choose that moment to barge into his room. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you watch porn like everyone else?’
Bunny trawled for cigarettes somewhere inside the corset he was stuffed into. Smoking was strictly forbidden in the theatre – it was a ‘tinderbox’ waiting to catch fire, according to the ASM. What smoke alarms there were had run out of battery long ago and there was a singular lack of sprinklers backstage, allowing for a good deal of illicit smoking from the performers. The chorus girls were the worst, lighting up like chimneys in their dressing room amidst a health-and-safety nightmare of hairspray and polyester.
Bunny offered his pack of cigarettes to Harry, saying, ‘Go on, pet, it won’t kill you.’
‘No, I’m all right, Bunny, thanks,’ Harry said. They had pretty much the same exchange every night and Harry kept a box of matches in his pocket so that he could light Bunny’s cigarettes. He (she, she, he corrected himself) could manage the cigarettes but there wasn’t room in her costume for anything to light them with. ‘Too tight,’ Bunny growled. ‘The friction it would cause if I tried to squeeze anything else in there would be dangerous. You might see a case of spontaneous combustion.’
Harry knew that just about everything Bunny said was salacious but he wasn’t always sure what was intended by the double entendres. There was something oddly Shakespearean about Bunny. They’d done some stuff about gender swapping at school – ‘Compare and contrast male and female roles in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.’
Harry had studied Bunny’s act as he might indeed have studied Shakespeare. It had an interesting trajectory (one of Miss Dangerfield’s favoured terms). Bunny’s act closed the first half of the show and was based around the concept that he – she – was an opera diva, a screechy soprano, who never quite got round to singing her big aria. (It was more entertaining than it sounded.) For the first half of Bunny’s performance the audience were restless, cat-calling and muttering – a lot of them were only there for Barclay Jack, not a big man in heels.
‘But you always win them over,’ Harry told Bunny.
‘Thanks for explaining my own act to me, pet,’ Bunny said.
‘Sorry,’ Harry said, pressing on anyway. ‘But I really like the way that you do it – you really are funny, and kind of … reckless.’ Harry would have liked to learn how to be reckless. ‘And then by the time you get to your big ending—’ (‘Oo, Betty,’ Bunny said mysteriously) ‘they’re cheering you on like you’re a hero. It’s brilliant.’
Harry liked the transformative nature of what Bunny did. He wondered whether if he changed his own name he would become a different person. What name would he choose for himself if he took on the identity of a drag queen? (An unlikely idea, he would never have the nerve.) ‘Hedda Gobbler?’ he offered Bunny. ‘Lynn Crusta?’
‘A bit obscure, pet.’
Bunny knew a drag queen called Auntie Hista-Mean, and another one called Miss Demena, which were definitely not real names. And Anna Rexia, which was just plain wrong. He wondered if Amy had eaten the hummus sandwich he’d left for her.
Crystal was called Crystal Waters before his dad married her. It seemed an unlikely name. She confided to Harry that it was her ‘stage name’. Had she been on stage? Harry asked eagerly. ‘Well, you know …’ she said vaguely. His dad had said that she’d once been a glamour model, ‘topless only’, as if that was an achievement, although more on his part than hers.
Not an achievement but a debasement, according to Emily. Emily could be harshly opinionated, especially on the subject of Crystal. ‘An ersatz woman,’ she called her. Harry had known Emily since primary school, so it was a bit late to start standing up to her. ‘I mean, your stepmother’s not exactly a feminist icon, is she, Harry?’ ‘No, but she’s a nice person,’ Harry defended weakly. And you had to admire the effort she put into her appearance – almost as much as Bunny did. (‘Donatella, eat your heart out,’ Bunny said when Harry showed him a photo. He was actually showing him a picture of Candace, but Bunny was more interested in Crystal, who also happened to be in the frame.) Harry recognized ‘ersatz’ as one of Miss Dangerfield’s words. Emily was going to be very put out when she learned that Miss Dangerfield wasn’t returning to school after the summer. Emily was