Saturday #3
“And what? Say, ‘Hi, I’ve got a thing for extremely controlling women, will any of you be kind to me?’”
Audrey’s dad scratched a flake of paint from his nose. It fell into his tea and began dissolving. “Maybe you could say, ‘Hello, my name’s Audrey’?”
It was a thought. But for reasons Audrey couldn’t quite pin down it seemed an impossible thought. To walk up to somebody, anybody, and say, “Hey, I’m just me, is that enough for you?”
Who’d be fool enough to go for that?
* * *
Back at her flat, Audrey was just making herself a probably-ill-advised-if-she-wanted-to-sleep-that-night cup of coffee when her phone rang. And since she was the kind of person who kept her contacts meticulously up to date, she could see at once that it was Jennifer Hallet.
A tiny, silly, forever-sixteen part of Audrey wondered if… well. Since she was no longer on the show maybe. Actually. No. That was absurd.
She answered anyway—mainly out of curiosity—and was treated to a “fuck you” instead of a greeting.
“Hi, Jennifer,” she replied.
“Don’t you Hi, Jennifer, me. Do you have any idea how thoroughly you have shat in my toothpaste?”
It was probably wrong to find shat in my toothpaste endearing. But apparently a week without Jennifer swearing at her had given Audrey profanity withdrawal. “How would that work?”
“What do you mean how would it fucking work?”
“I mean how do you shit in somebody’s toothpaste? If there’s one thing toothpaste tubes are famous for it’s being hard to get stuff into. Like, you can’t even get toothpaste back into them. There’s a saying about it.”
“Are you taking the piss?”
“You killed my story, threw me off your show, then called me up at”—Audrey checked the time on the corner of her phone—“thirteen minutes past seven on a Saturday to tell me to fuck off and treat me to a vulgar but poorly thought out metaphor. I’m not sure you’ve got the high ground here.”
A noise of barely coherent rage echoed down the line. “You. Have. Made. My. Job. Difficult.”
“Sorry, I didn’t understand that because it wasn’t expressed in terms of bodily fluids in inappropriate places.”
The coherentness of Jennifer’s next noise dropped from “barely” into “not.” “Alanis wants to drop out.”
Audrey’s stomach lurched. “I’m sorry, I think I must have misheard?”
“No, you heard fine. I said the jailbait baking minx wants to chuck in the most interesting thing she’ll do in her shitty—”
“Please don’t talk that way about Alanis. You know it makes me uncomfortable.”
That got a laugh. Not a sincere laugh, but a loud one. “Uncomfortable? How comfortable do you think I am right now?”
“Oh I don’t know”—her mum had been right, Audrey reflected, she really needed to start being attracted to women who weren’t horrible—“probably about as comfortable as if you’d got something you don’t want lodged in a place where you don’t want things lodged.”
“If this is your twisted parochial attempt at flirting, save it for your cousins.”
“That’s Norfolk.”
For a moment Jennifer was silent. “What?”
“The county that gets the tired jokes about inbreeding is Norfolk,” Audrey explained.
“The stereotype for Shropshire is that it’s so boring we don’t have a stereotype.
Though if you absolutely must accuse us of something sexual and untrue, we’re close enough to Wales you could borrow the one about fucking sheep. ”
“God I hope that rod up your arse is turning you on.”
Jizz-in-cornflakes-Audrey rose like Venus to the occasion and just replied, “Immensely,” before handing the reins back to regular-Audrey. “So go on. How am I making your job more difficult this time? And why should it remotely be my problem?”
“Let me put it this way,” said Jennifer. “Remember when you told my entire cast of contestants that the show was rigged and that nobody who wasn’t either the maiden, the mother, or the crone had a wanker’s chance in hell of actually winning?”
Ah yes. Audrey had done that, hadn’t she? “I was just—”
“I don’t care what you thought you were just. What you actually just was you just got in everybody’s heads and made morale on set drop faster than the knickers of a strong, well-educated, independent woman who chooses to enjoy a very sexually active lifestyle.”
It didn’t take much to make Audrey feel guilty. And potentially ruining a teenage girl’s life was decidedly much. “I didn’t mean to.”
“And I’m sure that prick on Pudding Lane didn’t mean to start the Great Fire of London, but here we are. My fucking show is burning down and it’s your fucking fault and you’re fucking well going to be the one to fix it.”
“Are you sure I’m actually the right—”
“No, I’m not sure at all. I called up out of the blue because I missed your sexy voice and sunny disposition.”
“I just mean—”
“Get here. Now.”
It was late and, since she’d officially been kicked off the show, any contractual obligation Audrey might have had to Inveterate Productions, or to Bake Expectations, or to Jennifer was basically over, bar the come-back-for-the-spinoff / don’t-talk-shit-about-us bits. “Look, I…”
“Lane.” Something not quite vulnerable but slightly less acerbic than usual crept into Jennifer’s tone. “Seriously. I need you.”
Audrey did not melt. Not even a little bit. Nor did any part of her brain start imagining those words being said in that voice in any context other than the totally appropriate and professional one they were currently being spoken in.
But she did get in her car very, very quickly.
* * *
It was well after ten when Audrey arrived at Patchley House. She was met in the carpark by an even-more-stressed-looking-than-normal Colin Thrimp.
“Thank goodness you’re here.” Without waiting he grabbed Audrey by the hand and started dragging her in the direction of the hotel. “Things have got very peculiar and we need you to talk to Doris.”
“Doris?” Audrey had, ultimately, not been super clear on what she was being invited down to do but she’d been working on the assumption that it was mostly about Alanis.
“Yes. She’s having a bit of an altercation with the manager and Jennifer insists—I mean, well, she insists…”
“That it’s all my fault and I need to sort it out immediately or she’ll do something unpleasant to a part of my body that a person in a position of authority shouldn’t be talking about?”
Colin Thrimp nodded.
Jennifer herself was in reception pacing a hole in the carpet. The manager was with her as, for reasons Audrey didn’t want to speculate about, was an irate woman in a dressing gown. Doris, however, was notably absent.
“Ah.” Jennifer greeted Audrey with all the warmth and enthusiasm of a shark with a chainsaw.
“Audrey, so glad you could make it. Now perhaps you can explain to these fine people”—she indicated the manager and the woman Audrey had to assume was a guest—“how you managed to fuck me so hard that your strap-on ripped through the back of my uterus and wound up going up both of their arses.”
The manager, the guest, and Colin Thrimp all winced at various elements of the image, but Audrey just said, “Happy to, only I have no idea what’s going on.”
“There’s…” The guest sounded hesitant in the way people tended to be once Jennifer broke out the uterus talk. “There’s an old woman in my bedroom, and she won’t leave.”
“She’s saying she needs to think,” explained the manager. “And since she’s a contestant, I asked Jennifer to handle it, but she said, well…”
“That the interfering sack of chaos vomit responsible would be here soon enough, and that this was entirely on her,” finished Jennifer.
Normally Audrey tried to resist her instinct to build stories out of limited information. It was bad journalism and worse social interaction, but this time she had a pretty good idea what was going on. “Which room?” she asked.
“214,” the guest and the manager said at once. Then the manager followed up with, “But I’d really appreciate being told what’s happening.”
From Audrey’s perspective, he could appreciate it while walking, and so she set off for the lifts with the guest and the manager trailing after her.
Jennifer Hallet and Colin Thrimp stayed behind.
Audrey would have taken it as a sign of trust if she’d thought Jennifer capable of trusting anyone or anything.
“I might,” Audrey explained to her two new companions, “have accidentally started a sequence of events that might have resulted in an elderly woman getting your bedroom mixed up with a bedroom that…” She struggled for a moment to find the words. “That meant a lot to her when she was younger.”
“Did she used to live here?” asked the manager. “Before it was a hotel.”
“No,” Audrey replied. And then because that wasn’t accurate, “Well, yes. Sort of. I’m guessing a bit.”
The lift stopped at the second floor and the little group made their way up the corridor to room 214.
The manager opened the door to reveal a pretty little bedroom, still decorated in vintage style, with Doris sitting morosely on the end of the double bed.
“Oh,” she said as Audrey entered, “it’s you. ”
Audrey waved an apologetic wave. “It’s me.”
“Wasn’t sure you’d be coming.”
“I am. I mean I did. I mean I’m here.”
The guest, who was still wrapped in a robe and thus had good reason to want things resolved quickly peered over Audrey’s shoulder. “Look can you just get her out?”
“Her’s in the room,” Doris replied dryly.
“But can you, though?” asked Audrey, striking the best balance she could between compassionate and patronising. “I get why you’re here—at least I think I get why you’re here. Was this her room?”
Doris nodded. “Sort of. They’ve knocked a bit through”—she pointed at one wall—“and blocked a bit off”—she pointed at another—“and the furniture’s all changed of course but it’s still…well I suppose it’s like him with the boat isn’t it?”
“If you…you didn’t do this for the story, did you? Because you didn’t need—”
But Doris was already shaking her head. “No, love. This was for me. I’ve not talked about this in so long it was—I could feel it slipping. And I didn’t want it to slip, not none of it.”
“Not none of what?” asked the guest, who seemed to be drifting now from irate towards intrigued.
Audrey was about to explain that it was private, that Doris hadn’t meant to upset anybody but that she was going through something personal and would be out of everybody’s hair immediately, but before she could Doris said, “I can explain if you want, but it’s a long story.”
And then everyone was speaking at once, Audrey and the manager both coming down heavily on the side of “that won’t be necessary” while the guest went instead to “go on then.”
It was the go on then that Doris chose to listen to.