by Penny Smith
She would have been gratified to know that Adam had been unable to concentrate fully on his meeting because he was thinking about her. Katie was unlike any of his previous girlfriends. He had always gone for women who were high maintenance. He hadn’t known they were high maintenance until it was too late. They had seemed normal. Then they had half moved in with clothes, toothbrush and bags, and he had discovered that they took absolutely hours to get ready, that there was a drama if the manicurist couldn’t fit them in, that one wrong word brought on a crisis. It was exhausting.
Katie was refreshing. She was beautiful, made him laugh, and was sexy–in fact, sexier because there were no tantrums. There was none of the rowing that had marred his other relationships. She had joie de vivre in spades. And the peachiest of bottoms. Just thinking about her was making him hot.
He dragged his mind back to the meeting–Nick was staring at him. Was he supposed to have said something? He brought his attention fully into the room.
‘Would you agree to that?’ asked the man from BBC Factual.
Adam thought quickly. ‘What do you think, Nick?’
Nick slightly raised his eyebrows. They were talking about an antiques project Adam had masterminded so it was basically up to him to sign it off. ‘It sounds fine to me,’ he said.
‘Good. Then that’s what we’ll do,’ Adam said, and looked at his watch. ‘Tell you what, I have to go now. Any odds and ends, we can discuss on the phone, yes?’
As they left, Nick asked mildly, ‘What were you thinking about when you were supposed to be making the deal?’
‘Suddenly remembered there was some stuff I’d got on the computer, and I’d forgotten to save it. Debating about whether I should go back to the office and sort it.’
‘Cool,’ said Nick, who clearly didn’t believe him. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’
Much, much later, between cotton sheets, the decision was made. Adam and Katie lay tangled together. She was snuggled down, with barely the tip of her nose showing, while he had most of his torso and one leg on top of the duvet.
‘How can you bear to have so much flesh exposed to the elements?’ she muffled.
‘I think you’ll find it’s tolerably warm out here. We have this new-fangled contraption called a boiler, which is linked to something we modern-day humans call central heating.’
‘It’s freezing.’
‘There’s something wrong with your thermostat.’
Katie giggled.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘When I was growing up, we had a really dodgy boiler,’ she replied.
‘Called your grandmother,’ he interrupted.
‘Cheeky No she was not. We had this really dodgy boiler–’
‘Can’t believe you call your mother that.’
‘Stop it. If you’ll let me finish…We used to have this really dodgy boiler.’ She lifted her head and gave him a hard look, as if she was daring him to speak again. ‘And periodically it would have to be riddled. When I look back at the winters at home, they were punctuated by shouts of “Has anybody riddled the boiler?,” which is just ripe for comedy. But either we weren’t as crude, rude and disgusting as we generally are now, or that expression was not in our lexicon.’
‘It was a more innocent time.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, you only have to look at children’s television programmes then and now,’ he said. ‘They’re more knowing today’
‘Teletubbies wasn’t knowing.’
‘SpongeBob SquarePants? It’s filth. Pure, unadulterated filth.’
‘SpongeBob SquarePants?’ She laughed. ‘Or are you talking in the cleaning sense?’
‘I was watching it last night. It’s sheer pornography. This bloke Bob sponging down a woman with square pants on.’
She chortled and put her nose below the duvet.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, with a throaty growl.
‘Warming my nose up,’ she muttered, through the feathers. ‘I think you’re the one with a dodgy thermostat.’
‘How the hell would you cope in the cold weather in Norway if you decided to do Celebrity X-Treme?’
‘Good point. I assume there’ll be central heating,’ she said, hopefully.
‘What? The Norwegians have mastered the art of centrally heating their countryside?’
‘It’s called global warming. We’re all helping,’ she responded, wriggling onto her front and propping her head on her hands. ‘You are awfully handsome,’ she said, gazing at his chin from close range.
Adam smiled down at her and kissed the tip of her nose. ‘You’re rather scrumptious yourself. But, really, on a purely basic level, are you up for Celebrity X-Treme in terms of the chilliness of the environment? If you find this cold, how on earth are you going to cope with minus thirty, or whatever it could be?’
‘I’m sure they’d provide me with adequate clothing. They wouldn’t have us freezing to death. ’Elf and safety would have something to say about that.’
‘And what about playing the game?’ Adam looked down at her, as she lay in the crook of his arm.
‘You really do have one of the best profiles of anyone, ever,’ she said, caressing his emerging stubble.
‘Is that a profile when you can only see my chin?’
‘Well, what else could you call it? An anti-file?’
‘Idiot,’ he said, stroking her shoulder. ‘And you have the silkiest skin of anyone, ever.’
‘Why, thank you kindly, sir.’
‘But you haven’t answered the question.’
‘What was it again?’
‘Do you think you can manage to do a reality show without coming a cropper?’
‘I don’t know. It depends who the other people are, I suppose. I’ll probably hate them all and look like a narky git.’
‘“Git”. What a very elegant word,’ he commented.
‘Onomatopoeic, I would say. Gittish behaviour. Just saying it makes your mouth into a long, disapproving line. Try it,’ she prompted.
‘Gittish behaviour,’ he obliged her. ‘I concur. It’s probably impossible to say with your mouth any other way’ He tried it. ‘Goatish. Ah, interesting.’
‘You see? Anyway…it’s impossible to know whether I can play the game or come out of it in a muppetish way.’
‘You do make up some interesting adjectives. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you have to be prepared for them to edit the programme in a way that’s not in your favour. And it seems to me that those who come out of these things best are the people who are perhaps the most innocent–to come back to what we were talking about earlier and those innocent times. And innocent is possibly the last adjective I would ever use in your general direction.’
‘I open my nostrils upon you. I spit in your general direction,’ she misquoted, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
‘Your mother smells of elderberries and your father was a hamster,’ he continued.
‘Hmm. I do see what you mean, though.’
There was silence for a while.
‘The thing is…’ she said slowly ‘…that there is also the matter of the money…’
‘Yes. It is quite a lot. But not if it’s the end of your career.’
‘That’s what my agent says. But could it really be the end of it?’
‘That’s a million-dollar question. It could radically alter how people view you, and therefore have a radical effect on the sort of jobs you get offered. But you know all the pros and cons, you don’t need me to tell you. What’s your gut feeling?’
‘I wish people wouldn’t ask me that. I don’t have gut feelings. Unless I’ve had a large dish of chillies. But it could be fun. I could maybe get a book out of it.’
She felt him smile. ‘What?’
‘You could, of course,’ he said, ‘but if that’s an excuse for why you want to do it, it’s a pretty poor one. You might as well be honest and say you’re doing it for the cash. If the money was less, how much of
a difference would it make?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve done that in my head already. Obviously it would make some difference, particularly if they were offering bugger-all. I’d just say no. Funnily enough, the thing that would make the biggest difference is if I could find out who else was going.’
She thought for a moment, then sat up abruptly and looked directly at him. ‘Hey. Do you think you could?’
He put his leg under the duvet and gave a little shiver.
‘Ha. Told you it was cold.’
‘It was an involuntary shiver such as one gives when a tickly hair gets up one’s nose.’
‘Was not. You’re cold. Let me feel that leg.’ She reached out and caressed his firm thigh.
‘Mmm. Nice,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t agree more,’ she concurred.
‘I could try to find out,’ he said slowly, thinking about who he knew at the production company. ‘But you know how they treat these things–like they’re covered by the Official Secrets Act. And sometimes they honestly don’t know until the last moment.’ He paused. ‘I get the impression you’re more tempted than not.’
‘Yes, I think that would be fair.’
He hugged her to him and dropped a kiss on her hair. ‘Mmm, you smell good.’ He closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of her hair. Katie melted and curled herself round him. The duvet sighed.
And so it was that Katie found herself in northern Norway at the beginning of March, in a hut, on the first night of filming for Celebrity X-Treme. There were bunk beds and bedrolls on the floor. It was the luck of the draw as to who had been assigned what, and Katie had pulled a short straw. She tried to get comfortable in her sleeping-bag as she listened to the snoring coming from the one on her left. She stifled a giggle. A bag in every sense of the word.
Denise Trench was the singer in a pop band that had had a couple of hits and won the Eurovision Song Contest before disappearing from view. The band had been about as trendy as a pair of pale nylon slacks. Their fan base was an army of women of a certain age, who smelled faintly of wee. Nowadays, Denise was more famous for her colourful sex life, and her occasional forays into bottles of Jack Daniel’s followed by stints in rehab.
Katie sighed and wriggled around in her sleeping-bag again. Whichever bit of her ended up touching the bedroll became instantly chilled and started to hurt. This is ridiculous, she thought. If I hadn’t bought that bloody cottage in Dorset, if I hadn’t spent my money on holidays, if I hadn’t taken my eye off the ball, if I hadn’t trusted Mike and he hadn’t stitched me up and got me sacked from Hello Britain!, I could have been coasting towards a happy early retirement instead of lying here in a ruddy shed with a draught and a whole load of people I’d rather see shot and mounted. On a wall. Obviously.
She thought back to the conversation with Adam. He had warned her, but she hadn’t listened. She had been seduced by the noughts on a cheque. Had thought she’d be able to cope with it. Oh, God, she groaned inwardly. I used to think people were numpties to appear on these wretched programmes. And now I’m one of them. How has it come to this?
She wriggled again, and merely succeeded in twisting her thermal pyjamas so far round she felt like a human Mr Whippy. She raised her bottom, unscrewed her pyjamas and humphed back down. She was freezing. It was no good. She was going to have to get out and put some more clothes on.
She rolled the sleeping-bag down, wriggling like a caterpillar, and crept out, instantly alerting the producer on duty in the gallery, who was watching the bank of television monitors in front of him. He pointed it out to the director, who mixed from a shot of Denise Trench snoring like a warthog and gently breaking wind.
Mark, the producer, was bored already, and hoping he could wangle a move to daytime. Nights were so tedious. So far this evening he’d got barely five minutes’ worth of good stuff. The best bit had been some kind of movement going on in Peter Philbin’s mid-region. The girls would like that. Particularly since one of the camera angles had got his fully muscled-up chest emerging in all its glory. That would go into the storyline they were hoping to manipulate in which the handsome soap star would end up in some way, shape or form with Crystal, the model. He checked on the camera which was pointing at her to see what she was doing. Sleeping prettily, with her lipgloss surprisingly intact. She was so much better-looking without all her usual makeup, he thought.
He watched Katie as she tiptoed past the others, and boosted the sound.
‘Who’s that?’ whispered Tanya Wilton, who was close to the door. The woman more infamous than famous after a fling with a politician was having a fitful night.
‘Sorry,’ murmured Katie, ‘I’ve got to get more clothes. My head feels like an ice cube.’ ‘Mine too,’ said Tanya, quietly.
‘Do you want me to pass you something? I’ve got a spare hat.’ ‘Could you? That would be great, thank you.’ Katie tiptoed to her suitcase, which she could see in the dim light of the moon, shining through the uncurtained windows, and rummaged through its contents. Her years as a presenter on breakfast television had stood her in good stead for pitch-of-night rummaging. Even at home in the flat, she hardly ever put the lights on if she had to get up in the dark, preferring instead to move around partially blind. So here in Norway, at three o’clock on a frozen spring morning, she was in her element, mentally logging where everything was. She found her hat and then, buried underneath, discovered a balaclava. Lovely, lovely balaclava. Thank goodness her chin was going to be warm. She also found a scarf and her sheepskin mittens and crept back past the sleeping bodies to Tanya. ‘There you go,’ she whispered, handing over the hat.
She snuggled back into her sleeping-bag, and pulled on her balaclava, wrapped the scarf firmly round her neck and slid on the mittens. Within half an hour she was finally warm enough to sleep.
Up in the viewing gallery, Mark peered closer at the camera. As daylight cast a gloomy glow, it was quite clear that the erstwhile queen of the breakfast sofa had crammed an enormous pair of green pants on her head, the stout gusset protecting her nose from the cold, her closed eyelids nicely framed by one of the leg holes. The producer and director shared a smile. That would definitely go in.
At six o’clock, they handed over to the early birds. The story producer was the glorious strawberry blonde Mark rather fancied. ‘Morning, Siobhan,’ he said, unfurling himself from the seat.
‘Hi, Mark. Anything happening?’
‘Not a huge amount. Peter having an early-morning fumble. Katie with a pair of knickers on her head.’
‘Really? May I ask why?’
‘Think she mistook them for a hat.’
‘Ah. Yes. Easily done. Same number of holes. Not.’
‘No, seriously. She was rooting around in her case in the dark.’
‘Why didn’t she use a torch?’
‘Probably trying not to wake the others.’
‘You don’t think she did it hoping for air time?’
‘Watch the tape. It didn’t look like it to me.’
Siobhan went over to talk to the director as Mark gathered up his belongings. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Looked genuine to me,’ he answered, yawning and stretching. ‘Actually, even if she did it for effect, it’s still pretty funny And not much else has happened. I think we’re going to have to stop wearing them out during the day. Four hours on that ice assault course yesterday–I was exhausted just watching them.’
‘I’ll have a word with the activities people,’ she said, ‘but they seem keen on distancing us from other reality shows by having them out and about. Otherwise it’s just Big Brother Does the Jungle in a cold place. It seems to be holding up well so far, ratings wise. As soon as we start the voting next week, the senior executives will probably have another look at it. I’m going to get a coffee–do you want anything?’
‘No, thanks. I’m whacked. I’m going to get straight off as soon as we’ve done the handover.’
Mark picked up his holdall and walked
over to the desk to join the other overnighters as they ran through the storylines that were emerging. Page three’s Crystal was being flirty with Peter Philbin. Denise Trench was doing lots of ranting at columnist Paul Martin. Alex Neil, the outrageously gay designer, was getting very close to the DJ Steve Flyte, who appeared to be enjoying the proximity. Tanya Wilton was continuing to spill the beans about her fling with the politician to Flynn O’Mara, ‘astrologer to the stars’. Katie Fisher was falling over a lot. And Dave Beal, the alleged comedian, was still telling jokes that failed to raise a laugh.
Mark straightened up from where he was leaning on the desk. I also think it might be worth keeping an eye on Katie Fisher and Paul Martin. There might be something going on there.’ He turned to lob his plastic water cup into the bin and failed to notice Siobhan’s slight smirk.
Siobhan was a man’s woman. She dressed for men. She studied men. She hunted men. She hated women. She particularly hated successful women. It didn’t matter that to Mr and Mrs Average, as she thought of them, with their drudge-end jobs, she was successful in the exciting world of television. She was a bitter woman. She had chips on her shoulder. And they were well-nurtured chips.
Many years ago, when she had cherished dreams of being a presenter, she had been beaten to her ideal job of hosting Hello Britain! by Beatrice Shah. She had been covering holiday shifts, and had thought it was a done deal. After finding out that her position had been usurped, she had stormed into The Boss’s office to demand an explanation. He had looked surprised and said she had never been considered. That under no circumstances would she ever be considered after research had shown her to be out of touch with the viewers.
‘Out of touch with the viewers?’ she had shrieked. ‘What do they mean “out of touch”?’
‘Apparently you sound snotty, for want of a better word,’ he had said. The Boss was not an unkind man, but he hadn’t taken to Siobhan. She was too ballsy for his liking. He preferred a more emollient woman. She did an efficient job, but her predatory nature meant that some of his male staff had confessed they felt hounded.
