by Jonathan Coe
Val had not thought too much about what would happen if she was made to perform one of these trials herself. The choice of celebrity was down to the viewing public, who usually picked on the most obnoxious and made him, or her, go through the ordeal day after day. Since she was determined to be cheerful, likeable and friendly to everyone, no matter what the circumstances, she was confident that it wouldn’t happen to her. And now, in fact, was the perfect opportunity to put this resolve into practice: for Danielle had just glanced over towards her and offered her a weak smile and a tiny wave of the hand, a tentative but unmistakable invitation to conversation. With a slow, effortful heave, pushing against the humid air as if it was a cushion of dampness pressing down upon her, Val rose from her hammock and wandered over to chat to the exquisite young model. She was keenly aware, as she did so, of how flawless Danielle’s beauty was, how ragged and dowdy she herself must appear by comparison. And the age difference between them was such that she could easily have been the girl’s mother. Perhaps that, then, should be the keynote of their relationship: her attitude towards her should be motherly. She should try to be friendly, caring and protective, offering advice and wisdom as well as companionship. Val knew that she must already have made a good impression on the viewing public. This approach could only make them like her even more.
*
Back in Yardley, Alison sat at the kitchen table with a pile of newspapers in front of her, skimming through the early press coverage of her mother’s arrival in the camp.
SHE’S A NONENTITY – GET HER OUT OF THERE was a typical headline.
‘As the latest “celebrity” makes her underwhelming entry into the jungle camp,’ the article began, ‘viewers up and down the country are asking the same question: Who the hell is Val Doubleday?’
AREN’T THESE PEOPLE SUPPOSED TO BE FAMOUS? another headline asked.
REVEALED, another one boasted: JUNGLE ‘CELEBRITY’ IS ACTUALLY PART-TIME LIBRARIAN.
‘In its heyday,’ Alison read, ‘contestants on this show used to fall into two types: has-beens and wannabes.
‘But now ageing single mother Val Doubleday (or Crabs as she is already known to the production team) represents a whole new category: never-was-in-the-first-place.’
Alison winced for the first time. ‘Crabs’, her mother had once told her in a confiding moment, used to be her nickname at school: a cruel playground twist on the initials V. D. It was alarming to learn that it had been revived by people working for this programme, and had leaked to the newspapers already. This felt ominous, somehow.
Alison pushed the papers aside and turned to her laptop. Before her mother had left for Australia, the two of them had set up a Twitter account for her. They had discussed whether to use a recent photograph or one from Val’s singing days, and had finally compromised by combining an up-to-date profile picture with a screengrab of her old Top of the Pops appearance, stretching across the top of the page as a banner photo. It all looked very smart and professional. For the first day or two the account had attracted no attention at all, but as soon as the first news of Val’s participation was published a trickle of followers appeared, and now the number had swelled to 4,752. Alison was keeping the notifications page permanently open, and she now noticed that there had been 319 new messages. Excitedly, she began to scroll through them.
The first one said:
Who the fuck are you bitch?
Followed by:
Never heard of you
U r well ugly
*Yawn* Bored with her already
I remember ur song it was shite
Vote her off! The campaign starts here #getridofVal
Your face makes me ill
U r well old
Ugh what a witch
Ha ha cunt
And so on, for tweet after tweet. After she had looked through the first one hundred messages or so, Alison decided it was time she started blocking most of the posters. It took a couple of hours to block all of the most offensive ones, not least because new tweets started appearing almost as fast as she could block them. At the end of it she felt somehow soiled, as if she had spent the morning scrubbing out a toilet without wearing rubber gloves. And still the new messages continued to appear. She was fighting a losing battle. For the time being she gave up, and went into college to check out the afternoon lectures.
A sense of unreality, of weightlessness, persisted for the rest of the day. Riding home that evening on the Number 11 bus, Alison struggled to understand that her mother was ten thousand miles away, on the other side of the world, probably asleep beneath an Australian sky in the company of a dozen people she had never met before. Her life for the last few years had been so circumscribed: how on earth would she be coping? The last piece of news she’d heard had been a text from Steve, saying ‘Just seen Val whisked off by helicopter, jungle-bound. That’s it for a few days then!’ To which she had not replied. So now she had only her own imagination to rely upon, and it was not equal to the task. Perhaps it would be best to put the whole thing out of her mind, if possible, until nine o’clock that evening, when the edited highlights of Val’s first day in the camp would go out on national television.
By five to nine she was ready on the sofa, with a big plate of brown rice and stir-fried vegetables, waiting for the programme to start. The sound on the television was muted for the adverts and it was striking how silent the house seemed, how empty, without even her mother’s subdued, untalkative presence. Alison missed her, more than she would ever have imagined possible. Would watching her on TV be the next best thing?
Sixty minutes later, she was not sure what she had just seen. Very little of her mother, that was for sure: her total contribution to the programme, including the footage of her arrival in camp, could not have amounted to more than two or three minutes. The moment when she turned up and called out ‘Hi everybody!’ seemed especially lame: the cameras lingered heartlessly on the scene for what seemed like forever, revelling in the silence that followed her greeting, zooming in to pick up the eagerness in her eyes and then, seconds later, the disappointment that clouded them. She looked so small and old, Alison thought. How could she not have noticed that before? And had she always walked with that half-stoop? Her posture was terrible. After that, in any case, she more or less disappeared from the programme, most of which was devoted to prolonged shots of Danielle the glamour model and Pete the reality star showering in their swimwear. Val made only one more appearance. She was seen chatting to Danielle on her hammock in the afternoon, while the other campmates slept.
VAL: … I thought there might be a bit more of a fuss when I arrived, that’s all.
DANIELLE: I think everyone’s just a bit tired, you know? Don’t worry about it.
VAL: For me, it was a bit of an anti-climax, after the helicopter and everything.
DANIELLE: A bit of a damp squid, yeah …
VAL: (after a beat) Squib, you mean.
DANIELLE: What?
VAL: That’s the expression – ‘damp squib’.
DANIELLE: Oh, I see. So you’re correcting me?
VAL: Well, a lot of people get it wrong.
DANIELLE: I thought it was ‘squid’ because, you know, squids live underwater, so they’re probably quite damp.
VAL: Yes, you’d think so. But it’s actually squib.
DANIELLE: Oh. OK. (a beat) Well, thanks for putting me right about that.
When the programme was over, Alison sat for a while on the sofa, staring at the blank TV screen. Watching the sh
ow had been one of the strangest experiences of her life. She knew her mother intimately: better – far better – than she knew anyone else in the world. And the woman on the television had recognizably been her mother. And yet, in the very occasional glimpses of her which the programme had afforded, it had also been like watching a stranger. She had seen her as the cameras had seen her, and as the people editing the show had seen her, and these perspectives, she thought, were unforgiving. They were unfiltered by love.
As for Twitter, there was not much love for Val to be found on there this evening.
Omg she is so dull
Get this woman off my fucking tv screen
Join the campaign #getridofVal
Fucksake what a bitch
How many blowjobs did you have to give to get on this show
Grammar nazi!
Lay off Danielle
Correcting Danielle who the fuck do you think you are
How dare you speak like that to Danielle you ugly old sow
Anvil faced mare #getridofVal
Get back to your library and leave Danielle alone #teamDanielle
Fuck off back to ur libary
Squid squib who gives a fuck apart from some dried-up librarian
Fucking bitch the viewers are going to make you suffer for that
Again, Alison spent an hour or two blocking the most offensive people. Again, she felt as impotent as Canute trying to hold back the tide. Her mother’s account had 6,111 followers now, she noticed. Not bad, except that Pete’s had 314,566, and Danielle’s was fast approaching one million.
The odds, she couldn’t help feeling, were stacking up against her.
*
Beneath a dark-blue, starry sky, Val sat in the shadow of a eucalyptus tree, alone. Her hands were clasped tightly around her knees, and her knees were pulled up to her chin. In this position, curled into a ball, she rocked backwards and forwards, eyes closed, allowing herself a few cathartic sobs. She hoped that nobody would see her, although presumably there was at least one camera trained on her, somewhere or other. They were everywhere: hidden in hollowed-out tree trunks, or in secret cavities inside the rocks; mounted on retractable poles sprouting from within the greenery. There was no privacy, none at all. Of course, she had forfeited that when she had agreed to take part. But still, she had never imagined that it would be this hard …
Backwards and forwards she rocked, forwards and backwards. She tried to remember the meditation techniques her yoga instructor had once taught her, but that was a long time ago. They would be no use anyway. The images she was trying to purge were overwhelming, immovable, and made it impossible to call anything else to mind. They were banal images, at first, from earlier in the day: late morning, early afternoon, something like that. Daylight anyway. Bright sunshine. First of all, the clearing into which her guide had led her. The table at which she had been required to sit down. The perspex tank which had been placed on the table, and inside it … Oh God. The insect, the … thing, the … what was it called? A ‘Goliath stick insect’, the programme’s two chortling hosts had informed her. For Christ’s sake, the thing had been at least six inches long. A vivid, sickly green. Six thin, gangly legs, a long torso carapaced in some hard matter, solid and unyielding, and at the end of it … the head, uncannily (save for the two antennae) like a little human head, the beady eyes staring up at her, alert, vital but inscrutable. (The expression of terror she thought she could see there being an example, presumably – at least, please God, let it be so – of pure anthropomorphism.) And then she had been obliged to put on a pair of plastic goggles (she was still not sure why), and then screw her eyes tightly shut, and then the ‘insect wrangler’ (yes, there really was somebody with that job description) had taken the poor, revolting creature, and Val had opened her mouth wide, and then the thing was inside her, inside her mouth, she could feel it, feel it wriggling, struggling frantically, its obscenely long legs flailing against her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her mouth which had become a prison, a cage for this animal … Almost at once she could feel the gorge rising in her throat and she had felt an incredible urge to gag and open her mouth and expel the insect on to the table in front of her, but she knew that for every ten seconds she kept it inside her, her campmates would be given a portion of food, and she didn’t want to let them down. Now it was wriggling and thrashing even more violently inside there, and trying to escape out the back by forcing itself down her throat, but Val just screwed her eyes even tighter – her eyes from which tears of distress were starting to leak – and closed her mouth ever more firmly. Even then part of the insect, one of its legs perhaps, must still have been protruding, because now one of the chortling hosts said, ‘Come on, Val, be a sport, you’ve got to get the whole thing in there,’ and his co-host had giggled and said, ‘Ooh, I bet it’s been quite a while since a fella said that to you, eh, Val?’ and the whole crew had started laughing, but it was only now, in retrospect, that she realized the leering offensiveness of what they had said, at the time she was just training all her energy on to the task of not gagging, not vomiting, of keeping her eyes and her lips closed, trying to ignore the scrabble of long, angular, insectile legs kicking inside her mouth, until, suddenly, the creature became still. And then Val thought, Oh my God, have I killed it?, but this thought only lasted for a second or two because then she felt something else in her mouth, something liquid, and a taste – Christ – a taste fouler and more vile than anything she had ever tasted or imagined tasting, and she realized that the stick insect was shitting itself inside her mouth, literally shitting itself with fear, and as she felt the first trickle of liquid excrement sliding down her throat, her stomach heaved and her gorge rose and with a loud, choking gurgle she spat the insect out on to the table, followed by a thin trail of drool, after which she must have … if not passed out, exactly, at least lost all awareness of what was happening around her, because she did not remember the cheers and applause of the hosts or the crew, she remembered nothing until she was sitting up in a chair, wrapped in a blanket, drinking mouthful after mouthful of water and swilling it around and spitting it out in a desperate attempt to get rid of that taste, that hideous taste which was coming back to her even now and making her want to gag again …
Val rolled over on to her hands and knees, crawled towards a clump of ferns and vomited, as quietly as she could. Thanks to her failure at the trial, her dinner that evening had been meagre – just a handful of rice and beans – and now all of it had come back up. Still, she felt better for it. Another few minutes to compose herself, and she might be ready to rejoin the others. The sooner the better, because she needed to talk to Danielle. She had spoken too sharply to her after dinner. Made some comment about her not helping with the washing-up. Val had been in the right, no doubt about that – Danielle was lazy, she never helped out with any of the routine tasks around the camp – but it had sounded snappy, and she didn’t want to upset her: or, of course, to alienate the viewers at home. As soon as she felt better again, she would go and apologize.
Danielle was not in the camp. She was lying with Pete in a clearing, about fifty yards away. They were both flat on their backs, staring up at the stars through the canopy of trees. Danielle’s face, as so often, was without expression. Pete looked bored and restless.
‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude,’ said Val.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Did you want a word?’
‘Yes – with Danielle, actually.’
‘No probs,’ he said. ‘I need a dump anyway.’
<
br /> He got up and left. Val squatted down beside Danielle, and said: ‘Hello, lovey. I didn’t break up a romantic moment, did I?’
Danielle inclined her perfect head a few degrees. ‘Don’t worry. No chance of romance with him, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a tosser. We were only doing it because the director keeps telling us to look more romantic with each other.’
Val nodded, not really knowing what to say to this. She was surprised to hear that they had been getting instructions from the ‘director’. She didn’t even know that there was such a person.
‘What did you want anyway?’ Danielle asked.
‘It’s about the washing-up.’
Danielle turned away from her again, and looked blankly up at the sky. ‘Yeah? What about it?’
‘I just came to say … I’m sorry if I was a bit rude to you. You’re not angry, are you?’
‘You didn’t show me much respect in front of the others,’ Danielle said, pouting. ‘I know I’m younger than you, but, you know, I think I deserve to be treated in a certain way …’
‘I was respectful, actually,’ said Val. ‘I mean, I could have said, “Oh, come on, you lazy cow, when are you going to start pulling your weight around here?” Couldn’t I? But I would never talk to you like that.’
