A Game for All the Family

by Sophie Hannah

  Justine Merrison was pessimistic, to put it mildly. But Donna Lodge was her boss and she couldn’t think what to do. Most people who had fallen out with Donna had not subsequently fared well in the TV industry, and Justine suspected this was no coincidence. She didn’t want to have to leave her job, and couldn’t think of a way to discuss her unhappiness with Donna that wouldn’t involve screaming at her to stop being such an imbecile.

  Ben Lourenco was the first good idea Donna Lodge had produced for a long time, so Justine said yes, hoping this might be the beginning of Donna coming to her senses. The lead role in the drama-free drama was duly offered to Ben and he accepted it, though he humbly asked if he could have some creative involvement in the idea’s evolution. ‘Of course!’ Donna gushed.

  Justine was astonished when Ben voiced her concerns, almost word for word. ‘We need a stronger hook, I think,’ he said. ‘I mean, we’ve got six hours of drama to fill. I think my character’s potentially interesting, but something needs to be driving him. I mean, ideally we’d have a strong story of the week and an overarching narrative as well.’

  ‘What a fantastic idea, Ben,’ said Donna, to Justine’s astonishment.

  Justine cleared her throat and said, ‘You mean like …’ and then she described her and Donna’s original idea, the high-concept drama, as if it were entirely new and had only just occurred to her.

  ‘Yesss!’ said Ben. ‘That’s wonderful. Exactly that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, let’s go with that, then,’ said a radiant Donna. ‘Justine and I were thinking of something along those lines at first, but we worried it was too high risk. But actually, we should pitch what we’re passionate about, not what we think they want, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Ben.

  ‘Right,’ said Justine.

  And in a flash, everything was back on track. Justine hated Donna more than ever, but in a way she knew she would enjoy and make a fun hobby out of, not in a seriously problematic, miserable way. The main thing was that the show was back on – the proper show, in its ideal form. Or, rather, the pitch was back on. Who can tell what the channel controllers will say yes to?

  As it turned out, the pitch never made it to the inbox of the head honcho of any channel. Why? Because of Freddii Bausor. Or, it might be more accurate to say, because of Freddii Bausor’s enemy, the woman who used to be the wife of Fred Bausor, as Freddii was known before her operation. This former spouse, an American historian called Carine Hartwell who had dumped Freddii after her surgery, went to the police and claimed that Fred had frequently battered her and done all kinds of other unsavoury things to her during their six-year marriage. Several of her close friends said they had known about the abuse. But just as many other people who had also known the married couple said that it was absolutely untrue. One friend said that Freddii had once tearfully confessed to being violent and unable to help it. Another said Carine Hartwell had announced many times that she was going to break Freddii if it was the last thing she did. Yet another claimed to have heard her verbally draft a plan that involved pretending Freddii was a wife-beater and rapist. In the end, it boiled down to everybody’s word against everyone else’s.

  With all these contradictory accounts buzzing around, the press and the public, who all wanted to be able to bray in a particular direction and had no idea which one to pick, were obliged to look further than what everyone was saying, so they looked at the work of Freddii Bausor and Carine Hartwell. Here is what they found:

  Freddii: detective shows featuring grotesque murders and psychopaths who pretend not to have committed them. One TV movie about a woman who believes seven pounds of extra weight renders her unloveable, and who lies about having once had an abusive partner.

  Carine: one scholarly tome about Christian missionaries in Malaysia.

  Most interested parties decided* (*completely kidded themselves) that the above comparison of works was pretty conclusive. In the television industry, many prominent producers, actors and directors let it be known that they completely believed Carine and would never work with Freddii or partake of her cultural artefacts again. This seemed to be the dominant opinion. Famous stars of screens big and small started to tweet infographics to one another: endless rows of little grey men and then, huddling together for warmth, two small red men in the corner. The grey men were supposed to be all the men accused, and found guilty, of doing unspeakable things to women, and the two red men represented the tiny minority of men who’d been wrongly accused.

  Endless heated exchanges took place on the internet about whether it was insulting and transphobic to apply a guilty-andinnocent-men infographic to Freddii, who had never been a man in anything but physique.

  Carine Hartwell was informed that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution of Freddii. This news was greeted with an outpouring of sympathy for her and an even bigger one of hatred for Freddii, who was seen as having got away with it, and loathed even more fiercely than she would have been if she’d been found guilty of something – though she would have been heartily loathed in either eventuality. There was so much venom sloshing around that Freddii, being only one person, couldn’t soak it all up. It started to drench all those who made comments in chatrooms and on social media along the lines of ‘But we don’t know for sure that Freddii did anything wrong,’ though the tide receded if the sinners repented with a follow-up like, ‘Though I personally suspect that she did and want her to die.’ The most enlightened folk of all expressed a wish to garrote Freddii with piano wire while making sure to chastise those calling her ‘him’, because to do that was insensitive and reeking of cis privilege. (Cis is a relatively new word and it means ‘Not trans’. You, gentle reader, are probably cis.)

  One day, Ben Lourenco could bear it no longer. He tweeted a tweet, which read as follows: ‘Please stop RT-ing *that* infographic, people. I get it. There are only two little red men. What if Freddii’s one of them?’

  The floodgates opened and vitriol poured forth in the form of abusive tweets and savage blog posts. Ben Lourenco replaced Freddii Bausor as Chief Devil Incarnate. This was quite rational: Freddii had only maybe done terrible deeds, whereas Ben Lourenco had unequivocally done two horrendous things: 1) he had tacitly given succour to the violent patriarchy by failing to condemn a possible wife-beater, and 2) he had misgendered Freddii, and, in doing so, shown himself to be a hateful transphobe.

  Ben explained that he hadn’t meant to imply that Freddii was a man. He was merely using the metaphor of ‘little red man’ to mean ‘rare and exceptional innocent person’, and if his use of little-men symbolism was offensive, then surely all the people RT-ing the infographic were guilty of the very same offence.

  The unmollifiable hordes remained unmollified.

  A few days into this controversy, Donna Lodge told Justine Merrison that she no longer felt Ben Lourenco was right for the hero’s role in their fledgling TV show. Justine was aghast. ‘He’s clearly a misogynist,’ said Donna. ‘Why else would he choose to defend Freddii when Freddii might be … dubious?’

  ‘But Freddii’s a woman,’ Justine pointed out.

  ‘Well, yes, but … not as much as Carine Hartwell is, let’s face it,’ said Donna transmisogynistically. ‘Don’t worry.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not going to change my mind again about the central concept. You were right about that.’

  ‘You were right to suggest Ben Lourenco,’ Justine countered. ‘And you’d be very wrong to boot him out when he’s done nothing at all to deserve it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Donna pretended to consider this. ‘I just … look, we want to get this show commissioned, don’t we? Do you think having Ben Lourenco as our leading man is going to improve our chances or stymie them?’

  ‘Do you think Ben has done anything wrong?’ Justine asked.

  ‘I know that an awful lot of other people do, and I’m worried about how it’d play with Joe Public,’ said Donna. ‘Jo anne Public.’ She tittered at her own joke. ‘We have to be pragmatic. We don’t
want to work with someone that half of our industry has taken against, Justine. Really, we don’t.’

  ‘Actually, I do.’

  ‘Tough. Ben’s gone. He’s off the table.’

  ‘Then please may I be excused as well?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Donna.

  ‘From the table.’ Justine stood up. In her mind, she had already gone. She no longer worked with Donna. From now on, she worked with Ben Lourenco, though the two of them would probably never meet again. She did not work with Ben on any kind of TV project, but on something far more important: remaining rational in the face of frothing-at-the-mouth numbskullery. Be warned, all: this is frustrating work, and it pays badly.

  After posting a sequence of tweets sticking up for Ben Lourenco and encouraging his detractors to do rude things to themselves, Justine Merrison walked out of her office and never went back.

  Donna Lodge soon replaced her. She replaced Ben Lourenco with another leading man whose tweets were mostly accompanied by the hashtag #istandwithcarine, and she replaced the high concept of the putative drama series with nothing because you don’t need a gimmicky concept if you’ve got multi-layered characters you care about, according to Donna.

  The show has been ‘greenlit’, and will air some time next year.

  11

  ‘Mum, this is the yummiest breakfast ever,’ says Ellen, shovelling another forkful of scrambled eggs into her mouth. Alex eyes her suspiciously, wondering about the identity of this charming visiting diplomat who resembles his daughter.

  Light streams in through the window, creating a golden patch effect on the kitchen table.

  I haven’t told Alex about Ellen and George’s agreement – I can’t bring myself to call it an engagement. Fourteen-year-olds can’t be meaningfully engaged.

  ‘Seriously, Mum, you’re the Queen of Egg Scrambling. Utterly delish!’

  Is this how Ellen will be from now on? Mimicking super-polite George? My heart aches at the thought. I want her to be a typical teenager. Surely we’ll get a few years of ‘You’re so unfair/You’re such an embarrassing idiot’? I don’t think I can bear the prospect of a charming Ellen-and-George unit jollying me into playing Monopoly in the drawing room for the rest of my life.

  Maybe I should provoke a row by demanding to read every word of Ellen’s story about the Ingreys. Until I saw her this morning, I intended to raise it with her first thing, but, coward that I am, I’m loath to do or say anything that might dim her radiant smile.

  Having read George’s frighteningly accurate account of why I gave up my career in television and escaped to Devon, I have a theory. I believe that he and Ellen agreed to swap. Each gave the other a true story to tell. George wrote the one that belonged to me, and Ellen wrote about his mother’s childhood. It must have felt like a way of getting to know each other better – strengthening the bond.

  Lisette Ingrey – mother of Urban, mother-in-law of Ellen – is Anne Donbavand. When the private detective gets in touch to tell me what he’s found out, I’ll be amazed if it isn’t that. The names might be different – I still don’t believe in three sisters called Lisette, Allisande and Perrine – but the substance is true. Anne Donbavand had a younger sister who murdered a boy and then was murdered herself.

  But if only the names have been changed …

  I remember my conversation with Ellen, after I read those first three pages. I asked her why she’d used our house as a setting, and she said, ‘Are you thinking Perrine Ingrey’s going to get murdered in my bedroom? She isn’t. Don’t worry. She doesn’t get killed in the house or the grounds.’

  Malachy Dodd does. He falls from a great height and smashes his head open on the terrace by the fountain.

  What if that really happened – here, at Speedwell House? No family called Ingrey has ever lived here, but others have. One of them could have been Anne Donbavand’s family. Must have been. Why else would Ellen make this house the setting for her macabre story?

  If Malachy Dodd fell to his death from Ellen’s window, might that explain the strange feeling I had in her room? Can tragic events leave an imprint on a place that’s still perceptible years later? What does that say about the much stronger strange feeling I had when I first saw Olwen Brawn’s house? Olwen who is coming to visit later today …

  I don’t want to live at Speedwell House any more. I don’t want Ellen sleeping in Perrine Ingrey’s old bedroom, or whatever the murderous murdered child’s real name was. It’s all I can do to keep my mouth shut so that I don’t blurt this out.

  ‘You all right, darling?’ Alex asks me.

  I nod. Now would be too soon to say anything, even to ask more forcefully to see Ellen’s story. I need to know, first, that I’m not wrong. The detective I hired should be able to find out if the family living at Speedwell House during the 1980s had three daughters, one of whom was murdered.

  A well-known local secret. Don’t tell the stupid Londoners – let them buy the doomed house, so we can laugh at them behind their backs.

  The doorbell rings. And carries on ringing. There’s an index finger pressing hard. It stops after nearly five seconds of solid noise. Figgy, who was asleep under the kitchen table, starts to bark ferociously and scoots out of the room towards the front door.

  ‘Early-morning harassment,’ grumbles Alex as I get up to go and see who it is.

  I have to find Figgy’s lead and attach it to his collar before I can open the door, or else he’ll be off and we might never see him again. This takes several minutes, during which time there are two more short rings of the bell.

  I find a policeman in uniform on the doorstep. He’s middle-aged with a scrawny neck, stick thin legs and a fat middle section in between. His face is red with dozens of small purple flecks from broken veins. It reminds me of a terrine.

  ‘Well, it was a toss-up which was going to happen first,’ he says. ‘Me calling on you or you calling on me. I’m glad I pipped you to it – saves you the bother, too. I’m here now.’ His Devon accent is stronger than I would have believed possible. He bends down and pats Figgy on the head repeatedly. ‘Hello, little fella!’

  Figgy lowers his head and slides out from under – a sensible reaction to being treated like a drum by an irritating stranger.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say. ‘If DC Luce has delegated me to you, please tell him I don’t find that acceptable.’

  ‘Euan Luce?’

  ‘Yes. Has he sent you? About the phone calls I’ve been getting?’

  ‘Ah, you know Euan then, do you?’ He seems to think this is a pleasing coincidence. Fancy that: me, a person, knowing DC Luce, another person who probably lives less than a mile away – who’d have thought it?

  ‘What phone calls are you talking about, Mrs …? Mrs …?’ He turns his head and offers me his ear, as if I’m trying to tell him my name and he can’t hear me.

  ‘If you’re not here about phone calls, why are you here?’

  ‘About the signs.’ He nods as if he’s said something profound and makes the shape of a square with his fingers.

  ‘What signs?’

  ‘“What signs?” says she! You ought to know, since you’ve got one yourself. I expect you’ve not been out yet this morning, with it being so early. If you’d care to step outside, you’ll see what I’m talking about.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing on my feet. Can you please explain what you mean?’

  ‘You don’t have to come far. It’s right here.’ He points at the wall in front of him, next to the front door. He must mean the stone plaque with the house’s name on it. Does he really want me to come outside and inspect it? I know very well what my own home is called.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I say. None of my shoes are near the door. My flip-flops are nowhere in sight, even though I left them right here last night. Moving necessary footwear to untraceable locations is Figgy’s favourite hobby. There’s a pair of green wellies – Alex’s. I pull them on and step out into perfection that even the pol
iceman’s presence can’t spoil: the dew-soaked grass sloping down to the ranks of leafy evergreen trees; the gorgeous winter sun; the sound of oars brushing water aside; the smell of the sea.

  For a moment I forget what I’m doing out here with the policeman. Then I remember and turn and look at the house sign. Over the words ‘Speedwell House’, someone has stuck a coloured, shiny plastic … thing. I don’t know what to call it. A transfer, I suppose: big and square. The background’s purple and the writing on it is turquoise. It says ‘Tide Glider’, and completely covers the house’s name.

  ‘You’ll want to peel that off,’ says the policeman. ‘Yours is the only one this side of the river, far as we can work out, but you should see ’em over Dartmouth side. Houses on the boats, boats on the houses. Imagine if your doggy got lost and someone read his little silver medallion to see where to bring him back to – you don’t want them delivering him to a dinghy over by the jetty, do you? I’d be peeling right now, if I were you.’

  This man might have many talents, but using words to convey meaning is not one of them. ‘Can you please tell me what you’re talking about in a way that makes sense?’ I say. ‘Tide Glider is … the name of a boat, I assume?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Last night, while you and I were getting our shut-eye, someone was awake playing silly beggars. They must have planned it, cuz I’ve seen nearly thirty of those big plastic sticker things so far, and that’d take time to do. Seen ’em on houses and seen ’em on boats, I have. Swapped! House names on all the boats attached to the jetty this morning, with the signs covering up the boats’ proper names – including your one, Tide Glider.’