by Rob Grant
So, back to business: she was leaning in favour of the knife. She could definitely get hold of a knife. It would probably need to be something a bit sharper than a regular dinner knife, though. She'd actually passed a tray of surgical instruments that very morning, while Mum was wheeling her out for the daily fresh-air nonsense, and spotted a wicked-looking scalpel in there. She couldn't grab it in full view of La Vache, of course, but the opportunity would present itself again. Making the cut would require courage: you can't be wishy-washy and indecisive in these matters or you wind up like Emmalina Dawson, in a great deal of pain, with hideous scars on your wrist that mark you out as an unstable loony, and constantly under the unblinking eye of parental suicide watch, so you never get another peaceful moment to yourself for the rest of your entire life. You have to be bold and sure-handed. Make sure you find an artery, and there's no going back.
She favoured doing it in a warm bath, which is what the Romans used to do. You just slip away, then, all warm and dreamy, hardly even noticing it at all. But, of course, nothing being straightforward in the life and troubled times of Hayleigh Griffin, they didn't let her take baths, with her leg and all. She just got a disgusting bed bath every three days from her mum or a nurse, during which you had to try like fury to go somewhere very far away in your head, which was not always easy. Sometimes even the Jason litany (extra-long version) didn't help.
But, presumably, when the opportunity to do the deed presented itself, she would be out of range of the Ever-Watchful Eye, and she'd be able to find a bath somewhere in the hospital and run it. She'd have to keep an eye out for bathrooms. Maybe she could ask an orderly or a nurse in a way that appeared innocent, and wouldn't set alarm bells going off in the heads of certain personages who need not be named. She'd have to think about that.
But the success of all of these schemings hinged on one thing: getting away from Mommie Dearest. Well, she'd just have to be patient, that's all. The dreadful woman would have to go home sooner or later. She would have to. Even if it was just for a night. Dad was always banging on at her to spend a night in her own bed, for the sake of her health: the sofa in Hayleigh's room was giving her a bad back. So far she'd refused, the stubborn old cow bag, but she couldn't hold out for ever, surely? Of course, if she did relent, Dad would doubtless be substituted, tag-team style. But that would be fine. She could get away with murder on his watch. She might even get away with suicide.
The big question remaining was: should she leave a note? That was a tricky one. Presumably, Mum and Dad would be upset, and a note might ease their distress a bit. On the other hand, she'd have to write the note beforehand, and, knowing herself as she did, that would probably entail several drafts before she got it just right, all of which would be potentially damaging evidence, if discovered, that may even thwart the entire finale. It's not even as if she were left alone at any time: Mum even accompanied her to the loo, lifted her on and made her leave the cubicle door open, to make sure she wasn't throwing up or some such thing. Dignity was not a major feature of Hayleigh's daily routine. The only time Mum left her side was when she needed the loo herself, and she always managed to time that to coincide with the appearance of an orderly or a nurse.
So a note would be risky. She had heard much talk, in the wake of the Emma Dawson incident, that suicide attempts are cries for attention. Well, that was the precise opposite of what Hayleigh wanted. Attention was what she was trying so desperately to get away from. She would leave a note only if she had time, and write it at the absolutely last minute. In the meantime, she could start composing it in her head. Something elegant and tragic. A poem would be inappropriate. Something prosaic, though, and dignified.
'Hayleigh, darling?'
Hayleigh looked over at her mother. She wasn't off Talk Strike as yet, but that was on the cards, certainly. She needed people to start dropping their guards a bit, and it would be difficult to achieve that without speaking. She would pick her moment to break her silence; a moment when she could secure the maximum advantage from it. For the time being, simply paying attention when la grande spoke would be considered breakthrough enough.
Mum smiled, predictably. 'You seem to be feeling a bit better.'
Hayleigh shrugged with her eyebrows.
'Would you mind terribly if Dad came to stay with you tonight?'
Would she mind? It was all she could do not to leap out of her wheelchair and perform Riverdance in its entirety, encores included. She sucked in her cheeks to contain an involuntary grin that didn't want to go away, and shrugged casually with her eyebrows again.
'It's just, well, Jonny's missing me, I think. And I wouldn't mind a night on a proper mattress, to be honest.'
Delicious. Jonny, a plague and a pestilence all his life, might very well turn out to be her salvation.
She smiled another shrug and bent back down to the maths exercises she was pretending to be working on -- oh yes, it's not enough to be a prisoner in a living hell, they give you stacks of quadratic equations in case you might actually be enjoying a minute of accidental happiness -- and tried to keep the grin sucked in while she mentally hummed the Big Boys Cry version of 'Tonight's the Night'.
THIRTY-SIX
Excerpts from the book: Cook It, Change It, Dig It! -- The Whole Lifestyle Makeover Show.
Cook It, Change It, Dig It! burst onto your screens this year, and what a splash it made! Our expert team worked wonders turning families' lives around. With dandy Leroy Burton-Blunt on decor, delicious Sammi Greene in the garden and super-chef Grenville Roberts in the kitchen, we really made a difference to the homes we visited! Now you can use all the top tips from our experts to make the changes you would like to see!
Enjoy this book, and don't forget to watch the next series!
Simon Falter (Series Producer)
BACK TO BASICS
Hi, Grenville Roberts here. What we found in many of the homes we visited was that people were too often buying prepackaged foods for their families, and hardly ever cooking from scratch. While that's all very well once in a while, it's not a good basis for a family diet. Warming things up is not cooking. What follows on these pages is good, old-fashioned home cooking, and not fancy-Dan, once-in-a-lifetime dinner party recipes -- the bookshelves are groaning with those types of books: what I'm offering here is good, nutritious food people actually like to eat every day.
HOW TO BOIL AN EGG
This is from the first show I did. The Warburton family confessed to being absolutely useless at cooking, and they practically lived out of the microwave. Which is a great shame. Simple, basic cooking skills used to be passed down the generations as a matter of course, but now, sadly, convenience has overridden that tradition. Let's see if we can't get it back.
Eggs are a magical ingredient in cookery. They provide the basis for many alchemical transformations, where substances change properties and texture. They bind oil and vinegar in mayonnaise. The whites fluff up and stiffen for meringues and souffls. You can boil them, poach them, scramble them, fry them and whip them and they come out a different way every time. Eggs provide all the amino acids essential for human nutrition. Now, neither you nor I know what amino acids actually are, but we know we need them, and you get them from eggs. One-sixth of the egg is protein. The yolk provides iron, sulphur and vitamins A, B1, D, E and K, and they're reasonably low in calories, if you care about these things.
For boiling, you need your eggs as fresh as possible. That way, the yolk will stay suspended perfectly in the dead centre of the albumen. There are several ways to check how fresh your eggs are.
Eggs lose volume during storage, so a fresh egg is heavier, with less of a gap inside between the white and the shell. You can test for freshness by dropping an egg into salted water: less than three days old, it will sink to the bottom; up to a week old, it will float halfway up. If it floats all the way to the top and lies on its side like the victim in the opening segment of an old Quincy episode, it's only usable as a stink bomb. Alternatively,
break a raw egg onto a plate. If the yolk stays in the middle of the white and stands tall and proud, it's fresh. If it's a week old, the yolk will lollop apathetically to one side, and the white will be less thick. If the yolk is barely held by the albumen, it's been around for a couple of weeks. If it's bright green, you've accidentally picked up a lime instead of an egg, or you've found an egg left over from my fridgeless student days, in which case put in a call to the bomb-disposal squad. Obviously, both these freshness tests are difficult to perform in even the most accommodating supermarket, so check by feel and sight. If the egg feels full, it's fresh. If you hold it up to a very bright light and it's transparent in the middle, it's fresh-laid. If it's transparent at the ends, it's a stink bomb. The final, and, actually, simplest method is to check the sell-by dates, if you can trust them. An egg has a natural lifespan of twenty-one days -- that's how long it takes for a fertilized egg to produce a chick. Older eggs have their uses: scrambling, omelettes, of course, and older egg whites are actually better for making meringues and souffls, but for boiling, freshness is paramount. Store them in your fridge, pointy side down. An egg stored at room temperature degrades more in a single day than a refrigerated egg does in a week. I don't know why they don't refrigerate them in supermarkets, but they don't.
Besides being graded by size, eggs in the UK have to pass certain quality standards, though, in practice, anything less than a Grade A is only fit for throwing at Deputy Prime Ministers. Grade A batches must have less than four per cent of the eggs cracked, and no more than one per cent of them should contain blood spots, which is mightily reassuring. Grade B are less fresh and may have been refrigerated or preserved. Alarmingly, there are such things as Grade C eggs, which are deemed fit only for food manufacture. Oh, good. How many bloodspots can they have, then? How many cracks? How old can they be? Do they come in boxes that still have those slogans from the 1970s -- 'Go to Work on an Egg', and 'E for B and Be Your Best'? Think of that next time you buy instant custard powder.
So, fresh Grade A eggs, free range if you can possibly afford it, and large ones. These timings here are specifically for large eggs. Besides the eggs, you'll need a pan of boiling water, a jug of some kind, a slotted spoon and an accurate timer. Don't bother with so-called egg timers, they're useless. Get a digital timer: they're not expensive and they're more accurate than their wind-up counterparts. And make sure you test the alarm on it before you buy. I had to replace one recently because it gave everyone in the kitchen a cardiac arrest every time it went off.
Eggs, remember, are one of very few foodstuffs we consume that are actually designed by nature simply to be food (the whites, at least). The whites are also, interestingly enough, one of only two ingredients in the average kitchen that are alkaline -- the other is baking powder.
Take the eggs from the fridge and place them in a jug of cold water. If any of them start giving off bubbles, the shells have tiny cracks in them. Take them out and use them for something else. They'll crack in the pan otherwise, and you'll have a mess on your hands, as well as a wasted egg.
Put the jug containing the survivors in the sink and turn on the hot tap. This will gradually bring the temperature of the eggs up to the point where plunging them into boiling water won't crack them.
Set the timer for four minutes and fifteen seconds.
With the slotted spoon, transfer the eggs from the jug to the pan, as quickly as possible, then start the timer.
Now you can make your toasty soldiers, if you like. When the alarm goes off, turn off the heat and get the eggs out as quickly as you can, transferring them back to the jug, and then run them under the cold tap for a few seconds. This stops them cooking and makes them easier to handle. And now all you have to do is put them in eggcups and eat them. You can even peel them at this point: tap firmly all along the shell, roll them firmly on the work surface, but not so firmly you squash them, and the shell will peel off easily. Either way, you'll find the eggs are perfect every time with this technique. If you want a slightly firmer boiled egg, such as you might use in a tuna nioise salad, set the timer for seven minutes. If you want a proper hard-boiled egg, the yolk of which you can rub through a sieve to make an accompaniment for caviar, or use as the basis of a 'safe' fresh mayonnaise, thirteen minutes is perfect. Anything longer than that and the yolk starts to discolour to an unappealing greeny black tinge around the edges.
So far we've only been talking about hens' eggs, of course, but there are several other types of bird eggs you can boil. Quails' eggs used to be fairly commonplace in restaurants, mainly because of their daintiness, which fitted in well with the Nouvelle Cuisine madness that swept through the country in the eighties. Not really worth bothering with in everyday cooking, frankly. Ducks' eggs, however, are a real treat. They're easier to get hold of than you think. Just ask your butcher. Let's move on, then, to boiling duck eggs...
THIRTY-SEVEN
Grenville was climbing the stairs of the Century Club in Shaftsbury Avenue. It did have a lift, but because the footprint of the lower floor wasn't as big as the space upstairs, the elevator shaft didn't go all the way down, and then, when you got to reception and signed in and they told you your agent was in the upstairs bar, just one floor up, you could hardly summon the lift rather than mount one more flight of stairs, now, could you? And so what was the point of the lift? Grenville had never seen anyone actually use it.
The problem with climbing stairs is that you exert a force on your knee joints forty times your body weight. When you're Grenville's size, that's a lot of force. That's probably enough force to move a small mountain five feet to the left. So don't be telling him that climbing the stairs is good exercise. It may be good exercise if you weigh as much as a single, normal human. When you weigh almost as much as two normal humans, it hurts. Pretty much all exercise hurts. If you are of average dimensions, imagine exercising with another you clamped around your body. Imagine yourself clinging onto yourself, onto your front, arms wrapped over your shoulders, legs wrapped around your waist, like some brain-dead, limp succubus. Imagine going jogging carrying that bastard.
Grenville carried his own succubus up the second flight of stairs. His agent was sitting at a table in a raggedy armchair. London clubs like raggedy furniture. They probably hack away at it with a carving knife just to get the right degree of raggedness. This club was, what? Five years old? Seven? The chairs looked like they'd been there for generations.
Seth rose from the chair when he saw Grenville, and he shook his hand and hugged him warmly with his other arm. Which, when Gren thought about it, was the most physical affection he'd been shown by another person since his divorce. Since long before his divorce, in fact. Unless you could counted DC Redmond kneeling on his chest, which you probably couldn't.
'How are you doing?' Seth asked sincerely.
'Good.' Grenville nodded. 'I'm good. Obviously, I've been better.' Obviously. He'd lost his livelihood, and very possibly his career, he'd acquired a criminal record and a reputation for rampage, was in a financial hole to the tune of seventeen thousand pounds, if you factored in buying another crappy hatchback -- all thoughts of zip and glamour were now out the window -- and paying the excess on the insurance of the Toyota he'd practically totalled. And he no longer had the Christmas book to look forward to. Yes, he'd been better.
'Well,' Seth beckoned towards the waiting staff, 'let's see what we can do about all that.'
Grenville sat, ordered a virgin Mary, and they got down to business. 'Have you talked to the production company?'
Seth nodded. 'I've talked to them a lot. We're not going to get much comfort there.'
'No chance they'll take me back?'
'Not really, Gren. Did you really call him a "suppurating little shit"?'
'It's possible.'
'I did manage to get some dosh out of them. Not a king's ransom. Four shows' worth of fees, and I had to do a lot of arm twisting and legal threatening just to get that, believe me. They've pretty much got us over a bar
rel.'
'Can we sue?'
'It wouldn't be worth it, even if we had a case, which I seriously doubt--'
'Seth, they sacked me for being overweight: surely that's discrimination. Surely a tribunal--'
'They'd never admit to that. Plus, can you imagine the publicity you'd get? You'd come off looking pathetic, even if you won. If you weren't white, if you were a woman, if you were a Muslim, even, anything, they wouldn't have dared chance it. But you're Caucasian, you're a man and you are, bluntly, a fat man at that. You have absolutely nothing going for you.'
'Right, then.' It stung Grenville, having someone come right out and call him fat, even though there was no denying it. He was fat. Face it. Suck it up. 'Onwards and upwards. Whither now?'
'Look, I've been talking to the Beeb. They are interested in you. They like your style, they like your talent, they like your cooking. They like your approach, cooking stuff that people actually want to eat instead of all that la-di-da dinner party baloney. Stuff people actually can cook. That's all good.'
'So, what? They're thinking about giving me my own series?'
'It's definitely on the cards. I pitched your title at them: Grenville's Staples, and they loved it.'
'There's a "but" coming here, isn't there?'
'There is a but, I'm afraid, Grenville, and it's a fairly big but.'
'Go on.'
'They want you to lose weight.'
'Jesus.'
'I know. They didn't come right out and say it, but your size is clearly a problem for them.'
'Jesus.'
'It would be a big break for you, Gren. Your own show, mainstream, prime time. Your own book deal. Strictly Come Dancing. It would be the making of you.'