had lost its lustre, faded and tinged with yellow. There was a small window ledge with dried flowers – dusty and cobwebbed. Next to the flowers, a faded green packet of menthol cigarettes and a lipstick case. The net curtain a shroud. A forgotten room.

Fran looked in the mirror. It took time to see her face in the reflection. The dust seemed to have trapped something else there, that almost but not quite moved along with her. She tried to pick out details, unsure that the features in the frame matched her own. She looked younger, less certain, an out of place hopefulness in the softness of her jaw. For a moment, it looked as if the face in the mirror was going to ask her a question before Fran’s features took hold.

When Fran opened her mouth to lecture herself, her breath clouded the space.

“I didn’t die,” she said. “Nobody died. It was just a bad gig.” The sound of her voice was muffled by the dust in the air.

She looked down and giggled at how ludicrous it was that she was here. That the opinion of those men should matter at all. Out of the corner of her eye, Fran saw the mirror giggle back, and the sound of the laugh arrived a moment too late.

She drew a breath to reset. On the inhale she felt something fill her lungs like a menthol vape.

When she looked up again, the mirror was empty.

Fran grabbed the door. It took a tug or two to re-open and to be blasted with the sharpness of the outside cold.

She took out her phone to use as a torch to find the pub entrance. But her view was blocked and the familiar smell of stale clothes, tobacco and bad breath preceded her recognition of his face.

“It’s like Miss Havisham’s bathroom in there,” Fran said. It was an offering of civility as she tried to move past him, but Dermot’s arm was raised to pin her back against the outhouse.

“Well, well, well,” Dermot said. “The comedy didn’t go great did it. But we can still have fun this evening.”

Fran’s response was polite, but terse as she held her breath against his halitosis. “I don’t think so. I just want to go home.”

“Typical. You get on that stage, saying you’ve not had any for months and here I am.”

“Not everything we say on stage is true.”

He was leaning in. He was pushing forward. She felt a hand grab at her breast, and saw a resentful entitlement looming above her. An impulse beyond Fran’s reason, stronger than her, took control of her right hand and balled it into a fist. Fran punched Dermot in the face. She had never hit anyone before and was surprised by the pain in her wrist as she made contact. Dermot fell back and from somewhere in her throat Fran emitted a laugh that wasn’t hers. Nursing her wrist, she ran back to the pub

She grabbed the boys. “We’re off.”

“What about the split bucket?”

“It wouldn’t have covered my petrol costs.”

***

In the car.

“You hit him?”

“Bit of an over-reaction.”

Fran’s wrist continued to throb as she careened around the tight corners of country roads. Legs twitching with adrenalin she dropped them off one by one before she made her way back to her own empty house.

That phrase – “an over-reaction” – rattled through Fran’s head, like a line had been crossed. She couldn’t trust herself anymore. She dreamed that night of the pungency of his body. Craddling her wrist, she lay awkwardly and alone.

***

As the world around her shut down, Fran’s head filled with an unknowing, unfocussed rage, so that when she read about the upset on the forums about the lack of support for the comedy industry, she laughed at their pettiness. Her laugh sounded like the creaking door of a forgotten room. In the fog of on-line meetings, cancelled exams and social media doom-scrolling, she cried whilst she hoovered. Her head ran cold as her body felt hot. She berated herself for her lack of focus. She was unsure who she was…

***

When Dermot died of Covid, he received an obituary in the local newspaper. Fran read about his Edinburgh nomination and how he never quite made the big time; how he faltered after his fiancée (unnamed) went missing. No one attended his lockdown funeral or watched its transmission on Zoom. Her wrist stopped aching. But her nights were still plagued by dark, cold water and pink, grimy bathrooms.

***

The dry summer meant the level of the Black Lake lowered and the sandy shore line was exposed. So was a body of a woman. It was estimated she had been in early twenties when she drowned.

Fran attended the heavily-policed, silent vigil, for the unidentified woman. She felt powerful, standing there surrounded by other women, each respectfully preserving the space around them. From behind her mask she smelt the powdery smell of Miss Havisham’s bathroom, she exhaled a menthol breath and her old self returned.