Audrey slept badly and woke up early. And the thought that awoke her was,fuck Jennifer fucking Hallet.
Fuck Jennifer fucking Hallet and her smug face and her swearier-than-thou, I-think-aggression-is-confidence attitude.
Fuck her and her fantastic oral dexterity and her fucking show.
It wasn’t so much that she objected to being asked, or more accurately told, to leave. She had, after all, agreed to Jennifer’s rules. Shit rules though they may have been. But there were ways. You could say, “That was great, but I’ve got an early start and I’m sure you’ll need to be getting home,” or, “That was great, but I’ve got serious emotional problems that mean I’m not cool with being around people after we’ve fucked,” or basically anything as long as it began “That was great, but.”
You had to really work to get as abrupt and dismissive as “You just did, sunshine, now, fuck off.” The only way Audrey could imagine it being more abrupt and dismissive would be if Jennifer had texted for an Uber while she still had her face in Audrey’s muff.
In theory, at least, Audrey knew that it was pointless to getangry at somebody who wastryingto make her angry and even more pointless to get angry at somebody forsuccessfullymaking her angry. She had half a mind to get up early, get back in her car, drive back to Shropshire, and never think about Jennifer Hallet or Patchley House orBake Expectationsever again.
Except there was still Alanis to consider. Not that Alanis was technically Audrey’s responsibility, any more than Doris was, or anybody else for that matter. And in fact the whole damned lot of them were explicitlyJennifer’sresponsibility in the actual, formal, legal, duty-of-care sense. Because if Audrey was being picky (and she was increasingly in a mood to be picky), whacking a sixteen-year-old-girl on national television and then leaving her emotional well-being entirely in the hands of a fellow contestant was what Ofcom standards would describe as adick move.
None of which stopped Audrey from feeling very strongly that she had to help anyway.
And in the end, the decision was rather made for her when, very slightly after she would normally have got up for breakfast, she heard a hammering at her bedroom door and Alanis’s voice calling from outside.
“Audrey?”
“Yes?”
“I heard you were back but I didn’t believe it.”
This was going to take some explaining. “I’m not really.”
“You sound back.”
“I mean, I’m here, but I’m not back on the show. I’m—actually I don’t know what I’m doing. Jennifer said you were thinking of quitting.”
There was a moment of quiet that Audrey didn’t find reassuring. Then another moment of even more quiet, which she foundstill less reassuring. She opened the door and found Alanis looking very small and very uncertain.
“Do you want to come in?”
Alanis nodded.
So a few minutes later they were sitting on Audrey’s bed because there wasn’t really anywhere else to sit in the still-relatively-small rooms that the BBC provided for the contestants.
“It’s just that,” Alanis began at the exact same time that Audrey was saying, “Look, you shouldn’t,” and then they both fell silent again.
Being the adult in the room, Audrey eventually psyched herself up to take something resembling charge. “I know I said that they’d want to keep you around for the story,” she managed, “but that doesn’t mean you aren’t really good.”
“I wasn’t last week.” Alanis looked intensely glum.
“You made some mistakes,” Audrey began, but Alanis immediately checked her.
“Don’t say, ‘But you’re young.’ I shouldn’t be here if I’m not good enough. It’s not like Meera gets special treatment because she has kids to look after, or you got a pass because you were busy being a journalist.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Audrey replied, and she genuinely hadn’t been. “I was just going to say that people can have bad weeks.”
Unfortunately, Alanis didn’t seem convinced. “But they can’t, though, can they? If you have a bad week, you go out. That’s what happens. So why didn’t it happen tome?”
Audrey bit her lip. The last time she’d tried to explain why “this whole thing is rigged” didn’t necessarily mean the whole thing was rigged it had gone... well it had left her with a sad teenager, an angry producer, and an old lady breaking into other people’srooms. Still, just because it had gone disastrously before, that was no reason not to try again.
“It didn’t happen to you,” Audrey said, slowly, “because the judges thought that you’d do better next week. And they were probably right. But I…” Reflecting on why you completely deserved to lose something you’d shouted at someone for taking away from you was, it turned out, kind of a crappy thing to have to do, and the crappiness of it took Audrey aback for a moment. “I probably wouldn’t. I think…honestly I think I was plateauing already. I was never going to win a week, I was only ever going to do fine. And that’s okay. The series needs people to do fine. It needs people who get to about week three and who you immediately forget were in it.”
Looking up, Alanis smiled at Audrey. She hadn’t quite been crying but there was still an air of vulnerability about her, like she was choosing very determinedly to be cheerful despite strong temptation to the contrary. “People won’t forget you were in it, Audrey.”
“You won’t. But the audience totally will. They’ll get to week five and they’ll be, ‘Who was that boring one who never really did anything special, I think she was a lawyer or something.’”
