Oliver's day

BUT from Day 20's Yara-text, Ollie took the Sunday Crouch End open-mic flyer to a room above a pub on Crouch End Broadway, mid-afternoon, and the lineup had Pryce headlining — Pryce had been booked by the Crouch End booker, a woman called Dee, and Ollie had not known until he walked in. He went on fourth, did the panic attack bit unchanged, and the room — small, thirty people, half comics — went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when a thing lands, and a woman in the second row wiped her eye and laughed at the same time. Pryce at the back folded his arms. Pryce went on last and did twenty minutes about Belgian waffles that included a thirty-second aside about bravery being a bit you do once and then it's someone else's, looking directly at Ollie in the third row. Ollie sat through it with his hand over his mouth and his face doing something he could not name, and the photo would be his hand and Pryce on the small stage in the background. He walked out and Dee caught him on the stairs and said that set's got a Soho showcase next month if you want it, and the warm win sat beside the bruise. He walked home and decided, by the time he reached Tufnell Park, that Pryce had called him brave one too many times.