Sunday #3
De-escalation had spectacularly failed. “It’s not pointless,” said Audrey, as firmly as she could. “Mostly the judges will be basing their decisions on how well you do. It’s just there’s, you know, wiggle room.”
“Wiggle room?” It sounded worse when Jim said it.
“Only in the sense”—help—“that there’s no objective criteria that the judges are actually held to. They’re the only people who taste the bakes. They get to decide what’s too simple and what’s too ambitious, if the flavours compensate for the appearance, things like that.”
Everyone was nodding. But not in a we-get-that-this-is-complex way. More in a we’ve-just-learned-about-the-doomsday-planes way.
“So really”—double help—“the only rule is that what the judges say goes. Which means if there happened to be a situation where, say, two bakes were mostly even and it made a better story for them to pick one over the other, then they’d be able to…wiggle?”
There was a long, long silence.
Then Linda straightened her spine and put a reassuring hand on Alanis’s shoulder. “There you go. It’s going to be me, not you.”
“But that’s not fair.” Alanis was tearing up now. “It should be about who makes the best pies, not who makes the best television.”
“Suppose it depends how you look at it,” said Jim, with the air of somebody who had been quietly looking at it for a while now. “Like there’s always that couple on Strictly what can’t actually dance but they stay in because the audience loves them.”
“I just really think”—Alanis’s mascara was beginning to run—“that Linda deserves it more than I do.”
From his position just behind her, Joshua leaned forwards. “Don’t say that. You’ve earned your place here just like the rest of us. And it’s okay for them to make decisions based on the whole contest, not just on the day.”
Although she was ever-so-slightly suspicious of his motivations, Audrey did think Joshua had hit on the right strategy. “Exactly. Don’t think of it as them going easy on you, think of it as them taking a…a holistic approach.”
“Also,” Doris added, “they might kick you out anyway.” She nudged Audrey. “No offence, love. I’m sure you know what you’re talking about, but I’m also sure smarter people’n you’ve been wrong about bigger things.”
That much was definitely true. Although in this specific case Audrey was ninety-nine percent certain that it was Linda who was getting the chop.
If the judges had been building up to send Alanis home, they’d have mentioned that her pastry had caught, and they’d probably have played up the very-good-for-your-age angle.
The little gathering shared a round of sympathetic noises, which were marred only slightly by the fact that consoling one person had to come with the implicit reaffirmation that the other person was definitely screwed.
And then, after a relatively short period of debate, the judges returned with Grace Forsythe leading them.
“Once more,” Grace Forsythe was saying, “we come to the happiest, and the saddest, part of the show. The part where we celebrate one baker’s floury triumph while another, unfortunately, bites the crust.”
There was a pause. Then Colin Thrimp raised a hand. “Jennifer says that doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.” Grace Forsythe was still standing immaculate on her spot, facing the cameras. “It’s bites the dust but with a more pie-appropriate substitution for the last word.”
“Jennifer says it’s awful.”
“Well I’m not reshooting.” And without waiting for a reply, Grace Forsythe went straight into the rest of her endgame speech.
“We begin, as always, with the joyous task of naming this week’s winner.
And it was a close one, because we saw some remarkable baking, but our winner is somebody whose filo filo-ed us with joy, whose pastry was perfection, and who, most importantly, also served us a banger of a curry.
” She paused in the place where she always paused. “That’s right, it’s Meera.”
And Audrey was happy for her. Unsurprised, since she’d got the first by ’eck it’s gorgeous of the series, but happy for her. So hugs were hugged and smiles were shared and then Grace Forsythe’s face fell theatrically.
“But now,” she said, “we come to the sad part of the week. Though Wilfred, Marianne, and I wish with all our hearts that we could take every single one of you home and keep you on little doilies on our mantelpiece—”
“Jennifer says she’s warned you about being surreal,” interrupted Colin Thrimp.
“On our mantelpiece,” Grace Forsythe continued. “Sadly, we must regift one of you to the aunt we dislike. And today, though it grieves me deeply, we are saying goodbye to Audrey.”
Audrey blinked.
And then, out of nowhere, started crying.
* * *
“What the fuck,” Audrey was shouting to Jennifer Hallet’s still closed door. “What the actual fuck. This was personal. You know it was personal.”
The door snapped open to reveal a somewhat rumpled Jennifer Hallet, sleeves rolled up, hair half-tumbled down. “And you know it was complicated.”
Audrey had been gearing up for a was not/was too shouting match, so getting a tacit admission that, at the very least, personalness had been involved was a little disorienting. Although not so disorienting that she couldn’t preserve the essence of the not-too strategy.
“It was not complicated. You kicked me off the show for annoying you, just like you kept threatening but which I foolishly didn’t believe you were petty enough to actually do.”
Jennifer looked down. She was a fair bit taller than Audrey anyway but standing at the top of a small staircase made her positively loom. “You had a bad week. Linda still has a story to tell. You were only ever set dressing.”
“Set dressing you were pissed off with.”
“I will admit, that didn’t help.”
Folding her arms, Audrey tried to look unintimidated. “That’s flagrantly unethical.”
“Whereas you’ve been a picture of journalistic integrity.”
“Oh my God, I have.” Audrey folded her arms even tighter. “You just don’t like what I’m doing.”
“No,” agreed Jennifer. “I don’t like what you’re doing. On my show. From which I am fully entitled to remove you. If you, for example, carry on chasing a story I told you to drop.”
“Are you spying on me?”
“Nothing happens on my set I don’t know about.”
“I was talking to Doris because I’m interested.” And why was Audrey on the defensive all of a sudden? “I’m allowed to talk to the other contestants.”
“So you didn’t make any notes then?”
Audrey opened her mouth and shut it again. “I…it was…habit. And besides”—she tried to reverse the polarity of the argument—“I still did better than Linda.”
“Not in the edit you won’t.”
“You…” began Audrey explosively.
But Jennifer just sneered. “I what, Lane?”
“You…”
“Interfering, micromanaging harridan with a god complex?” suggested Jennifer Hallet.
“Y-yes but also…”
“Performatively cynical foul-mouthed hack?”
“I mean—”
“Callous, belittling needlessly hostile she-demon?”
“Now you’re—”
“Bitch?” finished Jennifer. “I’ve heard it all before, sunshine.”
“And you don’t think”—Audrey’s arms unfolded themselves like they were on springs—“any of that feedback might have been leading you somewhere?”
“It led me to the conclusion that I don’t give a fuck what people think of me.”
“Clearly not.” Audrey’s anger was beginning to cool and congeal like gravy in yesterday’s pie. It was still there; just not as appealing as it used to be. Her whole body slumped. “But you didn’t have to do this.”
“I did. You were a walking conflict of interest.”
“I tried to apologise, Jennifer. And I really was going to drop the story.”
“It’s cute you believe that.”
“If you’d said no—”
“Were you not fucking listening? I did. Several times.”
Shit, they were back here again. And Audrey knew where that ended: with her saying things she didn’t want to say and being someone she didn’t want to be.
“I just thought,” she said carefully, “that if I finished the story and you saw how good it was, you might change your mind. But I would never run it unless you said I could.”
An expression that Audrey couldn’t read—or perhaps didn’t dare to—crossed Jennifer’s face. “Just because something’s amazing,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s what I need in my life.”
The evenings could be sharp in the summer. And it was probably just the chill that raised goose bumps on Audrey’s arms. “What are you—”
“Oh come on, Lane.”
Audrey’s anger gravy was getting reheated in the microwave. “You better not be implying that you wrote me off the show because you fancy me.”
“I wrote you off the show because you spent the last three weeks doing everything in your power to get in my fucking head.”
Of this, Audrey had to admit that she was profoundly guilty. So naturally she didn’t. “I have not.”
“You have, and you know you have.”
“So it was personal,” said Audrey in a tone of triumph she didn’t feel.
“I never said it wasn’t. But it was also the right call. You’re disrupting my show and I can’t have that.”
“You realise you aren’t the show?”
“That’s where you’re wrong, sunshine.”
Audrey was, she felt certain, just about to come back with the most devastating and appropriate retort ever retorted by a living human.
But Jennifer slammed the door in her face before she got the chance.
And so she was left standing there, the last dregs of sunlight draining over the horizon, wishing she was still angry.
Angry would have been a whole lot less confusing.