by Jonathan Coe
Still I try to do my best, but I need your breath
As the moonshine controls the water,
I will sink and swim.
*
Perry Barr – Handsworth – Winson Green – Bearwood – Harborne – Selly Oak – Cotteridge – Kings Heath – Hall Green – Acocks Green – Yardley – Stechford – Fox & Goose – Erdington – Witton – Perry Barr .
The weeks went by, the days grew shorter and colder, until one day, in early November, a turning point came.
Val’s hours had been reduced from four days to three mornings a week.
Her salary was cut in half and she was having to spend more time at home. The house was freezing. She started to worry about her next heating bill. And it was boring, sitting at home by herself all afternoon, watching daytime TV. Boring and lonely.
One Wednesday lunchtime she was coming home from the library on the Number 11 bus. She got on in Harborne and planned to get off close to her home in Yardley, a journey of some twenty-five minutes. But as she approached her stop, she changed her mind. The bus was warm; her house was cold. The bus was full of people; her house was empty. The view from her seat on the bus was ever-changing; the views from her house were monotonous. Suddenly she felt no inclination at all to get up from her comfortable seat and step out into the cold.
It was 1.15. A complete circuit of the city would bring her back to this same spot at 3.45. So that was what she did, and that was what she soon got into the habit of doing every day. Every working day, at first, but then, before long, she found that she was doing it on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well. Sometimes clockwise, sometimes anti-clockwise. Two and a half hours in which nothing was required of her, except to sit still, to watch the comings and goings of the other passengers, and to allow her thoughts to drift in spiralling patterns which mirrored the bus’s slow, circular progress.
Yardley – Stechford – Fox & Goose –
Why was her house so cold? Because she couldn’t afford to keep the radiators on all day. And even when they were on, she didn’t turn them up to 5 any more, the way she used to when winter came. Nowadays she never turned them higher than 2. Why not? Because the library couldn’t afford to pay her properly. Because the government had drastically reduced its budget for libraries. Because we were now all living – apparently – in an age of ‘austerity’.
– Fox & Goose – Erdington – Witton – Perry Barr – Handsworth –
This new buzzword – austerity – had only entered common currency about a year ago. What did it mean? In 2008 there had been a global financial crisis and some of the world’s largest banks had been on the point of collapse. The people had bailed them out and now, it seemed, in order to pay for this, public services would have to be slashed and benefits would have to be cut. But it was worth it because we had been living beyond our means and we were ‘all in this together’.
– Handsworth – Winson Green – Bearwood –
And this, essentially, was why Val was now being careful never to turn her radiators up higher than 2 and was choosing to ride round and round the outer circle on the Number 11 bus rather than go home to her chilly living room. But at the same time, she couldn’t help thinking about the traders and fund managers whose activities had brought the banks to the brink of collapse: were many of them, she wondered, being careful to keep their radiators turned down to 2? It didn’t seem very likely.
– Bearwood – Harborne – Selly Oak –
The thought made her angry and depressed. The fact that she was angry and depressed made her feel guilty. It couldn’t be much fun for Alison, living with a mother who was angry and depressed all the time. What could she do to stop herself from feeling angry and depressed?
– Selly Oak – Cotteridge – Kings Heath –
Last night she had watched a TV panel show where a popular comedian, Mickey Parr, had gone off on a satirical riff about bankers still getting bonuses even after the banks had had to be bailed out by the government, and the studio audience had been in stitches. They all seemed to think the situation was hilarious. Val had sat on the sofa with her glass of Pinot Grigio and watched the routine through a puzzled frown. Why did people think it was funny? Why did it not make them angry and depressed?
– Kings Heath – Hall Green – Acocks Green – Yardley
She was still pondering that one as the bus reached her stop at last, after a longer than usual journey of two hours and forty minutes. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Before getting off she hesitated very briefly, wondering if she should stay on for another circuit, but even Val realized that would be a step too far. So she disembarked and went straight to the supermarket, to try and find something different (but cheap) that she and Alison could have for dinner. It was on the short walk home from there that her mobile rang, heralding the call from Cheryl that would transform her life.
*
Alison had been to the pub with Selena again, and was late home. It was after 9.30 when she let herself in. She went into the kitchen and found that her mother’s shopping was still sitting unpacked on the kitchen table. From the living room she could hear the sound of the television.
She picked out the first thing she could find in the shopping bag. It was a small plastic packet, on the front of which were the words ‘HAPPEE CHICKEN BITES’, accompanied by a cartoon picture of a purple chicken with a cheeky smile on its face, biting its own leg off. Alison turned the packet over and read the small print at the bottom. ‘Manufactured by Sunbeam Foods’, it said. ‘Part of the Brunwin Group’.
She took the packet into the living room. ‘What is this, Mum? Are you taking the piss or something?’
Val jumped to her feet. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying to contact you for hours.’
‘Sorry, my phone battery ran out.’ She was almost having to shout over the sound of the television, it was turned up so loud. ‘Can you mute that? Why are you watching that shit anyway?’
Val was watching a famous reality show, in which a dozen celebrities were flown off to the Australian jungle and had to survive there for two weeks, while the viewing public voted them off the programme one by one. It wasn’t the kind of show she would have bothered with in the past, but nowadays it seemed she would watch almost anything.
‘Why am I watching it?’ Val turned and pointed at the screen. Her face was flushed, her pointing finger was shaking. ‘You want to know why I’m watching it? I’m watching it because I’m going to be on it.’
Her eyes were wide with an excitement she was waiting for Alison to reciprocate. But the words she had just spoken made no sense to her daughter. Alison recognized them all, individually, but her brain could not put them together into a meaningful sentence.
‘What are you talking about?’ was all she could say.
‘Cheryl rang up this afternoon. I thought it might be about the song, but … anyway, this is nearly as good. They want me to go on the show. This show.’
After opening and closing her mouth ineffectually a few more times, Alison managed to ask: ‘When?’
‘The day after tomorrow,’ said Val, and laughed wildly. ‘I know. It’s amazing, isn’t it? They want to bring someone new in halfway through the series and the person they’d booked has dropped out. So they called Cheryl and said they were desperate to find someone and she suggested me.’
‘Desperate?’
‘Well … no, that wasn’t the word. Anxious, or something. It might have been desperate. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s not the point. In three days’ time, I’m going to be in that ca
mp. With those people.’
Alison stared at her mother, utterly nonplussed. In fact neither of them could speak, now: but the moment of release, when it finally came, was euphoric. It wasn’t long before they found themselves shrieking with excitement, and dancing together around the room until Val lost her balance, fell heavily against her daughter’s artificial leg and they collapsed on to the sofa in a heap, tears of joy running down their faces.
2
Val sat in the middle of her hammock, trying to get used to its wobble, trying to keep her balance. She looked around her at the camp. She didn’t know what time it was: mid-afternoon, maybe. It was difficult to keep track, since none of them were allowed to wear watches. Most of her campmates were asleep, or trying to sleep at least. There was nothing much else to do in this heat. Edith, the elderly soap star, was flat on her back, one arm dangling over the edge of her hammock, snoring gently. Roger, the celebrity TV historian, was curled into a foetal position with his back to her, a river of sweat visible through his shorts at the cleft of his buttocks. Pete, the genial reality TV star from Manchester, had one hand on his crotch and the other behind his head. Only Danielle, the endlessly lovely, the beautiful Danielle, seemed to be keeping her composure and her dignity. She lay on her back, perfectly still, her hands folded on her belly, breathing evenly, the only traces of sweat being a few beads on the upper slopes of her breasts which did nothing but add to her carefully tousled allure. Her tan was smooth and even and she seemed to have applied concealer to the two or three mosquito bites on her face and neck, despite the nominal ban on make-up in the camp. She had a way of getting around these things.
For her own part, Val felt like shit, and knew that she probably looked it as well. Before arriving here she had resolved always to look her best for the cameras, but had already given up on that idea. Really, would anyone care what she looked like? The important thing – as Alison had said – was to ‘be yourself, because then everyone will like you’. That, and to make sure that she got to sing ‘Sink and Swim’ to the show’s ten million viewers at some point. Although the last thing she felt like doing, at this moment, was bursting into song.
It wasn’t that she was jetlagged, exactly. The worst of the jetlag, she was told, would kick in after the journey back to England. This was simply a profound sense of disorientation. Five days ago she had been at home in Yardley, a place she had not left – apart from a few days’ holiday here and there, always with Alison, always within the British Isles – for several years. But an incredible amount had happened in those last five days. So much so that now, already, she could hardly remember the events in sequence. There had been …
… the mad dash down to London for two emergency meetings. The first had been at the offices of the production company, Stercus Television. A young, brittle production assistant called Suzanne had met her at reception and led her upstairs into the Hilary Winshaw suite, named after the legendary executive who had joined the company in the early 1990s and transformed its fortunes by taking it in its present cost-efficient, populist direction, with 90 per cent of its output in the field of reality shows. Here she was briefed on her travel arrangements, given contracts to sign and told that Suzanne would be flying out to Australia with her and would not leave her side until the helicopter flight into the jungle itself. The second had been in the consulting rooms of a Harley Street doctor. He gave her a quick examination, and an even quicker psychiatric assessment. ‘You did tell them,’ Alison had asked when she got home that evening, ‘that you’re terrified of insects?’ One of the questions they had put to her, it was true, was whether she suffered from any phobias, but Val had said no, fearing that otherwise she would not be allowed to take part. ‘Well, that was bloody stupid,’ Alison had said. ‘What are you going to do when they start getting you to eat cockroaches?’ ‘Why would they do that?’ Val had asked, to which Alison said, ‘Have you ever seen this bloody programme, before last night?’, leading to another tremendous row which went stratospheric when her mother had informed her that Stercus were paying for one companion to fly out to Australia with her, and she was taking not Alison but Steve …
… the taxi drive to Heathrow the next morning. Steve clasping her hand as she sat in the back seat, shaking with nervousness and expectation, the beige conurbations of Banbury, Bicester, High Wycombe, Hemel Hempstead swirling past on their way down the M40 …
… the sheer, unimaginable joy of flying first class, the pamperedness of it, the dry marzipan richness of the free champagne, the quantity and variety of the free food, the things they had never tasted before, the caviar, the foie gras, the carpaccio of bluefin tuna, the fillet of Kobe steak, the thin ribbons of pasta in truffle sauce, and finally the thirty-year-old single malt which had sent them into a deep, restful sleep, the depth and restfulness of this sleep being made possible by the welcoming embrace of the fold-down beds, and by the soothing ministrations of the cabin crew, who did pretty much everything but massage their toes, stroke their hair and sing them lullabies …
… the dazzling whiteness of the light as soon as they stepped off the plane at Brisbane, a light they had not experienced, had not even been able to imagine, while living in Birmingham, and then the excitement of having a cluster of young, enthusiastic people from the production company waiting for them in the arrivals hall, and a couple of dozen journalists and paparazzi. The thrill of being recognized again, of no longer feeling invisible …
… the wonderful, trashy opulence of the beachside hotel outside Brisbane, to which they were taken by limo. The mindboggling acreage of bedroom, sitting room and bathroom – altogether about twice the size of Val’s house in Yardley – all done out with magnificent vulgarity …
… a vulgarity which was carried over to the poolside restaurant where they had their first dinner in this amazing new continent and met some of their fellow guests: Mr and Mrs Perry, the parents of Danielle, the gorgeous young glamour model who was favourite to win the competition this series; Mary Walker, the mother of Pete Walker, the reality TV star, and her younger sister Jacqui. ‘So Pete and Danielle were allowed to bring two people over with them, were they?’ Val had asked Suzanne, and Suzanne had nodded but offered no explanation, giving Val her first intimation that perhaps there was a hierarchy among the contestants on this show, and she was not going to be at the top of it. But she had brushed this mildly troubling thought aside, and instead found herself enjoying the company of these people, enjoying the feeling of being part of a chosen few, an elite, transplanted from mundanity into paradise, and she soon warmed to Mary and Jacqui, who remembered her hit single and agreed with her that this show was just what she needed to reboot her career, and she didn’t warm to Danielle’s parents quite so much, in fact she and Steve agreed afterwards that they were rather strange, especially when Val ordered a Caesar salad and when it arrived Mrs Perry burst into tears, because apparently Caesar had been the name of their boxer dog, and he had died just a couple of days before they’d flown out to Australia, after twelve years of living with them, and that was a bit weird, the way a salad made her burst into tears, but anyway, they both sympathized, and put it down to the champagne, of which they had all drunk about a bottle and a half each by the time they made it upstairs to bed …
… the helicopter ride the next day, which had been the real start of the adventure. She had kissed Steve goodbye and said – for the first time in seven years or so – ‘Love you’ (which he had answered by hugging her and whispering ‘Good luck, babes’). Before she had climbed into the helicopter, a sound engineer had clipped a microphone to the lapel of her jungle outfit and Val was told that anything she
said from this point onwards would be recorded and could potentially be broadcast. She tried not to swear, or to say anything too inane, or to scream too loudly as they took off. She had never been in one of these things before and it was, at first, predictably terrifying. But the journey, which she had imagined would take at least an hour, plunging ever deeper into impenetrable rain forest, turned out to be quite short – only ten minutes or so – because the camp was really only a few miles from the hotel, in what looked from the air like rather a tame stretch of national park. The pilot had made a lot of unnecessary swoops and dives, to get her screaming and to make their arrival look more dramatic, but then she was deposited safely in the middle of the forest and there was a guide on hand to walk her towards the camp …
… her entry into the camp. What had she been expecting? Whoops of recognition? Hardly. But something more, certainly, than the palpable sense of indifference when she walked into the clearing. ‘Hi everybody!’ she had cooed, embarrassed to hear how needy her own voice sounded already. It took about ten minutes to explain to everybody who she was, and then it transpired that only two of her campmates – the oldest two, as it happened – remembered her, her hit record or her fleeting appearances on Top of the Pops. Apparently there had been a rumour going around that the star of a hit sitcom from the 1990s was coming to join the camp, and they were all a bit deflated to discover that this wasn’t the case. (Val guessed that this was the person she had been called in to replace, although she had been told to keep quiet on that subject.) After that it seemed there was nothing much she was expected to do except settle in. The prevailing atmosphere among the celebrities, she noticed, was one of intense boredom. Everyone seemed to be suffering from exhaustion, brought on by a combination of heat, humidity and hunger. All that anyone could think of, and talk about, was the evening meal, which consisted of ungenerous portions of unflavoured rice and beans: in fact tonight’s portion would be especially small, as Edith, the elderly soap star, had failed dismally at today’s ‘trial’. The purpose of these trials was to entertain the public by torturing and humiliating the celebrities, making them perform various revolting tasks in order to obtain food for their campmates: tasks which usually involved being put into confined spaces with large numbers of insects, snakes or other jungle creatures which presumably found the experience just as distressing as the human participants.
