Sunday
Audrey slept badly and woke up early. And the thought that awoke her was, fuck Jennifer fucking Hallet.
Fuck Jennifer fucking Hallet and her smug face and her swearier-than-thou, I-think-aggression-is-confidence attitude.
Fuck her and her fantastic oral dexterity and her fucking show.
It wasn’t so much that she objected to being asked, or more accurately told, to leave.
She had, after all, agreed to Jennifer’s rules.
Shit rules though they may have been. But there were ways.
You could say, “That was great, but I’ve got an early start and I’m sure you’ll need to be getting home,” or, “That was great, but I’ve got serious emotional problems that mean I’m not cool with being around people after we’ve fucked,” or basically anything as long as it began “That was great, but.”
You had to really work to get as abrupt and dismissive as “You just did, sunshine, now, fuck off.” The only way Audrey could imagine it being more abrupt and dismissive would be if Jennifer had texted for an Uber while she still had her face in Audrey’s muff.
In theory, at least, Audrey knew that it was pointless to get angry at somebody who was trying to make her angry and even more pointless to get angry at somebody for successfully making her angry.
She had half a mind to get up early, get back in her car, drive back to Shropshire, and never think about Jennifer Hallet or Patchley House or Bake Expectations ever again.
Except there was still Alanis to consider.
Not that Alanis was technically Audrey’s responsibility, any more than Doris was, or anybody else for that matter.
And in fact the whole damned lot of them were explicitly Jennifer’s responsibility in the actual, formal, legal, duty-of-care sense.
Because if Audrey was being picky (and she was increasingly in a mood to be picky), whacking a sixteen-year-old-girl on national television and then leaving her emotional well-being entirely in the hands of a fellow contestant was what Ofcom standards would describe as a dick move.
None of which stopped Audrey from feeling very strongly that she had to help anyway.
And in the end, the decision was rather made for her when, very slightly after she would normally have got up for breakfast, she heard a hammering at her bedroom door and Alanis’s voice calling from outside.
“Audrey?”
“Yes?”
“I heard you were back but I didn’t believe it.”
This was going to take some explaining. “I’m not really.”
“You sound back.”
“I mean, I’m here, but I’m not back on the show. I’m—actually I don’t know what I’m doing. Jennifer said you were thinking of quitting.”
There was a moment of quiet that Audrey didn’t find reassuring. Then another moment of even more quiet, which she found still less reassuring. She opened the door and found Alanis looking very small and very uncertain.
“Do you want to come in?”
Alanis nodded.
So a few minutes later they were sitting on Audrey’s bed because there wasn’t really anywhere else to sit in the still-relatively-small rooms that the BBC provided for the contestants.
“It’s just that,” Alanis began at the exact same time that Audrey was saying, “Look, you shouldn’t,” and then they both fell silent again.
Being the adult in the room, Audrey eventually psyched herself up to take something resembling charge. “I know I said that they’d want to keep you around for the story,” she managed, “but that doesn’t mean you aren’t really good.”
“I wasn’t last week.” Alanis looked intensely glum.
“You made some mistakes,” Audrey began, but Alanis immediately checked her.
“Don’t say, ‘But you’re young.’ I shouldn’t be here if I’m not good enough. It’s not like Meera gets special treatment because she has kids to look after, or you got a pass because you were busy being a journalist.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Audrey replied, and she genuinely hadn’t been. “I was just going to say that people can have bad weeks.”
Unfortunately, Alanis didn’t seem convinced. “But they can’t, though, can they? If you have a bad week, you go out. That’s what happens. So why didn’t it happen to me?”
Audrey bit her lip. The last time she’d tried to explain why “this whole thing is rigged” didn’t necessarily mean the whole thing was rigged it had gone.
.. well it had left her with a sad teenager, an angry producer, and an old lady breaking into other people’s rooms. Still, just because it had gone disastrously before, that was no reason not to try again.
“It didn’t happen to you,” Audrey said, slowly, “because the judges thought that you’d do better next week.
And they were probably right. But I…” Reflecting on why you completely deserved to lose something you’d shouted at someone for taking away from you was, it turned out, kind of a crappy thing to have to do, and the crappiness of it took Audrey aback for a moment.
“I probably wouldn’t. I think…honestly I think I was plateauing already.
I was never going to win a week, I was only ever going to do fine.
And that’s okay. The series needs people to do fine.
It needs people who get to about week three and who you immediately forget were in it. ”
Looking up, Alanis smiled at Audrey. She hadn’t quite been crying but there was still an air of vulnerability about her, like she was choosing very determinedly to be cheerful despite strong temptation to the contrary. “People won’t forget you were in it, Audrey.”
“You won’t. But the audience totally will. They’ll get to week five and they’ll be, ‘Who was that boring one who never really did anything special, I think she was a lawyer or something.’”
It seemed like Alanis was about to protest, but then an expression crossed her face that Audrey suspected was her trying to remember the early eliminated candidates from previous seasons and coming up blank.
So instead of reassuring Audrey of her definite unforgettability, she changed the subject.
“I still feel like I don’t belong here, though. ”
“Did you ever?” asked Audrey.
When she’d said it, Audrey hadn’t known what reaction she’d expected. Maybe a slow nod and a good point. Instead, Alanis just looked perplexed. “Well, yeah. Obviously.”
Which was awkward. “Right”—Audrey reached out and patted Alanis on the shoulder—“then congratulations. You’ve just discovered imposter syndrome. If you’re lucky or much better adjusted than most people, this’ll be the only time you get it.”
Alanis winced. “It sucks.”
“I know. And this probably won’t help, but I’m pretty sure if you’d gone home, whoever stayed in your place would have been feeling the exact same way.
Also, some of us had been feeling that way the whole time.
” Audrey thought about this for a moment.
“Actually some of us have been feeling that way for most of our lives.”
Alanis flopped back on the bed. “You make being a grown-up sound really shit.”
“Honestly”—Audrey shuffled around to keep facing her companion—“I don’t think that’s a being-a-grown-up problem. I think that’s a being-me problem. Although I also reckon most grown-ups are pretty bad at telling those two things apart.”
Alanis nodded, only slightly ruefully. “Yeah, I reckon you are.”
Deciding that joining them was in this case decidedly better than beating them, Audrey flopped back next to Alanis and let herself just stare at the ceiling.
It felt like a strangely teenagery position to be in, and if present-day-Audrey had let her, fifteen-years-ago-Audrey would have taken the wheel completely and suggested they go buy cider from a store with a lax ID policy and then hang out talking about girls.
“It honestly really scares me,” Alanis said into space. She didn’t elaborate or explain what scared her.
“Being a grown-up?”
“That being a grown-up will suck. Because being me kind of sucks sometimes, and if being an actual proper adult will suck worse, that’s really upsetting.”
“I think”—present-day-Audrey and fifteen-years-ago-Audrey compared notes behind her eyelids and came to a rapid conclusion—“I think it sort of sucks differently?”
“Thanks. I’m going to put that on my wall.” Alanis stretched her hands upwards as if framing an imaginary banner. “Everything sucks, but sometimes it sucks differently. Real inspirational stuff.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s cool. I’m beginning to accept it,” replied Alanis with apparent sincerity. “Everything sucks, but sometimes it sucks differently. I think I can work with that.”
“I really didn’t mean—”
“No, no, that’s my philosophy now. I’m like a…a kind of a happy nihilist.”
Still not entirely sure if she was being humoured, mocked, or genuinely witnessing the birth of a philosophical movement, Audrey lay still for a while.
And when it became clear that happy nihilism wasn’t a great conversation starter, Alanis asked, “So you really feel like you don’t belong all the time?”
“Sort of?”
“All the time, all the time?”
It was hard to squirm lying down, and a bit embarrassing to be squirming in any position when you were talking to a sixteen-year-old whose emotional health you were supposed to be supporting. “Not so much anymore. In my old job, yes. Constantly.”
“What was your old job?”
“Journalist.”
For a moment Alanis was silent, then she asked the obvious question. “I thought that was your regular job.”
“Different sort of journalist.”
“How?”
And wasn’t that going to take some unpacking?
“Well, what I do now is very… I mean I love local news but it’s very…
it’s small. Whereas what I did before was very…
very not small. I got into it with a friend of mine.
More than friend. Girlfriend. We had this whole…
we were going to set the world on fire and she sort of did and I sort of didn’t and so most of our relationship was just me following her around trying to keep my fingers warm. ”
“That must have…”
“Sucked?”
“Yeah.”
Audrey nodded. “It did. And it was—I don’t think it was her fault really.”