Sunday
Jennifer, it seemed, had the same breakfast every day, which didn’t surprise Audrey at all because for a woman who worked in a creative industry, Jennifer seemed very much to be a creature of habit.
And so now, she and Audrey were sitting side by side, their bacon rolls half-eaten alongside smears of ketchup, while through their headsets Grace Forsythe was pouring out another of her mellifluous introductions.
“Bonjour,” she was saying to the half dozen remaining contestants.
“And the bonnest of jours it is because today we are asking you to focus on a French classic. We want you to demonstrate your mastery of meringue and your finesse with flavours as you make us no fewer than forty-eight perfectly formed, identically sized, beautifully presented macarons. We’re asking for two dozen sweet and, in a move I frankly consider slightly too trendy—”
“As do I,” added Wilfred Honey.
“—two dozen savoury. You have four hours starting on three.” Grace Forsythe paused for—now Audrey was watching timestamps—exactly the same amount of time she always paused. It was actually quite impressive. “Three, darlings.”
Everybody started furiously baking. Well, everybody started furiously baking except for the people who had been collared for the mandatory banter segments.
They began with Meera, who was blitzing almond powder together with something Audrey didn’t recognise. Which inevitably meant that Marianne Wolvercote opened with, “Well, this looks interesting.”
“Freeze-dried beetroot,” Meera explained. “It’s a bit hard to get hold of, but you need the flavour without the moisture.”
“Clever,” Marianne Wolvercote conceded. “And for the filling?”
Meera nodded at a little pile of goat cheese, cream cheese, and dill.
“So what’s the cardamom for?” asked Wilfred Honey.
“That’s for the mango and cardamom sweet,” Meera told him. Then she immediately gave the blender another pulse.
Audrey gave a little preemptive wince. Wilfred may have been the nation’s grandfather, but, like many grandfathers, he sometimes made some very culturally specific assumptions about food.
“Is that not more suitable for a savoury?” he asked.
“It pairs well with mango,” Marianne Wolvercote put in, “which I notice you’re also using.”
Meera nodded. “That’s right. It does mean that I’ll have a tray that’s all purple and orange, though.”
Jennifer had been right about Grace. She had a tremendous instinct for how to deflect an awkward line of questioning onto something frivolous. “Fabulous. Reminds me of a suit I used to wear in the eighties.” She turned to the judges. “Shall we?”
So the three of them continued their circuit, leaving Meera to continue grinding her freeze-dried beetroot into a fine powder. And when the camera operator judged that they’d got all the footage they needed from her, that feed moved away, and Audrey switched her attention to another contestant.
Towards the back of the ballroom, Linda seemed to be having a rough time of it. There was no sound, but she was staring into her bowl of macaron mix looking like she was worried it was going to explode.
Jennifer was occupied elsewhere—issuing a series of instructions through Colin to the camera operators—but, as Audrey watched, the image on the screen in front of her evolved from bit-of-a-bad-day to definite-freakout.
The initial stage of the macaron-making process wasn’t exactly frenetic, but it definitely involved doing more than just staring at a bowl of rapidly settling egg whites with a panicked expression on your face.
“Should somebody check on her?” Audrey asked, leaning over a little closer to Jennifer.
“The nervy one?” Jennifer hadn’t so much as glanced at Linda’s feed, but she knew at once who Audrey had meant. “No, she’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? She doesn’t look especially fine.”
Jennifer’s eyes flicked for half a second to Linda’s screen. “Not looking exactly fine is what she’s here for.”
“That seems cruel.”
“It’s a cruel business. You want to complain, complain to the viewers.”
“You know there’s not actually an award for needless cynicism?”
Glancing briefly away from the monitors, Jennifer smirked. “What do you think BAFTAs are?”
On the live feed, Audrey watched as Alanis wandered away from her station and back towards Linda.
And the fact that Linda had barely started while other contestants were in the taking-a-break-to-talk-to-other-people stage did not bode well for her.
Audrey was about to ask Jennifer for audio, so that she could hear what the two were saying to each other, but she only got as far as “Could we” before a squicky, intrusive feeling shut her down.
Jennifer, however, was thoroughly unsquickable and flicked over to their channel anyway. “Monitor the child and the flake, Colin,” she said into her headset. “And make sure it stays wholesome.”
And it was incredibly wholesome, from the little Audrey managed to hear before she removed her headset out of a perhaps overzealous respect for Linda’s privacy.
Alanis came in quiet and confident and supportive, and Linda looked at her with real gratitude when she said everything was going to be okay.
“Are you going to broadcast this?” Audrey asked.
“Of course. If it edits right, it’ll come out incredibly heartwarming.”
“Okay, but, is it not also a bit personal?”
Swivelling her chair around, Jennifer gave Audrey a flatly disappointed look. “They both know they’re on television. They both signed the exact same bits of paper you did.”
“Okay, but they’re still people.”
Jennifer nodded. “And so is every other prick you’ve seen a meme about. It feels different now because you’ve met them.”
It would have been hypocritical for Audrey to disagree.
Because while she wanted to believe that she was the kind of viewer who watched a reality television show with an eye to what was best for the mental health of the contestants, she strongly suspected that she, like a whole lot of other people, cared mostly about what made good drama. It just felt bad to say it out loud.
On the other hand, disagreeing seemed mandatory.
“Okay, suppose you’re right. That doesn’t change the fact that I have met them and so I do feel differently.
Like”—searching for inspiration, Audrey picked up the cold remains of the bacon roll from the desk in front of her—“I’ll happily eat this, but I’d probably hesitate to stab a pig in the neck. ”
“And there’s me thinking you were a farm girl.”
“You know there are people in Shropshire who aren’t farmers?”
Instead of replying, Jennifer just said, “She’s moving; Colin, keep eyes on her.”
Looking up at the screen, Audrey saw Linda step away from her workstation and head out the doors. Feeling weirdly responsible for the whole situation, she stood up herself. “Should I…?”
Jennifer shrugged. “Can if you want to. Colin’s following her, but you might do a better job than him. Then again so would my grandmother.”
“And she’s been dead for six years?” added Audrey.
“Actually she’s a fully qualified workplace psychotherapist. Also, she’s completely hypothetical. Now go out there and stick your oar in.”
Audrey wasn’t especially fond of being told what to do, especially not in such dismissive terms, but she’d also finally got to the point where she was emotionally mature enough that she wouldn’t let being told to do something she wanted to do anyway put her off doing it.
“Is this your way of looking after people?”
“It’s my way of saying, ‘I’ve given up trying to stop you so I might as well get something out of it.’ Go talk to Linda. If you want to tell her what a sinister mastermind I am for filming her with the cameras I cleverly hid by disguising them as a film set, you can. Let me know when you’re done.”
Given that arguing with Jennifer Hallet could distract Audrey indefinitely, she just nodded her agreement and headed out.
Linda was sitting glumly on the sitting-down log and Audrey approached in the most definitely-haven’t-just-been-watching-your-emotional-crisis-on-screen way she could manage.
“Hi,” she tried.
Linda “Hi”ed back.
“Not in the ballroom?” was Audrey’s next gambit.
“No.”
Now Audrey was closer, she could see that Linda had tears in her eyes. “Rough week?”
Linda nodded.
And Audrey, still not completely certain she wasn’t being either invasive, manipulative, or both, sat down next to her. “I—umm—I should probably say that I’ve been watching you from Jennifer’s trailer.”
“How’d I look?” asked Linda. There was a kind of hollow irony in her voice, a trying-to-have-a-sense-of-humour-about-things tone that Audrey recognised.
“Like you’d had a rough week.”
“I’ve completely blanked on macaron.” It was an absurd sentence to be saying. In some ways even more absurd now she was off camera.
Audrey did her best to radiate sympathy. “Yeah. You did freeze up a bit.”
“I just”—Linda made a swirling motion next to her head—“I just got stuck in a loop because I know meringue is really finnicky and if you don’t fold it exactly right it doesn’t foot properly—”
“Foot properly?”
“A macaron should have a little”—she made a sort of very broad hourglass shape with her hands—“foot at the bottom of each half.”
That wasn’t something Audrey had ever noticed, which suggested she’d probably been eliminated at about the right time. “And that made you get…stuck in a loop?”
“Short version: I couldn’t decide what to do because I was getting too worried about how little time I had left to decide what to do.”
It wasn’t quite a problem Audrey could say she’d shared. Her brain tended to play different kinds of tricks. But she could understand the heart of it. “So how do you want to play this?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Audrey was wondering at the shape of them. They did and didn’t sound like her. But they also felt like the right thing to say. Because Jennifer had—once again and fuck her—been right. Linda knew she was on TV and needed to act like it.