In the back room of the Wellington Arms in the same city and at the same time, a man calling himself Unfunny John paced behind a damp curtain.

The cigarette smoke made him wheeze. The temperature in the room made his face flush red and his ruffled shirt stick to his body. There was a patch of eczema on his chest that had flared up. He resisted the urge to scratch it. If he scratched it he would get blood underneath his fingernails and it would make him hate himself.

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John has a wife too. She is called Emma; he hasn’t seen her for ten days and if he’s not careful he’ll never see her again. Emma worked at a morgue and thought about death, on average, every moment of her working day. She thought about it in her leisure hours too but she kept it hidden. Like people do.

Ten days ago she asked John if he knew what the “divine wind” was. John felt a gag of indigestion coming, but swallowed it. Emma got withdrawn if he didn’t take her seriously. So withdrawn she looked like she was on the slab herself, and John thought the look unflattering.

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Unfunny John worried about his stage name. Was it ironic or was it true? Perhaps he should change it to Suicide John.

No, who’d laugh at that?

He used to be a magician. Old school, despite being a young man. Sleight of hand. Illusions. Escapology.

Emma had been his assistant. She didn’t want to be, she said she was already an assistant. He said a morgue assistant was no kind of assistant so he’d put her onstage, locked her in boxes and put swords through her. He’d made her cap her teeth, lose weight, and wear body stockings. She was better than this, she told him, she saw real men cut real people in two and magic didn’t come close.

So Emma went back to the morgue and John became Johnny John, a knowing, politically conversant wisecracker doing open slots. Then he became the Mysterious Monsieur Jay, performing stream-of-consciousness observations on life that went down badly in working-men’s clubs. Then Screaming Johan, Political Fury. It was too hard to sustain and he’d croaked offstage after only half a set. He tried to be Comic John Heron but that was too exposing because John Heron was his actual name.

Ah, what the hell. Names were for tombstones.

He gouged a small hole in the black backcloth. Front side, the backcloth supported a banner reading WELLINGTON COMEDY NIGHT. Back side he was using the hole to scope the crowd. Looking for troublemakers. Looking for goofy laughers. Looking for psychos who might glass him.

In order to get a panoramic view he had to twist the curtain around, making the banner crumple and read WELLINGTON CODY NIGHT.