What Fresh Hell

by Lucy Vine

  Mum/Dad: What do you mean by that? Has your father/mother said something? Tell me what he/she said? Tell me EXACTLY.

  Me: Oh, no no no, nothing, I promise. It’s just—

  Mum/Dad: I am an adult and even if he/she can’t be civil, I can be pleasant. I’m always pleasant. Even though he/she is a bag of dogshit with a garbage mouth.

  Me: OK, fantastic, I’ll see you on Friday evening then. Can’t wait.

  They are both determined to prove they’re winning the divorce. And it makes them super selfish. Anger does that to people, I think. It makes them only see their own problems. When I speak to my parents, it’s all we talk about: their raging, burning fury about where their life has gone. Even at her cousin’s wedding the other day, all Mum talked about was what a shit-for-brains my dad was. Sometimes it’s funny, but mostly it’s just tedious and embarrassing.

  Which is how we find ourselves all here today, waiting on tenterhooks for an explosion as Tom’s friends stare, completely absorbed, while the two sixty-year-olds glower at each other across the room like babies. But in a totally grown-up, civilised manner, of course.

  Will takes my hand and squeezes it as we head into the large, open-plan living room. Tom lives in what he likes to call an ‘urban commune’. Try not to roll your eyes – he’s a sweet guy, really. It’s essentially a big house with lots of housemates, who come and go fairly freely. Tom’s a bit of a drifter and says he hasn’t ‘found his calling’ yet. Which, I think, really just means he doesn’t want to work for a living. He’s currently earning his pocket money as an ‘apprentice caricaturist’, which, yes, is exactly what you think it is: someone who’s learning to draw caricatures of tourists. You know the guy – he’s always in your way on a busy pavement and he’s always got a bad drawing of Jack Nicholson pinned up. And when you do let him draw you that one time because you feel sorry for him, he gives you a fucking huge nose that makes you go home crying and googling Harley Street surgeons.

  ‘Gogetadrinkgladyou’rehere,’ Tom says in one long breath, as we survey the room. He pats me awkwardly, gives Lauren a lingering, longing look, and then turns on his heel, scuttling off in the direction of the stairs. He gestures hurriedly to one of his greasy-haired friends, who runs after him. I know where they’re going: they’re off to hide in Tom’s bedroom with a videogame, never to return. Leaving me to deal with all this. I can’t believe my brother’s twenty-five; I swear he’s still fifteen.

  I feel Mum and Dad’s eagle eyes watching me as I cross the room. They’re waiting to see which of them I will greet first. I will get so much passive-aggression based on this decision. Thank God we foresaw this eventuality – we totally have a plan.

  ‘You ready?’ Will whispers, grinning at me. I nod determinedly as he adds in my ear, ‘After this, let’s you and me go get a burger and we’ll eat it in our pants on the sofa at home and then have bloated sex. We’re really great at sex – even fat, burger sex – don’t you think?’ I giggle and he goes on. ‘And hey, if you’re really good, Lilah, I’ll even go through your phone and delete all the pending news podcasts you have stacking up. I know you feel guilty for not listening to them, but we both know you only really want to listen to the gruesome murder-y podcasts.’

  Will knows me too well.

  I totally listen to the headlines of the news though!

  Sometimes.

  ‘Right, break!’ Will hisses, as he and Lauren peel off in formation. Lauren to my mum, Will to my dad. Distract and conquer – this is the plan and precisely why I brought bodyguards with me. I breathe a sigh of relief and head for the kitchen. I will most definitely need a drink for this.

  When I return with a plastic pint cup full of wine, Will joins me, looking shifty. He is in full secret-service mode. He tried to get us to use codenames and a password earlier, but Lauren told him to stop being a dope.

  He leans in excitedly. ‘I told your dad there were old copies of Loaded mag in the upstairs bedroom,’ he says in a hushed voice. ‘He’s gone to have a quick look. Now’s your chance – go say hi to Alice. Hurry, though, he won’t be gone for long.’ I give him a grateful smile and stand on my tiptoes for a kiss. He immediately goes red – kissing in public is very much not Will’s bag, particularly around in-laws – but he gives me a quick peck, and then his trademark goofy side grin. When he’s feeling bashful, only one side of his mouth goes up. It’s one of my favourite things about him.

  Right, OK, if you promise not to judge, I will tell you how Will and I met.

  You ready for this? No judging, remember?

  It was in a free clinic about a year and a half ago, where we were both waiting for STD checks.

  Just routine! Just routine, I swear.

  Kind of routine.

  I mean, I was probably due a test anyway. But OK, the week before, I had done ‘the sex’ with some guy from Tinder, and even though we used a condom, I worry about the stuff that gets up the sides, y’know? And also, after we’d finished, he took it off but then there was some more . . . touching. And I kept thinking, what if there was jizz on his hands and it got on my vagina? I didn’t pay that much attention in sex education to all the euphemistic bananas, but the impression I got from the shouty PE teacher taking the lessons was that everything to do with genitals gives you hepatitis.

  Anyway, I was in the waiting area, rehearsing what I’d say when I got into the tiny room and the nurse asked me if I’d ever had anal sex. (‘Hmm, maybe once? By accident? It was just to impress this one lad because he used to go out with a glamour model.’) I didn’t realise I was pulling faces until the boy across from me, soon to be known as ‘Will Hunt’, started giggling. He awkwardly waved hello from his plastic chair and we smiled at each other. Me, full-on I-fancy-you-and-will-let-you-get-stuff-up-the-sides-any-day smile. Him, the first of many goofy side-smiles. I came out of the room a few minutes later and he was waiting awkwardly by the door to ask me out. We went for a drink and talked for hours about our lives and his work in the charity sector, as well as my fairly new job at the time – as an assistant producer on a daytime quiz show.

  And when we both got the all-clear via a text eight days later, we celebrated with unprotected sex because I am just the absolute worst.

  Condoms are over, STDs are in. Tell your friends.

  That story isn’t exactly wedding-speech material, so I just tell people we met on a dating app like everyone else.

  ‘Oh Lauren, my pet, how wonderful,’ Mum is saying coolly, examining her ring with a hint of disapproval as I join them. ‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy together. It’s about time Charlie proposed. How long have you been together now? Five years?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer before continuing dramatically. ‘I had a chance to be happy once, but your father –’ she shoots me a look – ‘ruined all that. The fat twat.’

  I ignore her, leaning in for a hug and a kiss on the cheek. ‘Hey, Mum, nice to see you,’ I say as she pats me distractedly.

  ‘It hasn’t put me off marriage, though,’ she goes on, tittering prettily. ‘If anything, it’s made me more sure about getting re-married one day. After all, any man I meet now is going to seem absolutely fantastic after my previous experience. He will seem kind, loving, generous, and – at the very least – not a disgusting degenerate.’ She glances nonchalantly over at the stairs, where my dad is re-emerging empty-handed and looking bereft. No luck with Loaded then.

  Mum clears her throat and adds in a loud stage whisper, ‘And whoever I date next is bound to have a much, much BIGGER PENIS.’

  I take a long, slow, resigned breath. I don’t need to look over at Dad to know he can hear. As can all of my brother’s agog friends, who have fallen silent.

  Mum opens her mouth to go again and Lauren takes a small, decisive step forward.

  ‘That’s enough now, Alice,’ she says firmly. ‘You don’t need to say things like that in front of your daughter. Or, indee
d, the whole room. No one needs to hear about Harry’s willy, especially when Harry is their father. Not under any circumstance, really.’ Lauren puts a protective arm around me and I feel a rush of gratitude – and a rush of fear that Mum will kick off.

  ‘Oh, but I barely mentioned his TINY WILLY,’ Mum starts, and Lauren gives her another hard stare. She harrumphs and blusters, ‘I’m just saying that marriage is a wonderful thing and you’re very lucky to be able to experience it with a man who isn’t a dumpster fire of a human being.’ She looks at me penetratingly before continuing. ‘And make sure when you have children with him, Lauren, that you firmly agree on a name before you go into labour.’

  Ah, yes. Thanks for that one, Dad.

  So yes, my full name is Delilah Mary Fox. Which, yeah, I know, sounds like a character from The Animals of Farthing Wood. Or maybe porn. Depends where your brain’s at.

  My dad, Harry, is an obsessive Tom Jones fan and my mum was still high on gas and air when they registered the birth. She didn’t realise what was going on until about a week later. Same thing happened with my little brother, who is even less subtly called Tom Jones Fox.

  I don’t want to be ungrateful, but I am really incredibly ungrateful. I hate it. My name draws attention and laughter wherever I go, and I’ve spent my life trying to convince people to call me Lilah instead of Delilah – or worse still, Delly. That was what the idiot boys at school always called me and I fucking hate it. Sometimes they would get even more creative and call me Delly the Belly, if they felt like maybe I’d temporarily forgotten that I was fat and needed a reminder.

  But that was obviously all ages ago, and is very much long-forgotten history. I’m totally not holding on to a hundred different grudges that I can never fully avenge. ABSOLUTELY NOT.

  At least Facebook lets me see how terribly their lives are all going now.

  Lauren shakes her head. ‘Alice . . .’ she says warningly to my mum. She’s heard all these speeches before, as have I.

  Mum tuts. ‘There’s no need to be snappy, Lauren. I’m not even talking about Lilah’s father necessarily, just . . .’ She pauses, noting my friend’s unchanged steely expression. ‘Congratulations on your engagement. I hope you’ll be very happy.’

  Lauren smiles broadly and starts talking about veils, as across the room, I make eye contact with Will. We are barely twenty minutes in and he already looks defeated, grimacing as my dad talks animatedly, hands gesticulating wildly. I don’t need to be able to hear the conversation to know my dad is currently justifying the size of his penis to my boyfriend. Poor Will. We share a little helpless shrug and I try to silently communicate that I will make it up to him later by going on top. Usually I can’t be bothered – who has the energy for that, especially post-burger binge? – but he’s earned it. Will nods, perking up like he gets it, and I turn back to my mum, who is telling Lauren about her own veil – which she set ablaze in a symbolic bonfire when she got her decree absolute.

  Hmm, maybe the penis chat across the room would be better . . .

  4

  ‘I’m afraid we really do need someone here right away, if at all possible. It’s an emergency.’

  I’m using my nicest, most professional phone voice, and wishing I could muster more authority, but I don’t think I have it in me.

  ‘Yeah, see, I dunno if it’s poss, though,’ says the girl on the line, who clearly has me on loudspeaker in her office, and is simultaneously texting on her mobile while I plead. I can hear the clicking of the phone’s keyboard noises she hasn’t bothered to turn off.

  ‘Did I mention I’m calling for Rex Powers? From Quiz Monsters?’ I try again but she doesn’t seem impressed. ‘He says you usually do this for him at his home and are often able to accommodate his last-minute requests?’

  More text clicking.

  ‘Is there someone else I can talk to, maybe?’ I say, trying to be strong, but wimping out of saying the dreaded ‘your manager’.

  ‘Nah,’ she says, and it’s barely a word, more of a noise. ‘The others are all the way downstairs, so I can’t ask them, and I’m not going down there to get ’em. I could do Rex at his place on Thursday?’

  I lay my head on the desk in front of me, the phone hot on my ear. I can feel the cancer waves creeping into my brain.

  ‘You see, the trouble is,’ I say, my voice muffled by the wood on my face, ‘we’re going on set in an hour and a half, and Rex says he really needs his chest done before the cameras can go on. He says you guys know exactly how to wax and style it to perfectly accentuate his man cleavage. Those are his words – I don’t know what they mean.’

  She’s silent for another long moment. ‘Yeah, we do do that,’ she says. ‘Loads of men love that one. But my boyfriend usually drives me to outside appointments and he’s at the football.’

  ‘Please,’ I say again, and I hate the desperation in my voice. ‘We’ll get you a car. A posh car. We’ll pay you twice your normal fee. Please. You don’t understand, Rex won’t let us start filming until his chest is done, and the producer will blame me if we’re stuck here all night yet again.’

  She sighs.

  I try one more sympathy tactic. ‘I might get fired.’

  The phone clicking stops momentarily. ‘OK, fine, where am I going?’

  I’ve already told her three times, but I explain again, keeping the impatient scream firmly inside my head.

  As I hang up, Rex thunders into the room. ‘Is she coming?’ he booms in his infamous quiz-host voice. His shirt is hanging open, showing off the aforementioned unruly and hideously un-contoured chest hair.

  ‘Yep,’ I say cheerfully, giving him a thumbs up, like it was no trouble.

  ‘Well, tell her to hurry fucking up,’ he says impatiently. ‘Every minute that goes by, these blasted chest pubes get longer.’ He gestures at himself and my eyes accidentally look at his body hair. I swallow some bile.

  ‘You don’t know how hard it is for me, darling, having such thick, luxuriant hair,’ he tells me dramatically, slumping down on the sofa in the corner. ‘You’re so lucky to have thin, unimportant hair that the public don’t care about.’ He lays a flannel across his face. ‘Get me some hot water, will you?’ he says. ‘I’ll do my pores while I wait.’

  I want to tell him we have runners and interns for this kind of thing. I want to point out there’s a sink literally next to his stupid head. I want to tell him to fuck off. But I don’t. I just go over and fill up the bowl.

  You wouldn’t believe it, but I am not actually Rex’s PA. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of not making any mistakes early on in our working relationship and now he thinks I am the only one he can trust to do anything. He says the runners are ‘a bag of burning poop’ who ‘cock everything up’. Which is true, but it’s still not my fucking job.

  When I started here nearly two years ago, I was so sure it was going to be the dream role. I’d done my time as a runner at a production company, then as researcher somewhere else, then as researcher again. Getting bumped up to AP was a big deal. And not just any old AP – I’m the assistant producer at one of the highest-rated daytime quiz shows on BBC9! I’ve always been obsessed with quizzes. When I was growing up, Franny and I used to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire every day, and our joint life aim was to be someone’s phone a friend. For a long time, as a teenager, I thought Chris Tarrant was my ideal man, until I realised he doesn’t actually know the answers to any of the questions, he just reads them out. I can’t tell you how many Sunday pub quizzes I’ve dragged Lauren and Joely along to. Franny’s the best teammate, though – she’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. She was in Mensa when she was younger! She has one of those photographic memories, and an IQ of 156, which is incredibly handy in those seventies pop trivia rounds.

  Anyway, working on Quiz Monsters seemed like it would be the most brilliant, fun job in the universe, and I was so sure those Facebook f
uckers with their eight kids and nappy posts would die of jealousy. But it’s never quite what you think it will be, is it? Everyone told me the host was ‘difficult’ – they warned me – but I thought I could handle it. I mean, I’m great with difficult people! I can nice-person anyone into submission! But it feels like all I’ve done with my two years here is turn myself into Rex Powers’ lackey. And I’m still not totally sure he even knows my name. He calls me ‘darling’ a suspicious amount.

  I step out of the office and flag Sam down. She’s the only runner who isn’t a total moron, and I’m her official ‘mentor’ here.

  I really like her, actually. She’s great. She’s straight out of school, couldn’t afford to go to university (because who the hell can these days?) but still wanted desperately to work in telly, so has been doing work experience like a demon for two years, while simultaneously working night shifts at a bar to pay her way. She’s a grafter and proper northern, so of course she thinks all the other rich interns and rich everyones are idiots. Actually, I picked her CV out of the pile just to annoy Rex and my producer, but she’s been a godsend.

  ‘Can you get me an urgent car?’ I say, handing her the address. ‘Tell them it’s genuinely life or death.’

  ‘Ooh, is it for someone famous?’ she says excitedly and I grin. If you work in telly you’re not supposed to get star-struck, but Sam loves a famous person. We have guest stars on the show sometimes and she can barely keep a lid on it. She is so excited about this massive end-of-series live celebrity special we’re currently planning. I’m excited too, but it is also the bane of my existence. You have no idea the egos I’m dealing with. It’s funny because the very few A-listers I’ve dealt with have always been absolutely dreamy. They are professional and friendly and get on with whatever you’ve asked them to do. But anyone D-list or below? You cannot imagine the levels of dreadful. I think it’s because the lower down the celeb scale you are, the less prepared you are for the unscrupulous yes-men who descend on you when you find fame. These people will say absolutely anything to get in with you. They will climb up inside your rectum and nestle there, taking the free drinks and the free drugs, encouraging your ego to spiral out of control, until you truly believe you’re the most beloved A-list celeb to ever leave Love Island.