Saturday #4
“What part,” said a loud, irate voice from inside the trailer on whose door Audrey had been banging for what felt like six minutes, “of I don’t want to fucking hear it do you not understand?”
“You don’t even know what it is yet,” Audrey pointed out. “Or who I am.”
“It’s almost like neither of those things make a difference. Now fuck off.”
Audrey banged again.
“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “Were you taking that as a request?”
“Since you’re not actually allowed to give me orders, yes.”
There was a very brief silence. “Excuse me, sunshine, I can give you all the orders I like.”
“And I can ignore them. I don’t work for you.”
“Everybody on this fucking set works for me.”
The part of Audrey that had never learned to quit while it was ahead dug its heels in hard.
The fact that she wasn’t especially ahead made that easier.
“No, I’m a contestant on a show you’re running, and I have some concerns I want to raise with you, and I’ll be out of your hair much faster if you just listen to them. ”
A sound of angry despair emanated from behind the door. “Fine. Come in. But this had better be really, really fucking good because I have sixty different things to be doing right now and you are none of them.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing you today either,” retorted Audrey.
Stepping inside, she found Jennifer Hallet was sitting in her supervillain chair, frowning at footage. “So you say. But I’ve met you once and I’m already willing to bet you’ve found some way to fuck me mightily.”
Audrey couldn’t allow herself to get sidetracked by thoughts of fucking Jennifer Hallet, mightily or otherwise. “I wanted to talk about Doris. In a non-fucking way.”
Jennifer rotated just far enough to shoot a baleful look across the room. “This is about the granny?”
“The granny has a name.”
“Not to me she doesn’t. Now tell me what was so important that you had to hammer on my door at this time of the evening and bother me about it.”
“I walked up to dinner with her today, and it’s a very long way up the hill for somebody her age.”
Jennifer Hallet’s eyes narrowed. “You know what I hate?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say…everything?”
“I hate clichés. Which is why I’m so fucking furious that you’re forcing me to tell you to go cry me a fucking river.”
The Echo was not, Audrey knew, the Guardian or the Times or even the Mail, but she was still a professional reporter and that meant knowing how to deal with bullshit.
“I’m not forcing you to do anything. I’m telling you that it’s not okay to make a woman in her nineties trek up and down that hill three times a day just so the BBC can save a couple of quid on hotel rooms.”
“She hasn’t complained.”
“Her generation was raised not to.”
That didn’t impress Jennifer. And few people, Audrey was realising, could signal their not-impressed-ness with as much silent eloquence. “Her generation w—”
“If you’re about to say her generation won the war, I will laugh in your face.”
The barely perceptible tip of Jennifer’s tongue ran across her lips. “I wouldn’t, sunshine. I’m not in the mood to have anyone get cute with me, least of all you.”
“I’m not being cute. I’m being concerned about an old woman’s well-being.”
“And I’m being concerned with my fucking show not being a fucking disaster.”
Given that Jennifer Hallet had been smashing this show out of the park for seven years solid, Audrey didn’t quite buy that. “Why, did we not sparkle enough for you?”
Jennifer was glaring now, but Audrey thought she could see genuine frustration in that glare.
A sense that she really did feel an intense need to go back to work or else some grand unspecified Bad Thing would happen.
“Well of course you didn’t. The contestants never fucking do.
We add the sparkles in postproduction. That’s why the bumbling one is loveable instead of just begging for a smack in the teeth.
It’s why the insecure one makes you hope she’ll see how good she is deep down.
It’s why the granny feels like your granny and the mum feels like your mum even though they’re really just two fuckers you’ve never met.
And if they weren’t on TV, they could both die slowly of a rectal prolapse and you wouldn’t know or care.
” She swivelled her chair around fully. “And none of that, sunshine, none of that happens unless I make it happen, so I would be unbelievably grateful if we could wrap this up before we both develop age-related incontinence.”
Probably the right thing to do was to leave it there. Audrey didn’t leave it there. “Alanis had a rough time today as well.”
“Oh boo fucking hoo.”
“She’s sixteen, Jennifer. She’s basically a child.”
Jennifer Hallet sat back looking, for a moment, like a grimier, more technologically up-to-date version of the wicked queen in a Disney movie. Which, for someone whose first crush was Maleficent, was a bad comparison to be making. “Not according to the law.”
“Yes, according to the law. According to the law she’s still a child for another two years.”
“And yet the law also says she’s old enough to join the army or get fucked wherever she wants to be fucked by anybody she wants to get fucked by if that’s what she wants to do. It’s a funny old world, but I don’t make the rules.”
Audrey tried very, very hard not to lose it, and mostly succeeded. “Okay, one: I really don’t think you should be talking about Alanis like that and two—actually I’m not sure there is a two. Because one is already quite important.”
“And that’s the best you’ve got?” The look on Jennifer’s face was exasperation commingled with…with something Audrey couldn’t readily identify. “The bad woman said a bad thing and I’m outraged. Fuck off.”
“I’m not outraged I’m—”
“If you’re about to play the I’m not angry I’m just disappointed card I’ll remind you that you’re not my fucking primary school headmistress. And, for the record, I didn’t give a fuck what she said either.”
Audrey had, in fact, been about to play exactly that card.
Except it wasn’t a card. It was just true.
Working in media—new, old, or whatever—you got very used to the fact that almost anything that made any sort of money was, if you dug deep enough, controlled by the same three straight white men.
And Bake Expectations being one of its genre’s heaviest hitters and being entirely woman-run was something that got regularly brought up as a bright light in an otherwise dark industry.
So yes, in a lot of ways, encountering Jennifer Hallet was becoming disappointing.
Even if the image of a tiny, foul-mouthed Jennifer telling her school where it could stick its rice pudding was ever-so-slightly adorable.
“Okay.” Audrey put the complex reality of Jennifer Hallet aside and took a deep breath.
“Let’s look at it like this. I’m aware that people don’t normally come to you about these kinds of issues, and maybe I’m a bit out of line, so I’m making some allowances.
But I don’t believe you’d let anybody treat you the way you treat the contestants on this show. ”
“And?”
Audrey wilted slightly beneath Jennifer Hallet’s precisely raised eyebrow. “And—I don’t know. Think about that maybe?”
“Sure,” said Jennifer Hallet, in a tone so sarcastic that if it tried to enter a most sarcastic tone contest, its application would be rejected because the judges would assume it was sarcastic. “I’ll go away and reflect and grow as a person. Now have you quite finished wasting my fucking time?”
It had probably been foolish to expect better.
Whatever Audrey thought she’d seen in Jennifer Hallet the night before had been an illusion brought on by overexposure to televisual nostalgia.
And it made sense. You didn’t get to be at the top of a competitive industry without basically turning, in one way or another, into a colossal piece of shit.
She’d seen it happen to so many people in her old job, and the ones it didn’t happen to had breakdowns or…
well, they ran home to get jobs writing about parking fees in Much Wenlock.
Still, it was a little sad-making to realise that the woman who created the nation’s favourite celebration of all that was wholesome and comforting was just as willing to put profits above people as every other macho prick in the industry.
Trying not to deflate like any soufflé she tried to make while sober, Audrey decided to give it one more go. “You know,” she tried, “I really hoped you’d be better.”
The disdain on Jennifer Hallet’s face was all the answer she needed to give, but she gave a verbal one regardless. “Oh no, disapproval, my one weakness. Just get out.”
“Yeah.” Audrey gave a resigned nod. “Guess we’ve been wasting each other’s time after all.”
She left quietly, because Jennifer was clearly the kind of person who took storming out as a win.
Then she very sensibly decided it was a good idea to get an early night before the next day’s competition.
And then somewhat less sensibly stayed up until well after midnight having imaginary arguments with an imaginary Jennifer Hallet.
Some of which she even won.