by Penny Smith
She surveyed the newsroom from her new position and found she liked it. It was quite small, considering the three and a half hours that had to be filled. There were the researchers and producers, the VT editors flitting through. A camera crew waiting to film a minister who would be coming into the building at seven a.m. One of the executive producers outputting the show looked up from typing to ask a younger man whether the SOT – sound on tape – was done, the VT (videotape) ready, and the graphics sorted on the story he was checking. The guy nodded and went back to his phone conversation with a reporter out in the field.
Keera went to sit at the computer and look through the links and interviews she would be doing that morning. Her first morning. The first morning of the rest of her life. She was going to make this work. It was her right.
She accepted the congratulations of Kent, a producer on her first show. ‘Nice to be working with you again,’ he said. Sincerely. Kent was one of the producers whose heart had not sunk when he heard the news. He thought Keera was one of the most stunning women he had ever met. She had been discreetly keeping him up to date with all of the offers she’d been getting.
‘God knows how they keep getting into the press,’ she had said to him one morning in the canteen. ‘This place is like a leaky boat.’
‘Well, it absolutely wasn’t me,’ he had said, horrified.
‘No, no. I’m sure it wasn’t, silly.’
‘You know you can depend on my discretion,’ he had said, handing over the money for two coffees.
‘I know I can,’ she had said, and given him the most delicious smile.
He wasn’t to know that he was the man she had decided to blame if any of the stories she had planted resulted in fingers pointed at her.
She had already commented on the veritable confetti trail of stories to the news editor. ‘Who on earth could it be, do you think?’ she had asked, a little crease between her beautifully arched eyebrows. ‘It’s quite dreadful, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not just that so many of the stories about me are wrong, but it’s not nice that they seem to involve not very kind things about others. I assume these people just think of the cash – they don’t care about the damage to the station …’
Mike also came in early on Keera’s first day – The Boss’s suggestion on Friday morning. Normally he barely made it to air. He never read the links because he ad-libbed most of them, some so poorly that they were virtually incomprehensible. But people liked his bumbling delivery, and he had discovered early on that as long as you laughed about your mistakes, everyone laughed with you and forgave you pretty much anything. Although God save anyone else who might mention his shortcomings.
Dee had once suggested laughingly that he might like to read a book without pictures in it after he had said on air that books were a waste of time. He had smiled rather oddly, and tripped her up later by asking if there were any damp patches that morning – a pointed reference to her disastrous one-night stand the week before. The man involved had immediately sold the story to a newspaper, revealing that Dee was obsessed with the cellulite on her bottom and had sent a fan letter to a member of Take That. The papers had used the opportunity to go over the old ground of her divorcing her husband after his long fling with the au pair.
Dee walked through the newsroom and noted the little knot of people circling round Keera. All the usual suspects, she thought. The editor, Simon, was in early too. He was virtually resting his tongue in her ear. Disgusting. And the director, Grant – the biggest creep of them all. The buttering-up process with some presenters could have taken a whole lorryload of Lurpak. And there was Kent with his gormless smile. Yurk.
She kept out of everyone’s way as the programme went to air, going into the studio only when it was time for her to point out the fluffy bits sweeping in from the west.
It seemed that the gallery, the nerve centre of the programme, contained more than its normal quota of people. The director had to keep telling everyone to pipe down – noticeably Heather, who was nursemaiding Keera through the show. The Boss had told her to devote herself to Keera. Heather liked Keera because she liked her job as an executive producer. If The Boss said Keera was to be dressed as a hedge, Heather would ask how high. If The Boss told Heather to hang upside-down and act like a bat, Heather would be squeaking like a pipistrelle before you could say vampire. Heather was long, lanky and grateful to have been given a second chance after a libel case that had almost stymied her career.
Keera began an interview with a man from a water company who was trying to defend the company’s appalling record on fixing leaking pipes.
Heather leaned forward and spoke quietly into the microphone on the desk: ‘Keera, ask him how come more of the profits go to shareholders than they do to fixing leaks.’
She dutifully put the question, then another one about whether the water that flushed the loo was the same as the water that came out of the tap.
Those in the gallery glanced at each other in confusion.
Heather got back on the microphone: ‘Keera, ask him when the company plans to fix the old Victorian pipes instead of just talking about it. They’ve had years to sort it out.’
And Keera could be heard asking exactly that – with a supplementary of her own about what the pipes were made of.
The bosses were thrilled.
Keera looked perfect: shiny black hair, tight little pink suit with a hint of cleavage and the highest stiletto heels this side of a massage parlour. Glimpsed, occasionally, in a cross-shot.
After the programme, as the backslapping began, Dee tried calling Katie again. She had already left five messages on her friend’s answerphone, asking if she wanted company. On a whim, she decided to go round to the flat.
She rang the doorbell at the white stuccoed building, and suddenly noticed that, considering it was eleven o’clock in the morning, there were rather a lot people hanging about near lamp-posts, behind wheelie-bins and in cars. As she took her finger off the bell, they shouted questions at her about Katie and where she was. She said nothing, but scooted round the corner and took refuge in the porch of a block of mansion flats. Well, that’ll be why she hasn’t answered the phone, then, she thought. And possibly why she didn’t answer the intercom. Which poses a problem.
She phoned Katie for the nth time and was surprised to get an answer. ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to wonder how I was going to get hold of you. Don’t you ever answer your phone?’
‘Sorry. It’s been on vibrate. I’ve got to the stage where I don’t even bother to look at who’s calling. You caught me between programmes.’
‘How are you? Whoops. Silly question. Can’t be feeling exactly wonderful.’
‘You ain’t wrong,’ said Katie, ‘and I now look how I feel. I think I may have overdone it on the vodka front. And I’m stuck here until I come back from holiday.’
‘What?’
‘I rather stupidly said I was the house-sitter. I can’t work out how to get out of here without looking like a right twat.’
A delivery man asked Dee to move so he could get a parcel to the basement flat.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’
A few hours later, a pizza delivery-boy rang the flat below Katie’s, accidentally pressing her buzzer at the same time. Katie let him in.
A few moments later, Dee appeared at her door with a beaming smile, a motorbike helmet in one hand and a delivery bag in the other. ‘Howzat?’ she asked.
‘Brilliant,’ said Katie, stuffing a few items into the delivery bag. Pyjama pizza and large tube of toothpaste to go …
Outside, the reporters and photographers were still keeping an eagle eye out for Katie Fisher. They had had information that she had definitely returned on a Virgin flight from Barbados. She might have gone elsewhere, knowing that there would be interest in the story of her demise as sofa queen. Phone calls to her parents and brother had turned up nothing, and they were now in limbo. Most were hoping to be allocated a differen
t story. Even if she came home, she probably wouldn’t say anything, and they’d just get shots of her letting herself into the flat.
They had perked up as the delivery-boy had rung the buzzer – but the snappers with their long lenses had told them it was the flat below. They didn’t spot that the delivery-boy who had just left appeared to have grown about six inches.
Katie popped on to the scooter and let it roll down the hill without turning it on. That she had no idea how to ride it had almost scuppered her and Dee, until they had come up with the idea of getting it to the end of the road where a strategic corner meant she could hop off and wheel it to the pizza joint.
Within an hour of leaving her flat, she was on her way home to Yorkshire with her brother, and Dee had phoned gleefully to tell her that she had left the building to a cacophony of camera shutters and shouted questions, all of which she had ignored.
‘How long are you going to stay with your mum and dad?’ she asked.
‘Until I can keep a smile on my face without it falling into Dad’s soup. It’s chestnut and prune today, apparently. He’s being creative. I think I just need to shout a bit, and use my body as a repository for pies. Thanks for all your help.’
Ben had managed to swap his shift with a fellow doctor at the hospital, in response to her emergency call for help in getting home. She couldn’t face the train. And anyway, someone might alert the media.
He was looking rather handsome, she thought, like someone out of Young Doctors, wearing jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with a pink logo. ‘Is that some smutty reference?’ she had queried, looking at the logo, ‘“Potting the Pinks”.’
‘No idea. Is it? I thought it was about geraniums. I bought it at a gardening shop. Or was it a gay shop? Anyway, what could it possibly mean?’
She smirked at him.
‘I’m sure it’s pure filth. We’ll ask Mum. She’s bound to know.’
She had rarely been so happy to see him as she had when he pulled up beside her outside the pizza joint and drove her away from its cheesy wafts.
As they headed north on the A1, and London slipped away behind them, she noticed that the daffodils were out. Lambs were gambolling. Did they go to Gambollers Anonymous? Easy to get fleeced. Shorn of money.
Was that the sort of thing that got me sacked? She dozed off.
Ben looked over at his sister as she lolled beside him with her auburn hair tied scruffily back at the nape of her neck.
She looked drawn and a bit blotchy. And smelled very slightly of pizza.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ben had phoned ahead to alert the parents to their imminent arrival. His father said he would immediately get on to it, which Ben took to mean that there would be more than just the aforementioned soup. His mother had merely said, rather vacantly, ‘Who?’
He skidded up the drive in a shower of gravel, undid both their seatbelts and went round to open the door for his sister, not from chivalry but for the joy of watching her fall out since she was still asleep.
‘Thanks very much,’ she mumbled, as she untangled herself from the seatbelt and put on her shoes.
‘No, no. Thank you,’ said Ben. ‘You were such an entertaining passenger to have on a long trip. The mistress of quick-fire wit and repartee.’
‘Well, sorry. I was a bit knackered.’
‘And it’ll take weeks to get rid of the smell of pizza.’
‘You were lucky it wasn’t extra anchovies.’
‘Oh. It smelled like it was.’
‘Beast.’ She laughed. ‘Wonder what’s for dinner, talking about delicious-smelling things.’
The house was grey stone with pillars at the front porch – a legacy from the mill owner who had felt they befitted his status. Their mother had wanted some sort of creeper growing up them, but their father had vetoed it, saying he would have to deal with the extra spiders and the work involved in pruning and general tidying.
It was their father, wearing the full chef’s outfit of checked trousers and a white jacket, who let them in. ‘Present from myself for my birthday,’ he said. ‘She’, he nodded in the general direction of the sitting room, ‘forgot. As usual. Now that she’s on her way to becoming the new Matisse, she’s far too busy to notice that that I’ve turned pensioner. I’ve started calling the paints cads. As in cadmium. The colour?’ he said to Katie, giving her a hug.
‘It’s OK, Dad. I got it. Utter cads. You know you never have to explain them to me. Maybe to your thicko son, though.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, brightening, ‘we’ve got the soup, followed by sea bream baked in coconut milk, yellow chillies, lemon grass and fresh lime leaves, then Moroccan rice pudding with pistachios and rose petals. Only I couldn’t find any pistachios, so I’ve had to use almonds instead. It was either that or peanuts. It almost wasn’t anything, mind you. Hercules had his nose inches from the bowl when I popped back into the kitchen to make sure everything was ready. Bloody dog.’ He looked at her questioningly. ‘You all right?’
‘I’ll tell you later, Dad. I’ll go and put the bag upstairs.’
Katie went up to her old bedroom – now a testament to her mother’s ex-loves. Full of abandoned items from spent passions. It was a beautiful big room with a large window that looked out on to the slightly distracted garden. It had felt spacious when she had lived in it. She had never been much of a collector and preferred being able to lie on the carpet with lots of space round her to make cardboard boxes into everything from spacecraft to ships. She had also liked to write fairy stories – endless fairy stories that had handsome princes, beautiful princesses, lots of danger and invariably death as she’d sought ways to bring them to a conclusion. So much easier to say, ‘And then the spectres ate them up and put their skeletons on display,’ than be bothered with more plot when it was time for dinner.
Now, though, the room was stuffed with bits of tapestry, a defunct potter’s wheel, a Workmate, half-made cushions and a badly stuffed badger.
In the kitchen, she challenged her mother about the badger. ‘You must have forgotten to tell me you were getting into animals,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’d have nipped to the Tower of London and brought you a flock of ravens.’
‘It’s an “unkindness” of ravens, I think you’ll find,’ replied her mother, wiping paint-stained hands on a cream smock. ‘And the badger was thumped into by your father two months ago. Made a very large dent in the car’s radiator. I thought it was a waste of an animal so I took it to the taxidermist. I told him not to bother too much – I just wanted to see how I felt with stuffed animals. And I’ve had second thoughts. I think your father would prefer to keep putting them in pies.’ She nodded sourly at her husband as he checked his soup.
‘And, Mum,’ said Katie, with a smirk, ‘that’s a nice top.’
‘Sod off,’ said her mother, smoothing it down. ‘I discovered it in an Oxfam shop the other day. Perfect for a budding Turner Prize winner, I thought. And it flatters my arse. Talking of which, what’s this about being sacked?’
‘Thanks, Mum. Not exactly sacked, more replaced by an upstart who just happens to be younger and prettier. And, talking of arses, has no doubt licked a number to steal my job. Scheming little witch called Keera Keethley. Should have known she was up to something. She was always in The Boss’s office. She’d have fluttered her breasts and stuck out her eyelashes – he’d never have been able to resist.’
‘Odd-looking woman, then,’ commented Ben, as he opened a bottle of wine. ‘Must get her to come to the hospital and see if I can’t get her into the British Medical Journal.’
‘You know what I mean,’ Katie said. ‘Anyway, here I am. Trying to escape from the press, so that the story dies away and I can sink into oblivion.’ She ended on a happy smile, then burst into tears.
Her dad hugged her and patted her shoulder. Her mother muttered something about turps and left the room. And Ben drank his wine, apparently unable to think of anything constructive to do or say.
As Katie showed no s
ign of stopping, her father took her to the sitting room and put her in front of the television. He went back into the kitchen. ‘Daytime television’s a Godsend, isn’t it?’ he said to his son.
‘Couldn’t do without it,’ said Ben. ‘I only passed my exams by watching hospital dramas.’
‘Actually, since we got the satellite dish, I can watch some really interesting stuff while I’m waiting for my peppercorns to soak,’ his father added robustly. ‘Soooo,’ he said, after Ben had refilled his glass, ‘what say you to a fish?’
‘I say yes please to a fish.’
‘And I say yes please to a glass of wine, which you haven’t offered me yet,’ shouted Katie, from the sofa. ‘A schooner of alcohol to take away the pain of watching this shite on the telly.’
A few hours later, Katie had finished what was left of the bottle, had downed another, and was still crying. Her family decided to take the dog for his evening stroll and leave her to watch How Green Is My Valley, a makeover show involving whole villages doing up everything from their houses to their rabbit hutches.
The dinner had been delicious, only moderately ruined by the occasional sniff from Katie’s corner.
‘Oh, enough now,’ said her mother brusquely, as Katie blew her nose over the broccoli. ‘I know it’s a bit bloody, but there are worse things that can happen. As your brother will testify.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Ben perked up, who’d only just stopped crying himself after eating a hot chilli. ‘Let me tell you about the bloke who came into A and E with his dick stuck up the end of a vacuum-cleaner.’
‘Do you mind if we don’t?’ asked his mother.
By the time Ben had finished his story, even Katie had raised a watery smile. In fact, she was finding that the red wine helped quite a lot and, with a muttered, ‘Is it OK?’ opened another bottle.
They decamped to the sitting room and sat in front of the television to ruminate. Katie drank her way steadily through the Merlot until the late-night news began. Ben made the by-now-habitual comment about the well-known newsreader putting the emph-ARSE-is on the wrong syll-ARB-les, and their mother pressed the off button. ‘Time for bed, I think?’ she said pointedly to her daughter.