by Adele Parks
‘So you are expecting Brian to choose Karen, then?’ asks Fi.
‘Not so much actively choose, more like his dick will jump out of his trousers through habit. Now, I need the logistics crew to work out where the camera should be for the grand seduction. Karen is planning to seduce him over a pint and some pork scratchings in their local.’
‘Very glamorous,’ says Fi wryly.
‘She’s not a glamorous girl. And he’s not a glamorous boy. It should be on their usual turf – we don’t want to arouse suspicions. Besides which, our budget is a pittance. Now go to it.’
Next I interview Tim Barrett. I think that Tim has a good career ahead of him as a criminal. Not because he appears particularly vicious, immoral or crooked but because he would be impossible to identify in a line-up. He is neither extraordinarily skinny nor obscenely fat. He is, in fact, of average build, average height, average looks and average intelligence. His hair is mid-brown; his eyes are a brown/grey/green colour. I forget which. After close investigation I discover that the only thing that distinguishes him at all is his fanatical, obsessive jealousy in relation to his fiancée, Linda. He runs through his suspicions regarding three of her exes. I don’t think his suspicions are founded. But that’s irrelevant. As he tells the stories he fidgets on his chair, moving from one buttock to the other. His hands appear to have developed an independent personality. They are animated. He picks up his coffee cup, puts it down again, he picks up a pen, pencil, ashtray, clipboard, biscuit. Everything, other than the biscuit, is put into his mouth. After he has spent fifteen minutes boring me with his paranoia and insecurity I think that this girl deserves a fling. If we do manage to cause a rift between them we will be providing a public service. I instruct a private detective to track down some of her exes immediately.
My next interview is with a petite brunette, Chloe. Chloe is an advertising executive in a small advertising agency in Bristol. She is more like the type of guest that I crave for the show. She is certainly attractive, with shoulder-length, curly hair, a winning smile and a neat, sharp body, which she is obviously and justifiably proud of. She’s aged twenty-five. She’s bright, funny.
And insecure.
I imagine that generally she hides it quite well. I imagine that her acquaintances and colleagues describe her as confident. But behind her back her friends discuss her ugly neediness. After chatting to her for four and a half minutes it is obvious to anyone who has ever read any popular psychology books (and I’ve read them all) that she is a woman who loves too much. She believes she is half a person unless she has a boyfriend. The men she meets believe she is an entire person, until they become her boyfriends. On sensing her dependency, their cocks go limp and they leave her. However, as I listen to her chat, it seems to me that her fiancé. Rod, breaks the mould. He actually likes her dependency; it makes him feel valued. But her historical, consistent failure has eroded her trust and faith in the concept of fidelity. Instead of being grateful to have found Rod and keeping her head down, Chloe is hitting the self-destruct button by testing him.
On national TV.
As the interview comes to a close and I have all the details I need regarding Rod’s exes, I ask Chloe why she feels compelled to verify his fidelity on TV. She must know that she is risking personal humiliation and universal disdain.
She shrugs and with a bravado which we both know to be fake replies, ‘I think if you are going to be a failure, you should try to be as conspicuous as you can about it. Who wants to be a run-of-the-mill failure?’
I love this wisdom. You’ve got to hand it to the British public. There’s an Aristotle in every one of them.
The queue for the live audience is massive – it stretches the entire length of the car park,’ laughs Fi excitedly. This is a good sign. The PR vehicle must have done its job.
‘What do they look like?’ I ask. The correct live audience is essential. There are lots of things that the majority of us will do in our homes that we wouldn’t do in public. Things like: cheer at other people’s insecurities, rejection and fear, encourage savagery and disloyalty, positively celebrate humiliation and distress. I need people who are either honest or stupid enough to have these reactions on live TV.
‘Generally poor and unhealthy-looking. But they appear oblivious to their aesthetic drawbacks – they’re oozing excitement,’ says Fi.
This is exactly what I want to hear. An anonymous voice cries, ‘Spot checking, ladies and gents.’ Nobody has a clue what that means, if anything at all, but it has the desired effect and the audience squirm with nervous expectancy. I don’t blame them. It is exhilarating. We put on a bit of a show to get them in the mood. The runner’s bleep pings incessantly; she ignores the increasingly desperate calls. The director (long-haired and self-important by necessity), production manager (a grumpy git – it’s a professional qualification) and the stage manager (careworn and exhausted) huddle in a corner debating furiously about some technical point or other. The production executive is running around the set as though her life depends upon it. A plethora of cameramen – dressed entirely in black, baggy combat trousers and Ted Baker shirts, Cats or DKNY trainers – are standing around, trying to look casually indifferent, as though their lives and souls depend upon it. The set, although flimsy, is attractive. The backdrop is a close-up picture of dozens of fat red hearts. At first glance the impression is romantic; a dip in the lights and the effect is satanic, open-heart surgery on stage. There are the compulsory comfy couches in the middle of the stage, ensuring everyone gets the best view of the gallows.
‘Where did he come from?’ I am referring to the warm-up act. He is a fat, northern comedian who has blatantly been on the circuit longer than Schumacher. He looks like a pantomime dame and his requests for the audience to ‘Go wild, go crazy’ illicit nothing more than a few embarrassed titters. Fi shrugs, ‘He does well with the Kin’s Kismet audience.’
I listen to him telling a few mucky jokes. He is the only one laughing.
‘What were you thinking of? I’ve told you I want an up-market show. Which bit of the word up-market is it that you don’t understand?’ I snap. Somewhere I can hear someone say, ‘Thirty seconds to live.’
‘You told me to deal with the detail,’ she defends.
I’m not in the mood for debating. ‘I want him off the show by next week, Fi.’ The voice in my earpiece says, ‘Twenty seconds.’ I tune back in to the fat man.
‘It’s a live show tonight, so if you are sitting next to somebody you shouldn’t be, move.’ The audience finally begins to smirk. ‘Ten seconds.’
‘Did you see anyone move, Fi?’ I ask. I’m always thinking about potentially adulterous relationships. ‘Eight, seven, six.’ There is a swell of expectancy.
‘Now a big hand for Katie Hunt, this evening’s presenter.’ The audience starts to clap their hands raw for the remote chance that there may be a nanosecond mug shot on TV. The fat man tries to get Katie to twirl like a modern-day Anthea. This is proof, if we needed it, that he has had his day. Katie wouldn’t twirl if Robbie Williams asked her to. Katie casts him a withering look. I’m relieved – at least she understands what type of show I’m making here.
Three, two, one – we are on air.’ The roving camera sweeps magnificently across the audience and set. The camera reminds me of an internal. It must do the same for Fi, as I notice she writes ‘smear’ on her hand with a felt tip. The emergence of the cameras acts as an aphrodisiac on the audience. Everyone visibly brightens; they grow a couple of inches, smile a bit wider.
‘Hello, and welcome to the very first Sex with an Ex.’ The stage manager initiates more applause; the audience catches on quickly and begins to cheer. Katie smiles back at the camera, appreciating their appreciation.
‘You smell the same.’
‘Smell? What do I smell of? ‘He is mildly irritated. Scrupulously clean at all times, he has made a particular effort tonight.
‘My youth.’ She smiles.
She leans closer to i
nhale him again. She notices he is quivering. She notices she is. He turns a fraction and he is staring into her eyes, straight past the pupils, and directly hitting her mind and soul. She is sixteen again. Which makes him eighteen. She has been propelled back to the doorstep of her parental home. The season is irrelevant; she feels warm and safe. It’s late at night, very late, because although they abide by the curfew and get her home by 10.45 p.m., they are literal: she is home but not in her home. It’s past midnight and they are still sitting on the step. They can’t go in because her mother is waiting up in her nylon dressing gown. Her mum will want to know what the film was like, and she’ll make a cup of coffee and stay up and drink it with them. They don’t want to talk to anyone else. They never do.
Did. ‘Did’ is the correct verb because she’s not sixteen, she’s twenty-six and she’s not on the step of her mum and dad’s house in Croydon. She’s actually just bumped into Declan outside Pronuptia bridal shop.
‘Big box,’ he comments, grinning, and he’s just the same. The grin is just the same; it lights up her stomach and a bit lower.
‘Er, yes. ‘She hesitates. The natural thing to say next is, ‘It’s my wedding dress,’ but Abbie doesn’t say the natural thing. She says, ‘Wow, it’s been a long time.’
‘Yes. Ten years.’ He pauses for a moment and then adds, ‘Four months, two weeks and about eight days.’
‘Delighted and shocked, Abbie blushes and glances both ways up the street. She’s not sure what or who she’s looking for. But she’s relieved not to see anyone she knows. ‘I don’t believe you’ve been counting.’
‘Fair cop. I haven’t. I just made up the stuff about months and weeks.’ They both laugh because it always was easy for him to make her laugh.
‘Fancy a drink?’ he adds casually. And why shouldn’t she? It’s just a drink. She hasn’t anything else planned except a night in with a face pack. Lawrence is out tonight – rugby practice.
They make their way to a nearby wine bar that he knows. She is impressed with the way he takes charge and really he couldn’t have chosen better. As she pushes open the door, she is overwhelmed by the smell of fags and booze, by the litter of noise and dark suits. Money and irresponsibility, the most potent aphrodisiacs. The wine bar is packed. Smart bods forcing their way to the bar, into each other’s psyches and beds. The suits are Armani and the bed linen will be Egyptian cotton. It’s Abbie’s kind of bar, full of deeply attractive and arrogant media types, all of whom have disposable incomes matched only by their disposable lifestyles. She hasn’t been to a bar like this for ages. It was in a bar like this that she met Lawrence. But once they’d been together for a few months such dens of sin were superfluous. It was easier to sin on the settee in his flat.
The music pumps through Abbie and Declan’s brains and rushes to her knickers and his cock. Music just does that. No one is dancing, it’s a bar not a club, and although Abbie is tempted to sculpt out a space on the designer scuffed wooden floor, she’s far too shy to do so. Besides which she’s still carrying her huge box with her bridal dress and six-foot veil. Where would she put it? What is she thinking of? Bringing her dress into a smoky bar? She notes that she’s tapping her foot. In fact, her leg is jerking almost uncontrollably. She wants to dance. She needs to whoosh and swirl. Suddenly she understands stripping. Music does equate to sex. It thumps and jars and consumes and fills and ultimately relieves. Abbie prefers to make love to music, rather than in silence. It helps to create the mood. Whichever mood she wants. Fast and frantic or slow and seductive. Abbie shakes her head. What is she thinking of? Sex, that’s what. Why is she thinking of sex? She’s not out with her fiancé; she’s with Declan. She should not be thinking of sex.
‘Drink?’ she yells. She orders him a Becks and herself two gin and tonics. She downs one at the bar and then returns to her seat with the other. She doesn’t normally try to calm her nerves with drink. Then again she’s not normally nervous with men. She’s been with Lawrence for three years so she can’t remember the last time she felt flirtatious or sexy. But she is nervous with Declan.
And flirty.
And sexy.
‘So you don’t drink Bacardi and Coke any more?’ He smiles.
‘No.’ She smiles back. ‘And I assumed you’d moved on from Woodpecker cider. Cheers.’
They clink glasses. They fall silent, as they have so much to say. She wants to ask him why he never wrote once he went to university. Why didn’t he reply to any of her letters ? She remembers the endless waiting for the postman, the fruitless, pointless hoping. The answer is he met a girl from Nottingham in Freshers’ Week. For the first two terms it seemed like love. He reads her mind and says, ‘I never was much of a letterwriter.’
He wants to ask her who she lost her virginity to and was it good. The answer is that, furious and bored with waiting for his letters and calls, she eventually climbed into bed with his cousin within hours of blowing out the candles on her seventeenth birthday cake. Yes, it was good, very good.
She reads his mind and assures him, ‘Pretty average, really. Like everyone’s first time.’
They both start to laugh at the cosmic connection that seems undamaged by the years of neglect. They had always found talk easy. Indulging in endless outpouring of thoughts, views, dreams and emotions. Now they exchange suppositions, opinions, histories and sentiments. They don’t notice the difference. It is still there, the familiar but indefinable sense of possibility. He’d always filled her with such a pure sense of adventure. She loves Lawrence dearly, but he doesn’t create that sense of future possibilities; he brings with him a sense of future stability. She thought it was impossible to feel sixteen unless you were sixteen, but now she is within inches of Declan, it’s back, that overwhelming sense of YESness. Her mood is buoyant as she drinks those first few G&Ts. Quickly they pass a respectable G&T hour, so they swap to red wine.
‘Aren’t you hot?’ he yells over the crowd.
‘Hot?’ she asks with feigned nonchalance.
‘You are still wearing your gloves.’
‘Slowly she peels them off, revealing her engagement ring.
‘When?’ he asks.
‘Two weeks,’ she answers. The answer does not create the same rush she experienced this morning when she checked her countdown calendar.
‘He’s a lucky man,’ says Declan, but he won’t look at Abbie. ‘We should be celebrating. I’ll buy us some champagne.’
Occasionally when she wanders around Heal’s furniture department or sits at a dinner party with Lawrence, Abbie finds herself idly wondering whether, if she’d met Declan later in life, he would have been ‘the One’. Occasionally Abbie has wondered what sleeping with Declan would be like. The front step of her parents’ house didn’t offer the correct opportunity. As she watches him at the bar she believes that it can’t hurt to find out.
As Abbie pushes back the hotel sheets and climbs on top of Declan she is sixteen again. As she leaves the hotel room, three hours later, under the cover of darkness she feels her twenty-six years and to be frank she rather likes it. Declan was a lovely part of her past and that’s where he should be. She’s walking with a swagger. It’s the swagger of a confident young woman who knows she’s marrying the right man.
When Lawrence watches the tape he misinterprets the John Wayne stance and is disgusted.
For a moment the studio is silent. Awash with betrayal, regret and fear. Lawrence is staring at Abbie. His jaw is hanging open, which is unbecoming. He looks like the dumb animal Abbie has reduced him to. It’s complex. I admit that. I signal frantically for camera two to move in tightly. Close up, close up. I want to see every muscle twitch, every emotion exposed. Abbie is shaking so violently that I think she may spontaneously combust. I suspect she wishes she could. She resolutely stares at the floor. Too humiliated and ashamed to think beyond how she can get out of the studio, she doesn’t even attempt to catch Lawrence’s eye. She’s forgotten that Declan ever existed. Declan is trying to look uncon
cerned. He is sitting back in his chair, with his long legs casually crossed, and he’s tapping his toe. His brave performance is exposed as the act it is when camera three picks up the fact that he is tearing at his own skin, digging his nails so deeply that his quicks are brilliant white. Boy, are they regretting it now. They are a mass of sweaty palms, quivering lips and knotted intestines. Their faces ask what they’ve done.
I wish I’d never written the letter.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Fuck.
Lawrence breaks the silence. ‘Why did you do it?’ he upbraids.
‘Why didn’t you trust me?’ accuses Abbie.
‘Fuck,’ says Declan.
That’s the cue for the audience. They become animals. They boo and hiss and spit and claw. They are collectively relieved that, in this instance, it is someone else who has been fucked over. Unscathed, they fly into an uncontrollable frenzy. The savages hurl abuse and insults. I think that if they’d had rotting fruit to hand they’d have used it. They despise Lawrence for being cuckolded. They loathe Abbie for being a slut. And they forgive Declan because he has got a cute grin and he’s a bit of a lad. The synthesized music pipes cheerfully through the studio. Oblivious to the fact that Abbie is sobbing hysterically and has to be carried off the stage. Her legs buckle. It’s a sad pathetic sight. I hope camera two got a close-up.
‘Good job, Cas.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Way to go, Cas.’
‘Thanks.’
‘High five, Cas.’
‘Yes, very high.’ I efficiently accept the congratulations and charge through the corridors with the air of someone who has a mission. Thing is, I have. My heart is pounding; the blood is rushing through my being. The show only finished minutes ago but already I know it is a huge success. Massive. The audience won’t leave and we have had to call in security. Lawrence punched Declan. Live on stage! I’m delighted. It couldn’t have gone better if I’d scripted it. Then Jenny, Brian and Karen – what a horror show! Brian wasn’t sure if it was the worst or best day of his life. The audience loved his unashamed cockiness.
