Tuesday
“What are you doing here?” asked Audrey.
The you in question was Jennifer Hallet. The here was the doorstep outside Audrey’s flat. She’d have said it was the last thing she was expecting, but who was she kidding? This was exactly the kind of shit you would pull if you were exactly the kind of person that Jennifer exactly was.
Arms folded, mouth tight, she was leaning against Audrey’s front door like she owned it. “Making an entrance.”
Audrey had spent the whole day chasing a group of firefighters who were chasing a greyhound that had briefly been trapped between a gate and gatepost and had celebrated its release by bolting across the fields almost like it had been specifically bred to move at high speeds across open country.
Right now, she needed a cup of tea and a buttered crumpet, not a television producer and an argument.
Not quite sure whether pushing past Jennifer was any more rude than just letting her stand in the street, and even less sure whether she cared about being rude in the first place, Audrey fished her keys out of her pocket.
“Did you really come all this way just to stand there like”—she waved her hands in frustration—“like that?”
“I can tell you’re a journalist, you have such a way with words. And yes, I came all this way just to stand here. Because I wanted you to know how seriously I take it when people fuck with me.”
With a speed she was sneakily proud of, Audrey gamed out the rest of this conversation: I didn’t fuck with you / Yes you did, you [vulgarity]ed my [vulgarity] so now I’m going to [vulgarity] on your mum’s [vulgarity] / okay but…
/ [vulgarity] and decided, as a result, it was a discussion she didn’t want to have in front of her neighbours. “Would you like to come up?”
Jennifer sneered. “Sweet of you.”
Letting Jennifer Hallet into her flat was a little self-conscious-making.
The flat Audrey’d shared with Natalie for over a decade had been chic to the point of hostile (minimalist, Natalie corrected her) and looking at the flat she’d moved to directly afterwards with fresh company-coming-around eyes there… might have been an overcorrection.
She liked to think it was still tasteful.
The cushions matched the sofa and the rug, and since she’d got most of her furniture off Freecycle, that had been a major interior design win.
The flowers, which she changed weekly, were chosen to complement the curtains, the fairy lights framed the fireplace just like she wanted, and she’d specifically crafted the lampshades to…
fuck, it was twee. She was twee. She lived in a twee little flat in a twee little town in a twee little county that only an incredibly twee person would ever go anywhere near.
To Audrey’s dread and relief, Jennifer settled herself into the only armchair without comment, even though in sitting down she’d had to remove the cuddly tortoise that child-Audrey, with a contrariness that Audrey remembered having once and feared she might have lost, had chosen to name Lion.
Lion the tortoise had been Audrey’s constant companion for the first fifteen and past two years of her life, and held very strong preferences for which seat he sat in.
“What,” Jennifer asked in a tone that made it very clear the question was rhetorical, “was the one thing I said you weren’t supposed to do?”
The main advantage of getting bollocked in your own house instead of Jennifer’s trailer was that you could sit somewhere comfortable. Taking off the bolero she’d been wearing over her checked sundress, Audrey defiantly claimed her own sofa. “If I could—”
“One thing.” Jennifer was holding up a single finger to indicate the single thing. “What was it?”
Sighing, Audrey decided compliance was faster than resistance. “Not to write anything about the show, bu—”
“No. It was don’t write anything about the show, no buts about it.”
“Bu—”
“No.”
“You came a long way to say a short word.”
Jennifer leaned forwards with an air of menace only slightly marred by the fact that she was cradling a fluffy tortoise. “I wanted to remind you I know where you live.”
This was definitely a not-taking-your-shit moment. “I told you where I lived when I applied for the show. Rocking up here isn’t some huge power play or baffling magic trick, it’s just…mildly annoying.”
She might have been imagining it, but Audrey thought she saw the glimmer of a smile on Jennifer’s usually very unsmiley lips. “You did not just call me mildly annoying.” For a moment, she sounded almost amused. Then she remembered herself and finished, “You diminutive rural hack.”
Of the three words in that sentence, only one was really insulting. “I think you’ll find I did. Look, I’m sorry Gavin reached out to you, but I really do believe—”
“That you know what’s best for my show?”
“That I know a good story when I hear one.”
The contempt on Jennifer’s face was palpable to the point of parody. “Oh yes, because if there’s one thing this country needs it’s more dewy-eyed pap about blitz spirit and how great it was to live in a world with rationing, conscription, and the constant threat of death by bombing.”
A tiny upside to having spent a decade with a miserable job and an opinionated girlfriend was that Audrey had come out with a very, very high tolerance for disapproval.
And if her goal had been to win the argument, she’d have told Jennifer that.
Well, not that that. But something kind of like it.
Something cool and cocky like, “Babe, you ain’t got shit on my issues.
” Unfortunately, Audrey wasn’t cool or cocky.
She was earnest and embarrassing. And, more to the point, she wanted the story more than she wanted Jennifer Hallet.
Wanted to get one over on Jennifer Hallet.
“And you don’t think”—she leaned forward, earnest and embarrassing to the last—“it’s even a little bit interesting that one of your contestants lived at the house your show is filmed in more than eighty years ago?
When it was owned by different people, used for a different purpose, when it was almost a different world? ”
Jennifer didn’t even blink. “No.”
“You’re not just shooting this down because it comes from me?”
“Oh, I’m completely shooting this down because it comes from you. You. Are. Not. Using. My. Show. To. Boost. Your. Career. Not how it works.”
Audrey was less good at withering expressions than Jennifer Hallet, but she tried one anyway. “You really think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Another moment of Jennifer Hallet not blinking. “Sorry, was that meant to make me have a harsh moment of self-reflection? I’m good at what I do and I know it. And you aren’t, which is why you work at the Shropshire fucking Echo.”
The sad thing is, said Natalie, that’s not even true—you were good, Really good. “I like working at the Shropshire fucking Echo,” Audrey replied. And that, Natalie added, is even sadder.
Jennifer gave the kind of incredulous laugh Audrey had once been too used to hearing. “You like writing about carpark fees, closed swimming pools, and rail delays.”
“Yes,” said Audrey, only belatedly realising that those weren’t random topics, they were the specific topics of her last three published articles. “Hang on, are you stalking me?”
“I’m monitoring you. I monitor every one of you fuckers.” Something almost tired had crept into Jennifer’s voice. “I know what you write in your little hack rag, I know what Joshua says to his followers when he Instagrams his breakfast, I know if Meera’s got in a barney at the PTA. That’s my job.”
“And my job”—Audrey decided a new strategy was in order—“is to look for things that the diminutive, rural people of Shropshire—”
“Don’t be an idiot, you can’t all be diminutive. You’re fucking diminutive—don’t go passing it off on the whole county.”
Audrey refused to be distracted. “Is to look for things that people in Shropshire will find interesting. And yes, often those things are small. But small things matter. And stories matter. And I think Doris’s story matters, and she should have the chance to tell it, and the fact that you don’t want her to because you think I’m trying to get one over on you is honestly… honestly, it’s petty.”
“Petty?” It wasn’t designed to get a rise, but a rise it got. “I am not fucking petty. I just have an eye for detail and a zero-tolerance policy for time-wasting bullshit.”
Daring, inasmuch as she ever could where Jennifer Hallet was concerned, to hope she was getting somewhere, Audrey decided to press her objectively minimal advantage.
“Nobody would be wasting your time. All I want is your permission to talk to another contestant, make some notes, and not publish a single word until I’ve run everything past you and got your go ahead. ”
“And if you change your mind and decide to go behind my back?”
Audrey threw her hands up in a gesture of frustrated submission. “Then I guess you—I don’t know, sue my tits off or litigate me until I have an anal prolapse or whatever inappropriate threat you want to make this week.”
There was a slight pause, in which Audrey sincerely hoped Jennifer was thinking about the proposal and not just of mean things to say.
Finally, she sighed. “You are being an unbelievable pain in my urethra.”
“I’d get that looked at. Might be an infection.”
For a moment, Audrey was worried she’d pushed it too far. But Jennifer seemed almost to relax. “You’re going to keep on at this until I say yes, aren’t you?”
It would have been convenient to pretend she was. But Audrey had given up pretending a long time ago. “Honestly? No. If I was going to keep bugging you about anything, it’d be putting Doris in the main hotel.”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “What if I let you do the story and in return you don’t bug me about that?”