Coming Up Next

by Penny Smith

  ‘The dog kept me up. I may have to take him to the vet today.’

  ‘Oh dear. How old is he?’

  ‘Only six. I don’t think it’s terminal.’

  Richard, the producer, was leaning over a researcher’s desk. ‘That reminds me about the man who goes to the vet with his dog because it’s got a cough. And the vet says, “I’m going to have to put him down.” And the bloke says, “But he’s only got a cough.” “I know,” says the vet. “But he’s heavy.”’

  The researcher laughed.

  ‘That’s not funny,’ said Keera, ‘not when Mike’s dog isn’t very well. How would you like it if your mum was ill and we all made jokes about it?’

  ‘Oh, lighten up, Keera. Mike just said he didn’t think it was serious. And, anyway, the vet only put the dog on the floor.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. You said he put him down.’

  Richard looked at her. ‘Yeah. Right. Hadn’t you better get to Makeup?’

  Keera checked her watch, stood up and turned on her heel.

  Richard watched her leave. ‘And, Mike, since you’re here a full fifteen minutes before the show starts, maybe you can look at the scripts and make any changes now instead of complaining later.’

  Mike raised his eyebrows. ‘If you were a better producer, I could come in five minutes before the show and not have to worry. What with you and that bloody director laughing at your gloriously unfunny “jokes”, it’s a wonder we manage to get on air. Thank God I can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. If it was up to me, you’d be out on your arse.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be able to find anyone else to put up with your bullshit,’ said Richard levelly. ‘And, frankly, I don’t think the show is anywhere near as good now Katie’s gone. There’s no edge. You’re finally exposed. As I knew you would be. Until now I’ve been kind because I know that, for some reason, Katie thinks you’re a good bloke. Don’t push me too far.’

  There was a pause.

  Richard added, ‘And don’t forget, I’ve been a long time in this industry and know an awful lot of people.’

  Mike pushed back his seat. Yawned. Stood up and scratched his scrotum right in Richard’s face. ‘Don’t threaten me. I think you’ll find I have a number of very useful friends too.’ He headed for the studio.

  But Richard’s comments had hit home. Was the show worse since Katie had left? Surely the whole thing hung on him. Ratings were the only judge of what was happening, he thought. He’d go and check them at the end of the programme. Or did Richard know something he didn’t?

  To get rid of the doubt and uncertainty, he went off to harangue the head of Wardrobe for putting his expensive suits on inappropriate hangers. Little did he know that his weekly tirades merely resulted in much worse indignities perpetrated against them – and that the occasional crop of spots on his thighs was nothing to do with heat rash.

  Katie’s mum was having trouble. She was trying to do a still life with a jug, a hare and some potatoes. The potatoes had come up a treat and looked nice and earthy. But while the hare looked properly limp and lifeless, it wasn’t remotely like a hare. Her attempts to give it a glossy sheen had made it look wet. ‘Too much white,’ she muttered, as Katie appeared at the door.

  ‘Too much wet,’ said Katie. ‘I know seals come from the sea, but by the time they’re that dead there’s not much moisture left on the outside.’

  ‘It’s a hare.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t appear to be very hairy.’

  ‘Thank you so much for your kind and unnecessary remarks,’ her mother said drily. ‘Can I help? Has Dad forgotten to get in another vat of wine?’

  Katie continued to walk towards the window, without giving any hint that she had heard the barbed comment. She had been there for five days and the bottles did seem to pile up, but she resented the implication that she was drinking too much. ‘Sorry, didn’t realize you were counting. Or, actually, that it mattered. I’m what they call “chilling”, having had the rug pulled out from under my feet.’

  ‘Just be careful you don’t end up under the rug,’ commented her mother cheerily. ‘Remember when your brother got so drunk he stayed the night at Bob’s and ripped up a corner of the carpet so that he could sleep under it? He’s still got that carpet-tack scar under his arm.’

  Katie’s eyes managed to sparkle. ‘Whatever happened to Bob?’

  ‘Got divorced. He doesn’t live too far away from here. Near Hawes. The Old Coach House – that lovely big place with the huge garden. He invited me to come round and paint there the other day. May take him up on the offer – give up with the lank hare, try harebells and hydrangeas instead.’

  ‘He was rather good-looking, as I recall,’ said Katie, as she checked her watch. Another quarter of an hour and she could legitimately ask her mother if she wanted a drink, then join her.

  ‘Well, funnily enough, I think he’s better-looking now. A bit like Richard Gere. Sort of pretty but rugged, with a hint of sadness and a soupçon of debauchery.’

  Katie had thoroughly perked up. ‘Maybe I’ll come with you. I need some more gear. Sorry. That was one of the most rubbish puns ever. Anyway, let me know when or if you go.’

  A week later, she and her mother were at the Old Coach House. Katie was thrilled. She might have no job, no prospect of a job, no way of paying her mortgage, no visible means of support in the near future, and parents who were getting a bit scratchy about her cluttering up their environment, but Bob was, as Kirstie Allsopp would probably put it, a des res with all mod cons and a particularly pleasant aspect. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, I wouldn’t mind seeing his flying buttresses, she thought.

  Her mother, after the formalities were over and done with – Yes, he was well. Yes, his parents were well. No, the cat had just been neutered, that was why his tongue was clamped between his teeth. And, yes, he did think he’d put the kettle on for a cup of coffee – had gone through to the garden and was setting up her easel by a verdant patch of hostas, flanked by snapdragons, hollyhocks and fading peonies. ‘I can already feel the muse upon me,’ she shouted back to them in the kitchen.

  Katie was flirting over a gin and tonic. ‘Ah. Thank goodness for that. Always nice to have good muse.’ She swallowed a pip and choked. ‘I am so sorry. I keep doing it today. Not the pips,’ she added, as he looked concerned, ‘the puns. As my old editor used to say: “Avoid puns like the plague.” But I appear to be in a bit of an Oasis soup.’

  Bob raised an eyebrow. Very sexy, thought Katie, then sang aloud, ‘You know … you get a roll with it. As in, I’m on a roll. Or not …’ She tailed off.

  ‘Maybe …’ said Bob, as he squashed down the coffee grounds in the cafetière ‘… your editor was right.’ He poured the coffee and took it to her mother, leaving her with time to worry if she’d cocked it up already.

  Well, whatever. It was hardly the end of the world. But bloody annoying. She had obviously lost her touch. That was what getting sacked and being away from the city did for you. The sharp edges got blunted. It was only a matter of time before she started wearing comfortable shoes, nylon slacks and a housecoat.

  ‘So …’ said Bob, as he came back to join her in the kitchen. He was smiling so she assumed she hadn’t completely blotted her copybook.

  ‘So what?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘Apart from me losing my job? Not much. I’ve eaten so much good food because of Dad’s cooking craze that I can barely fit into my pyjamas and Mum kind of hinted today that I may like to leave before I become an embarrassment. But as George Burns said when he was asked how he felt about getting to a hundred, “I feel fine, considering the alternative.”’

  Bob sipped his coffee and gazed contemplatively out of the window at Katie’s mother, frantically daubing pink paint on the canvas. ‘What’s the alternative in your case?’ he asked.

  ‘What – to death? I suppose a kind of living death where I don’t get another good job in television, don’t eve
n get offered a reality show, and end up running a dog-dependency unit in Penge. Where occasionally someone says, “Didn’t you used to be someone on breakfast television?”’

  Katie stopped. She hadn’t meant to sound so bitter. But being sacked wasn’t the same as moving on in the television world. Everyone knew what had happened because the papers, so keen when you were on the way up, were even more excited about chronicling the way down. And because it was all so public, it was almost impossible to gloss over it. You couldn’t tell people you’d decided to leave because you wanted to widen your experience, spend more time with your family, have a change of scenery when they all knew you’d been dumped.

  In many ways, it was like an actor leaving a soap. You could go on to bigger and better things, but often you sank without trace.

  Unless, of course, it was the BBC. There, they cherished you. Nurtured you. Even if you were a patronizing, irritating woman with no sense of humour like that awful Saskia Miller. ‘How are you?’ she would ask, hand grasping forearm, eyes gazing upwards as though she’d heard you were in terminal decline.

  ‘Pah.’

  ‘Sorry?’ she asked, missing what Bob had just said.

  ‘I wondered what the exclamation was for.’

  ‘Oh. Nothing. Well, nothing much. Another presenter who still has a job and who I bump into periodically,’ she said. She caught Bob’s eye and added, ‘I’m not normally like this. It’s all a bit new. Hey, Mum’s painted a blancmange – or a baboon’s anus. Shall we go and encourage her?’

  Dee was having the most hideous day. Mike and Keera had been talking so loudly through her weather bulletins that she couldn’t concentrate properly and the Met Office had phoned to complain.

  As soon as she’d handed back to the sofa she knew she’d mixed up the wind speeds with the gusting speeds. The editor had torn her off a strip and she’d had to apologize – even though it was damned hard not to say that it hadn’t been totally her fault. You had to take into account other people’s professionalism – or lack of it.

  But no. She had sat on his plastic sofa without complaining.

  He had stared at her from his seat – deliberately set a lot higher than the sofa to make sure he was in the superior position. ‘Pull your socks up,’ he said. ‘Plenty of people out there are simply itching to get into your shoes. They’d probably do the job a lot better and a lot cheaper.’

  There was nothing Simon liked more than giving his female staff a ‘damn good bollocking’, as he called it. He got such a buzz from it he’d sometimes hunt them down in a corridor and harangue them at close quarters, standing with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his head forward, like a primate about to fight over a choice melon.

  He preferred to deal with the men by email.

  Dee had sat on the low sofa, looking troubled. He had peered up her skirt. She had seen him do it and slammed her legs together.

  Dee had taken her beating, stood up and apologized. Said it wouldn’t happen again and headed back to her warm flat. She sat in the back of the car on the way home, thinking of what she’d eat for lunch.

  On a whim, she redirected the driver to her boyfriend’s home in Islington. To cheer herself up, she’d go to Franco’s Ristorante with him, drink a bottle or two of Rioja, have a huge plate of cuttlefish in its own ink with polenta, and crash out in front of some trashy movie after a nice drunken romp on the sofa.

  She arrived to find him in bed with her hairdresser. Her male hairdresser – the only one she had ever found who could make her thin hair look thick and healthy.

  She stood at the door as they scrambled for clothes. She was tired. She couldn’t think of any articulate words that would adequately convey her feelings. ‘Fuck off,’ she said, as her now ex-boyfriend tried to explain.

  With tears coursing down her cheeks, she left. No more hairdresser. No more boyfriend. And an awful worry that maybe she should visit the STD clinic to check whether he had left her with any little presents. It would not be her first attendance. Her ex-husband had donated a number of lifetime gifts after playing the field during the last months of their marriage. ‘Well,’ he had said, as if right was entirely on his side, ‘you were never around when I needed you. What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘Abstain. Like me,’ she had suggested, blowing her nose on a wet tissue as she had packed the few possessions she cared about.

  But to discover that the moron she had been dating since her divorce was not only playing the field but playing over a couple of other acres was too much.

  What a fool. Would she ever learn? Why was she the one it always happened to? How come none of her mates had noticed he was gay? How come the queen of gaydar, Katie, hadn’t spotted it?

  She lay on the pink sofa in her flat, unable to cry any more.

  She had a headache from crying. Her nose ached from crying. Even her toes seemed waterlogged.

  She couldn’t think of a single thing that might have alerted her to the dreadful fact that she had been competing with the whole of the human race for the affections of a man who was probably, right now, coming out of the back of her hairdresser.

  She watched the television through tear-soaked eyes and wondered if it hurt to die of painkillers – or if that was an oxymoron. Or just ironic.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Keera was beyond excited. She had been asked by GQ to pose naked with a panther for their section on ‘The Ones to Watch’.

  It wasn’t a complete surprise – her publicist had been phoning all the magazines every week to get her something.

  When Keera had hired him, she had said she wanted publicity at any cost. He had taken her at her word. She had said she did not want ‘the usual stuff’ – soft interviews of her at home – she wanted something that would make people sit up and take notice.

  It hadn’t been difficult to sell her the idea of a nude shoot, although he had been nervous initially. ‘After all,’ he had said, ‘you do so much exercise that it’s a shame to waste the result under clothes. And it would be very tasteful. They were desperate to get you. You’d be one of ten people they say are going places.’

  ‘Excellent,’ responded Keera, a gleam in her eye. Her only anxiety was whether they’d get it past the press office.

  ‘Well, I was hoping you’d help out on that front,’ said Daniel. And he had left it to her.

  God knows how she’d managed it when one of the other presenters had been virtually put on rations for doing a photo shoot in which she had featured wearing nothing but paperclips for a recycling campaign.

  Keera’s strategy had been simple. She had gone straight to the top. She had avoided the press office, on the basis that the man in charge didn’t like her very much, and was gay, so her wiles would be wasted. She had knocked on The Boss’s door and sprawled alluringly on his black sofa, allowing him a glimpse of her lace lingerie. She had given him a whisper of more to come. So much more. After ten minutes he had caved in.

  It had taken her hours to get the outfit right. Nothing too obviously tarty … don’t want to frighten the pants off him. She giggled at the thought. She did find him strangely attractive – but with no pants on?

  She didn’t want anything too girly. She wanted him to know she meant business.

  In the end she had chosen a tightly fitting black suit with a low round neck and a thin pink stripe, from a new designer she had spotted at Selfridges. Sounded French, looked French, but actually American and lower cut at the front. Just where it needed it. She had hesitated over the stockings, then decided on hold-ups. If he caught sight of them – if? – it wouldn’t look as if she was trying too hard.

  Finally, the high-heeled Charles Jourdan court shoes with an ankle strap. It had taken her almost as much time to put on her makeup. Less is more, she thought, as she expertly applied base and powder. A touch of mascara and pink lip-gloss, and she was ready. Her hair, specially blow-dried for the event, framed her face with its soft, black shininess.

  With one last glance in
the mirror, Keera set off for the twelve o’clock appointment. Friday was always the best day to see anyone who worked in breakfast TV. No programme on Saturday – people could let their hair down. The Boss was guaranteed sober if caught before lunch. Too late in the day and he’d be under a table, if not under a woman. He’d once been found with a fifty year-old Russian countess in a broom cupboard at the Savoy Hotel after a particularly late lunch. It had been hushed up but, like most things in the media world, the news had leaked out. No journalist could resist a juicy piece of gossip like that.

  Laughing coquettishly and doing a Princess Diana-type peep up through her lashes, Keera had asked The Boss if he could limit the number of people he told to the bare essentials. She thought, as he laughed too, that she had made some sort of joke about being naked. She could have hugged herself. ‘I’m on my way. I do know where I’m going,’ she hummed, as she left the building.

  To tell Mike – or not to tell Mike? He was a bit of a prude and would probably be mildly – if not hugely – horrified. However, if she didn’t keep him in the loop he was likely to be severely miffed and do that horrible thing he used to do to Katie when he was in one of his pre-menstrual moods: he had turned his back on her when he was interviewing someone on the sofa, not responded to comments and – the only thing Keera was scared of – made witty comments she didn’t entirely understand.

  On the other hand, she knew the viewers were on her side. They liked her natural girl-next-door approach. Never mind that someone had described her within earshot as a lobster short of a seafood platter. They’d got rid of Katie because she was too sharp. Unpleasantly so. She tried to think of a simile. As sharp as – a lemon?. No, she was partial to lemons.

  As sharp as a shark! she thought triumphantly. If she, Keera, was like a lobster, then Katie was a nasty old shark. A nasty old dead-in-the-water shark. Yes, the lobster was taking over the aquarium. Although, now she came to think of it, sh e wasn’t sure she wanted to be a lobster. But, then, was there anything pretty in the sea?