Coming Up Next

by Penny Smith

  ‘I’ll check with the chef, but I’m almost sure we could do that. A week this Saturday?’

  ‘This Friday. I’m going down on Thursday to get the layout and see what’s up. Actually, I’m suddenly feeling nervous.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. As long as you stay sober.’

  ‘Mum,’ said Katie, annoyed, ‘I’m not permanently plastered. It was a phase I was going through because I didn’t have a job. Let’s not argue. Can you just check with Dad and try to come down? I know it’s a schlep, but you could take the train to London and come with me in my car.’

  ‘Have you bought one?’

  ‘No. I’d have told you if I had. The car they send for me. It’ll be a nice one. Dad can talk torque with the driver, while we open bottles of champagne in the back.’

  ‘Katie!’ said her mother, scandalized.

  ‘I was joking,’ said Katie, with a smile.

  There was a gap, while they both responded to a shout from the kitchen.

  ‘It’s curdled, apparently,’ said her mother.

  ‘You don’t want that on a Tuesday, do you? Erm … have you seen anything of Bob?’

  ‘Funnily enough, yes. Your dad saw him at the pub last night with Harry. They’d been away for the weekend somewhere in Ireland.’

  ‘How did he seem?’ asked Katie, mentally kicking herself for asking the question.

  ‘Same as usual. He’s a lovely man,’ said her mother, deliberately.

  ‘I know. And I can hear the criticism implied in that statement, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, do stop taking a huff. But he is. He looked the same as he always does. He was wearing a blue shirt, if that helps. And he told me to come round and paint whenever I wanted. So I assume he’s not holding a grudge.’

  ‘Good,’ said Katie, deciding that it literally hurt to talk about him. Or maybe she had indigestion.

  ‘I’ll talk to your father about that Saturday…’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Friday. I’ve written it down. Is Ben coming too?’

  ‘I haven’t asked him yet, but I will. And I’m going to see if Dee can make it. You’ll be a select group. Witnessing what may be my final ever appearance on British television.’

  ‘Oh, stop it. It’s like riding a bike. You’ll be fine. Oh dear. Hercules has licked the steak. That dog. We should swap him for a hamster.’

  ‘Remember what happened to the hamster…’

  ‘Who would have thought it could make such a mess of the skirting-board, eh?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve just had a thought. If you come with me on Thursday, you’ll have to overnight in Dorset. But whatever, I could definitely sort you a car. For free,’ she hastened to add, knowing how careful her parents were on the money front. ‘So it’s up to you. ‘Bye, Mum. Say ‘bye to Dad for me. Hope dinner hasn’t been ruined.’

  Katie went out to the King’s Road, sat in her favourite café with a slice of pecan pie and a pot of tea, and texted all her friends.

  Dee was the first to phone back. ‘Well done. Such good news. I’m so jealous. There’s part of me that’s so jealous I can barely speak. But bloody well done. And one in the eye to Hello Britain! Can I come and watch it go out?’

  ‘I was going to ask you. Do you fancy it?’

  ‘Is your brother coming down?’

  ‘I’m about to ring him. Why?’

  ‘Can he bring that nice proctologist down?’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Katie.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Dee. ‘I did think he was rather, rather…’

  ‘So you did get it together that night at the comedy place?’

  ‘No, we didn’t get it together, as you so horribly put it. But we did have a moment. And I thought I might help the moment along. If possible. And you said he was single – and so am I, now that William Baron has been taken by that piece of work.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have wanted him. I watched him on the lifestyle strand. If he was chocolate, he’d eat himself. He and Keera are well suited. They can either get lost in their own vacuous thoughts or stare into each other’s eyes and admire their reflections.’

  ‘Changing the topic slightly. I hesitate to ask. But … Bob?’

  ‘Nothing. I assume it’s over. I know it was my fault. But it wasn’t totally my fault, I don’t think. I know I should have told him earlier, but we were having such a good time and I didn’t want to ruin it with a “discussion”. It wasn’t as though I’d shagged the other man. It’s not the first time anyone’s been caught out doing something they shouldn’t after a few drinks, is it? And I bet he’s done worse.’

  ‘Men do tend to take the high ground on that, though.’

  ‘Yeah. As I say, like they’re all angels.’

  ‘Anyway … you could always text him about the show.’

  ‘And say what? “I know you think I’m an unreliable drunken slapper … Come to Dorset”?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m sure you could think of some way of putting it where it sounded all right. Sort of placatory and…’

  ‘Come-hitherish?’

  ‘Yes. Placatory and come-hitherish.’

  ‘At this instant, I cannot imagine any combination of words that would conjure that up. If they do occur to me, then maybe. If Ben could speak to him … But he says he wants nothing to do with it.’ She pulled out an eyelash, stuck it on the side of the table and admired its length.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Dee. ‘Ask Ben if he can bring Oliver, and maybe we can all go together.’

  ‘OK. ‘Bye.’

  While she had been talking, the phone had beeped in a flotilla of nice texts. Mike had sent her one. There may have been a whiff of miff behind it – but that was the way with all presenters. Even if they were happy about someone getting a new job, there was always an element of ‘It should have been me.’ But, for now, Katie basked in the warmth of her return to the spotlight.

  When Katie met Adam, it was lust at first sight. She was bang on time, which earned her major Brownie points, and was wearing a long black fitted dress, flat silver sandals, and a little grey cardigan. Her long auburn hair was newly washed, and she had put on just enough makeup to look as if she wasn’t wearing any.

  He wasn’t to know that inside she was full of trepidation. She was wearing the black dress because it was the only thing that would stretch to fit her new ample curves. She couldn’t believe how much weight you could put on if you mostly wore tracksuit bottoms and mostly ate out of tins.

  But as she smiled at him and shook his hand, Adam only noticed that she oozed sex appeal, and decided he would definitely be very hands-on with this project. He offered her a cup of coffee, and left her in his office while he went to gather the relevant troops.

  When they were assembled, and introductions had been made, he sketched in the outline of the show. ‘It’s one hour – so forty-seven minutes’ actual time. Eight shows, as I think you know, going out from, erm, well, to be honest, Nick’s house.’

  Nick nodded at her. ‘One of my many spare homes,’ he joked.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam went on ‘We’ve got an OB shed in the garden, and a lighting rig that will go up on Thursdays. It would be helpful if you could be there that evening, so we can check that it’s all OK?’ He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘No problem,’ said Katie, green eyes gazing straight at him.

  ‘There’ll be four cameras. Three in the “studio”, as it were, one of which is roaming. I’m assuming you like open talkback?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Never knew a breakfast-telly presenter who didn’t. We’ll be doing a tease some time between eight and ten p.m., then we’re on air at eleven. Any questions so far?’

  ‘Yes. Will there be any audience?’

  ‘We weren’t planning on it. Why?’

  ‘Oh, just friends and family threatening to make an appearance.’

  Adam looked at Nick enquiringly.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was a problem,’ said Nick. ‘It might be quite nice to have
an occasional camera pan past a collection of people. À la Big Breakfast when it started. We could try it on the first show, and continue it if we like the look of it.’

  He wrote it down on his notepad.

  ‘As for the guests, well, Gemma can take you through those who are confirmed. We’re going to do a maximum of five pages research per guest. We want it to be loose chat, rather than going over the old stuff. So the research will be there for backup more than anything else. How does that sound?’

  ‘Fab.’

  ‘And I’m sure every chat-show worth its salt tries to avoid the plugging element, but we’re going to do it as obliquely as possible. Oh, and we’re also going to have a couple of VTs, which are really short – say, two minutes max – which are going to be about anything from a man with a strange job, such as – Rose?’

  ‘Such as a bloke who trims badger hair for shaving brushes.’

  ‘Right. So from the man or woman with a strange job to the quickest way to put a duvet cover on.’

  ‘There can’t be that many options, can there?’ asked Katie, aghast. ‘Don’t you open buttons, shove it in, and shake hard?’

  ‘You’d have thought so,’ replied Adam, mock serious, ‘but you’d be wrong. Anyway, during the VT we’d get one guest off and another one in so that we go into each break promising more of the guest you’ve been talking to and teasing up the next one.’

  Katie was in her element. She nodded, commented, flirted and charmed everyone. None more so than Nick, who generally went for very slim girls but was suddenly as keen as Adam to get very involved with this project.

  As the meeting concluded, Adam asked her a final time if she had any more questions. ‘Yes. I was wondering – that is, if it hasn’t been organized already – if I could have any input on the guests. It’s just that I’d quite like to get Mike in, at some stage. Mike Dyson, from Hello Britain! He’s been very supportive, and I know he’s got a new show starting.’

  When she hadn’t got the job co-hosting the new show with him, she’d felt as if she’d been hit with a pillowcase full of bricks. But now she could afford to be generous. He’d tried to get her the gig and he’d been locked in meetings with the bosses at Hello Britain! to try to stop them sacking her. She’d like to repay the favour by having him on her new show.

  Nick, who was now convinced that she was flirting only with him, and would have granted her first dibs on his prized collection of Dinky toys, was hardly going to deny her this. ‘You know,’ he said, pondering, ‘I rather like the idea of having him on the first programme. You can have a go at your former employer … if you want to, obviously. And he can defend it. Make for a spirited interview. What do you think, Adam?’

  Hours later, as Katie was heading to a wine bar for a drink with Andi, Mike’s alleged mate at the Vice Squad was putting together a collection of people to be investigated during a clamp-down on prostitution in an area of north London that was becoming known for its abuse of illegal immigrants. A number of Chinese and Nepali girls had recently been freed from a brothel. And a number of high-profile people appeared to have visited the area. The detective had had no response to repeated requests for a meeting with Keera. He resigned himself to the fact that Mike no longer thought he was important. His cursor was blinking … he did a right-hand click on the mouse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The day before the first programme, Katie headed down to Dorset. That morning, the mail had contained an official-looking envelope. She’d opened it after bracing herself with a strong cup of tea and a prayer to the goddess of small things. A letter from the Crown Prosecution Service saying that she would not be facing a court appearance. Skipping round the kitchen, she sent a text to everyone on her phone, including (accidentally) the woman who waxed her legs and a hotel in Paris.

  Katie was excited and scared in equal measure, with a dash of indigestion and a soupçon of desperation for a bracing snifter of whisky.

  Do something that frightens you every day, she thought. Was that something she had seen on an advert? Or a poem. That would make her sound more intelligent. She wouldn’t mention it to anyone today just in case it was a naff ad. And how could you keep finding things to frighten you every day? Surely there would come a point when you were too exhausted from being scared to be scared any more. It must have been an advert. No one sensible would tell you to be scared every day. It was too horrible to contemplate. Even a week of it – and not counting hideous things like facing a gang with flick-knives and guns. First day, sky-diving without lipstick. Second day, potholing in a lemon boiler suit. Third day, wrestling a grizzly bear immediately after a manicure. Fourth day … would have to be walking over Niagara Falls on a tightrope in your favourite Gina shoes. Fifth day? Going to the bottom of the Philippine Trench in a submarine without access to a mobile phone. Sixth day … base jumping off the Empire State Building with mismatched earrings. Sunday, live television before you’ve lost weight.

  ‘Could you turn up the radio a bit, please?’ she asked the driver. Anything to stop her brain running round in her skull, trying to upset her equilibrium. Equi-librium. Isn’t Librium what you take when you’re schizophrenic? Oh, no, that’s lithium. Oh no. Don’t tell me my brain’s going to do this tomorrow. Please don’t, she begged it. But her brain was on the Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It was refusing to stop even though she wanted to get off. It swooped round the corner and plunged down into a rambling concatenation that made her so hot and dizzy she had to ask the driver to pull into a service station so that she could have a walkabout.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, as she got back into the car. ‘Ridiculous at my age to still be getting car sick. Can I sit in the front, please?’

  For the rest of the trip she talked to the driver about his history degree and whether history could ever be entirely accurate, what with one person’s truth being inconsistent with another’s.

  Nick and Adam were at the house to greet her. They were being uncharacteristically quiet on the subject of Katie Fisher. Nick had expressed an interest in rather crude terms. Adam had felt a resentful surge of jealousy – stupid when he considered that his relationship with Naomi was fresh in its grave.

  They had confined themselves to a conversation about the colours she should wear that would go best with the set, and the last-minute technical stuff. It looked a bit of a mess at the moment, with cables all over the shop, and men with tool-belts, but they had been assured it would be fine for the run-through, scheduled for six o’clock.

  Katie uncurled herself from her snail-like position in the front of the car and smiled up at Adam as he came forward.

  Nick scowled slightly.

  ‘Problems?’ enquired Katie.

  ‘No,’ said Nick, shaking his head.

  ‘Oh … I thought – but – so – erm, everything ready?’

  ‘We’re on schedule,’ said Adam, leading the way into the building. ‘Welcome to Nick’s home.’

  ‘Hey, I can do my own introductions,’ laughed Nick. ‘Mind your feet, there are cables everywhere. This is where you’re going to be doing the best late-night show on television,’ he said, with a flourish, as he opened the door to the sitting room.

  It was beautiful. A vast white and bleached-wood space, with double doors to one side, and french windows on to a sweeping lawn on the other.

  ‘My goodness. Did you win the lottery?’ exclaimed Katie.

  Nick smiled smugly. ‘I was lucky with the property market. Flukily bought and sold homes at the right time. The rest of it was down to a lot of hard work. Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Katie, gravely, walking over to the hessian-coloured suede sofa. She could never resist a furry fabric. She bent over to stroke it – and two sets of eyes flew to her peachy bottom.

  Adam was thinking of a DVD he had watched recently.

  Nick was thinking thoughts that would have done an eleven-year-old boy proud.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Katie, turning – and echoing their though
ts.

  ‘You’d be sitting there,’ Nick pointed, ‘with your guests on your right. They would be waiting over there in our “green room"’ – he waved at the double doors. ‘It’s a sort of den/snug area, call it what you will. It means they can talk and chink glasses, et cetera, without being heard too much. Hopefully they won’t be heard at all, but even if something does filter through it shouldn’t be a problem. Now. Your friends and family. We were thinking they could park themselves around here,’ he said, gesturing towards a small collection of chairs and a table in front of an enormous painting of an ant’s head.

  ‘We could reconfigure it, of course,’ added Adam, walking over to the table, ‘so that the chairs are more angled towards you. And there are some fluffy lambskin carpets upstairs that we could drag down for the more limber to sit on – and to muffle the sound of scraping chairs. We were maybe thinking that if we need them to, they could be doing something like playing cards or whatever so that they’re not just staring into the camera. Or at you. Or whatever.’

  ‘You mean, like they’re really uninterested in what’s going on?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Hmm. Sends the wrong signal, you think? We were a bit tired when we came up with that. We’ll work on it. Maybe have one of them bring you a cup of tea as we go into the break. And as we come out of the break, taking the cup and saucer away. You do have a cup and saucer, not just a mug rack, Nick?’

  ‘Mug rack,’ said Nick, scathingly. ‘You’re so eighties. Yes, as it happens, I have some bone-china cups and saucers which my mother bought me for my first wedding.’

  ‘How many others have there been?’ asked Katie, interestedly.

  ‘I don’t know why I said first. I meant my only wedding. Once wedded.’ Then he added quickly, ‘And once de-wedded. And nothing serious since.’

  Adam looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Anyway, the point is,’ Nick said, ‘that we can have them featured or not. It’ll also depend on whether they want to be in shot, of course.’

  ‘I’ll tell my dad to wear his pink dress, then,’ said Katie.

  ‘If he wants to be seen in shot,’ Adam reiterated.