Saturday #2
“Now this one,” Wilfred Honey was saying, looking at Linda’s pie with an air of sympathetic disappointment.
“You can see that the pastry wasn’t let sit long enough, and that’s thrown the texture off.
Which is a shame because it’s otherwise lovely.
Whoever this was they just needed to have a little bit more nerve. ”
Linda gave a perfect reaction. A shot that said, This is my arc for this season and I know it.
“This one,” Marianne Wolvercote took over narration, with much more disappointment and much less sympathy. “It’s too thin, so it’s fallen apart, and I don’t know quite how but the filling’s come out too moist.”
To Audrey’s relief, that wasn’t hers, although the next one, which was “too thick, just a touch, mind, but a touch matters” was, placing her firmly in the middle.
Doris, Joshua, and Alanis had all done well, although Reggie had just pipped them, which was about what Audrey would have expected from a man with his sense of precision. Meera’s never-using-store-bought-filo strategy, however, had paid off and put her comfortably at the top of the pack.
Afterwards, the remaining contestants gathered around the picnic benches either celebrating or lamenting their success or failure. Audrey’s little group, on this occasion, consisted of Alanis, Joshua, and a deeply despondent Linda.
“So,” Alanis was asking in a keeping-people’s-spirits-up kind of tone, “who do we think’s going all the way?”
“You,” said Joshua immediately, and apparently sincerely. “And I reckon you’re in with a chance as well,” he added to Linda.
Linda looked glum. “Not after today. I messed up really badly.”
“Your nerve went,” Joshua told her. “Happens to everybody.”
She looked unconvinced. “Didn’t happen to you.”
“Well, I think,” offered Alanis, with an encouraging smile, “that we’re all in with a good chance of making the final.”
Audrey—whose head was still twelve percent elsewhere—gave something a bit like a laugh. “That’s very diplomatic of you, since there’s only three people can be in it.”
“Which is why I said chance.” Turning to Audrey, Alanis gave her a playfully challenging look. “But okay then. If you’re going to be like that. Who are your exactly three choices?”
To be fair, Audrey had sort of brought this one on herself. She shuffled slightly uncomfortably. “I do have some thoughts but, fair warning, they’re probably a bit unfun.”
Alanis blinked at her. “Wow, you’re really selling this.”
“Sorry. It’s my inner journalist. It tends to make me think about things from a very specific perspective.”
For the first time in three weeks, Joshua looked almost respectful. “Nothing wrong with thinking about things differently.”
“Yeah.” Alanis nodded her agreement. “Thinking about things differently is good.”
Audrey shrugged. This wasn’t exactly a trade secret.
It was something pretty much anyone could work out from watching enough YouTube videos.
But it still got a bit laws and sausages—knowing how they were made kind of ruined it.
“Well I used to hang out with a lot of media people and the thing about this type of show is that… It’s not that they’re rigged exactly. ”
“Knew it.” Joshua threw his hands in the air. “That’s why I came bottom of the blind first week.”
“No.” A half lifetime of interviewing difficult subjects kept Audrey’s tone as non-patronising as she could make it. “There you genuinely did just miss the brief. But it’s why I think you’re not likely to make the final if I’m honest.”
Alanis had gone from cheerful to distressed in an eighth of a second. “But he’s great.”
“We’re all great,” Audrey pointed out, though she privately felt she was the least great at the table.
“But this is a TV show and TV is about storytelling. Your story”—she nodded at Alanis—“is that you’re the youngest contestant ever to be on the show.
Yours”—she indicated Linda—“is that you’re good but you don’t have faith in yourself.
You and me”—she waved her hands between herself and Joshua—“we’re sort of filler. ”
Aren’t you always, said a voice that sounded like Natalie. Except Natalie would never have said that. In some ways, it might have been easier if she had.
“Filler?” repeated Joshua, with as much outrage as he could muster without breaking his lifelong commitment to ironic detachment.
Audrey nod-winced. “Maybe that’s not quite the right word? We’re there to be recognisable characters, but nobody’s rooting for us and nobody’s going to tune in to see if we win or—”
“You’re making it worse,” cried Alanis. “This is horrible. You’re not characters. You’re people.”
“To us we’re people.” Audrey’s nod-wince was progressing down her body and had just reached her knees. “But to the audience, and kind of the crew because it’s their job, I’m the quirky chubby one—”
“You’re not,” began Joshua predicably.
And that, Audrey waved aside. “Joshua, I know what my body looks like and I’m fine with it. Anyway, I’m the quirky chubby one, you’re the obligatory hipster. Neither of those characters win.”
“I’m not sure”—Joshua extended his forefingers like he was making half a picture frame—“I like hipster.”
“I’m not sure anybody likes being reduced to a reality TV archetype.” Audrey shrugged. “But that’s what we signed up for.”
“Still not comfortable with it,” said Joshua.
It shouldn’t have surprised Audrey that a man who refused to be pinned down to a single cake didn’t like the idea of being reduced to an elevator pitch, even if that pitch was essentially the kind of man who refuses to be pinned down.
“Didn’t say you had to be. But look at it this way, people are going to think about you the exact way you thought about the contestants from last season. ”
The other three shared a series of crestfallen looks.
“Fuck,” said Linda, “am I the Paris?”
Audrey made an I’m-afraid-so face. “Assuming he was the tall one with the hair, yes.”
“Fuck.”
Despite the length of this particular tangent, Audrey had singularly failed to distract Alanis from the who-will-win question. “You still haven’t told us who you actually think is making the final.”
Honestly, it was pretty simple. Well, as simple as these things got. “There are regulations here,” she said carefully, “so it can’t be completely set in stone. And besides, production wouldn’t want it to be because that would kill the spontaneity.”
“You’re still hedging,” Alanis pressed her.
“Fine. It’ll be you, Doris, and Meera. They won’t be able to resist the”—Audrey bit her lip; this was likely to land even worse than hipster—“old lady versus mum versus young girl hook. It practically pitches itself.” And now she’d said it aloud, she had to admit it was going to make one hell of a season.
No wonder Jennifer was protective of it.
The expression on Alanis’s face, however, suggested she wasn’t appreciating the artistry. “But that’s so…basic.”
“It’s reality TV. It’s a basic medium.”
Joshua was staring in the middle distance, which made him look either contemplative or constipated. “This is depressing.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Audrey. “It’s just that TV magic is like all other magic. Mirrors and hidden wires.”
“Um.” To give Audrey credit, she’d successfully distracted Linda from one set of worries. If only by giving her a new set. “I’m not sure magic isn’t real is as undepressing as you think it is, Audrey.”
They seemed to be taking this harder than Audrey had expected. “Yeah. But. We all knew that, right?”
“We know it,” complained Linda. “But we don’t like to say it out loud. I mean, if we took you to see a movie, would you be sitting there going, Oh, it’s all just CGI and pretending?”
“Not in those terms.” Audrey was used to asking herself if she was weird, but she’d really hoped that it would stop when she left London. “But I might want to talk about what was done with physical effects or whether the acting was any good or if the story beats landed.”
Linda, using only her eyes, managed to flawlessly communicate the sentiment, Remind me never to go and see a film with you. “You wouldn’t want to talk about, I don’t know, if you enjoyed it? Or who your favourite character was? Or if the ending made you sad?”
And because she didn’t want to be a dick, Audrey said, “Well that, too, obviously.”
“You know”—Joshua got to his feet abruptly—“I think I need a drink.”
* * *
In the end Audrey didn’t quite fancy the bar.
She’d killed enough joy for one day, especially given her normal quota of joys killed per day was zero.
Of course, reminding reality TV contestants that reality TV could occasionally be the tiniest bit artificial shouldn’t have been a big deal.
And probably wouldn’t be. But it made Audrey feel off her game.
Which was a pisser because she’d worked really hard over the last couple of years to reestablish what her game actually was.
Without London and Natalie to decide for her.
In any case, whatever Audrey’s game might have been, it definitely wasn’t half-arsing filo or dropping trite truth bombs on children, neurotics, and hipsters.
And it definitely, definitely wasn’t telling other queer women they were doing their jobs wrong and then threatening to force them into mutually disastrous legal action to try and make herself feel better.
The only thing to do was to apologise.
Two minutes later, a shaky but determined Audrey was knocking on Jennifer Hallet’s trailer door.
There was no answer. Not even a fuck off.
She knocked again. Then she listened very, very carefully. Jennifer was in there. She could tell.
“Jennifer?” she tried.
Still no answer.
“Jennifer, it’s Audrey.”
Nothing.
“Jennifer, it’s Audrey, and I’m sorry.”
The level of nothing, if anything, intensified.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
Yet grander and deeper nothings answered.
“Really.”
In many ways, Jennifer’s silence was worse than her swearing. It felt more hostile somehow.
“Jennifer?”
Still nothing.
Audrey’s sense of contrition didn’t waver. Her patience, however, was beginning to. “You know you’re being kind of stubborn here.”
If the devastating allegation of stubbornness moved Jennifer to repentance, her closed door showed no signs of it.
“Actually, check that. You’re not even being stubborn. You’re being childish.”
The door bore that accusation with similar equanimity.
“I’m trying to do the right thing here.”
Nothing.
“But you won’t give an inch, will you?”
A temptation was building inside her to say something, anything, to bait a response.
It would have been better than the silence.
Except that would also have defeated the point of apologising and, in a perverse way, would have felt like letting Jennifer win.
And how had she gone from I have hurt this person and must make amends to This is a competition in which somebody must lose in less than three minutes?
“Fine,” Audrey said instead in a desperate bid to showcase her maturity. Which she promptly ruined by adding, “be that way then.”
Because this was so typical of Jennifer Hallet.
Here was Audrey, doing her best, making the first move, like you were meant to, admitting responsibility and generally being great.
Meanwhile Jennifer was sulking like a…like a dick.
Probably under Audrey’s quilt. And, yes, if you wanted to get all reasonable about it, Audrey had fucked up and Jennifer was entitled to her privacy.
Just like she was entitled to stop Audrey publishing Doris’s story.
But she wasn’t entitled to stop Audrey speaking to a fellow contestant.
Just on her own time. For her own reasons.
Defiantly, Audrey went to look for Doris.