Saturday
The following morning, Audrey was awoken by a frantic hammering on her door.
“Aaaaauuuu-dreeeey,” came Alanis’s voice. “You’re going to be late for breeaaak-faaaaast.”
Rolling over, Audrey checked her phone, whose alarm was scheduled to go off in about twenty minutes. “I don’t think I will,” she called back.
“Okay not late, late, but come on, it’s the first day. You don’t want to miss the start of the first day.”
This was, in a vacuum, true. Although she didn’t think a little longer in bed would actually make her miss the start of the first day—and even if it did, she suspected that the actual start of the day wouldn’t be anywhere near as early as Alanis thought.
Audrey was used to print media, which was a very hurry-up-and-wait business, and she couldn’t imagine broadcast media being any better.
On the other hand, telling teenagers to fuck off was probably a job best left to Jennifer Hallet.
So Audrey got up, dragged her hair into something resembling tidiness, glad that the show would have professional hair-draggers to do the rest, dressed, and let Alanis tow her out into the dawn.
There were, she had to confess, worse places to be towed, and worse people to be towed by.
The morning was bright and the sun danced across the hillside of Patchley House and Park with a joyfulness that was matched only by, well, Alanis, who—having apparently categorised Audrey as closer to the “me” box than the “my parents” box—was full of excited stories about her home (“the boring bit of London”), her friends (too numerous to count), and her planned cake-that-shows-us-who-you-are for Sunday’s baketacular (chocolate and chilli, because “I’m a little bit sweet and a little bit spicy”).
Breakfast, like the dinner Audrey had nearly missed because she was too busy getting dressed down for nothing by a paranoid authoritarian, was being served outside at picnic tables. Tables that were already filling up with people.
Alanis made a kind of “eek” noise. “Ohmygodtheresso-manyofus.”
“Only ten.”
“And there’s so many old people.”
By Audrey’s count, only one of the contestants—a silver-haired woman who moved through the group with a serenity that might have been confusion—really counted as old, although a couple more were well into middle age. “Yeah,” she said, “we twenty-five-year-olds get about a bit.”
With a social ease that Audrey should probably have expected given how they’d met, Alanis slipped away to join the one member of the party who looked even remotely her own age—a tall, slim man with a goatee and a trilby.
That left Audrey momentarily alone, which, honestly, wasn’t a huge problem for her.
Being on her own in an empty room would have driven her up the wall, but getting a chance to stand back and people watch was a genuine relief.
A personal hobby, as well as a professional habit.
On the distaff side of the equation there was herself, Alanis, the one actually old person in the group, a graying-but-otherwise-young-looking woman who Audrey suspected was taking the role of nation’s favourite mum for the season, and a tousle-haired woman Audrey’s own age who was wearing a ruffled blouse and an expression of panic.
On the something-for-the-ladies side of the coin, there was the obligatory hipster baker who had already monopolised Alanis’s attention, the equally obligatory blue-collar baker—complete, in this case, with a pencil tucked behind his ear—and a man who, although it was probably wrong to judge too much from his failure to eat a bacon bap without spilling ketchup on his shirt, was likely to have been recruited to be this year’s “adorably hopeless one.” Which, since Audrey was still half convinced she’d been cast in that role herself, came as something of a relief.
“Excuse me dear.” That was the old one—the actually old one—leaning past Audrey to the cereal table. “Can you pass me one of them little things of butter?”
Obligingly, Audrey passed the little thing of butter, then introduced herself. “Audrey, by the way. Like Hepburn.”
“Doris,” replied the old lady. “Like Day.”
An unfortunate side effect of her live-to-work years was that Audrey’s brain tended to default to “interview” and it took her a second to adjust to small talk. “So,” she tried, “have you just got in?”
“Oh no.” Doris didn’t laugh, exactly, but she had mirth in her voice. “Too old to make it this far this early. I come in last night. You?”
“Same.”
“Where from?”
“Shropshire. You?” The moment she’d asked it, Audrey realised that it was a silly question.
“London,” replied Doris in an accent strong enough to make the answer entirely self-evident. “Which ain’t a long way when you’re young but is a very long way when you’re nearly a hundred.”
Audrey tried and failed to stop her human-interest sensors from kicking in. “You’re nearly a hundred?”
“And to think I don’t look a day over ninety-three.” She grinned. “That Thrimp lad says I’m the oldest contestant they’ve ever had.”
The part of Audrey that lived permanently behind the curtain put that little factoid in her mental filing cabinet next to Alanis.
Oldest Contestant And Youngest Contestant On Same Series was exactly the kind of harmless and ultimately meaningless gimmick you pulled out of the box for a season that, for some reason, had to be perfect.
It was also the kind of thing that would be an amazing early scoop for the Echo and exactly the kind of thing she’d signed multiple contracts saying she wouldn’t tell anybody about before the series went to air. “You must’ve seen a lot,” she said.
Doris grew oddly quiet at that. “A bit but, I don’t know. Sometimes you wonder where it all goes.”
Despite being substantially further from her telegram from the king than Doris, Audrey could relate. She’d been wondering where it was all going since she was twenty at least. It went to a career, Natalie narrated from an unhelpful part of her psyche. A career you threw away. “Yeah.”
And that did make Doris laugh. “And what do you know about it? I’ve got grandchildren your age.”
“Perhaps I’m an old soul,” suggested Audrey in what she hoped was a breezy tone.
“How about we swap your old soul for my old body?”
There didn’t seem to be a good answer to that. A strong desire to avoid lawsuits had made other people’s bodies a topic Audrey avoided on general principle. “It’s seen you all right so far.”
“True, I shouldn’t grumble. Still, whoever decided we were going to have to stay at the bottom of a great big hill and do all our filming at the top of the great big hill…” Doris heaved an exaggeratedly weary sigh. “Well they can go take a long walk off a short pier.”
Doris had said it lightly, but from Audrey’s perspective making a nearly hundred-year-old woman walk up and down a hill every day was a big fucking deal.
And she was about to ask Doris if she thought maybe something should be done about it when she was cut off by the sudden swarm of people with headset mics and clipboards who zoomed in to shepherd everybody off to hair and makeup.
* * *
Audrey had been right. Broadcast media was indeed even more hurry up and wait than print media.
Hair and makeup had taken well over an hour, most of which was standing around doing nothing.
They’d then been sent up to the ballroom where the show was to be filmed for a briefing that didn’t actually begin until half an hour after everybody was assembled.
When it did begin, it consisted of Colin Thrimp coming in and telling them all the basic rules of filming—don’t look into the camera, don’t swear on camera, when people ask you a question, answer it as if you aren’t answering a question—and then Jennifer Hallet coming in and telling them the exact same information, only with more swearing and threats.
“And one more thing,” she added like a vulgar executive Columbo, “this is season eight. Which means a lot of people are getting bored as piss of this formula and as a result I have bent over fucking backwards to pick contestants who I expect to sparkle. And so you shower of arseholes had better fucking sparkle or I will personally go to each of your grannies’ houses and tell them what miserable fucking disappointments their grandkids are. ”
“My gran died in nineteen fifty-four,” said Doris from the row of otherwise-cowed-into-silence contestants.
“Oh, don’t you think for one second that’ll stop me. I’ll dig her up and say it to her fucking skull.”
Audrey had almost convinced herself that she could learn to like Jennifer Hallet.
That she was that rarest of creatures, an authority figure who actually did respond well to pushback.
But hearing her threaten personal retribution to the corpse of a nonagenarian’s grandmother rather took the shine off.
Back when Audrey had been in London with Natalie and everything that entailed, she’d had a boss very much like Jennifer Hallet.
For a while she’d let herself believe that she’d be able to earn his respect if she just ate enough shit with a big enough smile, but she’d eventually worked out that he wasn’t challenging her, just bullying her.
He’d been a huge part of the reason she’d decided that the run-to-the-city-and-never-look-back path that most of her school friends and all of her university friends had taken was supremely not for her.
The breakup had been part of it too, of course, but three-years-ago Audrey insisted it wasn’t the biggest part and present-day Audrey went along with it for the sake of her self-esteem.
I think you’ll find, Natalie’s voice was saying, it was the other way around. We didn’t work because you couldn’t hack it. And I wanted so much better for you.