“Yeah, I should have probably told you that at the start. Look, Pete, I have to get back to the producers by lunchtime today, so I should just tell them that you’re not interested, yeah? That this kind of celebrity bullshit is beneath you, hm?”
“Now let’s not be too hasty here,” Peter said. In his head he’d already started spending the money. “It’s just for a week, right? Seven days, and I’m out of there?”
“You could leave after one day and pocket the hundred grand,” Ed reminded him, “but I don’t think the general public will think much of you for doing that.”
The general public? The same people leaving negative reviews of his books, even the good one, all over the Interweb, or whatever the fuck it was called? With a hundred grand he could buy a whole new general public. Perhaps.
“Tell them I’ll do it.”
“Now, there’s no need to be like that, Pete. Two hundred and fifty grand is a lot of what the fuck did you just say?”
“I said,” Peter continued, fighting to hold down the contents of his stomach, “I’ll do it, but if this shit goes south, I want you to know that I’ll be looking for a new agent. One that doesn’t call me before six p.m., comprende?”
There was a slight pause before Ed next spoke; Peter had visions of his agent picking himself up from whatever he was standing on, much the same way as he had been for the majority of the morning. “Mate, this is going to be spectacular! Or should I say ‘spooktacular’?”
“No you shouldn’t,” Peter said. “I’m hanging up now. I have to go get cleaned up.” And with that he dropped his Nokia Brick 1.0 on the sofa, pushed himself up and rushed toward the toilet, hoping he’d make it in time, although he knew it was simply a matter of damage limitation.
He made it to the hallway before every orifice gave up the ghost.
2
A week later and Peter Kane was sitting on a bus, hurtling down the motorway toward the Forest of Dean, to where the Hathaway house (or just Hathaway House, according to the antediluvian brochure Peter had managed to procure from the library) sat surrounded by fifty acres of oak, beech, and sweet chestnut. According to the brochure, fallow deer and wild boar remained in abundance, despite a plethora of Royal bastards doing everything in their power between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to make anything that moved – including members of their own families – extinct.
Peter tucked the tattered pamphlet back into his satchel (man-bags, to the stylish gentleman, but he didn’t know that) and gazed out of the window as concrete and steel went by in a colourless blur.
“Going somewhere nice?” an old, somewhat nasally, voice asked. Since the geriatric dear sitting beside him had remained silent for the first two thirds of the journey, her sudden outburst came as quite a shock. The saggy bingo-wing suddenly pressing against his arm, well that was just downright grotesque.
“Not really,” said Peter, lifting the woman’s flesh flap to retrieve his arm. She didn’t seem to mind; in fact, she licked her lips, as if the act had somehow turned her on. Peter visibly shuddered before adding, “I’m a writer. I’ve been invited to take part in some low-brow TV show in exchange for lots of money and the possibility of a future that doesn’t see me eating spaghetti in the shape of Alan Titchmarsh’s face whilst contemplating how I’m going to end myself.”
“That’s nice,” the old dear said, the false teeth two sizes too small for her jaw slipping down the gum and clattering against the bottom set. “Which one is it?”
It took Peter a moment to realise what she was asking. “Oh! The show?”
“Yessss,” the old dear hissed. “Is it that one with the ballroom dancing? I loves me a bit of that, I does. Makes me all damp in the downstairs area, that one does. I think it’s the spangles.”
Peter didn’t know whether to cry or scream. After a few moments of silence, he managed to utter a single word. “No.”
“Oooh, is it the one where they go into the jungle, and are forced to eat kangaroo bollocks and cuckoo gizz and fish legs?”
How many fucking jungles do you know of in Gloucestershire? Peter wanted to ask the old dear, but she was old, and therefore deranged. It wouldn’t do his career much good if he was arrested when he got off the bus for peppering an elderly lady half to death with headbutts.
“It’s a completely new one,” he told her. “You wouldn’t have heard of it.” Fuck, I only heard of it a few days ago, and I’m fucking in it.
“What channel’s it on?” pressed the old dear. She’d given up trying to hold her teeth in now, and so they sat in the palm of her hand, surrounded by bile. As a result, her entire face had shrunken in on itself, leaving her sucking her own nose.
“ITV7,” Peter said, glancing out of the window at the three car pile-up two lanes over. It wasn’t quite as disgusting as the thing sitting to his right.
“Celebrity Hell House!” the woman screamed at the top of her lungs. People turned in their seats to see what all the fuss was about and, upon realising there was a senior sitting there, holding onto her teeth as if she might launch them at any moment, went back about their business. It was best not to interfere, not where missile-teeth were involved.
“That’s right,” Peter said with genuine awe. So people did know about it, which meant that some of them might actually watch it, which meant—
“It looks like a big ol’ barrel of shit, so it does,” said the old dear, cackling to herself. “Stick a bunch of celebrities in some old house and try to scare the bejesus out of them. How is that entertaining?” She pulled a sticky, lint-covered bonbon from her pocket and stuffed it into the corner of her mouth. She looked like a shaved hamster.
“Well,” Peter said, turning back to the window, dejected. In the glass he watched as she sucked fervently upon the horrid sweet. He could swear, despite his palpable despair, she was grinning her little head off. “We’ve all got bills to pay.”
“Are there going to be any real celebrities in there?” She crunched the sweet, which was remarkable, really, since she was only wearing one half of her dentures. “No offense, like, but I don’t think I’ve seen you on any of my shows before.”
Peter had a good idea what her shows were. Anything with David Suchet, Angela Lansbury, Miranda (I’m only funny because I’m a hermaphrodite) Hart, and that baking programme with the two lesbians and Mary Berry.
Peter sighed. “Actually, I’m a writer. I don’t do much TV.”
“Not got the face for it,” said the woman, a little too quickly for Peter’s liking. “So, what do you write? The news? Sport column? Are you that lying fucker from the horoscopes, because I’m still waiting for Mister Right and you promised I’d get him back in 1973?”
Peter, unwilling to tell the old dear that she would probably never find Mister Right, not the way she was sucking on that bonbon, reached into his satchel (man-bag, fanny-purse, gay-wallet) and came out holding a paperback book. It was a copy of, in his opinion, the best novel he’d written: Dawn of the Living Undead, which was published back when zombies were as rare as rocking-horse shit. He handed the old dear the book. She looked at it as if it were alive and liable to bite her fingers off if she wasn’t careful.
“You wrote this?” she said, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “Dawn of the Living Undead? Sounds like a million other books out there. Not jumping on the bandwagon, are we?”
Peter could no longer control his rage, and so snatched the book from her gnarled grasp and stuffed it back from whence it came. It wasn’t his fault that zombies had become so popular, saturating the market quicker than bondage nonsense in the wake of Fifty Sheds of Grey, or whatever the fuck it was called. The Walking Dead had been the final nail in the coffin, as far as he was concerned. How could you compete with that? How could you write survivalists in a post-apocalyptic wasteland once Norman Reedus had picked up a crossbow and dropped a million pairs of soggy knickers across the land? You couldn’t, so why bother?
“You’re very rude for a woman of advanced years,�
� Peter huffed. “I’m an award-winning author. I once drank the mouth-piss left at the bottom of an empty pint from Stephen King.” It should have sounded cool – smug, even – but for some reason he felt like a hobo. “Look, I don’t know how good a career move this is going to be for me, but I’m not on the verge of death, unlike you, so I have to make enough money to see me through the end, and this is possibly the easiest way to do it.”
The old dear – Peter still didn’t know what her name was – pushed her teeth back in. “No need to get all testy,” she said. “I just watch a lot of reality programmes, and if you’re not good looking, which you’re not, and you’re not out of Eastenders or Coronation Street, which you’re not, then you don’t have a cat in Hell’s chance of winning.”
Peter sighed, for he knew she had a damn good point. “We shall see,” he grunted. “This is my forte. Do you think some big-boobed, arachnophobic blondie from some second-rate soap is going to outlast me in a house of horrors?” It wasn’t meant to be rhetoric, but the old dear answered anyway.
“Yes,” she said. “People will vote for her if she has boobs, and you will be left scratching your head, wondering why you, a writer of the macabre, is now watching the rest of the show from some rundown hotel, and she’s in there, squealing as if she’s having her first period, hiding from fake ghosts and men dressed in masks harnessing foam knives, because that’s how it works. Everyone knows that.”
The bus moved along to the middle lane, avoiding a fatal pile-up in the fast lane involving a VW Beetle full of nuns. There was a joke in there somewhere, but for the life of him, Peter couldn’t remember it.
“Look, I didn’t need a grilling today. I’m fully aware that this is not a highlight of my career, but – you look much better with your teeth in, by the way – this is something I just have to do. I’ve got a new book coming out soon, and this is a great way to sell copies.”
“Have you ever thought about writing something good,” said the old dear. “Perhaps something with slaves? Slaves are always good. Throw in a sadistic oil-tycoon and an abused girlfriend and you’ve got yourself a Booker shortlisting and a pair of tickets to the Nobel Peace Prize awards.”
“That’s not my cup of tea,” Peter said. His brand of horror was far less true-to-life. Who wanted to read about suppression and serfdom anyway? There was enough of that in real life without finding it between the pages of a book.
The old dear licked her lips once again; Peter tried not to gag. “After this you’re going to be a superstar,” she said, glancing down at his concealed nether-regions. “Surrounded by girls with nary a pube between them.” Peter hoped this was going somewhere, and yet he was terrified of where. “Have you ever considered an older lady?” Ah, that’ll do it.
“I’m gay,” he lied.
“Really? You don’t look it.”
“It’s a new type of gay,” he said. “Low-key. We don’t even like John Barrowman.”
“Such a shame,” said the old dear. “Even though you’ve got a face for radio, I reckon we could have had a good time.”
“Thanks,” Peter said, easing the old dear’s bingo-wing from his arm once again. “But I’m so gay I could probably have a go on Mickey Rourke.”
The old dear winced. “Ew,” she said. “Well, I’ll be watching to see how you get on in the house. Let’s just hope you’re not the ugliest one in there.”
“We can but dream,” Peter said, biting his lip and counting the number of red cars from his window. The bus sped past a sign announcing their imminent arrival; Peter was still annoyed that the producers hadn’t sent a car for him. Not because he was meant to be considered a celebrity, but because he was down to his last eighty quid, and the bus had cost him thirty.
It didn’t matter, for this time next week he would be at least a hundred grand better off. Whether he would still possess the little integrity he had left, however, was another thing altogether.
3
A makeshift studio had been erected in the field adjacent to Hathaway House. Vans, trucks, gazebos and tents littered the landscape. At the opposite end of the field, a herd of sheep plaintively baaed as ITV7 planted themselves unceremoniously on the land. There hadn’t been such an obvious and unfair claim of land since Lewis and Clark rocked up at Black Hills in 1804.
“Are those sheep going to be an issue?” Samantha Bollinger said, lighting a cigarette and nervously poking it in the direction of the watching herd. If you couldn’t get Davina McCall for a show, and Claudia Winkleman was busy, Samantha Bollinger was the person for the job, though the three were pretty much interchangeable. In fact, Davina McCall had once come first in a Samantha Bollinger lookalike competition. Samantha Bollinger had come third.
Callum Edmonds, the show’s producer, zipped his flies up and wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers. The Porta Potties hadn’t arrived yet. He hoped they arrived soon, though, as there was quite a pile stacking up next to the main studio gazebo. “Not afraid of a couple of sheep, are we?” he said, retrieving a walkie-talkie from his coat pocket.
Samantha exhaled a plume of blue smoke. “Did you know that 894 Americans are killed by sheep every year?” She shook her head, as if the fact was too much for her to comprehend.
“Ah, but they have guns over there,” Callum said, deadly serious. Samantha was about to explain that the second amendment probably didn’t apply to the livestock when Callum added, “but if it makes you feel better, I can have the sheep forcibly removed from the site.” He depressed the button on the walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “Derrick? Are you there, Derrick?”
The walkie-talkie crackled for a moment before a high-pitched voice answered. “I’m here Mister Edmonds.”
“Derrick, would you get a couple of lackeys together? We have a host here afraid of sheep.”
“Now hang on a fu—” Samantha stopped speaking as the producer’s finger pushed against her lips. A faint tang of stale piss drifted up to her nostrils, and she knocked his hand away with an almighty slap. “I didn’t say I was frightened of the sheep,” she said, trying not to lick her lips. “You said that.”
When Derrick returned, it was clear he was trying not to laugh. “Would you like me to have them executed, Mister Edmonds? We all know how tricksy sheep can be. I’m not sure stuffing them in the next field is going to do the job.”
Now Callum was laughing, too. It was a regular fucking fun-fest, unless you were Samantha Bollinger, in which case it was simply pathetic. “Now, Derrick, you do know that ITV has a very strict policy against harming animals.” He sniggered, turned his back on Samantha, who was visibly seething. “If you could locate the farmer responsible for them and bung him a few quid, that ought to do it.”
“That’s a lot less messy than a firing squad, Mister Edmonds,” Derrick snorted. “I’ll get onto it straight away. Was there anything else, Mister Edmonds?”
“Coffee, three sugars, black,” Callum said. He pointed toward Samantha, who shook her head. “That’ll be all.” He returned the walkie-talkie to his coat pocket, where it continued to crackle and fizz, albeit with less intensity.
“Are you going to be a complete jerk the entire week?” Samantha said, shaking her head incredulously. She’d worked with Callum on many shows; found him to be something of an acquired taste. But he was damn good at his job, with almost every show he produced returning for second and third series. If you could just see past his childish pranks, his idiotic stance on everything from religion to children (“If I wanted a small person running around the place, shitting all over everything, I’d hire Warwick Davis and ply him with laxatives.”), and his inability to self-censor, he was, for the most part, a decent guy.
“I don’t think I’ve got the stamina to keep it up all week,” he said, smirking.
“That was what your last girlfriend told me,” Samantha grinned.
“Touché, sugartits,” said Callum, catching Samantha off guard. “What time are our first celebrities arriving?” He glanced down at a cli
pboard. Samantha wondered where the hell he’d pulled it from.
Samantha took a long pull on her cigarette, almost coughed up a lung, then said, “Celebrities? That’s a bit of a stretch, ain’t it? I’ve got more talent in my left vagina lip.”
“That’s what your last boyfriend told me,” Callum said without looking up from the clipboard. “We’ve got some corkers lined up for this show. You’re just jealous because you haven’t been asked to do Strictly Come Breakdancing yet.”
“Not my cup of tea,” Samantha lied. Every year she waited, sat by her phone, praying for the call that would allow her to showcase her Swipe, her Wu-Tang, her Toprock and her personal favourite: the Windmill. Every damn year, and every year she was left disappointed. She wouldn’t have minded, except for the fact that last year’s contestants had included Susan Boyle (whose Moonwalk was sub-par, to say the least) and one half of Jedward, whose idea of breakdancing was to simply bounce around the place like Charlie Sheen at an all-you-can-snort competition. “And who are these corkers we’ve got lined up?” she asked, feeling that a change of subject was the only thing that could prevent the inevitable onset of tears.
“Well,” Callum said, sighing as he ran his pen down the clipboard. “We’ve got Crystal Cobb. The Crystal fucking Cobb.”
“Fantastic,” Samantha chided. “An ex-Playboy Bunny with one eye. If there was a barrel here right now, we’d all be taking it in turns to scrape the fucking thing.” She lit another cigarette off the one she’d just finished before continuing. “And who the fuck is Dawn Clunge? Sounds like something my lady-parts do at sunrise.”
Callum lowered the clipboard and glanced toward the presenter with no small amount of disbelief. “Seriously?” he said. “Dawn Clunge. The Dawn Clunge. She’s designed clothes for everyone from Camilla Parker-Bowles to Dame Judy Dench.” It wasn’t that much of a spectrum, really.
“So seamstresses are celebrities now?” Samantha said. “Why don’t we just get the guy that peels Roger Federer’s bananas for him between sets?”
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