There was nothing aftershereally. Natalie’s reasons were Natalie’s and always would be. They made sense when you were in her orbit, but once you got outside it they turned to leaves like fairy gold.
“I just think you should be with somebody nice,” Audrey’s mum explained. “There’s that lesbian book group in Shrewsbury. Why don’t you try that?”
“And what? Say, ‘Hi, I’ve got a thing for extremely controlling women, will any of you be kind to me?’”
Audrey’s dad scratched a flake of paint from his nose. It fell into his tea and began dissolving. “Maybe you could say, ‘Hello, my name’s Audrey’?”
It was a thought. But for reasons Audrey couldn’t quite pin down it seemed an impossible thought. To walk up to somebody, anybody, and say, “Hey, I’m just me, is that enough for you?”
Who’d be fool enough to go for that?
* * *
Back at her flat, Audrey was just making herself a probably-ill-advised-if-she-wanted-to-sleep-that-night cup of coffee when her phone rang. And since she was the kind of person who kept her contacts meticulously up to date, she could see at once that it was Jennifer Hallet.
A tiny, silly, forever-sixteen part of Audrey wondered if… well. Since she was no longer on the show maybe. Actually. No. That was absurd.
She answered anyway—mainly out of curiosity—and was treated to a “fuck you” instead of a greeting.
“Hi, Jennifer,” she replied.
“Don’t youHi, Jennifer, me. Do you have any idea how thoroughly you have shat in my toothpaste?”
It was probably wrong to findshat in my toothpasteendearing. But apparently a week without Jennifer swearing at her had given Audrey profanity withdrawal. “How would that work?”
“What do you mean how would it fucking work?”
“I mean how do you shit in somebody’s toothpaste? If there’s one thing toothpaste tubes are famous for it’s being hard to get stuff into. Like, you can’t even get toothpaste back into them. There’s a saying about it.”
“Are you taking the piss?”
“You killed my story, threw me off your show, then called me up at”—Audrey checked the time on the corner of her phone—“thirteen minutes past seven on a Saturday to tell me to fuck off and treat me to a vulgar but poorly thought out metaphor. I’m not sure you’ve got the high ground here.”
A noise of barely coherent rage echoed down the line. “You. Have. Made. My. Job. Difficult.”
“Sorry, I didn’t understand that because it wasn’t expressed in terms of bodily fluids in inappropriate places.”
The coherentness of Jennifer’s next noise dropped from “barely” into “not.” “Alanis wants to drop out.”
Audrey’s stomach lurched. “I’m sorry, I think I must have misheard?”
“No, you heard fine. I said the jailbait baking minx wants to chuck in the most interesting thing she’ll do in her shitty—”
“Pleasedon’t talk that way about Alanis. You know it makes me uncomfortable.”
That got a laugh. Not a sincere laugh, but a loud one. “Uncomfortable? Howcomfortabledo you think I am right now?”
“Oh I don’t know”—her mum had been right, Audrey reflected, she really needed to start being attracted to women who weren’t horrible—“probably about as comfortable as if you’d got something you don’t want lodged in a place where you don’t want things lodged.”
“If this is your twisted parochial attempt at flirting, save it for your cousins.”
“That’s Norfolk.”
For a moment Jennifer was silent. “What?”
“The county that gets the tired jokes about inbreeding is Norfolk,” Audrey explained. “The stereotype for Shropshire is that it’s so boring we don’t have a stereotype. Though if you absolutelymustaccuse us of something sexual and untrue, we’re close enough to Wales you could borrow the one about fucking sheep.”
“God I hope that rod up your arse is turning you on.”
