Monday
“The problem is,” Ms. Waverly, the custodian of the @bagleybrooktrolleys Instagram account was saying, “that we’re at a nexus.”
Hoping that she’d explain what that meant without being asked verbally, Audrey gave an encouraging nod and a tell-me-more handwave.
“There’s a Spar, a Tesco Express, and a Morrisons in a triangle around us, and for some reason people like to take trolleys from all of them and leave them right in the brook.
And I swear I don’t know what they’re doing with them.
Because I’m sure it’s nobody that lives nearby, so if the trolleys are full then where are they putting the shopping, and if they’re not full then what do they want them for? ”
“Probably kids,” suggested Eddie, forgetting as usual that the role of the cameraman was to remain silent.
“It probably is kids,” Ms. Waverly agreed.
A tiny, ever-so-slightly traitorous part of Audrey couldn’t help but feel that a truly excellent journalist wouldn’t be running stories to which “kids” was the ultimate solution.
Of course, she’d had this conversation with herself hundreds of times in the past. It was just that being on the show, or off the show, or peripherally involved in Bake Expectations however she was now, was reminding her that there were things you could do under the broad umbrella of “the media,” which felt a whole lot bigger and more important than trolleys in a brook.
“And you’ve been getting a lot of support,” Audrey prompted.
Very much the kind of person to respond well to prompting, Ms. Waverly took it from there.
“There’s been real community uptake,” she said.
“I’ve got over two thousand followers on Instagram now, and there’s people submitting pictures from all over Shrewsbury.
And further. We got one from Pontesbury the other day. ”
“And what do you do with the trolleys, once you’ve found out about them?” asked Audrey.
“Well there’s a little band of us now because there’s me, and Mr. Waverly—no relation—and Donna that works down the pub. And when we get a message in, one of us will usually head down and see if the trolley is still there, and if it is we’ll take it back where it’s meant to be.”
Audrey nodded again. People liked it when you nodded. It made it seem like you were agreeing with them. “And how many trolleys have you returned since you started?”
Ms. Waverly fell silent a moment. “It’s tricky because we’ve been going since January and we’ve not kept detailed records, but if I had to put a number on it, I’d say”—she began counting on her fingers—“about six.”
Congratulating Ms. Waverly on her triumph against a half dozen inconveniently situated shopping trolleys, Audrey and Eddie made their way back to the car.
As she settled into the driver’s seat, Audrey caught herself unconsciously slipping her phone out of her pocket and checking her messages.
She had none. And she’d expected none. If there was a woman on the face of the planet who’d wait at a minimum of forty-eight hours after fucking you before texting, it was Jennifer Hallet.
“Are you okay?” asked Eddie, and the fact that she’d apparently been demonstrating sufficient not-okay-ness that even he could spot it made her feel substantially less okay than she hitherto had.
“Yeah,” she lied. “Fine.”
“Still upset you got kicked off the baking thing?”
Was she going to actually have this conversation? And with Eddie of all people? Apparently she was. “Honestly, that bit was okay. But then—there’s a whole big thing where some people were upset because I’d sort of told them the thing was rigged and—”
“Wait, Expectations is rigged?”
She had to stop saying that to people. It was becoming clear that it was the adult equivalent of walking into a primary school playground and yelling, “Santa is just your parents.”
“Not really.”
“So why did you say it was?”
“Because it is. Sort of. And also not. Sort of. I mean all those sorts of shows are.”
Eddie seemed to be having a very small crisis. “What about Strictly?”
“Less rigged, because there’s rules about public votes.”
“MasterChef? Dragon’s Den?” His face fell still further. “Oh my God, not Drag Race?”
Audrey nodded. “And Drag Race UK. Then again, I suppose you could say—I mean what even counts as ‘rigged’ when the whole system is that one person gets to decide who wins based on criteria they get to make up on the spot?”
As an alternative perspective, it didn’t seem to be helping Eddie with his existential uncertainty. “It’s not made up on the spot. It’s based on Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent.”
“And who gets to decide what Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent look like?”
Eddie’s mouth worked helplessly for a moment. “I’m not sure I know who I am anymore.”
“Anyway”—it seemed best to move the conversation on or back or somewhere that wasn’t destroying Eddie’s faith in humanity—“I told everybody this, and a couple of them freaked out that they stayed in while I didn’t so I had to come back on Saturday and I’m still sort of interviewing Doris about the story we probably can’t run—”
“The one with too much lesbian sex in it?”
“Yeah, that one. And there wasn’t that much lesbian sex in it.
Although probably thinking about it, not that much is still more than you’d expect in a story about baking and the blitz.
” Also, Audrey had to privately admit, there had been rather more in the most recent instalment.
“Long story short, I sort of wound up banging the producer and now I’m waiting for her to text like I’m fifteen again. ”
Eddie was making a sympathetic face. “You could text her?”
“Maybe, but I’m worried that will make me seem desperate.”
“That’s very, very fifteen.”
It was. Or it might have been. Either way, right now Audrey was technically at work.
And although Gavin wasn’t especially strict about conducting personal business on the Echo’s time, pretending he was let Audrey make a decision re: texting that she’d otherwise probably have prevaricated on for much longer.
Instead, she put her phone away, started the car, and set off on the twenty-minute drive back to Telford.
Twenty minutes of light conversation with Eddie, it turned out, was not the best thing for Audrey’s focus or for her commitment to the importance of local journalism.
Eddie had many fine qualities—a surprising level of sensitivity to relationship issues apparently amongst them—but there was no denying that he was also very slightly…
inane? Possibly one of the least ane people Audrey had ever met.
Which meant the whole trip back to the office, present-day-Eddie, who was very much the same as every other version of Eddie, was happily scrolling through the Instagram feed of @bagleybrooktrolleys and retweeting pictures of discarded supermarket furniture, present-day-Audrey was asking five-years-ago-Audrey to explain why she’d ever thought that this was a good career move.
Sitting at present-day-Audrey’s desk cutting together the details of the rogue trolley article into something at least vaguely interesting, five-years-ago-Audrey tried to explain that working for a major outlet on stories that nine times out of ten were just glorified doomscrolling was an incredibly unhealthy place to be.
And present-day-Audrey believed her. But she couldn’t quite shake the conviction that there should be at least some middle ground between “the world sucks and everything’s fucked” and “six trolleys in Bagley Brook.”
A middle ground, Natalie asked, between the nonsense you’re doing now and actual journalism? Gritting her teeth, Audrey got up, sauntered through to Gavin’s office, and said as casually as she could manage: “I think we should run the Expectations story.”
Gavin stared at her between his glasses and his eyebrows. “The story that the very angry, very litigious producer suggested you shouldn’t run because it didn’t fit with the way the show positions itself in the wider market?”
“The one with too much gay, yeah.”
Tapping distractedly on his desk, Gavin frowned. “As I recall, that wasn’t how she expressed it.”
“It’s never how people express these things, but it’s how they are.”
“However it is”—Gavin was never the kind to display strong emotions, but he was becoming cautiously agitated—“hasn’t she made her position perfectly clear?”
“I was hoping I could persuade her to un-perfectly clear it.”
Gavin’s glasses slid an eighth of an inch down his nose. “And how might you do that?”
Anything for the story, Aur, said Natalie. Although ideally the story wouldn’t be a trite human interest piece.
“Well the thing is,” Audrey began, less confidently than she’d have liked. “You see—we’re sort of—I think she likes me.”
“Likes in the sense of considers you a valuable journalistic contact with whom she would be well advised to maintain a positive working relationship?” asked Gavin in a tone that anticipated a negative answer.
“No,” answered Audrey, negatively.
“Likes in the sense of is sexually and/or romantically attracted to?” he followed up, in a tone which anticipated a response that may or may not be totally honest.
“Kind of,” Audrey admitted.
“Is that not…ethically questionable?”
She really, really wished he hadn’t gone there. “It’s a grey area?” she ask-asserted.
“Is it, in fact?”
Gavin, in Audrey’s experience, responded best if you took these kinds of concerns seriously.
“I think so, actually?” She sounded less certain than she felt, and she didn’t feel especially certain.
“I really don’t want to play the gender-reversal card, but if she was a man I think playing on the fact he fancied me would be pretty normal? Or at least pretty normalised.”
You have him there, said Natalie, in a tone Audrey found worryingly approving.
“Isn’t it also the kind of thing we’re meant to stop normalising?”
Or does he have you? That’s the problem with being a quitter—it makes it so hard to stick to your principles.