The Wish List

by Jane Costello

  ‘I know,’ I concede. ‘And I’m not saying I feel a burning desire to do all of those things specifically. It’s more what they represent.’

  They’re all too tired or too tipsy to respond. And I know when to shut up. So I simply stare at my phone screen and register that the date is Saturday 30 June. There are less than six months until I turn thirty.

  And I wonder if anything will have changed by then at all.

  Chapter 5

  There are some jobs for which the Monday-morning blues are perfectly acceptable. If I was employed at a call centre, for example, facing a hard day of interrupting Jeremy Kyle viewers to ask them to review their broadband package. Or if I worked in IT and had eight hours of hard toil ahead, suggesting that callers switch off their computer, then on again.

  Anyone would understand if you were a bit on the grumpy side then.

  But mine isn’t that sort of job. My job requires a disposition that never deviates from happy-pill cheeriness and that’s the case whether your house has burned down, your car has been clamped or your cat has vomited in your new shoes.

  I walk along Rodney Street with a warm morning breeze in my hair until I reach the door of Little Blue Bus Productions. It doesn’t look bad from outside. If you didn’t know any better, you might be quite impressed. Rodney Street is one of the grandest roads in Liverpool, home to businesses ranging from financial planning institutions to upmarket cosmetic surgery clinics.

  Even when you open the distinctive dark-blue door into reception, you’d be forgiven for thinking this place was kind of swish. They’ve got an Illy coffee maker. A Conran sofa. Abstract-looking canvases on the walls – stills from the show that made its name.

  It’s only when I’ve said hi to Carolyn, the receptionist, and reached the room I call my office, four flights up, that things take a turn for the worse.

  The once-plush carpet is now held together with bits of gungy masking tape. There is mouldy coffee in cups abandoned over the weekend, a damp patch on the ceiling and a creaky stationery cupboard that nobody opens for fear of being flattened by a mountain of unfiled paper.

  This room was once lovely, bright, conducive to creative thought. Now, like the business itself, it shows all the signs of neglect and chaos.

  ‘You will not believe what that interminable tosser has done to my storyline.’ My colleague Giles is staring with characteristic fury at his computer screen and I’m convinced he’s trying to blow it up through the power of thought alone.

  Despite being otherwise brilliant at his job, Giles has some way to go before he masters that disposition I mentioned. I like to think of him as misunderstood largely because I genuinely like him – and the alternative is to think of him as the grumpiest bastard on the planet.

  ‘I had a lovely weekend, thank you,’ I say, smiling as I sit at my desk.

  Giles looks up. ‘Oh . . . uh . . . sorry, Em. Bad morning.’ He scratches his chin sheepishly and I notice he’s growing a beard again, as if he wasn’t hirsute enough. I saw his chest once when he got his jumper caught in the photocopier and he’s like a woolly mammoth.

  Apart from that – and his ubiquitous heavy-metal T-shirts – Giles isn’t bad-looking. I’ve seen women eye him up on the odd occasion, though that inevitably stops as soon as he opens his mouth. Because, while I know that Giles is a pussycat, he has a terrible tendency to give the wrong impression.

  It’s his favoured method of communication – grunting – that does it. In Giles’s world, the grunt is still as à la mode as it was in the days when men dragged their knuckles on the ground. It also doesn’t help that ninety per cent of what he says is about how shit work is, how screwed up the world is and how stupid his colleagues are.

  ‘You know I don’t mean you, don’t you, Em?’ he said to me once. ‘Nor Denise in accounts – she’s lovely. And the blokes in studio are sound. Apart from that, they’re all unremitting wankers.’

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘did you take my advice and go to that bar in Edinburgh I recommended?’

  ‘Thanks, but it didn’t look like my kind of place. We stuck to white wine and Cosmopolitans in the Hotel Missoni.’

  He looks appalled. ‘You’re not into that poncey crap these days, are you? You were drinking bitter at the Christmas party.’

  ‘I had half a pint, Giles, and only because you persuaded me to try it.’

  ‘You persuaded me to do karaoke. I’ll never forgive you for that.’

  ‘I barely had to ask twice.’

  ‘Bollocks. And switching the song to “Hey Frankie” by Sister Sledge was unforgivable. I was expecting a classic.’

  ‘“It’s Raining Men” by the Weather Girls?’

  He grunts.

  ‘So what happened to your script?’ I ask.

  His face turns a shade somewhere between red and green, before he necks his coffee – it’s gone eight thirty so it’ll be at least his fifth – and says, ‘It’s been butchered. I’m incandescent. I won’t rest until I’ve ripped someone’s head off.’

  ‘You’re taking it well, then?’

  Of course, by the time Giles’s script actually appears on screen, our viewers won’t have any clue about the blood, sweat and politics that go on behind the scenes. Not least because all they’ll see is a highly edited, beautifully produced, tightly scripted piece of film-making.

  And because the average age of our viewers is three.

  Little Blue Bus Productions is a highly successful children’s programming company, responsible for what was once – only a few years ago – the UK’s number one pre-school kids’ show.

  The appeal of Bingbah is simple. It’s gentle enough for parents to approve of, and weird enough for kids to love. There have been comparisons with Teletubbies and In the Night Garden, yet its creator – Perry Ryder Senior – came up with the concept long before Iggle Piggle picked up his red blanket.

  He’d been writing and producing successful, nay legendary, children’s television since the 1970s, and, although the other shows exist solely in the archives these days, Bingbah continues.

  The stars of the show are the three Bingbahs: friendly, overgrown kitten-type creatures with big eyes, sing-song voices and a penchant for marshmallows, which – in the land of Bibblybobbly (where they live) – conveniently grow on trees. They are gentle souls, whose adventures in each episode usually involve fending off the evil squirrels who want to spice up their diet of nuts by stealing the marshmallows.

  I have been writing this stuff for eight years now. Don’t ask me how. All I know is, it comes naturally, not because I have any great understanding of children – from whom I generally try to stay as far away as possible – but because . . . God, I just don’t know.

  By ten o’clock, the office is a hive of activity. Raj, our producer, is downing Natracalm like Smarties – but still looks like his head is about to explode when he glances at the pile of schedules on his desk. Jo, the assistant producer, is firing instructions to James, an animator, who’s scribbling as if the end of his pen is on fire; Harry, our editor, is splicing together scenes; Jill, the administrator, is dishing out mail, and everyone is more creatively fired-up (and frantic) than you’d think possible for a Monday morning. The only exception is Jez, the music producer, who doesn’t do frantic – even when Raj pushes his feet off the desk, grabs him by the shoulders and screams: ‘Don’t you understand the word deadline?’

  They’re a brilliant team, one I’m proud to be a part of. Which makes the fact that success doesn’t come as easily to us as it once did a fairly bitter pill to swallow. There’s little doubt in people’s minds about who is the reason for that.

  ‘You’re back!’ My boss, the venerable chief executive officer, proprietor and son of the genius that was Perry Ryder Senior, storms over to my desk.

  Perry Junior is the only member of staff not wearing jeans and a T-shirt, which makes him an anomaly in our industry. Though Perry would be an anomaly in any industry. Today, he is suited and booted in a Sherlock Hol
mesian three-piece, his shock of curly hair even wilder than last week.

  ‘How’s our world traveller?’ he booms. The gap in Perry’s front teeth sometimes looks wide enough to drive a four-by-four through. ‘Have fun in Wales?’

  ‘It was Scotla—’

  ‘I had a cracking holiday in Portmeirion when I was your age. I’ll never forget sitting overlooking the sea with a large Piña Colada in my hand. Mind you, anywhere’d look good after a couple of those!’

  Perry perches on the edge of the desk and crosses his arms tightly, swaying back and forth hyperactively. He seems to have been forever perched on this desk since Sarah McIntyre, the creative director, left three months ago. Sarah, who was my immediate boss, kept us sane – she seemed to be the only person capable of protecting us from Perry’s insanity.

  When she left to emigrate to Australia with her husband, we all hoped whoever was appointed as her successor would be as good. Which made one big assumption: that there would be a successor. So far, Perry hasn’t got round to advertising, deciding to hold the fort himself so he can indulge in some ‘hands-on’ creative work with Giles and me. You can imagine how well that went down.

  ‘So. Are we both fired up to our creative bests this Monday morning?’ Perry’s face is round, waxy, permanently cheerful and resembles one of those potato Smiley Faces you get in the freezer sections of supermarkets.

  ‘I’m not doing badly,’ I say brightly, to deflect attention from Giles, who’s staring at Perry as if he’s flown in on a spaceship direct from the Planet Arsehole.

  ‘That’s what I like to hear. I want to talk to you when you’ve got a min, Emma. I’ll get Carolyn to bring us both a nice cuppa char and we’ll have a good old brainstorm, eh?’ He winks, before bouncing out of the door.

  ‘If he tries to get me to work on one of his shit ideas, I’ll have something to say about it,’ mutters Giles as the door closes.

  ‘He hasn’t said anything yet.’

  ‘Yeah, but you know what he’s going to try to make you do, don’t you?’

  Sadly, the answer is: yes, I probably do.

  The big problem with having a history that boasts some of the UK’s most successful children’s programmes is finding ways to follow them. And, frankly, we haven’t. Little Blue Bus Productions – to the disbelief of the industry – has failed abysmally to capitalise on the success of Bingbah and produce our Next Big Thing, despite Perry’s perennial attempts at rooting it out since his father retired five years ago.

  The team – not least Giles and I – have come up with a million ideas. But Perry doesn’t want to produce a TV programme from one of our ideas. He wants to come up with the idea all by himself.

  Which I can partly understand, given that his dad is considered to be one of the world’s most inspirational children’s writers, a man lauded globally for his ingenuity, talent and ability to tap into young minds.

  The problem is, every one of Perry’s ideas is worthy of only one description – a word favoured by Giles but so perfectly suitable in this context I can’t bring myself to use anything else: shite.

  ‘I’ve come up with a humdinger overnight,’ Perry tells me. ‘And I want you to work on it!’

  ‘Oh . . . great!’

  ‘You’re going to love this, Emma. This is going to make your career. Sit down. Go on – I’ll clear a space.’

  He pushes a compost heap of paperwork onto the floor and pats the chair enthusiastically.

  ‘Here’s the pitch.’ He claps his hands as I sit down. ‘We’ve got a mouse. A damn clever mouse. He’s the main character.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He’s got friends too – I don’t know, a duck . . . and a dog, hell, maybe we’ll even throw in a mouse girlfriend. We’ll work on that bit. So this mouse, our hero – he can talk and dance and has crrraaazy adventures with his pals.’

  I sigh. ‘Does he have red shorts and yellow shoes, perhaps?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘And a squeaky voice?’

  ‘Great minds!’

  I put down my pen and paper and look at Perry. Really look at him. As if to plead with him to recognise the problem with this idea before I have to spell it out. He gazes at me like an eager puppy waiting for a pat on the head.

  ‘You’re not worried that people might think our mouse is a bit similar to . . . Mickey Mouse?’

  His face drops. ‘Hmm. There are some potential areas of crossover there, aren’t there?’

  Chapter 6

  In the absence of an opportunity to purchase a cottage in Rutshire – with wisteria round the door, a millionaire neighbour and an adorable Labrador to lick my cheeks when I come home – I rent a flat in south Liverpool instead.

  I was ludicrously house-proud too, until I was reminded by that list of what the alternative was. Still, it’s not bad. In fact, it’s not bad at all.

  I live in Grassendale Park, which sits in isolated splendour on the banks of the River Mersey and consists of a cluster of tree-lined avenues, a grand esplanade and some jaw-droppingly elegant nineteenth-century mansions. The place is overflowing with charm and grace, which, obviously, is me all over (ahem).

  I never dreamed I’d be able to live somewhere like this. I’d look at these houses in the property section of the local paper and the experience was nothing less than pornographic. I’d be flushed at the decorative coving, frothing over at the original features, groaning with pleasure at the prominent positions within mature landscaped gardens.

  My neighbours are a mixed bunch. Next door, in the seven-bedroomed stucco building, is Charles Cavendish QC, a barrister, and his (fifth) wife Stacey. Directly opposite is Vlady Simeonova, a Bulgarian striker who plays for Liverpool FC and owns more flashy cars than I own matching lingerie.

  My building is an elegant Victorian villa with a buttermilk exterior and a coach house in the grounds. It’s been converted into five apartments, ranging from the gorgeous four-bed penthouse with huge bay windows and dark wood floors – to the teeny, tiny, minuscule one-bedroom broom cupboard on the ground floor.

  That one would be mine.

  It’s fair to say that when I moved into the flat two years ago I fell in love with the area and the house as a whole, rather than being bowled over by any generosity of floor space.

  Despite the size, though, the apartment is lovely – recently refurbished, with a wood-burning stove in the living room and a trendy fitted kitchen. Courtesy of my addiction to interiors magazines, I’ve put as much of my own stamp on it as I’m allowed to – playing at being the interior designer I was desperate to become when I was a teenager.

  I’ve almost got used to the fact that I have to turn sideways to squeeze into my bathroom, that I bang my head on the sloping ceiling in my bedroom and that it’s the only apartment in the building that doesn’t have a window overlooking the communal gardens.

  Instead, my kitchen overlooks the house next door – the bottom floor of which was the home of Rita Harvey-Esteves, a former dancer and actress who appeared in a string of television dramas of the 1970s and who refused to let the fact that she had reached the autumn of her years ruin her fun. Friday afternoon wasn’t Friday afternoon if I didn’t bump into her with a glass of champagne in one hand and a young man in the other. She died of lung cancer in February after a six-month battle, the irony being that smoking was the one vice in which she never indulged.

  I loved Rita and I still miss her. Whenever I look out of that window, I still expect to see her there, teetering down the road in last night’s clothes or assuring the postman that there must be a mistake whenever he tried to deliver promotional material from Saga.

  Tonight, my car crunches up the gravel driveway and I step out with the shopping I picked up on the way home in preparation for Cally coming for dinner with Zachary. It’s long overdue, and is something I’ve been putting off while I looked into ways of bomb-proofing my flat so that it would be able to withstand the force of this particular two-year-old.

&
nbsp; ‘Emma! Pssst!’

  I know this is Stacey before I even turn to face her because she always addresses me with a ‘pssst’. The first time she did this, I spun round expecting to be confronted by Inspector Gadget.

  ‘Hi, there, how are you?’ I say. Stacey looks as though she’s in her mid-forties, but I suspect you could throw a few years on top in reality. She has gleaming red hair, freckled, dewy skin and Madonna-esque arms.

  ‘I haven’t stopped today,’ she sighs. ‘It’s been all go.’

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Gym. Lunch. Hair. Nails. Scrutinising the Dow Jones index for potential investments. Ha – joking!’ She barely pauses for breath. ‘Anyway, they’ve found a buyer for Rita’s place.’

  ‘Really?’ I suddenly feel a bit sad. ‘It doesn’t feel right without her around any more, does it?’

  Stacey screws up her face. ‘Not to speak ill of the dead, but Charles thought she lowered the tone.’

  I tut spontaneously.

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, he liked her,’ she leaps in. ‘We all did. But you know what I mean. There comes a time when every woman needs to give up topless sunbathing.’

  ‘Well, I thought she was fantastic and funny and I miss her.’

  ‘Oh yes, me too,’ she says hastily. ‘But it’s good that the apartment isn’t going to be left empty, don’t you think?’

  ‘Of course. When are they moving in?’

  ‘Very soon, I gather. And . . . it’s a man.’ The second part of the sentence is loaded with implication, as if this man creature is a strange and mysterious phenomenon, to be subjected to serious in-depth anthropological research.

  ‘A man,’ I repeat.

  She purses her lips mischievously, her pupils dilating wildly. ‘Mmm-hmm. And he’s good-looking, apparently. Marjory on the second floor saw him with the estate agent. She said he’s very, very handsome.’

  I put my key in the door. ‘Stacey, Marjory thinks Cliff Richard is a great big stud.’

  ‘True. I just thought, seeing as you are single these days, there might be some . . . po-ten-tial.’