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“Out?” Patrick didn’t stir. “What do you mean?”
“You know, that whole place that exists outside of your hotel room? Honestly, it’s a good thing you’re as handsome as you are, because you are not the brightest star in the sky.”
“But we’re not—”
“If you say ‘We’re not allowed,’ I might just slap you,” Audra said, flexing her right hand, which Patrick now noticed was bejeweled with several elegant but weighty-looking rings. “It’s Friday night! And we’re the talent. What we say goes. Otherwise, what is the actual point of being a movie star?”
“I don’t know about this…” Patrick reluctantly allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.
“Trust me, a night off from reading endless rewrites and scrolling through what people think of us online is exactly what we both need.”
“Oh, I try to stay off social media,” Patrick said.
“Very admirable!” She looked him up and down. “You should probably shower. That last workout is lingering. I’ll see you in the lobby in half an hour.” She waved him toward the door and muttered to herself, “Now, what to wear…” before vanishing into her bedroom, clearly confident that Patrick would play along. She’s right, he thought. She’d have been wasted on real life.
“I…fine,” he called out. “But only for a little while, OK?”
Audra’s head reappeared from behind the door. “Great! And who knows,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go absolutely wild and get a haircut while we’re at it.”
Chapter 2
Will Wright was halfway through transforming into a woman when his sister called. Upstairs at the Village Inn, the area designated for the drag queens’ toilette was a former utility cupboard that had been colonized by the bar’s coterie of performers. Dressing tables and vanity mirrors had been installed against one wall, but metal filing cabinets and moldering cardboard boxes still lined the opposite side, and its occupants wasted no time in enforcing a pecking order. Spots at “the High Table,” as the queens had dubbed the well-lit vanity, were intensely coveted. According to local lore, those chairs were reserved for the more seasoned artistes—although, more often than not, they were claimed by whoever got there first on a Friday night.
Three drag queens—Faye Runaway, Gaia Gender, Raina Shine—were sitting there now like Macbeth’s witches, titivating between sips of gin and tonic. Tammy, the emcee for the evening, was already downstairs at the DJ booth. Julie Madly Deeply wasn’t due to join them until after midnight.
Will, who was both the new girl and incapable of showing up on time (according to everyone who knew him), had no chance of a seat at the High Table tonight—or even a proper mirror. As a result, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor and applying his makeup while peering down at the front-facing camera of his phone, which he had propped up against the skirting board. At one point, Gaia left her post to go smoke outside, but Will resisted the urge to take her place, staying his own licentious hand: Stealing such a spot once it had been claimed was a sin akin to sleeping with somebody’s husband. Come to think of it, most queens were less territorial over men than they were over favorable lighting.
When Will first began experimenting with drag, doing amateurish, clown-like makeup in his bedroom during lockdown, he had daydreamed about being invited behind the curtain at a real club even more than he had thought about performing. He imagined gossiping with the other queens in the dressing room, sharing stories and lipstick, the glamour and the camaraderie. Admittedly, the reality was markedly less “backstage at the Hippodrome” than Will had once hoped, instead giving the overall impression that they were all preparing to put on a particularly baroque school play.
Faye, at least, had welcomed Will with open arms: He was the latest in a long line of fledglings to be taken under her sequined wing. But the queen of the runaways had more to offer by way of advice than she did tutelage, deadheading Will’s ingénue-like expectations with a French-tipped talon.
“Most of these novices you see on Instagram wouldn’t even make a half-decent chorus girl,” Faye had told him. “It’s not a matter of talent. It’s that other thing. The ineffable. Je ne sais quoi. Not to be confused with Jenny Sais Quoi,” she added, referring to the queen who had recently moved to Bristol to be with a man she had met at the Renaissance tour.
Beat nearly done, Will swore under his breath as his own image vanished from the screen, replaced by his sister’s name and a picture from last New Year’s Eve in which they were, for once, both smiling. He answered the call, dusting foundation from the surface of his phone at the same time, before opening the camera again.
“Thief,” Margo declared. Behind him, Will heard Raina tut indelicately at the tinny sound of the speakerphone.
“Am not,” Will said. This was not a video call, and so Margo could not see the oversized white blouse he was wearing, purloined from her wardrobe on his last visit and tied into a cute little knot at the waist.
“I’m going out with The Girls tonight,” Margo admonished, “and I was going to wear that top. You are so annoying.”
“The Girls” consisted of Claire and Fiona, women Margo had known since school and who had become very fond of peppering Will with all kinds of questions since they got hip to Drag Race UK on the BBC. “Do you tuck?” Fiona had asked him last Christmas Eve. “Are you a look queen or a comedy queen? When are you going to go on RuPaul?”
“You should wear that top from Reiss,” Will told Margo. “It’s smarter.”
“That top is brand-new,” she accused. “How do you know about it?”
“Brotherly intuition.”
“I swear to god, Will.”
He and his sister had been sharing clothes since their late teens, when their wardrobes had consisted solely of oversized hoodies and band T-shirts. As the years went on, they discovered that Will’s taste and Margo’s income were a match made in heaven, and every quarter or so, without fail, Margo would show up at Will’s flat unannounced with a tote bag and a scowl, demanding her stuff back.
“Very Twelfth Night,” he murmured to nobody, as he executed a pleasing (if not perfect) cat-eye flick.
Will and Margo were far from twins. In fact they weren’t blood relatives at all, just a pair of former delinquents brought together by Will’s father and his ever-roving eye. Still, with Will’s dark Irish hair and lashes, and the thick black mane Margo inherited from her Italian mother (not to mention the savage shorthand in which they communicated), you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
“Did you hear who’s in Brum right now?” Margo asked, her annoyance giving way under the urge to spill tea.
