The Understudy

Understudies do not sit around backstage hoping the lead breaks a leg. This is the first thing Adaeze tells people, usually before they have finished making the joke.

What understudies do is arrive at the half, sign in, and then spend two hours and forty minutes in a small beige room being paid to be available.

She has done this two hundred and forty times.

She knows the part. She knows it better than Ruth does, if she is honest, because Ruth has had the luxury of forgetting the bits that don't work, whereas Adaeze has had two hundred and forty evenings to sit in a beige room and think about them. She has opinions about the second act that she will never be asked for.

She has a routine. Warm up at the half, properly, because the one night she doesn't will be the night. Then the crossword. Then, at the interval, tea with Marcus from wardrobe, who has been doing this for thirty-one years and has views about everyone.

"You're too good for it," Marcus says, roughly monthly.

"That's not how it works."

"No," he agrees, and pours.

Her mother rings on Sundays and asks whether she has been on yet, and Adaeze says not yet, Mum, and her mother says well, soon, in a voice that has been getting less certain for four years.

Here is what Adaeze has not told her mother, or Marcus, or anyone.

Around performance one hundred and something, she stopped wanting it.

Not the acting — she wants that the way she wants air. She stopped wanting this. She stopped wanting the version where Ruth falls ill on a Wednesday and Adaeze goes on cold to a house that booked to see someone else and spends two and a half hours being not-quite-what-they-came-for, and gets a paragraph in nobody's review, and goes back to the beige room on Thursday.

She had built her whole life around a door opening. And then somewhere around performance one hundred and something she looked at the door properly and thought: I don't think I want to go through it. I think I want a different door.

That was fourteen months ago. She has told nobody, because saying it out loud makes it a decision, and she has been enjoying it being a thought.

Tonight is performance two hundred and forty-one.

At the half, the company manager comes into the beige room, which he does not do, and says: "Adaeze."

And her stomach goes through the floor.

"Ruth's fine," he says immediately, because he is not a monster. "Sorry. No. It's — do you have ten minutes? There's someone in front who wants to meet you."

"Front of house?"

"A director. She saw your workshop thing in the spring. She's been trying to get hold of you for a fortnight and your agent's been — well." He makes a face they both understand. "She's doing a new play in the autumn. She wants to talk to you about the lead."

Adaeze sits very still.

Two hundred and forty nights in a beige room, waiting for a door.

"I go on at the half," she says stupidly.

"You don't go on at all," he says, kindly. "That's rather the point of you."

She laughs. It comes out cracked.

She warms up first. Properly, all of it, the full sequence, because the one night she doesn't will be the night — and because two hundred and forty performances of discipline are not the kind of thing you put down casually, even on the evening you find out you can.

Then she goes to meet the woman in the foyer.

Marcus, watching from the wardrobe door with his tea, does not say I told you.

He waits until she is out of earshot, and then he says it to nobody, with enormous satisfaction.